The Memory of the Yellow Boat

The power went out during the thunderstorm, so there was nothing to do but talk by candlelight, and that was when the argument started.

"The boat was yellow," Maya said.

"It was red," said Soren. "The boat at the lake. Two summers ago. It was red, and it had a white stripe."

Maya's mother was at the counter, feeling around for matches. "You two were practically attached at the hip that whole week," she said. "Same lake, same dock, same everything."

That was the strange part. They had been standing in the same place, looking at the same boat. Maya remembered the man who rented it laughing at something. Soren remembered the smell of gasoline and lake weed. Maya remembered yellow. Soren remembered red with a white stripe.

"One of us is just wrong," Soren said. He did not say it meanly. He was already turning it over, the way he turned over a thing that was behaving wrong. "Memories are like photographs. One of the photographs is messed up."

"They're not photographs," Maya said. She said it before she knew why. It just landed in her, the way things did. "If they were photographs they'd both stay the same. Mine doesn't stay the same."

Soren looked at her across the candle. "What do you mean it doesn't stay the same?"

"Last winter I remembered the dock being long. Like really long, you had to walk forever. Now when I think about it, it's short. When did it get short?"

Soren got very still. He pulled his notebook closer to the candle, but he didn't write anything yet. He was doing the thing where he needed more steps.

"Okay," he said. "Test. Don't tell me yours. I'll say everything I remember about the dock, all of it, right now." He closed his eyes. "Gray boards. A nail sticking up that Mom told us to watch. The water was loud under it. There was a bucket. A red bucket."

He opened his eyes. "Now you."

"Gray boards," Maya said. "The nail. But no bucket. There was a fishing rod leaning on the rail."

"There was no rail."

"There was a rail."

They stared at each other. The candle flame leaned in the draft and stood up straight again.

"We can't both be right," Soren said. "We were standing in the same place."

Maya's mother set down a second candle. "You know what's funny," she said, not really paying attention, mostly looking for the flashlight. "I'd have told you that boat was green. Old green rowboat. I'm sure of it." She wandered toward the hall. "Memory's a funny thing."

Three people. Three different boats. Maya felt something open up under that, like the dock boards giving way.

"Soren," she said slowly. "What if nobody has the boat? What if there's no boat sitting anywhere in your head at all?"

He leaned in. "Say it the long way."

"When you remembered the dock just now, you built it. Just then. At the table. You said gray, then nail, then water, then bucket, one piece at a time. You didn't open a drawer and take out a finished dock. You made it again. Out of pieces."

Soren's pencil was moving now. "The pieces are stored in different places," he said, talking and writing at the same time. "The color somewhere. The sound somewhere else. The smell, that's a whole different part, I read that, smell goes its own way. And when you remember, your brain grabs the pieces and snaps them together fresh."

"And if a piece is missing," Maya said, "you grab one that fits. You don't even notice. I needed something on the rail so I put a fishing rod there. You needed something on the boards so you put a red bucket."

"The red bucket." Soren stopped writing. "My bucket at home is red. I have a red bucket in the garage right now."

They looked at each other in the candlelight, and the kitchen felt suddenly very large, much larger than a kitchen.

"Every time," Maya said softly. "Every time you remember it, you build it again. And every time you build it, you change it a tiny bit. Then that's the one you put back. So next time you're remembering the changed one."

"That's why the dock got short," Soren said. "You weren't remembering the dock. You were remembering the last time you remembered the dock. And the time before that. It's been through your hands a hundred times."

"Like a story told down a line of people."

"Except the line is just you." Soren wrote that down. Then he set the pencil flat. "So which boat is real?"

Maya didn't answer right away. Outside, the rain was easing. The whole problem had flipped inside out. They had started trying to find out who was wrong, and now there was no place left to even put the right answer.

"Maybe none of them," she said. "Maybe the real boat only existed that one afternoon, in the actual light, on the actual water. And the second we walked away, all any of us had was pieces. And we've been rebuilding it ever since, each in our own way, and they all drifted."

"Three boats now," Soren said. "Yours, mine, your mom's. From one boat."

"More than three. Every time we remember it tonight, we're making new ones."

Soren made a small sound, half a laugh. "So this conversation. Right now. Us arguing about it. That's going into the memory too. Next summer when I think about the lake, I might remember this kitchen. The candle. You saying it's not a photograph."

"You'll remember the rail," Maya said. "Watch. You'll start remembering my rail."

"I will not."

"You will. You can't help it. The pieces don't have your name on them."

The lights came back on all at once, sudden and yellow, and they both flinched and laughed. Maya's mother called something from the hall about the microwave clock blinking.

Soren blew out the nearer candle. A thin gray thread of smoke went up and bent and came apart.

"Tell me about the boat again," he said. "Right now. Before you forget you don't actually know."

Maya closed her eyes and started building it. "Yellow," she said. "There was a yellow boat."

Soren watched the smoke fray into nothing and reached for his pencil.