The Memory Palace Read Online Free Page A

relieved when, without even deliberating, she said she’d join me in Cleveland.
    “Nattie, I’m so happy you’re here.” I ran up to hug her. I had almost called her Rachel, her birth name before she changed it more than a decade before. Being back in Cleveland made her newer name feel strange on my tongue for the first time in years. Just as well. Around our mother, we’d have to be Myra and Rachel one last time.
    “How is she?” asked Natalia.
    “Don’t be shocked. She looks like a survivor from the camps.”
    “I really want to see her. Let’s go first thing in the morning.”
    “Before I forget, I wanted to tell you—I found some keys. And receipts from U-Haul. She must have a storage room somewhere.”
    “What do you think is in there?”
    “I don’t know. But we can go this week and see. I imagine there’s a lot of junk.”
    The next morning Natalia woke up early to work out in the gym. She has always kept a strict regimen—a daily exercise routine, a rigorous schedule for writing, teaching, grading her students’ papers before bed. While Natalia was out of the room, I skimmed through my mother’s dairy. She wrote about staying up all night in the rain on a stranger’s porch and trying to sleep at the bus station without getting mugged. Should I read any of this to my sister?
    When we walked into our mother’s room at the hospital, she looked up at Natalia and said, “Who are you?” She turned to me. “Who’s this lady?”
    How could my mother not recognize her? Did she look that different seventeen years ago? The last time our mother saw her, Natalia was running away from the house on West 148th Street. Maybe that was how ourmother remembered her—a terrified young girl in flight, long hair flying in the cold January wind.
    “It’s me. Rachel,” said my sister.
    How could we explain that we had changed our names so she could never find us? That we had been so scared of her all these years? She was the cry of madness in the dark, the howling of wind outside our doors. I had changed my name the year after my sister did, reluctantly, giving up the name signed at the bottom of my paintings so I would be harder to find. But I could never relinquish my first name. I simply exchanged a y for an i. My sister couldn’t give up her first name either and kept it sandwiched between the first and the last: Natalia Rachel Singer. She took Isaac Bashevis Singer’s last name, I took Béla Bartók’s.
    “Rachel? I thought you were dead.”
    “I’m not dead,” said my sister. “I’m here, right beside you.”
    “Is it really you?”
    Natalia pulled up a chair next to the bed. “It’s really me. How are you feeling?”
    “You girls have got to get me out of here! We have to go back to the house. There are criminals inside.”
    “Don’t worry, the house is fine,” I lied to her. “Everything is just like you left it. You can go home as soon as you are better.”
    After all these years, our mother was still obsessed about her parents’ house she’d sold in 1989. When she signed the papers over to the new owner, she believed that she was only renting it to him for a while. Not long after the sale, and after my sister’s and my last failed attempt to get her a legal guardian and medical treatment, our mother disappeared into the streets.
    “Do you have a husband?” my mother asked Natalia. “Are you wearing a ring?”
    “Yes,” said my sister. “I’ll tell you all about him.”
    Natalia, who had seventeen years of stored-up conversations, began to talk. But after a few minutes, I could tell our mother was too exhausted and frail to listen anymore.
    “She can’t tolerate that much talking or sound,” I said. “She gets overwhelmed like me. Just sit with her. That’s enough; she’s happy you’re here.”
    Natalia took out a brush from her purse. “Can I brush your hair?” she asked.
    “If you like,” said my mother.
    I looked at them, mother and eldest daughter, strangers for