Work Text:
“What do you do with the memories of someone who’s gone?”
Josh had an older sister.
She was named Joan, after the grandmother she never knew, the grandmother who died on arrival in Birkenau. But it was her father who gave her the nickname of Joanie. It’s one of the stories Josh remembers hearing as a kid, Joanie covering her face with both hands when her father would say how Joan was too formal for such a little girl, how she needed to be his little girl instead of a grown-up lady before her time.
She is faded in Josh’s memories of her, now. He mostly remembers school pictures, getting all dressed up for the first day of school and Mom would take their picture and add it to a photo album, and then a few weeks later, everyone in their best clothes for a class photo. Their photos all perished in the fire; what was left were the pictures Mom had given to her father and brother, or to any of the Lymans. The first picture that corresponds to one of Josh’s memories is the one he keeps in his desk drawer, beneath all the other papers – fifth grade, her brown curls escaping from their braids, lace trim at the collar of her dress.
There are stronger memories, of course, though they are fewer. Her music, always her music – practicing on the piano all hours of the day, first on the scratched upright and then later on the beautiful baby grand, driving their mother to distraction. Schubert, so much Schubert, but also Bach and Beethoven and Handel, played when their grandfather wasn’t expected. Too German, their mother had tried to explain, but neither Lyman had understood. To Joanie, music was music and all that mattered was the sound, miraculous and eye-opening. Who cared whether Mozart was Austrian or Scottish when "Ave Verum Corpus" could lift up the soul? As for Josh – only nine when music took its sudden departure from his life – he couldn’t understand how his grandfather, who had never set foot in Germany in his life, could be so upset by German composers who had been dead for a century or more.
Joanie was the brilliant one. She read constantly, stacks of books piling up around her bed. She devoured them all – Anne of Green Gables and Pride and Prejudice and Little Women and Jane Eyre. She read Shakespearean sonnets and Dickens’ thick prose.
It was aggravating at times, to live with her. She and Josh were supposed to do the dishes every night after dinner; in theory, Joanie would wash and he would stand on a step-stool and dry. But usually she would retreat to a corner with a Bradbury or Tolkien to consume and Josh would escape to watch TV until their mother tracked down one or both of them.
She was stubborn, every inch of her. Stubborn curls she would yell at in the mornings as she hogged the bathroom mirror and a strident mind to match. “Genius comes with a price,” Ruth Lyman joked to anyone who would listen, but on mornings when Joanie couldn’t find the perfect necklace to match the day’s outfit, Josh would hide behind the couch to avoid the inevitable argument between mother and daughter.
Josh knows that he'll be forced to keep the NSA card. He can hand it back, but not permanently. Even as he sits here in his darkened office, listening to the music Joanie had insisted she would conduct one day (“The National Symphony Orchestra, Mom, in Washington, I’m gonna conduct them someday—” “Sure you are, bubbeleh—”), he knows that he can’t keep that at bay forever. His friendships mean nothing to the NSA. But they mean everything to him.
What do you do, goes the old question, with the memories of someone who’s gone? All the information you have stowed away? Their favorite color and why they hated their middle name? The way they tapped one finger on top of the other hand when they were thinking, and how she told you that she was proud of you when you came first in the spelling bee?
You replace it. You replace it with Sam’s passion for the LA Lakers despite his disdain for all their top players and Toby refusing to say the world “loquacious” and CJ hoarding packets of soy sauce, whether as a psychological safety net or because she really likes the condiment yet to be determined –
You find a new family, and you cover up the memories that fade more every day with the information of those who surround you now.
At least, that’s what Josh does.
“Josh? I was knocking but you didn’t answer.”