I found the pool by accident, though afterwards I could never remember what I had been looking for.
It lay in a hollow among the trees, perfectly still, with no stream feeding it and no leaves floating on its surface. When I leaned over, I did not see my face. I saw the house where I had grown up.
The red door stood open. Behind it was the hall, the stairs, the clock my father had once tried to repair. And at the foot of the stairs stood my sister, Anna, who had been dead for eleven years.
I knew the coat she wore. I knew the way she held her head when she was waiting for someone to explain himself.
I reached towards the water.
It gave way beneath my hand.
I climbed through into the hall.
The house smelled of beeswax and rain. The clock was ticking backwards. In the kitchen, a cup of tea stood on the table, cold enough to have formed a skin, yet sending up a thin thread of steam.
Anna appeared in the doorway.
“You took your time,” she said.
I could not speak. She looked exactly as she had on the last afternoon I remembered us being together: the same dark hair, the same small scar beneath her chin. I had spent years trying not to remember that afternoon.
“Where have you been?” I managed.
She frowned. “Where have you been?”
I told her she was dead.
She looked past me, towards the hall. “Is that what happened to me?”
I could find no answer.
She said that I had left home when I was seventeen and never returned. I told her that I had stayed until she was grown, that we had quarrelled on the afternoon she died, and that I had carried the quarrel with me ever since.
She listened without interrupting.
Then she said, “I don't remember that.”
“You don't remember dying?”
“I don't remember you leaving.”
For a moment I thought she was trying to spare me. Then I saw that she was frightened.
The clock continued to tick backwards.
I went back through the water.
The pool closed over me without a ripple. I found myself kneeling in the leaves, with the ordinary wood around me and my own face looking up from the surface.
I returned the following day.
The house was still there, but the red door was shut. Through the window I could see the hall, and on the wall hung a photograph of Anna and me as children. We stood beside our mother in a garden I did not recognise.
I crossed over.
Anna was in the kitchen, writing at the table. She looked up with no surprise.
“Did you remember?” she asked.
“Remember what?”
She turned the paper towards me. It was a list of things we had done together: a bridge we had crossed, a dog we had found, a night we had spent hiding in the garden because we thought our parents were going to separate.
I remembered the bridge. I remembered the dog. I had no memory of the night in the garden.
“You told me about it,” she said. “You said it was the happiest night of your life.”
“I never said that.”
“You did.”
She returned to her writing. I stood beside her, looking at the familiar shape of her hand moving across the page. I had the sudden, absurd wish to take her wrist and hold it still, as if I could keep the moment from becoming another memory we would disagree about.
Instead I asked her what year it was.
She told me.
It was the year before I had been born.
I laughed, but she did not. She looked at me as if I had made a joke at a funeral.
“You always do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Laugh when you don't know what to say.”
I had no memory of her ever saying that before. Yet I knew it was true.
On the table lay a second sheet of paper. I turned it over. In my own handwriting were the words:
I will come back when I remember.
I slipped it into my pocket.
When I crossed back, the paper was gone.
I did not return for several weeks.
I told myself that the pool had been an effect of light, that grief had supplied the rest. But the explanations would not stay in place. I began to remember things that had never happened, or things that had happened to someone else. Sometimes I could almost hear Anna laughing in the next room. Sometimes I remembered her voice so clearly that the silence afterwards seemed like an answer.
At last I went back to the pool.
The house in its depths was dark. No light shone behind the windows. I crossed over and found the front door unlocked.
Inside, the furniture was covered with sheets. Dust lay thick on the stairs. In the kitchen, the table stood bare.
Anna was waiting in the hall.
“You came back,” she said.
“I don't know why.”
“Yes, you do.”
She led me upstairs to the small room that had once been mine. The walls were bare, and the floorboards were dark with age. In one corner stood a bowl of water.
I looked into it.
The house appeared beneath the surface, bright and new. In the hall stood a young girl with dark hair. Beside her was a boy I recognised as myself, though I had never seen that expression on my own face.
They were arguing.
The girl turned away. The boy reached for her, but she went through the red door and disappeared.
I looked up at Anna.
“Is that how it happened?”
She shook her head.
“How did it happen, then?”
“I don't know.”
“But you were there.”
“So were you.”
I looked again into the bowl. The boy was alone now, standing in the hall. He seemed to be waiting for someone to return.
Anna took my hand.
Her fingers were warm.
“I thought you had forgotten me,” she said.
“I thought you were dead.”
She nodded, as though both statements were true.
We stood together for a long time. I wanted to ask her which of us had remembered wrongly, which of us had been left behind, which of us had come here first. But every question seemed to require an answer that would make one of us disappear.
At last she said, “You should go.”
I held her hand more tightly.
“Will I see you again?”
She smiled, though there was sadness in it.
“You always ask me that.”
I went down through the hall and out of the red door. The pool was waiting in the wood, as still as before.
On the other side, the water showed only trees and sky.
I leaned over. For a moment I saw my face, pale and tired, and behind it the faint outline of a house.
Then the image changed.
Anna stood on the other side of the water, looking down at me. She raised one hand. I raised mine.
Neither of us crossed.
I still visit the pool. Sometimes I see the house, sometimes only the trees. Once, I saw Anna sitting at the kitchen table, writing something I could not read. Another time I saw a boy standing in the hall, waiting for a girl who had gone through the red door.
I have stopped trying to decide which of us is remembering.
I only know that when the water is clear, I can sometimes hear Anna speaking.
And sometimes, just before I leave, I hear her say my name.
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