Little things come back to me sometimes, memories unattached to one another, like the leaves of the cinquona tree which suddenly all fly away because they were never leaves at all, but butterflies. My memories are like those butterflies, floating away, rootless.  

    For a long time I remembered a game we used to play with pebbles that we moved through a series of little holes we dug in the sand. But then I saw the exact game being played by children in an old movie and I had to wonder if it was the movie I was remembering, or my childhood.  

    I’m sure I remember my father who was tall and thin and stern with a back as straight as a chair leg. He wore a felt hat with a brim to keep off the sun, and he carried a gold pocket watch that he consulted often, as though the exact time were a thing of great importance. He would always wipe the crystal with his handkerchief before snapping the watch closed.  

    My mother was tall also, which makes me wonder why I am not, and she was always smiling—or maybe she smiles only when I remember her. She must have taken in laundry, for there were usually white sheets hanging on the lines behind the house and I remember her bending, daily it seemed, over the wash tub, wringing out miles of fabric. She would let the water flow into the garden. We had, she would say, the best garden in all of Quahanda. But my father claimed the vegetables tasted of soap."

    As she wrote, it seemed to Escarla that these people, these parents, somehow did not fully belong to her. They had had real lives, outside of her memories, which she could never know, and of which she had never been a part. Even on Quahanda, though they had been her parents, they were not hers. It was true also that the men she had loved had not been truly hers.  

    "Alvaro was never mine alone," she wrote, "for most of him belonged to the world which beckoned beyond the ocean. I would find him often on the water’s edge, staring into the horizon, and I knew he was imagining a different life away from the hollowness and barren dreams that plagued Quahanda. For, Alvaro said, our island suffered from a drought of the soul which no rains, no matter how torrid, could cure."  

    Escarla had been young when she’d loved Alvaro. Their lovemaking had been hot, and dry, and frequent. Through it, she had conceived a son, whom she had named Ruggerio. He had his mother’s auburn hair, but his father’s features, so that, though she had known her lover for only one languid summer she saw him as a child, a youth and a man in the face of her son.  

      When he was eleven, Ruggerio had somehow learned that his mother had had to leave the island because of something his father had done. He had been a distant, dreamy child, content to make up tales about his absent father to satisfy his school chums. But, at eleven, he had been eager for the truth. Escarla told him that she and his father had not been married. That her pregnancy had been a sign that she had sinned; that she had shamed her household; and she had left Quahanda for that reason. She was giddy with relief when he believed her.  

 Maria, Ruggerio’s daughter had been society’s child from the day of her birth. She married well, as all had predicted, love never having influenced her choice of suitors. She would have kept well away from her grandmother, whom she considered a peasant, but her husband, a professor of philosophy with full tenure and thus nothing to fear from association, had decided to consider Escarla a charming eccentricity.  

  It was for Ruggerio’s grandson, Sebastian, that Escarla endured the pain of her memories.

    Sebastian had his great-grandmother’s auburn hair, his father’s wits, his mother’s charm, and a curiosity that had never appeared in the family before. His passion for knowledge burned bright and his tenacity was either inspiring or irksome. At fourteen he had become interested in genealogy. He astonished all by constructing his father’s family tree reaching back to seventeenth century Europe. Then he had turned his attention to his mother’s side of his heritage. Unsatisfied with the sketchy details his grandfather had provided he had petitioned his great-grandmother.