Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon

disproving, arriving at conclusions only to throw everything into doubt again.
    Memories came in snatches or in long threads that stretched thin and refused to expand. A musky perfume floating through darkened rooms. A narrow street where half a dozen squealing children hurled snowballs. A woman who looked like Mother braiding my long red hair while I watched her sorrowful face in a mirror.
    One Sunday morning as Mother stood at the living room window in a blaze of sun, I suddenly saw her at another window, in another time, holding a scorched African violet up for examination.
    “It died from too much sun,” I blurted, remembering the drooping, brown-edged leaves.
    Mother’s eyebrows went up. “What?”
    “That African violet you used to have,” I fumbled, sensing the wrongness of what I said but unable to pin it down. “It was in a sunny window, it got too much sun.”
    “Rachel,” she said, with a slight bemused smile, “I’ve never had African violets.”
    The picture was still as vivid as the splash of light on the windowsill. But no, it wasn’t Mother. It was a woman who looked like her. The woman who’d braided my hair.
    “Oh.” My voice came out faint, and I made an effort to raise it to a natural level. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
    I turned away from her sudden scrutiny, and smothered the inexplicable panic that rose in me.
    ***
    During those long weeks of July, Mother suggested three more times that I let her hypnotize me. She wasn’t going to let it drop. It was important to her.
    “Why don’t you let her do it?” Luke said.
    Astonished, I faced him. “Are you serious?”
    We were in the National Zoo’s Amazonia building, a miniature tropical rainforest where monkeys, birds, and a shy sloth inhabited soaring trees under a glass roof. On our first date in three weeks, Luke had wanted time alone with me in his apartment, but I balked at the intimacy we both craved. It was one more form of pressure, a demand I couldn’t handle. Disappointed and baffled, he gave in when I suggested the first thing that came to mind, an outing where we’d be surrounded by a multitude of strangers.
    I wanted to unwind away from home, put Mother out of my head. But she was all we talked about on the drive into D.C., and we went on talking about her among the camera-flashing Japanese tourists who crowded the narrow path through the exhibit.
    “Yes,” Luke said, “I’m ser—” A screech erupted from the scarlet macaw in a nearby tree, making Luke break off and wince. “Yes, I’m serious,” he said when the bird fell silent. “I’ve been reading about hypnosis. If you consciously decide not to go into a trance, nobody can put you under. Right?”
    A knot of half a dozen Japanese children squealed and pointed at two black monkeys leaping in the branches overhead. Safely out of reach, the monkeys settled to chewing on apple chunks and returned the children’s interest with indifference.
    Luke and I edged past the kids and stopped at a railing overlooking the small artificial river.
    “What’s your point?” I said. “Why would I let her try to hypnotize me, then not let her put me under?” 
    “Pretend to be hypnotized. Find out what she’ll say to you when she thinks you’re under her control.”
    I looked down at catfish three feet long. Their plump yellow-sided bodies floated lazily, their whiskers drifted back like loose hair in a breeze.
    “I’m not sure I could do that,” I said at last. “I don’t know if I’m that good an actress.”
    The children, impatient for a turn at the rail, jostled us and we walked on.
    “Listen,” Luke said, his voice low. “What have you been doing all your life but acting, to please her?”
    Two feet from my head a white-billed hummingbird hung in the air at a feeder, furiously beating its wings just to stay in one place.
    “It seems so bizarre,” I said.
    “It could tell you a lot.”
    I didn’t answer. We moved along the path, stopped to watch blue and red tanagers flitting among branches at the far end of the exhibit, then left the mini-rainforest through heavy double doors.
    The air outside was hotter than that inside, and almost as humid. “I’ll bet it’s a hundred degrees already,” Luke said.
    ***
    In the Mane Restaurant, a utilitarian cafeteria redeemed by wide windows overlooking a wooded trail, we had a lunch of cheese sandwiches and iced tea. Luke made small talk, giving me time to get back to the subject that I