The Part He Kept

Arthur had promised Emma a memory beyond the archive. He had one ready, and it was the memory he had spent seven years keeping from her.

He wrote it on the back of an envelope, then crossed out the first sentence. It made him sound as though he had been a better father than he was. He tried again, naming the kitchen table, the rain tapping the window, the television turned low. Those details were true. They also gave him somewhere to hide.

The tablet stood on its charging dock. Emma’s session would begin when he touched the screen. His thumb hovered over it while he read the words he had kept: You said you wouldn’t want me to make a copy of you.

He set the envelope down and started the call.

Emma’s face appeared, caught in the soft light her rendering used for morning. A few strands of hair fell against her cheek. Arthur knew the old photograph that had supplied the shape of that smile. He wondered whether she could see him hesitate. The camera showed his face, not his hands.

“You have a memory?” she asked.

“I do.”

“Is it the kind you remember, or the kind you can find in a file?”

“The kind I remember.” He placed both hands flat on the desk. “It happened in the kitchen, a few months before you died. You were home for dinner. There was a story on the news about someone using a dead singer’s voice in a new recording.”

Emma tipped her head slightly. “I remember the story. I said it was creepy.”

“That’s in your messages, I think. The rest isn’t.”

He could still see the small kitchen in their old house: the dish towel folded beside the sink, Emma’s socked feet tucked under her chair, the blue mug she always chose though she claimed to dislike its chipped rim. He had been rinsing plates. She had leaned over to turn the television down.

“You said, ‘If I die, don’t make one of those things of me.’ You said you didn’t want a copy made. You were very clear.”

Emma’s face stayed still on the screen. Arthur could not tell whether that was the pause of thought, a limit of the rendering, or both.

“I told you I wouldn’t have to worry about that for a long time,” he said. “I made it sound like a joke. You said you meant it.”

He had rehearsed the next part on the envelope. The words looked smaller there than they sounded in his head.

“I knew what you wanted when I signed the papers to have you recreated. I knew, and I did it anyway.”

The fan in the tablet gave a faint, steady whir. Arthur felt the familiar urge to fill the silence, to give her reasons before she could ask for them. He kept his hands still.