The Blank Page

The notebook had been open for two hours.

Mira knew this because the clock on the wall made a sound on the hour, a small hollow tick and she had heard it twice. The page in front of her had her name in the top corner, the date under it and nothing else. Twenty-two lines, all empty, going straight across like they were waiting for something to happen.

Leo appeared in the doorway.

"Tell me a story."

"I'm busy."

He looked at the notebook, then at her. "You're not writing anything."

"I'm thinking."

"You've been thinking since lunch." He came in and sat on the edge of her bed without being invited. He was eight and had recently stopped asking for permission to do things in her room, which Mira found deeply annoying. "Just one. A short one."

"Leo."

"The one about the lighthouse keeper."

"I don't want to tell that one."

"Then a different one."

"I don't want to tell any of them." She pressed her pen to the page. Lifted it. The page was still blank. "Go watch something."

Leo picked up the eraser from her desk and turned it over in his hands. It was shaped like a strawberry, a present from their aunt and he'd been fascinated with it since it arrived. Mira had told him fifteen times not to touch it.

"Put that down."

He put it down on the wrong side of the desk. "Why can't you just tell me one?"

"Because I can't."

"You always can."

"Well, not right now."

"Why not?"

Mira set her pen down flat. "Because they're not there, Leo. Okay? They're just gone."

Leo looked at her. He had their mother's way of going completely still when something surprised him, like an animal hearing a sound it didn't recognize.

"All of them?"

"All of them."

"Even the one about the girl with the red coat?"

"I remember that one exists. I can't remember what happens in it."

"She goes through the door in the tree..."

"I know how it starts." Mira pulled the notebook toward her, then pushed it away. "I can't remember the rest. It's like" She stopped. "It doesn't matter. Go away, Leo."

He didn't go away. He picked up the strawberry eraser again.

"I said don't touch that."

"I'm not hurting it."

"I don't care, it's mine, put it down."

He put it down. Picked up a pencil instead, which wasn't his either. Mira watched him do it and felt too tired to say anything.

"How long has it been gone?" he asked.

"I don't know. A while."

"Like a week?"

"More than a week."

"Like a month?"

"I don't know, Leo. A while." She turned a page in the notebook without reading it. "A long while."

Leo's eyebrows went up. "And you haven't told anyone?"

"What's there to tell."

"That you can't remember anything. That seems important."

"I remember things. I remember everything. I just can't" She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. "I can't make anything new. Every time I try to start something, it just goes flat. Like something's missing and I don't know what."

Leo twirled the pencil. Dropped it. Picked it up.

"Stop fidgeting," Mira said.

"I'm not fidgeting, I dropped it."

"You dropped it on purpose."

"I didn't, it slipped." He set the pencil down with exaggerated care, like he was defusing something. "Can I see the notebook?"

"No."

"I won't write in it."

"I know you won't, because I'm not giving it to you."

"Mira."

"Leo."

He held out his hand. She looked at his face. He had that expression he got sometimes, not the one where he wanted something, but the one where he was actually trying. Those were different and she'd learned to tell them apart, even when she didn't want to.

She slid the notebook across the desk.

He looked at it for a long time. The empty lines, the name in the corner, the date. He turned to the previous pages, covered in her handwriting, dense and slanted. Turned back to the blank one.

"What's this one supposed to be?" he asked.

"I don't know. That's the problem."

"Did you have an idea before?"

"Sort of. Something about a girl who wakes up and all her memories are there but she can't read them. Like they're in a language she forgot."

Leo looked up from the notebook.

"That's good though," he said.

"It's one line."

"So?"

"So it's not a story."

"It could be."

"Leo."

"It could. Why don't you just write it."

"Because there's nothing after it. That's the whole point."

"You don't know that."

"I do know that, I've been sitting here"

"You haven't written that one though." He held up the blank page as evidence, like it proved something. "You said the thing about the girl just now. That was new. You hadn't said that one before."

"It's still not going to work."

"Why."

"Because nothing works right now!" She grabbed the notebook back. "That's what I'm telling you. It all just stops. Every single time."

Leo was quiet for a moment. He picked up the strawberry eraser, put it down before she could say anything and then just sat there looking at his hands.

"Okay but what if you tried though," he said.

Mira stared at him. "Get out of my room."

"I'm just saying"

"Out."

He slid off the bed slowly, the way he did when he was trying to show he wasn't in a hurry, that leaving was his idea. He got to the door and stopped.

"I'm not saying it'll definitely work," he said to the doorframe. "I'm just saying you didn't try that specific one."

"Leo."

He went to stand by the window in the hall instead, which was just outside her door, which was not the same as leaving and they both knew it.

"I'm not going to" But he was already in the hallway, already making noise on the stairs.

Mira looked at the doorway. Then at the notebook.

She picked up her pen.

She wrote: She woke up and all her memories were there, but she couldn't read them, like a language she used to know and had somehow, in the night, forgotten.

She stopped. Read it back.

Wrote the next line.

Then the one after that. Then she stopped noticing the lines at all, just the page filling up, the pen moving, something opening that had been shut for a long time without her being able to find the handle.

"Are you writing?" Leo said from the hallway.

She didn't answer.

A minute passed. Then she heard him go downstairs. He came back and appeared in the doorway with two cookies. He looked at her, still writing, not looking up, set one biscuit on the corner of her desk and settled cross-legged on the floor with the other. He picked up one of her books and opened it to a random page.

Neither of them spoke.

The clock ticked once on the hour.

Mira kept writing.