It's a clear, bright SoCal day, sometime in July.  School is out for the summer.  The three of us - my mom, my dad and me - are all piled in the Chevy, on our way north to visit Aunt Claire.

For the longest time, I thought it was just one word.  Antclear.  I never asked what that word meant, or how it had become our own secret code for the tall woman with the long braids who seemed to live in a different house every time we saw her.  And then someone, probably a kid at school, sat me down and explained the whole thing about aunts and uncles, and how your parents got to have brothers and sisters too, which didn't really mean much to me at the time, since I didn't have either one.  Only later, the more I thought about,  the more it did start to mean something, and I knew I felt a little bit jealous, maybe even angry, that my Mom and Dad got to have a sister even though I never did.

I guess I must have talked to my Mom about it, because sometimes she'd bring up the story about how she had to explain to me how Claire wasn't both their sisters, only hers, which then left me feeling sorry for two people, my Dad and me, instead of just one.  Not that Aunt Claire was some magic prize.  Whenever we went to see her, Dad seemed mostly bored.  And my Mom got different somehow.  Looking back, I know now she was anxious, but that wasn't a word I would've known, or used, back then.  Still I could tell something was up, the way her voice got sharper, and how her cigarettes didn't last nearly as long, and the way she'd keep fussing over me, straightening my hair, or picking the lint off my shirt.  With all that, who needs to know the word?

So we're all in the car, the big black Chevy, which means I must be at least eight, because that's how old I was when my Dad bought it, and not quite eleven, because that's when my Mom quit smoking, and I can see her now, up front in the passenger seat, puffing away on a Kent.  Scenery flashes by - the flat, green fields lined with crops, eventually giving way to hills, trees, a sparkle of water out near the horizon.  Every few minutes I'll steal a glimpse, then it's back to the stack of comics I've brought along.  On the other side of the big bench seat it's mostly silence, my Dad clutching the wheel, my Mom staring through the glass, and it's just like with the Justice League, one half stuck on Earth One, the other half on Earth Two, and the only thing that will eventually bring them together is a battle with Kanjar Ro. 

Or, more likely, each other.

And then it must be a day or two later, and we've finally stopped driving, we're parked instead, and we're climbing out of the Chevy, my legs all stiff and my Mom's hair kind of flattened from where she was resting it against the window.  It's almost dark, and the air is cool, and it smells different somehow, different from home, and the streets are narrow, and the sidewalk all buckled, and there are trees everywhere, on the streets, in the yards, like a picture in a jigsaw puzzle.  We have to go through a narrow gate, my Dad has trouble with the latch, and then we're in the front yard and the tall woman with the braids is coming down the steps, only the braids are gone, she's got shorter hair, and I'm thinking of a picture I saw of Petula Clarke, who I like almost as much as the Beatles.

The house is tiny, from the outside at least, but as soon as we're inside it seems to explode, or expand, and there's stuff everywhere, scarves dangling from a rack on the door, and real paintings on every wall, and a big old couch with a really fat cat sleeping in one corner, and a fake elephant with wings hanging from the ceiling, and a fish tank with no fish in it, but a hand instead, like from a mannequin in a store window.  There's a funny smell in the air, which my Mom later explains is called incense, and some kind of music coming from somewhere, not the kind I like with singing, but the kind where the instruments sound all upset and crazy, and then a dog starts barking, and the cat wakes up, and my Dad is trying to find a place to set down our luggage, and my Mom is hugging the woman, and I'm starting to think that it's not just Earth One and Earth Two anymore, but a whole new place, Earth Three.

And yes, that's it, that's it exactly.  Earth Three.  And now instead of a memory of one time, one visit, it's like I'm watching a movie go by real fast, or looking at one of those flip books, and I'm seeing all the times I visited that third place over the years.  Some were up at that same tiny bungalow in Olympia.  A few more at an apartment in San Pedro, where you could hear the seagulls, and it always smelled like anchovies and diesel.  Sometimes Earth Three even visited us, and I had to sleep in my Mom's project room next to the sewing machine and all those rolls of unused canvas.  And it was like with each time, each visit, I got one more clue, one more piece of the puzzle that was this place, this woman, antclear.

At first what I noticed was all the things she didn't have.  A man for one thing.  I wasn't quite sure why grown-up girls always had to be around grown-up guys, but I knew that they did, and knew that for some reason antclear had decided to break the rules.  And kids.  She should've had kids too, like Mom and Dad had me.  Plus there was never one place, one place she called home.  Not even a car like our Chevy.  She talked once about having to borrow a car from a friend of hers, and I remember how shocked I was, but excited too, because I never knew you could borrow a car and maybe, someday, I could borrow the Chevy from my dad.

Then, as I got older, the pieces fell into place even faster, but in this weird, mixed-up way, and I realized that what I'd thought was one thing was really another, that I'd somehow mistaken sky for ground, gift for burden.  Sure, there were a lot of things Aunt Claire didn't have.  And then there were all the things she did.  Like that time she disappeared for almost a year, and it turned out she'd been living in Morocco.  Or the way all those pictures on the wall had been painted by her, or were presents from other artists, some of them almost famous.  For the longest time I didn't know what a name-dropper was, or how people could pretend that they didn't want you to notice something, when in fact they really did.  All I knew was how other people reacted, how my Dad always found an excuse to leave the room, or how my Mom got that look on her face, staring into space, her eyes seeing nothing at all.

Sometimes, when we'd visit, my aunt would pull out a deck of Tarot cards, and for me it was like they were all superheoes, each figure with its own special power, special fate.  But what she was really showing me was them.  Aunt Claire was the rider on horseback, her banner unfurled, heading out to the meet the world, while a second woman, who could only be my mother, stayed behind to tend hearth, home, child.  And there was a third card lying on the table, a man, my father, witness to the drama that played out between but powerless to act.  Or maybe that was me, that silent figure, stuck there in the middle.  I loved my mother, understood in some child's way all that she'd sacrificed to bring me into this world, to make me whole.  But it was antclear I was drawn to, her wild spirit, her power to be whatever, whoever, she wanted.  I knew someday I'd face that choice.  To draw my card.  To be one or the other.

It's the very next day on that very same visit, our visit to Aunt Claire.  I am alone.  I've traded, it seems, all the intrigue and innuendo of the adult world for the relative calm of the back yard.  It's a space that mirrors the house itself, and the woman who calls it home.  Vines run rampant over arbor and fence.  Flowers fight it out for attention.  It's chaos, it's magic, it's everything our neatly managed yard back home is not, and for a while I wander around in a daze, trying to take it all in.  And then I see it.  A small, rather plain tree tucked in the very back, unremarkable in every way except for the one remarkable thing hanging from one of its branches.  A thing that is round, and green, and shiny.  A thing that I thought existed only in lunchboxes, or supermarkets.  A thing that is somehow, miraculously, growing out of the tree itself.

And with that, I wake up.

It takes me a moment to realize that this is, in fact, what I'm doing.  Waking up.  Which means that I must have been asleep.  Asleep, it seems, on my couch.  The couch, I start to remember, where I lay down that afternoon.  The same Sunday afternoon that saw me pick up an apple, and cut it into pieces, and then pop one of those pieces into my mouth.

Unwilling, or unable, to get up, I stare out towards the glass slider, see that there's still a bit of late afternoon light hitting the crepe myrtle, and realize that if I was asleep, it couldn't have been for long.  Just long enough to relive half my life.  Or half of someone's life.

A while back Simon asked me a question, one those impossible, imponderable questions that seem to be his stock in trade.  How can you tell if you're remembering or imagining?  How do you know the difference?  And because I was feeling impatient at the time, and maybe a little put out, I gave him the stock answer, the one grown-ups have been doling out to kids since god knows when.  "You just know."  Still, it wasn't a lie.  Somehow you do just know.

The same way I do just know two things right now, as I lie here on my couch, watching the day fade to darkness.  One is that whatever just happened, it wasn't imagined, wasn't a dream.  There really was a little white bungalow.  There really was an Aunt Claire.  They were as real, as uncontestable, as Petula Clarke, or the Justice League, or any of the other minor bits of window dressing that had served as part of the tale.  And the second thing I know is that if it was, in fact, a memory, then it clearly wasn't mine.  Because I never had an Aunt Claire, who never lived in that bungalow, who wasn't visited by someone who couldn't have been me.

Which leads, in turn, to a question.

Whose memory was it?