The Life Lucy Knew. Karma Brown

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      I have a complicated relationship with my memory.

      Most of us, me included, believe our memories are fairly accurate. That events happened the way we remembered them, like a video camera capturing a scene: hit the play button and you’ll see the same images, the same order of events, unfold before your eyes. The quality as good as it was the first time the scene was captured.

      But apparently that isn’t at all how it works.

      Like the bike I got when I turned eight, with the rainbow handlebar tassels I’d been coveting, and the tinny bell I insisted on ringing incessantly as I set out on a ride. I remembered waking the morning of my birthday and seeing it at the end of my bed, shiny and begging for me to ride it. But when I later recounted this memory as an adult at a family dinner, my mom told me that while, yes, I did get such a bike for my birthday, it was never in my bedroom. “How would we have sneaked it in there? And how on earth would you have carried it down the stairs, Lucy?” my mom had said, laughing. “It was in the living room, half-hidden by that ficus. Remember that plant? It lived forever...”

      Yet no matter how I tried to place that bike behind the mangy ficus tree my mom routinely