The Memory Jar (13 page)

Now

Obviously I'm here to see her, so I wrap up my whining session in the car and then Joey gives my hand a quick squeeze without looking at me, like he can pretend someone else is offering me this comfort. He offers to come in with me, but he understands this is between me and this Kendall person. He will wait for me in the car, my quick getaway prepared.

The automatic doors into the brain trauma ward always startle me, even though I've been through them a million times by now. The low hum they make as they swing wide is a menacing tone, at least today.

“Taylor,” she says, standing up immediately when I approach the door of the family waiting room. She's several inches taller than me, with that easy athleticism I'd first noticed. “I'm so sorry to hear about Scott. Really, I don't even know how to express how much I feel for you, for his family.”

She's so full of grace and ease. I open my mouth to ask a question, but she hasn't left me any opening, and I don't know quite how to go about asking her.

“Why are you here?” I finally say. It's not as though Scott's other friends haven't visited. They have, some from high school and some from college. They brought flowers and teddy bears and baskets and cards like everyone else. Some of them we knew and some were unfamiliar, but she's something different, and she knows what I mean when I ask.

She sinks to the waiting room couch, waving her hand to indicate that I should sit too. I stay on my feet for a moment or two longer to establish some things, but then I sit on the edge of the chair opposite. “We had … I suppose I'll call it a relationship.”

“A relationship?” I should be in history right now. No, Spanish. I should be thinking about heading to the library after school with Dani, maybe hanging out watching her cheer at practice. Any number of a million things besides sitting in a hospital waiting room listening to a girl tell me she was sleeping with my boyfriend. “I'm sorry, I can't do this. We met, once, right? At the playoffs game?”

She nods. “Scott talked about you all the time.”

Scott didn't talk. “He never mentioned you.” I still can't figure out why she's here, why she insisted on speaking with me. What does she want? Does she think that she's going to get a place to wait by his side, that she's going to be in there telling him stories like she's one of us—one of the people he loves?

Kendall pushes her streaky blonde hair back off her face, twisting and retwisting the hair tie. “I can't believe I have to tell you,” she says. “He told me he would tell you.”

“Well, he didn't.” I want to go back in time. I want to go back to that moment he hugged me and I want to say,
Stop. Who else have you been holding? Who else has a hold on you?

Kendall twists her hands in her lap and then she looks up at me, and her eyes are all filled with tears. I'm queasy and evil, suspicious of a weeping girl. “It's my older sister,” she says. “She and her husband tried for six years to get pregnant. He had a low sperm motility, but they tried everything, even in vitro. Nothing happened, and then my sister got uterine cancer.” Kendall points to the little looped ribbon she has pinned to her shirt, and I wonder if she wears that all the time or only when she's trotting out some kind of sob story to explain to me why my boyfriend has failed to mention her. She cries then, full-on, no shame, not even wiping away the tears. Her eyes visibly redden right in front of me, and I'm a complete asshole if I still hate her.

“What does any of
this
have to do with your sister's uterine cancer?”

Finally, the girl has the decency to wipe her eyes with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “She had to have a hysterectomy. They've exhausted all their medical insurance, with the fertility treatments and then with Kathryn's chemo and surgeries.”

“But, Scott?”

“He should have talked to you about this.”

“But he didn't.” I'm confused, and I'm getting angry
again, and there's this girl here, and there's a
relationship.
“Was he cheating on me, is that what you're trying to say?”

“Oh my god, this conversation should not be happening, okay? This is so random, I mean, what are the
odds
, you know? What happened on that snowmobile?” She looks up, dropping her hands, and her eyes are pleading with me, and they're so raw, so wounded. “I can't tell you. I can't say the words, knowing he didn't say them first.”

I'm done with this conversation. I can't sit here anymore, listening to her tell me absolutely nothing. “Look,” I say. “I don't have a lot of time. I basically ran away from school to hear what you had to say, and you apparently have
nothing
to say, so you can just—”

“He said I could have your baby,” she says, her voice barely audible.

Then

This one time I was at Scott's parents' house when a spring storm began, like they often do, with a sloppy rain. It fell on the roads and froze into a treacherous glaze as the temperature dropped—which was precisely when the rain turned over to snow. A flurry of disastrously large, heavy white flakes fell fast and thick, obscuring the slippery ice. It was Sunday night, and Scott's parents refused to let him drive back to St. Cloud even though his truck had four-wheel drive.

“Doesn't do a thing on ice like this,” said his dad, standing at the window. “Gives you false confidence, that's all, and you still can't stop or turn on a sheet of black ice.”

“Besides, with the snow drifting up on top like it's expected to do until after four this morning, they're saying visibility is down to almost nothing.” Scott's mom leaned against his dad, and he tucked his arm over her shoulders. Emily bustled around in the kitchen making cocoa, and Joey was playing the model teenager huddled up in his basement bedroom with the stereo shaking the floor beneath us. They all fit together there, picture perfect, and I felt so completely awkward in the middle of this functional family moment.

“I should probably get home before it gets too bad.” I whispered it in his ear because I didn't want his parents to hear. I don't know, I guess I thought they would feel like they had to drive me or something because they're the parents. Never mind that we were practically grown, too. So I was leaning in on tiptoes, talking in his ear, when his parents stopped their murmuring at the window and turned to me in unison, like they've rehearsed this moment.

“There's no need,” said Scott's mom. “You can stay here, and we'll get you to school in the morning.” She smiled and basically headed straight for the linen closet. I'm pretty sure she had clean sheets on the guest bed before Scott's dad finished his next sentence.

“No way is there going to be school tomorrow,” he said. “You know what that means.”

At this point, I hadn't even said a word. Hadn't uttered a sound. I turned to Scott and raised my eyebrows, but he just grinned. “I don't know what that means,” I said. I was thankful for their kindness, but, you know. Shouldn't someone at least ask me what I wanted?

“Don't worry about a thing,” said Scott. “You'll see.”

“It means you're going to learn how to play bridge,” said Scott's dad. “And I'm not going to let you win.”

Now

I try to storm away. “You can't seriously expect me to listen to one more word,” I say, but Kendall follows me into Scott's room, and I don't know what to do. I'm trapped, and again, I don't want to fight in front of him. I glare at her, but she sits down across from me, pleading with her eyes.

“We were close,” she says, and her voice cracks. “He was going to tell you.”

I can't speak to her, can't find any words in my head that are willing to line up into sentences that make any sense at all. Even so, I feel my anger transform into something much more difficult to hang on to. Silently, I pick up a deck of cards and start to shuffle. In my head I begin a thousand accusations, but I see the way she looks at him, and I know she loves him. Did he love her? I shuffle the cards close to Scott's ear, hoping the sound will trigger something in his consciousness, hoping he'll sit up and tell me the truth about all of this. I'm sure the school has called my mom by now. I deal out the cards and tell a story instead of talking directly to her, a story about the time I got snowed in overnight at Scott's parents' house and his dad tried to teach me to play bridge. We don't play bridge, this Kendall person and I, but after I finish the story, we do play a rather confrontational hand of rummy over Scott's still form.

“He said you could have our baby?” I put down a pair of aces.

“He called it the perfect solution,” she says. She considers for a moment and then picks up my discarded eight. “I'm sorry, this is so random.” Her eyes fill with tears again and she leans over him, rubs her hand across his arm, and it hurts me to know it feels slightly like a cushion. I don't want to believe this, but how would she know about the pregnancy if he didn't know her? If he didn't
confide
in her.

“You told him you'd
take
our baby.” I can't fathom this. Why would Scott ever say that?

Kendall nods, and she swabs her face off with a soggy tissue while slapping down four eights and a trio of kings. “Rummy,” she says.

Then

I can't write about this Kendall person, not about what she said. I can't think about it without crying, and I don't want to cry around Joey. I need a memory. Something about Joey, maybe, like how he used to race motocross. I begged Scott to take me to a race but he said he couldn't watch his brother race.
It wasn't safe
, he said. He didn't like to drive things with a motor as much as things that were self-propelled. When he went to the island alone, he skated across the snow on his long, narrow cross-country skis, but together we mostly took Joey's snowmobile, and Scott never let me drive. I bothered him about it, that night. “Just let me drive, one loop around the island. I'll go slow,” I said. I don't remember if he let me drive.

I don't remember don't remember don't remember. Remember. Why can't I force my brain to go there? But there's something—a mosquito in my ear, if even a metaphor for a mosquito can exist in January. The fire had dwindled, but Scott kept stirring up the coals, coaxing more heat and light out of the little ring. “It's almost out, and then we can head back. If you get cold, remember you can wrap up in the wool blanket,” he said. “In my pack.”

He had a pack filled with every necessity, and he carried it everywhere. It didn't surprise me in the least that he was prepared for me to get chilly. “Let
me
drive home this time,” I said, and I stepped toward him, putting my arms around him from behind. I can still feel his chest, the way my hands slid up and rested there, and even though I'd been waiting for my opportunity to break up with him, and even though I'd been ready to abort his baby, I still held him like that for a long moment, my face resting on his coat. He smelled like wood smoke and boy.

He shrugged—I could feel the muscles jumping in his abs—and sort of laughed me off. I understood, though. It was anxiety, and I'd seen it in other ways, too. Crowds, and sometimes even worse in wide open spaces.

“It makes me feel unconnected to myself,” he said, in answer to my question, as if that was any kind of answer.

I pushed him. “You're only saying that because you don't trust me,” I said. “You're sexist, and you don't let me drive because I'm a girl.”

“I'm not sexist.” He twisted out of my grip but caught hold of my hands again, held me. He looked into my eyes, serious. “I don't let you drive because you're not
me
.”

“Just let me try,” I said, and I don't know if I want to remember what Scott decided.

Now

It takes me three tries to get myself to open up the front door of my own house. So many questions are tearing me apart right now, and I have to pretend like nothing's wrong. Like the questions aren't about to fly out of my mouth at a moment's inattention. I slip into the kitchen and stand quietly behind my mom as she faces the sink.

It's obvious she knows that I skipped out of school again. I can tell by the set of her shoulders, by the fact that I'm studying her shoulders as she scrubs a frying pan that's been lying there in the sink for a week, the fact that she doesn't even turn around when I walk in the door. She's pretending I'm beneath her notice. “Hey, Mom,” I say, and then I can't even shut my mouth before I'm spilling out too much. “I got a text from Joey that said this girl was at the hospital, this girl who knows Scott and her sister can't get pregnant.” Oh my god, what the fuck. Why did I say the word pregnant in front of her? Where exactly am I going with this line of thought? It's dead silent, but she turns around, soap suds dripping from her yellow rubber gloves onto the dingy gray linoleum. “Look, I know you were worried, but Joey thinks maybe Scott and this girl were sleeping together—”

“Taylor, what the hell.” She makes her eyes all wide and kind of sticks her face toward me like she's been doing since I can remember, a menacing kind of way that never fails to make me curl my hands into fists.

This time I consciously relax my hands and take a breath. “I'm super tired and my life is in pieces, Mom. May I please just … go to my room?”

Mom narrows her eyes. “You'd better think long and hard about your attitude, missy,” she says, and whatever, that's fine. She has her scripts and I have mine, and neither one of us has a picnic, let me tell you. She turns her attention back to her frying pan grease and her soap suds, and I slip into the sanctuary of my room and my creaky old bed and my moonrise window and my memory jar.