The Memory Jar (19 page)

Then
(Memory Jar)

Joey drove me to Dani's house from the hospital this afternoon since there wasn't another bus coming for almost two hours, and while we were waiting for the car to warm up in the parking lot, he asked me if I'm thinking about the past too much. He wondered if I was afraid of the future.

This only happened like five minutes ago, but it was five minutes that I wouldn't mind remembering, so I'm writing it down. I don't know why people say we should “live in the moment.” I feel like we're all living in one eternally awful moment that never comes to an end. But sometimes there are good things in the middle of all this pain, moments I don't mind living, and the ride home with Joey today was one of them. Also this moment right now, writing in Dani's tree fort bed, snuggling with a bunch of stuffed spiders.

Now

“Instant Vacation,” says Dani, but she doesn't say where. She takes a long look at me and pushes Neep into my face. His eight fuzzy legs dangle into my ears and hair, and I can feel the worn spot where little Dani rubbed her thumb against his little spider tummy, all those years ago when she cuddled him in the orphanage.

“Well, this isn't much of a vacay,” I say, blowing fluffy spider fur out of my mouth.

“I don't know where to take you,” she says. “I don't know how to fix this.”

I turn my head, letting Neep slip off my face. “What if your mom had had an abortion?” I ask. The question is hollow and far away, and I know it might hurt her, but this is where we are, this vacation.

She's quiet—not so quiet I suspect I've crossed a line, but quiet enough that I know she's taking my question seriously. I think Dani's adoption is something so much a part of her and her moms' personal narratives—the whole blogging adventure, complete with photos—and so much a part of who she is to me that I guess I don't realize that being adopted means she's part of a group of other people with their own adoption stories. I should have been thinking about how all of this might be hurting her, on a different level.

“Are you asking, because I'm adopted, how do I feel about abortion?” Dani takes a little breath, a hitch that I can hear, and then she lets it out in a little puff. “I guess I think … I think there are spirits of people who are waiting to be born, and I would have jumped the next ship. I'm not too attached to my genetic material, really, and I think it's sort of luck of the draw where each person ends up, physically.”

“Like karma luck, or just random?”

Another little sigh. “I'd
like
it better if it were karma luck,” she says.

I hug my arms around my body. “Me too,” I say, and then I think for a while. “Maybe.”

Then
(To Dani)

I remember one time I asked my mom why she hadn't given me up for adoption if I was such a pain in the ass and turned her life to shit like she said. It must have been one of those times where there was no stopping the collision, where we were both so far over the line that it didn't matter one way or the other what I said or did, I was still screwed. Sometimes I kind of liked those times because I knew where I stood, anyway, and I could speak my mind.

“I loved your father, and he loved me,” was all she said.

“Why did he leave?” Everything about me was a challenge, from the set of my mouth to my firmly planted feet. “If you guys were so in love, why did he leave?”

Kids can be such little shits, you know? There's this
strange tide turning within me, and I keep on seeing things from her point of view. I keep seeing my mom's vulnerability, her struggle. It's not much fun to see adults as humans—as people with the same issues we have—instead of heroes or villains. It means getting way too close to being grown-up.

How easy it would have been for her to spit out at me what is probably the truth—
he left because of you
.

Now

Dani holds the spider, cradling him in her arms in a way that is habitual and a little heartbreaking. “I don't think your mom is messing you up, Tay,” she says in a soft voice. “I think you're both good people doing your best.”

I peer out of the leafy canopy at the room, which is pure Dani. On the walls, a muted palette: grass-mat texture, a mural of an endless savannah. A solitary lion on the horizon, with the sense of others behind it. Dani's moms had found it enchanting and humorously ironic when Dani requested they design her room after the Ray Bradbury short story where the kids have their holographic nursery lions eat their parents. Janie wrote a whole series of posts on her blog about it and the whole thing made them get several requests for bedroom redesigns. They made a little extra cash off that idea and spent a week in Mexico together, the three of them, and they asked me to go along. My mom wouldn't allow me to go, and anyway, I had no passport, no spending money. It would have been strange to have gone. But oh, I wanted to.

“I won't ever get to travel,” I say. “I won't ever get to see the whole world.”

“Or,” she says, “you might discover the world with your kid.”

“On my earnings as a poet?”

She laughs. “Well, let's not get carried away. Maybe your cardiologist income will have to take care of some of the travel expenses. The poetry could buy you, maybe, a really cute handbag.”

“And for my kid? What do I get for him?”

Dani thinks for a moment, then smiles. “Your kid will need a really professional camera. He's going to take glamorous photographs of you for his art class that will someday show up in a fancy magazine, like fancy people buy from a fancy art shop and then put them on display. Fancily.” She starts to giggle.

“A
fahncy
coffee table book,” I say, and I'm laughing, too. “Dahling.”

“After that, it's only a matter of time before you're publishing your memoir, what's it called again?”

I think too long, wondering how to sum up my life. “
This Memoir is Fiction
?”

“No, no, that's not sappy enough. We'll call it
To Mend a Broken Heart
,” she says. “And obviously the play on words with the heart surgeon piece, yeah?”

I roll my eyes.

“
A Song of Heart Mending
,” she goes on, barely able to get the words out between giggles. “
Doctor Heart's Mending Song
.”

“Oh my god, Dani, stop. My stomach—” I can't breathe from laughing ridiculously. “Probably more accurate if my title mentioned a broken head,” I say, and the words pull all the fizz out of our moment. It gets quiet again, in our little tree fort in the murderous veldt. “I can't really have a baby, Dani.”

“This isn't fair, you know, any of this.” She takes my hand and squeezes it, and I don't know what to do anymore, so I don't do anything. Fair is irrelevant.

Then
(Dani)

I remember when you bought those matching sweatshirts. You know, the ones from St. Cloud State? You got them for some special event in your relationship, like your twenty-two-month kiss-iversary or something revolting like that, and you were wearing them at this party. It was out at that Cody guy's place, and they had a bonfire, and there were like thirty people there I didn't know and you guys, a matched pair. No, I'm not saying there was anything wrong with it, Taylor. I mean, the two of you were always reaching for each other, and the best part was that neither one of you was reaching more often than the other, I remember that.

There was nothing wrong with the two of you, but there was something—I can't even explain it. At the time I dismissed it as my own jealousy because, you know, I was there with some mouth-breather off the hockey team who, between you and Cody, I somehow got matched up with. He wasn't a mouth-breather, that isn't fair. It was Jason Adams, actually, and he had nice hair and pretty eyes even if he wasn't much for, I don't know, conversations that involved ideas or curiosity. That's what it was! Between you and Scott. A lack of curiosity. You know how, when you first meet someone, you want to know everything about them? You want to know what they're doing every single minute, and you want to think about how cute they are when they're doing those things? You and Scott … that night, around the fire, you were there, in each other's sweatshirts, but I didn't see you thinking about each other's lives, outside of that night. Do you hear what I'm saying? You were his girlfriend, and he was your boyfriend, and that was an accepted fact, but neither of you had the look of a person
in love
. A person who is always thinking, always wondering about the other person.

Now

I swear, we did not call it a kiss-iversary. He bought the sweatshirts, actually, and I was angry at him that night, something to do with the whole party thing, and he and Cody forcing me to drag Dani along by setting her up with one of their friends. I didn't want to spend our one evening together at some stupid bonfire party surrounded by all of his friends, is that so terrible?

“Oh god,” I say. “It's my fault.”

“What are you talking about?” Dani shifts beside me, tries to get a good look at me, but I cover my face with my hands.

“You're right. I'm so stupid. I wasn't interested in knowing his friends, in seeing his life or who he was becoming.” The realization makes me sick to my stomach. I wanted
our
lives to continue on, in stasis, until I could graduate and join him somewhere down the line. I wanted to seal him under a bubble and keep him “my boyfriend” without anything changing, trapped inside our little high school romance. I'm such an idiot.

“It's natural, though, don't you think?” Dani pulls my hands down and tries to pin me down with her dark eyes. “The two of you were mismatched from the start.”

Natural. I can see what she means, and I know the difference between us would never have been that big of a deal if we'd met later, if we'd both been in college or all the way grown up. I think about how unfathomable Scott's high school life was to ninth grade me, visiting him in the weight room after school, and I wonder if I've always been wrong for him, like Dani's saying. Like he said plenty of times in the beginning too, I guess. That sounds so dramatic, though—mismatched from the start. And what does that mean for this potential kid, for any future he ever might have had caught between the two of us.

“But go back to the part where you're trying to say this is all your fault,” says Dani, tugging me back to her intense gaze. “What do you even mean by that? Because none of this—” She spreads her hands out as though this whole tangle is hovering in the air in front of her, here in the safety of her tree fort
.

“I know, all right?” Anger rises up inside me almost like her words are a stick that's stirred up a bucket of river water, mud that had settled once more spinning up to the surface. I feel clouded with feelings I haven't been able to feel since all of this started. “Everyone keeps telling me that none of this is my fault, blah blah blah, but if it's not my fault, whose is it?” There, okay? My fault for getting pregnant, my fault for not figuring out he was apparently sleeping with a legit crazy person. My fault for not making him understand how I actually felt about the whole getting-married idea (eject! eject!), and maybe even my fault for whatever happened on the snowmobile. “Everyone thinks I'm suicidal, Dani. Nobody even knows who Kendall really is. I probably can't get an abortion, and even if I can, I should probably use my money to pay for my teeth, since my mom lost her job and we have no insurance. But I can't … ” Peace breathing. “I can't have a baby.”

Dani doesn't try to talk, to be logical. She just squeezes me into a tight hug, then pushes me over and covers me up with her blankets. “I'm going to talk to Momma Fran,” she says, climbing down from the tree. “You'll be staying here tonight.”

Then
(To Scott, with coffee
)

Do you believe that, what Dani said about us being mismatched? At any other point in our lives, the age wouldn't have made a difference, but it did for us. It really did. I don't know what else to say. I've been telling stories about your past, but I miss you here in the present.

Remember that one night when we walked all around campus in the dark, after your team lost so badly they had to run the clock at the end of the game? We didn't have a lot to say to each other, I suppose, other than endless choruses of “I miss you” and “I love you,” and was that so terrible? Sometimes it bothered me when that happened, but other times those words felt like all we needed to stay close. I remember when you put your arms around my shoulders and pulled me close and we marveled at how our hip bones fit together “like a puzzle,” you said, mine locking in right beneath yours. We walked with our bodies intertwined like that for several hours, keeping our balance as if by magic as long as we held closely together and moved in sync.

“When you get down here, we can get an apartment,” you said, like you always said.

“We can get coffee in the mornings before heading to class,” I said.

You laughed at me then, and said you would just enjoy the smell.

“That's a little creepy,” I said, but when we stopped to make out on a shaded bench, I knew we were both thinking about that someday life, about our someday morning coffee.

Now

I hold the cup close, but not too close, to Scott's nose. I stopped for the good stuff, no stupid hospital cafeteria coffee today, and I can't help feeling weird when I talk about kissing him even though nobody else is in the room right now.

“Wake up,” I say, but I'm not sure I believe anymore that it's going to happen. “Open your eyes and smell this yummy caramel latte.” This is totally silly, and I'm not sure how long I can keep it up. The guy in this bed is a stranger to me, a waxy face, clumsily shaven, his hair far too long to be my boyfriend. Scott never ever let his hair grow past the tips of his ears, and he frequently criticized Joey's shaggy mop and offered to “clean it up” for him. This makes me smile. “Hey, do you remember that time you chased Joey around the house with the clippers? Remember how he screamed?” Remember how you called him a little girl and how I stopped laughing and told you there was nothing wrong with being a girl, that the word girl wasn't an insult to throw around? Remember how you looked at me like you were going to argue but then realized you didn't have an argument?

A shadow moves, flickers over his face, and for the briefest instant my heart jumps—so many feelings clattering together inside me in that millisecond before I realize it's not Scott waking up but someone behind us entering the room, the reporter guy from before. The cute one.

“Hello,” he says, and his voice is clear and particular—the kind of voice that's been trained for public speech. “You probably don't remember me.”

“Tom.” I remember the way I told him he couldn't use me in his news story or whatever. “You're the one who told Joey that Kendall's story doesn't match up, right?”

He shrugs, his shoulders reaching up toward his little sea-shell ears. Seriously, I can imagine him as a toddler, his family gathered around to pinch his adorable little cheeks, telling him his face needs to be on the television. “Yeah, that's me. Tom Baker from channel seven.” He smiles an apology. “I left the camera by the door this time.”

I look away, fixing the plastic lid back on my coffee since it doesn't seem like the aroma is going to lure my boyfriend out of his middle ground between sleep and waking.

“Taylor, right? You were his girlfriend.”

“Yeah.” I don't correct his verb tense because who am I fooling. My boyfriend is a couch cushion who now occasionally moves when his feet are poked with pins and who once cleared his throat or possibly mumbled his brother's name.

“You're the one who started the memory jar thing, right?”

“Well, my therapist started it, really.” I think about Emily in the waiting room with her glue gun and all those little memory jars she's making, how nobody will say it but everyone is afraid that she's making them for her brother's funeral. I turn to look at Tom again, because really, how long can I pretend that this coffee lid is more interesting than his face? “So, tell me what else you found out about Kendall. If the whole sister thing is fake, what else is a lie?”

“Wait.” Tom-the-beautiful-news-reporter pulls out the chair at the foot of Scott's bed and sinks into it like he's lost all ability to hold up his own spindly weight. “I'm sorry. From the start, you know, it's uncomfortable to come in here—
your boyfriend's had a traumatic brain injury, would you like to do an interview?
” He shakes his head. “And then I come back because my boss is like, Go back, Tom, you've got to get this story, and I talk to his sister and she's not saying much, so I'm trying to figure out if I have anything I can use, anything I can make a story out of, and, I mean, I'm looking through the tape I have of you and Scott that first day, and there's like a little bit I could use but I'm not using it because you made it clear you weren't comfortable with the whole thing, and suddenly there's this other girl sitting there in the family waiting room and she's all, ‘Oh, are you here from the news? Let me tell you all about Scott,' and I mean, I had
no idea
about you being pregnant at that point, but this Kendall girl is telling me all about how heroic he was and how her sister has uterine cancer, and I thought … ” He spreads his hands in front of him, helpless. “I don't even know
what
to do with this.”

I sip my coffee. “Is any of her story true?”

“I haven't exactly been able to figure that out,” he says, “but one thing is clear. Kendall has some pretty serious issues. I found out pretty quickly that what she was telling us wasn't actually the whole story. Just a standard background search online showed me that she has literally hundreds of profiles, identities, addresses. I couldn't help digging deeper. Once I started feeding her various email addresses into the search, it got even weirder. There's a whole strand of identities where she claims that she and Scott are a couple. She has posts about their life together, including a fair number of photos. I can't verify if they're real. In some of her profiles, she mentions they've moved in together. In other identities, he's a sperm donor for her pregnancy. She's been very active in forums about uterine cancer and also a bunch of motherhood communities, including some where she posts photos of her belly, or a belly, anyway, claiming that
she's
pregnant.” Tom holds up his hands like he's surrendering. “I know. It's messed up.”

“Oh my god. I can't … I can't even form words.” Pregnant, comatose, suicidal, none of it compares to that mess. “This isn't a feel-good story anymore, is it?” I take a sip of my coffee. “Plus, it's not over. Probably I'll die of a back-alley abortion, and he'll wake up perfectly fine and well-rested and ride off into the sunset with Kendall.”

“I would never put this on the news
,
” Tom says, and I believe him.

“It would make a better reality show, anyway,” I observe. “A slow motion trainwreck.”

“This is so awkward.”

“Did they ever have an actual relationship?” I don't want to know, but I have to know.

Tom rubs his elbow. “I talked to Scott's roommate, Terence. He knew Kendall from hockey, and he said Scott was friends with her for a while, or at least they got together to study, saw each other at the rink. Terrence says Scott stopped hanging out with her pretty abruptly a while back, a couple of months ago at least. Scott used the phrase ‘too intense,' and Terence also said that Scott was getting a lot of calls and texts, even a string of weird deliveries—flowers and candy and once even this gigantic stuffed teddy bear dressed like a goalie. They assumed she was behind it.”

“I don't know what to think about any of this.” I sit back down in the chair. I sip my coffee, but the queasiness hits me as soon as the first mouthful hits my tongue and I have to take a few deep breaths to steady myself. I am so
sick
of feeling sick. I set the cup down on Scott's bedside table and open one of the little dinner mints I brought for him to smell.