The Memory Jar (7 page)

Then
(To Tom, Plus Camera)

So I'll tell about how Scott taught me how to swim. The first skill I mastered was floating. I could lie on my back in the sun and drift in the shallow water, and we both relaxed. I would float and bob in the water until I got cold and then sprawl across my Hogwarts towel on the warm sand. Scott fished the weeds along the shore for bass, which he caught and then released in a quick silver shimmer.

Casting was an act of meditation, and so was floating, and our conversation drifted in that pleasant place where both participants are truly at ease. The island was our sanctuary.

“I tried fly fishing in Idaho,” he said, and I shaded my eyes, tried to read his face but it was inscrutable. “Fishing and baseball and setting up Joey with a string of grandmas to babysit him all day long so I didn't have to keep him out of the way.”

I turned in a slow mermaid roll that I was beginning to perfect. “This was when you stayed with your aunt and uncle?”

“Great uncle. When my folks had to put Granny into an assisted living place because of the dementia. He was a mean one, and my great aunt only told me to get Joey out from underfoot and to keep him out until dinner time. If my folks ever knew how we were treated that summer … ” Fishing line sang out as he extended his arm, a graceful zing and then a small splash as his lure hit the water.

“Did he hurt you?” I treaded water so that I could look him in the eyes. Looking for damage? Looking for danger, maybe. “Did he hurt Joey?”

Scott slowly reeled in his cast. “Fishing was the only time he wasn't angry.”

Now

My phone rumbles again in my pocket and a rush of nausea hits, my face prickling, my head spinning. “I'm sorry,” I say, and I pull the mic from my collar. “I can't do this. That wasn't the right kind of story at all.”

Tom takes the mic and doesn't try to stop me, though it clearly disappoints him when I ask him not to use any of that on the news. I check my phone on the bus headed home and there are two more pro-life texts, both from different numbers. I try calling the first one, my stomach uneasy as I debate what to say if someone answers. The number rings over to an automated message saying that the user is currently unavailable, and the second number does the same. The numbers don't exactly seem local. Whoever it is must be using some kind of phone number service, some kind of spammer software. Is it a real person, or a bot? I suppose it could be some kind of political activism group, but how would they know to target me? The drugstore bathroom, the shoplifted test? It's not like I purchased baby formula or prenatal vitamins or whatever. I mean, I've searched a few things on my phone about pregnancy and abortion laws and stuff, but it would be so creepy for people to be texting me based on my search history. Is that even legal? I wonder if I should take those vitamins. I shut down my phone for the rest of the night and resolve to be more careful to browse in private mode.

The next morning, I'm actually supposed to go to school. My mom clinks her spoon against the inside of her bowl, trying to get at the last of the oatmeal. “I suppose you haven't finished your homework.” She sighs. “Taylor, you have to go.”

I don't know what I thought was going to happen. I guess I thought that people whose boyfriends have lapsed into comas—not lapsed so much as
crashed
, I suppose—did not have to attend school. Or maybe people with lacerated faces. Or a person who is secretly pregnant and mildly amazed that no medical personnel have suspected or revealed said secret to said person's mother, for that matter.

I am not able to go to school. The thought is ludicrous. “I have a concussion.” My fingers wander over the stitches on my chin. “I have memory loss.”

She snorts, tossing her dish into the sink to make it clatter. “You have a C in English, for chrissakes. In
English
. The language you've been speaking since you were born.”

“A C is average.” I don't quibble about my speaking ability on the day I was born, though I'm tempted. I can't help it. She brings out my will to argue.

“Too bad you're not average,” she says, and flicks me in the face with her wet fingers. “Now go to school.”

“A half day,” I plead. “The doctor would call that reasonable. I'll go to school this morning and then spend the afternoon at the hospital.” Mom stops, midway through the door to the garage, her keys bouncing in her fingers. “Please.”

She walks out the door with a slam, and I slump against the kitchen counter. The old garage door rattles up in its crooked tracks, and I know without waiting to listen for it that she's going to leave it for me to wrestle back down.

I pick up my phone from the edge of the table, contemplating it in my hand. I'm not sure I'm ready to face turning it back on. I need to text Dani to come get me, though, so after a moment, I power it up and brace myself for a barrage of pro-life texts. No surprise, there are three new texts, again each from a different number, and each gives me a hollow thud in my stomach. I don't even bother trying to call them back.

By the time I grab my comb and a ponytail holder, brush my teeth, and scrub the sleep out of the corners of my eyes, Dani's here. I loop my backpack over my shoulder, grab my hastily packed paper-bag lunch, and step into my boots. Dani touches the horn, twice, to let me know she's waiting, and I wrap my scarf around my mouth before opening the door. The wind is icy, and my eyelashes freeze instantly. The kid is warm inside me, I guess, but the ordinary acts of wrestling the awkward garage door and navigating the treacherous stairs down to the street feel like some kind of high-pressure test. I don't like this feeling, this lack of my usual invincible comfort. I don't like this.

“Whatcha got?” says Dani, pulling my lunch out of my hand and unrolling the top. “So awesome.” She tosses her hand-sewn, quilted lunch bag into my lap. “I've had to eat that shit for two whole days, thanks to you.”

Dani's mom Janie is a mommy blogger and her mom Fran is this super-vegetarian or whatever, and every day since Dani started preschool, her moms have photographed her lunches, categorized the contents, and posted recipes for all the healthy whole foods they've cleverly cut into intricate shapes and packaged in fancy, segmented, pastel containers. “Your food is good,” I say, and it's true. Her lunches are filled with things like homemade frozen kale and apricot smoothies and organic tomato soup in an adorable anime thermos. I get maybe a slab of bologna on white bread with ketchup and ripple chips from a big cardboard box. Sometimes an orange or a banana, depending on when payday was.

“I can't eat it once there's a picture of it online,” she says, already pulling open the foil wrapper on my Pop-Tart and stuffing part of one in her mouth. “How can I eat it when the entire Internet is watching, thinking,
This is what Dani eats for lunch
. Here's the adorable note her moms wrote to her. See how they reference that fight they all had two nights ago, which Janie completely documented online in ridiculous fucking detail so the
whole world
could chuckle at her life? Here's the whole wheat pancake sandwich, filled with the homemade raspberry jam that the whole Internet knows Dani helped Fran make last summer.” She finishes wolfing down the first Pop-Tart and pulls away from the curb. “So you're alive and stuff, you asshole. I was so worried.”

I can't help smiling. “I love you too.” She turns away from the road long enough to make crazy eyes at me. It's a little weird about the lunch pictures, but I think Dani's moms' blog is pretty great. They've written all about the adoption, from the very beginning of the mountain of paperwork to Dani's first airplane ride home clutching Neep in her tiny brown hands to the lunch she took this morning, I suppose.

“So … ” Dani trails off, but I know what she's asking, or rather, I know she's asking everything at once.

“He's the same. Everything's the same.” Everything except the stupid icy sidewalk, which was trying to kill me, and my stomach, which can only tolerate pure grease. “I still can't remember anything.”

She drives in silence all the way to Gordon High, then slows down but doesn't turn into the parking lot. Her old hatchback rattles past the entry and she sneaks a look at me beneath her long lashes. “Are they expecting you?” she asks, nodding toward the brick building. “Like will they call her cell?”

I relax into the passenger seat, breathing out all the anxiety I've been holding. “You have a plan?” I say. She has a plan. Dani's good at plans, and she's good at getting in trouble without getting in
trouble
.

“Momma Fran will call in for me, and she'll let us hang upstairs at the shop, do some baking, watch some movies.” She steps on the gas. “I'll give you a manicure, and you can eat my froofy lunch. We need a mental health day, Taylor, that's all there is to it. We haven't even had a chance to get the hospital smell off you.”

“That's a pretty good plan,” I say. It's thin, but simple. I do need a mental health day, but after the way Mom argued with me, there's a pretty high chance of her checking up on my attendance. The question is, how much do I care? “My English grade isn't going to get me on any scholarship lists, though.”

“Put this in your essay,” says Dani, and that's that. “You're going through a bit of a rough patch.” She dials her mom Fran as she drives. “You might even be a hero.”

I look out the passenger window, the narrow mining company houses with their attics and dormered ceilings. It's true. But maybe I'm the villain.

Then

It wasn't unusual for me to sneak off for an afternoon in St. Cloud, but usually Scott knew in advance that I was coming. The entire drive down there—two whole hours—my hands wouldn't stop sweating. I put the heater on full blast and alternated, one hand on the wheel and one held in front of the vent. The roads were good, the sun bright in the clear but colorless winter sky, and I squinted as I drove, wondering how the conversation would go.

“We were careful.”

That's what he said, but I still can't think about the look on his face. I still don't understand the feelings I saw flitting across it. Surprise, sure, bordering on shock, but there was something of joy, too. And there's a part of me that felt so warmed by that, wanted to snuggle up in the idea of forever.

“Yeah, but you know. Still.” I spread my hands like, what else can I say? He held me, then, and he still smelled like the fitness center, where he'd been lifting. A strange glimmer of jealousy rolled over me as I felt his strong arms, but I couldn't figure out why I imagined him holding some other girl. I shrugged it off, the whole image. We had bigger things on our minds at the moment, but later, in scattered pieces, it would come back to me. What triggered the jealousy? Was there some other smell beneath the warm human scent of perspiration in the hollow of his neck, the spice of his deodorant wafting up through the embrace—was it the smell of someone else? Our visit was, by necessity, brief, and we agreed to text later, keeping “the issue” secret to be safe. I had to be back up in Sterling Creek by 2:30 at the latest. The drive back was filled with nagging thoughts about our relationship, about whether the tension in our conversations was all new or whether something had been changing before any of this ever happened.

I took a deep, steadying breath as I walked through the door of the library, inhaling the reassuring and unchanging smell of books inside the old Carnegie building. Two more deep breaths and I was sure the smell wasn't going to make me queasy. When Dani's arms enclosed me in a quiet, fierce hug, I wasn't sure if the tears welling up were from the complexities of my visit with Scott or from relief that at least this sanctuary was still sacred. I didn't know what I would do if the smell of books made me sick.

“Did he take it like a man?” It was our code for total breakdown, complete with a pint of ice cream, two spoons, and a marathon of sappy romantic comedies.

I shook my head. “He was really calm, you know. Scott-like.”

Dani wrinkled her nose. “Stoic. I don't like that.”

“Let's go look at weird things,” I said, tugging myself out of the embrace, up the marble steps to the main level of the library. Miss Marcia smiled at us over the top of her black cheaters, looking so reassuringly like a librarian that once again a wave of relief washed over me and I had to stop to pick up a tissue from the edge of the dark wooden circulation counter that curved around toward the reference area. “Taylor. Dani, hello.” She looked away respectfully, toward the stack of books she was organizing onto a shelving cart. Our feet whispered against the polished hardwood floors.

Other kids spent their time in the library working on math homework or using the library Wi-Fi to watch goofy viral videos, but we preferred the deserted microfiche room and the annals of the past that Miss Marcia so graciously allowed us to peruse according to our whims, as long as we were sure to put everything back in its place as soon as we were done. There was some really weird shit in yesterday's news, and it was almost enough to make you forget about an odd moment of jealousy or the end of your life as you had planned it to be.

Now

Dani doesn't mess around with preliminaries. She ushers me up the stairs to the apartment above the yarn shop, a bulky cloth grocery bag looped over her arm. “I think we'll start with some cranberry white chocolate zucchini spelt muffins,” she says, and she ties my apron for me because my arms are still too stiff and sore to easily reach. Although she makes fun of her mom's blog, Dani is actually the baker in her family, and many of the whole-grain contents of her faithfully photographed lunches are her own creations.

“And then you can tell me everything.” She's as confident in her ability to get me to talk as she is in her ability to shout and smile and do the splits in cheerleading, or her ability to lay out all the ingredients for her muffins in five seconds flat. Mixing bowls materialize from her fingertips.

I look through the cupboards until I find the muffin pans and the little tube of cupcake wrappers. Dani measures and stirs with a little soft hum to let me know she's waiting, listening. But giving me space. What can I say? I can tell her anything, but what do I
need
to say? The baby, the coma, the missing ring. The disturbing mystery texts that I've been receiving. The news reporter, the way Joey flipped out in the café.

“Parental notification,” I say. “Forty-eight hours prior to the abortion.”

“Don't worry about that. I'm on it. The hospital didn't tell her?”

I shake my head. “I … I didn't tell them. It didn't feel related to the accident.”

“There are no accidents,” says Dani, and then she's quiet for so long, I finish lining all the muffin cups with little pink paper wrappers while she stirs everything together in a red ceramic bowl. “Everything happens for a reason,” she finally says.

I hate that, honestly. Like, I get it that people are looking for a way to make sense of bad things happening to good people and all that, but what possible reason could there be for this to happen? “I can't remember the crash, not at all. Nothing real, anyway.” I watch Dani grate the zucchini into a finely shredded yellow hill. “What happened, do you think?”

“What do you mean, nothing real?”

I tell her about the image, about the red stain on the snow, about my feeling of fading into darkness. I tell her about hearing the crunch even though my ears were packed with snow from landing in that deep drift. “I think I can remember the sparkle,” I say. “Snowflakes in my eyelashes. It was cold.” This is new, a fresh image in my brain, and I latch onto it, persistent. The sky, a dark blue sky. It was cold. The sparkle in the light from—where was the light? A flashlight? The moon?

“Was Scott upset when you left the island? I mean, I know you were probably both upset, of course, there's a lot of stuff going on, obviously.” She reaches for the rubber spatula and tips the bowl a little, scraping around the edge and drizzling the batter into the first row of muffin cups. “Did you fight?”

“I don't remember.” It's a lie, and I don't know how to tell her the rest. The memory is a tightly packed kernel of unpopped corn, heating up in a pan of oil, but I'm not sure if I'd call it a fight, exactly. The ring on my finger, the absence of it now—I have to lean on the kitchen countertop and focus on my breathing. “I can't remember anything.”

Dani nods, slips her hands into her oven mitts, and slides the pans onto the racks. She doesn't say anything else, but when she sets the timer, I know what she's waiting for.

“I didn't keep it from you for a reason,” I say, like she already knows what I'm going to say. “It's not like I actually went through with it.”