The Memory Jar (8 page)

Then
(To Dani)

I didn't tell you. I couldn't. I didn't want to scare you. I didn't want you to see me like that, to pity me like that, or to look at me from the sides of your eyes like you were wondering, all the time, what was inside my head. What I was planning. What I'd planned.

It's like this, and I'm sorry if it's hard to just out and tell it. I didn't sleep that night, my mind a mess of soap-smells and selling kidneys to pay for abortions and a playlist of sad songs in my ears. It's not like there was a voice in my head, not something outside of myself—the playlist had run out, and I hadn't noticed the silence, and I made the decision to jump. It felt very sensible, and I saw what would happen with the certainty of something that had already occurred. I would jump into a frozen mine pit, break my neck, and it would be over. I couldn't see any way past this vision, somehow.

I walked to the cliff, which was a lot farther than I had bargained on, plus I was surprised by how long it took for the sun to come up. My feet were on fire with the cold by the time I got there, and it was still pitch black. I almost threw myself over the edge just to stop feeling cold, but I wanted to notice the pink light of sunrise. I wanted to see everything.

This idea wasn't entirely new, you know. There was always my fascination with the story of Petra Jarvi—the girl whose daddy allegedly pushed her over the edge and then hanged himself in the shack on the ridge. Petra Jarvi, who would pull me to the bottom of the pit by one ankle and never let go. I always wondered about the girl, though. Was she alive when she fell? Was she really pushed, or did she jump?

It wasn't going to work. My whole life was broken. My mom was going to find out, and I was going to be reduced to a problem like some kind of trash can that needed to be emptied. Dirt to wash out. These thoughts were like solid iron, heavy—dragging me toward the edge of the cliff. I leaned. I inhaled and closed my eyes.

I don't know how close I got to the edge. My memory narrows down to a black pencil point of a moment, and I know that if I remember the lip of that cliff beneath my feet—if I see how close I was to being that girl—I'd lose my mind. It was too close.

And then I stepped back. I was dizzy and cold and pregnant, but when it got right down to it, I saved myself instead of flinging myself into oblivion. So I figure I must want to live, even if it didn't feel like it right then.

Now

The oven door bangs shut. “You seriously thought you couldn't tell me that?” says Dani. She holds her two oven-mitted hands out, one painted with sunflowers and the other with rainbow-striped goldfish.

“You. Giant. Idiot.” The words equal a whack of sunflowers followed by two whacks of rainbow fish. “Of all the people in the world?” She throws the mitts to the kitchen floor and puts her arms in my face. I turn away.

“Look at them, Taylor. Look, or I'll let the muffins burn.” Again, she pushes her arms to me, her wrists extended.

“You wouldn't do that,” I say, but I look, and like always, my eyes fill up with sorrow to see her scars. I cover them with my hands. “I wasn't going to do it, but now you'll think I did it for sure. That I crashed the snowmobile to, like, kill myself.”

Dani crouches to pick up the oven mitts. She pulls the muffins out, and the room fills with the warm smell of fresh baking. “Well, did you? I wouldn't judge.” The pans clatter against the stove top, and the sound comforts me.

“I don't know,” I say. “I remember snowflakes on my eyelashes, blue sky, and a kind of light. Or blood on white snow. Or nothing.”

She nods and leaves the oven propped open so the heat shimmers up behind her. “Well, I'm glad you stepped back.”

Then
(To Dani)

I walked away from the pit, my thoughts still dark and too sharp to hold on to, and I couldn't be alone with myself anymore, so I called Scott. And I needed him to be strong. I needed him to be someone who wouldn't judge me. Like he could have said, “Hey, Taylor, thank you for not jumping off a cliff because, you know, I love you,” or even, “Whoa, your feet must be freezing.” Instead, he freaked out, big-time angry, and angry wasn't at all what I needed.

So the thing is, I'm exceptionally good at getting yelled at. You would know that, but I guess he forgot. I kept putting one foot into the snow and then the next, the whole time he went on about how I didn't have the right to make that kind of decision for the baby. For his baby. After about a block and a half of this I realized that I could hang up my phone instead of listen, so I did, and he called back immediately. I didn't answer. He called back five more times, and on the fifth time I picked up the phone and was like, “What.” No expression, just what.

“I'm sorry,” he kept saying. “That was stupid, Taylor. I was caught off guard. I'm worried about you.” He told me to hang in there until Saturday evening, after his shift at the oil change place—you know, he worked there on the weekends he was home. He said I should dress warm. He said he would have a surprise.

And I couldn't get over it. I stewed over his reaction all week, my brain unable to focus on anything. Saturday night, I waited by the window, and I tried to forgive him, but I was about to break up with him.

Now

My mom starts calling after lunch, irate. I don't answer, but she fills my voicemail with vitriol and then starts in on the texting, so I have to tell her where I am just to shut her up. Dani says to turn off the phone, but it would be just like my mom to call the police and say that I'm suffering from a head injury and possibly deranged or something, get them to hunt me down like a wild animal lurking amid the knitting needles, desperate.

I can't pass the row of baskets by the till without running my fingers over the balls of wool huddled together like sleeping kittens inside each one, without pinching the thick felt on Fran's felting station. Everything in Dani's mom Fran's world has a soft, steady order to it. I have to turn myself to steel to walk through the bright yellow wooden door and into the world of my mother, who waits in the car. Her eyes drill through the windshield at me.

“I've got my phone,” says Dani, from behind me, and she tugs on my hood twice.

“I'll be all right,” I say. The passenger door is so heavy. I drag myself into the car, which is filled with the smell of my mother's perfume—a bright, round shiny thing like a new coin.

“She won't stop texting me,” says my mom, and her tone is so light, it's a complete mismatch with her intense gaze and her perfume and her voicemail.

“I—” have no idea what she's talking about.

“Dani. Telling me I need to listen, I need to be fair to you, I need to give you a chance to talk.” She looks down at her phone as she speaks, her eyes seeking out the bifocals in her lenses. “She's quite persuasive.”

“I didn't know—”

“I know.” She swipes the phone screen to black and drops it into the console, shifting the car into drive. “The school nurse called me, I called you, I was a jerk on your voicemail.” She sighs and checks her mirror, then pulls away from the curb. “I was scared, Taylor. Okay? I was scared for you. So I called the psychologist from the hospital.”

“The lady I already talked to?”

“Celeste somebody.” Mom taps her nails against the wheel. “Post-trauma counseling or whatever. She's fitting you in now, on an emergency basis, based on the fact that you completely disappeared from school and nobody could find you and we were like five minutes from calling out an Amber Alert.”

“Yeah?” I'm trying to figure out how I feel about the therapy thing. I don't believe her about the Amber Alert, but it was probably still a good idea I didn't turn off my phone.

“So I called the nurse back and told her I'd completely forgotten about your therapy appointment and you'd be back in school tomorrow.” She puts on her blinker and turns onto the street that crosses over the Sterling Creek to the hospital side of town, where a kind woman named Celeste waits in her office to help me find my way.

Then

I talked a lot, when Scott and I were together. He was kind of quiet, and when I'm around quiet people, if they're not going to talk, I will. Sometimes I'd get on a roll, going on about something that was really interesting to me, and Scott would put both of his hands on my shoulders and stare me into silence with this funny grin on his face. Then he'd be like “I love you, Taylor,” and it was all perfect, like the earth rotated only for our sakes. I know he really liked what I had to say, but I also know it wasn't always the case that my opinions and thoughts were so charming to him that he just had to stop me and kiss me. There were times when he was tolerant of my talking, as long as I would kiss him.

I talked my way through that entire visit to the island, talked my way through any chances he might have taken to spring his surprise. I talked about everything but what I wanted to say to him, that we needed to break up, that I needed some space, that I had some thinking to do. All those things were too difficult, and I wondered if he would stop and listen to me. He made a fire and wrapped a wool blanket around me, and I prattled on about anything and everything besides babies and drop-outs and welfare moms and break-ups. I talked even when he did the thing with his hands on my shoulders and his smile; I kept my eyes averted.

“Taylor, listen to me for a second. Listen.” He was still smiling but he was getting irritated. I wouldn't even let him apologize the right way, wouldn't let him get around to his surprise. I was terrified. I
knew
him. I knew Scott, knew his steadiness. I couldn't have even had said, if you'd asked me right then, why I didn't want to give Scott the satisfaction of
a moment
, but I was scared, and on some level I knew he was going to do the right thing, and by that I mean the exact opposite of the right thing.

He caught me. It's not like I could say no. He got on one knee and everything, and I just wanted him to stand up. He was embarrassing me, and I wanted to run. I was filled with the urge to escape, to turn my back and walk out on this particular life, but of course I was surrounded, trapped on this island with everything so inevitable in the way I just
hate—
and at the same time everything that is so tempting and beautiful. Happily ever after.

Now

I keep checking myself, this little mental status update where I try to figure out if I feel pregnant. The therapist's name is Celeste, and I've already spent a considerable amount of time thinking about how absurd that name is for this heavy-set woman with her lipstick settling into the small, papery crinkles around her mouth.

“I still don't remember anything,” I say when she ushers me into her office—a real, walls-all-the-way-to-the-ceiling kind of office with a closing door—in the central wing of the brain trauma unit. Mom drops me off and goes back to work helping other people's kids.

“Oh, it's early,” says Celeste, settling herself into one chair. The office is small, and there's no desk at all, though there are lots of dark wooden storage compartments with orange bins. Three chairs are arranged near a rug and an end table, like it's someone's living room, and as I perch on the edge of the same chair I sat on that first time, I wonder what this is all about. Is she going to try to talk to me about the crash, or is this going to be about skipping school today? No matter what, I can't tell her what I told Dani, or she'll put me in the ward for suicidal girls or whatever. It's one floor down from here; it would be easy to push me into a wheelchair and then whoosh, everyone in my entire life believes that I'm the girl who tried to kill herself on a snowmobile and ruined her boyfriend's life.

“You weren't ready for school today,” says Celeste, interrupting my thoughts. She smiles, and I'm taken aback. She's sincere, like this deep kind of real, and I can see it there right in her eyes. I could tell her anything. “I'm glad you answered your mom's messages so we knew you were safe.”

“I was baking muffins with my best friend. We just needed a day, you know?”

She knows, actually. She sees this kind of thing all the time. Well, not exactly this kind of thing. I don't know. I think I might trust her. She doesn't respond, but she waits, and I know I'm going to talk again; it's just a matter of how long I can hold out. If I want to hold out. Somewhere in the back of my head there's a little salty pool, and if I let the tears spring forth, I'm not sure if there'll be a bottom. I focus on school, on this morning. Nothing else.

Celeste doesn't push. She pulls one of the orange bins down off the wall and takes out a glue gun and a big bag of sparkly things. She plugs it in and spills the plastic beads and things into a plastic tray. Then she takes out a little plastic jar, like maybe it used to have lotion or bath beads in it but it's all spray-painted glossy white, and the lid has a slot cut into it, like a piggy bank. She busies herself with other little tasks, like she's forgotten that it's my therapy time and not arts and crafts hour. She's humming softly, kind of flat actually, and I wish she would stop. But she keeps sorting through the bead tray, laying out the ones she likes on the table near the jar.

“Are you making some kind of can for donations?”

She smiles and shakes her head. “This job doesn't pay much, but things aren't that bad.” She drops a couple of beads inside the jar, puts the lid back on, and gives it some good shakes. “This is for you, silly. It's for your memory collection. So you can write about what you remember.” She hands me a handful of half-sheets of paper, each with some lines and some white space. “You can write on these by hand, or you can print out the memories you've written on your phone,” she says.

“Do you read them?” Some of the memories I've written already are not things I'd want her to see, I don't think.

She smiles and shakes her head again. “Only if you share them with me,” she says, and I completely believe her. “Here you go. The glue is hot.”