I’m not used to endearments from Ruth. It’s never been her style, and I never needed it from her because her love came through in the midnight hours when she comforted me from a dream, in her home-cooked meals, the dress she sewed for prom. Hearing it now is a soft blanket around my shoulders.
She continues, “And with the help of your rehab team, you figured out pretty early on how to remind yourself about your memory loss.”
My forehead wrinkles. “How?”
“First, with a note card you kept in your pocket. Your doctors suggested you keep it on you with everything you needed to know, and then they would instruct you to read it whenever you were distressed or upset because you couldn’t remember.” Ruth shrugs. “It worked and eventually you didn’t need to read about it anymore; you just knew. You’re the one who transferred that idea to your notebooks. Then again, you’ve always been such an organized and self-contained person, even when you were just a little girl.” Her voice is warm, like she’s proud of me.
I read again from my notes. “But when did I call Tate?”
“It was later, when you were back home and still adjusting. Vance said it was late one night after he’d gone to bed. He woke up and found you in the kitchen with your notebook, writing the same thing over and over. Tell Tate about the baby.” She pauses, sips her tea. “You begged Vance to help you call Tate.”
“Oh.”
Ruth studies me, like she’s trying to decide something. “You know, Vance helped Tate get the harbormaster job.”
I write that down. “Why?”
“What you don’t know”—Ruth puts her hands out, palm up—“actually, it’s something Vance never told you . . . is that he’s kept in touch with Tate all these years.”
The information spins in my head. “Why?”
“He’s worried about that boy since you were both little. Alice too. Well, she did before”—Ruth pauses—“before she went downhill and couldn’t focus on anyone but herself.” Ruth presses her lips together. “But she’s sober now and lives here. You have that in your list, right?”
I nod because I’ve just read it.
“Alice used to bring him clothes from the Goodwill in Anchorage whenever she went because Bill couldn’t be bothered to keep the boy in pants that fit or winter coats without holes. Your dad made sure Bill got Tate to school when you two were real little and then later when you were teenagers.” Her lips quirk up. “Used to wake that boy up himself.”
My eyes open wide. “Dad did?”
“Oh yes.” Ruth sips her tea. “But when Tate left, Vance worried about him out there, all alone, so he found a way to get in touch.” She cups her mug with both hands, looks at me over the rim. “That was after he was already married to that horrible woman.”
I write it all down, and while none of it surprises me—especially the part about Dad helping someone, that’s just the kind of person he is—my heart is full. Dad also helped Tate because he knew how much I loved him. He did it for me too. The cramping in my hand pauses my writing, and I stop to stretch out my fingers, roll my shoulders and neck.
Ruth sighs. “Oh, Claire,” she says and touches my hand, her palm surprisingly warm and soft. “You’re trying, sweetheart. It’s just not easy, is it? For anyone, especially for you. But you’re trying.”
“What choice do I have, right, Ruth?”
“I don’t think you understand,” Ruth says.
Something I’ve written makes my face feel tight. “Dad met Tate’s wife?”
Ruth takes my cup and hers, turns to put them in the sink. “Only once,” she says, and I notice that she stands as though she carries a heavy weight across her shoulders.
“Is everything okay, Ruth?”
“I’ll be okay.”
My phone buzzes. “I should probably go. Thanks for the tea.”
She gives me a sad smile. “Anytime. See you tonight, sweetheart.”
I slide my bag onto my shoulder and head out, checking my phone as I walk to my apartment to see what plans we have going on for tonight. I hope it’s a game night.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A loose photo on my desk catches my eye when I walk past on my way to—I stop, rub the back of my neck, momentarily at a loss for what I was doing. I turn in a half circle, hands stretched out in front of me, trying to shake the present like I’m panning for gold. Hoping that the answer to what I was doing will rise golden flecked and shiny above the silt. But nothing. My bladder feels empty, so I wasn’t going to the bathroom. A fullness in my stomach means I must have eaten recently. Still, nothing comes to mind, and when my eyes spot the photo again, I pick it up, grateful for something to occupy my thoughts.
I smile. The picture is of me and Dad after I received my graduate degree in elementary education. School was always a safe place for me, and as I grew older it became an easy leap for me to see myself as a teacher. Teachers didn’t disappear for days inside their bedrooms or have to leave Whittier to drive a truck for weeks on end. Teachers, at least in Whittier, were around and available for students even when the school was locked up and dark. Plus, teaching came naturally to me, and I loved being around kids, especially the ones who were too loud or troublemakers or angry at the world. I could relate. I look at the picture again. Poor Dad. I put him through so much. Once, I pulled the fire alarm, just for fun, and forced the entire building outside in the middle of a night when the snow flew sideways. I skipped school with Tate more times than I can count, and we shook the vending machine so hard hoping snacks would fall out that we broke it. I can come up with a list of stupid things I did when I was a teenager. I think at one point the homeowners’ board wanted to kick us out because of me. But Dad and Ruth were always there, and my antics didn’t go unpunished, at least the ones I got caught for.
So it was easy picking my major and later deciding to get my master’s in education. Because without all the adults sticking with me, believing in me, and punishing me, too, I might have followed a very different path. Once I was focused, school came easily to me, due much in part to my love of lists and notes and calendars of all kinds. I look again at the picture, remember the proud tautness of Dad’s shoulders, so convinced that I would take my education and travel the world. He wanted me far away from Whittier, refusing to ever see how much this town had saved me. I did have friends who left to teach in international schools all over the world, and I could have gone that route, I suppose, but there was a big part of me that yearned to give something back to the kids in Whittier.
I shake my head, blink rapidly. That was all a long time ago, I tell myself.
In some ways I can feel the years that have passed since this photo was taken in the texture of the skin across my arms, the looseness around my eyes, because time itself has changed me even if I don’t recall its passing. In other ways, it shocks me to face the truth. The present is liquid, flowing from moment to moment, and I am a raft, drifting with the current, not always connected to the minutes or hours, days and weeks attached to the passing of time, until I stare at a photo like this and am forced to acknowledge how much I have missed. I press my arm against my eyes, wait for the burning to fade before looking at the picture again.
In the picture, I’m wearing a black cap and gown, and Dad has his arm tight around me, his bearded face split in two by his grin. I trace the outline of the two of us with one finger. This was taken right before the ceremony, before my mother’s untimely arrival, before I broke the news to Dad about my job in Whittier, and before Tate Dunn walked back into my life.
No, Claire, you can’t come back to Whittier. Dad had touched my face like I was delicate and made of glass, a sad wrinkle in his forehead. It isn’t the right place for you. It’s too small, honey. I think if I’d been able to afford something better for Alice, maybe things would have been different.
I’d put my hand on his arm, made him look me in the eye, because I was both angry and saddened by his words. I’m not her. I’m nothing like her.
The memor
y fades and I focus on returning the picture back to where it belongs. That must have been what I was doing in the first place, certainly not dredging up old memories that hurt.
Framed pictures line the hallway, and I let my eyes travel over them, looking for an empty frame where this one might belong. There’s a picture with me and Dad by the water, a glistening salmon swinging on a fishing rod between us. Another of me as a toddler—a little monkey clinging to his back during a hike, blonde curls flat against a chubby face. A grainy photo of me standing in the mouth of the Whittier tunnel. Dad took that one the first time he drove me to college. He stopped just before we entered and ordered me out, said he needed photographic evidence that my days of traveling the tunnel were numbered.
My phone buzzes and a reminder pops up on the screen. Relax and read your favorite book, make coffee. I click my tongue and smile. I must have been making coffee; then maybe I got this photo out because I was thinking about him. It’s enough of a guess to make me feel grounded, and now I know my next move: go to the kitchen and see if I made the coffee or was in the middle of it.
When I enter the kitchen, I freeze.
A young girl, maybe nine or ten, kneels on the yellow laminate squares, small hands collecting hunks of glass. She looks up when I enter, studies me from behind glasses with frames that are too big for her small round face. Glasses that don’t look like the prescription kind. And her hair. It’s piled up on top of her head and appears to have been wound around the cardboard of a toilet paper roll. I can tell because half of the roll is sticking through her hair.
A bubble of laughter fights to escape my mouth. I stop myself. Kids don’t like to be laughed at by adults.
“Hi!” I say because I can’t think of how else to start this conversation. It’s embarrassing to have forgotten why she’s here, but something about her puts me at ease. Maybe it’s just because I’ve always been comfortable around kids. “Is everything okay?”
She narrows her eyes, pinches her lips together. “Aw, hell, did you forget about me already?”
I shrug. “Did you forget that kids your age shouldn’t use language like that?”
She ducks her head, smiles. “You sound just like Ms. Kiko.” Still smiling, she lifts one hand. Blood trickles down from her pinkie in a dotted line. “You were getting me a Band-Aid, and I think you forgot. And also, maybe you forgot that I broke one of your glasses on accident. So I’m sorry, even though I already said that, but you probably forgot that too. And I guess you definitely forgot that you walked me home from the Buckner ’cause you said there were bears who would eat me.”
The way she says forgot like it’s something she knows about me, like it’s written across my forehead in thick black letters, inches up my back. But I ignore it because she’s just a child, and kids can say all kinds of things they don’t mean or completely understand. I grab a paper towel and press it into her palm, examine the cut, which is small and mostly superficial. Just in case, I check my pocket, and to my delight I pull out a slim Band-Aid.
Her eyes widen and I see that they are a dark blue ringed in green. “You didn’t actually forget, you just forgot that you remembered! That’s great!” She reaches to take it from my hand. “I can do it myself.”
“No worries,” I say and open the slim package, pull it apart, and have the Band-Aid on her small wound in seconds. “I used to be a teacher, you know.”
She holds her hand to her chest, stares at me like perhaps I’ve grown a pair of purple horns. I touch the top of my head—nope. A chunk of her hair falls away from the toilet paper roll on her head and lands squarely in front of one eye. The cardboard roll, finally released, falls to the floor amid the broken glass between us.
“Aw, hell,” she says, and maybe it’s the juxtaposition of her kid voice saying an adult word or the fact that I was just like her at that age or that the kid was wearing a toilet paper roll on her head, but a lightness builds inside and I laugh. I try to stop, cover my mouth with one hand—I don’t want her to think I’m making fun of her—but the entire situation is so bizarre that I can’t help it.
It doesn’t seem to matter because the girl laughs, too, small, light giggles that fill the kitchen. It’s surreal and sweet, and a lump blooms in my throat.
“What’s up with the hair?” I say. I could ask her why she’s here, but that would be acknowledging how much I don’t know, so instead I play along, figuring that the answers will uncover themselves if I just look for clues. I’m very good at figuring these types of situations out.
“I already told . . .” She wrinkles her nose, stops midsentence, and begins to pick up the glass, throws it into the trash can I pulled out from under my sink, and together we finish cleaning up the mess.
We’ve both risen to our feet and stand opposite one another in my small kitchen. “I like your glasses,” I say.
She nods, her lips quirked up at the sides. The kid is cute, I’ll give her that.
There’s a name for the shape of her glasses, but I can’t get the words to form on my tongue. “I like your glasses,” I say, then squeeze my eyes shut because even I can feel the familiarity of the words in my mouth, like I’ve just said them.
The girl laughs, but it’s a sweet infectious sound, like we’re enjoying an inside joke. I laugh too. No matter; I do like her glasses. I offer her a fact to cover up for my slip. “Cat-eye glasses. They were popular in the sixties.”
She giggles, crosses her eyes as if she’s trying to look at the glasses on her face. “Yeah, I know; aren’t they cool? They’re not real, you know. I got them at the Goodwill in Anchorage because they’re from the sixties, and I love everything sixties. I watch old movies with my dad, so I know a lot about old stuff. And I most especially love everything Audrey Hepburn, you know?”
I nod. “When I was your age, I was into everything seventies—bell-bottoms, braids, tie-dye.”
Her eyes grow big behind her glasses, and she looks at me as though seeing someone different. “Cool,” she says, then touches a shiny brown curl that hangs below her chin, looks at the fallen cardboard roll on the ground. “Audrey Hepburn wore her hair in a beehive sometimes, and I think it looks cool. I found a YouTube video on how to do it.” She picks up the roll, frowns. “I think I need more bobby pins.”
I hesitate. I should send her to Sefina, who has two girls of her own. She must have loads of practice doing girls’ hair. Besides, this girl can’t possibly be here to hang out with me. I turn to lead her out, stop. My mother was a hairdresser, and if there was one thing I learned from her—really one of the only things—it was how to do hair.
“Why don’t you let me try?”
The girl stares at me. “Um, okay. Do you want to see the video too?”
I smile, shake my head. “No, I think I can manage on my own.” Then I hesitate because I still don’t know why she’s here, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t so I could do her hair. I glance quickly around the kitchen, see a backpack by the table—not mine, so it must belong to the girl. A crumpled piece of paper sticks out of the unzipped top. I move closer to see whether it can give me any clue, but the girl’s next words stop me.
“Is this when you forget everything again?”
I turn, give her a look that is perhaps a bit too sharp, but she’s surprised me. “Excuse me?”
“Aw, geez.” She scrunches her nose. “Sorry. Nina says you don’t remember anything, Tasha says you can remember some things but mostly not much, and Ms. Kiko tells them to hush ’cause she says you’re an amazing person who’s been through lots.” The girl pushes her lips out, tilts her head to the side like she’s studying me. “I think probably that Ms. Kiko is right, and besides Nina and Tasha are teenagers, so they can be mean for no reason. You know?”
My jaw hinges open at the girl’s blatant honesty, and I try not to dwell on the fact that teenagers are talking about me at all. But the effort loosens my hold on this conversation, and I search my brain for something to say that relates to this little girl. Ms
. Kiko. She’s a teacher at the school here in Whittier. I know this is a fact because I taught with her briefly from before. “Are you in fourth grade?”
“Yep, me and six others. It’s weird here, you know. Real different from my other school.”
More information I can use. “So you’re new here?”
The girl’s eyes grow round. “Wow, yeah! I knew Nina was wrong; you do remember some things. We moved here on September 4, and I remember that date ’cause it’s National Wildlife Day. Did you know that?”
I shake my head.
“I do ’cause I have a little flippity calendar that says what’s special about the days.” Her voice turns serious. “Animals are important on September 4, and I love animals so that’s how I remembered it.” She seems to be waiting for me to say something, and when I don’t she gives an adult sigh and picks up a purple backpack from beside the kitchen table. She pulls out a piece of paper. “I think you probably forgot why I came up here to see you.” She hands me the paper, which is crumpled like it had once been a paper ball.
It’s a flyer with a picture of a guitar, the kind I could find in clip art, and a few typed sentences.
INTERESTED IN BEGINNER GUITAR LESSONS?
CONTACT CLAIRE HINES, APARTMENT 1407
“I’m interested,” the girl says. “And my name is Maree, like Mary with a y but with two e’s like in Anne of Green Gables.”
I stare at the flyer, biting my lip. The paper is familiar, thicker than regular copy paper, and cream instead of white. I look at my printer, and the skin on my forehead eases with relief because the same paper fills the feeder tray. I tap the flyer. So this is from me. But what would put this idea into my head? I can’t teach anymore.
I open my notebook but can’t find anything related to why or where or anything else that would be helpful to me in this moment when I am faced with the gigantic black hole in my head. I hold out the flyer. “I don’t think this is mine.”
The girl scrunches her nose. “You’re Ms. Claire, and this apartment is 1407, so, um, I think it is.” Her eyes roll skyward. “And I want to learn how to play ’cause I think it’s cool, and my mom will love it. I saw you accidentally throw it in the trash, so I figured I should bring it to you so you know what I’m talking about, since you have your, you know”—she shifts her weight, points to her head—“sucky memory and all.”
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