Among These Bones (Book 3): Maybe We'll Remember
Page 26
“Yeah,” said Chase. “We’ve got other places to be.”
“But did you find what you were looking for?” Peter asked.
“No,” said Chase. “We didn’t find anything.”
“That’s too bad,” he said. “That’s a bummer. I don’t suppose you’d like a cup?” He gestured at his teapot. “One for the road? No?”
Chase sighed heavily but said nothing. He only scrubbed his face roughly with his hand. He was getting to his feet when it hit me. The tea. I grabbed the sleeve of Chase’s coat and made him stay still.
“Peter,” I asked, “what’s in this tea of yours?”
He shrugged. “Just the mushrooms. I dry them, grind them into a powder. There’s nothing else in it. Want some? I kinda thought maybe you weren’t like a big fan, Alison.”
I thought about everything. The tents in a circle that looked as though they’d grown there. The ancient marking on the aspen. The mushroom garden.
“Peter,” I continued, “people have been coming here to visit you for a long time, haven’t they?”
He nodded as though this were common knowledge. He readied three of his teacups on the low table.
“People looking for answers,” I added.
Peter nodded again with a small, peaceful smile on his lips. Chase’s brow was rumpled and he looked from me to Peter and back, like he was following a tennis match.
The tea. The camp. Peter was the Guide, yes; but not just for people who’d had their memories scrubbed by the Agency. Peter didn’t know anything about the Agency.
“It was you and Mary at first, wasn’t it?” I asked. “And you were young then. Decades ago. People came here looking for answers. All kinds of answers. All kinds of people.”
Peter smiled wistfully. “Yeah. It was me and Mary at first.”
“She’s down at the bend in the river,” I said.
He nodded again, and the smile on his face was more to comfort me than himself. When the tea was brewed, Peter brought us the cups. They had been very fine antiques when Peter packed them here into these woods as a young man. They were still beautiful, finely detailed and slightly translucent. But they bore the marks of wear—small cracks and chips, and even a scorch mark or two.
“Thank you, Peter,” I said.
Chase took his cup from Peter but regarded me with a quizzical look.
“Drink it,” I said.
CHAPTER 55
The tea was beyond awful-tasting. It made me think of the black mud where Peter pulled up the cattail roots. It was earthy and musty, and I gagged as I coughed and swallowed it in small sips. But I choked it all down, and so did Chase.
“What happens now?” I asked Peter.
He blinked at me serenely and held up a finger. Suddenly, I knew what his answer would be. I mouthed the words as he said them: “That’s an interesting question, Alison.”
“Peter,” said Chase, “you’re one of a kind.”
“I’m glad you two stayed,” said Peter, “if only for a cup of tea.”
Peter told us the story of the first day he’d climbed to the peak of the mountain of the bear. He said something about seeing the whole land stretching out before him. There was something he figured out when that happened, but soon I began to lose the thread of his story. I was staring at the fire, at the coals, and I was all at once intensely interested in the way they throbbed and flashed under the slightest movement of air. Then I noticed a floaty feeling, a feeling of well-being. And underneath all of this there emerged something even more profound. It was a sensation of complete mental openness, and a sense that I had stepped onto the very precipice of a massive discovery.
I looked at my hands. I looked at the woodgrain on the poles that held up the tee-pee. I looked at Chase’s thoughtful, scruffy face. We sat in the tent for several hours, staring at the fire, asking each other questions of the most wildly theoretical nature. Most of that conversation is hazy to me now, but this much I do remember: I was in the moment. I was living each moment as it arrived, and this felt so right.
At some point I must have drifted off, into sleep or some other state I’m not sure, but I knew it was evening when I was next aware of my surroundings, because the vent at the top of Peter’s tee-pee was dark. I saw the stars burning brightly in the sliver of sky. Chase was next to me, sitting up, drinking from his water bottle. When I stirred he looked over to me. He smiled and offered me the bottle. I sat up and drank.
I didn’t have any more memories than I did before, but I felt as though I did have something new. I couldn’t say what it was, but there was something new inside me.
Peter was boiling a starchy cattail root stew on his fire, and soon he ladled it into small pots and we ate. When the stew was gone, Peter made more of the tea.
“Is this how we get our memories back?” I asked Peter as I accepted a fresh cup of the bitter, brown liquid. “We know that others came here and got their memories back.”
Peter shook his head. “I told you guys. I don’t know anything about memories. And this tea can’t, like, give you anything. The answers you’re looking for can’t come from a pot of tea or a pot of gold or a pot of anything else.”
I thought: Then why drink it?
Peter, as if reading my thoughts, said, “The tea isn’t the answer. The tea is a way, a path, to the answer. The tea is, like, a guide. But you have to answer your own questions, Alison. Ultimately, the most important answers are for us to say.”
As the effects of the tea came on again, I figured out what was new inside me. It wasn’t that I had acquired something new—it was that I had let go of something old. My anxiety, impatience, and restlessness seemed to have vanished, melted away like a thick coating of ice. We talked more. Peter told us about his life in the camp, about the people who’d come and gone from here. And we asked questions of Peter, many of the same questions we’d asked him already, but instead of being confused and annoyed by Peter’s evasive, obtuse answers, I pondered them deeply. Sometimes they made sense to me, sometimes they left me thirsting for knowledge. I drifted away again, completely at peace for what I now know was the first time in many years.
As I faded into a waking dream, I saw Chase’s face far above me. He grinned and said, “See you on the other side.”
CHAPTER 56
Somewhere a calliope played a marching tune.
I saw a galaxy of winking lights.
There were flashes of colors—red, purple, gold, green.
I saw human skulls on spikes lining a dark hallway with many doors.
I saw a Ferris wheel circling, the wheel spinning faster and faster, like a bicycle tire, like a fan.
There was the sound of laughter, someone singing a lullaby, the sound of someone crying.
The ground rose and fell around me. I felt dizzy. I closed my eyes.
I saw faces. Hundreds of faces. People talking, eating, reading, sleeping. They passed before me like visions. I ran after them. But they swirled around me like the Ferris wheel.
It was chaos and motion. Everything loud. Everything bright. Everything dazzling and explosive and alive.
I waved my hand in front of my face and a trail of hands followed the movement, as if I were watching in slow motion.
Thousands of birds dived and climbed, their flocks forming vast shapes in the sky that formed, stretched, and reformed.
There was an explosion in the distance. There was another explosion, this one so close I could say that I was in it.
The ground fell away from me and I fell. I floated, weightlessly. I could let myself go here—let myself be washed over by the colors and the sounds to be eased into a reverie of peacefulness. It would be easy to float through this place to drift where the whims of my mind wanted to carry me, but I remembered Peter saying that my questions were mine to answer.
So I tried to focus, tried to resolve the fuzzy colors and haziness around me into images. I swam in the space, making long strokes with my arms, until I reached firm ground. I concentrat
ed on finding my memories and as I did rows of doors appeared in front of me. I ran to them, opening them, but behind each one was only darkness.
This isn’t working, I thought. There’s nothing here.
But the secret was here. I knew it. I just needed to keep searching.
I opened another door and found myself in a bedroom. There was shag carpeting and a twin bed. I felt an impression that what I was looking for was here in the room. Had I been here before? Was this a room I knew? I began searching the room. I pulled the drawers out of a dresser. Emptied a shelf of books and knick-knacks. Threw out the clothes in a closet. Pulled off the bedding from the bed. I even pulled up the carpet. But I’d done this before, been here before. The strongest sense of deja vu, like I was reliving some part of my life.
What was it I was looking for?
I sat on the bed to think and felt a strange lump under me. I remembered this. I remembered.
I ran my hand down the side of the mattress—and yes, just like I remembered—a slit cut right next to the edge of the mattress. Barely noticeable. I reached in and pulled out a red notebook.
My heart pounded and my hands shook.
I opened the notebook and a brilliant white light shone out, so bright I couldn’t see. So bright I shut my eyes. So bright that I could feel it burning into my soul.
CHAPTER 57
I opened my eyes knowing beforehand that I’d see a bright light. It had shone onto my eyelids as I came out of a sort of dream state, and I knew I was bathed in a warm, bright light. I opened my eyes slowly. The tee-pee was aglow. The rising sun beamed directly onto the western side of the tee-pee and the cream-colored canvas caught the light and glowed so brightly I thought it might burn the canvas away.
My memories had returned.
I didn’t have to think about it. I didn’t have to concentrate. I just remembered. Everything. Indeed, some part of my mind had already accepted all of this and was roving merrily through my entire catalog of remembrances—memories recent and those very distant. A million moments flashed in my mind so rapidly that they seemed almost simultaneous.
When my conscious mind caught up and realized what had happened and what was happening, I gasped so deeply it was as though I’d had the wind knocked out of me, and it took several frantic moments to breathe properly again. After that it was still a bit overwhelming but in a pleasant, bountiful way.
I wept for a while with gratitude, because of course I remembered the periods when I could remember only back to the prior Agency treatment. And I wept for a while for myself in those dark times, but soon I was laughing and nearly delirious.
I remembered my father, and his kindly face and glasses. I remembered my mother, plump and pretty and always busy, always smiling. I had an older brother who loved motorcycles and a younger sister who was a soccer champion in college. I remembered growing up in a suburb where kids rode their bikes everywhere, and we played night-games in the streets all summer. I remembered going to college and backpacking in South America and working in a big city and getting married and giving birth and holding Arie for the first time—the feeling of fascination and immediate and overwhelming love. I was transfixed by his inquisitive eyes. There were days at the park and first-days of school. There were lazy moments when Arie and I sat close together, doing nothing but just being together, even breathing in and out at the same rate. There was stress, too, so busy with a young kid to take care of and there were hard times that slowly got better and there were joyous days.
I remembered it all.
And I remembered Christopher. Chris. Chris, my husband, my love, Christopher. The memory of him and the loss of him was most wrenching of all. I had loved him with all my heart, still loved him. I remembered holding his hand as he died from the virus, holding his hand so tight, trying to keep him here with me, willing him to stay, praying for a miracle. Praying to please not take the light of my life from me.
Chris.
He was the husband who showed up to my first obstetrician appointment with flowers, who blinked away tears when we first heard Arie’s heartbeat. All of his life Chris had been so full of health and vigor. He was handsome and charming, and I’d fallen in love with him so quickly and overwhelmingly that it hardly seemed real.
And then I lost him, and when he died, it created an ache in me that never went away—I knew that now. I’d always ached for him in some way, even if I couldn’t remember him, just as I ached for Arie when I couldn’t remember him.
So many memories. Memories of the back before and after the first of the Agency’s treatments. All the horror and all the exhilaration. I remembered sweet little Gracie, the girl Arie coaxed with apples in our back yard. I remembered the wise and beautiful Brigitta. I remembered the defiant and reckless Lotus kids. My very happiest and my very saddest moments had filled up all the once-empty places in my mind, accessible at the speed of thought, and I cherished them all, with all of my heart. They were the most precious thing I could ever think of.
I stood up. I was alone in the tent. The fire had burned low. I crossed the tee-pee and pushed the canvas aside and went out into the light.
Chase stood outside the tee-pee facing the sun. He was shading his eyes with one hand. He turned to me as I approached.
“Hey,” I said. “I remember you.”
Chase smiled broadly and broke into an episode of laughter that consumed him until he was wheezing and bending over. I went to him and he took me in his arms. Then he turned me to face the blazing sunshine.
“Look at this,” said Chase, gesturing to the east. “I never noticed before but Peter built his tee-pee so that the door faces this open place in the trees and the valley out there so that the sun would shine right through here. It’s set up perfectly.”
It was an astonishing view. The sun rose between two far-off mountain slopes, and a complex series of overlapping mountain ridges. The sunshine filled the valley with light that radiated like a super-nova. It must have taken Peter weeks to find a site like this, and he awoke to it every single morning. No wonder he was always so calm, I thought.
“It’s gorgeous.”
Chase had tears in his eyes, too, and I knew why. I’d wondered so often if I knew Chase before all of this. Sometimes I’d been sure I had. Now I recalled that I’d never met him before that day in Ruby’s amusement park lair.
But as I watched him there by the tee-pee, facing the sun, his fogging breath golden-white in the morning sun, I knew that I loved him. With the full record of our many interactions—interrupted here and there by the Agency’s hideous treatments—and with the full recollection of my entire life, I knew I loved Chase with a heart-stopping, calamitous love. As much as I loved Christopher, and I loved him full-heartedly, I loved Chase, too.
Chase turned to me and smiled. There was something in his expression, something in his eyes that told me he was full of new realizations and recollections, too. All the memories of his life were back, and he knew now that we’d met only after our memories had been wiped. Had he lost a love, too? Surely he must have, but I knew he loved me.
That’s when I learned that there is no limit to our capacity to love. It’s endless and infinite. It can grow and grow and never run out.
“I want to tell you everything I remember,” I said.
“I want to hear.”
“I want to know everything you remember,” I said.
“I want to tell you.”
We got our boots and went down to the river bend where there was a big dry rock to sit on, and we began to talk. We talked and talked. We laughed and cried. We embraced and smiled. We kept talking all day, and it wasn’t enough time to say everything, but that was okay, because we’d have a lifetime together—to share old memories and to make new ones.
CHAPTER 58
In the afternoon we wandered back from the river bend to find a little food. Neither of us had seen Peter—it seemed that he’d left us on our own, knowing that he’d only be a distraction, even if we were ve
ry excited to tell him what had happened to us.
The sun had crossed through the sky above the camp and was sinking down behind the tee-pee, and we saw a plume of smoke rising from the vent. The air was cool and still, and we could smell the aroma of stewed meat and perhaps some kind of bread.
“I’m in here,” said Peter, his voice slightly muffled inside the tent. “Supper’ll be ready in like ten.”
We went into the tee-pee and it was warm and inviting. Peter had made a tremendous cauldron of rabbit stew and he’d made a kind of flat bread of wild grain flour. On the fender of the fireplace there was also some kind of dark pudding of berries and seeds.
“What’s all this?” I asked.
“A celebration,” said Peter. “You found what you were looking for, didn’t you? Or, I guess I should say you found out that what you thought was lost really wasn’t?”
I smiled and nodded.
“You too, Chase?” asked Peter, smiling.
“Yeah,” said Chase. “Me, too.”
“Well then,” said Peter, “take a seat. Alison, maybe you could check that bread—make sure it’s not scorched. Chase, you could fill up these cups—there’s a bota bag of currant wine there on that hook.”
“Sure, Peter,” we said, and he kept us busy as he put a few finishing touches on the meal.
When everything was ready, we ate slowly, savoring each bite and sip and morsel. It was all very rich and delicious, but as good as the food was, something else happened that overshadowed even the berry pudding.
We reminisced.
The rabbit stew reminded Chase of the squirrel stew his grandpa made when Chase was a kid in the South.
“He’d shoot these stringy little squirrels out in the woods,” said Chase, his eyes intense and gleaming with the wine, “like six or seven of them, and he’d skin ’em and dress them out, and my grandma would quarter them—just like a chicken, and she’d add all her spices and carrots, and this stew would just simmer in a huge iron pot for hours and hours, until it was thick enough to eat a whole bowl of it with a fork!”