by Megan Hart
James traced a finger along each of my eyebrows. “Forget it. You’re right, it’s stupid.”
“I didn’t say it was stupid.” I put my hands on his chest. “I just want to know if it’s true.”
He shrugged, a nonanswer that said more than words. My guts did a slow, rolling tumble.
“What is it about him?” I whispered the question so he could pretend not to hear it.
He heard me. He didn’t answer, but he heard. We looked at each other. I didn’t like the sudden distance between us, in a moment when we should have felt closer than ever.
We both heard the door open at the same time. We both turned our heads toward the sound. We both heard Alex coming home, but it was James who went to greet him.
Patricia’s house is always clean. I’ve seen her vacuum her carpet to leave marks in a herringbone pattern. I’ve known her to scrub her kitchen floor on hands and knees with a toothbrush, just to get the grime from the grout. We might make fun of each other for various things, but none of us ever mocked Patricia about the cleanliness of her house.
Despite her compulsion to clean, she’s always made it comfortable. Her kids have the run of the place. They’re good kids, too, messy like kids can be but not destructive. The house is clean, but you can tell people live in it. It’s not a showroom. It’s a home.
So when I walked inside my sister’s house and saw the pillows scattered off the sofa and puzzle pieces littering the floor, I wasn’t at first surprised. When we went to the kitchen and dirty dishes were piled in the sink and crumbs scattered the counter, I stopped to take a second look.
“I hope you brought the pictures,” Patricia said from behind me. She grabbed a full mug of coffee from next to the pot and sat at the kitchen table. More crumbs there, and she barely paid them a glance. From upstairs I heard the sound of pounding feet and some shouts as the kids played.
“I did.” I held up the envelope and took the seat across from her. “I brought some really good ones.”
Patricia took the envelope and shook out the photos. She sifted through them, sorting them by size. I watched her efficiency and wondered if her natural sense of organization had made her a good mother, or if having children had fostered her managerial skills. I tried to remember if she’d always been so naturally precise, but I couldn’t.
“Pats,” I said. “Do you ever try to think about stuff from when we were kids and can’t?”
“Like what?” She picked up a picture of the two of us as toddlers, dressed in identical yellow sunsuits. “I remember those outfits.”
“Do you remember them because of seeing this picture, or do you really remember?”
She looked at me. “Both? I don’t know. Why?”
I reached for some of the pictures. One of my parents at a party, both with cigarettes, my dad with a tall glass of amber liquid. One of Claire as a baby, the three of us clustered around her bassinet staring at her like she was a prize. I was eight in the picture. I remembered things from when I was eight, but I didn’t remember this moment that had been captured forever by a camera.
“I don’t know. Just thinking.”
“Well,” my sister said tersely, “I don’t know why you’d want to.”
She snapped a couple of photos down in a row, like she was laying out cards.
“Pats,” I said gently, waiting until she looked at me before I continued. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Why?”
I looked around the kitchen. “You seem a little tense, that’s all.”
Her gaze followed mine. “Yeah. Well. Sorry about the mess. I fired the maid.”
I waited for her to laugh, but she didn’t. “It’s not a mess.”
Not compared to my house, anyway, which didn’t even have the excuse of children. Certainly not compared to the house in which we’d grown up, where chaos had reigned on a daily basis. Faced with too many choices, my mother often chose none. The result had been a lot of half-finished chores. I was in college before I figured out that if you fold your laundry right out of the dryer instead of leaving it in the basket for a week, you don’t have to wear wrinkled shirts.
“Let’s take these upstairs to the spare room. I’ve got all the stickers and stuff up there.”
Upstairs, I heard the mutter of cartoons and peeked my head into the bonus room above the garage. Tristan and Callie sprawled in beanbag chairs, their eyes glued to the television. I heard a familiar theme song.
“Hey, Scooby Doo,” I said from the doorway.
Two small faces turned to me. “Aunt Anne!”
Tristan, six, leaped to his feet and ran to hug me. His sister, older by two years, was slower about her affection. She was growing up, getting too cool for hugs.
“What are you doing here?” Tristan clung to me like a barnacle and lifted his legs so I was forced to pick him up or fall over.
“I came to work on some things with your mom. Why aren’t you guys outside?” I said, before releasing Tristan.
“It’s too hot and Mommy said we could watch TV.” Callie had shot up another inch since the last time I’d seen her. Now her head reached my shoulder.
I might have trouble remembering some things from my childhood, but I had no trouble remembering the first time I’d held my niece in my arms. I’d been the one to drive Patricia to the hospital when her water broke in the middle of mopping her floor. We’d met Sean at the hospital and Callie was born twenty minutes later. I’d had the chance to hold her before she was even two hours old.
“C’mere and give me a hug,” I told her and squeezed her like I never wanted to let her go. “You’re getting too big.”
Tristan, dancing, gave me a few more pokes before attacking his beanbag with a flying leap that threatened to bust it open. I looked at the TV, which had…shrunk?
“What happened to the big screen?”
The kids were watching their cartoons on an old twenty-five-inch set with a bunch of scratches on the side. The picture was a little fuzzy around the edges, and duct tape covered one bottom corner.
“Mommy and daddy sent it back,” Callie said.
“They did? Why?”
“Anne,” Patricia called from down the hall. “Come on!”
The children either didn’t know or care about the disappearance of the big television. I left them to their cartoon overdose and went to the spare room where Patricia kept all her craft supplies.
Usually even that room is as neatly cataloged as a museum collection, but apparently a tornado had whirled through it. Patricia pushed aside a pile of fabric squares from the desk along the wall and put the pictures there. She closed up her sewing machine and put it away.
“Been working on something?” I asked, looking around.
“A quilt.” She pulled out an accordion file, then another, from the closet and set that on the table, too. “I’ve got lots of stickers and papers.”
Patricia had inherited my mom’s creative talents for sewing, knitting and baking, though she was better about finishing projects. She’d started scrapbooking. I was lucky if I got my photos in an album, much less took the time to write journal entries about them, but Patricia had several bookshelves full of albums dedicated to different topics.
“I thought you were making a collage on a piece of poster board.”
She pulled out a small black album from a shelf in the closet. “I thought I’d make an album with the pictures and leave pages for the guests to write comments. There will be blank pages at the back to put pictures from the party.”
She gestured at the plethora of materials spread out all around the room. It was a nice idea, the album, if a daunting one.
“What? You don’t like it?”
“I think it sounds great, Pats. Just ambitious, that’s all.”
“I like doing it,” she said.
“Are you sure you’ll have time? I mean—”
“I’ll have time,” she said.
Tension crackled between us, and I backed off. “Ok
ay, but if you need help…”
She smiled, looking more like herself. “Oh, right. None of you like scrapbooking. Claire would rather poke out her eyes than do something like this. No, it’s fine. I like doing it. Thanks for getting the pictures.”
“Sure.” I paused. “Have you seen them lately?”
She looked up from the piles she was making on the table. “Who? Mom and Dad?”
I nodded. She shrugged. She had a bunch of clear plastic shoe boxes filled with markers and various scissors, the kind that make fancy cuts. She was organizing them as she answered.
“Mom came over to watch the kids last week, and I talked to her on the phone. Why?”
“Have you seen him lately?”
She looked up, her hands full of colored pens. “No.”
I hadn’t thought so. Patricia took her children to visit my parents, but she never left them there. When my mom babysat, she did it at Patricia’s house. But, like my father’s consumption of “iced tea,” nobody ever talked about why.
Without answering her question, I looked through the stack of pictures I’d brought from my parents’ attic. I held up a faded Polaroid showing me and Patricia, both of us sitting on our father’s lap. We were all grinning. I had my mother’s hair and eyes, but I had my dad’s smile, and so did my sister.
“I look at these pictures, and I just…I don’t remember that.” I tapped the picture. “Do you?”
She took it from me. “We were so young. You look like you were about four, which meant I was two. Who remembers anything from when they were two?”
That wasn’t what I meant, but I wasn’t sure I could find the words to explain myself. At least, not without crossing into forbidden territory. I looked at the picture again.
“We looked happy,” I said.
My sister said nothing. She took the picture from my hands and put it back on the pile. She opened her accordion file and pulled out a package of stickers shaped like balloons. She was ignoring me.
“I just…I look at these pictures and I know they happened because I’m in them, but…” My struggle to voice my thoughts hurt my throat. “But I just don’t remember any of it.”
I didn’t remember sitting on my dad’s knee while he read to me from Dr. Seuss, or putting together the train tracks that circled our Christmas tree every year. I didn’t remember the family portrait session with all of us dressed in sweaters my mother had knitted with our names on them. I didn’t remember our family being happy.
“I had to be about Callie’s age in this one,” I said, showing her. “And I just don’t remember it. I remember the sweater, you know? It itched and the sleeves were too long. I remember looking at this picture. But I just can’t really remember being in it.”
My sister looked at me, the eyes we’d inherited from our mother bleak. “Stop thinking about it, Anne. Just stop it, okay? We have the pictures. We were there. You were there. Memory’s a fragile thing—there’s a reason why people can’t remember everything. We don’t have enough room in our brains for all of that garbage.”
“I’m just saying, that’s all. Some of these things wouldn’t be so bad to have in my brain. I can remember Chris Howard upchucking all over me on the bus in second grade. That’s a memory I could do without.”
We laughed, but it sounded strained. I helped Patricia organize her supplies until it became quite obvious to me I was hindering more than assisting. She didn’t need me there.
I squeezed my niece and nephew extra hard before I left. Would they remember the times I took them for ice cream, or played Candyland? Or would those memories fade in time, too, replaced as they aged with more recent events?
It wasn’t that my mind was a gaping black hole. I remembered school and visits to my grandparents’ house in Pittsburgh. I remembered the sight of the three rivers joining in one place, the view from the Duquesne Incline, and not only from seeing the pictures of that trip. I remembered favorite toys and books and television shows. I remembered bits and pieces of my life before ten…but so much of it was slippery. Maybe Patricia was right, and there just wasn’t enough room in my brain.
Everything had changed the summer I was ten, Patricia eight, Mary four and Claire two. There had been phone calls waking us in the middle of the night. The shouting that used to happen behind closed doors erupted in the middle of dinner. My mother burst into tears without warning, frightening me. Everything was changing, and at ten I was old enough to know it had something to do with the phone calls and my mother’s tears, but I didn’t know what it was. All I knew was that we weren’t supposed to talk about it, that mysterious “it” that was pulling us all apart. It had been a bad summer, and I remembered all of it with crystal clarity.
My dad had always been jolly, but he became a parody of “good-time” Dad, who got on the floor and wrestled with his daughters whether they wanted to or not. The one who brought home gallons of ice cream, half-melted because he’d stopped for a drink on the way. He woke us up at dawn on Saturdays to take us fishing, or kept us up late to catch fireflies in the yard. He’d always been a drinker—we had plenty of photographic evidence of that. But that summer he was never without his glass of tea, heavily laced with whiskey from the bottle in the cupboard. Mary and Claire were too young to notice, but Patricia and I could count. The more trips Daddy made to the kitchen, the louder he got and the quieter Mom became.
I didn’t want to go out on the boat with my dad, but there wasn’t any way to tell him so. I didn’t like fishing, putting the worms on the hooks or the boat rocking side to side. I didn’t like sitting and frying in the sun that always managed to find the spots I left uncovered. I wanted to stay home, reading my Nancy Drew mysteries, but when my father shook me awake I got out of bed and dressed and went with him.
I never told anyone, until Alex, about the day on the boat when the storm came up and my father almost capsized our boat. Like the bottles we hid under the garbage and the doors closed to mute the shouting, it was one more thing not to talk about.
Two days after the one on the lake, my mother disappeared. Taking Claire, who at two was too young to be left behind, my mom went to take care of my aunt Kate, who’d fallen ill with a mysterious ailment the adults wouldn’t reveal. With school out for the summer and my dad home to ostensibly handle the details, I’d been left to take care of my sisters during the day while he worked. Looking back, I can’t believe my mother ever left us alone for that long, but I guess she had no choice. And she wasn’t leaving us alone, exactly. She’d left us with our dad. If I had told her about that day on the boat, she might not have gone. But I’d said nothing, not then or ever, and she had left us with my father, who’d never harm us but who hadn’t done a very good job of keeping us from harm.
He’d always been moody, but without my mother to temper and soothe him, he was free to wallow. Up, down, up, down. One day he’d be talking a mile a minute, serving popcorn and potato chips for dinner, playing hour upon hour of Monopoly or Clue with us. The next, he’d come home from work and disappear into the darkness of his room with a full bottle and come out with an empty one. It was like having two fathers, both frightening in their extremes.
Patricia had asked me why I wanted to bother thinking about the past. I wanted to remember good things. It was like my life had begun for real that summer, and everything I’d ever done since, every choice I’d made both for better and for worse, had been as a result. Now my life was changing around me while I stood in the middle, wanting something without knowing what it was. I wanted to remember something good so I didn’t have to think about the bad, so it didn’t have the power to keep affecting me. So I didn’t keep making choices based on feeling like whoever I trusted would eventually let me down, so I could stop feeling like I didn’t deserve good things. So I could stop dreaming about drowning.
I didn’t see much of Alex over the next few days. Whatever his new business was, it took him out of the house before I was up and sometimes kept him out until after I went to b
ed. I knew he was in touch with James, but I didn’t question my husband too carefully about it. The subject felt tender to me, like there were answers to questions I didn’t want to ask, even if I thought James wanted to answer.
I’d almost got used to thinking I had the house to myself again when Alex came home one afternoon as I sat out on the deck, reading. I could’ve been cleaning, or doing work for the anniversary party coming up in August, but instead I’d made myself some lemonade and gone out to read in the sun before it got too hot.
“Hey.” He lounged in the doorway for a second before coming all the way out to the deck. He’d pulled his tie loose but the suit still looked sharp.
“Hi.” I shaded my eyes to look at him. “Long time, no see.”
He laughed. “I’ve had a lot of meetings. Investors.”
“In Sandusky?” I made an impressed face.
He laughed again and shrugged out of his suit jacket. His salmon-colored shirt beneath looked barely rumpled, and I envied men who didn’t have to fuss with hair and makeup to look good. Or pantyhose. “No. Cleveland. I’ve been driving to Cleveland every day.”
That would explain why he’d been so scarce. “I made lemonade. I can make some lunch, too, if you want.”
“Such service.” He squinted into the sun. “You shouldn’t have to work so hard.”
“Yes, well, I haven’t had any luck with hiring a houseboy.”
Alex unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it from his waistband as he kicked off his shoes. I was learning something about him. He liked to be half-naked.
“Now there’s an idea.” He pulled off his socks and wiggled his toes against the sun-warmed wood. “You could put an ad in the Register. ‘Help wanted. Personal Mr. Clean needed for lakeside cottage. Duties include washing windows, scrubbing floors and shiatsu massage.’”
I giggled. “Not from Mr. Clean.”
He stretched his back with a groan, twisting at the waist until his spine crackled like puffed rice cereal in milk. “You’ve obviously never had a good massage. Christ, I’m tight. I got spoiled in Singapore. I had weekly massages there.”