The Memory Keeper

by Jennifer Camiccia

  The aroma of dinner leads me to the kitchen. Gram flashes me a smile and hands me a knife. “Just in time to chop the celery.”

  I pick up the celery and place it on the cutting board. “Gram, can I hear more about your friend Jacob?”

  I start chopping while she stirs the meat she’s browning. “Ah, Jacob. Last time I told you about our chess games, yes?”

  I smile. Her remembering was a good sign. “Yes, Gram. You said you used to always beat him at chess.”

  She snorts in a very un-Gram-like fashion. “Unless he cheated. One time when we were playing, I beat him and he tried to convince me he was the one who should have won.” Her laugh fades along with her smile.

  I stop chopping and lean closer.

  “That’s the afternoon his papa came home early.” She pauses, still stirring the meat. Her mouth takes on a thin, grim line. I almost tell her she doesn’t need to go on, but before I can say anything, her voice changes, going up like she’s out of breath.

  It’s the voice of a little girl.

  “Jacob’s papa could be most charming, but there were also times when he was very scary, yes?” Her accent gets thicker as she continues. “That night Jacob’s papa flung the front door open so hard, it hit the wall. Pictures fell off and broke. He sounded like a monster on a rampage. Jacob and I hid in the closet, and he held my hand tight until the yelling and crying stopped. He told me his papa turned into another person when he had too much vodka. I thought I’d be happy when I could no longer hear his papa yelling… but the silence was almost worse.

  “When his mama came to let us out of the closet, one of her eyes was black and sealed shut. She told me to go home, but I didn’t want to leave Jacob there. He told me they would be all right, that his papa had passed out and he wouldn’t wake up again until morning. When I got home, my mama hugged me tight. She sang to me until I fell asleep. I wished she could have done the same for Jacob.”

  Gram slowly opens her eyes. She smiles at me. “Will you tell your dad and mom that dinner is almost ready?”

  My heart beats as fast as a hummingbird’s wings. How can she look so normal after telling me such a terrible story?

  13. Skull

  Our skulls safeguard our brains from the outside world. But sometimes, like in a car accident, the very thing that’s supposed to protect the brain actually injures it. The force of the accident can cause the brain to slam against the bones of the skull, causing a concussion. The effects of a traumatic brain injury can cause long-term damage.

  I think of this, and I think of how parents are supposed to protect their children. I think of Gram’s friend Jacob and how he must have felt all those years ago when the person who was supposed to protect him hurt him instead.

  * * *

  I’m on my way to tell my parents that dinner is ready when my phone buzzes.

  Olivia: I’m sorry I had to leave without helping with the horses

  Olivia: Did you ask your gram about

  Olivia: the passports and the journal??

  Me: Not yet. She just told me a really sad story and I found a picture of her in Russia when she was like our age. I don’t know what to do. Should I ask her?

  Olivia: NOOOO!! What if she’s

  Olivia: a spy??????

  Olivia: She might have to tell the government

  Olivia: that you know. You could put her and your family

  Olivia: in danger!!!!!

  I roll my eyes. Did I really think I would get advice instead of her wild theories?

  Me: She’s not a spy!!!!! Ugh, Olivia. Just stop with that stuff.

  Olivia: Fine, but you should listen to me. Did you hear back from Max yet?

  Me: Not yet.

  Olivia: Do you need me to come over? I can have my mom drop me off. I could spend the night

  Me: Let me ask my dad

  I find Dad in his office. “Gram says it’s time for dinner.”

  Dad looks up from his desk, which is covered with papers. He has the faraway look he gets when he’s grading homework. “Thanks, hon. Can you ask her to bring me a plate?”

  “Can Olivia spend the night?”

  He nods, not really hearing me. “Sure, okay.”

  “Can we go to the park?”

  He nods again. “Yeah, sounds good.”

  A good thing about a distracted dad is he always says yes to everything.

  Mom’s lips pinch shut when I say Dad wants to eat in his office. She takes a quick taste of the spaghetti while she makes him a plate. Her hand flies to cover her mouth. “How long did you cook the pasta, Sue?”

  My stomach jumps to my throat and then free-falls to my toes. I know before I take a bite that the spaghetti noodles aren’t right.

  I take a forkful and nearly chip my tooth. Gram didn’t cook it long enough. I forgot to double-check and set the timer for her.

  “Sorry, Gram,” I rush to say. “I forgot to set the timer like you asked me to. I was texting with Olivia and got distracted. I must have poured it in the strainer too soon.”

  Gram blinks in confusion. “You did?”

  Mom puts another pot of water on to boil. “We’ll just make some more. Your sauce is delicious as usual, Sue. Don’t worry, Lulu. You’re still learning. I remember when I first started to cook. I nearly burned the kitchen down.”

  My cheeks tremble when I smile. Taking the fall for Gram is worth Mom thinking I can’t even set a timer right. If it means Gram stays with us, then I’ll take the blame for every last thing.

  * * *

  Olivia’s mom drops her off just as we’re finishing dinner. “Hi, all,” Olivia says with a wave. She sticks her tongue out at Clay and he giggles.

  “Hello, dear,” Mom says. “Love the bracelets.”

  Olivia lifts her arm and shakes the silver bangles. “Thanks, Mrs. C.”

  “Dad said we could go to the park,” I tell Mom.

  She looks over in surprise and glances at Gram. “Um, I guess that sounds okay. What do you think, Sue?”

  Gram hands Clay his juice before glancing over at me. “You girls didn’t get your fill of each other today?”

  I push my chair out. “Olivia has something she needs to talk to me about. It’s personal stuff.”

  Olivia shuffles nervously and manages to look suitably pathetic.

  “As long as you follow the rule to be back before dark,” Gram says. “Does that sound reasonable, Rose?”

  Mom nods and smiles at Olivia. “How are your mom and dad? I haven’t spoken to Felicity in weeks.”

  Olivia’s eyes dart from Mom to me like she doesn’t know what to say. I stare back at her with a faint frown. Olivia always knows what to say. “She’s busy with… um… her job.”

  “We’ll be back before dark,” I say, linking arms with Olivia and tugging her out of the kitchen.

  We’re halfway down the driveway when I whisper, “Thanks for coming.”

  “Well, you needed me, so…”

  I smile. “So, about your personal stuff.”

  Her giggle is the same from earlier today. The forced laugh, the one that stretches her mouth too wide. “Funny. Now, tell me why we’re going to the park. Don’t you have piles of photo albums you still need to look at? I can help.”

  “I told Max to meet us there.”

  She tugs me to a stop. “What! Did he find something about your gram?”

  I start walking again. “He said he found something, and I didn’t want him to bring it to the house.”

  “I knew it! He found out she’s a spy,” Olivia says. She hurries past me and opens the small metal gate designed to keep little kids from escaping.

  Max is perched on the edge of a swing. A couple of swings down from him, a mother is trying to get her toddler out. When the boy throws a tantrum, Max hops up to help untangle the child’s legs.

  “There you go, buddy,” he says. The boy stares up at him with fascination. The boy’s mom thanks him. Who knew that Max Rodriguez was such a softy?

  Ma
x’s smile kicks up to a grin when he glances over and sees us. “Hey!”

  “You find out her gram’s a spy?” Olivia sits on one of the swings and pushes off with her foot.

  “Stop calling her that,” I say automatically, my eyes going to the paper in his hands.

  Max hands it to me and runs a hand through his hair. He nods to the benches near the slide. “Sit and read. We can talk after.”

  Olivia jumps off the swing and plops next to me on the bench. She tries to read the paper over my shoulder. “What does it say?”

  Brains use chemicals and electricity to either find memories or store them for later. Mine, as I read, is exploring data it’s already collected. It can determine in advance if there’s a point to the search. The hippocampus and frontal cortex analyze a variety of things to decide if they’re worth remembering. Other brains, without HSAM, might discard a memory that doesn’t seem important. But my brain holds on to it. I hoard the memories in a hidden maze of cells, lobes, and intricate pathways too detailed for me to fully understand, no matter how hard I try.

  “It says Tatyana Petrov was born in Moscow, Russia,” I say. “Her father was a politician, and her mother was a professional ballerina before she gave birth to Tatyana. When she was thirteen, Tatyana and her mother disappeared. No one knows what happened to them.”

  Max shoves both hands in his pockets and leans against the slide. “I ran the name through immigration records here, but there wasn’t anyone with that name. Then I tried to find out more about her life in Russia, but there was nothing else. The only reason I found out this much was because her father was a pretty big-deal politician and he put out a reward for information about them.”

  I shake my head. “None of this makes sense.”

  “I did some reading,” Max says. “I guess it was really hard for people to just leave Russia. If someone left, it was usually kept secret because it embarrassed the government or something. Maybe this dude, the dad, managed to smuggle his wife and daughter out to America, to get them somewhere safe. Then he says they’ve disappeared. Boom. They’re safe and he’s not in trouble.”

  “Why wouldn’t he go with them?” Olivia asks, her face pale. “I mean, a dad should stay with his family, right?”

  “If he was an important politician, maybe he couldn’t leave as easily as they could,” I say. “But why is there no record of them here?”

  “No record of a Tatyana Petrov that matches your gram’s age. But there is a Susan Smith and her mother, Mary. They arrived in San Francisco on May 2, 1958, from Paris, France. I tried looking for immigration records from France, but so far there’s nothing.”

  “They changed their names.” I close my eyes, the information like a computer code scrolling across my eyelids. “To protect them from something?”

  “Maybe,” Max agrees. “Or… the Russian government could have sent them to the United States as spies.”

  I grit my teeth. “Why do you both think that my gram is a spy? You’ve met her. Does she seem like a spy to you?”

  “Which is what would make her a good one,” he insists. “A good spy can fit in anywhere. They’re adaptable, smart, good with language. Can you think about any time she did something that seemed the slightest bit suspicious?”

  Olivia kicks at the wood chips on the ground around us and stares at me with wide eyes. “You have to remember something.”

  I pull off my shoe to shake out the wood chips lodged in the heel. The dust from the wood floats in the air and fills it with the scent of freshly cut trees. The smell triggers a faded memory peeking around the crisp edges of now. Click.

  Gram is arguing with a man while I gather sticks. I’m five. It’s March 2, 2011, on a Wednesday, and Gram is babysitting me while Mom and Dad are on vacation. We’re in the woods, and I want to keep exploring under logs for lizards, but she’s told me to keep quiet while she talks to the strange man. I strain to hear, but they’re not saying real words. The man yells at her, and she runs to me and grabs my hand. We run away, and I’m scared because I’ve never seen Gram cry before.

  “Lulu!” Olivia’s voice breaks through my thoughts, and I look up, remnants of the woods still before me. “Where were you just now?”

  I brush a hand over the papers in my lap. “What does the word ‘izmennik’ mean?”

  “What?” Olivia’s brow crinkles before her gaze flies to Max.

  “It sounds Russian,” he says, typing the word into his phone. “Says here it means ‘traitor.’ ”

  They both wait for me to explain. But all I can hear is the angry man shouting that Gram is a traitor as we run away.

  14. Basal Ganglia

  Neurons are nerve cells that help the brain communicate with the body. There’s a group of neurons that are hidden deep in the brain called the basal ganglia. Gram puts basil in her spaghetti sauce, and Dad says my legs are gangly, so I imagine this part of my brain as spaghetti noodles clustered together, helping me figure out how to move my feet and hands after I’m hit with the memory of this man shouting at Gram.

  * * *

  “When I was five,” I say, glancing up at Max, “I remember Gram meeting with a man. He kept shouting ‘izmennik’ to her. We were in the woods, and I remember running and Gram crying.”

  “Holy crap,” Olivia mutters. “You were on a mission with her!”

  “It was probably a meeting with her handler,” Max says.

  “What’s a handler?” Olivia asks, starry-eyed. She looks at him like he knows everything.

  He keeps his gaze on me. “A handler is the person who makes sure the spy is doing their job and tells them what the next one is. It’s important to help keep the deep undercover agents from forgetting their jobs.”

  Suddenly, Gram being a spy doesn’t seem so far-fetched anymore. Could Max and Olivia really be right? And if that Russian man in my memory really is Gram’s handler, what will he do if he finds out she’s losing her memory?

  “What do they do if agents stop wanting to, you know, spy?” My thoughts are spiraling, and I can barely keep up.

  “Silence them forever.” Olivia slices a finger across her throat. “That’s what happens in movies.”

  The panic I’m feeling must be written all over my face because Max frowns at Olivia. “Don’t worry about that right now,” he says in the same gentle voice he uses with the horses. “Can you remember what woods you were in when the man chased you?”

  I close my eyes and freeze the picture of Gram and me running. I examine the trees and look for something I recognize. There’s a small sign near a bubbling creek.

  My eyes fly open. “Samuel P. Taylor Park. We were by the creek.”

  “Okay,” Max says with a quick laugh. “That was fast. Are you sure?”

  Olivia snorts. “If she says so, then it’s true. Her memory is amazing.”

  My stomach clenches at her words. She doesn’t have any idea how “amazing” my memory really is, that I could tell them what I had for breakfast the day the Russian stranger yelled at us, or that we went to the nursery and bought seeds for Gram’s garden. How would they look at me then?

  “We should go,” Max says. “See if the place triggers more memories. Maybe you know more than you think?”

  “Ooh! Yes, Lulu. We have to go.” Olivia jumps up and down, clapping her hands.

  Could the actual place trigger more specific memories? Even if I can recall the memories right now, I have no way of explaining how I’m remembering. Either I tell Olivia and Max the truth or go along for a field trip.

  “How will we get there?” I ask. “I don’t think the bus goes out that far.”

  “Uber,” Max says like it’s no big deal. “I take it all the time. I can have a driver here in five minutes.”

  Olivia’s eyes widen. “You can do that? I thought you had to be, like, an adult or something.”

  Max shrugs. “If they ask, I just tell them I’m eighteen. My dad got me prepaid Visa cards and I use them. No problem.”

 
I shake my head. “That’s lying.”

  He pulls his phone out, his smirk more know-it-all than ever. “And you don’t lie, Lulu?”

  Max calls me out with the challenge in his eyes. He knows that I pulled Remy back and let Olivia’s horse win and that I’m prying into my gram’s past without her knowing. Lately I’ve been walking a minefield of half-truths and misdirections. It’s impossible for him to know all the details, but it kind of feels like he does.

  “Please, Lulu. You’ve come this far. Don’t you want to know?” Olivia clasps her hands together, begging.

  I sigh. “Okay, but if the driver looks sketchy, I’m not getting in.”

  I can only imagine the trouble I’ll be in if Gram or my parents ever find out about this, not that I’m planning on telling them.

  A silver Prius pulls up with an older woman at the wheel, looking like she’d rather be doing anything else but this. At least she doesn’t look a killer who will dump our bodies in the bay. So there’s that.

  Max sits in the front, and Olivia and I pile in the back. I stare out the window as we head past the town of Fairfax and over the hill to the valley. Traffic is heavy, and I wonder how long it’ll be before Gram gets worried. Mom and Dad might not notice at all.

  Olivia chatters nonstop. Redwood trees stretch to the sky, blocking out the sun, and the darkness matches my mood. I wish I could go back to thinking my gram was nothing but a grandmother who makes the best pies. I’m afraid of what else I’ll find out.

  “I think we’re close,” Max tells the Uber driver.

  “Two more miles,” I say.

  His gaze meets mine in the rearview mirror before turning back to the road. “That’s specific.”

  “Yeah, really specific,” Olivia agrees. “My phone isn’t working out here. Is yours, Lulu?”