Memories in the Drift: A Novel

by Melissa Payne

  “Hi, Claire! Oooh, that smells good,” Sefina says. “Must be your lemon-pepper chicken, hey?” Her smile is wide, teeth white against her smooth, dark skin. One dark winter night, Dad hauled away her abusive asshole of a husband. But that was a long time ago, at least for her.

  Behind me I hear a door open, and when I turn, Ruth is stepping out of her apartment, holding a cellophane-wrapped tray with a tub of ice cream balanced on top.

  “You made dessert?” I ask.

  Her forehead creases. “Oh, um, no, I didn’t.” She stands with her lips pressed firmly together. My mouth quirks up. Ruth’s not a soft person, but she’s a good one. She stepped in when my mother turned to vodka, and well, truth is, at this point I’m probably more than she bargained for, but she doesn’t let on, at least not according to my notes. Her eyes travel over my shoulder and harden.

  I turn and see nothing but my refrigerator covered in sticky notes. Some have directives like check expiration date on milk; others are observations: you hate broccoli. That one makes me laugh softly. No, I don’t. I’ve always loved it. Must be some kind of mistake—maybe I was thinking about someone else. I’ve just reached up to take it off when Harriet speaks from behind me. “Don’t take that one off, Claire, it’s true. You really, really hate broccoli now. Believe me; I forgot and served it the last time I hosted, and it made you gag.”

  “Oh,” I say, and leave the note in place, a prickling frustration raking across my skin at the idea that I lose far more than I record. Wishing for all the world that I could just know and feeling the exhaustion of trying to exist as a normal person pooling in my pores. I am tired and, at the moment, feeling sorry for myself. Tears collect in my eyelashes, and I swipe at them, angry for this surge of weakness. It’s why I write everything down—so I can avoid this situation. I roll my shoulders, make a note about broccoli in the notebook, and turn back with a smile, hope they didn’t notice my emotional slip. “Guess I’ve changed my ways. No more broccoli, then.”

  Ruth reaches past me, points to a note that says Mom is a liar. “Everyone can change, Claire, even your mom.”

  I fold my arms, ignore her sentiment about my mother because Ruth will always have a soft spot for Alice. I touch the mark under my eye from where the graduation cap gouged into my skin. It was the last time I saw her. In some ways, I’m grateful for the physical scar she left then. It’s a reminder to me of how scarred I am on the inside. Ruth stares at me. At one point she and Mom were close, and despite everything, Ruth is the kind of person to see the good in everyone. I should know. She’s always managed to find the good in me, even when I was a teenage girl who thought smoking pot and picking fights would fill the sinkhole my mother left behind.

  I take the tray from her hands, inhaling a rich chocolate scent that makes my mouth water. “Smells amazing. Thanks for baking.”

  Ruth snorts, lifts one side of her mouth in a half smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. There’s something different about her. I tilt my head. She looks pale, and her back, normally straight up and down like she’s preparing to have her height measured, rounds just the slightest bit. “Everything okay, Ruth?”

  She holds my gaze, then says, “I don’t know, Claire; do you think everything is okay?”

  Her words aren’t heavy with sarcasm or clipped with rudeness; it just comes across as a question, so I don’t take offense to the oddness of it. I am very good at figuring situations out, so maybe Ruth is just testing my honed skills. I study her: red-rimmed eyes, the skin around her nostrils flaky with dryness, her cheeks slightly pale. “Looks like you don’t feel well. A cold? It’s okay if you’re not up for joining us for dinner tonight,” I say. “I can make up a plate and bring it over for you if you’d rather rest at home.”

  She blinks, shakes her head, and taps my hand, wordless. The contact startles me. Ruth is not a touchy kind of person. “I could use some company tonight, Claire,” she says. “Let’s go, or Harriet will eat all of that garlic bread I smell before we get a chance to sit down.”

  From the table, Harriet barks a hoarse cigarette laugh and says, “She’s not wrong!”

  Later, with the garlic bread gone, a few stragglers of soggy romaine stuck to the sides of the empty salad bowl, and Ruth’s surprisingly exquisite brownies drowning in vanilla bean ice cream on a plate in front of me, I slide the SOCIAL EVENTS CURRENT folder from the file storage by my feet and open it on my lap. I scan the conversation plan quickly. “So, Harriet, I heard you had an interesting pair of renters last week. Sefina said something about witches?”

  Sefina laughs and it’s such a clear and bright sound that I can almost forget the person my friend was when she first moved here. The one with the hollowness in her eyes and the yellowing edges of a bruise forming a half moon on her cheek. “They told Harriet they were green witches,” she says. Her black hair swings around her face, and her peacefulness is at odds with the other memory that rises—the one of Dad, his eyes narrowed and fist tight, standing over a man sprawled on the floor with a bleeding and broken nose. And Sefina, holding her little girls close to her sides, her face streaked in tears. That was years ago, but to me it feels recent because it’s part of the memories I retrieve quickly, the ones that stuck because they are from before. I don’t remember the—my eyes drift to my notebook . . . there it is, at the top of each page. Ten years since it happened. I don’t remember the days and months that made Sefina into the woman she is today. I blink against a wetness in my eyes. I can’t lie. It sucks to be me.

  Their chatter moves around me, but I can’t recall the conversation. My gut twists and I shake my head, feel the fuzziness that muddles the present. This is why I take notes; this is why I’m organized, so they can’t see the real me, the woman who can’t remember shit. I’m breathing a little too rapidly, so I scan the notebook to anchor myself. Dinner Party. Harriet and renters. “So you had renters at the B & B?” I shake my head. No, that’s not a worthy conversation point. Of course Harriet had renters. I bite a nail, flip through my notes, which are extensive. I try to get everything I can down, so sifting through it to root myself in a conversation takes all my focus. They wait until I find what I’m looking for, and when I do, I say, “You had renters who were witches?”

  Harriet nods. “They said they came to Whittier to worship nature in all her glory.”

  “The witches?” I ask.

  “That’s what they wanted to believe,” she says. “They were here to see the Buckner. Called it the building that had become one with nature.” Her eyes roll. “Their words, not mine.”

  The Buckner Building once housed nearly a thousand military personnel, and much like BTI, it was a self-contained city under one roof. Now it’s just a decomposing building up on the hill that looks like something out of an apocalypse movie.

  “They said they wanted to commune with the spirits.” Sefina laughs so hard her eyes close. “Then they pulled out a joint and asked Harriet for a light.”

  Harriet takes a bite of the brownie, licks the vanilla ice cream from her lips. She’s a quirky woman but with a head for business and a bed-and-breakfast that attracts all kinds. She and her husband, Pete, were nomads who traveled from one outsized adventure to the next. They came to Whittier in the eighties, intending to stay for one summer of fishing before heading off to some other destination. Harriet says that once they made it through a winter here, they decided they were tough enough to survive a few more. So they never left. “Which is why,” she continues, “income be damned, I told them to leave. They broke my no-weed rule, and they’re stupid.” She blows air through her lips. “Witches. Silliest thing I ever heard. Didn’t even know a single spell either.” Pete owns the only bar and restaurant that stays open in the winter, the one I can see from my apartment window. For a shared glass of wine, Harriet will let anyone use a pair of binoculars to check whether a spouse has left the bar. It’s good to know in case they stumble into a bear or lose their way in the fog. Harriet pushes the empty plate away from her. “Mel
t in your mouth. I’ll have to give my compliments to the baker. But something was different from her last batch. Can’t quite put my finger on it.”

  Sefina nods. “A little spicy. Cinnamon, maybe?”

  “I’ll be damned,” Harriet says. “She’s just as creative as she’s always been.”

  “Who?” I ask.

  The table goes quiet, punctured by Ruth’s fork clattering heavily onto her plate. “Alice,” she says. “She said she was going to stop by this afternoon. Did she?”

  My grip on the fork tightens, sends the tines skittering through melted ice cream. My mother is in Whittier? I can feel their eyes on me, expectant—probably waiting for my reaction. I breathe in and out, try to untangle the knot in my stomach and focus on the tender crumbs of brownie drowning in the ice cream. Do I know she’s back? I try to act like the news hasn’t skyrocketed my pulse, try to casually flip through my notebook. No notes about Mom, and I can only imagine how it’s affecting Dad. I look up, shrug. “Nope, she didn’t.”

  Ruth’s gaze flickers and she wipes her mouth. Something is off about her, and it pricks at my skin. I turn back to my notebook, flip through pages and pages of my writing, desperate to find some hint of why a room of my friends is subdued, different in some important way that I can’t see. But another conversation has started around me, and in the din of voices my thoughts scatter like dandelion fuzz, drifting until they catch on something substantial. There in my notes from this morning, doodled in the margins. Dad and the bear. It makes me smile. “Remember that bear that Dad thought followed him around? The one he chased out of our building when I was seven?”

  “Before my time,” Sefina says. “But I’ve heard the story from you and all the old-timers here.”

  “Hey!” says Ruth, and Sefina laughs.

  But Harriet is nodding. “Vance said he’d catch sight of it for years afterward. Said they had a connection.”

  “Like his spirit animal?” Sefina says.

  “Or just a pesky bear who’d gotten used to scavenging dumpsters for human food,” Ruth says. “But Vance has such a soft spot for animals. It wouldn’t surprise me if that bear had taken to him in some way.”

  I smile. “Of course he did. Everyone loves Dad.”

  “Bigger than life,” Sefina adds. “And a psychic to boot.”

  Harriet grunts. “Or the man just listens to his gut,” she says. “That’s an Alaskan quality, if you ask me.”

  I’m half listening now because when I think of Dad and that bear, my thoughts drift to Tate Dunn. We were both seven years old with larger-than-life fathers. His was a fisherman, gone for long stretches of time in the summer, hardly leaving BTI for longer stretches in the winter.

  Tate and his dad had been in Whittier only a few weeks, and I was curious about the scabby-kneed boy with long black hair who never spoke. That night in the lobby, after the bear was gone and Dad had slung me over his shoulder to take me back to bed, I saw Tate, curled into a tiny ball outside the laundry room, asleep. I’d tapped Dad on the shoulder and pointed. He’d made a noise in his throat, walked down the hall, and without putting me down, picked Tate up in his other arm. I remember thinking my dad was stronger than any other dad, stronger even than that bear. Tate’s eyes had fluttered open, and with our heads hanging over Dad’s shoulders, we stared at each other across his broad back. I smiled; he didn’t smile back, but our eyes stayed locked all the way up to his floor. When we got to his apartment, I was sleepy, trying to keep my lids from sticking together, and when Tate slid off Dad’s shoulder, I let them close all the way. Dad’s voice vibrated softly against his collarbone. Found him in the lobby. A woman responded, her tone low but brittle: You were supposed to be in bed, Tate. Later I learned she wasn’t his mom, just the first in a string of women his father rotated through.

  It was later discovered that the bear had found his way in through a lobby door that someone had left propped open, and what followed were signs posted on every exterior door and papering the insides of the elevators, warning all residents to CLOSE THE DOOR TO KEEP WILDLIFE OUTSIDE.

  “Claire?” Sefina’s voice, soft and calm but laced with something else. Concern?

  I doodle across the page while I wait for the burning in my cheeks to fade. I’ve forgotten something. I don’t know what. Could be a question someone asked me, or maybe I’d been talking and stopped midsentence, but all I know is that I do not want to meet their eyes. I can already sense their pity; it slides across the table like a gelatinous glob, and when it touches me, I am reminded that this is all a charade, an act that they put on to help me feel like the normal twenty, no—I check my notes—thirty-six-year-old woman I am not. I love them for it, but the reality is that I am anything but normal, anything but the Claire I used to be. I take a deep breath and lift my eyes because self-pity is a luxury I don’t rest in for more than a second.

  I give Ruth a smile with a confidence that I feel only in the lift of my shoulders. “Let me guess. Another Groundhog Day moment?” I say lightly.

  Ruth laughs, seems relieved. “What a great movie.”

  “Yeah, but as Bill Murray movies go, he could never top Caddyshack,” Harriet adds.

  Ruth sits back in her chair. “I’m a Ghostbusters fan myself.”

  Sefina, who grew up in a tiny Alaskan town without cable or, at times, running water, draws her eyebrows together. “Who’s Bob Murray?”

  And everyone, including me, laughs, my forgotten moment a thing of their past as well. This is why I love them.

  Ruth claps her hands and reaches for the brownie-crusted spatula. “Another round?” she asks, and we all push our plates toward the center of the table.

  My fork sinks into chocolate gooeyness, and I swirl it around the ice cream before sliding it into my mouth and tasting the explosion of sugar and vanilla, the coolness of the ice cream mixed with the slight bitterness of chocolate. “Wow, this is so good. Who made it?”

  There’s a beat, a pause, a lingering in their gazes; then Ruth finishes chewing her brownie, smiles. “I did.”

  The air around the table lightens with their laughter, and while I know that in some way I’ve let my mask slip, shown the real me, I shake it off. Sometimes there’s only so much pretending I can do.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Friday, September 28

  “It’s really nothing like Groundhog Day, you know?”

  “What do you mean?” Kate crosses her legs. She wears navy-blue hiking pants, the kind with thin material that dries in an instant, and worn-in hiking shoes. She’s a good therapist, I think. She’s calm, patient, and honest, and when I get off course, she gently guides me back to whatever conversation we were having that I’ve forgotten about. I used to see Kate when I was a teenager, after Mom left. It was Dad’s idea. Kate lived in Whittier then, before she started her own practice here in Anchorage, so I remember her from before. I don’t know if therapy makes any difference for me, but talking with her calms me and helps me to stay focused. This information is all in the file that I keep on her, so I know it to be fact.

  “Bill Murray’s character knew he was living the same day over and over again,” I say. “I don’t feel that way. I mean, I guess in some ways I am, but I’m not frustrated about it the way he was. I’m just”—I shrug—“existing.”

  Kate leans forward. “Do you ever feel like that’s not enough?”

  Her question is personal in a really intrusive way, even for a therapist, but especially for Kate, who should know better than to ask me something that’s literally impossible. It’s almost cruel of her. “It has to be enough, Kate. What other options do I have?”

  Instead of answering, because it was rhetorical anyway, she slides on a pair of reading glasses and opens a blue file folder. “You were talking about Tate earlier.”

  “I was?”

  She nods. “Yes, about your feelings when he left Whittier.”

  “Oh, right. Well, it hurt like hell.” I stop, hating the bitterness that punctuates my words.
Tate understood something early on that I didn’t get until much later: we couldn’t heal each other, no matter how much love there was between us. He tried to tell me that he was leaving, I think, but we were teenagers, and I was too embroiled in the storm of my own thoughts to understand what he was trying to say. It was a late-October evening, and Tate and I sat in the bed of his pickup truck at the head of the bay, a six-pack of beer between us, our middle fingers raised to each car headed out of town.

  We were happy, I thought, content with the universe of our friendship—at least I was. It was Tate’s eighteenth birthday, and I’d just finished putting the last candle into my impromptu cake of Twinkies and Ho Hos. Make a wish, I’d said.

  We sat with our legs crisscrossed, our knees touching, and Tate looked at me with his green eyes that nearly always took my breath away.

  I love you, he said.

  It wasn’t the first time. We’d been telling each other for as long as I could remember. With him, it was simply a feeling that had always existed. But this time when he said it, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end because I thought he was trying to tell me something more, and I didn’t understand. I ignored the feeling and kissed him—light, probing, sweetened by packaged sugar and cream filling. Soon his hands roamed, leaving heated trails down my back. This wasn’t new, either, but when he lay on top of me, it felt like he savored me in a different way, and it left me with an empty yearning.

  Afterward, we’d settled back onto the truck bed, lain next to each other, and watched the stars pop out one by one. The length of his body warmed my side, simultaneously familiar and intoxicating. I was happy, satiated, sure that this was something that would never change.