The Weight of Memory

by Shawn Smucker

  “She was?”

  “She came back in from the playground and took the map she was working on today, and I gave her a few supplies. She said she needed it all for the trip.”

  “The trip?” I ask. I don’t think I told Pearl we were going anywhere.

  “I’m sorry. She said you’re going back to the place where you grew up?”

  Again, the strange sense that I’m in the middle of a dream.

  “Yes.” I don’t know what else to say. “Yes.”

  “Mr. Elias, if Pearl is going to be out of school for more than three days, you’ll need to fill out an excused absence form. Otherwise the absences will be unlawful,” Ms. Howard says, eyeing me suspiciously.

  “Yes, yes. Of course. I’ll take care of the form,” I say, with no intention of filling out any form.

  “Did she say where she was going?” Ms. Howard asks Ms. Davis. “We didn’t see her on the playground.”

  “We could have missed her,” I say. “Maybe she left as we were coming in. She could be outside waiting for me. Thank you, Ms. Davis.”

  She nods, a sad smile on her face. Why is everyone giving me sad smiles today? Has the doctor already called the school? Is social services on the way? Hospice? Can I not be given one day to hold this news to myself?

  We turn to walk away, but then I remember something. “Ms. Davis, did you have a teacher’s aide in class today, a white-haired woman?”

  She looks confused. “No. We didn’t.”

  Beyond her, the room is empty. “No visitors to class? No other parents?”

  “I’m sorry, no,” she says. “Why do you ask?”

  “That’s okay. Just curious.” I turn to walk outside, even though I know you will not be there. You have never been one for waiting.

  We walk the halls, Ms. Howard and I. We exit the building through the heavy door, and it smashes closed behind us, like an ending. We stand there scanning the playground.

  “I can go check the other side of the building,” Ms. Howard says, moving to do just that, but I stop her.

  “No, she’s not there.”

  “But I—”

  “No, that’s okay. She doesn’t wait.”

  Ms. Howard stares at me. “Should I ask some of the teachers to help?”

  I sigh. Shake my head. “I’m sure she went home. I’m sure she . . .”

  I know, more certainly than I know anything else, that you did not go home. Where you went, I have no idea. But after so many of your disappearances and so many of your undramatic returns, I am feeling more annoyed than worried.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  I walk away. Nothing in the world feels emptier than a vacant playground. A line of gray clouds drifts in front of the sun. I walk out through the wide gate at the far side of the schoolyard. When I look back, I see Ms. Howard still standing by the door, watching me walk away. She waves, and something like affection for her stirs deep inside of me. Aren’t most of us doing our best with the path we’ve been given? She cares for Pearl—I know that. Couldn’t that be enough?

  The alley stretches ahead of me, long and narrow and mostly uphill for the five blocks between me and our house. I pass the empty lot, peering into the tall autumn weeds to see if you’ve nestled there like some runaway bunny, but you are not there. I cross the street, and when I think of you crossing streets, the anxiety I’ve been able to keep at bay begins to rise. I hope you check both ways. I know you will come home if you can.

  But what if something happens to you, and you can’t?

  You remind me so much of your father at your age. He used to run away too when I put my foot down. He would shout something boisterous, something meant to hurt me, like, “But you’ll never be as good as a mother!” and he’d slip out the door. He always came home after dark, listless and wordlessly apologetic. We were missing so many things back then, living with so many gaping wounds that had never been dressed. We had no idea how to tenderly care for each other’s injuries. Silently walking around our transgressions seemed to be the kindest thing to do, and for many years I thought his wounds had healed. But some had festered. I know this now, much too late.

  Yet in all of the wordlessness that existed between John and me, there was also quiet affection. He would move to my side of the couch as we watched baseball. Or come slide under the covers in my bed late at night, when the darkness took on a physical presence in the house. I could feel his eyes searching my face when he thought I was sleeping. You do similar things now, holding my hand and examining the lines, the veins, the patterns in my skin. And we usually do not talk about your running away or the strange things you say. We keep moving forward.

  I move farther along the narrow alley, closer to home, still looking for you. I cross another street, and I enter that section of alleyway with tall brick buildings on both sides. The one on the left is the solid back of a building dotted with metal doors that lead to offices and a day care and a corner store. But the one on the right is derelict, vacant. The power lines above me droop, heavy. The windows—and this is the first time I notice this—have been closed in with cinder blocks, gray squares that form a kind of pattern along the three stories of brick. It is early afternoon, but in the alley it feels closer to dusk, it’s cooler, and the shadows are thick and alive. There are wide metal vents, rusty and bent, that lead into the empty building, but I don’t hear any air coming through. An aching sense of emptiness exudes from the building—it smells like dust and overheated rubber and something burning in the distance.

  I come to the middle of the block where there is an old back door locked with a heavy chain. But the chain has slipped, and I see it’s not actually locked and the door is open a crack. The chain hangs limp, and I imagine the bottom link is still swaying from someone recently passing through the door.

  You wouldn’t go in there, I think. Would you, Pearl?

  Closer Than They Might Appear

  I peek in through the narrow darkness and listen. The wind picks up and the door opens another inch, but the unlocked chain holds it in place. I check the alley. I lift the chain and pull it through the handle so that it makes a rhythmic clinking. I twist it into a loop and lay it on the crumbling alley. I look around again, nudge the door open another few inches, and poke my head inside.

  “Pearl?” I call out in a quiet voice, too afraid to shout into the shadows. There is a sense of sleeping things that don’t want to wake. “Pearl?”

  I should walk home. You’re probably there, resting in the armchair by the front window reading a book, or sitting at the large dining room table working on the map. You’re probably fine. But the thought of even the possibility of you in this building, hiding alone, makes it impossible for me to leave until I have at least checked inside.

  I push the door open, wide open this time to let in as much light as possible. The floor is covered in debris, dust, old boards, and plaster that has fallen from the walls and ceiling. It is an abandoned construction site—interior walls have been demolished, and new wires poke out of outlet cases, never reconnected. There is more light than I expected, and while the windows facing the alley have been filled in with concrete blocks, the windows facing south are still glass panes coated in a decade of grime.

  “Pearl?” I say again, this time louder. My voice comes back to me after wandering the building and finding nothing. Another open door gapes by the far wall, revealing a stairwell going down, the beginning of broken stairs, and a thin handrail.

  If you came in here, you will be down there. I know you well enough to know this.

  “Pearl,” I mutter, because while I don’t entirely believe in ghosts, I don’t not believe in them. And even more pressing, I am not completely naive about the types of characters who might be lurking in a building like this, in our city, at the end of a lukewarm fall day.

  I go over to the steps and put my hand on the rail. It wobbles back and forth, barely attached to the wall.

  “Pearl?” I shout down the steps.

  W
alking into the basement of that old warehouse is like descending into pitch-black water. I hold my breath. Something like old glass crumbles under my feet, and the air carries a strange combination of stale dust, moisture, and the smell of cats. Each step lets out a weary groan that shoots right up my spine alongside the fear. When I stop, when I am silent, I can hear something dripping in the basement, some liquid falling into a pool.

  Drip.

  Drip.

  Drip.

  Is there a lonelier sound?

  At the bottom, I find myself standing in what feels to be a completely empty room, a never-ending stretch of smooth concrete under my feet, and an almost silky darkness that drips down the steps and fills the space like liquid rising. I close my eyes. I do not like the feel of the place. Across the way, the dim light glares off a thin sheet of standing water, completely still.

  I hear a distant whistling.

  “Pearl?” I call out.

  The whistling stops.

  “Pearl? Honey? Please talk to me. It’s dark. I can’t see anything.”

  “Grampy?” Your tiny voice scuttles along the edges of the walls and under the steps and flits along the ceiling.

  “Pearl.” I’m not sure what else to say.

  “I’m sorry, Grampy.”

  “Honey, you’re not in trouble. Come out. Please?”

  “Maybe you should come in here. I’m under these boards.”

  My eyes adjust, and in the dim light, I can see a pile of wooden pallets that has partially fallen over, and a small crawl space in among them.

  “Pearl.” I sigh and get as low as I can. I inch my way back into that narrow opening, feeling the grit under my hands and knees, and you are there, in the darkness.

  A light appears like a single eye, first skimming the floor, then lifting of its own accord and bouncing lightly through the void.

  “Do you keep that flashlight in your backpack?”

  “Isn’t this place kind of like the old cave where the giants live?”

  “I’m afraid it’s too small for giants,” I reply, trying to find a comfortable position.

  “You only think that because you’re one of the giants,” you say.

  “Oh, is that right?” I smirk, but you remain serious.

  “This is the cave of the giants, the ones that eat little boys and little girls.”

  “Are you a giant, or are you a little girl about to be eaten?”

  “A little girl, of course!” you protest.

  “If I eat you, can we leave?”

  “Grampy!”

  “Okay. I’m sorry. Go ahead.”

  “There are many of us little children trapped here in the mean, ugly giant’s nasty cave, but only I have found the important map.”

  “A map of where?” I ask.

  You start to talk but clamp your mouth shut.

  “You can tell me, Pearl. I’m not really a giant.”

  “I know, Grampy,” you say, your voice quiet and unsure of itself. “It’s a map of Nysa, where you grew up.”

  Again, a soft chill puts goose bumps on my arms.

  You stand as well as you can inside the tiny space and move to the opening. “C’mon, Grampy. Let’s go.”

  You don’t want to talk about the map. That’s fine, because I don’t either. I follow you out between the boards, out into the building’s basement, which now seems much less dark than it did before, especially after being under the pallets.

  “I’m sorry, Grampy,” you say.

  “C’mon. You’re right. Let’s get out of here.”

  That’s when I hear the metal door upstairs slam shut. My heart skips a beat. I reach down and take your small hand. It’s dry, and I can feel the fine dust from the concrete on it, like chalk powder. You follow me up the stairs, across the room to the door. It’s closed.

  “The wind must have blown it shut.” I push the bar, expecting it to be locked and us to be trapped. But it pops open, and we are bombarded by the fresh autumn air, now much cooler than it was only minutes before, and the slate-gray sky above us. The wind is like breath.

  I drop your hand and wrap the chain back around the door handle. When I finish, you reach up and grab my hand again, and we drift up the alley. Your hand feels even lonelier and smaller than it did in the dark, the alley feels lonely and narrow, and the sky, even as the clouds break up, seems lonely and tired. We pause at each street between the school and our house, look both ways, and walk across, my steps long and ponderous, yours short and sometimes turning into skips to keep up.

  “Why did you go in there?” I ask you. “Places like that aren’t safe here in the city.”

  You smile. “The woman from class. She was helping me with the map. And she gave me this.” You hand me a quarter. “See the year?” you ask, pride in your voice.

  I hold the quarter up closer to my face, rubbing it to wipe away some of the grime.

  1979. Forty years ago. The same year your father was born. The same year your grandmother left me. Dread seeps into my neck, my eyes, my hands. It’s a tightening, a filling up, a kind of heat. I’ve had this feeling before, this hollow sense of low-grade dread, and I realize it was that day forty years ago when I was lying on the sofa, John on my chest, and our friends came back across the water without your grandmother.

  Without Mary.

  On that morning, I stood holding John in my arms, pressing his body to my chest with one hand while cupping his head in the other. I navigated the sliding door with my elbow without putting him down and walked out onto the deck.

  I keep seeing it now, over and over again. Shirley bent at the waist, crying and gasping for breath.

  “Where is Tom going?”

  “He’s going for help.”

  “Mary?” I asked, not able to say anything else.

  She shook her head. “There was an accident.”

  “Grampy?” you ask me.

  We are standing at the crosswalk. Two cars have stopped to let us walk, but I am lost, far away.

  “Should we cross?”

  I give a half wave to each car, and we pass between them. One of them roars behind us, formally registering the driver’s impatience.

  “Almost there,” I whisper to you. I think again of the imaginary woman you have been talking about. “Pearl.” I pause. “Tell me again. Why were you in that building? You have to be careful. Sometimes abandoned buildings have people in them who might hurt you.”

  You smile again as we turn onto our street, and your smile is so innocent, so bright, so seemingly unaware of the weight of the world. “The kind white-haired woman took me in there. She wanted to show me that quarter. And she wanted to help me a little more with my map.”

  “Who is this woman, Pearl?”

  “You passed her on the way in. You must have seen her. Besides, I already told you: she needs my help. She’s lost something that means a lot to her.”

  I don’t know what to say to you, whether to warn or threaten or keep questioning. I often feel too old to navigate this parenting role again, with the first failed attempt so near in the side-view mirror of my life, where the objects are closer than they might appear.

  “Pearl, be careful,” I end up saying, not sure what that’s supposed to mean. I want to ask you if this is somehow related to your father, if this woman knows him, but I hesitate to bring him up because the topic always makes you so sad.

  You smile and squeeze my hand.

  “Can I see the map? When we get home?”

  “Not till it’s finished,” you say with a mischievous smile.

  The First Drowning

  We walk up onto the porch, I unlock the front door, and we are home. I can breathe again. I think of the tumor, the diagnosis, and I reach up and feel the lump under my skin. Still there. I think you might have seen me feeling it, so I try to turn the motion into a pushing back of my hair, a scratch of my ear. I smile down at you.

  “Tea party?” you ask. I nod. And my mind spins back to Nysa.

  I
’m not sure why I was invited to Justin Thomas’s Halloween party during my junior year of high school—I have a feeling he wanted to have a large party, one he could brag about on Monday, so he invited everyone. I didn’t know Justin well, although I watched him from a distance. He was one of the chosen ones, one of those high school kids whose life seemed so easy, so enviable, with his path already cleared for him. All he had to do was take long, easy strides all the way to the top.

  If I can’t recall why I was invited, I’m even less sure about why I went. I didn’t fit in back in those days. I found my own skin difficult to live in, as if my soul had been given the wrong size outer garment. It’s hard to explain. That discomfort led me to avoid people, more or less, but my parents were always trying to prod me into situations where I might make friends.

  I wore an old sheet with holes cut all through it—a nod to Charlie Brown and his ghost costume. But my parents had not wanted to sacrifice any of their white sheets, so mine was an old sheet from the linen closet with small pink and blue flowers on it. When Mrs. Thomas answered the door, she took me in with a wry look on her face, more wince than smile, and motioned to the basement door. I nodded, the sheet shifting up and down, and walked to the stairs, holding on to the rail through the sheet. I was sure I would trip and fall the length of the stairway, breaking my neck, and the thought was a relief. Death was preferable. As soon as I walked into that house I wanted to leave.

  There were only five or six kids there when I descended into the dark and shrank into one of the corners. Although I knew everyone at the party by name, I did not have what is commonly known as “friends” during those late high school years. I had a nervous habit of pushing the hair out of my eyes so that I could keep reading whatever it was I was reading. Books were my friends. Who needed people?

  The basement was not pleasant. The ceiling was nothing more than naked floor joists and wires running alongside pipes, although it was difficult to see. The only light came down the steps from the upstairs hallway. The air was musty, even in the cool of autumn, and hovering all around was a sort of dampness mixed in with the more pleasant scents of hot apple cider and pumpkin pie.