“Are you okay?” I ask as we push open the door.
You look up at me with weariness in your eyes, but you smile through it. “I’m okay.”
Your eyes are hazy, and instinctively I feel your forehead.
“You feel warm,” I say. “Are you sick?”
You shrug and crawl into bed, pulling the covers under your chin and sighing. “Just tired.”
You fall asleep in moments, and I’m upset with myself for letting Tom question you so soon after you nearly drowned. But I also smile slightly, thinking that he got much, much more in return. It wasn’t fair, really, him going into that conversation with you—he had no way of knowing how you can turn a chat on its head, how you can know things you should never know. I guess I’m used to it by now, or as used to it as one might become. But Tom found it disarming, and understandably so.
I go to each of the tall windows and double-check the locks. I stack the three books neatly on the table. I sit in the chair and look out the window, but it’s dark, and all I can see is a reflection of this room: me, the books, the bed, the small ridge in the blankets that is you, now asleep.
The longer I sit there, the more I think about what you said.
There are too many secrets in this house.
I remember the photographs in the book and the one I took back to my room. I would like to see those photos of Mary again, but I’m not sure I should leave you. I walk over to the bed and stare down at you, waiting for you to move, waiting for you to wake up, but you are so deep in sleep that your breathing seems like something being done to you, not something you are doing. I reach down and gently nudge your hair from your face, tuck it in behind your ear, and leave the room.
By some great act of chance, I find my way to the basement hallway without getting turned around, and I walk all the way to the end, to the door that leads into the storage room. The house is silent. I wait for the sound of a door slamming somewhere in the hallway, but it doesn’t happen. I open the door and turn on the light. Before I even get to the shelf, I can tell that something is wrong.
Before, when I was in that room, the photo books were packed tightly in place, organized and arranged perfectly. But there is a small gap so that one of the books leans through the empty space. I don’t have to check the notebooks on either side of the gap to know which album is missing. But I do anyway.
The album with those photos of Mary is gone. I place my hand in the gap, and it feels like a missing space in my memory. The entire room tilts to one side, and I put both of my hands on the shelf, lean forward, gasp for air. What’s going on? I turn toward the door, and the room spins. I have to close my eyes to keep my balance, but I still end up dropping to my knees. I can feel that ache of nausea forming deep inside of me and crawl for the door, but I don’t make it—I throw up all over the cement floor. I feel like my body is revolting against itself, trying to get something out that is too deeply lodged.
I wipe my mouth on my sleeve, but unlike other times in my life when I’ve vomited, I don’t feel any better than before. I lean against the wall and try to stand up, but it’s difficult, and the room keeps tipping and spinning. I make it to the door, leaning hard against the frame, then feel my body twisting through midair. It takes ages to reach the ground, and by then everything has gone dark.
This coming up out of unconsciousness doesn’t feel anything like waking up. When I wake from sleep, I open my eyes and see where I am, what time it is, and I do a quick self-inventory to see how tired or awake I’m feeling. But this is different. This is like rising out of deep water—I can see a pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s rushing at me. Objects come into focus, but I can’t move. I’m a passive observer of the room I’m in.
It’s the living room, and I’m lying on the couch you had been sitting on when Tom asked you questions. The kitchen light is on, but besides that, everything is dark. I can move now, and I lift my hand to check the knot, but it’s so tender it starts to hurt before I even touch it. Something about it has moved into my jaw, or at least that’s the sense I have, that my jaw movement is impeded somehow, especially on the side with the knot. And in my ear on that side of my head is a distant rushing, the kind I hear when I place a conch shell up to my ear. It’s the sound of some faraway sea.
Someone is in the kitchen. I can hear a cupboard open, the whistling of a teapot, the sound of porcelain, the clinking of a spoon as it makes its rounds. Tom emerges, carrying a coffee mug and a plate of crackers. I try to sit up, but pain flashes through my head, and I decide to stay lying down.
He sits in the wooden chair beside the couch. “Tea and crackers. You okay?” he asks, placing them on the end table.
“Never better,” I mumble, sighing.
I try to sit up again, and this time I make it, although my head is throbbing and my stomach feels like an empty pit. I take a cracker and let it dissolve in my mouth before swallowing it.
“How’d I end up here?” I ask, though I have hazy memories of coming up the steps, my arm draped over Tom’s shoulders.
“I had to help you up the steps. You’re not as light as you used to be.”
“I’m sorry. I threw up in your storage room.”
He waves it off with one hand. “It’s okay. I took care of it.”
I sigh, reach up, hold on to my forehead. I hate it that Tom had to help me. I don’t want to be indebted to him for anything. It makes me feel weak and inferior.
“What happened, Tom?” I ask, staring at the floor.
“I don’t know. I found you on the floor in the hall.”
“Not that.” I pause. “What happened to us? What happened to our friendship? What happened to you?”
“That’s a lot of different questions.”
“I know it is. But something’s changed. Something’s here between us that was never there before.” Yet even as I’m saying it, I know it’s not true, because I had felt this way once before—on the day Mary and I got married. I felt this emanating from Tom when we first broached the topic and during the whole ride to the mobile home chapel. It’s here again, this sense that something is between us, something we can’t find our way past.
He doesn’t reply. I think of you.
“What time is it?” I ask.
He glances over his shoulder. “Around ten p.m.”
“Pearl,” I whisper. I make a move to stand, but the blood rushes to my head along with a streak of pain, and my stomach twists. I can’t get up.
“Would you like me to check on her?”
I nod slowly, reach for the tea, and hold it in front of my face, the steam clearing my nasal passages. Tom vanishes into the dark shadows of the hall, and only then do I think of the ruined carpet rolled up in Shirley’s old room, the scratches on the floor. I consider going after him, stopping him, coming up with some excuse that I should be the one to check on Pearl. But resignation sets in, and with it, some small relief.
I think through what it will be like for him to demand that we leave. Am I fit to drive? How many stops will we have to make on our way home? Who can come to the house and watch over you if I don’t recover from this particular bout of sickness?
To be honest, I’m eager to leave, especially after hearing Jenny’s story. I think of your teachers at school and wonder why I didn’t consider asking any of them to take you in. I know it’s a big ask, but they seem to care deeply for you. I rack my brain for other people we might know, but I live an isolated life, and the list is short. Actually, it’s nonexistent.
I am running out of time—that much I know—and I’ve wasted a precious amount of time with this pointless trip to Nysa. And me with anytime to three months. I find it hard to imagine that, at this rate, I will last three more months.
I hear Tom before I see him, his light footsteps coming across the hardwood floors, the carpet in the living room. It is such an empty house, and I feel a surge of sadness for him, living in this expansive place on his own. I remember the rug, the rug in your roo
m that you destroyed, and I expect anger or something like it, so the serious look on his face doesn’t surprise me.
But the words that come out of his mouth do.
“She’s gone.”
Our Future Spelled Out
The four of us moved to the cabin the day we graduated from high school, and one thing that the years have obscured is exactly how my parents felt. I can’t remember talking with them about it, or arguing, or pleading. I can’t remember if they came out to see the place, or what they said when I told them Mary and I were married and she was pregnant. I guess some memories simply aren’t able to make the passage through time with us. They’re too heavy, forgotten, dragged to the bottom by their own weight.
A few things changed when we arrived at the cabin that second summer. Each couple took one of the bedrooms—that was different. Even though we were all of age by that point, we drove across the border and went to the same chapel, went through an identical ceremony for Tom and Shirley, the only difference being that I drove with Mary in the passenger seat while Tom and Shirley sat in the back.
Another thing that changed was our lifestyle. In one magical year we had somehow turned into adults. Shirley had taken a job as a clerk at a small supermarket about twenty minutes from the cabin. Tom worked on a construction site and spent Sundays filling out applications for colleges. Tom and I each had a car, but Tom’s hours were early, so I drove Shirley to the supermarket before going to a local insurance office on Main Street in Nysa and typing up paperwork for them. I thought I would hate it, but there was something therapeutic about the sound of the striking keys, the winding of the return, the satisfaction of an error-free page.
Mary stayed home and played mother to all of us.
I guess some things remained the same—Tom and I spent much of the weekends fixing up the old place, painting and repairing. Most evenings we took the kayaks out onto the water, drifting into the late dusk, watching bats swoop down over the water, their wings scraping the thin skin that otherwise provided a perfect reflection of the gathering night. We’d sit out there on our small boats, paddles resting on our laps, listening to the sound of fish gently rustling the surface.
“Does it get better than this?” Tom asked as we watched the sun dip down in the west, dropping behind the trees, beyond the fire-orange water reflecting it.
No one answered for a long time, because we all knew the answer.
“You okay, Mary?” I asked, looking over my shoulder. I paddled back to her when I saw how far away I had drifted. I reached out my hand to her and she took it, pulled me and my kayak close. Our boats bumped together. Her stomach filled the opening.
“Only a few more weeks, Mary,” Shirley said, something wistful and faraway in her voice.
I couldn’t look at her without getting choked up, without being bowled over in a wave of joy and uncertainty and fear and hope. A dad. I was going to be a dad.
“I sure hope that baby looks like you, Mary,” Tom said.
“Hey!” I said, using my paddle to send some water his way.
He shouted at me, laughing.
Even though we were far from shore, I could hear the crickets chirping. Early summer fireflies blinked in among the trees like a thousand lighthouses, each trying to guide us home.
“Aw,” Mary said, smiling, staring up at the navy-blue sky where the stars had begun peeking through. “I hope he takes after Paul.”
Shirley laughed her joyous laugh. “How do you know it’s a boy, Mary? Better not get set on one or the other.”
“I just know,” Mary said so quietly it was almost a whisper.
“There’s Orion,” Tom said. “There’s the Big Dipper. And there’s Cassiopeia.”
“Where’d you learn all this stuff, hon?” Shirley asked.
Tom didn’t reply, and we all stared up into the sky, searching it, as if there in the combination of stars we would find our future spelled out to us, plain and simple.
“What do you want to do with your life, Paul?” Tom asked, his words coming smooth across the black water.
“Do with my life?” I repeated. It was something I didn’t think too much about. I had Mary, a place to live. I made enough money for now. I wasn’t sure what else there was to be thinking about.
“Yeah!” Tom continued. “What do you want to do? You’re not going to spend the rest of your life on a typewriter, are you?”
Somehow it felt like a mean question now that he was pressing the point.
“I don’t know, Tom,” I said. “I figure it’ll come to me.”
Tom laughed, and there was something spiteful in his voice. Something derisive. “Oh, Paul,” he said, and I felt like I was about six years old.
I started rowing back to the cabin. Eighteen years old and I could feel hot tears rising. Why couldn’t Tom let me be? Why did I have to be so sensitive?
“Paul?” I heard Mary calling, and I hated to leave her out there without me, but I couldn’t take Tom. I couldn’t take the sound of his voice or the way he questioned my future, my motivation, my ambition. I paddled harder.
Twenty minutes later I was in bed, and all the lights in the cabin were out. The windows were open, the summer air leaking in at the perfect temperature. A slight breeze kicked up, and I could hear the trees hushing each other. Then I heard the kayaks bumping against each other, and I felt bad for a split second that Tom would have to pull all three of the boats up onto the dock, but that feeling passed quickly. I heard the girls whispering to each other, silence, and then Tom walking up the dock, his footsteps heavier, distinctive. The back door closed, and I heard the dead bolt.
Mary came into the room, nearly silent. I heard her clothes drop to the floor, felt the bed sway as she leaned in. She arranged her pillows the way she wanted and nestled up against me, as close as she could with her round stomach in between us.
“Paul?” she whispered.
I didn’t answer, but I turned my head so she knew I was listening.
“You’ll figure it out.”
“I know,” I whispered back.
Enough time passed that I thought she was asleep.
“Paul?” she whispered again, and her voice sounded almost drunk with sleepiness.
“Yeah?”
“Please don’t ever leave me out on the water. I don’t like being out there without you.”
“I’m sorry.”
The moment came when Mary had such terror in her eyes that the terror left her and filled me, until I felt like I was drowning in it.
“I can’t do this,” she whispered. “I can’t do it.”
She squeezed my hand as the next contraction came, and the endless moan that left her turned into a suppressed scream at the end. That sound, that moan turned scream, was like a slap across my face.
I leaned in close, and I could smell the sweat and the blood and the fear. “You can do this, Mary,” I whispered fiercely. “You can.”
When Mary pushed your father out, it was one of the most miraculous things I’ve ever seen. That a baby could appear all covered in that fine shimmering white—it took my breath away.
“Mary,” I said into her ear, “you did it.”
She nodded, her face wrinkling into a full-on cry.
“You did it.”
She nodded again.
“It’s a boy, Mary. A boy.”
She took in a quick breath, and it caught in a sob on the way out.
“It’s a boy,” I repeated.
Her crying turned into a laugh, a joyous sound, a crying, sweating, sobbing laugh.
“Let’s call him John,” she said as the nurses placed your daddy on her chest. “Little Johnny.”
Screams at the Cabin
Tom pushes the throttle forward, the boat charges ahead, and I am thankful for the nighttime spray of the lake—the cold mist wakes me up and helps chase away my splitting headache. When Tom first suggested we take the boat to look for you, I was hesitant, wondering if crashing over the water would make me feel
sick again. But it hasn’t, at least not so far. I feel more alive than I have for some time and settle into the seat, close my eyes.
Where have you gone?
When I mentioned your story about the cabin, Tom shook his head.
“I’m sure she didn’t go that far,” was all he said, and the conversation was over.
I didn’t object. After all, it was nonsensical to think you could have hiked all that way, either through the woods or along that winding country road, especially considering the state you were in when you went to bed, feverish and still weak from your near drowning.
But Tom and I had spent the next twenty minutes searching through the house, the surrounding woods, and the edges of the lake, with no luck. If he noticed the state of the rug and the wood floor in your room (which he had to have seen), he hasn’t said anything about it. I’ll take this as a good sign, although he may be waiting until we find you before he kicks both of us out.
The night is chilly and the stars are bright. I can even see the haze of the Milky Way, that cloud of stars that boggles the mind. I hope you are looking up, seeing the same sky. I hope you haven’t gone far.
The cabin comes into view as the boat turns toward the shore. When I say “into view,” what I mostly mean is that there is some strange shape to the shadows, the darkness begins to align itself, and the form of the house somehow becomes present among the trees, even if I can barely see it. Tom cuts the engine as we approach the bank, and the dock also emerges from the shadows. It all seems to happen magically, these things coming into view where at first there is only darkness.
Without the roaring of the motor, our approach feels almost ghostly. We drift seamlessly through the water, soundlessly, and the overhanging branches of the large oaks and elms and sycamores reach for us, drawing us close. There is a soft scraping as the underbelly of the boat makes contact with the dock, and our approach shifts slightly. Tom grabs one of the large wooden supports that rises above the deck, slows the boat to a stop, and ties us up. He steps out first and looks over his shoulder. We make eye contact, but he doesn’t say anything. Not with words. But his eyes say, This is completely ridiculous. I can’t believe we came all the way out here.
The Weight of Memory Page 20