The Memento

by Christy Ann Conlin

  We moved through the forest shaking and silent all the way back to camp, where Harry waited with Sakura. About halfway down the steep trail tremendous rains came pelting from the sky, and the fierce gusts almost knocked us over as a thunder and lightning storm moved in—the first one we’d seen all summer.

  They sent out a helicopter and a boat for us when Sakura discovered spare radio batteries, but they could not find Pomeline’s body anywhere in the turbulent ocean. It was swept away. It was this that began to stalk us, a shadow that grew longer with each year that passed—the kind of shadow that belongs to the dead who have come to call.

  9.

  The Dark Rolling Deep

  MY BELIEF that facing the truth concerning Pomeline’s death would end the madness was mistaken. It did the exact opposite. The sounds coming from all corners of the mansion seemed much louder—each creak, the hum of the refrigerator, the drip in the sink and the wind outside. When I would busy myself with housework I’d then hear a quiet singing, but the singing would end at the exact same time I stopped my work to listen closely. Pomeline had followed us back to Petal’s End. There was no other explanation. Jenny was right. Art could go on pretending but I was finished with that.

  It was late and Art and Jenny still weren’t back from the hospital. Art finally called and said they’d be there all night doing tests. “If Estelle calls,” he said, “just tell her Jenny’s sleeping. Tell her to call Raymond Delquist if she’s got anything to say.” He didn’t tell me much more. There was a moment when he asked if I was okay where I wanted to say We need to talk about the island, but before I could utter a word came a soft click … what sounded like someone picking up the receiver somewhere in the house. There was a prolonged silence on the phone line while Art waited for me to reply and I listened to my own heavy breathing.

  “Fancy?” Art said.

  “Well, goodbye then,” I said to him, and hung up.

  Shaking and raw, I went to the front of the house. The phone was where it always was, in the parlour on a table, where it remains to this day. The receiver was on the hook. I picked it up and put it to my ear. “Hello?” I trilled. “Hello, hello,” like I was answering myself. It was my brain from drinking again, I told myself, no question about it. My little girl came through the window in my mind then. I could hear her laughter, feel her delicate hands. I saw Pomeline falling over and over in the mist.

  I was overcome with dread that my mind was collapsing. It seemed the past was slipping out of my eyes and taking form in front of me. My screams snapped down the hall, an endless rope cracking out and snaking through all the corridors and over stairs, then back at me from every corner of the house. Suddenly I was running in the kitchen and there was Melissa looking at me with great big dark water eyes. It was a mirror I was staring in. I took to laughing. My lips were moving, the lips on the Fancy Mosher in the mirror, and I peered up right close, put my fingers on those cold lips, and they were whispering Grampie, Grampie, come and help me. His voice singing Hear the wind blow, love, hear the wind blow and I don’t know if he was singing in my memories or if his voice was coming right out of my lips. Hang your head o’er and hear the wind blow. I closed my eyes and hung my head down and his voice was ringing in my ear. On wings of the wind o’er the dark rolling deep. There was breath on my neck, and the soothing balm of turpentine and beeswax. I felt his fingers gentle on my shoulder. Angels are coming to watch o’er thy sleep. My eyes opened and I was hoping he’d be there behind me, his hand on my shoulder, but there was only me in the mirror.

  I was resting in my bed still hearing Grampie’s voice but I didn’t trust it. Just what sort of messenger would be standing over me if I fell to sleep? I prayed out loud for Holy Mother Mercy to come and relieve me, to guard me. Far off I could hear the wind bells in Evermore, and then a breath smelling of decaying flowers brushed my lips as a dark shape leaned over me. But before I saw what it was, the night closed in and took me away.

  10.

  The Lady on the Beach

  IT WAS them birds that woke me the hell up. Before my eyes were even open I heard chirping and I thought how I’d like to shoot them out of the branches. I was acutely aware I was turning into Ma, with a thought like that. She didn’t never see a thing wrong with killing something for food, or if it was eating your food. Right before the car accident there was a groundhog in the garden eating up her lettuce and she shot it dead. If she had just the right amount of drinks in her to stop her hand shaking, she had a deadly aim.

  Drinking was the least of my worries right then. It was early dawn, when the light was still thick and dark. The bed spun and I fell asleep again, my fear lessened knowing the night was over. I closed my eyes and it was like Grampie was still singing to me, and this time I believed his words. Melissa’s pink sweater was in my hands as his voice became my voice and I sang my daughter her lullabies, the same songs Grampie sung to me. Then it was late morning.

  The curtains weren’t shut and I looked out. The thing was there, on the grass, and then on the path to the kitchen door. Then it was gone. It only took me a moment to fly down all them cold wooden steps and I stopped when I reached the kitchen, feeling like I’d been kicked in the gut. There was a colossal bouquet of flowers on the table. And in the main house, in the front hall, another huge vase. I gathered them up and ran out the back door to find petals scattered about, as though we was about to have a ceremony. I took my armfuls of flowers and tossed them in the humus pile. On the way back to the house it seemed a thousand eyes were upon me. I kept waiting for that horrid thing in white to peep out, but it did not. I didn’t know what was worse—seeing it and being terrified, or not seeing it and thinking I was crazy.

  At first, pretending things was normal seemed like it might fix everything up. I made coffee. I made biscuits and I hummed and whistled the whole time, every song I knew, keeping the creaks away. And yes, it seemed like there was something else in the house singing and whispering. I’d run down the halls screaming for it to come out but there would be only silence. Then when I’d go back to the kitchen I would hear it again.

  Twice I went up to Jenny’s room. I could hear it in there, breathing heavily, warbling. The first time I snuck up the stairs and down the hall the door was closed, and I put my eye to the keyhole. There was a flash of white and I damn near pissed myself, but I was stubborn. I looked again and did not see a thing, but I heard the singing, and I rested my ear against the keyhole. The words were muffled and a puff of cold breath filled my ear. The glass doorknob rattled, and right before my eyes it began to turn, and my mouth opened to shriek and to this day I have no idea whether I did. The doorknob clicked. I wasn’t waiting to see what might pop out to throttle me. I grabbed that doorknob and pushed the door open with all my force. The window was wide open and air blew in, the white curtains dancing. You try at moments like that to tell yourself it was the curtains and the breeze. You cling to any explanation, anything so you don’t have to believe. I felt a rush of relief as I stood in the room.

  Just as my heart rate was finally coming down, the doorknob swivelled when my hand was not on it and that click was more like a bang, and yet again nothing materialized. Art and Jenny were playing a trick on me. That was the reason for all of this. It was a punishment for refusing to help them with my memento.

  I ran back up to my room and I took out Melissa’s pink sweater and the embroidery I did for her—but they’d gone and messed with it. I couldn’t imagine Art would do this, torment me so. The pictorial I did for my daughter to hang in her room—Jenny had gone and changed it. There was the house and all them flowers in the garden and such a peaceful babbling brook and ducks paddling, and butterflies in the air, but in the water there was a girl, a little girl with dark hair and a cute dress, face down and legs and arms fanned out. There was a man kneeling by the edge of the brook and his face was screwed into a scream. Jenny went and made it a horror show. It felt like it was burning my fingers.

  I put it down and went thr
ough the upstairs hall connecting the back to the main house, through the door and over the carpet back to Jenny’s room. The door was open but the windows were somehow closed and the white curtain hung still. Her big wardrobe, which was kept locked, loomed over me. It wouldn’t open. I pulled and pulled on the door but it would not budge. So I went out to the carriage house and I got an axe. There’s lots of things you learn growing up with a wood stove and one of them is how to use an axe, and yes, I did, I chopped my way right through that door.

  I took out the photo albums Jenny had been working on and I opened one to find black-and-white photos, a young woman in what they called a bathing costume, a short sleeveless dress with bloomers. She had on a swimming cap that looked like a bonnet. She had won a prize ribbon. She stood by a big pool. It was a very young Marigold. My ears filled up as though I was crashing through the air. Marigold had said she couldn’t swim. It was why John Lee drowned. There wasn’t a thing she could have done, she said. But she lied. I threw the album down.

  I jumped then, for Art was standing in the bedroom door with Jenny beside him. She hobbled over to her bed. “I need a nap,” she said, as though it was just another day and I was having a little episode there on the floor. Jenny looked at the axe and the broken door, and then at me. She perked up and cleared her throat as though she had just remembered she was supposed to deliver a sermon.

  “He was my grandfather’s son. John Lee was my uncle. The Colonel couldn’t keep his hands off the maids. That’s what my grandmother told me as she lay there in the nursing home. She thought she was making her confession to me, that telling me would set her free. ‘Forgive an old lady,’ Granny said. ‘You and I are the only ones who understand how important the time-worn ways are, Agatha. We are the only real Parkers. We have a duty.’ She thought I’d feel badly for her, of course. That Marilyn Mosher was such a temptress. That’s the word she used. As if it was your mother’s fault. But Marilyn was just a teenager, Fancy. She didn’t know better. That’s what I told Granny. She was crippled up lying in the bed, looking pathetic, but she still didn’t want to die. Can you imagine that? She refused to accept that her time had passed. Her shock that I felt compassion for a piece of poor white trash like Marilyn Mosher. She felt a bit of remorse later, but she still felt justified, vindicated. She thought she’d righted something unnatural—your brother. That crumb of remorse … that’s why she let Loretta have you here.”

  Art went over to the bed. “You really should just stop talking and get some rest.” He was starting to cry. Jenny was not through holding forth.

  “No, Art, I want to tell you both. It must be illuminated. My grandmother couldn’t see what all this meant, that we, in fact, were unnatural. We were the abomination. Granny thought showing her mercy to Marilyn would put things in their natural order. That’s why she did what she could for your Grampie. Because she could fool herself. She even fooled herself when I came in with her precious botanicals, and she drank what I gave her. I needed to make sure she would never recover. It took Granny a few weeks to figure out what was making her feel bad, but by then it was too late to do anything. Poor old lady, sick and breathless, like stupid Margaret was. You remember that, Fancy?”

  I stood up from where I’d been sitting on the floor, and my cheeks burned. Jenny held my eyes.

  “They were just the same, those two, so vain. I remember near the end whispering into Granny’s ears that the white flower bells were ringing but it wasn’t fairies she was going to hear singing on the other side. Her eyes were popping out of her head. They thought I was dry-eyed at her funeral because of my condition, but even if I could have cried I would have had no tears for that wicked woman. Guilt never repairs anything, does it? I did not feel badly for her. I do not feel badly for any of them.”

  Art started to speak, and Jenny cut through the air with her arm. “I am not finished, Art. Don’t cut me off. I am not dead yet. Someone must restore the natural order, I realized. What I felt looking at her was horror over what I did to Pomeline, how I made you two go along with me. We were children. My grandmother was not a child. She was selfish, just as my mother is. They smelled it on each other. And my mother can smell it on me. I reek of it. I am no longer a child. I’m the only Parker left.”

  Jenny collapsed back onto her bed, dry weeping, looking for relief when there was none to be had, and her hands dug into the bedding, hanging on tight as though she might fall.

  Art stepped forward then. “Jenny is exhausted. They sent her back home. There’s no hope. She’s on a new medication to help with the pain. That’s all they can do for her now. It’s making her delusional.”

  Jenny waved at him. “I’m not delusional, Art. How deep is your denial? Aren’t you the psychologist?” she hissed, and her anger seemed to steady her as she sat back up on the bed.

  I was too confused to process what they was saying. It was in one ear, out the other. I held up the embroidery picture of Melissa. “You don’t have to go and ruin me and my daughter just because you want to destroy your whole family. What did we ever do to you that you’d change my picture like this? You just tell me what. Even dying young don’t give you the right, Jenny Parker, to go and wreck things so everyone has to suffer. There ain’t enough suffering in all the world to satisfy your thirst for it.”

  “I didn’t change anything. You’re the crazy one, Fancy. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m trying to make things right. I am trying to confess.”

  “It’s just the way you are looking at things that is changing, Fancy. Your mind is clearing,” Art said.

  “Oh stop with your psychology, Art!” I shrieked. “The only thing that’s changed is I got no patience no more, not for any of you. Look what you done to Melissa. You put her in the stream face down. You want everybody dead. You are suffering because of your mother and whatever she took that went and made you all cancerous and deformed in your organs, Jenny. But that’s not my fault. You want us all to suffer just because you suffer. You’re no different than Ma. You’re jealous because Grampie gave me the memento and no one else, but I ain’t using it, not to make selfish people like you and my mother happy. No, I am not.” My throat hurt, as though I’d breathed the smoke of a thousand beach fires, fires burning up the words of a thousand ghost stories. The rage was all through me, deep in my bones. I pointed at Jenny and I could feel a vibration in my fingertips.

  She drew back, but then softened, like she was suddenly feeling terrible sorry for me. She was up and down like the tides. Out crawled her low, raspy voice. “Fancy, Art saw your mother. She’s in the hospital. Ronald was there in the lobby. Isn’t that what you said, Art? You should go and see her. She doesn’t have long. I’ve been telling you all summer and you act as though you don’t hear.” Jenny started coughing.

  Right then I decided I should go and make peace with my Ma. That or be just like Jenny and spend the rest of my life senseless with regret.

  11.

  I Found You in a Picture

  RONNIE WAS outside the hospital having a smoke. “Well, looky who decided to think of someone other than herself.” Ronnie took a hard drag on his cigarette, sucking it right down to the filter. He dropped it on the ground and crushed it under his heel. He sized me up with a look that offered no mercy. “Fancy Mosher, come to see your mother? Look at all the trouble you caused her. I wish when she had that car accident that you’d been thrown clear and hit a tree so hard that was the end of you. But you’re like an earwig, Fancy Mosher. You don’t stop crawling no matter how hard life stamps you down. Marilyn tried her best for you. Tried helping you with your baby. Tried helping you in the hospital. But you just had to have your own way. At least your mother could admit what she did, but look at you … still hiding out in your goddamned fantasy land so you don’t never have to grow up and take responsibility like your mother did. If you come to give her even a bit of grief, you turn right around and march your ass back over the mountain to Petal’s End and rot away with those two other freaks.
”

  Ronnie hocked and spit out a big yellow glob and wagged his finger right in my face.

  “You were born strange, just like them Parkers. And don’t you go telling me it’s your mother’s fault. I knew Marilyn like no one else ever knew her. I always loved the woman. I waited my entire life for her.”

  He went white because he realized he was talking about her like she was already gone. I knew then Jenny and Art weren’t just trying to get me out of the house. Ronnie cried like Jenny, no tears coming out of his eyes.

  “None of you appreciated her. And your Grampie weren’t the saint you like to believe. Not that I believe in any of that horseshit, but he could have at least pretended and give the woman some peace. And you, you could have done the same. She’s up there now believing to her dying breath that her dead baby boy’s going to eat her alive when she passes.” A great large noise come out of him, this big whooping sob. He sucked it right back in and waved me away without letting me say a word.

  People were looking at me as I ran through the hospital corridors but it made no difference. On the ward an attendant took me to her room. He asked when the last time was I seen Marilyn. He couldn’t hide his shock when I said not for six months. She was gravely, gravely ill, and I should prepare myself. The cancer was all through her now.

  I took a deep breath and went in. The room was full of the prettiest bouquets. Ma lay in the bed and didn’t her eyes open wide. She’d gone yellow. She held out her hand and I went to her crying like a child. She comforted me as the dying always comfort the living.

  Ma took my hand and said they took a biopsy off her liver. “When will you get the results?” I asked.