Among These Bones

by Amanda Luzzader

  I had at least stopped crying.

  One day I awoke in the chair by the front window and I looked outside. The sun shone through torn and broken clouds. The storm had almost cleared away. More than two feet of snow had accumulated. It lay undisturbed over everything like a vast covering of cake frosting.

  A flock of pine siskins was attacking the fir tree across the street, prying the last of the seeds from its cones with their hard tiny beaks. They chased and scolded in the branches. On the snow around the tree lay a dusting of fir needles and seeds and cone scales. As more of the noisy little birds arrived to raid the fir, they knocked the snow loose from the boughs, and it fell in cascading, powdery waves to the ground, where it buried the ring of seeds and needles.

  I heard a noise from the front porch. Someone had trudged up the snow-covered steps and was turning the doorknob. After finding the door locked, there was a soft knock.

  It was Arie.

  Of course it was. It had to be. It had all been a mistake. That happened sometimes—fouled-up records, wrongful arrests, collapsed memories. I’d heard of that happening many times. Someone might vanish and be gone for a few days, even weeks, before reappearing without explanation.

  Arie had been put in the wrong bed, maybe.

  Misidentified. Misdiagnosed. Maybe they’d held him for questioning—they’d found out about his contraband, his searches outside the Zone. It was some kind of mistake.

  But now he was back.

  I ripped my blanket away, scrambled from the chair, and pounded across the room to the door.

  But it wasn’t Arie. There’d been no mistake. It was two knocks followed by a pause and then a third knock.

  “Alison. Hello.”

  “Oh. Hello, Gary.” I stepped aside to let him into the house.

  “Are you okay? You look—am I bothering you?”

  “No, it’s just—” I stammered and sighed. “I’m tired.”

  “You should probably be resting.” Gary said. “I know it hasn’t been easy.”

  I nodded.

  Gary took a deep breath.

  “Alison,” he said, “I want you to know how sorry I am about what happened.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “I’m devastated, Alison. Really. I’m so very sorry. I would have done anything to help him.”

  “But you couldn’t,” I said, realizing too late how much that must have sounded like an accusation.

  “No,” he said softly, his gaze falling to the floor. He’d tracked snow into the living room. He watched it melt into the carpet. “I wasn’t told. They didn’t tell me. I didn’t know.”

  “Then you have nothing to be sorry about.”

  “Yes, but, I feel like I need to make it up to you somehow. I can’t bring him back, but please let me help you. Some way.”

  He took a step toward me. I could see from his face that he was sincerely troubled, hurt.

  “You do help me, Gary. You helped us a lot. And I appreciate it.”

  “I want to do more for you than bringing you a little food or propane. You’ve lost your son. I know he was a hard worker. I know he helped a lot around here. And maybe you get lonely sometimes, like I do. Maybe you’d like some companionship.”

  All I wanted was to go back to bed.

  “Could I come by and help you Alison? With anything you need around the house? Or just to talk?”

  Maybe it would be nice to have someone around. To have company, at least. Someone to help.

  I shrugged. “If you want.”

  “I do, Alison. It would mean so much to me.”

  Without Arie and his searches and our journals and adventures, I knew the tedium and strain of this life would grind me into sand. And I wanted to feel safe, if only until it was time to take the serum again. I wasn’t sure I even knew what it was to feel like myself, but there were several months remaining. Something had to change.

  Having an adult in my house—how would that be? Having someone I could speak with, someone I could trust—how different it would be. And Gary was someone with connections, a man who could help me with matters more grave than drafty windows or a broken down bicycle.

  Gary said he would be back in a couple days to help me work around the house. The windows really did need caulking and there were other chores. He might have even wore the hint of forlorn smile as he put his hat on and went out into the deep snow.

  This made me slightly sorry for him—I longed for the new year now, and any kind of friendship we might cultivate would be wiped away in just a few months. Gary’s offer brought me a faint hope, but he wasn’t my way out. Instead, I felt the way I thought a patient of assisted suicide might feel—I was consigned. I would get through these last few months, and then I would embrace oblivion and escape from pain.

  CHAPTER 9

  The house had fallen into disarray—my clothing was strewn on the floor and over chair backs; cups and bowls lay discarded around the place. One day I stepped and slipped on my journal as I came into my bedroom. I must have been stepping on it or over it for a week or more, because the cover was spindled and partially detached. Something made me pick it up and take it with me to my chair by the window. As I thumbed through the pages, something in my mind began to change.

  Arie would want me to remember him. I knew on some level that was true even as I had fought through blackest of my despair. Sitting in the chair and reading through the terse and lackluster entries in my journal, the truth gnawed at me. Arie wrote in his journals constantly, and he spent the rest of his spare time compiling what was basically a cross-referenced indexed history of the world we’d all forgotten. He’d want to be remembered, and he’d want me to write down everything else, too.

  But this new realization concerned what I wanted, and what was good for me, as well as what Arie would want.

  If I went to the infirmary at the end of the year and took my shots, I’d forget Arie—but only in a technical sense. His name, our past, and maybe even his face would be wiped from my mind, but was it that simple?

  As soon as the Agency had told me that I had a son, back at the beginning of the year, I’d known it to be true.

  The Agency worker had traced her gloved finger down her clipboard. “Your son, Arie, will be here shortly,” she said to me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “My what now?”

  “Your son,” she said. “Yes. Arie. They’re bringing him out now. Just take a seat.”

  “I have a—son?”

  “You have a son.”

  In the months that followed, every time I finished one of Arie’s sentences for him, or knew what he wanted to eat for dinner before he asked, I became more certain that we were mother and son.

  And this was the problem.

  Because if I had carried that certainty with me through the memory-erasing serum, I could never really forget Arie. If there were no one to remind me that I had a son, I would instead feel his absence in my life, his negative image, and I would carry the sadness of his passing without knowing why.

  I went to kitchen, brewed a strong cup of tea, and ate several stale granola bars. Then I opened my journal to a new page and set it on the table in front of me. In the spiral binding there was a stubby pencil. I drew it out and sharpened it with my pocket knife.

  Outside, the sunlight receded and then there was only cold starlight on the snow glowing dim and blue. The moon rose and still the siskins darted among the branches fir tree.

  Without my journal, without a complete record, Arie really would cease to exist. It would be as if he had never existed. His name might appear in some inactive file or graves registry, but there would be no description of the way he ran his fingers through his bangs when they fell into his face, or how his nose scrunched when he laughed hard. At that moment, Arie existed only in my mind and nowhere else. I had to bring him out and write him down.

  And so I threw away my lonely, desperate plan—crumpled it up and tossed it like a page of unsatisfactory writing from a
notebook. I would take the serum, but I would also leave behind a record of Arie that I could keep beyond the scrim of forgetting. And it would be a good record, one I could keep regardless of whether we ever regained our memories.

  At first I wasn’t sure if I could do it. How could I when he was so recently gone? Wouldn’t every page I wrote feel like losing him all over again? As I finished the last of my tea, I decided that it didn’t matter—it was my pain, and I was keeping it. Besides, the hurt would fade with time, as all hurts do, but the love would stay vivid. I smoothed the fresh new page and began to write.

  I’d mentioned Arie in my notebooks before, of course, but I’d never written much expressly about him, never even described what he looked like. I’d committed the very error Arie had warned me about—I wrote as a diarist, not a journalist. My entries assumed the future reader would know everything I knew in those moments: background, context, and history.

  “Write to your future self, not your present self,” said Arie. “Write like you’re writing to a stranger, because that’s what you’ll be when you read this next year.”

  Now it made sense, and I wished I’d listened better. I’d written of Arie most when we were first re-united, immediately after our treatment at the first of the year. He’d conceived the journal-writing idea within the month, and I’d made a few notes back then. But the entries from that time were crude, cursory, as though I was still coming to grips with my responsibility to him. Not to mention I was still getting to know him, and I was enjoying our time together.

  Later on, after I’d gotten accustomed to his constant presence in my life, he was mentioned even less—and less informatively. A stranger could learn little about him from my journal. I’d made too many assumptions, too many omissions.

  I had to start over completely.

  And so I scared up a new notebook and wrote through the night. My candle burned out as the sun rose on the drifted snow outside. The siskins merrily raided the fir tree in the cold. I kept on writing.

  *

  It took me almost three hours to reach Donna’s RV.

  By the time I’d used up all the notebooks we had in the house, an icy crust had formed on top of the snow, and my snow boots broke through it with practically every step. The drive-in theater parking lot was a series of soft undulations covered over by the glittering, white blanket. The cats were gone, and there were few tracks in the snow around the RV. However, a pipe on the roof emitted a stream of vapor that whipped in the breeze.

  “Donna?” I shouted as I approached. “It’s Alison.”

  Winter clothes weren’t hard to come by, so I was dressed warmly, but I’d gotten sweaty and damp trudging for so long through the crusted drifts. The wind picked up and the sun was dropping and I shivered violently under my layers of fleece and Gortex. I rested awhile, made a few more post-holes through the snow toward the RV, and then I called to Donna again.

  She didn’t come to the door, and I saw no stirring inside. I kept going until I stood thigh-deep in the snow at the base of the wooden steps.

  “Donna!”

  No response.

  I stepped onto a lower stair and banged on the door with my gloved hand.

  “Donna, please,” I shouted. “Kinda cold out here.”

  I stood there a few minutes. She didn’t come. If I didn’t start back right away, I might freeze to death, so I unshouldered my backpack and drew open the heavy zipper. Inside there was a bundle of books held together with rubber bands.

  “Donna, I’ve got books,” I said. My voice halted and hitched with my shivering. I held the books up in case she was watching. “I’ll leave them out here. But I really need more notebooks.”

  I banged on the door again. It stayed shut. The speaker masts of the drive-in theater stood in their rows across the lot, casting blue shadows that seemed to lengthen as I waited. I cleared a flat spot in the snow on the wooden steps and set the books there like some shabby, unwrapped Christmas gift. Then I stood to go, placing my boots in the post holes I’d left.

  When I’d taken ten or twelve steps, as I’d hoped, I heard the door handle click.

  “’Bout time, Donna,” I whispered. Then I turned around.

  The snow had piled up and froze in front of the door, and Donna had to put her weight behind it to push it open. She peeked out at me.

  “Hi, Donna,” I said, waving. I gestured at the snow with a gloved hand. “Hey, wow! How about this weather?”

  She crouched at the door and picked up the books.

  “I hope you like those,” I said, pointing. “I know you like those classics, the brainy stuff.”

  She examined the spines, read the titles—The Great Gatsby, Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Orpheus Descending.

  “Donna. It’s awful cold out here. Any chance I could come in for a minute?”

  She pulled one of the books from the bundle and took a close look and I saw the faint smile I’d seen before when she found a book she wanted. She nodded to me.

  I climbed the staircase of hard snow as Donna got the door all the way open. Then I stepped into the RV. Donna backed into the dim interior as I entered. It was even more cluttered than it looked from outside. The books were everywhere, and the air was stuffy with their acrid, musty odor. Four or five cats appeared from under the stairs and slipped into the open RV, threading around and between my ankles. They climbed onto the piled books and sat monitoring me like Egyptian sentinels. Donna went to the couch by way of a narrow path that ran between the books. She sat down and then motioned with a stiff, awkward gesture for me to join her. I opened my coat and removed my hat and gloves. We sat a while without speaking.

  “I was sorry to hear about your son,” said Donna. Her voice had a muddy quality, as though she might be medicated. Her eyes were always slightly glassy, too. But who could medicate her? And why?

  “You heard?”

  She nodded.

  “How?”

  “You’re not the only one who comes.”

  “Oh.”

  It was only marginally warmer inside the RV than it was outside, but we were protected from the wind, and a handful of ruddy embers burned like a clutch of incandescent eggs in the belly of a tiny wood-gas stove in the corner. Already I was feeling the painful, itchy tingle of restored circulation in my fingers and toes. The cats blinked drowsily but kept their watch.

  “You’re here for notebooks?” asked Donna.

  “Yes, please. And pens. Or pencils. Hell, crayons. I need to write.”

  “About Arie.”

  “Yeah,” I said, my voice hitching. “I have to write down everything about him, or he’ll be forgotten forever.”

  “There are no more notebooks,” she said.

  “What? Are you sure?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry to bother you. It’s just—I need to write. I’m nowhere near finished.”

  “How much more is there?”

  That was a question I’d been asking myself for days.

  My hand throbbed with writer’s cramp. My wrist was numb and stiff, and there were raw patches on the knuckles of my little finger where they rubbed the paper. I’d been writing for days, everything I could remember. I’d read all of Arie’s journals, some of them more than once. I’d read his notes about his searching and collecting. I’d scoured my own journal, too.

  The process had been chaotic, exhausting. I worked practically from the time I awoke, writing, reading, thinking, writing more. I could not stop at night until I collapsed. Sometimes I would awake with a start in the middle of the night with some newly remembered image or nuance, and I would light a candle and write it down. Each morning I would start again.

  It had not been unpleasant. Alternating between grinning and crying as I strained to recall each day and moment with Arie—no, it wasn’t unpleasant at all. As I read over what I’d written I’d laugh and cry some more.

  There was the first day I met Arie at the Agency depot,
and our long walk home, so awkward I thought I’d cry or maybe break down and giggle.

  “What do you like to do?” I asked him.

  He shot me a skeptical, sideways glance and then said, “How the hell should I know?”

  We laughed, and things got better.

  Then our first night as mom and son. It took us two hours to make one can of pork and beans because we couldn’t find anything in the kitchen of our own assigned house.

  “We need to reorganize this kitchen,” I suggested. “Or else we’re gonna starve.”

  Arie immediately pointed out: “That’s probably what we did last year.”

  I wrote about the first neighborhood we searched and the way it seemed that Arie would never tell me everything he knew, or thought he knew. I wrote about the ideas he would share with me, especially when we talked all night.

  “Do you really think it’s an accident?” he once asked me. “Do you really think there was some plague, and the treatment just happens to wipe out our memories?”

  “You mean you think it seems kind of—”

  “Made up? Yeah. That’s exactly what I think.”

  I wrote about my final day with him and waiting in vain for him to come out of the door at the infirmary.

  There were some events and things that I’d written about already, but my writing had since become stronger, clearer, and more focused. The memories I wrote down again during that journaling marathon benefited greatly from my new perspective and ability.

  In answer to Donna’s question, I did not know how much there was to write down. I only knew there was more. With every memory and every line I put on the paper, two more would occur to me. But how to write it all? And when? How long would it take, and how would I know when I’d finished?

  “There are a lot of blank pages in some of the journals,” I said, more to myself than to Donna. “I could collect those, write small. Maybe write between the words of the used-up journals, in the margins. I can write on the pages of magazines and books.”

  “You know, Alison,” she said. “There may be something that you’re not thinking of.”

  “What do you mean?”