“I’ll be back next week to see how you’re doing, Thomas,” Aunt Olivia said, as if nothing had happened. “Well, Chris, are you coming?”
Chris shook his head. He needed to remember, and this was the place, these were the people to help him. If for no other reason than they seemed to be afraid of Aunt Olivia.
Of course, they were afraid of him, too, but he needed to get to the bottom of that.
“I thought you might stay,” the old woman answered, chuckling a bit. “Do you think you can remember the way home on your own, dear boy?”
“How could I forget?” he answered, and she accepted his response with another chuckle.
“I’ll see you tonight at dinner, then.” She walked slowly past, touching his shoulder lightly on the way out. He heard her steps fade down the hallway, down the stairs. The front door opened, closed, and the entire house seemed to expel a long-held breath.
Suddenly, Mae dashed into the room, pushed past Emma and Chris, rushed to the side of her husband. His head lay on the pillow, eyes staring into space, silent tears spilling down his cheeks. Mae held him tight, and they both cried.
“Chris,” Emma whispered, taking his hand and pulling him from the room. “Come on, we’ve got a lot to discuss.”
“I know.”
* * *
PART THREE
She led him from the house into the backyard garden, brown and wilted from the autumn. Bare stakes, turned earth and the detritus of dead plants were scattered here and there, giving the landscape a peculiar, ravaged look. Only the trees farther back in the yard lent any color to the surroundings.
A picnic table squatted amidst this, its boards grey and warped, its top uneven. They sat side-by-side. She held his hand tightly in hers, studied him for a minute.
“I didn’t know if you would come back,” she said. “I mean, I didn’t know if you’d be able to.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is…I didn’t know if you’d remember.”
And she hugged him, buried her face in his neck and cried. He felt her tears, warm against his flesh on this cold morning, trickle underneath his shirt and down his shoulder. He returned her embrace.
And remembered.
The almost prophetic curve of the small of her back. The smell of her hair. The sound of her breathing. The softness of her skin.
His wife. A bit older than he remembered, but it was she who had appeared to him at the institution. Was that a delusion?
“Shh,” he said, his love for her returning in a blast of memory that shivered through him more powerfully than the damp, cold air. “I’m beginning to remember everything. And some of it I wish I could forget.”
She pulled up, wiped her eyes. “That’s in the past. We settled it before she sent you away. I know you never meant to hurt us. You loved us so much that you wanted to keep us the way we were. You know it can’t be that way.”
“You’re going to have to help me,” he said, taking her face gently in his hands. “I don’t remember everything yet. That’s dangerous. Aunt Olivia is playing a game with me, trying to see how much I remember. When she finds out, she’ll try to get rid of me again. I need to know some things. Can you tell me?”
“Of course.”
“From what I can piece together from my memory and what happened this morning, Aunt Olivia has some sort of power that holds this town just the way she remembers it, the people, the things, the landscape. They all stay the same forever. Is that right?”
“Yes,” she said, her face trying hard not to express surprise that he didn’t remember even this.
“Okay, bear with me,” he sighed. “That’s the strangest part, and I wasn’t sure whether I really was crazy for thinking that. But I have that same power. Is that right?”
“Yes. In fact, you’re the only other person in the family who does. You were sort of her second-in-command. She was grooming you for something.”
“Right,” he said, standing suddenly and pacing. “I remember that. She knew I had the power—object permanence, she called it—and she wanted me to do something. To help her with something. But what was it? Did I ever say anything to you about it?”
She shook her head.
“Shit. All right, we’ll leave that at present. Walking with her today, I felt that it was something we’d done before, often,” he said.
“Every day. Olivia split the town into sections, and the two of you would take a walk every morning. That way she could see everyone and everything in town once a week—”
“Because she needed to,” he interrupted. “That’s it. To maintain the control, she has to remember. And to remember, she had to see everyone regularly, to keep them in mind.”
“Before she sent you away, you told me something that you thought was important. You said that she didn’t always do this every week. She began by seeing everyone once or twice every couple of months, then it became once a month. Only recently did it become once a week. You said that it meant something,” Emma said.
Chris stopped pacing, stunned. His mind, racing as it was, locked its brakes and squealed to a stop.
Aunt Olivia was getting older.
She was forgetting.
He was sure of it. That’s what he’d known before she had him institutionalized.
And then it all came back, like a dam crumbling, washing over him, threatening to sweep him along with the flow.
She wasn’t just grooming him to take over.
She was growing old and losing her memory, and she wanted to make sure that he was around to remember her.
That way, she could arrest the downward spiral of her life, because her powers were becoming ineffectual on herself. When he was around, he could prop up her failing memory, make sure she never aged, never changed.
And she could continue her grip on the town.
For some reason, he had broken with her, refused to participate. And she had used her power on him, but his own power had kept him from being forgotten altogether, just as hers protected her. Instead, she drove him to the brink of insanity, and the results were two years on drugs and electricity.
That’s why she was keeping him around, to see if he remembered all this. To see if it was possible to try to convince him to help her again.
Ruefully, in the jumble of memories that returned, Chris knew that he’d done the same thing to Emma and her family. Held them by the force of his memory, whether they wanted to or not. It was plain from this morning’s scene that they did not want it.
But he did know that as part of realizing what Aunt Olivia was up to, he’d let his wife and her family go. It was both the hardest and the easiest decision he’d ever made, and the pain it had brought settled on him now as if he’d only come to this conclusion a moment ago.
He turned to look at his wife, seeing the affection in her face, and realized how much he owed her.
“I remember now, almost all of it,” he whispered to her. “I know she was using me. That she’s forgetting things, and wants me to do the same thing to her that she’s doing to this town. If you have any doubts about it, I still won’t do it. It’s wrong.
“No, more than that,” he reconsidered. “It’s evil. And, I’ve got to stop it.”
“Chris, she can hurt you. She’s done that already,” Emma said, standing and hugging him again.
“I know what she’s capable of.” He returned her hug, this time with the full force of his memories. “There’s just one thing that bothers me now. And it’s something I think I knew before she sent me away.
“If I was helping her while I was here, who was doing it before me?”
* * *
The sky was dark when he left the Archibald house, its face frowning on him as he walked down the tree-lined street. It was hard having to part from Emma again. But he had to confront his aunt, had to find out what she was up to. And that meant having to stay away from Emma and her family. They were bargaining chips now, something his aunt could use against him. He would bring no more harm
to this family than he already had.
The sunset had come in a heartbeat, the temperature dropping precipitously. He wore only a denim jacket he’d taken from one of the employee lockers at the institution.
Halfway to Olivia’s house, the moon rose, three-quarters full, and bathed his path in silver-white light. Leaves blown in the wind became shards of delicate glass drifting in its pearly light.
In the distance, he saw blue smoke curl above the trees, floating up from the thick chimney that perched atop the roof of his aunt’s house. He quickened his pace, and was clumping up the porch steps and letting himself in seconds later.
The house was warm and smelled of fireplaces. He stripped off his denim jacket and hung it on one of the staircase finials, then headed up to his room.
The second floor was dark and quiet, and he saw no one. His door was ajar, and a thin wedge of light pushed into the hallway from the room. Slowly, he opened the door, poked his head inside.
As he did so, a shape launched from the partially lit room. It caught him in his midsection, tumbled him back into the corridor, knocked his breath away.
His hands worked blindly to catch whatever it was, a shock of thick hair, a smooth expanse of squirming skin.
“Gotcha!” it yelled, wrestling free from him and climbing to its feet.
Chris gulped in a breath, looked up.
It was the small boy Chris had seen in bed this morning. No more than eight or ten years old.
“You’re getting old,” the boy laughed.
Chris pulled himself up to a sitting position against a door on the other side of the hall, returning the smile as good-naturedly as possible.
“Yeah, too old for that game. I had a cousin who used to do that to me all the time when I was...”
He stopped in mid-sentence as his eyes became accustomed to the low light and he got a good look at the boy.
“Who are you?” he whispered, his mouth suddenly dry.
“Aunt Olivia said you might not remember,” the boy said, kicking out roughly at one of Chris’s feet. “You really don’t know, huh?”
“Oh my God…Ben?”
“See, how could you forget me?” he said, slightly petulant.
Dumbfounded at the implications of this, Chris stumbled to his knees, crawled over to where the boy stood, his head hung low.
“Ben?”
He reached out, lifted the boy’s face. It was wet, and he realized Ben was trying to contain his sobs. They caught in his chest, hitched in his lungs.
Without warning, he grabbed hold of Chris, and bear-hugged him.
For the second time today, Chris was bathed in tears. Ben clung to him, twitching and gasping at the force of his sobs.
Chris patted him on the back, returned his embrace.
This boy was ten years old when I was five, he thought. That would make him a 34-year-old man today.
But right here, right now, Ben was only ten years old.
Because that’s the way Aunt Olivia chose to remember him.
Chris found himself tearing up at that thought, at all that had been denied Ben by his aunt’s cruel, hateful memory. He was locked in a life of toy cars and bicycles and playing army. It might have been fine for a while, but he hadn’t known adolescence and all of its joys and heartaches. Hadn’t known girls or women, and their strange and frustrating thrills.
“You said you’d come back if anything happened,” Ben sniffed, pulling away and roughly wiping his eyes. “Said you’d come back to get me. Is that why you’re back?”
Chris, too, wiped his eyes, pulled himself up. Ben’s words brought back a vow he’d made just before Olivia had him committed.
If she does anything to me, if she sends me away somewhere, you’ve got to promise to be good and do whatever she says. Wherever I am, I’ll come back to get you, and we’ll move away from here. Far away. I’ll take you somewhere you can grow up.
“Yeah,” he said. “We’re gonna get out of here. But, you have to wait until everything’s ready.”
Ben looked at him, his face flushed and doubtful.
“You don’t remember everything, do you?”
“I think if one more person asks me that, I’ll scream,” Chris laughed. “But, no, I don’t. Aunt Olivia doesn’t know that yet, and I don’t want her to, either. Understand?”
“Sure. I was just getting ready to head down for dinner. It’s only Uncle Joe, Aunt Olivia, you and me tonight,” Ben sniffed, still containing his hitching breath.
“Well, then, let’s go.”
“Okay. I have something to show you, but after dinner. Last one there’s a butt head,” he yelled, stomping on Chris’s foot and taking off down the stairs.
Collecting his wits, Chris hobbled after him, tripping him in the library and getting to the dining room first.
* * *
Dinner was a restrained, uncomfortable affair, with Uncle Joe trying gamely to start conversations that evaporated after a minute or two. Eventually, he gave in to the silence, too. Aunt Olivia said little throughout the meal, and Chris followed her lead, fearful of revealing too much of what he didn’t know.
Before coffee and dessert, Chris excused himself from the table, followed closely by Ben. When they reached the landing at the bottom of the back staircase, Chris stopped and whispered to Ben, “What is it you have to show me?”
“A note.”
“From who?”
“From you, dork,” he answered, dashing up the steps with more energy than Chris could muster after such a big dinner. He followed slowly, hearing wisps of quietly animated conversation between Aunt Olivia and Uncle Joe drift to his ears. Nothing was intelligible, but he got the distinct impression it was about him, and that his aunt was admonishing his uncle about something.
Cresting the stairs, he heard another sound down the hall, from his bedroom. It was the sound of things being thrown around, of something big being moved. As he came through the doorway, Ben was crouched behind a huge, old oak dresser, prying up one of the floorboards.
It popped from its place with a hollow, wooden knock. He reached in and fished around for a second, pulling out a small envelope.
Ben stood, sweaty and covered with dust. He took two steps forward and held the envelope out to Chris with a shaking hand.
Chris touched it, and immediately remembered what it contained, and it chilled him to his marrow. He ripped it open anyway.
Confronted by the cold reality of his own handwriting, echoing his memories, he fell back onto the small bed.
He finally remembered everything.
And he knew what he had to do.
“We need to find a photo of Uncle Frank.”
* * *
Although the big house was relatively empty, Chris was still nervous about creeping around in it with Ben like two thieves. Aunt Olivia was, no doubt, reading in the library. Uncle Joe would be playing a solitary game in the basement billiards room.
And everyone else? Chris was not really sure just where everyone else was, and this tugged nervously at the back of his mind. Some four or five whole families lived in this house or on the adjacent property, but he’d seen no one except Aunt Olivia, Uncle Joe and Ben.
He didn’t have a good feeling about the fate of the others.
Despite their best efforts, floorboards creaked and furniture shifted as they prowled through the house. Aunt Olivia’s room was on the first floor, unfortunately very near the library. Ben and Chris skulked down the narrow hallway that led past that room.
They were close enough for Chris to hear the crackling fire, the turning pages of the book she was reading. The library’s pocket doors were pulled almost shut, and Chris and Ben crept past the slim opening, crouched and holding their breaths, pausing to look into the room. Fortunately, much of their stealth was unnecessary. The old woman sat in a wingback chair facing the fire. All that was visible was the crown of her grey head.
Each taking a quiet breath, they proceeded down the hall, coming to a door t
hat Ben indicated, with a tug on Chris’s sleeve, led to Aunt Olivia’s room. It swung open easily, without a squeak. The room inside was bathed in dim pools of golden light, cast from two enormous hurricane lamps that sat on nightstands on either side of a great canopy bed, turned down in preparation of Aunt Olivia’s imminent slumber.
The furniture was not just old, but ancient by American standards. The pieces had to be at least as old as Aunt Olivia. Dark wood paneling, mahogany or cherry, Chris could not be sure in the light, dominated the large room; an imposing dresser, a dressing table and a mirror, a tall wardrobe. All of it with the dull burnish of old, well-cared-for wood.
Chris moved inside, looking around, quickly trying to take it all in and decide where she might keep a photo of her dead husband.
The wardrobe had been one of Uncle Frank’s pieces of furniture, Chris remembered, so he opened it first. Dozens of outfits hung there, all men’s clothing. She hadn’t gotten rid of these in more than twenty years.
He dug through these frantically, the room beginning to make him uncomfortable. It was as if her bedroom were a microcosm of the town. It felt as if nothing had changed in here since the 1800s.
But that was ludicrous. Aunt Olivia was old, but she couldn’t be that old.
Could she?
Finding nothing in the wardrobe, he pushed everything back inside, closed the doors carefully. He spun around, momentarily concerned by the look of fear on Ben’s face, and caught sight of a desk tucked away in a dark corner.
As he approached it, he could see that it was a closed roll-top desk with a vaguely unused air about it. With a nervous glance back toward the door, he quietly unrolled the cover.
Everything inside was neat and tidy and dust-free, leading Chris to believe that someone used the desk regularly. Drawer after drawer held papers or files or stacks of meaningless magazine covers dating all the way back to 1867.
When he drew open the bottom file drawer, though, something nearly popped out at him. It was a small silver picture frame, heavily tarnished. But, the photo behind the glass was turned backward, its yellowed side showing.
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