The Memory Thief

by Rachel Keener

  “But you’re one of the most successful bachelors in town. You could have any other woman. A modern, beautiful woman. So I have to wonder, why on earth do you want my Hannah?”

  He shook his head as he turned to go. “How could you not know?” he asked. “She’s been yours all this time. How could you ever wonder?”

  Wonder. It was the same word that came to him, whenever he thought of Hannah. After the other women in his life that had come and gone, Hannah seemed like a new creature altogether. Like a beautiful secret waiting to be revealed. She made him believe that he would never grow bored of her. That he could never fully understand her. He hadn’t so much as seen her naked ankle, and yet when he looked at her before that potter’s wheel, whispering gentle words to her clay, she took his breath. This thought of her, the mystery of her, interrupted his thoughts, his work, his peace. He only had to close his eyes to see her and be filled with wonder.

  He had touched her, only once. They were walking toward the front door to sit on the porch. She reached for the door-knob and so did he. He let his hand fall over hers. She jumped, pulled her hand back as though he hurt her.

  “Sorry,” he said quickly, as he pushed the door open.

  He was old enough, perceptive enough, to see the challenge of loving her. And to enjoy it. He kept his distance, and whenever doubt crept upon him he remembered the plate. She had painted to order for him. He was the first. He was the only.

  “Come to dinner with me,” he said one evening. “In town. My mother could join us. She thinks you’re quite the celebrity.”

  “No,” Hannah said. “I have too many orders to work on. Let’s just eat with the guests. Shari is making lasagna tonight.”

  “But we always eat here. Besides, there’s a new gallery opening about twenty minutes away. A painter. I thought you’d enjoy—”

  Hannah shook her head. “Please don’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to leave this mountaintop. I don’t want dinner out. I don’t want to see a new gallery. And I don’t want to meet your mother.”

  “What are we, Hannah?” he asked calmly. “I keep coming here. I can’t make myself stay away, but I don’t know if you want me to come or not. I have no idea what we are supposed to be.”

  “That’s what you like best,” Hannah said lowly. “Remember? Nobody can solve it. That’s what you told my father you liked.”

  “About your art.”

  Hannah sighed. “There’s no difference between me and my art.”

  “That’s fine. I think I’ve made it clear that I love your art.”

  Hannah turned to walk away, the bridge within her swaying wildly. “You need to leave now,” she said coolly. She went to her workroom, but the clay wouldn’t do what she told it to. She threw it to the floor and went to her bedroom.

  Mother came to her. “What’s wrong?”

  “He wants to take me off the mountain.”

  “Of course he does.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not safe. Besides, I can’t meet his mother. She’ll see right through me.”

  “Nonsense. You’re surrounded by guests and workers, and none of them have guessed.”

  “But her son likes me, so she’ll study me closely.”

  “Is that all? Just likes?”

  Hannah shook her head. “He thinks he loves me. But he doesn’t know me.”

  “And how do you feel?”

  “Like a liar. Sometimes I want to tell him. Just so he’ll be warned and know to escape.”

  “There’s no reason to tell him. But even if you did, what happened was so long ago. You were young, and you made the same mistake that many young people do. The only difference is you got caught. I doubt your past would matter to Daniel nearly as much as you think.”

  “Then I would hate him.”

  “Why would you say such a thing?”

  “Because it matters, Mother. It matters.”

  “Why can’t you just allow yourself to be happy? This man is my promise to you come true. Maybe we can all finally have peace together.”

  “Oh no, not together,” Hannah whispered bitterly, as her voice broke. “Somewhere there’s a baby.”

  “Shhhh, not a baby. Somewhere there’s a girl that is happy. Somewhere there’s a girl that is loved. She’s growing up and moving forward. She’s having a wonderful life. Why can’t you do the same? Go to him at his office tomorrow. Tell Daniel you were wrong. Tell him you want to meet his mother. Show him that you are willing to be loved.”

  “Once,” Hannah whispered. “Back when I used to think that Sam and I would be together forever, I wrote him a letter and told him I wanted him to meet Father. He wrote me back, ‘Relax, Yank.’ ”

  Mother laughed dryly. “Daniel is no Sam.”

  “You wouldn’t know.”

  “Oh, but daughter, I do.”

  Hannah sat up in bed. Mother nodded slowly. “Yes, I met him once. He was so defensive. ‘I’m just a kid,’ he kept saying. Like that excused him from everything. He never once looked me in the eye.”

  “But why did you go to him? Because Father suggested we marry?”

  “Because we needed to find you. When you didn’t return after a week like you were supposed to, Father went to your school demanding answers. He explained to them how you were attending the senior college tour. He wanted to know what the delay was, and when you would return. When they told him there was no such trip, he refused to believe it. Nobody could convince him that you had lied. When a secretary suggested he contact the police and file a runaway report, he jumped across the desk at her screaming, ‘My daughter is not a runaway!’ The only way they could get him to leave was to call the police on him.”

  “I wasn’t a runaway,” Hannah said lowly. “I meant to return, until I found out…”

  Mother shrugged her shoulders. “Doesn’t matter what you meant, Hannah; we imagined the worst. We knew, just knew, that someone had lured you with a fake trip. We called the police and told them about the college trip that you had believed you were going on. The trip that someone had set up and tricked you into so that they could lure you away from any protection. To do Lord knows what to you. They believed us at first. They searched records at the bus station. They ran your picture in the paper under the headline Have You Seen This Girl? They interviewed dozens of kids at your school. They focused on a certain group. I never knew of them until those police interviews. Kids that chased you and Bethie to the buses every day. Called you Polyester Pollys?”

  Hannah nodded.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “You should’ve known,” Hannah said.

  “We knew there was teasing. But that you and Bethie had to hide in the janitor’s closet to escape them? That they threw cups of Kool-Aid at you? When I read those reports, I started to wonder. Maybe you really were a runaway. And then the police brought me copies of the bus schedules. Told me to review them to see if there were any locations that we had family or friends that you might go to. There was only one thing that caught my eye. A tour of the Atlantic coast. Beginning in South Carolina and working its way back up through North Carolina and Virginia. It left the same day you had. It all made sense then. You were happier on James Island than I ever remembered. With your job and that green bike.”

  “So how did you find him?”

  “We went straight to that little place you used to work. The steampot place. I found your old boss and asked her if she had seen you. She told me how you had stayed with her when there was too much company at our home on the marsh. She said she thought I knew, thought I had sent you. That’s when it all started to unravel. She was hesitant to talk to me. I could tell she didn’t like me one bit. Didn’t respect me, or our ways.”

  “She just sees things differently.”

  “I begged her as a mother to help me find you. I told her I knew you were in danger. I knew it. And begged for any way that she could help me find
you. She wrote something down on a piece of paper, and then looked me in the eye. ‘Your daughter is a good girl,’ she said. ‘But she’s a baby yet, and when you find her, for once in your life, you treat that child like the baby she is. You hold her. You comfort her. She done got her heart broke for the first time. For once in your life, be the momma she needs.’ ”

  Mother covered her mouth with her hands and shook her head. “I went crazy that day. I could’ve been arrested, too. I took the paper from her hand and then I slapped her as hard as I could. Father had to drag me away, and she followed, yelling, ‘Lady, I forgive you already. ’Cause there’s a hurt comin’ your way that’s a world darker than any hurt you just gave me.’ ”

  “A prophet,” Hannah said.

  “Perhaps. But she loved you. That’s why she agreed to help you later. She hated me, blamed me, but she loved you.”

  “What did her paper say?”

  “Go see Sam,” Mother whispered. “A part of me knew exactly what trouble you were in. Such awful words for a mother to read. Go see Sam.” Mother shook her head and laughed softly. “Of course your father was still expecting the best. Cora gave him Sam’s mailing address, and the whole drive to Columbia he spoke of how maybe you had gotten another job. Maybe Sam was your new employer. Maybe you were just out in search of new adventures, tired of your academic routine. But then we found Sam. So young and already with that unmistakable mark of rebellion in his eyes. It was clear to us both then, Sam was something altogether different than a green bike or a new job. Altogether more dangerous.”

  “He wasn’t so different from me, Mother. It took us both to make that choice.”

  Mother leaned closer, stared hard into Hannah’s eyes. “I know about the promise. Such lies he told you.”

  Hannah shook her head. “He never promised me anything.”

  “A house. He promised you a house, and with a house comes a life. That’s why you ran to it. That big rotting house. That place you lived in, filthy and alone, like an animal, for weeks. Father could never understand it, but I know why you ran there. It was all you had left, wasn’t it? After Sam had taken everything else.”

  “He was just a boy,” Hannah whispered. “And he wasn’t raised to believe like I was. I should have been stronger. You’d spent so many years teaching me to be stronger. But when it really mattered, I wasn’t. I was the same as him. I was as weak as him.”

  “No child, you are not the same. You loved him. And he didn’t even want to help us find you. We told him you could be hurt. We told him you could be dying. But he kept twisting his hands and denying that he even knew you. Father threatened to call in the police, to name him as a suspect in a missing-person case. That’s when Sam started spilling it all, about boats and deep water and Cora’s motel. None of it helped, though. None of it returned you to us. Until I interrupted and asked the right question. ‘What did you promise her?’ He shook his head and swore he’d never even spoke the word marry. ‘But you still promised something, didn’t you?’ I demanded. He nodded. ‘Just to fix up a house. An old abandoned house.’ ”

  “Did he take you there?” Hannah asked. “Did he see me, the way I was?”

  Mother shook her head. “I shoved a pen and paper in his hands and made him write directions. He doesn’t even know that we found you. He never bothered to check. We never spoke again.”

  Hannah looked at Mother’s face, and marveled at how easily stone can break. There were deep lines across her forehead, lines around her narrowed eyes and her tightly set mouth. “My, how you hate him.”

  Mother closed her eyes and bowed her head. She sighed. “He hurt you. But we were the ones punished.”

  “I’m sorry,” Hannah whispered.

  “If you really are,” Mother said, “then you’ll stop the punishment. Don’t pass it on to Daniel. Let the hurt Sam gave you end with us. Discover the difference between Sam and Daniel, between what you once thought love was and what it could be, what it is.”

  Hannah lay back against her pillow. Mother leaned and turned off the lamp by her bed. She stood to leave the room.

  “He called me pretty,” Hannah said.

  “What?”

  “He gave me more than the promise of the house. He called me pretty, too. And it was a gift that I’d always wanted. I was used to boys laughing at me, chasing me with scissors and trying to cut my hair. Sam was different. He was the only person in my entire life to ever call me pretty. It doesn’t matter so much now. But for some reason, at sixteen, it meant everything.”

  Mother breathed deeply and turned her back to Hannah as she stepped toward the door. She paused with her hand on the doorknob. “He had that much right, I suppose. You are pretty,” she said, the words catching in her throat and sounding more like a choke than love.

  Hannah closed her eyes and felt the war inside her. Between the pressure to move forward and the desire to savor guilt, and remember the one perfect moment she’d had long ago.

  Everything swirled together, like paint on dry clay.

  VII

  Tucked away inside a sleeping hotel, Hannah spent the night comparing Sam and Daniel. She paid all the attention to detail that any true artist would, and began in the most obvious place. With what she saw.

  Sam was an island boy, if only for the summer. His skin was browned, his hair was streaked gold by the sun. He was bare-chested and barefoot as much as not. His body very lean, built of long, thin lines. He wore a hemp-rope necklace. Turquoise beads were strung across it. He was always smiling, showing his perfect rows of teeth. His eyes, she couldn’t remember the color. But she remembered their message. He was happy. Easily happy. And she thought him very beautiful.

  Daniel was raised on the mountain. He wore hiking boots, even with his work clothes. Unless it was a court day, khakis and polos in the summer or cords and thermals in the winter were as dressed up as he got. His face wasn’t browned like Sam’s. But by the time Hannah saw him in the evenings, the shadow of his beard was apparent. His body was grown up—his shoulders squared, his arms muscular. There was a thickness to his build that a boy would never have. He shaved his dark hair close to the scalp. A no-frills kind of cut that required no grooming. But it accented the lines of his face. The swift rise of his cheekbones. The brooding that hovered over his brow. He didn’t smile easily, like Sam. He saved his smiles and gave them away sparingly. Hannah never thought to call him beautiful. She called him striking. She called him intimidating. She called him strong.

  Hannah reached her hand up to her head, felt the rope of hair beneath her. She thought of all the things she had felt with Sam. Such beauty, such fear, mixed together. Like the feel of his hand reaching out that first time, grabbing a handful of her hair. The feel of the deep water pulling away the polyester from her skin for the very first time. The feel of running and falling through an old cotton field on her way to the mansion that would always belong to them. The feel of his hand reaching out, pulling her to him underneath that old live oak. The feel of an electric fence. The pain. The numb. The rejoicing.

  She hadn’t felt with Daniel. Other than the one time he reached for the doorknob when she had. Their hands had touched, and his had lingered for just a moment over hers before she pulled away in fright. Everything else was a mystery. She had known him now for much longer than she had ever known Sam. And yet, she knew Sam’s touch but could only wonder about Daniel’s. What his hands might feel like running through her hair. What that shadowy beard might feel like as he pressed his mouth to hers.

  Hannah smiled in the dark, remembering what Daniel had said: I’ve made it clear that I love your art. In another time, in another state, love was something to hide. Love was a sloppy heart drawn with a Sharpie across her hand. Love was a fistful of Spanish moss tucked underneath her pillow, crushed into dusty bits as she waited for a letter. Love was pledging herself, all of herself, if only Sam would want her just a little bit. Love was a Greyhound bus ticket, a wannabe teenage bride. Love was a broken heart. A war
cry learned one awful night on the dunes of Folly Beach.

  Hannah closed her eyes and dared to face the memory of who really pulled her close under a tree on a dead plantation. He was seventeen years old. Just a boy playing dress-up at his favorite playground. A motherless little boy, playing Confederate hero.

  Downstairs the workers were beginning their morning routines. Hannah heard them and went to her wheel. She worked with fresh energy, one hand dipping in water as the other applied a steady pressure. She was making something new, only she wasn’t sure what it was yet. She didn’t talk to this piece, never told it to be a plate or a vase. She only felt its rhythm, perfectly centered within her hands, as she guided it into an unknown form.

  She let the wheel stop and continued to pull out the clay. Until before her sat a sloppy rectangle of sorts, with a well in the center, and low sloped sides. Her mother would have been pleased. Another antique-like dough tray. Perfect for apples and tea bags.

  When it was ready, she filled its empty center with paint, nearly every color she had or could mix to create. Only when she stared at the finished piece did she finally speak to it. She gave it the message, the one it was supposed to carry in its center. She spoke of love. No longer satisfied with sloppy hearts, war cries, and fistfuls of moss, she gave love a new name.

  “Love is like mud. Only as strong as the shape you give it. Love is like paint. It can color over all the empty places.” She whispered lowly, “If you drop it, Love will break you.”

  When the piece was dry, she placed it in a box. Then she went and dressed herself, found her best yellow blouse. She unbound her hair from its tight braid. Waves, perfect like the ocean, spilled down her back.

  The hotel driver dropped her off at Daniel’s office downtown. And as she walked into the lobby of his office, she couldn’t avoid her fear. What if he didn’t want her there? Around his friends and his staff and his clients? What if she was wrong, and he was just like Sam? Wanted to keep their relationship hidden high on the mountain, a new form of deep water?