The Weight of Memory Read online

  We rarely slept in the bedrooms—they were mostly for storing our clothes for the summer and where we’d go to change, and they were normally too hot at night. More often than not, we slept on top of sleeping bags on the dock, or on the couch or floor of the living room.

  I had not been in the girls’ bedroom very often, but when Mary let out another cry, I could tell that’s where she was.

  “Paul!” she screamed, and I barged through the door, not sure what I would find. An attacker? A wild animal? Something worse? At first I didn’t find anything—only a dark room, the shadowy outline of two single beds, a window that didn’t let in any light.

  “Mary?” I asked.

  A whimpering made its way across the floor. Mary had tucked herself in the far corner of the room, behind one of the beds, and I moved quickly through the darkness, banging my knee on the bedpost, crawling over the mattress, reaching for her.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Mary, what’s going on?”

  “There was a woman outside the window,” she whispered, and her eyes flashed in the dark. “The same woman I saw in the field at your house last fall.”

  A chill raced along my spine. “Mary, we’re on the second floor.”

  Her eyes remained wide open.

  “How did you know it was her?” I asked.

  She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the wall before whispering, “Paul, I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

  “Tom!” I shouted, but he was already bursting into the room and turning on the light. “Tom,” I said again, “some strange woman is outside the house. Mary saw her through the window.”

  Shirley’s mouth dropped open in horror, and she came across the room and tucked herself in the corner with Mary.

  “Stay here,” I told them both. Tom and I took the steps down from the loft two at a time, turned the corner, and went out through the front door into the warm summer night.

  One might think that being in the middle of nowhere meant silence, but it seemed like those lakeside summer nights were the noisiest places on earth. Crickets in the undergrowth and cicadas in the trees and other insects I couldn’t identify whirred and chirped and sang. Bullfrogs along the lake’s bank were bellowing, giving their loud assent. Occasionally, bats would swoop through the light, snagging gnats and moths and mosquitoes. When the breeze gathered and moved among the leaves, there was the sound of a thousand trees, their leaves green and fluid, rustling.

  We did a quick walk around the house, and the night was still warm. We were both wiping the sweat from our eyes. When we didn’t see anyone, we continued up the lane, into the deepest shadows under the trees, night within night. I tried to walk quietly, but every so often my bare foot caught a rock in the driveway and sent it diving into the leafy underbrush.

  “What do you think?” Tom asked.

  “It’s dark. We should have brought a flashlight,” I replied.

  “I mean about Mary,” he continued.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you think she really saw someone?”

  We kept walking, and I moved ahead, farther into the dark, leaving Tom behind.

  What’s Real?

  You don’t come out of the room all afternoon. Tom makes us dinner, some kind of fish and green beans served on beautiful pottery plates that each have a small blue square filled with a red infinity symbol. I guess the diner leftovers are being saved for another time. The house feels empty as the three of us eat in the large dining room that opens up into an even larger living room. Expansive glass doors on the other side of the living room go out onto the deck and face the lake. I can’t imagine how lonely Tom must feel in this place, by himself, with Shirley recently passed.

  You are quiet. I find the silence unnerving.

  “Enjoying your room?” I ask you, and you nod, your mouth full.

  You swallow and say, “The knives are scary.”

  I recall a glass case of various knives hanging on the wall down the hallway from your room.

  “I can take them down if you’d like,” Tom says, tilting his head.

  “No, it’s okay,” you say.

  “Which book did you start reading?” I ask, changing the subject.

  You chew vigorously and swallow hard before speaking. “I read a little from both of the George MacDonald books.”

  “Ah, yes,” Tom says with a smile.

  “I love Mossy,” you say.

  “And what did you think of the flying fish that they ate?”

  “A little weird.”

  “Yes, yes,” Tom agrees, his voice trailing off. “I always thought that was rather strange.”

  The rest of the meal passes in relative silence. We learn that Tom was a psychiatrist, now retired. He and Shirley never moved away from Nysa. They never had any children. He started a successful practice in a neighboring state, opened five locations, and some years ago sold to a large hospital conglomerate. Thus the mansion. The car.

  What that doesn’t explain to me is why, after all these years, he and Shirley remained here, in Nysa, so far from everything.

  I notice three or four hallways that all branch off from the living room, as well as a stairway that leads downstairs from the kitchen. What possible use could Tom and Shirley have had for a house like this?

  “May I be excused?” you ask.

  “Where are you off to?” I ask.

  “My room.” You don’t wait for an answer to your question, leaving Tom and I sitting over empty plates. I stand up and carry yours and mine to the sink, watching you skitter off into the expansive house, down the hall that leads to your room. It is nice being under the same roof while simultaneously giving you some space to explore, to be on your own.

  “I guess we won’t see much of her,” I say as I set the plates in the kitchen and go back out to clear the rest of the table. Tom stands and joins me, and we go back and forth, table to kitchen, loading the dishwasher, neither of us saying anything. I smell coffee. Five minutes later, Tom hands me a mug.

  “Come outside,” he says.

  I follow him out through the double doors that lead from the dining room onto a wide deck that stretches along the entire back of the house. On one side is an outdoor kitchen complete with a grill, a sink, and a stone island with a refrigerator in it. In the middle are a few benches facing east, over the water. It is a perfect deck for parties, for entertaining, but Tom doesn’t strike me as the entertaining kind, not anymore. And even if he was, who from Nysa would he invite to his house? Junior? Jenny the witch queen from the diner?

  One section of the deck has two comfortable chairs with a small table in between. Tom motions for me to sit in one of them. I do, staring into the forest off to the side of the house. The sky is dark in the east. Tom walks soundlessly along the edge of the deck, lighting small torches that flicker and somehow make the night outside of the light seem that much darker.

  He sits in the chair beside mine, and for a long time we say nothing. I am very aware of my own breathing. I can sense the lost presence of Mary and Shirley in a tangible way.

  “How long since Shirley passed?” I ask.

  “One year,” Tom says, and I can’t tell by his response if this is something he wants to talk about.

  Again, an apology forms in my mind alongside this growing sense that I somehow abandoned Tom and Shirley, that things would have worked out differently if I had stayed. But I keep it to myself.

  “It’s forty years since Mary,” I say, unable to add a verb onto the end of that sentence. Died? Disappeared? Left?

  “Yes, I know,” Tom says. “And how is John?”

  I take a breath. “Not well. Haven’t heard from him in a long time. Four years now, give or take.” Saying it, I feel like a complete failure. Here we sit in Tom’s mansion, with its accompanying garage that holds his expensive car. Meanwhile, back at home, I live in a falling-down row house raising my granddaughter because I failed at parenting the first time around. Even my own body, with this kno
t growing out of my head, is somehow evidence of my failure.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Addicted to drugs.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says again. “Happens a lot these days. I see it all the time.”

  “I have Pearl. Every day I ask myself how John can keep himself away from her. She’s the most beautiful thing in my life.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to spoil her. I’ve known people dependent on substances who leave their lives because they think they’ll destroy the people they love.” He moves in his seat and the wood creaks under him. The night is quiet around us. “She’s a fascinating girl,” he says.

  “You don’t know the half.”

  He smiles. “Is that so?”

  “Tom,” I begin hesitantly. “Do you remember the woman Mary saw in the field that night? The one she kept seeing every so often after that?”

  Tom doesn’t answer.

  “Or did I make that all up in my head?” I ask, adding a dry chuckle.

  “No, no,” he says. “I remember. Of course I do.”

  “I think Pearl’s been seeing her.”

  “Who?”

  “The same woman. I think Pearl’s been seeing her. You can’t pass that kind of specific thing down through your DNA, can you? She keeps talking about this silver-haired woman who’s been helping her with various things. I’m used to her making stuff up—she’s met with more than her fair share of fairies, gnomes, elves, and autonomous shadows. She has an extraordinary imagination. But this one, this ‘kind, silver-haired woman,’ as she refers to her, has me a bit unsettled.”

  Tom stands and walks to the deck rails, staring out over the water we can no longer see in the darkness. The red-orange of the torches flickers on his back, dancing his shadow around us in many different forms and angles.

  “You must have mentioned it to Pearl at some point,” Tom says in what I imagine is his diagnosis voice. “That’s the only explanation. Pearl heard the story, and now she’s taken it on as her own.”

  I shake my head. “I’ve never talked about that with anyone. Not a single soul.”

  I wish I was having this conversation with Tom inside, where I could read his face. As it is, his back faces me, and the darkness keeps me from noticing even a slump in his shoulders or an uncomfortable shifting of his weight.

  “Shirley saw the woman in the weeks before she died,” he says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “As she was dying, she said she was seeing the woman Mary had always talked about, the one from the field the first night we met.” He paused. “The woman we all knew was imaginary.”

  “Maybe you knew that. I was never so sure.”

  He clears his throat but doesn’t say anything. I hear a splash in the lake where it edges up against the woods.

  “How’d Shirley know it was her?”

  “I asked the same. She said she just knew.”

  I reach up and touch the knot on my head tenderly with my thumb. “Is it a psychological thing?” I ask. “I mean, Pearl hasn’t had a father. He’s been gone for a long time. Her mother died when she was a baby.”

  “She has you.”

  “You know what I mean. Could be she’s wishing for a parent?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “But you don’t think so? In your professional opinion?”

  “I’d have to spend some time with her to get a better feel for what’s going on.”

  “The woman isn’t real,” I say. “Is she?”

  “That depends on what you mean by ‘real.’” He is still facing the water out beyond the trees. “If you mean something that everyone else sees, I would guess not, or someone else would have seen this woman by now. But if you mean something that actually occurs to someone in their own mind, then yes. I would say what Shirley explained to me was very real to her.”

  “Real to her? Isn’t that the definition of insanity?”

  He turns away from the darkness and returns to his chair, giving me a slight smile. “Perhaps. Do you think Pearl is insane?”

  “It’s something I’ve thought about at times.” I pause, gather myself, take a breath. “Maybe not insane. Not quite that. But ever since she was little, she’s been very different. Brilliant in some ways. In other ways . . . just different. For a few years, she would run off almost every day. I tried meeting her outside her school so that she couldn’t leave without me, but she’d find some other exit. So I started coming to her room at the end of the day, with permission from the principal, and she’d have already gone to the bathroom or for a drink or slipped out the window. Out the window, Tom. Eventually, I let her do it. I let her run off. In the city.” I shake my head.

  “She sounds like a clever girl,” Tom said.

  I look down at the chair I’m sitting in. The cushions are burnt orange. I look up. There are stars in the sky, far away, their light coming at us from a thousand years ago.

  “You’ve done well for yourself here, Tom. I guess I should have been a psychiatrist too.”

  He laughs. It’s the first laugh I’ve heard from him, and it takes me back forty years. That is the Tom I knew, that Tom in the midst of laughter. Tears rise to my eyes, because at the sound of that laugh I am reminded of everything he has lost with Shirley’s death. I think about her laugh, the way she would come up behind him and give him a bear hug, refusing to let him escape, and the way she’d peek around him and smile at me from that safe spot, wink, and laugh again.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss, Tom,” I say.

  “Grief is hard and good. It is the disease and the medicine, all at once.”

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve grieved Mary,” I admit. “I moved on long ago. Here I am.”

  “You must throw yourself in. There is no other way,” he says in a far-off voice.

  “What?” I ask, confused.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, and when he shakes his head it’s like he’s coming back from somewhere far away. “It’s a line from one of the books your granddaughter is reading.”

  “I think I’d like to go over to the cabin tomorrow,” I say, and something in my chest flutters uncomfortably.

  “We could take the boat over,” Tom suggests.

  “I’m sure Pearl would enjoy that. She’s fascinated by the water.”

  I wish I hadn’t said that, because I know that now we’re both thinking about the afternoon when Mary left us.

  “The man we saw at the diner said some strange things,” I venture.

  “Gerald?”

  “Yeah, that’s his name.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That Nysa went through a strange time right after I left, in 1979. He said something about drownings, that we should stay away from the lake. Junior said the same thing out at the gas station.”

  Tom nods hesitantly. “Yes. Soon after you left, it did seem inexplicable what was going on. A few teenagers vanished. Another one was found in the lake. Drowned. And another. And after that, an elderly couple. Because they came so soon after Mary, when everyone was still going out to search the lake for her, it started to feel like there was something ominous going on.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “I think teenagers run away sometimes. We did, for a summer. I think accidents happen. There were a lot of people at the lake who had never spent much time around water, especially during the search for Mary, so it seemed expected that people who weren’t strong swimmers might fall in. I think Gerald Mills is one of the superstitious few who would like there to be a deeper story, some other reason for the failing of this small town.”

  “Nysa is as empty as it looks?”

  Tom nods. “It’s dying, Paul. Twenty years from now, I don’t know if there will be anyone left. Those disappearances were the beginning. They frightened people off. Since then, all the young people have left—it’s a town of geezers. When we’re all dead? I don’t know who will remain.”

  So I am correct. My hope is crus
hed. What will I do with Pearl?

  “I have a breakfast meeting in the morning,” Tom says, an obvious attempt at changing the subject. “My weekly catch-up with some friends in town. You’re welcome to join us.”

  “That’s okay,” I say. “I think I’ll take a slow morning here.”

  Tom stands up. “I should be home by ten. We can have lunch out on the boat.”

  I stand too. “Thanks, Tom.” We both know I’m thanking him for more than a boat ride, for more than a promised lunch on the lake.

  He nods, and the shadows dance around us, congealing as he makes his way from lantern to lantern, snuffing them out. I follow him inside.

  It takes me a little while to get to your room—I get a bit lost, but then I see it. Your door is open slightly, and I press on it, peek inside. The only light on is an antique lamp with a green glass shade and a golden pull string. You are lying on the carpet at the far end of the room, almost under the table, sleeping on your side with a book close to your face. I walk across the room, and the carpet feels like thick moss under my feet. I can understand how you fell asleep on that luxurious floor.

  The book beside you is the third one, the one you hadn’t yet read, and I lift it carefully and place it on the small table. I lift you even more carefully and carry you across the room. You seem both light and heavy, both floating and weighing me down. Your hair is loose around your face, and your eyes don’t open, not even when I half drop you onto the mattress. I take off your socks and adjust the pillow under your head, and you cuddle deeper into it. I pull the thick comforter up over your shoulders, take one last look around the room, decide not to close the blinds, and walk out.

  The Question

  When Tom and I came back from our search for the woman who had been peering in the second-floor window, I found Mary asleep on the sofa in the living room, her head in Shirley’s lap. Shirley watched Tom climb the stairs, cross the loft, and vanish into the boys’ room.

  “What’s up with him?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  I stared down at Mary’s dark hair, spread as it was on Shirley’s lap. It was hypnotic, the movement Shirley’s fingers made through the dark strands, the way she started close to the scalp and moved ever so smoothly outward.