The Weight of Memory Page 12

  “Will you sit here with her for a little bit?” she asked. “I’m so tired.” She yawned to prove her point, then smiled.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “We’ll be okay. I’ll make sure she gets to bed soon.”

  Shirley slid out from under Mary the way a mother eases herself from a child’s bed, and I took her place, Mary’s head now on my lap. I took her in, didn’t even notice Shirley making her own way to bed. All I could see was Mary.

  Have you ever examined someone so closely that you see their pores, the particular designs in their skin, the path of a single hair, the tiny wrinkles in their eyelids that make blinking possible, or the bundles of skin that form their lips? I watched Mary that way. What did she want out of life? What did she dream about? Who was this woman she kept seeing? I wished she would leave Mary alone. We had this whole future spread out in front of us, and it felt like this woman might be the only thing in the way.

  Mary’s eyes slid open, and it was in that moment that I knew something.

  There was a small twist tie from one of our bread bags. I took it and wrapped it around one of my fingers, making the most insignificant of rings.

  “Mary,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded, and her face was innocent, like a small child’s.

  “Do you want to talk about what you saw?”

  She shook her head this time.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay.” I stroked her hair, not the way I had seen Shirley doing it, like a comb, but smoothing it, pushing the small strands behind her ears. She closed her eyes, relaxed.

  “Mary?”

  She opened her eyes again.

  “I don’t ever want to leave you.”

  She smiled faintly.

  “I mean it,” I said. “I don’t ever want to leave you. When I heard you screaming, I knew I always wanted to be close enough to help. Close enough to come running.”

  Her eyes glazed over with tears, but none ran down her cheeks. “Oh, Paul,” she said, taking my hand.

  “I’m serious, Mary. I always want to be with you. Would you marry me?” I held up the small wire ring, and she giggled.

  “Paul!” she said, emotion in her voice, her eyes searching mine to see if I was serious.

  I met her gaze with such earnestness that she knew I meant it. I didn’t say anything else. She nodded eagerly. I slipped the ring on her ring finger.

  It was nearing the end of our first summer in the cabin, and we were both seventeen.

  The End of Me

  The smell of coffee lingers in the house, and besides that there is only silence. Tom left early to go meet with his friends, and in the massive emptiness of the house, I never heard him stir. I walk through the stillness. It feels so strange to be here, to be waking in a place that is not our home, and even more strange not to know how long we will stay or what the end will be. I should talk to Tom about that. I should tell him my diagnosis, go over how long he’s okay with us staying here.

  I reach up and touch the knot on my head, and it feels as though it has grown overnight. Tom, in his kindness, still has not asked about it, but I’m sure he has noticed it. How could he not? And even you still have not asked, which is a relief to me, because I don’t know how much to tell you, if anything. I feel weary, although I don’t know if it’s from the illness or from the long night or from yesterday’s drive. It could be anything, I suppose, though it is hard not to see the end of me in all these small changes.

  I walk the winding hallways in search of your room, and at first I can’t find it. I somehow end up on the second floor, in a room with large picture windows that face the lake. There is a large couch and a few plants in the room. Who waters the plants? Who cares for the home? Tom must have help, maybe a maid, some cleaners. I walk over to the large window and look out at the water. The far side of the lake isn’t visible, even from the second level, and a stiff autumn breeze rustles up narrow whitecaps all across the blue-green skin of the water.

  She Went Under

  Did I grab Shirley by the shoulders after passing John to her? Did I shout my questions at her, or did they come out in desperate whispers? Some memories are forever lost to us.

  “Mary? Where is Mary?”

  Shirley shook her head, tears falling, so I asked, “Where were you?”

  “By The Point,” she whispered.

  “Did she jump?”

  But Shirley was crying into Johnny’s neck, and his little arms were flailing.

  “Shirley,” I said again.

  “No, she didn’t jump. She . . . fell in.”

  Even in the chaos of that moment, I recognized the unnatural pause between “she” and “fell.”

  “Where is she?” I asked, feeling the edge of something frantic beating in my chest, throbbing its way up the veins in my throat.

  “We don’t know,” she sobbed. I could barely understand her. “We don’t know. She went under.”

  Maybe that’s how it went. I do know that I paddled as hard as I could, felt the entire lake alive under me. Soon I was skimming over it, my eyes on the horizon.

  “No, no, no,” I muttered with each stroke of the paddle, with each pull.

  The Point was where a rocky outcropping jutted out into the lake, a thirty-foot-high piece of granite that the lake could not wear away. There the lake was deep enough for someone to jump from the top, if they had the courage. I saw it long before I got there, that bony knob poking up out of the gray water. A cloud passed over the sun, and I could see its shadow move, turning the water from gray to green.

  “Mary, where are you?” I whispered, my arms aching. I was gasping for breath.

  That’s when I saw it: her kayak, all alone, drifting away from The Point, toward the middle of the lake.

  Desecrated

  I pull myself away from the view of the water. Why did I bring us back here, really? Was it to find you a new home, a new set of parents, a future? Or did I really return to Nysa to find out what happened to Mary? To find Mary? Was that what brought me here, this tumor and a desire for closure after all these years?

  We can never trust ourselves, never know our true motives. There is always something deeper at work, something unseen pulling us along to hidden ends. We paddle where we think we want to go, but all along it’s the hidden current that takes us.

  After more searching, more wrong turns, more empty rooms, I find myself finally in front of the door to your room. I feel like I should knock, which is a first, because at our house in the city I never felt the need to knock. In fact, I don’t know that you ever closed your door, and I start to feel a strange sense of foreboding. Why is your door closed? Did you close it? Are you hiding something?

  I don’t knock. I simply push the door open, and it swings in. There you sit on the floor in the middle of the room, on the rug. The beautiful red oriental rug that Tom had purchased to furnish this special room. My breath is taken from me because the rug is ruined, cut into pieces, and you hold a knife in your hand. What hasn’t been destroyed, which is most of it, is covered in muddy footprints.

  I can’t even say your name. I can’t speak. I am too shocked and disappointed, and anger simmers, begins to boil.

  You stand and run to me and fall into my arms, weeping. “Grampy, oh, Grampy,” you say.

  I’m still not sure what to say. Your name finally comes to me, and it contains all the questions I want to ask but don’t know where to begin. I stare at the rug. The word that comes to mind is desecrated.

  “Pearl?” I can barely speak, barely say your name. What have you done? And why?

  Through your sobs, you tell me a story. The words come fast at first, through hiccups and sobs and sniffles, but soon your voice steadies. You do not look at me, but I wish you would, because I feel like I would be able to check for the truth of the story in your eyes.

  The Carpet

  Grampy, the room was so quiet and dark, and I tried to close my eyes and go back to sleep, but someone whispered my name.
At first I thought you had come into the room, but the door was still closed. That’s when I knew the silver-haired woman was in the room with me, standing still in the corner. The woman from my school. She wore a kind of hooded coat, and the only reason I knew it was her was because the moon coming through the window lit up a few of her stray silver hairs. She asked me if I had finished the map. I said I had, and she sighed like it was the best news, like I had done something very important and she was happy instead of sad like she had been up until then. She asked if I would show it to her, so I reached down under my bed and brought it out, and when I turned she was right there. I hadn’t heard her coming across the room, and I jumped. The carpet makes footsteps so quiet. Her face was still in the shadows of her cloak.

  I handed her the map, and out of nowhere I felt this fear that she wouldn’t be pleased, that maybe my drawing was too much like a little kid’s or my words weren’t spelled right. But she nodded and drew a sharp knife from her pocket. It was one of the knives from Tom’s knife collection, the scariest-looking one in the case, the one with the black handle and the curving, smiling blade. She held that knife up to me in between two fingers so that she was barely touching it. I knew she wanted me to take it, but I was afraid of it.

  The blade flashed in the night and reflected the moonlight coming through the window. Sometimes I think the tall windows are more like doors than windows, and sometimes the light that comes through feels more like something I can grab on to.

  “Go ahead,” she said. At first I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to do with the knife, but I took it in my hand, and it was much, much lighter than I thought it would be. So light, like it might float away. I held it extra-special tight so it wouldn’t float, because I knew Tom wouldn’t be happy if we lost his knife.

  “How did you get this?” I asked. I hadn’t seen an easy way to open the glass case on the wall, but of course this woman is taller than most women I know and it was probably quite easy, so I felt stupid after I asked. But she didn’t make me feel stupid. She pretended I hadn’t said a thing.

  “The only thing your map is missing,” she said in a kind, quiet voice, “is the location of the door, and it’s a very important door, one we need to find together. I know it leads down into the ground, and I think it might be . . . under this carpet.”

  She knelt down on the floor of my room, right there on Tom’s red carpet, and drew a big rectangle with a long, pointy fingernail. I stared at her finger because I had never seen anything so long and thin, and I had never seen such white nails. And sharp. She drew the rectangle again, and I knew without her saying so that she wanted me to cut a hole in the carpet.

  Oh, Grampy, I didn’t want to. I didn’t even kneel down beside her at first, but I could tell she was very serious and very sure it was what I needed to do. I came down off the bed, and at first I tried to pull up the sides of the rug, to see if we could move it, but the rug is fastened to the floor somehow. I got on my knees beside her, and that’s when I noticed that she hadn’t taken off her shoes when she came in, and the rug was covered in muddy footprints ground into the redness.

  “Oh,” I said. “You didn’t take off your boots!” I was so sad about the mud on the carpet and so sad about how upset Tom would get when he saw.

  She smiled at me like that was the silliest thing she had ever heard. We were both on our knees on the floor, but her back was to the window so that the front of her was still in shadows, and even though we were close, I couldn’t see her face. I so badly wanted to see her face—I thought if I could, it would help me do what I needed to do. She leaned forward again and traced the same large shape in the red rug with her long fingernail.

  “You do it,” I whispered.

  She told me this was very important and that it would be a great help to you if I did it. To you, Grampy.

  “Someone took something from me a long time ago,” she said in a kind, faraway voice. “It means quite a lot to me. I’ve asked so many people to help, and no one has been able to bring this thing back to me. But I think you will. I think you’re the one.”

  Still, it was the fact that this might help you that made me do it. Oh, Grampy, I was so sad to do it, but I held the knife tight in my hands and slid the blade along the carpet. I expected it to be very tough, but the carpet almost melted under the sharpness of the knife, and it only took two trips around the rectangle before I could peel it away. It came back like a thick slab of skin, and a hardwood floor was underneath. I could see that by cutting through the beautiful rug I had also scratched the floor, and I had to catch my breath. I felt so horrible about what I had done.

  There was no door.

  The woman stared at the square, and I could tell she wasn’t sure why the door wasn’t there. She stood, took a few steps away, and chuckled to herself.

  “Of course,” she said in a quiet voice. She reached out one arm—it seemed a very long arm—and beckoned for me to come to her again. My feet were very heavy and I wanted to go back to sleep, but not because I was tired anymore. I wasn’t tired at all. I was scared. I thought cutting the rectangle out of the carpet was the hardest thing to do, but I could tell she wanted something else now, and it worried me.

  She knelt again and drew another rectangle, this one bigger than the first. That’s when I started feeling sick to my stomach because I knew how much the carpet meant to Tom, but the woman was depending on me, I could tell. I started to cry, Grampy, but quietly, because I didn’t want her to see. I thought that if I only had to cut out the first small rectangle, I could fix the rug so that no one would see. I didn’t know how, but I thought I could figure something out. But cutting out another piece? This was no good. I was ruining the rug for sure.

  But she told me again it was for you, that I would be doing it for you, and that it was very important. Her voice was so sincere and kind, so I cut again. This one was harder. I went around three times, four times, and each time I couldn’t quite find the same line, so the rug was sliced and the material started to fray and the edge was raw. This piece was not like the last one, cut nice and neat, but torn so that I would never be able to fix it. I’m so sorry. I cried and cried while I cut it.

  When we peeled and tore that piece away, there was nothing but hardwood, and the floor was even more ruined than the first time. I’m so sorry.

  She stood, and we did it over and over again, and each time the woman grew more and more frustrated and sad. After I cut the last piece and pulled back the carpet, only to see there was no door there either, she was gone.

  Gone.

  And there were no doors. No doors anywhere.

  I’m so sorry.

  The Boat

  Oh, Pearl.

  My anger subsides in light of your story, replaced by a sick feeling in my stomach at the state of the carpet and a deep, deep sadness at the realization that something is very wrong with you, with your mind. How could you do this? Why? What would bring you to this?

  But I don’t ask any of these questions out loud. I start gathering the scraps of carpet and piling them beside the bed. “Where will we go, Pearl?”

  “What?”

  “Where will we stay? Tom won’t let us stay here anymore, not after this.”

  “We could go home,” you say, and clearly that is where you want to be. “Do you believe me?”

  “Pearl,” I reply, not knowing what else to say.

  “Do you believe me?” you ask again.

  Morning light drifts down through the windows. “It doesn’t matter if I believe you, Pearl. This”—I open my arms, indicating the destruction—“this is what we have to deal with right now. What am I going to tell Tom? That you destroyed a room that was precious to him because a ‘kind woman’ told you to? That doesn’t sound very kind to me. Should I tell him that there’s a door in his floor, under this carpet, but apparently there isn’t?”

  I feel like shouting. I feel like crying. I feel like leaving. But I keep picking up strands of carpet, chunks of carpet, not ev
en knowing what to do with it all.

  I hear you whisper something, but I can’t hear the words.

  “What?” I ask in a sharp voice.

  “It does matter whether or not you believe me,” you whisper. “It’s all that matters.” You get down on your knees and, through your tears, begin to help me.

  After some time, I go into the kitchen and find a bucket, fill it with soap and hot water, and return to your room, settling in to clean the remaining scrap of rug. The worst of the dirt comes up, but even after I’ve cleaned it as best as I can, there is still a tan effect to it, a kind of tint of the lightest brown that covers everything. Scrubbing only made it worse. We try to piece the squares and rectangles of cut carpet back into their original spots, but as we stand there beside your bed and look over the massive rug, I sigh.

  It is completely ruined. There is nothing we can do.

  I walk back to the kitchen and dump the brown, soapy water down the sink. I stand there and watch it swirl around, listen to the sound the water makes as it vanishes. I rinse out the bucket and the sink and put it all back. I return to your room.

  You come out and stand in the hall. There are tears in your eyes.

  “Come,” I say. “Don’t worry.” I walk you into the bathroom and start a bath. “Sit in here for a little while. Relax for a minute. I’ll tell Tom when he comes back.”

  “But he’ll be so mad. He’ll ask us to leave.”

  I think about Tom. I think about Shirley and the room he created for her. I think about the cabin farther up the lake where the four of us stayed and The Point where Mary left us, and the life I lived in this small town seems a million years ago.

  “We’ll see,” I say, and I really have no idea if he will or not. He is so different from the Tom I knew as a teenager. No reaction would surprise me.