The Weight of Memory Read online

  I hear a door slam somewhere down the hallway, and it scares me worse than a gunshot. I close the notebook gently and slide it back into the vacant spot on the shelf.

  Was It You?

  I race over and switch off the storage room’s light, feeling embarrassed that I’m snooping around and hoping Tom doesn’t come into the room. The door is still open about an inch, and a blade of light from the hallway shines in. I look through the crack and into the hall. As far as I can tell, it’s empty. It must have been Tom, right? Who else would be wandering through the house at this hour?

  I take a deep breath.

  I open the door, walk through, and close it behind me.

  I exhale.

  As I’m about to climb the stairs, I hear it again—another door slams. I look quickly over my shoulder and see a shadow vanish around the corner at the far end of the hall, the direction I came from. I pause, consider going on my way, following the stairs up to wherever they might lead, but my curiosity gets the better of me, and I jog the long length of the hallway and follow whoever raced around the corner.

  After a moment, I slow to a walk and realize I’m somehow in a part of the house I haven’t been in before. When did I take a different turn? This hall seems narrower than the hallways in the rest of the house, and it’s lit by lights that come out of the side of the wall like upturned hands. There is another hall to the left, and I decide to take it. But there’s no sign of the person who slammed the door.

  “Hello?” I venture. My voice vanishes in the empty spaces. Nothing returns.

  I keep going, and soon I have to go up a flight of stairs. I come to a short hall with two doors. I consider opening them but am scared of what I might find. The photo is stiff in my pocket. I go up another flight of stairs, and I find myself staring at a plain door with a dull brass knob. I open it.

  I’m in the kitchen.

  How did I get so turned around?

  The transition from the basement hallway, which felt almost otherworldly in its stillness, to the very normal kitchen disorients me, and I stand there with my hand on the knob for an extra moment, the stairway door still open. What is this strange house? How long until I know my way around? How many secrets can one residence hold?

  “Hi, Paul,” Tom says in a steady voice, approaching from what I assume is the direction of his bedroom, over by the garage. The kitchen and dining room and large open living room seem to be the axis around which the rest of the house rotates.

  “Hey, Tom,” I say, closing the door, my heart still pounding. The photo feels conspicuous in my pocket.

  “Looking around?” he asks in a disinterested voice, glancing at the door as he walks past and stops at the kitchen counter.

  I nod. “Yeah. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all. Find anything interesting?”

  “This place is huge,” I can’t help blurting out.

  Something like a dim smile flashes across his face. I still find something about him uncomfortable, but I can’t pinpoint it. Is it because he’s so different from the teenager I was friends with? But if that’s the case, should I hold it against him? Don’t we all change significantly as the years go by?

  There’s something else, though, something besides age. He’s so staid, so emotionless most of the time. Except when it comes to you—he seems to have a genuine interest in you.

  Am I jealous?

  The knot throbs on the side of my head. Now that I’m here, I’m finding it difficult to imagine giving you over to him. But it would be difficult no matter who it was. Giving you to someone else is unimaginable.

  I miss him. The old Tom. I miss his big laughter and his teasing, his audacious claims and the way he ruled the room. This Tom seems a deflated version of my best friend, and I want that guy back.

  “Yes, I suppose it is rather large,” he says. “Shirley always thought the place was too big.”

  He pours two mugs of coffee and hands one to me. “Let’s drink it out on the deck,” he says, and it’s not a question, not really.

  He moves steadily away, and I take a sip of the hot coffee, scalding my tongue. I glance at the doorway that leads down the hall that eventually winds its way to your room. I should check on you once more before I retire for the night, and I think of veering off, going to your room. But I don’t. I follow Tom through the unlit living room, through the glass doors, and outside onto the deck.

  I’m surprised by how warm it is tonight at the edge of the water. I sit down in the same spot as the night before.

  Out of nowhere, I think of the doctor who gave me the diagnosis. What is she doing tonight—sitting on a porch with her husband, enjoying one of the last warm nights of fall? Perhaps drinking a glass of wine? I wonder if she thinks of me at all, if my diagnosis weighs on her, or if, when she closes the file folder, she forgets about me. I hope she thinks of me. I’m not sure why. It’s not romantic, this desire of mine to be thought of by her. I think I want to know that someone else who knows about my diagnosis is swimming these dark waters beside me.

  Tom doesn’t turn on the large floodlights—there is only a small porch light shining from the back door of the house. We sit among the slanting shadows, steam rising from my cup of coffee. Above us, the stars are bright, and the forest sounds very alive.

  “Pearl is . . .” he begins.

  “Yes?”

  “She’s . . . quite the little girl.”

  “That she is,” I reply. A breeze picks up and swirls a few leaves around on the deck.

  “When we got back tonight, she asked me if I would teach her to swim.”

  “Really?” I ask.

  He nods, laughs to himself. “She said she needed to swim the entire lake, that she wanted to soak it all in.”

  “That sounds like her.”

  “Is that okay with you?” Tom asks.

  “If you teach her to swim? Or if she swims the entire lake?” We both chuckle. “I don’t mind.”

  I picture the two of you in the water, Tom holding you afloat, and an ache soaks into me. But this is why I came, isn’t it? This is why I dragged you across the country, over the bridge, all the way into Nysa—to find you a new home, a new guardian. I reach up in the shadows and feel the lump. It feels almost like another lump is starting to grow right beside it, the size of a pea. The wind is knocked out of me.

  Oh no.

  “How was your evening?” Tom asks, interrupting my thoughts, sipping from his mug.

  I pause. “Interesting.”

  “Interesting?”

  I’m not sure how much to tell him. How comfortable will he be with me sneaking around his house, exploring the rooms he never showed to you and me? To be honest, it wasn’t completely deliberate—most of it was simply the result of me getting lost. I decide to start there.

  “I actually got lost in the house. It’s quite a place you have.”

  He chuckles. “You should start leaving a trail of bread crumbs.”

  Bats swoop down into the low light, flickering here and there, barely missing our heads. I decide to tell him.

  “Tom, it was completely by accident, but I found myself in the long hallway in the basement. I happened to open one of the doors, trying to find my way back, and I ended up in the room with all the photo albums.”

  “I should’ve taken you down there before. There are some great old photos in those boxes. Shirley was quite the historian of our friendship. And then, afterwards, of the life that she and I created together.”

  “Pretty amazing, actually,” I admit. “I felt like I was back there.”

  A melancholy silence drifts down between us, and I know that Tom and I are thinking through the same old memories. It’s like we’re sharing a mind, sifting through those two summers at the cabin, reliving all of it.

  “Was it difficult, not having children?” I ask, peering cautiously at him to see if I’ve caused any offense.

  “For a time.”

  I wait for more of an explanation, but he l
ifts his coffee mug and takes another sip. I could only be imagining it, but I think I see a flash of regret drive his gaze lower. It takes less than a second to pass.

  “You know . . .” I continue, because I can’t stop talking. My curiosity is too great. “You know, I found the album of the summer Mary was pregnant, right before John was born.”

  “Seems like a dream,” Tom replies.

  “It does.”

  “A dream,” he repeats.

  “Shirley was quite the photographer,” I say in a steady voice. “She really knew how to capture all of us. In fact, there were so few photos of her.”

  “I always told her she needed to be in more pictures herself.”

  “Yeah.” I pause. “But I also looked in the album of photos taken earlier that summer.”

  Tom doesn’t say anything. I can’t see his face in the shadows.

  “There were some really beautiful photos of Mary. Absolutely stunning.”

  “That was Mary,” he says, which seems like a strange thing to say, but I keep going anyway.

  “They were so different, those photographs. I don’t think Shirley could have taken them. Completely different style.”

  The cicadas and crickets are chirping, and the lake seems to have grown rough, perhaps from the wind that sweeps through the trees. Tiny waves lap against the dock. The trees whisper.

  “Did you take those photos, Tom? The ones of Mary?”

  He doesn’t reply. In the shadows, he turns his face away from me toward the trees, away from the house. I keep waiting for him to say something, to admit that he had spent those months looking at Mary in such an intimate way.

  Unexpectedly, he stands, not making a sound. At first I think he’s going to walk right past me and disappear into his endless house, but as he passes me he stops. He stands there for what feels like a long time, and his hand comes down to rest on my shoulder. When he speaks, his voice is tired and soft.

  “If you want, send Pearl out to the dock early tomorrow morning. Around eight. I’ll teach her to swim. If she’d like.”

  I think about you jumping off the dock, vanishing into the cobalt water.

  I nod, not saying anything. When his hand lifts from my shoulder, the movement is so subtle that at first I don’t realize he’s taken it away. It’s only when I hear the back door of the house open and close that I register the absence of his touch.

  I sit on the deck for a long time.

  So, it was Tom who took those photos, Tom who captured Mary in that loving gaze. He saw something of her in those photos that I never saw. Everything about that time of my life—everything about Tom and Mary and Shirley—it all shifts in my mind. Questions knock on the door of my brain, but I don’t want to let them in.

  We have a certain way of recalling the past. Our mind relives those old days in particular ways, travels comfortable paths, but do we ever really know the whole story?

  I stand up and dump my coffee over the deck. I need to check on you.

  A Wedding and a Ring

  Maybe I got the suit and tie from Tom. He would have had to sneak home to retrieve it, out from under the nose of his parents. The pants and coat were navy blue, almost black, and the tie was a yellow paisley. This was, what, thirty years before you came into this wild world?

  I was waiting with Mary in the back of Tom’s car on that hot day. My skin flamed up, and sweat gathered around the tight shirt collar and under my arms and trickled down the small of my back. Mary was in a plain white dress that made her look like a fairy or a princess. Her dark hair was braided, and the two braids formed a crown around the top of her head. When she smiled at me, when she reached over and took my hand, my heart soared.

  “Are you sure you want to marry me?” I asked her, so earnest it hurt. “If you want to wait, we can wait.”

  “I’m so sure,” she said, leaning over and putting her head on my shoulder as we waited for Tom and Shirley to come out. I could see her forehead and the small rivulets of sweat welling up.

  It was the end of that first summer we’d spent at the cabin, a month after I proposed with the twist-tie ring, and Mary and I had persuaded Tom and Shirley to drive us across the state line to get married. In Nysa, you could only get married before you turned eighteen with your parents’ permission. I knew my parents wouldn’t give me permission, and Mary knew her mom would be depressed and her dad would kill us. Or at least he’d kill me. We had to drive about four hours, into the next state, where the legal age was seventeen.

  Tom and Shirley took some convincing.

  “Where are you going to live?” Tom had asked.

  “We’ll live apart until next summer, when we’ll both be eighteen and finish school,” I said. “After that, we’ll tell our parents and get a house, or run away if we have to.”

  “So why not wait to get married until next summer? What’s the point in being married if you can’t live together?”

  “Don’t you want a proper wedding?” Shirley asked Mary with concern in her eyes.

  “I don’t care about that. We couldn’t pay for it anyway, not now, not next summer. That won’t change. I’m ready, Shirley,” she insisted.

  “You don’t have to take us,” I finally said. “But we’re going, one way or another. We’re getting married. We’ll walk there if we have to.” I searched Mary’s face for some reassurance that we weren’t crazy, that what we were doing was right. Her smile was enough.

  Happiness found its way into Shirley’s eyes as she came around to the idea.

  “Married. My two friends. Kind of hard to believe,” she said, smiling shyly and wrapping Mary in a hug.

  But Tom didn’t change his mind. I could never figure it out at the time, why he had such a problem with it. Eventually, it took Shirley talking him into it, and I had overheard them arguing about it the night before.

  But all of that was in the past. In that moment, in the heat of the car, in the glaring sun and the August air heavy with humidity, it was only Mary and me. I dug in my pocket for a tissue and dabbed the sweat from Mary’s forehead. She sighed.

  Shirley came out, sat in the passenger seat with a nervous smile. When Tom climbed into the car, he didn’t even give us a backward glance.

  “All set?” That was all he said.

  “Yep,” I said. “Me and the missus are ready.”

  Shirley laughed at that, and Mary smiled. Tom grunted, whipped the car around, and sped down the drive.

  “Tom!” Shirley protested. “Slow down!”

  It was a long trip, and I dozed off and on along the way. I dreamed of swimming in the lake, Mary off in the distance. The water felt amazing, but a sense of frustration grew and grew as the various dreams progressed and I couldn’t find my way to her. In the end, my limbs were exhausted, and I gave in to the water, sinking into its coolness.

  I woke with a start, gasped for breath. Tom’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror, but neither of us said anything. Shirley’s head rested against her door, bobbing with each bump in the highway. At some point during the drive Mary had leaned away from me, against her own window, sound asleep.

  In that moment I had an overwhelming sense of panic. It was like I suddenly recognized how young we were—only seventeen! A stirring anxiety itched deep inside of me, a place I couldn’t reach. My hands were the hands of a kid. I became strangely aware of how large Tom’s suit was on me, how ill-fitting his shoes. The disappointment of my parents, should they find out that I had eloped, threatened to take my breath away.

  I put my hands down to my sides, stared out through the glass. When I was about to tell Tom in a quiet voice that he should stop the car and turn around, I felt Mary’s cool fingers intertwine with mine. She didn’t look at me. I don’t even know if she was awake. But her hand held lightly on to mine, and all of my doubts melted.

  The town where we went to get married was called Deen, and it was much farther across the state line than we thought. We drove along the main street, where there were only a few s
hops: a pizza place, an antique store, an auto parts shop. Behind the line of stores, I could see a baseball field full of kids playing. Through the open car window, I could hear the ping of the ball on the bat, the shouting of the children, the protests about whether or not the batter was safe. I felt so old, watching that scene.

  Tom muttered something about being lost.

  “Why don’t you ask those kids?” Shirley said hesitantly, and Tom must have been suitably frustrated because he actually pulled to the side of the road where a boy and a girl walked slowly along the shoulder.

  “Hey, kid,” Tom shouted through his open window. “What’s your name?”

  The boy was skinny, his baseball glove much too large for him. The girl’s blonde hair was long and swirled around in the summer breeze. She pushed it aside and stared at us.

  “Sam,” the boy said.

  “I’m Abra,” the girl added, in a tone full of confidence and daring that said, Who are you and what do you want?

  “Well, Sam and Abra, we’re late for a wedding and looking for a little chapel.” Tom wiped the sweat from his forehead. He said the name of the preacher and asked if they knew where the chapel was.

  The boy thought about it for a minute. “I think if you keep going the way you’re going, it’s outside of town, on the right.”

  Tom pulled away.

  “Thank you!” Shirley shouted.

  “This town gives me the creeps,” Tom muttered.

  The boy was right—the chapel was beyond the town. Actually, it was a double-wide trailer where a small church congregation met, and the pastor was a larger-than-life Pentecostal preacher wearing a gray suit and black shoes that shone like the deepest reaches of space. He was balding ungracefully, the way someone does when they refuse to admit it and no one around them has the heart to break the news. Long, wispy brown hair was gathered from every corner of his skull and combed up and over the dome. During the entire ceremony, which didn’t last more than ten minutes, he kept reaching up with a yellow handkerchief and wiping the sweat from his face and forehead.

  When he asked for the rings, Tom reached in his pocket and handed me the green twist tie. Mary giggled as I slid it on her finger.