The Weight of Memory Read online

  But what had she seen? I was young and careless. I never asked, though now, years later, I could probably guess.

  “So where are we going?” I asked Tom again.

  “It’s a surprise, old boy!” he shouted, pressing on the accelerator once more.

  Gone Again

  I wake up and the hotel room is still dark, but there is a glow around the heavy curtains, so I know I slept later than I wanted to. I sit up in the darkness, rub my eyes, clear my throat. Instinctively, as I have done every morning for the last three months or so, I reach up and gently touch the knot on my head. It feels harder this morning. It feels like it has taken root.

  There have been times when the knot makes me feel almost claustrophobic, desperate to rid myself of it. When it was smaller, I considered shaving it off with a razor—anything to flatten that side of my head back to normal. Recently, as it grew, I considered shooting it off.

  Yes, I know.

  But you have always kept me here.

  Thinking of you, I look over at your bed. Strange, because in the darkness your bed appears empty, but that must be because of the way the dim light flattens out the blankets. You must be hidden in there somewhere. I reach over and turn on the light. “Pearl?”

  But you’re not there. Your map sits on the desk, partly unrolled. I put my feet down on the rough carpet, stand, walk quickly to the bathroom. You’re not there either. I open the door to our room wide enough so that I can stick my head out and look down the long hall. I don’t see you anywhere.

  “Pearl,” I say again, this time with exasperation. You don’t make anything easy.

  When I pull back into the room, something is different. The darkness feels heavy, loaded with something that makes me walk quickly to the windows and pull back the curtains. The light erupts, pushing back the shadows. But still, the room makes me feel like a foreigner, like I’m staying somewhere I’m not welcome.

  Your shoes are by the bed, side by side. I sweep the blankets away, wondering if it’s possible I overlooked you, if the bed is so soft that you are still there, sunken into the mattress. But no. The bed is empty.

  I throw on some clothes, slip on my shoes, and get ready to leave the room. But a wave of nausea hits so heavy that I bend over inside the door and feel my whole body tense. I dash back into the bathroom, bend over the toilet, and throw up, over and over again, without stopping.

  Finally, I wipe my mouth with a small hand towel and throw it in the trash. I stare into the toilet, because there it is, a small thread of ruby-red blood among the vomit, and other threads of black. My breath is taken away with how long I might have. One less day than I had yesterday. One day closer to the end of my anytime to three months.

  I clean up and go out in search of you, feeling unsteady. The long hallway is quiet and still, which seems strange for this hour of the morning. Shouldn’t people be up and around? Shouldn’t parents be herding children to the continental breakfast or businesspeople be moving efficiently on the cheap carpet, their roller bags leaving small tracks behind them?

  The emptiness of the hallway is unnerving.

  I turn the corner, and at first all I notice is the empty lobby. There isn’t even anyone at the reception desk, so I pause. I reach up and touch the knot on my head. Decidedly bigger.

  I see the old man we met the night before sitting at a table for two, and you across from him, listening intently while eating a piece of toast. I walk over.

  “Pearl,” I say in a firm voice.

  You seem surprised, like I was the last person on earth you expected to find there that morning in that hotel, in that small dining area, surrounded by the smell of bacon and biscuits and waffles. “Hi, Grampy,” you say, and there is nothing defensive in your voice, nothing ill at ease. You clearly have no clue that I am ready to give you a stern talking-to.

  The old man turns and looks at me dismissively, only nodding the briefest of acknowledgments.

  “Where have you been?” I ask you.

  “What?”

  “Where have you been?” I ask again, quieter this time, slower. “When I woke up and you weren’t there, I was worried.”

  “I thought we had agreed to meet here,” you say. “For breakfast. At seven a.m.”

  “Yes, but you’re eleven years old. You shouldn’t walk around on your own in a strange place.”

  The old man turns and gives me a look that clearly communicates, What’s wrong with you, mister?

  I shake my head. I grab a chair from a neighboring table and pull it over, but the old man stands, gathers his things.

  “You two go ahead,” he says, his morning voice scratchy. “I should be getting on.”

  I don’t say anything, not even when you get up, walk around the table, and give him a hug, the kind where you wrap yourself close and hold on for an extra moment. Tears gather in the man’s eyes. He clears his throat, pries himself away, and walks out the front door.

  “Pearl,” I begin, but to be honest, I don’t know what to say to you. These kinds of things—you disappearing or running off or leaving for hours at a time—have been going on for so long that I’ve given up on reforming you in any way. So I change direction. “How was breakfast?”

  You smile as you sit down. “He’s seen the woman too. The one helping me with my map,” you say, focusing on your toast while you talk. “That’s why he’s afraid.”

  “The woman?” I ask.

  You nod.

  “The one you’ve been seeing at school? And in the building in the alley?”

  You nod again. “The one who helped me with the map, the one who needs my help,” you say again, insinuating that I am clearly not operating on all brain cells. “But I told him not to be afraid. There’s really nothing to be afraid of.”

  I think of the woman Mary started seeing, first on that Halloween night in the field, then over and over again after that. But I don’t know what to say to you. Could something like that be genetic? Can visions pass from one generation to the next, like black eyes or arthritis?

  I go get a cup of coffee and sit back down at the table.

  “Are you excited to go home?” you ask me, light in your eyes.

  I give a wry grin. “I don’t know,” I say, and it’s true. The closer we get to my old hometown, the more questions I have about why I thought this was the thing to do, why I thought this was a good idea. I think again about what the old man said. Drownings. Ghost town.

  “Well,” you say, “I can’t wait.”

  I’m glad. But your visions of the woman have unsettled me.

  I can’t help but wonder if this time she has come for me.

  No Trespassing

  Tom’s driving slowed uncharacteristically, and I glanced at him to see what was going on. In the back, Mary had fallen asleep, her head on Shirley’s lap, and Shirley’s head nodded as she drifted off. It was only thirty minutes or so after we had left Mary’s house.

  “I know it’s here somewhere,” Tom mumbled to himself, sitting up straight in the driver’s seat, his eyes scanning the woods on either side of the back road we were on.

  “What’s here?” I asked.

  But he refused to say. When I was ready to make some kind of threatening statement about boxing his ears if he didn’t tell me what was going on, his eyes lit up, and he fell back into his seat with relief.

  “There it is,” he said. And somehow the simple proclamation woke Mary and Shirley. Both of them stuck their heads into the area between the front seats. I could smell Mary’s shampoo, and I closed my eyes, took it in. I thought I might collapse under the weight of my infatuation.

  “There’s what?” Shirley asked, and that’s when I saw the break in the trees and the metal livestock gate blocking the way, and on it a sign: “No Trespassing.”

  There was enough length of driveway between the shoulder and the gate so that Tom could pull off the winding back road, get out, and walk over to the chain that held the gate closed. He wiggled his eyebrows up and down at us
, the way he always did when he knew something spectacular that we weren’t yet privileged enough to know, and proceeded to untangle the chain from the gate.

  “What is he doing?” Mary asked.

  “Just Tom being Tom.” Shirley sighed. She leaned her head out through her window. “Tom, what in the world are you doing? You’re going to get us all arrested.”

  But Tom kept at it until the length of chain was pulled clear of the gate. There wasn’t even a lock. He walked the gate open and propped a rock against it, then came back. He hopped into his seat energetically.

  “This is it,” he said, and the sound of victory was in his voice.

  He pulled far enough forward so that he had room to close the gate behind us, and I watched through the back window as he wrapped the chain all around the gate and the post. He ran back to the car, and I thought he was going to drive us farther down the lane, but instead he reached in and fished around under his seat, eventually pulling out a large padlock with a key sticking out of it. He removed the key and held up the lock.

  “Just in case,” he said, grinning. He ran back and clicked the lock in place. No one could follow us, at least not in a vehicle. They could climb the gate easily enough, but when he attached that lock onto the chain, it felt like he was blocking out the entire world.

  I glanced at Mary—she was also watching Tom lock the gate—and I thought I caught a small glimpse of the anxiety she had shown at her house, as if Tom barring the way with a locked gate somehow wasn’t enough.

  He drove carefully down the rutted lane, and the trees pressed in close on each side. We drove for about five minutes, the car heaving this way and that, the occasional branch reaching out and screeching along the length of the car. We were all quiet—we knew that any question we asked would be answered with Tom’s cryptic, “You’ll see,” or maybe we didn’t want him to tell us. We were holding our breath, wanting to discover this new and fabulous thing together.

  We came around the last corner and there was the lake, a flat slate gray under the light blue Saturday morning sky. Farther up the lane, perilously close to the water, rose a kind of cabin—two stories clad in dark wood with oversized windows and a long back porch that reached out over the gentle waves. I could see the dock from there too, a long, straight line into the water.

  “Wow,” Shirley said in a hushed voice.

  Mary stared at the house, her eyes bright.

  “Whose place is this?” I asked.

  Tom smiled, shrugged. “Ours, I guess.”

  “Thomas Avery!” Shirley exclaimed. “Have you lost your mind?”

  “Whoa!” Tom said, and his laugh made Shirley even more disgusted with him.

  “You can’t take over houses,” Shirley spat. “Not even if they’re abandoned. And in fabulous locations.”

  “Well, if you would listen once in a while, I’d have a chance to talk,” Tom said.

  Shirley’s eyes squinted as if she was trying to pierce through him with her gaze.

  Tom laughed again. “Geez, Shirls. This is my family’s place!”

  “No way!” I exclaimed.

  “No way,” Shirley said matter-of-factly, the voice of reason.

  “It is,” Tom replied, shrugging. “It is. My grandparents built it like fifty years ago. All their kids moved away from this crazy town—I guess they had more sense than us. All of them except my mom. And she hates the wilderness. And places without air-conditioning. My dad too. Their last idea of a relaxing weekend is coming out here and chopping wood and clearing the driveway and cleaning off the dock.”

  Shirley’s defenses seemed to be crumbling.

  “C’mon,” Tom said.

  Into Nysa

  The morning drive is long and slow and sleepy, and you drift in and out beside me in the passenger seat. Out of nowhere, the bridge to Nysa appears. I had lost track of where we were, my mind wandering through all of these long years, and then the bridge emerges, rising up above the tree line. It’s a lumpy old arc of metal and concrete, but I have to admit that seeing it brings a tear to these old eyes. I reach up and touch the knot. I look over at you. You have been sleeping for at least an hour.

  “Pearl,” I whisper almost reverently. “Pearl. Wake up. We’re almost at the bridge.”

  You yawn and stretch, your limbs unfurling like one of those fiddlehead ferns in time-lapse, and you rub your eyes. “Where are we?”

  “We’re nearly at the bridge that goes over to Nysa,” I say, and we drift off the exit and make a right onto the simple two-lane road that leads toward the bridge.

  The forest in those parts is dense and dark, so when we drive down the exit ramp and off the highway it is like we are submerging underwater. You, however, rise. You press your nose against the window, and I can see a mini caldera of steam form on the glass. We drive through the deep shadows, and sharp flashes of light fall through gaps in the trees. I put my window down a few inches, and I can smell the water. I feel suddenly like I’m home. It’s been forty years since I felt this way.

  We arrive at the bridge, begin driving up its long span, and the whole sky opens up. There is one lonely boat droning its way upriver, to the left and away from us, its hull smacking the water over and over. I have such a strong longing to be in that boat, to feel the spray, the sun, the almost violent up-and-down movement, being tossed, to close my eyes and smile at the expanse of the river.

  You turn downriver, looking to our right, your face open to every possibility offered to us by the wide world. We get to the top of the bridge and begin another descent, this one down onto this strange terrain, this Nysa. The forest that waits for us on the far side of the bridge is even more dense than what we’ve already driven through, if that’s possible, and far beyond those trees I can see the flat expanse of farmers’ fields, but I can’t yet see the small town. I can imagine it. I can see it how it used to be, forty years ago.

  Strangely enough, so far nothing has changed. Yes, the bridge is crumbling, the cement barriers missing chunks, the pavement cracked and pockmarked. I had prepared myself on the drive for developed land, perhaps mansions along the river with their own docks slicing the water and cell phone towers rising through the trees. But the woods are exactly as I remember them, the river the same, the sky as endless as it ever was. I can easily imagine that I am eighteen again.

  You retreat down into your seat so that you’re almost prone. You look surprised, taken aback.

  “Pearl, what is it?”

  You lift your head slowly and peek back through the passenger-side window, and it sounds like you might be crying.

  “Pearl,” I say again.

  You look at me, and now the disbelief, the amazement, is clear. When you talk, your words come in whispers.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” you ask.

  “Tell you what?”

  “It’s so sad here. So sad.”

  You turn, facing straight ahead, and I experience a flash of memory, the quickest vision. I was approaching the bridge again but driving the other way. Leaving. Your father was only a couple weeks old, and he was in a kind of bassinet wedged into the floor space in front of the passenger seat. That was in the days before car seats. He was crying, his voice raspy and dry. And I was driving as fast as I could.

  The trees had felt heavy, and they leaned in over us as we approached the bridge, but your father and I made it into the clear air, rising up onto the bridge. As we entered into that bright daylight, the sun streaming in, I rolled down my window and felt the warm breeze, smelled the fresh air. Immediately, your father stopped crying and fell asleep.

  In the rearview mirror I saw the forest churning, a green so dark it was nearly black, the shadows boiling up over the surface of the treetops. I felt an immense amount of relief that day, leaving Nysa with your father.

  As if we had barely escaped.

  We are across the bridge now, down among the trees, and I pull over onto the shoulder of the road, the trees so close you could roll down your window and
stroke the bark if you wanted. But you are still crouched in your seat, quivering now, whispering to yourself.

  “Pearl,” I whisper. “Pearl.” I reach over and hold on to your shoulder, and my touch seems to ground you somehow.

  You reach up and hold my hand in place, swallow hard, and nod, saying to me without words—reassuring me—that you can do this thing.

  “Pearl,” I say again, this time a little louder. “This place . . .”

  I look away from you, across the street, into the woods on the other side. Everything is still. I see a single leaf fall from one of the trees and spin, fluttering, all the way down until it rests on the road. Nothing else moves. There are no cars.

  “This is a good place,” I say, trying not to sound like I’m convincing myself. “It can be a lonely, dark place, yes. It can be sad. But there are good people here.” People who could take care of you, I want to say.

  “It’s okay,” you say, your voice trembling. “It’s okay, Grampy. I know.”

  “It’s kind of scary,” I admit. “But that’s probably because you grew up in the city. You’re not used to these wide-open spaces, not yet. Or all the trees—they can crowd in on you sometimes, if you’re not familiar with them. But you’ll get there. You’ll love it, Pearl. I know you will. You’ll be playing in these trees soon. And there are streams and fields and even a beach. I’ll take you there. You’ll see.”

  You nod again.

  “Pearl, what’s wrong?”

  But for the first time in a long time, you refuse to say. You shake your head, purse your lips. After I try to press you for information one more time, you shake your head in tiny, quick jerks. “It’s okay, Grampy. It’s okay.”

  I pull back onto the road and close my window, the silence between us like an extra passenger in the car. I know you well enough to know that you saw something you didn’t expect. This isn’t a surprise—you’ve been seeing things like that since you were a little girl.