The Weight of Memory Page 8

  What’s surprising to me is that you don’t want to talk about it. You have always been eager to tell me about your latest imaginary encounter. You have always gone on and on about the things you see, the inexplicable friends, the fairies, the mythical creatures bounding along the skyline of our small city.

  The road turns in a sweeping motion to the left, and as I glance in the rearview mirror, the light from where we came down the bridge vanishes. All around us is nothing but the dark wood. In front of us, the road is worn and crumbling. There are no lines. I know the woods will give way any minute—soon we’ll be in farmland, out in the wide-open day. I hope you’ll be okay once we get into the light.

  I drive faster.

  No Cares in the World

  We’ll fix the place up,” Tom said in a convincing voice as we stood inside the front door, taking in the dust and the animal droppings and the cobwebs. But there was such unguarded optimism in his voice, such hope lifting his face, that the three of us couldn’t say otherwise. “All the inside needs is a good cleaning and a little paint. We can tear out the old carpet—it’s wood floors underneath. I checked it all out. It’ll be fun.”

  “A good cleaning?” Shirley asked skeptically.

  “You’ll see,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  “I bet it gets hot here during the day,” I said. The midday heat made it hard to breathe inside the house, although the open front door did let in some air.

  “Thus the lake,” Tom said, laughing. “And the nights are cool. We can sleep on the porch.”

  “I think it sounds wonderful,” Mary said almost breathlessly. “Can we stay here all summer?”

  Tom laughed again, and this time it was completely unreserved. “That’s the spirit, Mary.”

  “What’s the alibi?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” Shirley asked.

  “If we’re going to stay here all summer,” I said to Tom, “what do I tell my parents?”

  He shrugged. “School trip? You’re working at a summer camp in Connecticut? Me and you are heading out for the summer before our senior year?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So pick one they will go for, Paul! I’m telling my parents I’m taking a road trip—not exactly a lie. This is the chance of a lifetime. The four of us! No cares in the world!”

  You Should Turn Around

  The roads are all the same.

  I keep thinking this over and over, almost in disbelief.

  The roads are all the same.

  The same old curves, the same pin-straight stretches, the same farmers’ lanes (although some are overgrown now), the same winding streams and narrow, one-lane bridges that span them. There is the steep dip on South Creek Road and the nonsensical winding on Old Schoolhouse Lane. I laugh to myself. I could drive these roads all day. But it is noon now, and we need to find some lunch and a place to stay.

  Galen’s gas station is still here. I can hardly believe it. I pull into a parking space and sit there. You seem relieved.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  “I feel better now.”

  I’m not sure what to say to that, so I reminisce out loud. “This old gas station was here when I was a kid. Forty years ago. Used to be run by a man named Galen. He was so big he used the garage doors to come and go out of the gas station. He didn’t fit through the normal door.”

  I shake my head in wonder. This does take a man back.

  I catch some movement out of the corner of my eye, and I feel a chill race through my body. A very large man shuffles across the pavement.

  Galen?

  But as he gets closer I can see it’s not quite him. It couldn’t be him, anyway. This man is much too young, seems to be about my age. Galen would be in his eighties or nineties by now.

  He taps on the window and I roll it down. His eyes squint suspiciously. “Help you?” he asks. He wears a limp ball cap pulled down low, the shadow hiding his eyes.

  “Do you know Galen?” I ask.

  His squint deepens, grows shadows. “Who’s askin’?”

  “I’m Paul Elias. I’m from here. From Nysa. Grew up here, anyway.”

  “Paul,” he says, and it comes out in a deep croak. He stands up as straight as he can and pulls a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket. He slaps the small box four or five times against his meaty hands and twitches the pack so that one peeks out. A lighter emerges from his sagging pockets. He lights, inhales, and exhales my name.

  “Paullllll.” He scowls to himself before asking, “What year’d you graduate?”

  Smoke clouds out of every hole in his head like there is some inner fire.

  “Seventy-nine.”

  He shakes his head. “I was a year behind you. Can’t say I recall your face.”

  “Does Galen still own this place?”

  “Galen was my pop. Guess he still is, but he’s dead now. Has been for six years.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s life,” he says, and the squint returns. “Why’d you come back?”

  “This is my granddaughter.” I gesture over to you. “I wanted her to see the place where I grew up.”

  He grunts, seems to communicate that this is perhaps the dumbest thing he has ever heard.

  “Doesn’t seem like it’s changed much,” I say hesitantly. “The old town still the same?”

  “When did you leave Nysa?”

  “Right after graduation,” I say, not wanting to get into the details.

  “Summer of ’79?” he asks.

  I nod.

  “You really haven’t been back, have you?” he asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Some things happened back in the day . . .”

  “Things?”

  “Things,” he says, and that word is like a period, ending that conversation. “You need some gas?”

  “Sure,” I say, though we have half a tank. I turn the car back on and pull in front of the pump. I move to get out, but he has already shuffled over.

  “I gotcha,” he says, waving me back into my car. “I gotcha.”

  Galen’s son is pumping my gas. We probably went to school together, but I don’t remember him. Everything about this feels so odd. I think of the old man’s words from the hotel—it does feel like a ghost town. I realize I haven’t passed a single car since we came over the bridge.

  I hear the loud click of a full tank. He tells me the total.

  “You take cards?”

  His mouth scrunches up, twists, and he jerks his head back and to the side. “Inside,” he mumbles.

  I turn to tell you that I’m going in to pay and see you’ve fallen asleep. Across the street from the gas station is a field. There’s a house in the distance, though I can’t see the road that goes to it. A grove of trees wraps around the gas station on three sides. I decide to leave you. I lock the doors.

  Inside, he swipes my card four times before it works. When he hands me the receipt, he says something I don’t understand at first.

  “I’m sorry?” I say, signing the receipt.

  “This place isn’t no good no more,” he says in a nonchalant voice that doesn’t seem to go with the message.

  “I’m sorry?” I say again.

  He squints at me again. “Nysa,” he begins, but his words devolve into mutters. “You know, when we were kids, this was a good place to be. The town was hopping. Community. Stuff like that. The little fair that came around in the fall.”

  I smile and nod.

  “Not anymore. Stopped coming. Not enough people. And things happened out by the lake. Bad things. Around the time you left, and it hasn’t stopped since. Don’t go out there.”

  He stands there as if he’s waiting for something from me, but I already paid. Everything is so quiet. Through one of the back windows I can see a squirrel jumping from limb to limb and then climbing onto an old barrel. From there it scampers into the shadows.

  “You really should turn around, head out,” he says again. “I would if I
were you.”

  Our gazes meet, and there’s a sadness in his eyes, and regret.

  “I think we’ll check out the town,” I say hesitantly.

  “It’s all dead, Nysa. The whole island. Nothing’s left.” He clears his throat.

  I decide to pretend he never gave me this advice. “We need a place to stay. Anything downtown?”

  “Downtown?” he asks in a husky voice, taking out his pack of cigarettes and going through the same routine as before. “Downtown?” Now he’s laughing through the smoke.

  “No motels?”

  “None suitable for a kid, ’specially not a little girl,” he says.

  “What about the old Highway Inn?”

  “Like I said.”

  “So there’s nothing?” I ask, skeptical. It’s a long drive back over the bridge, south on the highway. The last hotel we passed was a good hour away.

  But even more discouraging is that I am beginning to doubt my entire premise. I had hoped, perhaps unreasonably, that Nysa had grown into a certain quaintness, that the gentrification I railed about in the city might have positively impacted our small town, our small island even. I thought mansions would line the lakefront. All I’m seeing so far is a crumbling place, a place left behind by the rest of the world, and it gives me an aching sense of loss.

  What if there is nothing here for you?

  I shake it off. I’m making this judgment based on Galen’s son and what he’s telling me from a gas station outside of town. I rediscover my optimism.

  “Thanks anyway,” I say, turning to go. I stop. “I didn’t get your name.”

  “Junior,” he says. “Just Junior.”

  On the way to the car, I panic. What if you ran while I was inside? Where would I even begin to search?

  But there you are, still asleep, your hair pushed flat against the glass.

  I climb in and turn the car toward town.

  When Everything Started Happening

  The two-lane road widens into three as we enter town, the middle being a turning lane, and you are staring out the passenger-side window again, your fingers on the ledge, your nose against the glass. An old Chevy pickup passes us, going in the opposite direction, out into the countryside. The driver appears to be in his sixties, white tufts of hair slanting out from under a green baseball cap. He stares straight ahead, doesn’t even make eye contact with me as our cars pass.

  Driving through town feels like an out-of-body experience. Everything is arranged precisely as I had left it forty years ago. On the right is the tire store and the small grocery and the in-town gas station that is Junior’s only competition. The Nysa Diner is on the corner of Main Street and North Bay Road, which runs north to south, all the way up the island. There are other small shops and offices at the intersection, but the buildings thin quickly to either side of Main.

  It’s the same but different. Nothing seems to be taken care of as it used to be—the weeds are high in the alleys and even in some places along the street, the roads themselves are rutted and pockmarked, and I can’t tell if the Nysa Diner is open. I try to think of some kind of explanation or apology for the state of things, but you’re still staring through the glass.

  “We should grab some lunch,” I say. “Hungry?”

  You nod, and your skin makes a squeaking noise against the glass. I eye the diner warily, but there’s nothing else close. There is the seafood place at the southern end of Nysa, and somewhere between here and there is a burger joint. Was a burger joint. It was in a terrible state of deterioration even when I was a kid, so if it has followed in the footsteps of the rest of Nysa, it is probably nothing more than a pile of dust.

  Again, I am overwhelmed when I think about why I’m here. Finding you a home feels less and less likely. For the hundredth time since my diagnosis, I wish Mary was here. I would feel completely at peace with dying if I knew she could watch over you.

  But would I? If she was here, would I be so willing to say goodbye to this old lump of dirt circling the sun? And if she was here, would your parents have even met? Would you even be here? Now that’s a sobering thought. If Mary hadn’t left me on that day long ago, your father’s life would have been so different. Would we have ever left Nysa? Would your father ever have met your mother and vanished? Would your mother have overdosed? It’s hard to imagine the endless twists and turns in life that would be different if Mary hadn’t left.

  I pull into the diner’s parking lot and turn off the car. You give a half smile and climb out. I shake my head, weariness from the drive weighing on my eyes. I see you in the rearview mirror, walking up to the door of the diner like an adult going in for a table for one. I rub my eyes.

  Some food and a good night’s sleep will make all the difference, I think, racking my brain for reasons the town feels so empty. It’s a weekend—perhaps everyone has gone to the coast or is taking the day off of work. That’s it. It’s quiet because everyone is off work or off school, and most of these businesses are probably closed for the day.

  I follow you into the diner, and again I find myself disoriented, unable to tell between past and present. A cowbell rings quaintly above the door. The same old bar with the same old bar stools. The afternoon air inside the place has a slow feel to it. Two men sit with their elbows on the bar, a mug of black coffee in front of each of them. One man wears eyeglasses with dark lenses and a John Deere ball cap. The other man is dressed more professionally, wearing a collared shirt with the top two buttons undone and a tie that’s been loosened so much it resembles a noose. They both swing their heads and look at me when I walk in, size me up, and go back to staring at their open newspapers.

  The booths are tucked up against the wall, and the large sheets of glass that make up the upper half of the outer wall let warm sunshine in. A handwritten sign propped on a folding table says, “Please Seat Yourself,” and beside the sign is a large pile of sticky notes made specifically for the diner with a watermark on each page: “Nysa Diner.” I see that you’ve taken a booth in the far corner, the same one the four of us always used to sit in. Of course you did.

  I walk over and sit down. The booth’s seats have that same brittle plastic feeling. There is a jukebox between us and the server’s area behind the bar, but I can see the cord has been unplugged and the selector buttons are coated in dust.

  A waitress comes out from the kitchen, the door swinging behind her. She’s about my age, I think, wearing jeans and a red T-shirt. Her gray hair is pulled up in a ponytail, and she speaks through a throat tuned by years of cigarette smoking. She drops a few sticky menus down on the table in between us.

  “You ever plug that old thing in?” I ask, smiling, trying to be friendly.

  She stares at me like I’m speaking a foreign language. “Anything to drink?” she asks.

  “Hi,” you say with a smile.

  Mild surprise shows on her face.

  “I’ll have a water,” I say. “Pearl?”

  “Do you have lemonade?”

  “We do, but it’s not very good.”

  “Oh. Root beer?”

  The waitress stares at you. “Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite,” she says, listing them off in tart fashion.

  “I’ll have a water,” you say, still smiling at her like you’re expecting some kind of gift or surprise.

  “You ready to order food?”

  “I think we’ll need a minute,” I say. You nod.

  The woman scribbles something on her notepad, although seeing as how we only ordered two waters, I’m convinced she’s writing down all the ways we’ve annoyed her so far. Thinking that makes me grin, and I smile at you as she walks away.

  “This is where you grew up?” you ask in a hushed voice. Your eyes are wide.

  “This is it.”

  “Is this how it was when you were little?”

  “Yes and no,” I reply. “Everything seems a lot older. But the diner is the same. Actually, my friends and I used to sit in this very booth.”

  “Really?”r />
  I nod. “We’d better figure out what we want to eat before our waitress comes back.”

  You smile, and your eyes scan the large menu. I glance over at the men at the bar, and they barely move. Every so often one of them will turn the newspaper page, and it makes a crinkling sort of wispy sound. I look longingly at the jukebox. It’s much too quiet in here.

  The bell above the door rings again, and we both turn to see who is coming in. Another older man, but he seems friendly. He catches my eye and nods, gives a half smile, walks over to the bar, and sits beside the man wearing the ball cap.

  “What’s up, Danny-boy?” he asks good-naturedly.

  I can’t hear the man’s reply, but the two of them chuckle and the friendly-looking man settles onto the stool. The waitress comes out, smiles when she sees him, and pours him a cup of coffee. Everyone suddenly seems more relaxed, and sunshine slants in through the windows and warms me on one side. I feel all of the mortgaged tiredness from the last few days coming due, and I take a deep breath, lean back in the booth, sigh. My knot throbs.

  “Know what you want?” the waitress asks, sliding up beside us.

  “Pearl, any ideas?” I ask you.

  “A grilled cheese, please.”

  The waitress grunts quietly.

  “What’s good?” I ask.

  “What?” She seems taken aback.

  “What do you like? Do you have a specialty?”

  She glances at her notepad, then back up at me as if I haven’t said anything at all, and sighs impatiently.

  “Let’s do the grilled cheese,” I say. “Can you put bacon on that?”

  When she writes, it’s like the pen is her weapon, the paper her enemy. I’m surprised she’s not tearing right through it. She grunts again and plunges through the door to the kitchen. The door swings in wide arcs behind her.

  “You know what she is?” you say. There’s a mischievous glint in your eye, and I know what’s coming. But I pretend I don’t. I try not to smile.