The Memento (34 page)

Jenny crawled up the crumbling stone wall and into what had been a cellar, now just a jumble of rusted metal and blackened wood. If you pawed around you could find pieces of glass, warped and deformed from how white-hot the fire had been. There was choirs of birds singing on the branches, and late-summer raspberries growing up through the wreckage. Jenny picked a handful. I held up my hand to her, like Loretta. “Don’t eat them, Jenny. Ground’s covered in mercury from the lens in the lighthouse. Grampie told us that.”

Pomeline told her to put them down but Jenny ignored her and stuck out her tongue. “Don’t be a fool,” Pomeline said. I had never heard her say nothing mean like that before. She walked over and reached down and held out her hand. Jenny gave them berries to Pomeline, dropping them in her white palm. Then Pomeline ate them berries, one by one.

We shuffled uneasily. “What are you doing, Pomeline?” Art asked.

She just laughed.

Pomeline seemed crazed after that. We played tag and hide-and-seek and she had an uncanny energy in her that we had not ever seen before. It was as though the higher elevation was affecting her, the crisp sea air whistling through the hemlocks and pines
was revitalizing Pomeline. Her ashen cheeks were now flushed red. The games stopped being games when Jenny was tugging at her sister, pulling at her like she was a small child and Pomeline was her mother. Pomeline ran away from her, up that skeletal metal lighthouse. We didn’t see at first from where we were sprawled on the Colonel’s helicopter landing pad. We lay there in the searing sun that broke through the mists every so often. We were drained, you see, from the tragedies. We hardly spoke. Art hummed and I whistled. It was Jenny who called out.

“Look,” she said, pointing, holding her hand to her forehead to block the brightness out. We did the same, and there was Pomeline up high on the metal ladder, her hair soaring out like a banner, her dress flapping in the wind, and she was laughing. She was not crying, she was not. “Catch me, catch me, catch me if you can,” she called out. The weather changed then, a thick grey fog rolling in, dark clouds behind it.

Jenny went over to the old foundation, picked up a small stone and threw it at Pomeline. I remember how surprising it was that it hit Pomeline’s ankle from such a distance. Jenny threw another one and Pomeline winced. “Come down,” Jenny shrieked. “Come down and don’t cause any more trouble. You’ve been very bad.”

Pomeline did come down, quickly, even with her one stiff hand. That’s how I remembered it. That is how we all remembered it. She stood there safely on the ground and rubbed her fingers, avoiding eye contact. She ran off to the south through the swaying meadow grasses yelling
Catch me if you can
and we went after her like we was hound dogs on a trail.

As we come to the end of the meadow we saw her, looking over her shoulder. I was screaming by then for she was at the island’s edge, and the wind come through them fir trees hanging on the edge, howling, and she dropped down and there was nothing but the foggy sky in front of us. We sprinted forward and she was below the edge, hanging onto a root with her good hand. Pomeline
tried to grab hold with the bad one too but she couldn’t stand the pain. Slowly, those long white fingers slipped and slipped, each one abandoning her. She was gone before we could even try to help. It started pouring then, sheets of rain coming down heavy in the storm that had blown in on the high tide. Art and I held Jenny back as the rain dampened her screams. I swear it looked like tears were streaming from her eyes just to be washed away by the rain. This is how I remembered it. We was only children.

Even with all them years behind me now, as I sit in my chair with my aching joints and my tired heart, young Jenny cries still. It was long ago but those who walk into the future with grief know the lamentations of the dead never cease.

W
E DROVE
over the mountain and down to the valley. Loretta wore her mourning clothes, a black dress and black bonnet. She insisted I don a dress she’d sewn for me, just like hers, and she made me cover my hair as well. We were going away, but she didn’t say where and I didn’t ask. It wasn’t a time for talking. Estelle had told us to leave immediately. We packed up our things and loaded them in her car for one of its rare outings. This one was different as it was a one-way trip. We did not talk of Hector and how the only reason the car still ran was from his careful maintenance. When we started driving away from the house it was clear just how little we had. Some clothes and books, Loretta’s worn Bible and hymnal, a few toys and knick-knacks, my embroidery basket tucked at the bottom of my suitcase. In our rush I’d left Ma’s box of supplies in my room, along with my letter from Grampie.

Estelle was shutting the whole place down. She had berated Harry. His grief draped over him so heavy the man was barely able
to walk. He couldn’t speak without tears threading through the lines on either side of his mouth. It was his fault entirely, Estelle had said, that Pomeline had fallen over the edge of the island, bashed against those cliffs. Harold alone was responsible for his innocent young cousin being sucked away by the horrible heaving waves and tides, not even a body for her bereaved mother to bury. He was liable for letting guileless children go unattended. It didn’t matter the bay had conjured up the storm out of nowhere. He should have done something.

He and Sakura had packed their trunk and left quickly. Sakura embraced us, leaning on her crutches. Harry apologized for not helping, he was overcome as Sakura led him away. Our young faces brought the island back to him, I knew. They went to the city, where Marigold languished in a hospital. Estelle was in charge now, with Dr. Baker at her side, comporting themselves as sole survivors of that summer. It was just what they wanted.

Art and Yvette went to stay with some cousins. We did not keep in touch. Jenny was whisked away after they brought us back to Petal’s End. We’d all been taken by helicopter to the valley hospital through a hole in the ceiling of clouds. We were checked over, Jenny, Art and I, and Sakura and Harry, while they looked for Pomeline in the bay, in the atrocious thunderstorm with the churning, monstrous currents of the outgoing tide. We’d all been desperate and parched for rain that summer. The heavens delivered and it arrived in torrents and sheets. Down in the valley at the hospital the sky loomed dark but the air was still. To the north over the mountain thunderclouds and distant flashes cracked through the air.

The police questioned Art, Jenny and me, and we told them that we’d been playing tag, and the gusting winds and rain came. We told them how the sunny afternoon sky had turned dark as night in an instant. After, we’d struggled down to the beach, tripping and falling in the mud. The gale had crushed down the meadow grass, obliterating our trail on the island top. Harry had
come back up with me and Art. Jenny had stayed below with Sakura, who could only offer comfort. But we were helpless, all of us. The bay was bashing into the cliffs where Pomeline had plummeted down. Sakura had extra batteries in her pack and Harry used his radio to call for help, but it was slow coming in the storm. We told them this, wailing and shaking. But we did not tell them everything, for we had taken a vow there on the top of the island.

Not for twelve years would we see each other again. We kept this second vow of silence along with the first one we’d made in the garden that summer, to keep what had passed between Pomeline and Dr. Baker a secret. Dr. Baker wasn’t as sad as he should have been. I was furious to see flashes of relief in his eyes. In those last strange few days at Petal’s End, Jenny walked about with her hands clasped, only speaking in her strange verses, humming, watching, until they removed her.

The nightmares stayed with me for a year, and I had to sleep in Loretta’s room with her. The heavy rain and wind would make my heart leap. I would wake covered in slick sweat as though the rain had come in through the roof. My lips tasted of the salt of the sea which seemed to have seeped into my body. Sometimes I would dream of my embroidery wickerwork box I’d forgotten at Petal’s End. Other times I would see myself standing over the secret floor compartment in my room at Petal’s End where I’d left the letter from Grampie with the flower sachet. I’d awake worried that maybe the peonies had called forth fairies but not the good kind.

They looked for Pomeline for a week. At first they called it a rescue. Then they called it a recovery. They was looking for her body, and they searched that whole massive bay from end to end, to where it emptied out into the ocean, but the natural world had claimed her. We were incapacitated with grief. Estelle only spoke once to me, when she came to the kitchen to tell Loretta we had to go.
At least your mother had a body to bury
. She made a horrible gagging sound like she was going to throw up and she ran out of
the kitchen and down the long hall, into the main house. Loretta did not go after her. Later I slunk out to the front of the house, to the door where the mirror was nailed. I stood with my eyes closed and panic crushed my lungs flat. I was sure there was a creak on the verandah behind me and I opened my eyes. Surely this would be the evocation to bring on the memento. But there was nothing in the mirror except me, and behind me the forest at the edge of the property. The dead made no appearance.

Death is such a quiet thing once it has come; however there is nothing quiet about its arrival. At first it feels like the dead have just gone away for a bit, that they’ll return. A yearning takes hold of your heart. When Grampie died it seemed if I waited long enough he would come back and take his place beside me on the verandah, or at the kitchen table, surely by his easel. But of course he did not come back. You look for the dead in familiar places. You listen for their footsteps, for their laughter, for their songs. I kept thinking I’d hear Pomeline laugh from down the hall or see her moving through the garden, on one of her solitary walks, resting on a marble bench with her notebook and her pen making her musical notes, her patient voice encouraging us in our singing, and the sound of her melodies cascading from the music room and out the window. Even the sorrow and perversion of her last days of playing, the broken music she had summoned from her crushed fingers and spirit of despair, would have been a welcome sound.

There was no funeral or memorial service for Pomeline Charles Parker. There was only an obituary. It was too horrible, and without the body it seemed she’d just gone away, that she’d forgotten to come home and, eventually, that she’d only ever been a memory, a story told to us once, a fairy who had moved through the garden, as though she was the girl in Harry’s garden story, not killed by poisonous flowers but by recklessness, a plague of recklessness corrupting us all.

I worried all the time Pomeline would appear. I had dreams of her looking for us, with that whispering voice singing like a quiet breeze that stirred the leaves of my mind for years to come, asking me where was her body, why was her body missing, why hadn’t we brought her home, why had the dead been left behind?
Last night she came to me, my dead love came in. So softly she came that her feet made no din
. The days were a blur, and despite that wicked storm the sweltering dry weather came right back and sucked out every bit of moisture, and the world of Petal’s End was as dry as Jenny’s eyes. The heat scorched over us as though Holy Mother Mercy was white-hot with wrath, and there was no relief.

Years later Jenny would tell us that jubilation filled Estelle when she closed up Petal’s End for there was no one to oppose her. The hired men nailed boards over the windows as Loretta and I left. We passed between the wrought-iron gates on either side of the immense stone walls, gates that would be locked shut for years to come.

As we headed toward the valley my head was heavy and I’d eaten hardly a thing in days. We drove in silence through Lupin Cove and across the mountain on the Lonely Road by them fields of hay and wildflowers. Loretta finally spoke, with her eyes fixed on the road the entire time.

“You know I was a Believer,” she said. “The Church of Believers in the Second Coming of the Lord.”

That was the full name of the church, but people just called them the Believers, and they called themselves that as well. She said nothing more as we drove along the foot of the mountain on the back road until we were in Believer country, surrounded by big farms that encircled the village. She turned down a long lane and we come up to a big house in front of a huge barn and
outbuildings. Two children come out, followed by a woman—their mother—and a man who looked like her husband. Next, the grandmother, an elderly lady—Loretta’s mother, as it turned out—stood there in the door with her hands on her heart. All them generations in one house.