The Memento (9 page)

Photographs were spread out on a nearby table like a deck of cards, as though Charlie had been playing a game of solitaire or blackjack with ghosts, drinking wine from a crystal glass. We ran in thinking we could do something but there was nothing to do except cry. Marigold backed up, hauling Jenny with her, and she crashed into the table. Nothing shatters as spectacular as a quality crystal glass. I was silent, a dark horrible shudder crawling up my limbs. Then there was a parade of adults coming in and hauling us away, Estelle righting the table, picking up the larger pieces of glass and the mess on the floor, screeching as though she had lost her senses, clasping all of those photos like they was the most important thing in the world, barely noticing the children.

When I was a small child we’d tell ghost stories on the beach by the bonfire. I knew many from my mother, from the fishermen in the village. We’d tell stories of the pirates who’d roamed the bay, the pirate who’d left the beheaded sailor behind over on the island. We didn’t share as many ghost stories after Charlie died. Estelle wanted to tear the Annex off the house but Marigold refused. It seemed odd that she wanted to keep such an awful memory alive in there, but eventually I understood that she wanted Estelle to remember, never to move on. The door stayed locked, the Annex shut up, locking in its memories and ghosts. It was the place we was not to go, the long dusty wing, the last place Charlie Parker ever saw.

I sat at the table, transfixed by the Annex. What if Charlie was in there waiting for me to come see him? I couldn’t ask Loretta about that. There was only one time later that anyone ever spoke of the Annex. Marigold had come into the kitchen to discuss the
menu for a dinner party with very important people. Estelle come in behind her. Loretta turned to the cupboard and I just kept washing the dishes. They were fighting over the Annex. The argument went as it always did between them two no matter what they were quarrelling over, with Marigold’s voice ice-thin and Estelle blowing and thundering. She started hollering that Marigold should let that godforsaken mausoleum be torn down. Marigold slapped Estelle and said it might be the place Charlie died but it was also the place he and Estelle had fallen in love. “You should show more respect, you gold-digging opportunist.” That’s what she called her, and it shut Estelle up for a long time. The Annex remained, vacant and avoided.

Loretta came out with strawberry shortcake and a sparkler flaring in the middle. She normally just sang hymns and she approached “Happy Birthday” as though it were a selection from her hymnal. “Here’s to a hopeful year, Fancy,” she said. We ate and Loretta chit-chatted about making jams and picking berries, and her plans for the summer and how charming the gardens looked. She didn’t ask me about the letter and she didn’t eat her cake. We brought in the plates and she said I could go entertain myself while she finished cleaning up the kitchen.

In my room, I put the letter in my backpack, tucking a flashlight in there as well.

I went back into Evermore when the shadows were starting to fall. Vesper bats were just taking to the sky. Summer days trick you into forgetting night is coming. I walked through the garden to the east wall back by the gazebo. The forest pressed in on that door, and the only opening in the dense brush was the narrow trail to the Tea House. This had been the path for the woodcutter years before, and then we Moshers had used it. It was much darker in the woods. Soon Loretta would come out to call me in for bedtime so I planned to be quick.

I’d been on that trail hundreds of times and could travel it with my eyes shut. It was quiet except for the flutter of the tree birds I was disturbing. Or the slumber of the wood spirits, for I was in such a state of sorrow and resentment it was sure to disturb them as they sang their twilight lullabies. When Art and I was little we made up a story of creatures living in the woodland. They weren’t people or animals, nor ghosts. If you came into that ancient woodland crying or breathing hard or stomping they’d see you, and you’d hear them if you listened proper. It was their breath that rustled the leaves, not the wind. And it wasn’t no proper rustle but the branches and foliage babbling, a susurration, as Grampie described it. We was sure the forest air held their moist breath, scented with emerald moss and dewdrops.

Far off I heard a coyote call. I went fast and smooth toward the opening in the forest ahead. I pushed aside the branches and there was the Tea House. The property had grown wild the last three years. Loretta never told me I couldn’t come here, and I did a few times, coming only to the edge of the woods, looking at our quaint house and the forlorn gardens. But it hurt too much to step out, and I’d turn and run back to Petal’s End. It was just a place of memories, and it was easier to leave them there undisturbed rather than carry them with me. But that night I swear I heard the house calling as I went along on the soft floor of pine needles and plush mosses.

I knew Grampie and John Lee’s cups must be in there. Loretta said the house was boarded up to keep Ma out. On my birthday I was thinking Loretta had misspoke—it was for keeping me out. Grampie’s clothes were gone, I knew because I’d helped pack them. There would be no shoes I could slip on and take down to the beach and see if I was that kind of Mosher.

I took a step forward, back into that world, into the high grass, and another step, looking for Grampie’s gardens, now tangled with flowers and weeds, the lawn now a meadow. Grampie pastured sheep and goats so we never mowed an inch, but those animals were long gone. Now I was wading through the grass and hay, the tall red clover
and buttercups and blue columbine. His pickup truck was rusty and abandoned, weeds growing right up through the stick shift. But the grasses was much lower near the house, like they was afraid to grow too close, and I went around to the front verandah. I saw Grampie’s bird feeders, paint peeling off, empty. There was wild roses along the side and the old peony garden he planted for my grandmother when they were first married. He called the peony the fairy blossom for sprites and said such beings was drawn to it. A flower, Grampie had told me, is the easiest thing to underestimate.
The peony, for instance, its leaves are thin and long, and the bud is an insignificant hard ball covered in green with ants crawling on it, and then it bursts forward into splendour. The peony can live for over a century, but who would know that, looking at the fragile petals? The peony blooms for itself. You move it and it refuses to bloom out of spite and will bloom again when it suits. But a peony always brings good luck, even if it begrudges
. The peony garden he planted in Evermore blooms still. Roses, Grampie said, are a different creature.
They need us. The more you cut, the more they bloom. A rose tended blooms for decades. The peony needs only the affection of the sun and the butterflies
.

I could hear Grampie then, in my heart, slow voice singing to the granddaughter who come to the old man like a stunted peony.
Hear the wind blow, love, hear the wind blow
. Our rocking chairs were gone so I sat down on the verandah floor. In those last days when he was sick I sat out there alone, within calling distance in case Grampie needed me, reading my books while I hummed and whistled,
Angels are coming to watch over thee, so listen to the wind coming over the sea
. Grampie wanted water from time to time, or for me to read him a letter or a book. And sometimes he’d ask me to sing. He had been dead three years but it was like Grampie had gone away on a trip for he was still sharp in my mind. Those were the best years, those six ones with Grampie.

What I grew up knowing about my brother John Lee wasn’t much. It was from the snippets Grampie had told me, for Ma rarely said
his name in my presence. In the house right off the front door there was an old-fashioned parlour where Grampie would receive his customers when they come about paintings. This was where Grampie and I would sit on Sunday afternoons. It was also the room where my grandmother’s body was laid out, and then finally Grampie himself. And John Lee. It was both the death room and the living room. Grampie was from the old world and he had no use for funeral homes or embalming. He kept some framed photos on a small table in the parlour. There was one of John Lee with my mother, holding hands on the beach. In a cherrywood frame was a picture of me as a baby sitting on Ma’s lap in a rocking chair. Grampie said having me brought her youth back for a time. From that picture you would never think she was forty-five. And you would never think that adoring smile was not for me but for herself, finally having a twelfth-born child.

One Sunday when we’d been sitting in the parlour reading, my grandfather had looked at Ma’s photos. She’d come by drunk the night before and I’d heard them arguing, then the door slamming. She was on his mind that whole morning and he couldn’t take his eyes from her in the pictures. “Remember your mother like that, Fancy. Remember her laughing. She loved her children, although she was not fit to raise them after John Lee. I always thought of Marilyn as a lake that had no still water. It was a marvel she could sit for so long and stitch. Before your grandmother’s hands were twisted by the arthritis she played the fiddle and tried to teach your mother. She stopped for fear your mother would fling the fiddle across the room.”

The fiddle was in a case on the shelf and no one played it after my grandmother passed on. Grampie looked at the case for a spell before he continued. “Marilyn was best when she was occupied doing things that spoke to her. The house used to be full of her cooking and singing. And she’d make sketches for her embroideries. I always wondered where she got her ideas for she was never still long enough to study or contemplate her surroundings. But
she just absorbed it. It was your mother who was always filling the bird feeders and whistling their calls.

“We should never have let her keep working at Petal’s End when I came back from the war but we were not thinking clearly at that time. Too much fell to your grandmother and your mother. But your grandmother felt Marilyn was too cooped up here in this cottage. She said Marilyn was afraid of me when I first come back, that she was frightened to be in the room with me for the look on my face when I thought no one was watching. We let her keep working there, but it was a mistake. Your grandmother blamed herself that Marilyn ended up with the baby. We welcomed the child. Your mother would never answer any questions and we knew better than to even ask. We’d never seen her happier.”

I could hear the silken leaves outside as they rubbed together. “We wept when his small body was brought here and laid out in the quiet of this room. I did not expect you, Fancy Mosher, as you came so late.” Grampie closed his eyes and eventually stood up and went to the verandah to smoke his pipe.

The last summer Grampie was alive I was out there on that verandah one afternoon while he was sleeping when a fragile, aged man come around. It was late August and the cicadas were screeching as the day drew in. I’d been finishing an embroidery that I’d been working on all week, a picture of Grampie napping on the sofa because that was all he’d been doing. I took the embroidery inside and put it in my bedroom, grabbing a book from the shelf, and returned outside. And there he was, this man. Lots of people come by to see Grampie and for portraits—it wasn’t unusual to have someone in the yard. But this one didn’t say a word, wouldn’t come out of the shadow of the grand sugar maples. My book was almost finished, a story about orphan children living alone near a mountain they called Old Joshua, gathering herbs and flowers. There was a rustle so I looked back at the man, who I then saw had dark smudges under his eyes and looked bent out of shape.

“Hello,” I rang out, and he stepped far back into the heavy shade. It was blistering hot. It was clear to me he was embarrassed. Some people didn’t want anyone knowing they were coming to the Tea House and they’d only come at night.

Grampie come out then. He was bent over, his hand on the door frame.

I pointed. “Must be looking for a picture … probably don’t want to disturb you, Grampie. Folks know you’re not feeling well.”

Grampie looked at me and out into the yard at the tree and then back at me. He braced himself as a big hacking cough erupted from his mouth. I went over to him with my glass of water and he took a sip and spit it out. Jake started barking in the house. “I see, Fancy,” Grampie said, and went back inside. I searched the whole yard but the man had gone off. They did that more often than not.

Grampie was resting in the parlour and I told him the man had left but I expected he would come back. Grampie nodded without opening his eyes. “No doubt he will return if you saw him. You’re a good girl, Fancy,” he said. “You don’t scare easy and nor should you.”

The next week we were inside around the same time of day and Jake started barking and panting out front. I went out and that same man had come by. His head was turned in my direction but the shade was so thick he was hard to decipher. Grampie came out quickly when I called for him but hurrying made his cough bad. He tended to the dog, patting Jake. Grampie said the dog was getting delusional with old age. “Oh yes,” he said, “it gets to some dogs like it gets to some people.” If you spoke to him and stroked him Jake would settle right down. It was being alone he didn’t like. A dog’s not a solitary animal.

I pointed out to the tree line and Grampie took a gaze at the sugar maples. “You’re sure, Fancy?”

“I’m no delusional old dog, Grampie.”

Didn’t he start laughing, but it led off into a coughing fit. He wiped his forehead and went back in the house, each step an
eternity, going right by the mirror at the door. When I followed behind Grampie I looked in the glass but saw only my tanned skin and the branches of the maples. I turned my head real quick to check the woods but the man was gone. There was only a red bird balancing on one of the fireweed spires. Round and round the Tea House I went but there weren’t nobody there at all, and the bird too was gone when I come back.

Grampie was on the couch. I brought him some bread and butter and a cup of tea. “You’re a brave girl. I’m glad for that. You’ll need to be brave.” There was a vase of browning peonies and he let his eyes rest on their petals, ruffled and delicate. The fragrance was cloying. Grampie’s eyes were closed as a long trill came out from the forest.
When’s your cough leaving, Grampie?
I had been asking him all summer. He would hack deep and low.
Soon enough, Fancy
. He’d already made me promise not to say one word to Ma that he wasn’t feeling well, and she hardly came to call so that was no trouble. He said arrangements were already in place. That I wasn’t to go get her until his time arrived, and I was to fetch Loretta first.