The Memory Jar (3 page)

Then

Dani. I told her first, of course, way back when I peed on the stick and the little line said MOMMY despite all Scott's precautions. I don't know what I'd do without Dani, but that's the thing, right? That's the best friend thing. I mean, it used to be we were this little trio: Taylor-and-Dani-and-Evelyn. But Evie got too cool for us and joined the girls who decided Sterling Creek needed a lacrosse team and a Wannabe Ivy League Club or some stupid thing like that, and then it was just me and Dani, the Trashy League Club or something equally stupid like that. We weren't really trashy, but you know. My mom is a receptionist for a therapist who works with troubled teens in the foster care system, and my dad skipped town while I was hovering somewhere between the zygote and embryo stage. Dani's moms own a sleepy little yarn store just off Sterling Creek's thriving Main Street shopping district. Neither one of us will be going to Harvard when we graduate without some kind of miracle. Not this particular kind of miracle, in case that's not clear.

She didn't speak, not right away. For all her perky looks and loud cheerleader yells—her pink nail polish and shiny black ponytail like a perfect pendulum—Dani knows how to be quiet. We were cocooned in her little handmade loft bed, painted by her mom Janie to look like an old gnarled tree, with a green cloth canopy of leaves hand-sewn by Fran. Heaped behind Dani was a pile of plush spiders she's collected since she was two years old and arrived in Sterling Creek from an orphanage in Nepal, clinging to Neep—the oldest, rattiest spider of the bunch.

“Options,” she said at last. “Do you want to hear them?” She held out her arms and I collapsed into her embrace, crying in complete silence for longer than I thought possible.

“My mom,” I gasped, in between sobs, “will kill me.”

Dani held me impossibly tight. “Let her even try,” she said.

Now

Sitting in this hospital, waiting in uncertainty, makes time go all funny. It rewinds and fast-forwards at the whim of something unseen. So you want to hear something weird?

I can see him sometimes, and he's always a boy, always with those wide, impossibly sweet blue eyes. Just like Scott. He's beautiful, but his face has that needy baby look. Hungry, like he would devour me whole.

And what if he did? That's stupid. But seriously, that's what babies do to people. What if I have this baby and it devours everything I am, all I could be or could have been? Am I a mother? That seems so abstract. And then there are the things that really scare me, the little phrases that fall out of my mouth, the tiny cruelties that remind me of the kind of mother I could become.

I'm getting an abortion. It's the right thing to do, especially now. I was about to break up with him. But the weird thing, you know, the weird thing is this other part, this other scene in the fast forward. I can imagine myself holding him out in offering, a blanket-wrapped bundle, all soft and blinking and needy and alive. This weird part of me wants to give this baby to them—to Understanding Emily and Angry Joey and to Scott's mom and dad with their wounded eyes and their fluttery hands. A consolation prize. Here is a part of your son I didn't ruin. Here is a part to help you move on.

Then

He wasn't my first choice, not in the beginning. And I wasn't his. After school most days in the winter, Dani and I would go skating. Even on the coldest days, we walked there and back together, our cheap vinyl skates tied by their laces and looped over our shoulders. We wore long floppy mittens with ice chunks clinging to them from when we fell, or pretended to fall, giggling and helpless into the snow banks that surrounded the “girls' rink” adjacent to the hockey rink, where the boys who were the reason for us being there in the first place circled fast, snapping their sticks against the ice like weapons.

Dani could whistle with her fingers between her teeth, and she could skate fast right up to the edge and stop with a spray of snow against our side of the wooden boards that contained the boys. The shrill call would cut through the sound of their skates scraping across the ice and the pucks clanging off the metal pipes that surrounded the net. Sometimes, not often, they would whistle back, and once the whole group of boys skated over and leaned against the edge and talked to us, but they were mostly juniors and seniors, and we were still ninth graders stuck in the dregs of junior high, even though every other school in the world put the freshmen in the high school. Basically, all we did was a lot of giggling. Dani said it was hard to be sexy when we were wearing so much clothing, so after that we started sneaking out of our houses without our snow pants on, our skinny jeans clinging to our skinny legs. Still, the boys barely looked. They circled the rink like sharks and flipped their wrist shots over and over, even though we waited for hours, hoping they would head into the warming shack for a break. All our plans for seduction seemed to revolve around the warming shack.

I had my eye on this redhead we called Ron Weasley, even though his real name was Kenny or Denny or something like that. There was no particular reason why I settled on him to be the object of my high school hockey player fantasies, other than I liked the way his hair curled up when he was sweaty, and he almost never spit on the ice—a habit I found disgusting. He was a senior and obviously safe because he was completely unavailable.

Scott wasn't looking for me—one of those annoying, skinny-legged freshman girls hanging around the warming shack all winter long—but he did have a blister starting on one foot, and he knew immediately from the feel of it that if he did not venture into the shack and change something about the way his sock was bunched up against his heel, he would end up with a blister that would keep him off the ice for a week or more. Dani and I chased him in, asking his name, telling him he had ugly feet. “Oh my god!” squealed Dani, jumping up on her toe-picks, sticking them into the black rubber mats on the floor. “Your toes are hairy!”

“Like a hobbit,” I said, and that's when he looked at me for the first time.

He used to snuggle up to me sometimes, like when we went to a movie or sat around the fire on the island, and I would think he was leaning in to say something incredibly sweet in my ear—he did that, too, sometimes. Anyway, he would lean in and then he would whisper in my ear, he'd go “Hobbit toes!”, and that unstoppable kind of laughter would steal over me until I collapsed against him, tears trapped in my eyelashes, warm and content.

Now

“Will he remember the accident?” The words spill out of my mouth when Scott's doctor approaches us in the waiting room. “Will he remember what happened?”

The doctor squares her shoulders, pulls herself together. “He's no longer receiving medication to keep him in the coma,” she says. She suggests I talk to him, or read to him, anything to have the familiar voices of his loved ones calling him back. “When Scott wakes, he might need us to help him find his place again. Memory is a complex process.”

Tell me about it.

Then

I wasn't allowed to see Scott. Technically. Anyway, I wasn't allowed to visit him in St. Cloud while he was living on his own for college. I accused my mom of being controlling, told her she couldn't control love. I slammed my bedroom door.

“That's what the kids are calling it these days,” said my mom's boyfriend-of-the-month with an awful wink, and Mom repeated the rule that Scott and I could only see each other when he was at “home.” Meaning, of course, his parents' home. “Supervised,” she said. “At all times.”

Scott was the kind of guy who never broke any rules. It turned me into the kind of girl who wanted to corrupt him, somehow. I did love him, that's important to know. I loved his voice, I loved his smile, I loved his eyes—the way they looked at me like I mattered. I loved sitting beside him on his parents' couch, even when we watched hockey. Scott explained all the rules of the game with patience and enthusiasm and I couldn't help seeing the sport in a new light, something we could share.

He didn't play for St. Cloud State, but during his sophomore year he did play defense on an intramural team, and Dani covered for me once a week so I could drive down and watch him play. My mom would have killed me if she found out, but luckily she never followed through on her threat of dropping by the public library to check on me. I watched him from an empty place in the stands, his new friends still strangers to me, his long easy strides building a slow sort of speed as he crossed the ice. I cheered for him, unabashedly, remembering the long years of leaning on the boards from the figure skating rink. He was my boyfriend. He was sweet to me.

Like I said, too, we were careful.

Now

There's no change, but at least Scott is stable. In serious condition, which is a significantly more positive outlook than critical. Emily offers to drive me home, and I don't want to go, but it's not really an option to stay. This situation has moved beyond the point of staying awake through to the end, and I might as well rest in my own bed. I feel like a liar, like I'm coming home late from a party I didn't have permission to attend, instead of arriving home from the hospital after surviving a really scary snowmobile crash that left my boyfriend in critical condition. Serious condition. At least nobody has noticed I'm pregnant.

My mom came to the hospital, but I wouldn't leave with her. I wish she'd stayed, but I understand, I guess. She has to work in the morning and stuff. It's just that … wouldn't she want Scott's parents to be there for comfort if it had been the other way around? If I had been the one in the coma?

If I had been. I think I should have been. I can't remember if I was sitting in front or in back, but I should have been the one to hit the ice because I know it had to have been my fault we crashed. Scott was such a careful driver.

My mom is … well, she's difficult to understand, even for me sometimes. She's the kind of person I always sort of think I've got all rationalized in my head, like I understand where she's coming from, and then she surprises me, attacks me somewhere I don't even know I have feelings. I know she loves me. I hope she's sleeping.

Emily insists on accompanying me to the front door, and I fumble with my keys, trying to figure out if my confusion is mere clumsiness or head injury. I do have a mild concussion. My thinking is weird, but I'm not sure if it's shock or what. My memory has a skip in it, like a rock flipped over the surface of the lake; I have gaps.

The ice ridge.

My fingers shake, and the door swings open before I can get my key in the lock. My mother, wearing a hoodie and yoga pants. So on her way to bed but not sleeping yet. There's one light on in the entryway, and my mom smiles at Understanding Emily, her hair softly backlit. Her face in shadow, mostly.

“Is she doing okay?” Her concern is real, but her hands make me flinch, coming so close to my face. “My poor baby.” She touches the bridge of my nose and even my split lip, but I hold myself still and act normal. Emily smiles, her eyes oblivious.

“Your glasses are bent,” my mom says, like that's the most important thing here.

“She needs some sleep, but you should wake her every so often to check on her because of the concussion.” Emily presses herself tightly up to me, her arms squeezing tight. “Call me if you need me,” she says, and then squeezes again. “He's going to be okay, Taylor, I can feel it.”

I'm not a hugger. I feel my arms come up and circle around her, feel them clinging strangely, someone else's arms. Desperate arms. I step back, but she pulls me even closer. “You're just like my sister already,” says Emily, and I can't breathe. “Get some sleep, and I'll call you tomorrow morning.”

“Or if anything changes,” I say. Like if Scott wakes up and remembers everything. Even the parts I don't.

Her eyes are so warm, so loving. “I'll call you if anything changes,” she promises.

Then

The island was special. It carried the weight of so many firsts.

Scott liked to build fires, to be an architect and build them like these perfect structures. He was a fire designer, setting his tinder up just so, little chips of wood with the edges all curled up and shredded in a perfect little flammable pile. This guy Cody from the hockey team—his dad was a big-time survivalist dude, and they lived out in the woods all crazy and wild—he showed Scott once how to start the fire with a cotton ball dipped in Vaseline. He gave Scott a flint and a little piece of steel on a loop of parachute cord. Scott couldn't quite manage to get the sparks to catch, though, and I got tired of watching. I reached for the flint. “Let me try.”

It was kind of amazing, if you want to know the truth, the way it felt to make a shower of sparks fly from the back of the knife. They rained down on the little cotton ball until it caught, turning into a round glow before a little orange flame burst up from the top, and I skewered it with a sharp chunk of kindling and moved it into the little center of the structure Scott built. It went up in a fury of hot flames, and I felt the warmth climb up my body.

You could come close to falling in love with anyone sitting around a well-constructed fire on a beautiful summer night. Close was all that really mattered, and Scott pulled me into his lap in one of the rickety lawn chairs he and his friends kept on the island, stashed in the weeds. We were both hot, from the fire and from our own daring. I remember that heat sometimes, the searing ecstasy of his mouth perhaps
—it should always be easy as that to fall in love with the person you're wondering if you are in love with. Sit beside a fire and climb into their lap and everything else falls away.

We went to the island for many reasons, and we went there often. In summer, Scott paddled the little canoe while I gripped the sides and tried to keep breathing. In the winter we drove across on Joey's snowmobile, but a lot of times it was too cold to stay long. Once we built a snowman family and dressed them up like they were marooned on a tropical island. They waved their little stick arms for help, and Scott and I laughed ourselves into a slushy puddle of greedy mouths and cold hands and shuddery breath.

The island was a place for memories.