The Memory Jar (4 page)

Now

This snow is the kind that snaps against the window pane in grainy waves, carried by the fiercely gusting winds that rock the corners of the old house. I like weather that reminds me how lucky I am to have shelter.

My bed is lumpy. This is nothing new; I think the mattress has needed replacing since before I inherited this bed from some other poor person who brought it to Goodwill. Scott and I have had sex on this bed on four separate occasions, as if that matters. As if there's any reason on earth for me to be thinking about that right now. God, what is wrong with me?

I fold my hands over my abdomen, and I try to determine if there has been any change in my size or shape. I don't think so, though I can feel some of the changes in my hips, in the way my body fits together at the joints. I've lost two pounds since that day I peed on the shoplifted stick in the drug store bathroom. No change, not really, but I push my stomach out until it rounds beneath the sheet, beneath my hands. If I let this baby stay, what will happen to me?

I think about the dumbest things. Like about how people will look at me. That people will be able to see, in one glance, what I've done. It isn't cool, the way girls have to walk around for nine months plus whatever else with this scarlet letter or whatever, fucking
advertising
that we had sex. And whatever. So you know what? I
liked
having sex with Scott. I slide my hands a little lower. How dumb is it that I'm thinking about having sex with him and he's maybe not even thinking at all? He's lying there in a vegetative state or something, and everyone's just waiting to see what will happen, what his brain will be like, what he'll remember, and I'm busy thinking about how it used to make me smile when he would hold me close enough that I could feel him wanting me.

I was giving this up, remember?
I was about to break up with you.
How can I be lying here thinking about all the times he sat pressed up against me on the seat of the snowmobile. It's the fire, those fires he was always starting.
Was
? I can't let him shift into past tense. I slide up to a seated position in the bed, my breath hitching in my chest a little. I put my hands where I can see them. I was about to break up with him. I remember the reason.

I pull my knees up close, wrapping my arms around my shins. I'll get an abortion. I have to find a way. I get to choose because it's my scarlet letter, and it's not only that. What if he's different? What if he's broken? What kind of father could he be?

He needs to wake up. I hate it that he left me all alone with all of this.

Then

Scott loved candy. It was funny at first because it was like his hidden weakness. The door pocket on the driver's side of his truck was filled with candy wrappers. Once, when things were new between us, I teased him that I wasn't sweet enough for him, and he didn't say a word. He leaned over and licked me, from the lowest dip of my scooped-neck tank top right up my neck and the bottom of my ear and all the way up to my temple, where he placed a little surprise of a kiss.

“Gross!” I pushed him away and wiped my hand across my cheek, all dramatic. “Sweetness germs!”

After that he called me Sweetness whenever he was teasing me, and I know that sounds the lamest of the lame of all things, but it made me feel special to hear him say it, and sometimes he still surprised me by licking some random exposed bit of me, eliciting a shriek and spreading those good old sweetness germs.

Now

I bring candy to the hospital, lots of different kinds but mostly the sour chewy varieties, which is what he liked best. Likes best. The nurse is a tall black woman with tightly braided hair, and she smiles when she says she'll be working this shift all week. Her name is Lydia, and she holds my face in her hands for a moment, examining my injuries. She clicks her tongue. “Stupid snowmobiles,” she says.

She doesn't have much time, but she talks to me while she checks Scott's vitals and records some notes into the computer. “He might be able to smell the candy,” she says, “if you unwrap it and hold it by his nose.” She stands up from the rolling stool and reaches over to adjust some tubing leading into my boyfriend's arm. My boyfriend. I can't even think that without wondering. What will he remem
ber? “Just talk to him, Taylor.” Lydia squeezes me in a
hug—not usually my thing, but I don't fight it, don't even pull back from it like I would have for anyone else—and then she sets Scott's chart back on the wall at the foot of his bed and exits the room on silent white sneakers.

“Hey, Scott. It's me, Taylor.” My voice feels faint and faraway, but in my ears, in the strange silence of the room, it sounds abnormally loud. It's so awkward, talking to what feels like an empty room. They've taken him off the ventilator, so there's no real machine noise in the room except for occasional beeps of the IV or the automatic blood pressure cuff. What can I say into this hush, into those still ears on the side of that pale, shaven head, mostly hidden under bandages and a knit hat. “Nice hat you've got there,” I say, lowering my voice because my god, if anyone hears me they'll think I'm cognitively impaired. “I suppose a stupid hat on your stupidly smashed-up head is as good a place to start as any.” I pull up a chair. “Lydia said you might be able to smell, too, so I brought some of your favorite candies, and I … I'm going to hold them under your nose.” I unwrap a piece of salt water taffy and hold it out. Not exactly under his nose—that doesn't seem dignified—but close enough so that he could probably smell it. If he can smell things. “Um. So can you smell things? Look. This is weird, you know? Talking to you like this. There are probably a lot of things I would say to you if I thought there was no way in hell you were actually hearing me. And there are things I could say if I thought for certain that you were hearing me, especially if I knew that nobody else could hear. But this … it's a weird limbo, you know? And I'm all tongue-tied.”

I have to look at him in little pieces, not all at once. The dark bruise around his eye, fading into purple and blue on the edges, the spiky bits of stubble on the edge of his jawline where the nurse didn't shave him close enough. The soft curve of his fingernails against the white sheets. The steady rise and fall of his chest, moving now without the aid of a machine.

“I want you to wake up so we can talk about some pretty serious stuff.” I pop the candy into my mouth and chew, my mouth filling with saliva that I have to slurp indelicately to avoid drooling. God, I can't even have a serious conversation with a comatose person without messing it up. “I mean, like, I need to know if you remember what happened, and how it happened, or who did it or why. And I need to tell you about the ring and what I'm thinking about with the one thing. You know I can't marry you, Scott, and I know you don't even want that. What was that, anyway? How did you expect me to feel?”

I've been keeping the ring in my pocket because I can't bear to wear it, but I feel like it should be nearby in case he wakes up. I pull it out and stare at it, settled on the palm of my left hand. It's not the engagement ring I'd choose for myself, but then again I've always kind of thought that was weird, that you'd go along with a boy and say, spend this much money on me. This is what I'm worth, if you want to keep my heart.

“You don't have to be here.”

I startle at the angry voice coming from the doorway, and the ring bounces off the tile floor and rolls out of sight.

“Joey, seriously. What's your issue?” Did he see the ring? I can't crawl under the bed right now and search for it unless I'm willing to have a witness, and a hostile one at that. “I'm aware that I don't
have
to be here. I walked four blocks in the middle of winter and froze my tail off waiting at the bus stop for almost an hour, then had to ride all the way over to the community college and the mall before the stupid bus finally looped back over to the hospital. All that to get here. To sit here, to have you treat me like dirt because you're mad at your brother.”

Joey's wearing the same jeans, the same jacket. He walks like someone who's slept in a waiting room. “I'm not mad at Scott,” he says, muttering under his breath.

“You're mad at me, then? For what? For existing? For not being there instead of him?”

He paces the space, twisting all the air in the room about himself. “My brother will never be the same,” he says. “He may not ever be able to speak, to walk, to feed himself. And I
know
, Taylor. No fucking way my brother was driving that snowmobile. He's never wrecked in his life.” Each of his words is a sharp stone, hurting us both.

“We shouldn't be doing this, not in front of Scott,” I say. Lydia said he might be able to smell. He might be able to hear. “Help me talk to him, Joey.” Maybe we can do this instead. My mouth is dry. “Let's bring him back.”

“You did this,” he says. His finger jabs at the air between us and then at the bed. At Scott. “This is your fault.”

I unwrap a caramel and start from the beginning.

Then
(To Joey)

Grave Lake, it was called, and I worried about the implications of that name from day one. I didn't know how to swim, but it wasn't that. I took a photo of him on the path to Grave Lake, and I put one of those stupid filters on it, see? Anyway, look—he was so gorgeous and vulnerable and young. In this photo, he looks like someone who might take a risk. Someone who might find himself saying things like, “Bet on yoursel
f
!” after spending a week in the woods with only a knife and his little fire-starter. Someone who might follow his heart.

I remember that comment you posted when Scott made this his profile photo. You were teasing him about how he looked so tough but probably whined about the mosquitos for the rest of the hike. I remember how I wished you'd been wrong.

There was beauty, though, moments where Scott really was the perfect boyfriend. You're probably familiar with the sandbar, the way the fireflies came out on shore and you could float on your stomach with your hands in the sand and try to catch the pattern of blinking lights, to make sense of its coded urgency.

Now

I'm surprised that Joey listens, that he takes my invitation. His hands are stuffed into the chest pockets of his jacket, his expression dark, but he keeps his eyes focused on Scott, on the rise and fall of his chest going solo on the whole breathing gig.

“I remember that picture,” he says, still spitting the words between his teeth. “Him standing there like a hero.” A dark laugh escapes him. “And now look at him.”

“Yeah.” I shift my body closer to the bed, closer to Scott's face, looking for movement. Buying myself time. “This isn't my fault.” My shoulders, my chest, everything shakes, even my lungs seem shaky, like I can't get enough to breathe. “I didn't want this.”

“You think it's that easy?
I didn't want this so make it go away.
It doesn't work that way, Taylor.”

I'm aware it doesn't work that way. I don't need him lecturing me about the way the world works. I need to find my freaking engagement ring off the floor of this hospital room so I can leave before my ex-boyfriend's angry little brother tries to avenge his brother's death by—my god, I have to stop killing Scott in my head. I didn't kill him. I never wanted that.

I have this image, in my head, and I'm not really sure where it comes from but it's so vivid—this image I think must be a memory until it suddenly can't be. My jacket, puffy and pink, the snow ridge in front of me, the scramble of the collision, and I can see myself looking down, looking at my abdomen as though from a distance, the spill of blood against the snow. An image of Scott, holding my hand as I die.

And that's it. That's the only image I can bring up in my head about the crash, that and the noise of Scott's skull against the ice, but obviously this memory isn't real and for all I know neither is the sound. I flew free of the machine and landed in deep snow. How can we both be in the same crash, and he's the one in a coma, while I'm fine beyond a headache and a fuzzy memory. The doctors basically waved a light in my eyes a few times and told me to stay home from school a couple of days, while Scott is lying here unresponsive, barely breathing on his own. I didn't tell anyone at the hospital I was pregnant.

“I have a story too, then,” says Joey, and his bones
seem to reanimate with a new kind of solidity, less rage and more—something. I don't have the word. Something makes me sit up and look at him differently, to see more than Scott's dangerously broken little brother. “It's about Scott, and it's about why I know you were driving that snowmobile.”

I might have been driving. I don't remember. They had me talk with the psychologist that once, but there's all the insurance stuff to deal with, so I don't know
.

Joey clears his throat. “Okay. I'm not a writer, so, not like you. You know they say all writers are good liars.” He looks up, clears his throat again, but when he starts to speak, all that preamble disappears. “Back when Scott and I were kids, we'd go out in the woods and shoot at rabbits. We had our pistols from Dad in our holsters and spent the days having sharp-shooting contests, trying to hit sticks and chunks of dirt and ice floating down the river. Scott was better than me at the range. I can't remember beating him a single time with a backstop and a target. But try and get him to shoot at something floating on the water or stuck in the ice and even when the banks were high he would go on about ricochets and safety until he missed at least half of his chances to shoot.”

He glares at me, but I get it. I wish I had someone else to blame, too.

“He wouldn't even let me hold the gun until I could recite the five rules of firearm safety,” I say. My face twists up into a smile, and I know it's one of the things I teased him about but also one of the things I was drawn to. Scott always had the safety on. I didn't have to stop and read every facial expression, every movement. I trusted him. “I don't remember the crash.”

Joey only nods. “That's what the police said.”

“I swear it's the truth.” I take a bottle of sunscreen out of my purse and squirt a little bit on Scott's lifeless hand, thinking maybe he'll remember this smell, this story. “I'm not a liar just because I write poetry, you know.”