Escape from Memory (2 page)

I wanted so badly to scream,
Stop it! This isn’t a joke!
But I couldn’t find my voice.

And didn’t I
want
this to be a joke? If it was a joke, it wasn’t real.

Lynne’s calm, rational voice came as a relief.

“There are lots of things wrong with your explanation,” Lynne challenged Andrea. “First, Kira mentioned cobblestone streets and alleys. That doesn’t sound like California, where she’s supposedly from.”

Andrea shrugged.

“It’s a big state. I’m sure there’s a cobblestone somewhere out there. Anyhow, if you were running away wouldn’t you lie about the place you were running away from?”

Lynne ignored the question. “Two, there’s the foreign language Kira was speaking….”

“It’s probably just Spanish, and we didn’t recognize it. Lots of people speak Spanish in California.”

Lynne could have pointed out that all four of us were taking Spanish in school. But we knew Mr. Sutherland, our teacher, had been hired more for his basketball coaching skills than his perfect Spanish accent. He probably wouldn’t even recognize real Spanish himself.

Lynne moved on to her next point.

“Three, what about the ‘thunder and lightning’ that was probably gunfire and bombs?” she asked.

“That doesn’t have to be
war
,” Andrea said sarcastically. “Maybe Kira’s dad was chasing Kira and her mom and shooting at them.”

Lynne was clearly losing the argument, but she didn’t act like it.

“And third, and most important,” she said, “can you honestly picture Kira’s mom as an abused woman?”

I could see Andrea struggling with that one.

“Maybe she’s changed?” she offered halfheartedly.

Lynne grinned triumphantly.

“Gotcha!” she declared. She turned to me. “So what are you going to do about this, Kira?”

“Do?” I whispered, the best I could do. I tried to remember how to make my voice sound normal, how to make my face look normal. “Why do I have to do anything?”

“Aren’t you going to talk to your mom and find out the truth?”

My friends had met my mother, plenty of times. They knew she didn’t drive her car, wouldn’t touch a computer, wouldn’t allow a TV in our apartment. But they’d never really talked to her beyond, “Hello, Mrs. Landon. Is Kira there?” They still seemed to believe that she was like Lynne’s mom, who’d given Lynne the menstruation talk a full month before the school nurse brought it up. Or Andrea’s mom, who kept better track of who was dating whom at Willistown High School than Andrea did. Or Courtney’s mom, who shared dieting tips and hot fudge sundae splurges with her daughter on a regular basis. My friends actually thought my mother was someone you could talk to. Someone you could ask a question.

I forced my hand to reach into the bag of M&M’s. I placed three pieces of chocolate on my tongue. I chewed. I swallowed.

“Okay, sure,” I said, proud of how steady I managed to keep my voice. “I’ll ask.”

That wasn’t good enough for Lynne.

“But if she tells you none of it’s true, will you believe her?”

“Yeah,” I said. “My mom doesn’t have enough imagination to lie.”

None of my friends disagreed.

E
VENTUALLY, WE PUT IN THE VIDEO, ONE OF THOSE SAPPY
dramas my friends and I love to cry over. This time, I couldn’t even keep track of which character had the fatal disease. Now that I had an excuse to cry I didn’t feel like it anymore.

What would my mother say if I asked her about my supposed memory? Probably
Such foolishness,
her usual commentary on most matters. I thought of Lynne’s question: “Would you believe her?”

It was my memory. Why did I need my mother to tell me whether or not it was true?

I concentrated hard.
Long ago, far away, my mother and me, running away, my mother saying,
“Sazahlya, sazahlya” …

Or was it my mother? I could get only flashes of memory like a videotape that had been partially damaged and badly patched. I couldn’t picture “Mama’s” face. I could feel the warmth of her arms around me, I could smell her perfume—

My mother doesn’t wear perfume.

That was all I needed. The woman who’d carried me, the woman I’d called “Mama”—that wasn’t my mother.

Strangely, that made me feel better. The supposed memory I’d found under hypnosis had to be false.

I made myself concentrate on the movie. I made myself eat more M&M’s and more Fritos. I laughed when everyone else laughed, but I didn’t cry along with the others. I wasn’t producing tears for some silly fiction.

In the morning Lynne’s dad came in and woke us up with his usual call: “Pancakes, anyone? I’m preparing a feast. If you young ladies sleep any later, we’re going to have to call it dinner instead of brunch.”

Sleepily, I regarded Mr. Robertson with new eyes. He was middle-aged, balding, just a little bit paunchy. He sold insurance in a little office downtown. Every year he helped Lynne with her science fair project. He was just there, no more noteworthy than the Robertsons’ well-worn furniture.

But he was Lynne’s father. If Andrea was right, I had one like him somewhere out there.

Or … not like him. Mr. Robertson was a nice guy, if you bothered noticing him. Andrea thought my father was so horrible that my mother and I had had to run away and hide, hundreds and hundreds of miles away.

I thought about everything my mother had ever said about my father. He’d died in a car wreck. He’d worked with computers, which was my mother’s excuse for avoiding them. Now that I thought about it, didn’t that sound more suspect than romantic?

Then I remembered my mother showing me his picture.

“This doesn’t do him justice,” my mother had said, holding out a photograph of a dark-haired, laughing man. “He had such vigor, such life. You remind me of him sometimes.”

There was an unusual softness in her voice. No one could sound like that talking about someone they hated.

I remembered that I’d decided my memory under hypnosis was all a lie.

But my dreams all night long had been such a jumble. I’d escaped with Mom—no, “Mama” whoever that was—again and again, all night long. Gunfire still echoed in my ears; I could still smell smoke and spices, exotic and familiar, all at once.

Gunfire? Smoke? Spices?

I remembered a movie Lynne had made us all watch once, about medical students who had their hearts stopped temporarily, just to see what it was like. They all had visions that haunted them horribly and quite dramatically once they were restored to life. They couldn’t distinguish anymore between reality and dreams.

Maybe hypnosis did that too.

Why had I agreed to it in the first place? Just because we were bored, and Andrea was insistent, and Lynne said, “Oh, no, you’re not messing around with my brain,” and Courtney said … I didn’t even remember what excuse Courtney had given to avoid being the one hypnotized. I noticed we didn’t try to hypnotize anyone else but me.

Had my friends suspected I had some unknown memory lurking in my brain? Had I suspected it?

Lynne poked me in the ribs.

“Earth to Kira,” she said. “Dad asked you three times if you want bacon or sausage.”

I looked around the familiar sunlit room, feeling as if I’d been in a far different place.

“Um, neither” I said. “I’m not very hungry.”

“More for me, then,” Mr. Robertson said cheerily. I noticed he didn’t rush off to the kitchen to finish cooking. He perched on the arm of a chair. “What’d you all do last night after the boring grown-ups went to sleep?”

“We watched this really old movie,” Lynne said,
“Dying Young.”

Mr. Robertson clutched his hand over his heart in mock dramatics.

“Oh, you are so cruel,” he said. “I remember when that was just out. Julia Roberts was in it, right? It couldn’t have been more than two or three years ago.”

Lynne tossed him the video box.

“Check it out,” she said. “Early 1990s. Read it and weep.”

“I guess your mother and I must have walked five miles each way through blinding snow to go see it,” he said. “Or was that how we got to school? I’m so old, I forget stuff like that now.”

“Very funny, Dad,” Lynne said, yawning. “Oh, yeah, and we hypnotized Kira.”

One of the most maddening aspects of having Lynne as a friend was that she told her parents things—just about everything, in fact.

“Did you try to get her to walk like a duck?” Mr. Robertson asked. “Did you convince her she was really a monkey swinging through the jungle? I remember my friends and me trying to hypnotize each other when we were kids, messing around. It never worked.”

“Well, it worked on Kira,” bigmouthed Lynne said. “She revealed this really incredible memory about—”

I panicked. I don’t know why. Why did it matter what Lynne told her dad?

“Oh, you actually believed me?” I said, too loudly. “I made all that up. Ha-ha!”

Lynne, Courtney and Andrea gave me stares only slightly less intense than those the night before. Even Mr. Robertson regarded me curiously. The house was so quiet, I could hear the clock ticking in the next room.

Finally, Lynne broke the spell.

“I didn’t know you were such a great actress,” Lynne said evenly. “Guess you’ll be starring in one of these movies someday.”

Lynne and I have been friends since kindergarten. She knew me too well.

She knew I had something to hide.

A
FTER BRUNCH—WHICH,
I’
LL ADMIT WE DIDN’T EAT UNTIL ONE
o’clock—parents started arriving to pick us up. At least, Courtney’s and Andrea’s parents came. Mr. Robertson drove me home.

I sat in the backseat, only half listening to Lynne and Mr. Robertson debate about whose turn it was to mow their yard. I tried to remember when Mom had started assuming other people would drive me around. Everyone else took it for granted. After Courtney and Ashley left this afternoon, none of the Robertsons had said,
Oh, Kira, why don’t you call your mom and see what’s keeping her?
No, Mr. Robertson had just hollered, “All right, girls, load up the car. Or are famous actresses-to-be too good to carry their own sleeping bags?” The Robertsons were so used to driving me places that I didn’t even have to ask. They just showed up in front of my doorstep before school football games and sleep-over nights, before parades and all-county dances.

Meanwhile, my mother had a perfectly good car just sitting in our garage, unused.

I
thought
I could remember riding in that car. I sat beside Mom and couldn’t see over the dashboard, even with my car seat making me taller. We drove and drove and drove, cross-country, I guess. I could remember Mom reaching over occasionally to hand me Cheerios and juice boxes. I could remember arriving in Willistown, Mom saying, “Look at that steeple, look at that dome, look at all those Victorian houses….” The word “Victorian” stuck in my brain. It reminded me of something.

Mr. Robertson pulled up in front of our place, one of those Victorians Mom had admired all those years ago. Maple Street is full of them—it’s one of Willistown’s few claims to fame. The house we live in is a three-story monstrosity, painted pale blue, with turrets and a cupola and frilly gingerbread trim, all the way around the porch. A hundred years ago when it was built, just one family lived here. (Of course, they did have twelve kids.) Now the house is divided up into apartments. Mrs. Steele, who is both our landlady and Mom’s boss at the library, has the first floor; Mom and I have the second; and the third has been vacant for as long as I can remember.

“Call me after you talk to your mom,” Lynne said.

“Talk to her about what?” I asked, opening the car door.

“You know,” Lynne said.

“You two aren’t plotting anything, are you?” Mr. Robertson asked.

“Dad!” Lynne protested. “This is private.”

“Don’t mind me. I’m just the chauffeur,” Mr. Robertson said.

“There won’t be anything to talk about,” I said as I stepped out. I slid my arm through the straps of my sleeping bag and backpack and shut the door firmly behind me.

Stairs lead up the back of the house to our apartment. There’s a wide second-story porch at the top—if we wanted to be fancy, we could call it a balcony. When I reached the top of the stairs, I realized that Mom was sitting silently in an old wicker rocking chair on the porch, staring off into space. This was nothing new. Mom watched our backyard the way other people watched TV. And there’s nothing
in
our backyard. Grass, a willow tree, a lilac bush that wasn’t even in bloom yet. In a month or so there’d be a garden that Mom and Mrs. Steele would plant together, but right now it was early April, and the garden was just a rectangle of dead dirt.

“Hi, Mom,” I said.

Mom nodded at me—a greeting that did nothing but acknowledge my existence.

I opened the door to our apartment and shoved my backpack and sleeping bag inside. Then I pulled another wicker chair over beside Mom and sat down.

Mom rewarded me with the ghost of a smile.

If I went along with it, Mom would be delighted to have the two of us sit this way for hours, in silence, regarding the willow tree arcing below us.

I couldn’t take it. I looked out at the small wooden garage at the edge of our backyard.

“Mom,” I said, “will you let me drive our car when I turn sixteen this summer? After I take driver’s ed, I mean.”

Mom tilted her head thoughtfully.

“Certainly” she said. “If you have someplace far that you want to go.”

There was a lilt to her voice that I’d been hearing all my life. But now I heard it differently. Did my mother have an
accent
?
Did she talk the way she talked because she was weird or because she was not speaking her native tongue? Strange, how I’d never wondered that before.

“Will the car even work anymore?” I asked impatiently. “It’s been sitting there—what? Ten years? Twelve?”

Mom waved her hands in front of her, just as impatiently.

“It is no matter,” she said. “If you need it, it will be there for you.”

That’s my mom. I’d just wanted to discuss my chance for wheels, and she was turning the conversation into some metaphysical meditation.