Escape from Memory (3 page)

No, let’s be honest. I didn’t just want to discuss my chance for wheels.

I turned and studied my mother’s face. She was staring out at the tree again. Her eyes were a dull, ordinary brown—the same color, come to think of it, as the lifeless garden. She had strong features and high cheekbones. One time Andrea had told me, “Hey, maybe that same bone structure will show up in your face when you get older. Lucky you!” But my bone structure wasn’t noticeable like my mom’s. Mom also had long, thick, steel gray hair, cut with bangs at the front—not the least bit fashionable even in decades-behind-the-times Willistown.

I thought about the debate Andrea and Lynne had had the night before and Lynne’s triumphant, “Can you honestly picture Kira’s mom as an abused woman?” I had never seen my mother hit another person; I had never seen her so much as disagree with anyone. But everything about her gave off an air of,
Don’t mess with me. You’ll regret it
.

I sighed.

“Mom, last night at the sleep-over we were goofing off, and
Andrea said, ‘Why don’t we try hypnotizing someone?’ And then, somehow, we decided I should be the one, and—”

Mom positively stiffened.

“You were hypnotized? You let yourself be hypnotized? How?”

“With a—” I gulped, caught in the intensity of Mom’s stare. “Lynne found this antique pocket watch that had belonged to her great-grandfather. Andrea swung it in front of my face. And then, well, I guess I was in a trance. I remembered something.”

“What?” Mom said in a low, urgent voice.

This was the most interest my mother had ever shown in a conversation with me.

“Well, I don’t know if it’s a real memory,” I said. “It was like a dream or something. I was a really little kid and my, um, mama and I were escaping from something bad. We were someplace I’d never been before, and there was danger, and … It’s not real, is it, Mom?”

Mom didn’t answer.

“Mom?” I said again.

Mom seemed to be in a trance herself.

“So it will happen,” she said. “Unless …”

I thought my mom had her verb tenses confused.

“No, Mom, I want to know if this is something that
did
happen. In the past. Did I—did we—really escape from some other place? Not California?” I was dead certain, suddenly, that the place I’d seen under hypnosis was not California.

Mom seemed to snap out of her trance instantly.

“We came here from California,” she said insistently. “That is true. I would not lie to you.”

“But before that,” I said, remembering the scenarios Lynne had proposed: illegal immigration, war-torn foreign lands, a daring escape across some dangerous border. “Were we from someplace else first? Did I remember something that really happened?”

Mom looked straight into my eyes.

“Put it out of your mind,” she said. “Do not think about this again. Do not let yourself be hypnotized again.”

“But, Mom …”

Mom glanced around fearfully, as if whatever evil we—I?—had escaped from might be lurking in the willow tree. She stood up abruptly and went inside. I followed her.

“Mom, I need to know—”

Mom whirled around.

“No,” she spat out. “You do not need to know. You need—I need—for you not to know!”

“But I remember—”

“No, you do not remember. Not enough, thank God.”

“Enough for what?” I asked, thoroughly puzzled.

Mom scooped up my sleeping bag and dropped it in the laundry room. She slung the strap of my backpack over her shoulder and deposited it on the floor of my bedroom. I wouldn’t let myself feel guilty that she was cleaning up my mess. I was on her heels the whole way. Finally, on the threshold of her room, she turned to face me.

“When will you leave me alone?” she asked.

“When you answer my question,” I said daringly.

“Then I will have a shadow forever” Mom said with a sad smile. “Because your question is not to be answered.” She shook
her head. “Kira, you are young. You do not know. You will have to believe me. Some memories are best forgotten.”

Her voice was soft, but with an edge to it. I took a step back, and my mother gave me a rueful smile, as if to say,
See? I knew you couldn’t handle this
.

I
TOLD
L
YNNE
. O
F COURSE
I
TOLD
L
YNNE
. W
HEN YOUR BEST FRIEND
is a genius and your mother dumps a puzzle worthy of Einstein in your lap, you’d have to be an idiot not to ask your friend for help.

“I don’t get it,” Lynne said.

It was Monday afternoon now. We were back in the Robertsons’ family room, sprawled at either end of the couch. I had ridden the bus home with Lynne after school, just so I could talk to her in private. Both her parents were still at work. So was Mom, of course, but there was some unwritten law: I went to Lynne’s house when we wanted to talk. She came over to my house only when we wanted to study. Sometimes she spent the night when she had a big test coming up the next day. She claimed our apartment had a great atmosphere for thinking—not exactly the reputation I desired.

I picked at a piece of fuzz coming out of the couch’s rough weave. “You’re a lot of help,” I said, slumping farther into the couch.

“Well, you haven’t given me a lot to go on,” Lynne said. “Just
a bunch of mysterious double-talk from your mom. She really won’t say anything else?”

I shook my head.

“And you really don’t remember anything else?”

“I’ve tried,” I said. “I racked my brain all weekend. But it’s like taking a test—the harder I try to remember, the further away the answer seems.”

“Hmm,” Lynne said.

“Oh, sorry I forgot. You never have trouble with answers on tests,” I said.

She kicked me gently.

“Shut up! I do so! I know just what you mean. When you’re thinking, ‘I have to remember the capital of Paraguay, I have to remember the capital of Paraguay,’ you don’t have a prayer of remembering anything. But if you think about something else, the answer just jumps into your mind. Asunción.”

“Show off,” I said. “I haven’t known the capital of Paraguay since fourth grade.”

Fourth grade was Mrs. Beltzer’s class. I could picture the blue social studies books we’d used, the flag that tilted at the front of the room, the school buses rumbling outside the window. Those details came to me so clearly; it didn’t seem fair that the memory I really wanted was so wispy.

“Maybe I should try hypnosis again,” I said hesitantly. Mom had forbidden it. But how else was I going to find out any answers?

“I don’t know,” Lynne said. “I did a little research, and it sounds like it’s not something to mess around with.” She pointed to a stack of books on the coffee table. I had a feeling they represented every bit of hypnosis research material available at the Willistown Public Library.

“Geez, what are you going to do?” I asked. “Write a report?”

“No, no” Lynne said soothingly. “I was just curious. A lot of that’s really flaky. New Age-type stuff. But with serious hypnosis—like what psychiatrists use—there’s a lot of controversy about false memories. Like a therapist asks a hypnotized patient about child abuse, and then the patient wakes up convinced that she was molested when she was seven. Even though it’s not the least bit true.”

“Maybe something like that happened with me” I said. “What did you guys tell me to think?”

I was suddenly angry. Here I’d been agonizing for two days about some stupid memory that my so-called friends had planted in my mind as a big joke.

Except Mom had acted like it was true. And dangerous.

Lynne was shaking her head defensively. Her long brown hair whipped in her eyes.

“All Andrea said was, ‘Tell us something we don’t know,’” she said. “And then you started talking about darkness and evil. Really, Andrea just wanted to know if you had a crush on John Mizer from your geometry class. She never expected … trauma.”

I did have a crush on John Mizer—sort of—but there was no way I was going to admit it now.

“That wasn’t fair” I said sulkily.

“No,” Lynne agreed. “All of these books say it’s unethical to try to get information from people under hypnosis without their explicit permission. But we didn’t know that Friday night.”

I shivered.
Cold. It was so cold in that room with Mama. Waiting.

“Wait!” I shouted. “I remember—”

“What?” Lynne asked excitedly.

The memory was gone.

“Nothing,” I said. “This is hopeless.” I slumped back into the couch.

“Not really,” Lynne said. She opened a notebook and wrote something in her usual, deliberate cursive. I waited. Then she ripped out the page and handed it to me. “Here’s what you need to do.”

It was one of Lynne’s lists. She’s famous for them. I read it aloud.

“‘One: Find Kira’s birth certificate. Two: Find Kira’s mom’s birth certificate. Three: Find Kira’s parents’ marriage certificate. Four: Find immigration and naturalization papers, if any. Five: Find other documents, if necessary. Six: Seek out other living relatives, if any. Seven: Confront Kira’s mom with known facts.’ Should I read her her rights first?” I asked sarcastically.

Lynne glanced at the list.

“Okay, okay, maybe that last one’s a little harsh. I didn’t mean it that way. But you deserve to know the truth about your own past.”

I could just hear Mom’s response if I told her I deserved to know the truth:
Deserve? What does anyone deserve?
She drove me crazy.

I stuffed Lynne’s list in my pocket.

Tuesday after school I went straight home, knowing full well that Mom would have to be at the library until at least six. That gave me three hours for detective work.

I started in Mom’s room, because I felt guiltiest about snooping there. I wanted to get it over with. She has a bed, a dresser, and a desk. Nothing on the walls, nothing lying out. The first dresser drawer contained a comb and a brush—that’s all. The
second held a single bottle of hand cream. I closed my eyes, thinking about drawers in the Robertsons’ house. I’d hung around there enough that Lynne felt comfortable yelling out from the bathroom, “Hey go snag my moms silver barrette out of her dresser, will you? It’s in the top drawer on the right.” And I’d go and find the barrette in an explosion of bobby pins and hair clips and old Christmas cards and bank statements and pictures of other people’s babies. It was the same way in every room of the Robertson’s house. Finding Scotch tape meant searching through a kitchen drawer full of Lynne’s old report cards and her older brother’s soccer pictures and her mom’s grocery store receipts from the past five years. Every drawer you opened meant a walk down memory lane, whether you wanted it or not.

No wonder Lynne thought I’d find my birth certificate and my parents’ marriage certificate just lying around. The Robertsons had memories. My mom had a comb and a brush and a single bottle of hand cream.

I went through the rest of the drawers, but they were just as bare. Five pairs of underwear and two bras in one drawer, three T-shirts in another, two sweatshirts and two sweaters at the bottom. No envelope crammed with personal papers and pictures and the past could have been hidden in any of those drawers.

The desk contained ten pens, eleven pencils, and a ruler. Nothing else.

I thought to look for false bottoms, secret doors, but Mom’s furniture was too straightforward: cheaply made, poorly veneered, easily forgotten. It was clearly furniture bought by someone who didn’t really care.

I looked under the mattress and behind each drawer, and I was still in and out of Mom’s room in ten minutes flat.

The rest of the place wasn’t much more challenging. We have sheer, practically see-through curtains on all the windows in the living room, and they seemed to taunt me by blowing around as I searched the couch:
Why are you even trying? Nothing could be hidden here
.

Who was I fooling? I knew every inch of the apartment, from the front door that squeaked to the bathroom window that didn’t open all the way to the dent in the kitchen linoleum that I myself had made, dropping a tureen of soup years ago. There were no hiding places.

Still, I was ready to go tear apart even my own room—on the off chance that there was some corner of my own drawers that I’d been overlooking for the past dozen years. Then, searching the kitchen, I reached my hand to the back of a cabinet and closed my fingers around something I didn’t know was there: a key. I pulled it out. The hard plastic key chain read,
SAFE-DEPOSIT BOX, FIRST BANK OF WILLISTOWN
.

Safe-deposit box. Of course. My mom wasn’t exactly what you’d call a big-time risk taker. Naturally, she would have placed all of her important papers in a fireproof bank vault.

Especially if she didn’t want me to see them.

T
HE NEXT MORNING BEFORE
I
LEFT FOR SCHOOL
, I
TUCKED THE SAFE
-deposit box key in my pocket. I’m not sure exactly what I wanted to do. I figured Lynne could come up with a plan.

I packed my own lunch and yelled at Mom’s closed bedroom door, “I’m leaving now! Bye!” Mom had the day off, to make up for working Sunday. So she wasn’t even up yet. I didn’t wait around for a response.

I was one of the few kids at Willistown High who could walk to school. It’s ten blocks. A bus would stop for me if I stood on the corner and looked pitiful when it was raining or snowing or just plain cold. I’m sure that all the other walkers had parents who would drive them during bad weather, so the bus drivers really went out of their way to be nice to me.

But this was a pleasant spring day, almost warm already. I took off walking on my own.

I thought again about my mother’s virtually empty drawers, her refusal to go anywhere she couldn’t walk, her strange silences and cryptic replies. She really was an unusual person. I just took her oddities for granted—and so did everyone else in
Willistown. Small towns have the reputation of expecting everyone to be the same, but in Willistown people seemed to protect my mom in all her peculiarities. My mom’s boss, Mrs. Steele, probably should have fired my mom when all the library’s records were computerized—what kind of a librarian won’t touch a keyboard, can’t look up any computerized reference source, can’t even answer the question “Is this book checked out already?” without walking over to the shelf to look? Even though she’d kept her title and salary, I didn’t see how Mom could be anything but a glorified clerk now—good for nothing but shelving books. Yet Mrs. Steele always raved about Mom, her knowledge of books, her encyclopedic recall of obscure details, her patience and speed in helping patrons.