Memory Wall: Stories (28 page)

Esther doesn’t reply. Robert says, “Okay, let’s do a big one.” He sets his lighter to a wick and the wick burns down and a rocket fizzes into the sky.

Esther’s gaze casts up through a thousand leaves, a sea of them shifting against a flower of noiseless, golden sparks. Which part of them is her, and which part is the rest of the world? She
tips backward onto the lawn. The sparks fall through the sky. A locomotive stampedes through her head.

When Esther wakes, it’s night. She can feel the sanded planks of a floor beneath her knees, a windowsill beneath her fingernails. Out the window, clouds blow past stars. The more Esther looks, the more stars she sees.

Somewhere below her a little girl’s voice is calling hello. Esther feels her way to the doorway. It is pitch dark in the hall. An old fear returns, rising in her chest, climbing her throat. She finds a stairwell; there is a wobbling banister. One flight, two flights. There’s a bit more light on the first floor, starlight washing through curtainless windows.

No furniture. No doors on the cupboards. Again she hears a voice, calling from somewhere outside. Esther finds the front door. Beyond is a harbor wind, and a sky swarming with infinitesimal lights.

Standing in the belt-high thistles are eleven girls, their faces smears of white in the darkness. Miriam is easy to spot: the tallest of them. Barefoot. Regal in her tattered dress. She takes Esther by the hand and helps her climb down out of the doorway. “We’ve been waiting,” Miriam says, and smiles a sweet-faced smile. Esther breathes. The wind settles. The twelve of them stand in the thistles looking back for a moment at the empty house crouched there in the night. Then they all start walking down the street.

26.

Robert is a senior in college; he’s home for Thanksgiving. Five days, seven inches of snow, twenty degrees. It’s the first snowfall of the year and everything is familiar and new all at once:
the leafless hardwoods ringing his parents’ house; the mingling smells of slush, gasoline, and firewood in the garage; the confused, wondrous looks on the faces of his two four-year-old sisters as they look out the living room windows into snow for the first time.

His father slices carrots in the kitchen. His mother wrestles the girls into matching pink snowsuits. Out the windows everything is either gray or white. The radio murmurs another storm warning; the twins stand very still as their mother pushes mittens over their hands.

Robert leads them out through the garage. A last few snowflakes slip down from the clouds. The girls plod through Robert’s tracks in tandem, heads down, into the big, white amphitheater of the backyard. They stand together amidst the falling white. Then the girls’ exuberance surges; they run out in front of Robert; they laugh, they fall down, and roll over, and squeal. Robert lopes after them, hands in his pockets.

After a few minutes the girls trudge between the naked willows at the left edge of the yard and disappear into what was once Esther’s property. Now it’s vacant, a realty sign covered with snow at the end of her driveway.

Every tree, every post of the garden fence, is a candle to a memory, and each of those memories, as it rises out of the snow, is linked to a dozen more. Over there is the birdfeeder Robert broke his wrist trying to hang; over there Esther helped him bury his parakeet named Marbles. He used to throw a football onto the section of the roof above that garage window and wait for it to come rolling off the gutter. He shot a squirrel out of that locust tree and carried its body on the blade of a shovel to the compost pile. He made tie-dyed T-shirts one summer day with his grandmother in the same spot where his sisters’ little boot prints now crisscross the snow.

The girls are throwing snow up into the air and watching it glitter as it sifts down around them. One yells, “You are, you are!” and takes a few running steps and then falls down onto her hands and knees. Robert helps her up. Already the heat from her face has melted the snow on it. “You’re okay,” he says.

Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.

In the five days Robert will be home his sisters will learn to say “rocks,” “heavy,” and “snowman.” They’ll learn the different smells of snow and the slick feel of a plastic sled as their brother drags them down the driveway.

We return to the places we’re from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines. “You’ve grown up so fast,” Robert’s mother tells him at breakfast, at dinner. “Look at you.” But she’s wrong, thinks Robert. You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

Now the girls are clawing sticks out of the snow and tracing shapes with them. Above them the clouds shift and—abruptly—sunlight avalanches across the yard. The shadows of trees lunge across the lawn. The snow seems to incandesce. Robert has forgotten that sunlight can look so pure, pouring out of the sky, splashing across the snow. It brings tears to his eyes.

Jing-Wei, the taller of the girls, lifts a long, black branch out of the snow and tries to hand it to him. “For Rob-ert,” she says, and blinks up at him.

Thanks to the American Academy in Rome and the Idaho Commission on the Arts for financial help while I worked on this book. I’m also indebted to Wendy Weil, Nan Graham, and Susan Moldow for their continued confidence in my work. Lots of folks helped with particular stories, especially Rachel Sussman, Rob Spillman, Ben George, and Laura Furman with “Village 113”; Cheston Knapp with “The River Nemunas”; Matt Weiland and Helen Gordon with “Procreate, Generate”; and Jordan Bass with “Afterworld” and “Memory Wall.” My mother, Marilyn Doerr, offered useful feedback on all six stories; watching her care for her mother taught me about patience, love, and the fragility of memory.

This book is for Shauna: wife, editor, counselor, best friend.

Anthony Doerr is the author of three books,
The Shell Collector, About Grace,
and
Four Seasons in Rome
. Doerr’s short fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes, a National Magazine Award, and a Pushcart Prize, and has been anthologized in
The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories,
and
The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction
. He has won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. In 2007,
Granta
placed Doerr on its list of twenty-one Best Young American novelists. Doerr teaches in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College, and he lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.