The Memento (41 page)

“Art, you bastard. How could you go and tell Jenny, or Agatha, or whatever it is you want us to call you? I’m not like Grampie. You swore you’d keep that a secret.”

He turned then but he looked at Jenny. “See, I told you to just let this alone.”

“She doesn’t even know what I’m talking about. She’s in total denial. An altered reality.”

“I do too know what you mean, you freaks. I can’t see the dead. Maybe I believed that stuff back when I was a kid. I ain’t going chatting with Pomeline. You’re out of your mind, Agatha. You’re the one in an altered reality. Art’s just indulging you.”

“I told you this was a bad idea, Jenny.”

“Do not call me that, Art. And you, Fancy, you are the one being indulged.”

“Everything is a bad idea, just one after another. This ain’t just a bad idea, it’s an abomination. Grampie used to say what you send out the door in the morning will come back to scratch at the door in the night if you haven’t made your peace. I made my peace, but you two have not made your peace with what happened, and that ain’t my problem. We all swore over there on the island, didn’t we?”

“We did. Pomeline fell,” Art said.

“She didn’t go
falling
off no cliff. I don’t see why you keep pretending it’s so. And are you trying to blame me? That’s nonsense to put it on me,” I said.

Jenny was rocking her head back and forth like she was a wind-up doll breaking down. “We need to go over to the island
and set things right. Art’s bought a little boat for me, down in the harbour. We are going to take that out to the island. We’ll do a prayer. Just as they did in that story Sakura told us about. Remember? You can call Pomeline for us. Her body was lost at sea. It’s August. It’s Obon. Her spirit is loose. Don’t you remember? Won’t you at least go look for her in the mirror at the front of the house?”

There was no way I was going to tell them I’d checked that mirror every day, and right then I swore to myself not to look again, no matter how much I was tempted. “No, I will not look in that mirror. You should take it down. And I ain’t going over to the island. You two don’t seem to understand some of us have real lives. I have my daughter to get back. I can’t go on no ghostly errands for you. What would the social worker say?”

“Well, to start with, I don’t know how you think you’re getting your daughter back—”

“Jenny, that’s enough,” Art said. “You need to take a sedative and go to bed. You’ll kill yourself.”

Jenny bit her lip and went back to rocking her head. “I’m going to die soon enough, so what does it matter? If you won’t help me I can’t force you to. And if you don’t even believe in your own gift there’s nothing I can do. She only comes in the night, and we’ll be safe with the windows closed. Maybe we should board them up again. We’ll be safe … for now.” Jenny coughed. “But Pomeline’s going to do something dreadful, just you watch.”

A few days later Art and I was eating breakfast in the kitchen. Jenny was still in bed. She had retreated into herself since her outburst at the pond. She still kept a watch on me, though. While she stopped with the demand to speak to her dead sister, the weight she’d slung around that night did not leave.

We heard a creaking sound in the hall early that morning. Jenny didn’t get out of bed until much later. Art and I clutched our coffee
cups, suddenly afraid, like we was kids, and we strained our necks to look down the hall. Art stood up and turned around, his arms out, like he was going to protect me.

Jenny arrived, infuriated, in the doorway. “Art, I told you to keep the windows closed. You should never have taken the boards off. I told both of you. And you know how I feel about flowers, Fancy. You know how I feel about cut flowers. You’re like a deranged florist, that’s what you are. You both know what this means, what you’ve done. Didn’t you even hear the wind bells warning you? Didn’t you even hear those, you idiots? Why do you think I had them hanging!” She was thrashing her cane around and her voice was ragged. We told her we didn’t know what she was talking about.

“First you refuse to help me and then you act on your own, without even giving me a warning. You want her to get me. To punish me. You went and called the dead, you and your stupid flowers. And you, Art, with your need for therapeutic ventilation. You’re helping Fancy. You two were always thick as thieves, one escape after another. But this is no child’s play. You want her to kill me.”

“I didn’t open the windows, Agatha,” Art said.

I went scurrying by Jenny in the hall as Art was trying to reason with her—we didn’t open any windows at night and no one was cutting flowers and bringing them in the house. No one was doing anything in the night but sleeping.

But sure enough as I come out into the grand hall the door was wide open with a breeze blowing in the screen. The windows Art had unboarded were opened wide. And there on the big marble-topped round table was the huge vase full of glorious, fresh-cut flowers.

Art come barrelling into the room behind me and Jenny came wheezing behind him. “Neither of you did this?”

We made to close the windows and Jenny banged her cane on the floor. “It’s too late. She’s in the house now and we’re never
going to get her out again. The point of no return, you imbeciles.” She went out to the verandah and swung her cane at the glass bells. They shattered on the wooden floor and she left them there, the jagged pieces, with bits of yellow and blue flowers on the shards.

T
HERE WAS
a pattern now—weird things happening, and then nothing but the normal eccentricity of Jenny and Petal’s End. We resumed our routine, the embroidery, Art’s group therapy activities. Art was now making a concerted effort to act like a psychologist, and he said his activities would help wake up our true emotions. Sometimes feelings don’t need no waking up, I lectured him. Hadn’t he seen that already? For a time there was not another word about which was crazier, going in the boat to the island, or Pomeline returning as an avenging ghost. Grampie said to choose your words carefully, that you speak of a thing once and before you know it, there it is, in the room with you, conjured up.

One morning I went out to the garden to look for raspberries. On the way back I glanced toward the front of the house and I noticed there was a path of rose petals leading from the house to the garden, just as there had been the day of the garden party. I
walked alongside of it, slowly picking up speed until I was charging back into the kitchen where Art was making coffee. I dragged him out to see. He stood there, holding his coffee cup, squinting from the brightness of the morning sun.

“Look what Jenny’s been up to,” I said. He shrugged. “She’s crazy, Art. That’s all there is to it. We’re living here with a crazy lady.”

“There’s no way she could have done this. Jenny can hardly get around with a cane. Maybe
you
did it.”

I couldn’t believe it. I slapped him right across the face and went running through the path of petals to the front door. I dashed up the staircase and down the hall and into Jenny’s bedroom. She sat up in bed wearing a black satin sleep-mask.

“Pomeline?” she cried out, trembling with fear. Jenny’s voice made me catch my breath. She lifted the mask up with one hand, the other groping for her thick glasses on her bedside table. She was like some newborn kitten without her glasses, all vulnerable, mewling. “Pomeline,” she whispered again, looking over at the door.

“It ain’t your dead sister. It’s Fancy Mosher.”

I would like to say relief come over her but it did not. I moved into the room and went over to Jenny, this trembly thing in the bed in her white cotton nightie. I knew then it wasn’t her who put them rose petals down. There was no way she could have got out of bed, gathered them up and scattered them about in the night just to scare me.

We were in such a state that when we heard footsteps coming closer we both shook uncontrollably. We stayed huddled up together until we saw Art in the doorway, and Jenny and I both started laughing. We kept laughing and laughing until Jenny’s weird giggles trailed off into a horrible veil of weeping and coughing that draped over the room. I moved to comfort her again, and didn’t she start screaming for us to get out and leave her alone to rot and die.

Art gestured to me and I followed him down the stairs. “She’s seriously ill. She’s making out she’s okay, but she’s not. She’s on powerful pain medication but I think she’s taking too much. It’s making it harder for her to breathe, and it’s messing with her mind. I don’t know what to do.” His cheek was red from where I slapped him. Art wasn’t no psychologist—he was just a young man trying to be a peacemaker.

“Well, I guess that means she’s got to stop pretending, don’t it, about what happened out there on the island? You can’t set the past straight when it’s twisted up in lies, and she’s running out of time.”

“You’re right, Fancy. And we’re not trying to hurt you. We’re trying to help you. Jenny’s got this idea in her head, but beyond that, she was trying to help you by bringing you here.”

The stress we had been bearing for twelve long years was causing this mayhem. That was what I arrived at in that moment—what happened on the island had damaged us beyond repair. Between the two of them they was making me crazy, Art acting like it was all resolved and, behind him, Jenny acting all creepy and wanting me to do her a séance. After a time I couldn’t come up with a single explanation except what I’d been avoiding—it really was Pomeline come back from the dead, set on getting hard, sharp and even … until we were all broken corpses just like her.

Jenny now spoke relentlessly of how Pomeline was in the house seeking reprisal. She pointed her finger at me, as we sat having cake on the verandah.

“You need to set things straight with her, Fancy Mosher.”

She and Art were drinking wine. It wasn’t taking much to get Jenny tipsy. And Art was drinking far more than normal. He’d been doing that the last few nights, when he gave up on settling
Jenny down. He didn’t even lecture her about mixing her pills and alcohol, for if he did she’d just deny taking the medication.

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. At that, Art put his hand on the table and told me Jenny had found Grampie’s letter. This was what was fuelling her.

“I did find it,” Jenny said with a slur. “I did. I found it a few years ago when I was here by myself. I would drive myself out and stay the night. I went up to your room and looked through it. Granny kept repeating your name when she was in the nursing home. I wanted to know what she was going on about. When I came out here to go through her things, I found the embroidery you did for her. It’s upstairs in my room. I went searching for a reason my grandmother couldn’t forget you, and I found the letter. The twelfth-born Mosher can see the dead.”

“It’s not fucking true,” I screamed.

Art shook his head, back and forth and back and forth, like it was some fucking pendulum in one of them grandfather clocks all over this house. He started waxing on about the stress of the many tragic things that had befallen me.

“Tragic things happening to me? What about Jenny? What about you, Art Comeau? You was out on that island too.” His head stopped swinging, and he and Jenny shared a look, as they had been doing since I got there, like they had a new secret, not just the old one.

“I can hear the noises, and I can see the flowers and the petals, but I can’t see Pomeline,” Jenny said. “I can’t see her, but I can sense her. Only you can see. Only you can hear her words and talk to her. My grandmother deserved what she got, Fancy, and Pomeline knew what Granny did. Pommie was the one who found out, and she told me. Well, she didn’t tell me but I went looking.” I frowned, unsure where she was headed. “All those years pretending. Marigold was no better than my mother. She was worse, if that’s possible. There’s no end to the horrors in the well of evil.
There are no tidings of comfort and joy, nothing to save us all. The only good one was Pomeline, but I was just a little girl and I didn’t understand. Children do not always understand that things are more complicated than they appear.”

I didn’t know what Jenny meant by all of that. We was just kids on that island, that was true. And children understood what lying could conjure. But I didn’t understand in the slightest what she meant about Marigold.

“Fancy, I’m so sorry. You have to forgive me, too. And you have to tell Pomeline that I’m sorry. She won’t listen to me. I’ve tried and I’ve tried. It’s my fault. But you and Art helped me.”

I wanted to wring her neck. Like we’d had any choice. She always had to have her own way, when she was twelve, and when she was twenty-four. Jenny was drunk, stoned and jabbering on. I asked her what Marigold did but she just kept bawling and bawling, that dreadful tearless weeping. Jenny held out her hands and Art took one. He gave me such a hard glance that, as angry as I was, I reached out and took the other one. Anything to wind her down. Her hands were cold and dry.

“You have to promise me you’ll sleep in the hall at the bottom of the stairs. My bedroom door must be shut at night. Pomeline’s in the house and she’s putting out the flowers and she’s going to come up the stairs and get me because of what we did. It was my fault. You just did what I told you to. All will be calm. All will be bright. Calm and bright.” She kept saying that over and over again with her eyes shut, her childhood religion welling up. A chill went through me for I thought of what she’d done, all those things she’d done, and pulled us into, and that maybe her childhood religion did have a power we had not ever taken seriously enough.