The Memento (42 page)

I could not stop myself from shaking. My thoughts kept drifting to the island, how I could not keep straight what had happened out there—what was truth and what was a lie. Jenny opened up those
eyes. She could sense I was starting to believe, not in her, but in the memento. It was an affliction put upon me, just as Jenny was born into her illness. I was a twelfth-born, and my time had arrived.

We sat for a while, holding hands. Jenny’s breathing got slower. Her head teetered forward, all that wine and fear. She started snoring. Art put his hand on my shoulder, and when he felt me shivering still he put more pressure into his long strong fingers, and the heat of his skin sent tingles zinging through me. He carried Jenny up to her room and came back down to the verandah for me. He said he’d get blankets for us to sleep at the bottom of the stairs, so we could tell her we’d kept our word. He went off and I cleaned up the dishes. When the kitchen was respectable I went to join him.

I heard a creaking and my bones froze, a chair rocking back and forth outside. I looked out the window—Art in a porch rocker with a glass of wine. I opened up the window and told him he’d scared me. He asked wasn’t I scared worse opening up the window and letting more hobgobblies in? I laughed, but then shut it tight. I walked over to the table and poured myself a glass of wine and I drank it right down. I knew it was wrong but that did not stop me, it did not, and I took the bottle out onto the verandah and sat beside Art and poured myself another glass. A glow come over me, and it was as though life was going to be okay again, and it seemed the summer sky that late at night was happy for me, streaks of orange and pink mixed in with the stars coming through. A few bats darted by.

After a few glasses, we went in, giddy like children, lying in our fort of mats and blankets Art had arranged on the floor. A longing for Art went through me, and him being my childhood friend fell away. He was a man, and I wanted him on top of me and inside of me, his smell and marks on my body, protecting me from whatever had come to call at Petal’s End. A desperate animal come out in us both. Art grabbed me, and his lips and hands were all over my
body, and he was whispering how he’d wanted to do this for years. As my eyes squeezed shut and the swirling nighttime sky surged into my mind I heard something else breathing. Art lunged forward on me one last time before he collapsed.
Shush
, I whispered and he held his breath but the noise was still there. We sat up, naked and slick with sweat. I saw a flash of white at the top of the stairs. He didn’t see it, he said.

I went naked up the stairs, quietly down the hall, but Jenny’s door was closed up tight. At the bottom of the staircase Art stood at a window he’d opened for some air. He shut it before I could say a word and we lay down on the floor in our burrow of blankets. I realized how drunk I was. My head was spinning as I lurched off into oblivion.

A pounding head and nauseous stomach woke me to the grey light of the early morning. All the windows were open, and on the table in the hall was a huge vase of lilies. My gasp woke Art. I covered my body. The shame was coming over me just as the fear was. Jenny must have done all this. She must have seen us. Art shook his head, reminding me there was no way she could have, not as sick as she was. We wrapped our bodies together and he stroked my face, and in time he carried me up the stairs to my room. I was too sick to do a thing but fall back asleep.

When I came down later there was a note. He’d taken Jenny to the hospital. She had woken at noon in severe pain. He’d told her I was feeling poorly and they’d let me sleep, and would call from the hospital. There was no lilies by the door. The previous night felt like a dream, except for how sticky I was between my legs, and the smell of our sex so thick I could taste it.

I had a bath and went off in the wildwood where we used to pick blackberries. They was still growing, succulent and dark on stiff canes, protected by thick sharp needles, which kept pricking and stinging my wrists and fingers. It seemed the blackberries were plotting against me and I knew I was not in my right mind.
A simple routine would ground me, I decided, so I returned with my bucket half full. From afar the house seemed like a dollhouse, getting bigger as I approached, out of proportion, and looming over me as though it had risen up from a grave. I could not trust anything, least of all myself.

I was the only one in the mansion but it did not feel empty. I did my chores, whistling, and made a blackberry pie. But I could not shake the feeling the house was alive. I rode Art’s bike down to the village as fast as I could, to have a break from Petal’s End. The lane was quiet and the village was thick with fog. I could barely make out the bridge, and could not get even a glimpse of the beach, but the air was fresh and salty and it invigorated me. I had been hidden away for too long. This was the problem. It had been weeks that I’d been sealed away behind the trees.

I pedalled back with a clear mind and fell asleep on the verandah, until I was startled awake by singing. I couldn’t tell if it was my voice, if I was singing in my sleep, and maybe it was me who was cutting flowers and putting down petals, and letting night air in, me that was invoking the dead. Or maybe we were all cracked. I shook my head, still full of hazy images, only I knew they weren’t dreams, or at least I thought I did. My memories were colliding into each other. Perhaps I was indeed going insane. This was how it happened—where lies became truth and truth lies, where a memory was nothing more than a made-up story we told ourselves. A deceit we could live with, or live with long enough until it made us sick. Haunted or crazy, they’d never let Melissa come back.

I thought of the letter from Grampie, how he said the dead would find me if I was willing. That they come for truth, a truth the living keep entombed. That didn’t make no sense to me as a child of twelve … until the summer Pomeline died, and we took our oath on that godforsaken island, and our corruption took form. I was peering through a window in my mind, back to when
I was barefoot and thin with wild long hair and pink cheeks, when we did not know better even when we should have. An overwhelming desire to see the truth came over me for I wanted to be free. I fell to my knees beseeching Holy Mother Mercy to forgive us for what we had done.

W
E DID
go to the island that day after Marigold had her fall during the concert in the gazebo. Jenny did look to her grandmother, and over to me, watching fixedly as Marigold’s foot went through the wooden floor, in the spot where Pomeline was supposed to stand for the bow. Jenny’s expression changed, the flushed fury flooding in as she watched her Granny fall while Pomeline sat at the piano in all her diminished beauty—her sister who had arrived at Petal’s End vivacious and elegant. Jenny clenched her fists, and it seemed she would plunge them into her own face for a moment, as though she had failed and had to be punished. Instead, she let her arms fall and she stood mouthing her strange prayers. Jenny reached out and took my hand. I was afraid to let go. Art glanced at me. We both knew—Jenny had loosened the floorboard.

Hector knew, too. She’d come to him for a hammer, he told me when we were married. A hammer to make a dollhouse, she’d
told him, for pounding nails in, not pulling them up with the clawed end. I don’t think Pomeline suspected the trap was for her. She had rushed to her grandmother’s aid, even though the old lady was so cold toward her. There had been such tumult, and more came as the smoke rolled up from Hector’s secret meadow. He took Jenny’s secrets to jail with him because he was afraid of her. Art and I were afraid of her too as we stood in our finery in the gazebo.

Estelle saw the island as a place we could be contained, exiled to, while she took command of Petal’s End. We hoped Jenny would stay behind, that her mother would say she was too frail to come to the island, but Estelle was busy taking over the estate. She was worried the garden party catastrophe would send Jenny into an apoplectic fit. But Estelle was a fool, and that would be her undoing. Frailty in the body don’t mean frailty in the mind.

We went out on the boat. That part is true. We were glad Harry and Sakura had taken us away from the calamity of Petal’s End, our unusual summer ending fittingly in such an upheaval of screams and smoke and sirens. Loretta and Dr. Baker were just as glad for us to be sent off for a few days. Harry was an expert outdoorsman, a veteran explorer, and he and Sakura had camped all over the world. What could possibly happen to us? You see, that was the wrong question. It was not what could happen. It was what we could do.

The boat headed north in the bay. We did not turn back once to look at the mainland. Pomeline was behaving strangely. She had slowly dimmed as the weeks had passed, her pink cheeks turning grey, as though a disease was taking hold. She was seasick on the boat. All that is true, and we did not deceive ourselves about this. Pomeline alternated two looks that day, either terrible sad or strangely content.

As I remember this my thoughts push me through the window
in my mind and I am back there, on the boat, seeing again what really happened that day.

Pomeline is staring down the bay, the afternoon sun twinkling bright on the waves. I don’t know how she can stand to look.
Purify
, as Jenny would say,
the blazing purification of the sun. Holy, holy, holy
. She’s been repeating that all morning. Art and I haven’t spoken a word to her. I prefer not to look at Jenny for I see Marigold staring at me instead. She keeps her hands folded together. I keep hoping she learned her lesson, that when you set a trap you sometimes get the wrong thing caught in it.

Art asked me how I was while we waited at the wharf as they loaded our camping gear. We heard the adults talking about Hector—he would be in prison for a long time. Jenny slid over and said Hector got what he deserved, and we shouldn’t feel bad. Art told her he didn’t want to be no part of her games or her secrets or lies and he walked away. Hurt rippled across Jenny’s face and was gone as quick as it come. Then we were on the boat. Norman Reilly took us out, a silver-haired man from a big family of fishermen, and his first mate, his eldest son. Norman knew my Grampie. He nods when I go by.

Sakura reassured us that we are not to blame—time would pass and the memory would fade, she said. The gulls cry overhead as they follow the boat. Even in the mist we know the water is calm and the boat glides onward.

The engine is cut. Harry is standing at the side looking into the fog and he calls out to the captain. “What’s going on? Why have we stopped? Is there a problem? Are we lost?”

Norman is looking into the mist.

“What’s he looking for? Is there a whale? Mechanical problem?” Harry speaks in a strained voice. He don’t want no more worries, no more accidents. I know why we are stopped.

He keeps looking at me and his alarm makes me feel queasy so
I hold up my finger to my lips. “Shhhh,” I say. “He’s listening for the island.”

Harry mulls it over. “Listening for the island … does the island speak back?”

Norman tells him the island never stops speaking. He lets the quiet take over. Jenny’s holding out her arms like she’s doing a spell and we just ignore her. I know Norman and his son think she’s just another crazy Parker.

I stand with sea legs as the boat sways. We hear seagulls crying and waves breaking on the shore. Norman goes back to the wheelhouse and the diesel engine roars to life. We begin to move forward and then to the west. After a short voyage, there she looms, the island, the mists swirling away, birds soaring as we circle around past massive, ancient cliffs, crevasses cleft deep into the stone running from the top of the island and dropping into the pounding waves. The island rises up in front of the boat, the northeast end the only part not surrounded by cliffs, where there is beach. To the left of the remains of the old fishing sheds is a saltwater pond that rises and falls with the tide. At the end of the pond there’s a long rocky spit slithering out into the water, riptides raging where the massive currents of the bay collide.

It’s a hard landing. A wind has come up the bay on the incoming tide and the waves are heaving mountain peaks. Norman struggles to keep the boat steady as his son lowers the dory in the churning water. He and Harry load in our gear. Norman says we might want to consider coming back to shore with him as the weather seems moody. Harry scoffs at the suggestion. The son and Harry row to shore and are almost dumped out there on the rocky barrier beach.

Harry is now waiting on shore, his arms wrapped tightly around his body, concerned as the dory lurches back. The rest of us pile in, and we are almost thrown from the boat, feet soaking wet, except for Jenny in her rubber boots, who is tossed off the boat and
into Harry’s arms. He sets her on the beach and she scampers away. Jenny stands at the top of the steep beach watching us as we haul the gear up. She don’t help. Even Pomeline, with her sore fingers, reaches for a bag. Art bats her hand away gently and she staggers up beside Jenny. Neither of them move, staring off over our heads, the island looming behind them as though they’re waiting for a photographer to snap a picture.

The engine revs and the boat heads off into the fog, and we are alone. The four of us are gathering up gear, me and Art and Harry and Sakura. Jenny starts singing. I look over and notice something else behind her and Pomeline. Small, disfigured, all in white, and I know it’s that thing I saw in the labyrinth, what I had been glimpsing all summer. It’s hard to see through the gusting mists. It disappears and there’s nothing but two sisters.

Jenny comes scuttling back down, and finally she grabs a bag, Harry’s knapsack he’d set down on the rocks. She loses her balance and drops the pack. She falls on the beach as it splashes in the water. Harry is angry, the first time I seen him this way, his face white, biting his lip. He’s sick as a ghoul with Jenny. He’s fed up with children. He grabs the pack out of the water. When we get up top of the beach to the campsite Harry spreads the gear out and the walkie-talkie radio doesn’t work. The batteries are soaked, and so are the extras he brought, and his camera. Harry starts swearing at himself for putting all his gear in one bag. He had no idea it would be such a difficult beach, such a hard landing. To the south, away from the water, it’s a whole other world, sheltered, the trees a living fortification. To the north, the water spews violently onto rocks. And off to the east, the beach covered in a mass of driftwood, overlooking the lagoon.