The Memento (45 page)

She drew back, but then softened, like she was suddenly feeling terrible sorry for me. She was up and down like the tides. Out crawled her low, raspy voice. “Fancy, Art saw your mother. She’s in the hospital. Ronald was there in the lobby. Isn’t that what you said, Art? You should go and see her. She doesn’t have long. I’ve been telling you all summer and you act as though you don’t hear.” Jenny started coughing.

Right then I decided I should go and make peace with my Ma. That or be just like Jenny and spend the rest of my life senseless with regret.

R
ONNIE WAS
outside the hospital having a smoke. “Well, looky who decided to think of someone other than herself.” Ronnie took a hard drag on his cigarette, sucking it right down to the filter. He dropped it on the ground and crushed it under his heel. He sized me up with a look that offered no mercy. “Fancy Mosher, come to see your mother? Look at all the trouble you caused her. I wish when she had that car accident that you’d been thrown clear and hit a tree so hard that was the end of you. But you’re like an earwig, Fancy Mosher. You don’t stop crawling no matter how hard life stamps you down. Marilyn tried her best for you. Tried helping you with your baby. Tried helping you in the hospital. But you just had to have your own way. At least your mother could admit what she did, but look at you … still hiding out in your goddamned fantasy land so you don’t never have to grow up and take responsibility like your mother did. If you come
to give her even a bit of grief, you turn right around and march your ass back over the mountain to Petal’s End and rot away with those two other freaks.”

Ronnie hocked and spit out a big yellow glob and wagged his finger right in my face.

“You were born strange, just like them Parkers. And don’t you go telling me it’s your mother’s fault. I knew Marilyn like no one else ever knew her. I always loved the woman. I waited my entire life for her.”

He went white because he realized he was talking about her like she was already gone. I knew then Jenny and Art weren’t just trying to get me out of the house. Ronnie cried like Jenny, no tears coming out of his eyes.

“None of you appreciated her. And your Grampie weren’t the saint you like to believe. Not that I believe in any of that horseshit, but he could have at least pretended and give the woman some peace. And you, you could have done the same. She’s up there now believing to her dying breath that her dead baby boy’s going to eat her alive when she passes.” A great large noise come out of him, this big whooping sob. He sucked it right back in and waved me away without letting me say a word.

People were looking at me as I ran through the hospital corridors but it made no difference. On the ward an attendant took me to her room. He asked when the last time was I seen Marilyn. He couldn’t hide his shock when I said not for six months. She was gravely, gravely ill, and I should prepare myself. The cancer was all through her now.

I took a deep breath and went in. The room was full of the prettiest bouquets. Ma lay in the bed and didn’t her eyes open wide. She’d gone yellow. She held out her hand and I went to her crying like a child. She comforted me as the dying always comfort the living.

Ma took my hand and said they took a biopsy off her liver. “When will you get the results?” I asked.

“Fancy, I ain’t getting out of here. There’s no getting better for me.”

“Sure you are, Ma,” I said. Ma always got better. She was like me, an earwig. She didn’t never die, no matter how hard you stomped. She stroked my cheek with a puffy finger. Though she hadn’t been smoking there was a faint smell of nicotine soaked into her flesh.

“I did you a picture,” I told her. Out of my purse I took her needlepoint wrapped in a towel. I unwrapped it for her, shaking because it had changed—it wasn’t a lady bending over, making a bed with a little boy beside her. It was a lady lying on a bed, and she had a yellow face, and there was a boy holding her hand. Ma started crying in such a gentle way, and it plays in my ear even now, as though I’ve opened a music box.

“Oh Fancy, thank you. You saw John Lee. It was just me all these years wanting to change what happened, the old me just tormenting the life out of the younger me. The past don’t change—just how we look at it.” She paused. “You’re the one who needs to know how sorry your Mama is, Honeysuckle. Your Grampie was right taking you away, giving you a chance, because I couldn’t do it.”

I held her hand and kissed it. Then I took out my embroidery of Melissa by the little brook and showed her how Melissa was lying with her face in the water, how Jenny went and wrecked it. I burst into tears.

“It’s okay, Fancy baby,” she said. “You did the best you could. Accidents happen, terrible, terrible accidents, and we can’t take them back. If the dead come looking for you maybe all they want is for you to let them go.” She pulled me close and we stayed like that for a moment, until I heard Ronnie clear his throat. I didn’t even know he’d come in the room. A nurse come in next and Ma cradled my head. “It don’t matter now, Fancy,” she said. “John Lee forgives me. I see from your picture, and he’ll be there to greet me. You found your gift, Fancy, in your pictures.” She
sang faintly and I could just make out the words,
Baby’s boat the silver moon, sailing in the sky
.

Ma gave a soft moan and the nurse said she needed her meds. It was time to leave. “Farewell,” I whispered, but she didn’t open her eyes. Ronnie nodded at me. It was the best he could ever do.

The sun was setting in the west by the time I was driving up and over the mountain. A sultry breeze blew in as I looked over to the island. Long shadows fell on the road. There was no consolation for me.

I understood now it wasn’t Jenny who went and changed my needlework. It was like that the whole time. I would check the others as soon as I got to Petal’s End. That kept hammering through my head as the car came down the hill into Lupin Cove. I drove over the bridge and turned up the road and at last down the long lane to Petal’s End. It was dark in the forest and the car headlights shone a dim beam directly in front. A deer ran into the road and stood there glaring at me. I slammed on the brakes and squeezed my eyes shut. There was a crackling of branches as the deer moved on, and I opened my eyes. That ghastly white thing was right on the hood of the car gawking at me, its fingers scraping against the glass windshield, long stringy hair, grimy and dirty. It was too dark to make out its features but I could hear its piercing singing through the open window. It was Pomeline, I was sure. She had come back to punish us.

My foot pressed hard on the gas and the car lurched ahead, throwing the creature into the ditch with limbs flailing. I screeched into Petal’s End and parked in front of the big house. Art came out on the verandah and folded me into his arms, and I whispered that Jenny was right, Pomeline had come back to get us. It was her opening the windows and cutting flowers and laying out petals.
She was furious we were lying. She’d make us tell the truth, each one of us.

“It’s bedtime, Fancy,” he said, patronizing me. “I shouldn’t have let you go down to the hospital alone. I’m sorry. I’m not thinking straight. None of us are.”

I had no time for this and brushed past him right into the sitting room, turning on all the lights as I went. I wanted to see my pictures, but none of them were there, where I had kept them. I ran down the hall to the Annex. The door had been unlocked and opened, inviting me in, terrorizing me. Art was behind me and he kept telling me to calm down, that I needed to have a nice cup of tea, he’d make me a pot. It was all overwhelming, he said, too much for me, too many people passing away. He started crying, and I realized I was as well.

I turned back then and went right up the stairs, taking them two by two even in my high-heeled shoes. Down the hall, Jenny’s door was wide open and she was reading by lamplight. Art was behind me still saying I needed to just take a time-out. Jenny placed her bookmark and closed the book. She was waiting for me.

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier about what Marigold did if you knew for so long? That John Lee was your uncle, that your Granny let him drown?” I was sobbing.

“Oh,
now
you listen to me,” Jenny said. “She killed him. She stood there and watched a child drown. It’s no different than if she had shot him in the head. It’s no different than letting Pomeline fall down over the cliff. And it’s no different than how Granny stood there as my father died. Remember? When you came down the hall and found us? My father was wiggling around like a helpless spider caught in a web. My grandmother did nothing. I was too young, too weak, to help. Even so, when I rushed toward him she stood in front of me, and her strong arms scooped me up like I was nothing more than a kitten rolled up in a quilt. She screamed and cried, yelling at Daddy that it was his fault for not being the right kind of son. He was to blame for not being a real man like his
father wanted him to be. It was his fault John Lee died because she did it all for him, but he was like the rest—ungrateful. He had wasted the life she gave him with his perversions. Being stupid enough to marry Estelle, letting his father down.

“Daddy finally stopped moving. I kicked Granny in the shin and ran free. I was trying to hold his legs up so he could breathe. But the dead can’t breathe. Then you and Art came along and you found us.” Jenny took a big breath of air, wheezing violently, then continued. “When Marigold was dying she told me that John Lee had come back for her, she could see him. It was him that tripped her in the gazebo, and she said that you saw him, too.”

“But I didn’t see him. I saw you. It was you.” We was both hollering, and Art came right in the room and shouted for us to calm down. He was going to have us both committed to a mental hospital if we didn’t get a hold of ourselves.

I needed answers. I ran back down to the Annex and right into the big room at the end where the curtains blew long and white. There was nothing but the wires in the ceiling, no chandelier any more, no Charlie Parker hanging with his eyes bulging. But on the walls Jenny had hung every embroidery picture I done, and they had all turned bad, every single one. I saw all my stitching, intricate and perfect, but they was all distorted now, serene pictures from a child’s imagination turned into nightmares on display. Jenny had made the room into a revolting art gallery. The space had been many things over the years—a chamber of wrongdoing.

I looked at my embroidery of Grampie on his sofa, but he wasn’t napping with his arms hanging down like they did. Grampie was lying there dead, in the same position I found him in, his arms crossed over his chest. The small miniature of Marigold wasn’t of her napping but of her lying there dead. And there was Pomeline, but she wasn’t sitting in a field of white flowers while we ran around laughing. She was falling through the mist as we thrashed about in the flowers screaming. Each a memento of a time to come.
While I am the one who can capture those moments, it is how each of us lives that guides the needle in my hand.

Art had come up behind me without me noticing. “We should go sit down and talk.” He was desperate now, his low voice breaking.

He told me this was how they always looked, that my perspective was finally getting clearer, that being cooped up in this house alone was changing how I was able to comprehend. We were ignoring things because it was all we could do. Art looked exhausted as he went on about stress and lack of sleep and worry. I looked over at the embroidery of Jenny by the lily pond with her swans, and she was in a lawn chair in her kerchief with her eyes open, a pink flower in her hand. That one wasn’t no different, at least, but it was the only one. I wondered why. I had a tantrum trying to figure out what I was seeing, and Art slapped me right across the cheek. My head flew back. My skin, my scar especially, was burning. There was stars in my eyes, but I was suddenly calm, like he’d knocked the panic out of me and what was left was a dull fear.

There was a thud. Art held his hand up to his lips, which at first I misread as guilt from hitting me. But his eyes revealed that he could hear it too, the steps in the hall, the wood creaking. Then running, and a bitter laugh, the door slamming. I threw on a light switch by the door and we hurried out in the darkness but there was nothing there. We heard a crash upstairs and ran up. Jenny was on the floor in her nightgown.

“Was that you running around down there, listening, spying?” She was groping for her glasses. I kicked them out of the way. “What kind of game are you playing, Jenny Parker?”

Art moved past me, picked up Jenny’s glasses and handed them to her and helped her up. “We need to stop this,” he said.

Then came that shrill singing and we all heard it, almost no tune, words we could not make out. Rushing into the hall, I
pointed as a shimmer of white descended the stairs. It stopped, waiting there at the bottom in the semi-darkness. Art came out behind me with Jenny at his back, as fast as she could be with her cane, leaning on the door frame. “There,” I said, pointing.

They looked and said in unison, “Where?”