The Memory Jar

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

The Memory Jar
© 2016 by Elissa Janine Hoole.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Flux, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author's copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover models used for illustrative purposes only and may not endorse or represent the book's subject.

First e-book edition © 2016

E-book ISBN: 9780738748870

Book design by Bob Gaul
Cover design by Lisa Novak
Cover image by getty/175816888/©sah

Flux is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hoole, Elissa Janine, author.

Title: The memory jar / Elissa Janine Hoole.

Description: First edition. | Woodbury, Minnesota : Flux, [2016] |

Summary: “Waiting for her boyfriend, Scott, to awaken from a coma after

their snowmobile accident, seventeen-year-old Taylor isn't sure what

Scott will remember from the night of the crash—or what she wants him

to remember”—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015045468 (print) | LCCN 2016002605 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780738747316 | ISBN 9780738748870 ()

Subjects: | CYAC: Memory—Fiction. | Coma—Fiction. | Secrets—Fiction.

Classification: LCC PZ7.H7667 Me 2016 (print) | LCC PZ7.H7667

(ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045468

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Flux

Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

2143 Wooddale Drive

Woodbury, MN 55125

www.fluxnow.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

To Creative Writing Club and the magic cards—
thanks to Maja, Symeon, Cecilia, Lillian,
Aspen, Ally, Evie, Rebekah, and Clayton.

Now

Nobody blames me for what happened. They murmur these words like a lullaby chorus, their fingers gripping my shoulders, their breath in my hair. Scott's parents, his sister, our friends. Even the service dog in the waiting room gives me those sad eyes when I walk past and thumps his tail, twice, telling me it's okay. Nobody blames me.

But they should.

“You can't keep it,” says Joey, glaring at me over the body of his brother draped in plastic tubing and medical tape. “You know that, right?”

I fold my hands into fists and wonder. Which secret does he know?

“It's not your decision,” I say, and it doesn't matter. I'd give the same answer for both.

Then

I was late. I didn't tell him because, hello? That shit is embarrassing. And besides, it was probably nothing. Stress, weight loss, whatever. And what was I going to tell him—what is there to say until you know? The test said you could find out with like 98 percent accuracy when you're only three days late, and I was five days, so I knocked the box off the drugstore shelf into my gigantic shoulder bag and then, you know. I peed on a stick.

It said three minutes. Three minutes is a long time, an eternity. My stomach hovered like a half inch above its normal position, the queasiness riding the buzz of my nerves. My phone counted down the seconds and then spit out this little chirp that made me jump, even though I was watching the numbers. What if everything changed? What if this was that one stupid thing, the one that screwed up my life? It would be a relief, maybe, to find out which of the world's evils would get me at last. My mom would be pleased to find out it wasn't meth or Internet creepers but ordinary sex that got me.

Not that the sex was ordinary. I mean, not that I had a lot to compare, god. Don't judge me. The overhead light in the public bathroom hummed for three minutes, and then I poked the plastic stick out from under the chunk of toilet paper I'd stuck on top of it to keep me from peeking and saw two thick lines in the pee stick, vivid. Pregnant. Vividly pregnant. My stomach lurched down from its perch, and I clapped my hand over my mouth.

Now

I won't leave his room, but I hide in the little bathroom that marks Scott's progress from a bed in the ICU to an actual hospital room. I sit on the flimsy plastic lid of the toilet for twenty minutes at a stretch. I stare in the mirror and remember to breathe and type things that barely make sense into my phone. The psychologist I talked to after the regular doctors were done with me suggested that I “start the healing process” by writing down whatever comes to my mind, but all I can write about is Scott and the crash. I tell myself that if I can get it down, put it into words, I can make sense of this.

I finally muster the courage to go back out there, sit beside his bed and look at his face, but I can't stop thinking,
I was about to break up with you
. His chest moves with a rhythm so regular—like he's never had an emotion. What if he's different? What if he doesn't wake up? My hands burrow into the pocket of my hoodie.

Scott's sister brings me ginger ale, in a cup with ice. She brings me soda crackers as if she knows. Does she know? Joey glares and glares, and I twist my hands in my pocket, staring at Scott. Wondering about his head. The crunch of the impact still sticks like a song on repeat, and then the thought, again,
I was about to break up with you.

“ … come with?”

I blink, turning to look at Scott's sister, Emily, who stands in the doorway. I have no idea what she just said.

“Come on, Taylor.” She reaches out to me like she's a mom and I'm a little kid, and I find myself reaching for her, too, and she squeezes my hand. My fingers squish together and I think about the ring, snug against my belly in the pocket of my sweatshirt, hidden from sight. Nobody knows, except maybe Joey, I don't know. Joey's a loose end.

Joey's staying put, crouched on the footstool, refusing to abandon his post.

“I can't,” I say, but I let Emily pull me, even though I don't want Joey to win. It occurs to me that he might want to talk to his brother in private. But shouldn't it occur to him that I might want to talk to my boyfriend in private? To my ex-boyfriend? To my fiancé? I can't decide whether the ring should be on my finger when he wakes up or not. If he wakes up. Will he remember? If he doesn't, will I tell him?

“Order anything you want, sweetheart, except you have to get the decaf.” Emily squeezes my hand again, and she must know, with a comment like that. She must. Did Scott tell his whole freaking family or what?

“You need to get some sleep,” she says. “It's been hours and hours.”

Sleep! Of course, she's talking about sleep. I exhale my relief and follow her out the door, to an elevator that drops three floors and makes my head spin so that I have to clutch the metal bar, and then I think about all the sick people who have clutched that bar and I feel kind of vulnerable. I don‘t know if I've ever felt like this before. I even follow Emily's directions and order a decaf.

There's a beat, a moment of actual silence. Emily and I pick at our raspberry scones and sip our coffee and breathe. For the first time in eighteen hours, I can nearly escape the constant refrain in my head.
I was about to break up with you.

“They're going to start taking him off the coma medication,” says Emily, still staring at her plate. “The swelling has slowed down.” She looks up for a second, and our eyes collide. “He's going to be okay,” she says.

I nod, but I can't swallow my food, and even though I know it's ridiculous, I swear I can feel my stomach swell out until it fills my sweatshirt, until the ring in the pocket is clearly outlined in the fabric and everyone can plainly see both of my secrets. What do I do with this knowledge—that my first slip of thought when she said that he would be okay was the hope that he wouldn't? No. Not a thought, even, not that solid. It's not even a feeling. It's a reflex, like when the doctor whacks that little rubber mallet against the soft spot beneath your knee cap. A jerk of a response, the instant I wanted Scott to die.
No
, god. Not to die. To forget, maybe.

“That's awesome,” I manage to croak out. “That's amazing.” It really is. We hit the snow ridge so hard—they say we both flew over the top, but I was lucky and landed in a snow drift. Scott hit the ice headfirst. The snow was packed into my ears, but I heard a crunch.

I lurch toward the restroom, abandoning Emily at the table.

Then

I tossed it in the trash. It's not like it was the first time I'd ever thought about having Scott's baby. I mean, we've been together since I was fifteen and he was seventeen, which was, like, prime time in terms of daydreaming about the perfect future with my perfect husband in our perfect mansion (according to the game of chance Dani and I played in our notebooks), with our four children of above-average intelligence (according to the lines on my palm and the cryptic answers of Dani's Magic 8-Ball).

Exiting that bathroom, squinting my eyes a little against the glare of the lights and the scrubby people tugging their kids around by the arms, I didn't really feel any different. It was real, but it wasn't, and I didn't know what direction to walk so that people would stop noticing me. “There she goes, that pregnant girl,” I was sure they were saying. “She was going to be a writer, or maybe a doctor, but now … ” There was so much to regret.

“She got knocked up in the passenger seat of her boyfriend's truck,” said the next guy, glancing over from a display of cheap watches.

His wife followed his gaze, her eyes sliding over mine. “And do you know what she was thinking about when it happened?” she said, in my head.

“Whether her ACT scores were going to be in the mail,” answered her husband, and both of them shook their heads sadly. Such a tragedy.

I shook my own head.
Jesus, Taylor. Get a grip.
Wish for a happy ending.