The Memory Jar (14 page)

Then
(Memory Jar)

Maybe it's a little bit funny that the only thing Scott and my mom agreed on was my writing—the fact that it was a waste of time and energy, that it isolated me and kept me from being ambitious enough. “You could do anything on earth,” my mom said, scowling at me in the mirror. We were getting ready to go to some college fair thing at the high school, and she was already mad at me before we left because she didn't like the results of the interest inventory I took at school. “You could be a fancy-pants lawyer, make some real money and get us up out of all this.” She waved her hand around our bathroom, like only my becoming a lawyer would get us out of the shitter. I stared myself down in the mirror and tried to remember that she was mostly acting like this because she hated going to the school, making small talk with the other parents, smiling at the people she knew had actual college funds set up for their kids. All that stuff was like torture for her. I didn't tell her about my plan to become a cardiologist. I told her I was going to be a poet, because a small victory can feel good even when you love someone.

“Why are you always scribbling in that silly book?” Scott would say, and he would tackle me to the floor, kissing my face, my hair, my neck, making me laugh like crazy until I couldn't remember why I'd want to put words in my silly book either. And maybe that was one of the reasons holding me back from choosing to go to St. Cloud with him. Having Scott around was bad for my writing. My poetry turned out all stupid and sappy, and I never got more than a paragraph into my fiction before he'd have me distracted. It's not that I was one of those writers, all tortured and sad all the time—someone who can only be inspired when they're in pain—but happiness made writing less vital to my overall survival. The worst part might have been that he didn't understand my poetry, not even the stupid, sappy ones. He didn't really try, waving his hands helplessly at the sight of a set of stanzas. It bothered me, but it was a small thing, really.

“You can write as a hobby.” Mom leaned into the mirror, running a gloss over her lips and then wiping most of it off with a tissue. She pressed her lips together. “What are you going to do with an English degree, anyway?”

I didn't tell her about my vision of the future—the double major with pre-med, the internship and the literary magazine, studying anatomy and subbing poems and stories to journals and living in a funky apartment with Dani, with friends who drank coffee and talked about ideas and had formulated opinions about gender and feminism. A stethoscope around my neck, making rounds. A chapbook of poems. Watching open heart surgery at the elbow of an amazing surgeon. An anthology of short stories that would get me a novel deal. Dani and I talked about it all the time, and it felt anything but unrealistic. It felt like the inevitable truth of our future, but I knew that if I spoke the words aloud to her, all wisps of possibility would vanish. The future could be fragile like that.

It was always a little bit uncomfortable to me that a tall, blue-eyed hockey player with broad shoulders and a shy smile wasn't automatically in my vision for my future. Dani was, and poetry and medicine, but not Scott. It's not that I couldn't find a place for him there, if it turned out that way, but it certainly wasn't an automatic.

“What do you even see happening to us?” Scott asked, that night on the island. This was before the ring appeared, before the flames started to die. It wasn't a desperate question, but a curious one, and I wanted to answer him in a way that would make both of us happy. I still cared about that, even though I was about to break up with him, but here he was making me cocoa with a little whittled stir-stick and there was no way off the island without him. I shook my head. “I'm sorry, Scott, but that's the least of my worries right now,” I said.

At that moment, or before that moment, was he promising this girl I didn't even know that she could take our baby?
Why would he ask me to marry him, then? They were
close
. Why didn't he say anything? Why did he leave this mess for me?

Now

Days pass with no more signs of increased consciousness, but no negative changes either, and the hospital staff moves him again, farther from the nurses' station and closer to the rehab center. I send messages online to Scott's roommate and two of his hockey friends asking what they know about this Kendall person, who has not shown up at the hospital since the bizarre game of rummy. Emily has promised to let me know the instant she sees or hears anything from Kendall, but I don't tell her why, not yet.

The mystery texts have stopped, but Dani hasn't had any more luck with the other plan either. Eight weeks. I have to have this taken care of before week twelve, before the first trimester is over. I'm still queasy all the damn time, but I'm keeping food down, so I haven't lost any more weight. Assignments are given and are due, and I have to work hard in school to keep up, even with the extra help and forgiveness and Ms. Smith's kind face especially. Even now, though, my brain can go funny—kind of slow and sleepy-like, and I keep trying to remember what happened.

“How did you sleep?” Dani turns down the music when I get into the car, and she makes me lift up my sunglasses so she can look at my eyes. “Your pupils are responsive to light,” she says, before I can even shrug. Everyone we know is becoming an expert on head trauma.

“I'm good.” Even though she's not looking at me now, I shrug because that's what it feels like, this waiting. “I wrote a poem.” It's not a nice poem, but I read it to her anyway, and then I crumple it up and put it into the memory jar, which is slowly filling up even though I'm no closer to remembering the crash than I was a week ago. At the bottom of the jar, there's a thin layer of ash. My face itches, and I resist the urge to claw at the scab.

“It makes me feel all worried and stuff,” she says. She spins her hands on the steering wheel in time to the soft reggae music in the background. “All that stuff in there about swallowing pills. Are you all right?”

“It's not about suicide,” I say. “I promise. It's a survival story, like I said.”

“Okay, then. If you're sure.”

“I'm not going to kill myself.”

“No killing,” says Dani, but then there's a stupid awkward silence and the seat belt presses against my abdomen like a noose.

Then
(Memory Jar)

Tonight I keep

imagining the tragedy

the wash of tingling panic

beat—the stop the start of casualty

the dizzy curl of pain behind

the sinking rising surge

of errors and questions

heroic instances or dumb paralysis

it's all the same

Already I can feel

the sodden tissues feel

the blurry nestle of pills swallowed

at someone else's insistence

the walls of my will wearing to dust

and my anchored eyes collapsing

into pits like sunken treasure—

the tales that are told

Survival stories

Now

Still no word from Kendall or any of the people I messaged asking about her. None of my limited searches—I don't even know her last name—are turning up any information, and I start to think sometimes that I imagined her. It's worse when I get myself convinced that I've imagined all of this, when I come out of the fog of my brain and recognize reality.

It's not that I would ever give the baby to this Kendall person, or to her sister, for that matter, even if Scott were to wake up right this instant and tell me it's what he wants. Still, there's this part of me that wants to let this pregnancy's future be determined by chance. I don't know what that says, that there's a part of me that basically wants my free will taken away. This part of me has seriously considered letting the outcome of Scott's consciousness determine my fate—I could draw up a chart with rows and columns, matching up with different outcomes.
Remembers pregnancy exists AND can utter complete sentences? Have the baby
.
Remembers pregnancy BUT has dramatic personality change? Terminate.
Look, I know that sounds horrible, and I suppose it is, but I guess I'm not the first girl in the world to feel terrified and unprepared for motherhood.

I stare at Scott's face, thinking of a baby who will have his blue eyes—eyes I could never see again. He was good at eye contact, you know. Not only with me, though his gaze could melt me right down to my middle under the right circumstances. Scott looked at people, and something kind of quietly assertive in his eyes would be like “I see you, and I value what I see.” I miss that look, and I wonder if this kid would inherit it, even if its father never opened his eyes again. I wonder what it would inherit from me.

Ms. Smith gets me a spot at the tutoring center for calculus, which is pretty cool of her since she's not even my advisor or anything. The guy whose sad job it is to help me takes a shaky breath before every phrase while he explains each type of problem, and he keeps wiping his hands on his jeans like that will disguise the fact that his palms are damp. His handwriting is meticulous, and I find myself looking at his hands kind of a lot, to be honest. Dani has cheerleading practice, so it's just me and Eric. I like him. He doesn't talk much beyond the necessary, and he has nice breath—cloves and orange, like a fancy grandma's closet. I mean, it smells better than I'm describing it. So Eric is all whispering about cosines or binomials or derivatives—something, honestly I have no idea. It's, like, statistically impossible to pay attention to calculus when you're pregnant and you were supposed to be a heart doctor and your boyfriend's in a coma and maybe your entire relationship was a lie and you're thinking about another boy's breath and your best friend is doing splits in midair and it's four o'clock and you wonder if the office lady with the kid in dance line or whatever is still there selling chocolate bars because there is
no way
you're going to make it until dinner. So Eric elbows me, and I turn away from the window where this very picturesque snow was falling.

“Do you want to”—shaky breath—“get some pizza?” he says, and I think holy shit, is he asking me out? What is this? But then I realize that all the tutors are packing up their stuff and everyone's getting together as a big group. “We”—shaky breath—“usually go out on Friday.”

A few minutes later and I'm riding shotgun in my tutor's station wagon, and then suddenly I'm smiling in a corner booth, drinking a bottle of root beer and watching a bunch of smart kids throw darts and play Ping-Pong and pinball at Thrasher's Pizza.

Mom orders pizza from Thrasher's sometimes, but she usually gets it as take-out, and she picks it up because she stops at the liquor store on her way. Scott and I never went there, and Dani can't go there because she has the most ridiculous crush on the owner's kid and does nothing but blush and giggle the whole time we're there. It's a busy place tonight, not just the usual stoner crowd and the jock crowd but other crowds, too, like us. Eric sits beside me in the booth, and I see how sorry he feels about me and my plight. To him, I'm the girl whose boyfriend is in a coma, or maybe the girl who almost died in the snowmobile crash. The girl who is hopeless at calculus, definitely.

“So Taylor,” he says. “Are you doing okay? Like in life, not in calc.”

I laugh and look away. “Yeah, because we both know the status of calc.” I'm too cool for this conversation. I grab my bottle of root beer, intending to take the most nonchalant of all drinks, but fail with a spectacular crack of the bottle against my front teeth.

“Ouch.” He winces, then peers at my mouth in concern. “I think you might have chipped it.”

My hand flies up to cover my mouth as my tongue explores the edges of my two front teeth and finds a sharp place where there used to be smooth enamel. Oh my god. I did not just chip my front tooth. Then the pain hits, and I can't even believe it. Not only did I chip my tooth, but I seem to have broken it in a way that's serious enough to need dental attention. At six o'clock on a Friday night, while I'm at a tutoring pizza party.
Before
I've eaten any pizza, for fuck's sake. “Bad news,” I say, around my hand. I feel so dumb. I tap my hand, the one that isn't clapped over my mouth, against the table, my fingers drumming out a nervous rhythm.

“Let me see,” and he tries to gently peel back my hand, but I shake my head.

“I can't,” I say. “I'm afraid part of my tooth is going to fall off or something.” The drumming speeds up, the chorus in my head repeating
dumb dumb dumb dumb
. “It hurts.”
So so so dumb
. Now I'm going to have to text my mom to come get me, and she'll be pissed as hell because she's already going to be in her yoga pants with her hair all up in a ponytail and her makeup scrubbed off and her glasses on. I mean, she's going to be pissed that I need, like, emergency dental surgery outside of the normal hours and probably outside of our lame insurance plan that really only covers things like one cleaning every year or something.

“I can drive you home,” says Eric, and his breath doesn't shake.

“You don't have to do that,” I say, my hand still over my mouth. The pain seems a little less. Maybe I can wait until Monday, if I eat soft foods or chew with the back of my mouth or something. “I'll text my mom, or maybe Dani can come get me.”

“I don't mind bringing you,” he says, and it's tempting, even if he wants to talk about awkward things like how I'm really doing, in life-not-calc. I shrug but I also nod, and Eric smiles, pats my shoulder like a friend, and goes to talk to one of the guys at the counter. My tongue won't leave my tooth alone, and I can tell that it's bad, like I'll-probably-die-in-my-sleep-by-choking-on-the-missing-piece-of-my-front-tooth bad.

“It's all set,” he says, tossing his keys lightly in the air. “I paid for your drink, even though you didn't get a chance to drink much of it.”

I sit in his car, holding a chunk of snow wrapped in one of Eric's old T-shirts up to my mouth. “I feel like the world's biggest idiot,” I say, pressing the cold snow gently against my upper lip. The ache from the tooth seems to have spread across my entire face, and I don't know how I'm going to sleep.

“Yeah,” says Eric, and then he shakes his head and laughs. “I mean no”—shaky breath—“you're not an idiot. This is terrible timing, though.”

I nod, but then I realize he probably didn't see me in the dark and while he's driving, so I find my voice. “I'm going to try to make it until Monday.”

He glances over. “I know I only saw a glimpse,” he says, “but it didn't look like you should wait.” He looks back at the road, and his voice gets stronger. “Dentists can do good work with that bonding stuff. Nobody will be able to tell.”

I haven't looked in the mirror yet, but I know it's not going to be a simple fix, from the way it feels on my tongue. If I look, I'm afraid I'll cry and that's not going to happen. My fingers are drumming again—
dumb dumb dumb dumb—
solid thuds of self-loathing on the armrest. “I can't do this.” I can't pretend I'm not freaking out.

“You'll be okay,” says Eric. “The dentist will fix it. You can suck back the laughing gas and not feel a thing.”

I lean back against the seat so hard I'm afraid I'll break it. “But I'm pregnant,” I say, my voice barely above a whisper, and it feels so ridiculously strange to tell someone—to tell a virtual stranger—that I start to laugh and then I do cry and there are tears and snot and a little bit of blood on me, and I bet Eric is really sorry he insisted on driving me home. “I don't think I can have laughing gas.” I giggle through the words, finding it utterly hilarious that I'm laughing while lamenting my inability to have laughing gas. Tears are streaming out of my eyes, and I no longer have any idea which are tears of laughter and which are tears of fuck-my-life.

“Whoa.” Eric draws a couple shaky breaths and keeps his eyes on the road, mostly. “Listen, Taylor, when I asked if you were okay, like … this is sort of the kind of thing that might make you say no. You know?”

I wipe the last of the tears away, though I'm still giggling and maybe hiccupping, too. “I think he might have been cheating on me.” Peace breathing. I pull myself together.

Eric slows the car, puts on his signal to turn into my street. “So is it true, that stuff people have been saying?” He parks and lets the engine idle. “I mean, I'm sorry. You can tell me it's none of my business, but Taylor, are you”—shaky breath—“
are
you thinking about suicide? This pregnancy, I mean—does anyone know?”

I'm still buckled in, held to the earth and the seat of Eric's station wagon by nylon straps and metal clasps. My fingers rest on the belt but make no move to release me. “You know,” I say. “Dani knows. And Joey knows now, but things with Joey are complicated, I'm not even sure.” What does he mean, everyone's been saying? “Have people been saying I'm suicidal?”

He keeps his eyes straight ahead, and I see his throat bob as he swallows, while he decides how to respond. It's a very uncomfortable moment. “It's just … there was a post, I think, I'm not sure where it showed up first, some person who was friends with a friend or something, I don't know. They posted about how they were super worried about you, that they thought you were probably deeply depressed and suicidal. They said you tried to jump off a bridge or something, and then when you chickened out at that, you crashed the snowmobile, you know. To kill yourself.”

“Wait, what? This is all online?” Nobody knows about the jumping except Dani and Scott. I haven't told anyone else. Mystery posts from a friend of a friend?
Unless he told someone.

I unbuckle the clasp and my seat belt slides off one shoulder and bumps softly into the housing above my shoulder. “I can't remember the crash,” I say.