The Memory Jar (18 page)

Now

“Scott wasn't a good listener.” I didn't even say the word abortion until the night of the crash, and even then I only said it once, and I'm not sure if he heard me. I swear, it was the first time I'd ever said the word out loud. I rack my brain, but there's nothing to this story. “He only looked like he was listening while he was waiting to kiss you.”

I can't believe what she's telling me, that Scott spent the night at her apartment crying about me, promising our potential baby to her sister. That before that, Scott was going to … help
her
get pregnant? No. I can't believe any of this. I sit back down on the chair beside Scott's bed. I want him to wake up. Enough, already, enough of this waiting. I don't understand. When he said those words, when he did that throat-clearing business, everyone acted so happy, like for sure it was only a moment or two away, and Scott was going to wake up and either it would all be the same or … not. I thought he'd be back by now. “Look. I didn't go down there all
la-dee-dah
, okay?” I imitate her stupid up-talking verbal tic. “You're right. I'm
in high school
. And I had to hurry back because my mom didn't allow me to drive all the way down to St. Cloud alone. I didn't know about this for weeks and weeks before telling him—I hadn't told him because, what, was I going to text him about it? I'm only seventeen years old, you know. It's kind of a big deal to find out that your whole life—all your planning for the future and double-majoring and being good at something—all of that has to change because you're fucking pregnant.”

The face she makes, the look on Kendall's face as she stares behind me, lets me know instantly that someone has been standing behind me listening, hearing everything I've just said, but I can't tell, without turning around, who it is. Is it Emily, standing guard in the hall? Is it my mom, overhearing what I've been too afraid to tell her? Is it Scott's mom, in so much pain already that she's been taking meds to help her cope? There are so many weights hanging from any of those possibilities, my chest is crushed completely. “Who is it?” I can't turn around.

“I have no clue,” says Kendall, which means probably not any of my guesses. I turn. It's Celeste, and Lydia, the nurse from the ICU.

“I helped her find you over here in the rehab unit,” Lydia says, and she steps back into the hallway. She doesn't say a word beyond the necessary, but her eyes tell me that she's made for compassion, for healing people. It's something I'm happy to get a chance to see.

“Your session starts now,” says Celeste. “Or actually a few minutes ago.”

“Perfect timing,” I say, and then I walk by her side to the office with walls that go all the way up to the ceiling. And glue guns.

Then
(To Celeste)

In
my
memory of things, there was a brief hug, a dazed look, the sort of physically visible bottling-up. If he was so sad, if he cried so hard in
Kendall's
apartment, why couldn't he spare any emotion for me? Why didn't he say anything about the possibilities, about what he was worried about, any of that? Why did he barely text me all that evening—seriously, I even forwarded the few terse, one-word responses he'd sent me on to Dani so the two of us could dissect them. Thinking about him going to Kendall for comfort makes me queasy, that there was someone in his life he shared more with than he shared with me. And seriously, did he promise my
baby
to her, like my child is some kind of commodity that he can trade? No. Everything about this story unravels for me there.

I remember driving back up north in a fog, unable to cry. I remember that awful feeling like I was too full of everything. I remember distracting myself from it all in the library with Dani, and I remember holding my hands over my belly in the night feeling all that weight settle down on me. I remember sitting up in the center of my bed with my headphones on but no music playing, just a terrible idea running through my mind.

Now

No. Not talking anymore. Not ending up on the fourth floor.

Celeste tries to act like everything is normal, but I can tell she's on edge by the way she sits on her specially ordered, comfy, lily-pad therapy chair—she's stiff and poised to spring. To leap into action, to solve this problem. Me.

“It must be so shocking finding out that Scott had secrets, things you didn't know about his life at college,” she says, and even the way she bends her elbows is anxious for me to speak, to spill.

“It's not the secrets,” I say, and she leans in. “It's everything all at once.”

“Have you told your mother?” she asks, her voice gentle. I shake my head very slightly. No. I have not told my mother.

“Do you want to talk about Kendall?”

“I sort of want Kendall to not exist for a while,” I say, and it's the kind of thing I like the sound of, so I say it in my head again. I don't want to kill her; I'm not unhinged in that kind of awful way. But I do want to be able to sit by my boyfriend and talk to him without seeing her there, telling her own versions of things that don't even make sense.

“Do you want to talk about Scott's recovery?” she says, and I swear she pulls out this clump of purple clay or something, and she divides this big lump into two pieces and hands one to me across the table. I mean, she doesn't plunk it on the table near me—she holds it out in front of her, the whole weight of it making her arm go a bit shaky before I finally realize I'm going to have to reach out and actually take the horrid thing in my hand, or she's going to have to decide to set it down, and it's this whole battle of the wills, and then my fingernails are sinking into the clay and I'm squishing the whole works into a ball in the palm of my hand. We both sit there, kneading the clay for a while, Celeste with her giant fingernails and everything all caked in purple clay.

“It's not much of a recovery,” I say, giving the clay a good pinch. In the beginning, the waiting was acute—we were hoping he would make it through the night, we were waiting to see if his brain would stop swelling in time, waiting for him to breathe on his own. “I thought he was making progress, but then he stopped.” It's hard to face the idea that this may be as good as it gets. That the miraculous, feel-good ending is not always the ending you get—that in fact you may not get an ending so much as a really sad beginning.

“It's hard to keep a positive attitude about progress sometimes,” says Celeste, and she says it in a way that makes it feel like an observation of the world, not a comment about me. She pinches her own pile of clay, and I wonder how much of this talking through trauma with other people might help her in thinking about her own stuff. For a moment it makes me want to be a therapist, too. A cardiologist, a poet, and a therapist, all at once. There are so many paths and possibilities, but this queasy pit in my middle could cut them all short.

“You're really good at empathy,” I tell her, and I peel off a small chunk of purple clay and start to roll it in my hands, warming it into a soft, moldable body. “I'm sure this would be hard without any added complications, you know?” This is safe. I'm not coming off as suicidal or worse. And really, what's the harm now, right? If this is my life, if this continues to be my life, I guess I'll need to get used to people knowing about it and talking about it. The clay baby sits cradled in my palm.

“He might get better, and he might not,” says Celeste. “And either option might take a lot more time than you've thought about, than you've imagined.”

I can't crush the little purple baby blob, so I take the rest of the clay and gently mold it all around the smaller piece, smoothing out the edges with my fingertips. “I'm sort of alone in this, no matter how many people know,” I say, and Celeste doesn't answer but she reaches over and pats my clay thing, which I've molded into an imprint of the space inside my clasped hands. I put it down on the table, and I pick up my memory jar. “I think I've got another story to go in,” I say.

Then
(To Celeste)

Scott took the news, like I told Dani, stoic and whatever. He was reassuring but stiff, and there was that smell on his shirt when he hugged me. I know it was a surprise, and maybe boys don't actually understand that just because I was six weeks pregnant, it didn't mean that I'd
known about this for six weeks.
I told him as soon as I could. I had no idea it was bothering him, the fact that I hadn't told him immediately. I mean, I was working things through with Dani. She's my best friend, and she was there, in my room, on my phone, beside my locker. She kept the secret from everyone else, and she helped me plan out how to tell him. I don't know what I expected when I drove down to St. Cloud all the way from Sterling Creek, skipping my afternoon classes and risking my mom's wrath, but I kind of expected more than a stiff hug and a stiff upper lip. And I swear I didn't say anything about getting an abortion. I couldn't have, because honestly, I hadn't thought that far until after I saw his reaction. This part of Kendall's story is false. How much of the rest is, too? Uncertainty rises up, this feeling that I should have known, and at the same time that I shouldn't have trusted him. But what if he's innocent? What if this Kendall person is lying to me?

When I told him I was pregnant, there was a super childish part of me that thought he'd fix everything, that his response would tell me exactly what I needed to do about everything. I mean, maybe I even dreamed that he would ask me to marry him then, or at the very least promise, like his brother has, to be there for me and for our baby through it all. Instead, I got nothing, or at least nothing reassuring.

So whose story is true? Whose memory is false? I want him to wake up and tell me if he really has changed so much, hidden so much from me. If he doesn't wake up, how will I ever know the truth?

Now

Joey's there when I walk out of Celeste's office, several minutes over time, but Celeste asked me to read my memory out loud to her and then print it for the memory jar. She said it's important to get my feelings down in a way that I can hold in my hands, that I can crumple up or seal into the jar or burn to cinders when I'm done holding on to them.

“Hey,” he says. He shrugs beneath his canvas mechanic jacket. “Can I see the new smile?”

“What?” I've almost forgotten about the stupid tooth, but I get it, a second late, and somehow him catching me off-guard like that makes me actually smile, and he nods.

“It looks good, honest.”

“I didn't tell them,” I say, shaking my head. “I had the numbing medicine.”

“Gas?” His eyebrows draw together a little, like he's worrying.

“No gas. I told her it makes me dizzy.”

“It's probably okay.” He tips his chin toward Scott's room. “Tay. I've been talking to Tom, you know, the guy from the news?” He waits for me to nod. “So he started thinking about the story of Kendall, you know. Her sister's uterine cancer, her plans to carry a child for her sister, the comatose sperm donor?”

“I suppose there's a story there, though I don't want any part of it.”

“You want a part of this, believe me. It's kind of incredible.”

“Yeah?” I still haven't had any answer from Scott's roommates, no evidence that any of what Kendall says is really true. “Incredible how?”

Joey leans in closer. “So Tom did some research and found out that Kendall doesn't
have
a sister. The whole story's bunk.”

“She's
lying
?”
My voice rises to a squeak, and I force it back down to a low whisper, but
come on
. “She couldn't have lied about that forever. There would've been adoption paperwork. I mean, she doesn't think I'd just hand over this baby in a wicker basket, right? Does she think nobody would look into those facts?” Is she legitimately insane? How far would she let this charade go on? My phone buzzes, and I'm unprepared for what I see. “Oh, god.” The words escape from my mouth and I almost puke. The picture shows an aborted fetus, chopped up into pieces. I close my eyes and sway on my feet.

“What is it?” says Joey. “Should we step outside for a quick fresh air break?” The concern in his voice is real. He puts an arm out to steady me, and I show him the awful picture. I let him take my arm. “Oh, fuck. What … ” He scrolls through the other messages, from the other numbers. “Are these all from her?” His face is pale and he hands the phone back to me.

“I thought they were spam at first.” I can't help seeing the image one more time when I close the message and switch over to the text from my mom, which tells me to catch a ride home from Joey if I can. “I might throw up.”

I'm shaky and sick, and I lean on his arm as we head to the elevator, taking deep breaths. Saliva pools in my mouth, and I'm tired of this, you know? It's downright exhausting to be nauseated all the time, and it feels unfair that I have to deal with all this without Scott, and I want to curl up in the corner of the elevator and weep, but Joey holds me up.

“Easy, Tay,” he murmurs. A smoke break is one of those dependable ways to make sure time is passing even in the hospital, where all time is stretched out into endless waiting—so Joey and I have been taking fresh-air breaks instead. It's not much like taking a smoke break, honestly, but at this moment it's a welcome change from the close personal atmosphere of Celeste's office before heading into the strangely heavy but impersonal air of Scott's room, and it definitely beats the anxious cloud that settles into the family waiting area. I'm steady on my feet by the time we go through the main doors, even if I look ridiculous sucking oxygen into my lungs and spitting all my extra saliva into the snowbank by the sidewalk. Instead of heading right or left along the sidewalk, or just hanging around the door like we usually do, we cross the street wordlessly and stare into the gated cemetery. I'm not sure what Joey's thinking as we look through the gates—maybe he's worried about his brother ending up under all that frozen earth—but all I can see is Kendall, who apparently made up that entire story about the cancer and carrying a baby to give up for adoption, and what does that mean about Scott? What does that mean about this “relationship” they allegedly had? Is everything a lie?

“Do you think she's dangerous?” I blow my breath vapor through the gate like I'm really smoking. We've called the latest number back and let it ring a million times.

“I'm going to find out everything, every bit of dirt I can get on that girl,” says Joey. He slams his fist against the iron bars, making me jump back beneath the rattle. “What the hell, Taylor? Why didn't you tell me someone was sending you shit like that? She's fucking lucky she's not still here. And I'm going to make damn sure she's not allowed to show up here again.” He hits the gate again, and it scares me a little at the same time as it thrills me. I'm not entirely alone. Joey is on my side.