The Memory Jar (2 page)

Now

This is not a story like that, not a clever story about the girl who gets the boy and they share a magical kiss and become high school sweethearts and go off to college together and live long, happy lives. This isn't a story about a boy and a girl who have an accidental pregnancy and make the best of this wonderful gift by raising their child and fighting cancer and witnessing miracles and writing a best-selling memoir or something.

In this story, the girl is a monster and the boy is brain dead. Well, not exactly brain dead. Maybe that would be better, actually, you know? More picturesque and tragic, like a sad poem or a love story for women to weep over. Instead I have Scott, who lies here in some strange middle between alive and dead, and I have Joey, his eyes filled with hurt. I have Understanding Emily, who maybe doesn't know. I have a little bathroom hideaway. I have an engagement ring and a break-up song. I have an empty space in my memory, followed by a crunch. I have one ugly laceration that starts at the peak of my forehead and slices its rude path down the bridge of my nose, across my bottom lip and ends on my chin, where I have one neat black stitch, hidden by a small bandage. And I have this creature swimming around in its little prison—a tiny cellular bundle right beneath my heart, which pumps it full of adrenaline and confusion and regret.

They paralyze you so you don't fight the ventilator. They've had him all doped up, in a medical coma. He hasn't been conscious at all except for that one second, his eyes opening wide and his mouth, like he was going to speak, and then nothing. I'm lulled by the sound of the machines, and Scott's mom clears her throat because she'd like us to leave.

“Just for a bit, let me sit with him,” she says. They're bringing him back, fishing him out of that murky deep, or at least they're going to try. She pushes his hair back on his forehead like he's a little boy, but the bruising is darker now and it's hard to look. The surgeons shaved a patch on the side of his head in case they had to remove part of his skull. They haven't had to, which is, as Emily says, “a very good sign.” If his brain stops swelling, recovery is more likely.

And I want Scott to get better,
obviously
, but there's a part of me—a miniscule part, I swear—that wanted to see what was inside his head. I can hear myself, whenever he would get too quiet, asking that stupid question:
What are you thinking?
Let me in, damn it.

I'm sleep-deprived, don't listen to me. I'm in shock. I'm pregnant. Whatever.

Then

It wasn't easy, having my boyfriend leave for college. Oh
poor me
, I know, I'll roll my eyes along with you. And no, I wasn't messing around on him. I think that's what he thought, at first. “We were careful,” he said. Yeah, no shit. Scott was
always
careful. He was the kind of guy who wore safety glasses to open the microwave and still worried. In fact, it's one of the things I remember most about Joey—the way he was always teasing Scott about being cautious, always thinking about consequences. Joey was the impulsive one, the reckless one. The one who ended up in some kind of treatment program for hurting himself or whatever. Joey should have been the one to end up with a pregnant girlfriend or a head injury.

Yeah, we were careful. Condoms, kid, that's what that means, because when you live in little Sterling Creek, Minnesota, so far north that even people from Duluth think you're in Canada, when your mom works in an office down the hall from the only Planned Parenthood in town and makes jokes about watching the “slutty girls” carrying their pee from the restroom, you don't necessarily get on birth control. Not unless you're into having uncomfortable discussions about what you're doing in your boyfriend's truck, which would be a disastrous conversation to have with my mother at least eighty-five percent of the time.

We established how careful we had been. “I mean,
really careful
, Taylor,” he said, frowning. “Like I pulled out, even with the condom.”

“I know, Scott. I know.” Like he had the condom on before he left his house, basically. I should have kept the test, I guess, as proof or something, because apparently Scott was going to require some additional convincing that his child-thing was implanted in the wall of my uterus, right that very instant leeching the nutrients out of my bones. Secreting hormones that were making me feel half-crazy and one hundred percent queasy. “But you know. Still.”

He didn't freak out. This isn't a sad story about an irresponsible boy who ran away from his knocked-up girlfriend, leaving her to turn to prostitution and smuggling drugs across the border (of Minnesota?) in her dirty infant carrier. It also isn't a thriller about a boy who flew into a rage when his girlfriend ended up pregnant and planned an elaborate murder-suicide scene in the woods behind his parents' garage but at the last minute chickened out of the suicide part and had to flee across the wilderness and ate slugs to stay alive, while police dogs followed, hot on his trail. This is a story about a careful boy who carefully purchased a moderately priced engagement ring and asked me if I wanted to take a ride on his brother's snowmobile across the lake to the island. He said he would make me cocoa. That's not as weird as it sounds, you know. The island was sort of our place.

“I know you can't drink or anything, so I didn't get any wine,” he said, and I put on my jacket. It was cold out, enough so that your breath would freeze a little in the time between exhaling and the air actually leaving your mouth or your nose. I put on a red hat, with a little tuft of yarn on the top. When I bent down to grab the back of my boots, to sink my heels into the hollows I'd been trudging down all winter, it felt strange, like something was already changing the way my body moved, the way I stooped.

“I'll get an abortion,” I said. It was the first time I had said those words out loud.

“It'll be okay,” he said, and he ushered me toward the garage. “You'll see, Taylor. I promise.”

Now

Joey pushes his way past the foot of the bed, running into my shoulder as he goes by. My phone almost drops to the floor. “Joey,” I say to his retreating back. “I don't know what you want.”

He shakes his stupid hair out of his eyes. He's so tough, so full of bravado, this kid, and any girl can see the fragile center of him playing around with the idea of getting broken, just because. He's like a cold deep lake, sharp rock bottom visible. Scott was the kind of lake that has sturdy docks and patches of lily pads, a pleasant place to swim where you probably wouldn't drown. He was only nineteen, but inside he was at least forty, all safe and sensible.
Is. Scott is.

“My brother didn't drive like that” is all Joey will say, and he gives his hair another shake and stalks off, toward the vending machines or some other place where he wants to be alone. His brother didn't drive like that.
Like that
meaning fast, reckless even. Out of control.

I sigh. I would like something from the vending machine, maybe. I can't tell if I should eat every couple of minutes or if I should never eat again. The nausea. I slide my phone back into my pocket and follow him.

“Joey, listen.” His shoulders are narrow beneath his black jacket, some kind of skinny canvas thing like a mechanic would wear, faded patches, ragged edges. He wears skinny jeans, too, and the kid is like nothing but a nervous wiry mess. He punches the letters and numbers and waits, metal coiling slowly, for his dill pickle chips to fall into the bottom of the machine.

“Can we—can we talk about it?” It occurs to me then that I have nothing to say, no plan for what to tell him. I have no excuse.

Joey is forcing himself to stay put, keeping himself from running away from me. He wants to fight me but he doesn't want to win. His fingers fumble with the top of the shiny bag.

“You're going to end up with chips everywhere.” I take it from him and pull the top open carefully. “Have you ever done that?” I try to smile. “I have. My mom always buys the big box with the two bags. They make them so hard to open.”

“My mom gets the grocery store brand,” he says, and of course I know this. I've spent hours on his family's couch sharing chips and sour cream dip. With Joey at times, in fact. He takes a deep breath. “Scott didn't want to marry you,” he says.

I breathe, too, and he twists the bag around toward me, the pickle smell wafting out of the wide mouth—the greasy invitation that, for the first time in weeks, makes me feel honestly hungry, with no hesitant swirl along for the ride. I reach for one, and I take several.

“It's okay.” I crunch down on a potato chip, talking with my mouth full. “I didn't want to marry him either.”

But I didn't mean to almost kill him. I mean, I'm almost certain.

Then

The first time we went to the island, it's funny to think of it, really. It was summer, and it was hot, and I didn't know how to swim. That's stupid, right? I live in the land of 10,000 lakes or whatever, and I didn't know how to swim. It was Mary Ellen's fault, really. She was my counselor when I was a kid and I got chosen to go to this science camp for girls on Arrowhead Lake, an abandoned mine-turned-
swimming beach. Mary Ellen knew all the really scary stories about that old mine pit, like have you heard the one about the ghost of Otto Jarvi and the Hanging Shack? All the girls held hands around the fire and giggle-screamed while Mary Ellen told us about the ghost of his ill-fated daughter, Petra Jarvi, who grabbed hold of the ankles of girls if they jumped off the end of the dock.

Mary Ellen said that Petra Jarvi took one eleven-year-old girl every eleven years to keep for her own in the depths of the old iron mine, and this was the year.

I was eleven. I refused to put one toe in the water after that.

So Scott had this little canoe, which is not as romantic as a little rowboat, and I told him so. It was our first date, and he sat behind me to paddle and steer. “If this were a rowboat you could face me, with your hands on two oars, and you could row me all the way around the lake while singing sweetly,” I said. I could be so brave, since I couldn't see his face. I pretended to sit all prim in the bow of his canoe, wearing the stiff life preserver he insisted I wear, and to be truthful I was so glad he did because like I said, I couldn't swim. The canoe wobbled beneath us and I put my hands down on the sides. “Islands are overrated,” I said, but he insisted.

He had some kind of alcohol, I can't remember what it was, some stupid bottle he'd stolen from his aunt or his grandma or something, but I remember he gave me this plastic cup, and he was really protective of how much I drank, like he rationed it out so I wouldn't get very drunk. He seemed so harmless.

Harmless
. That's just what he was.
Is
.

So the snowmobile ride to the island was not completely unexpected, though it pretty much made it impossible to go through with my plans for the evening, which had been to break up with him. I hadn't quite decided on what to do about the other thing, but it seemed clear all of a sudden that this was something I wanted some space to figure out, on my own.

He drove us out to the island and I rode on the back, my arms loosely around the waist of his puffy down parka. We didn't wear helmets, which is something that people would later point out with a sad sort of pursed-lip pity, but it was the one safety measure Scott didn't believe in. It was because of some cousin of his who got into a motorcycle crash and the doctor told him that if he'd had a helmet on, he would have died. I don't know how many doctors are going around telling people that, but from the looks of the traumatic brain injury ward in Scott's hospital alone, doctors
should
be telling people to walk around wearing a helmet at all times, night and day. Anyway, he drove slowly, and we made it out there without incident, though Scott pointed out several dangers along the way, including the ridges made by people driving out here with plows on their trucks or ATVs. “You hit one of those going fast enough and your machine will crunch up like a pop can,” he said. I remember that.

Now

My face is pretty badass, even in the weird yellow light of the hospital bathroom. The toilet is close to the little sink, and I have to sit sort of tilted to one side to keep out of the way of the stainless steel stability bar. On the wall beneath the toilet paper hangs a little chain with a red plastic disc on the end.
Pull for nurse assistance
. My fingers idly flip the little disc, spin it. I wonder how the nurse would assist me, if I pulled. Me here, with my pants around my ankles and my split lip and my guilt.

I stand and flush, even though I can't remember if I peed or not. My head is foggy, and my face is terrible, and the water that runs from the tap is icy cold. I pool a little in my palms and think about splashing it onto my face, but it seems like too much work and I let it go, down the drain. Like my life. Oh, the melodrama, right? I stare again at my wrecked face and try to remember what happened, right before the crunch.

“The ice ridge.” My voice is husky, and I wonder what would happen if I stayed in this bathroom all night talking to myself. It sounds like I smoke a pack a day, but I haven't had a cigarette since last Tuesday, when Dani made me stop. Scott would be so happy, since he always hated the smoking thing, and I wonder if that's why I did it. It was Joey who got me started, actually—the realization makes me a little uncomfortable. I squint at myself in the mirror, baring my teeth in a grimace. Do they look whiter? Do I look pregnant?

I read an article once about how if you look into a mirror in dim light and stare at yourself for some crazy amount of time, you'll start to hallucinate. Your face will turn into something else entirely, a demon or something. It happens to everyone, I guess, everyone who tries it. I tried it once, in my mom's bathroom, at midnight just to make it creepier. I guess I overestimated my tolerance for creepy shit, though, because after a couple of minutes something strange and taffy-like happened to my chin and then my forehead, and they kind of stretched out for a second like I was some kind of weird science experiment, and I freaked out. I was all alone, my mom out of town, and I didn't want to be a monster. I couldn't get my heart to stop racing for the longest time.

The light is plenty bright in this sterile little closet, but I don't have to look long before my own image repulses me.