Memories in the Drift: A Novel

by Melissa Payne

  ALSO BY MELISSA PAYNE

  The Secrets of Lost Stones

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Melissa W. Payne

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542004725

  ISBN-10: 1542004721

  Cover design by David Drummond

  For Mom and Dad:

  your love, guidance, and wisdom are a bottomless well from which I am forever pulling.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  Claire, thirty-six years old

  Thursday, September 27

  I am staring at my hands. My face is wet. For a minute, the chaos of questions inside my head is a deafening roar that drowns out the rhythm of my heartbeat. I breathe in; I breathe out, slow and controlled, letting the facts accumulate until I can put together enough pieces to understand my present situation. I wipe my face dry and sit up straight.

  First fact: I’m in my apartment in front of my desk with the wide window that overlooks the harbor of the Passage Canal. I glance down at my body to find that I am dressed in jeans and my University of Alaska sweatshirt. Also, I’m wearing purple ankle socks. Second fact: I wear purple socks only on Thursday, so it must be a Thursday. The sock thing started when I was a little girl and I wanted to remember the days so I could keep track of when my father would return from his job as a long-haul trucker. Now it’s a habit that comes in handy for a situation like this.

  Outside, it is not dark but not bright, either, which means, in Alaska, that it’s either morning or afternoon and not the dead of winter, when the light never brightens enough to be called day. I check my phone for the time. Bingo. Afternoon. I sit back in my swivel chair and survey my desk. From the looks of it, I was in the middle of recording the earlier part of my day and planning for the rest of it. My forehead wrinkles and I make a note of what I was doing inside the notebook that lies open on the desk. Something sticks out of my sweatshirt pocket, but when I reach for it, a sensation that stops my hand overwhelms me. I swallow past a stubborn lump and instead turn back to the work at hand. My notes.

  Third fact (and one that doesn’t surprise me): I am well known in my small Alaskan town. Not for any particular accomplishment or feat of strength or intellectual achievements, unless you count the sock thing. I am the woman with no short-term memory from the fourteenth floor. And I know this because it’s written in my notebook, just above a bulleted list of To Do items I intend to complete this afternoon. Fortunately for me, the event that took my memory didn’t affect my exceptional organizational skills, which helped me sail through undergrad and grad school and now, today, allow me to structure my day with confidence even when I find myself staring at my hands for no reason. I know this because it’s all in my notes, and because it’s a skill I’ve honed since I was a little girl, when my mother couldn’t leave her bedroom for weeks on end, and it was garbage day or laundry day or any day where something needed to get done.

  But I’m not going to think about my mother right now, because those thoughts take me down a rabbit hole where sadness sticks to the walls in hardened globs of old gum that break my fingernails when I try to scrape them off. Instead, I turn my thoughts to Dad, and already I’m breathing easier.

  My father happens to be a legend here in Whittier and not just for his size; he stands well over six and a half feet tall, with shoulders nearly as broad as the hallway. But mostly for his compassion and mountain-man willingness to pull a stranger’s car out of an icy ditch in the middle of the night, haul off an abusive husband, or chase away a bear from the lobby of our building. When I was a little girl, I asked him how he always seemed to be in the right place at the right time. Learn to listen, Claire, he’d say, and his eyes crinkled with his smile. To this—he’d point to my stomach—and always to this—he’d point to my heart. It won’t let you down. Then he’d wrap me in his arms, and I’d lay my head against his chest, listening to the steady thump, thump of his heart beneath his thick plaid shirt.

  I turn on a lamp by my desk—clouds have spilled over the mountains, straining the sun’s already feeble light—and my apartment window creaks against an onslaught of wind. Goose bumps prick the skin on my arms and cool the warmth of the memory. Soon the last cruise ship of the season will sail out of town, the seasonal employees will pack up and leave, and the businesses that line the harbor will shutter their windows for the long, dark winter, when the rain turns to snow and the wind that buffets the window will be the Alaskan kind that can freeze a person’s nose off. I turn my attention to my notebook and read an instructional line: You are hosting dinner tonight. I smile when I see the next line: Recipe and ingredients in the fridge. Good. Cooking will keep my hands busy, my mind focused. Plus, it will be good to see my friends. An uneasiness unfurls deep inside me. Today it feels like I need to see them. I have a feeling I can’t explain, something that ripples just under my skin. Sadness. I run a hand through my short blonde hair, frustrated because I don’t know why I feel this way, and it bothers me to admit that, even if it’s just to myself. It’s like brushing snow off the ground and discovering that I’m standing on a thin sheet of ice with nothing but a deep black emptiness beneath my feet.

  Today that feeling is combined with this persistent sense that I’m sad with no idea why. But then I rest my hands across my notebook, and the heavy weight of not knowing lifts the tiniest bit. It’s okay, because everything I need to know is here. From me. In my handwriting. And if I can’t trust my memory, I can always trust my notes.

  I flip backward through the notebook, searching for something, anything, to explain why my throat closes around a sob that I choke down. There are lines and lines of observations and information, exhaustive in detail about what I’ve done and who I’ve interacted with. I notice a few lines here and there blacked out with a thick marker, like they’ve been redacted. Odd. I move on. Likely it was extraneous information I removed so that it wouldn’t distract me from what’s important.
>
  Reading my notes, I see that yesterday I hiked the Portage Pass Trail with Sefina, and we had good weather and even startled a bear when we reached the top. Sefina hid behind me until he was gone. That part makes me smile. Sefina is a good friend from before and a self-proclaimed wimp when it comes to wildlife. But spending time with her wouldn’t make me feel this way, so it’s not what I’m looking for. Moving on I see that yesterday was also a Wednesday, when I wash my laundry, which I like to do in the late afternoon when the kids in the building get out of school. The laundry is just down from the lobby, where the kids like to hang out, and I can listen to their talking, laughing, and goofing off while I fold warm shirts and match wool socks. I was a teacher briefly before, well, everything, and I still like to be around kids, even if I can’t ever teach again and was a teacher for only—oh, there it is. Just under laundry but before make dinner. One line that gives me a pang and explains the heaviness that settles across my shoulders.

  I wish I could teach again.

  A thought, a wish, a yearning I had and then recorded last night before it slipped away. It’s true. I do miss teaching. And the feeling that made me want it, the sadness, is what remains of that thought. There is a certain kind of relief that comes with understanding, and I breathe out, rewrite the idea along with a summary of my thoughts from today.

  Satisfied, I move on to the rest of my tasks, see a line I’ve doodled in the margins, next to the To Do list in my notebook. Bear that broke into building. I chew the end of my pen, my thoughts drifting to the parts of my past that I do remember. From before.

  Like how Dad had wanted me to leave Whittier as soon as I finished high school. Worried that if I didn’t escape our remote town, which had more inches of snow and rain than people, then I would never get out, that in time I would grow to hate it just like my mother. Said he felt it in his bones. And it was the same feeling he’d had just before my mother walked out on us.

  Some people in town think he’s psychic. He just shakes his head with a sad wrinkle between his eyes. Some things you just know, he says.

  Bitterness presses my lips together. Mom was a reclusive alcoholic whose depression became a heavy shroud with every dark, cold winter. Everyone knew she’d never stay in a place where the sun flirts with the farthest horizon, out of our reach for months at a time. Or in a town bounded by the cold waters of Prince William Sound and dwarfed by rock and glacier and forest that stretch for miles and miles in every other direction. My fingernails dig into my palms. And I wasn’t enough to keep her sober or make her stay. Nobody had to be a psychic to see that coming.

  But Dad was right about me, and now I’m Rapunzel, trapped in a tower of notebooks and calendars. I pinch the pen between my fingers until the ridges dig into the bone, try to breathe through this sudden bout of anger that slides over my scalp. It was my choice to come back to Whittier. I wanted to live here because I’ve always loved this close-knit community. After Mom left—after my best friend in the entire world ran off, after I lost everything—it was the people in this town and Dad who never deserted me. Whittier will always be my home. I just never thought it would be my prison too.

  Rain hits the window, and I watch as it spreads down the glass in wide rivulets. I keep breathing, letting the moment thin until it trickles away, just like the rain. When I glance up from my notebook and look toward the water, I see the dark body of an orca hurl itself above the surface, twisting black and white in the air before slamming back into the water. The familiar rush of excitement floods me, and I jot a quick note: Saw an orca breaching today. This wild beauty is just another reason I love Whittier, even if the majority of town lives entirely in one building.

  Begich Towers—or BTI, as we call it—is an old military building constructed in the fifties to house officers and their families and designed to withstand earthquakes, which it has had the opportunity to do on more than one occasion. Behind its rectangle of fourteen stories loom mountains with waterfalls that cascade down the sides. Wide windows span each apartment, many of which offer stunning views of the harbor with Billings Glacier in the distance. The thousands of people who drift through our town on their way to fishing adventures or cruise ship vacations think we’re crazy to live in a Cold War high-rise and in weather that often forces us to live indoors for much of the year. They see the decaying and dry-docked boats, stacked and rusted storage containers, and old buildings that haven’t been used in decades. I see glaciers and mountains and a community of people who make it possible for me to live here as I am.

  My phone chirps and vibrates in my pocket. Across the screen is a reminder: Make a chicken Caesar salad for the dinner party. I nod—great idea. It’s a family recipe that Ruth showed me how to make when I was a teenager, one with a light dressing and homemade croutons. Not that I’m related to Ruth, who believes in conspiracies and cameras capturing our every move, but when the entire town lives in a place so remote we share a two-and-a-half-mile tunnel with a train, well, even Ruth is family.

  I cross-check the reminder on my phone with the written To Do list and laugh softly when I see a note about the bear that Dad scared out of our building the summer before I turned eight years old. The bear had been causing trouble that summer, trying more than once to get into BTI, scaring cruise ship passengers who wandered around our small port town, and startling local teenagers who trespassed inside the abandoned Buckner Building, another relic of Whittier’s brief military occupation. And when he finally entered BTI’s lobby through a door left cracked open, he filled the entire first floor with the oily stink of dead fish.

  Dad got to the lobby first in nothing but his boxer shorts and wool socks, his wide, hairy chest heaving up and down, one arm slung back because he knew I was there, right behind him. Where Dad went, I went, even if he told me to stay put. “Stay behind me, Claire,” he said in the same warm and gravelly tone he used to tell me to go to bed. The bear stood on his hind legs, waving his big paws in the air like a boxer. Dad mimicked his stance and straightened up to his fullest height. “Go, bear,” he said, unyielding and stern. I stiffened because if I were that bear, I’d be running out the door with my tail tucked. But the bear huffed, shooting thick white flecks from his mouth. One hit my face. He stared at Dad from his good eye—the other was just an empty socket, an old scar puckered and black—with an intensity that I remember even now. Like he knew him. But Dad stood with his hands raised above his head, and his fingertips grazed the cinder-block walls, nearly touching the ceiling of our building. He is that tall.

  “Go, bear!” he roared, low and guttural. He was Paul Bunyan; he was Grizzly Adams; he was Daniel Boone. The bear growled and sniffed the air once before spinning his bulk to the ground and loping out the way he’d come in.

  Behind me a handful of our neighbors stood grouped together. Hank from the market nodded. “Not even bears mess with Vance.”

  Ruth pinched her lips together, crossed her arms. “But you were upstairs with us. How’d you know the bear got in?”

  Dad placed his big palm on top of my head and looked down at me with a smile. “Well, Ruth, I could feel him enter the building. It made my bones vibrate.” Then he whispered to me from the side of his mouth, “And maybe I saw him from our window, but don’t tell Ruth.” He winked and I covered my mouth with one hand when I giggled.

  I was only seven at the time, but I remember it like it happened yesterday. I smile to myself and stare past my faint reflection in the window to the harbor. The afternoon storm has moved over the water, turning the sky a gunmetal gray, the water choppy and black and obscuring the mountains beyond in a wall of fog. My childhood memory of Dad scaring off that bear is crisp like the vibrant red of his plaid boxer shorts and pungent like the heavy musk of the bear’s fur that tickles my nose even now.

  I stand from my desk and turn to the kitchen, taking the notebook with me. When I flip the light switch, the murky gray light inside the apartment transforms into something warm and soft, cozy. Another chirp; I look at t
he screen. Make a chicken Caesar salad for the dinner party. On the counter by the dry-erase calendar is a portable file cabinet. First, I check the calendar, letting my eyes pass over the squares that are crossed off with a thick black line until I reach the first square without a line. Today is Thursday, September 27, and I am hosting dinner for a few friends, at—I squint at the tiny print—six this evening. From the file cabinet, I pull a folder labeled SOCIAL EVENTS CURRENT and flip it open. Written across a lavender sheet of notebook paper is the information I need. Dinner with Ruth, Sefina, and Harriet.

  Moving on, I see that Ruth will bring dessert. I squint to make sure I read that right. Huh. Ruth never bakes. She always says she never had to learn or try because my mother was the best baker in all of Whittier. She’s right. My mother had been the best, spinning magic out of dough. Even now I can taste the way she infused our small apartment with sugar and vanilla, smell the cinnamon that clung to her skin like perfume. But a sourness erupts in my mouth, erases the memory. She stopped baking when alcohol comforted her more, left me when forgetting became more important than being my mom. My eyes sting and I press a palm flat against them until it fades. Her leaving was something that even now, as an adult, I feel in the way it nips at my heart and trails me with a lasting feeling of bitter rejection.

  I shake my head to dislodge the image of her, and when I return to the work of preparing for the dinner party, I relax, relieved to have something else to focus on. The next few lines in the notebook make it easy for me to move forward. Dinner: lemon chicken Caesar with garlic bread, iced tea and water to drink. Ingredients and recipe in the fridge. And the final line: Review folders for guests and make a list of talking points for conversation. My chest expands. It feels good to have a plan I can count on.

  I open the refrigerator and bend my six-foot frame to see inside, where I quickly spot the romaine, Parmesan cheese, chicken breasts, a bright-yellow lemon, and a clove of garlic stacked together on the top shelf along with a lined three-by-five recipe card. Cool air from the refrigerator brushes my ankles with goose bumps and a wisp of a memory. Of Mom doing something similar and me helping, gathering the ingredients and watching her chop and mince, listening to her humming a song I didn’t know, the light touch of her body beside mine, a warmth radiating from my chest.