A Clatter of Jars

by Lisa Graff

  “Don’t worry,” Lily said. “Our act’s going to be amazing. Way better than punch.”

  • • •

  As she made her way back to Cabin Eight, Lily wound the length of swampy yarn around her thumb, grumbling to herself. How was she supposed to come up with a brand-new act in only a few—

  Peaches.

  Lily stopped walking. There was the most curious feeling, like an itch in her mind. Something wiggling its way in. A memory.

  A memory that tasted of crisp peaches.

  She had broken a jar, she remembered. Lily scratched the itch harder. The glass had shattered across the toes of her Kelly-green high-tops. And there’d been a frog, and a silver knot . . .

  Scratch scratch scratch.

  There had been a bracelet in that jar. Lily remembered. A bracelet that stored a Talent. Scratch scratch scratch.

  If Jo had one Talent in her office, then she might have more.

  If Max had a different Talent, then it would be easy to create a new act.

  The itch completely scratched, Lily spun on her heel and headed toward the lodge.

  Jo’s Blackberry Sage Iced Tea

  a drink reminiscent of summer evenings on family porches

  FOR THE TEA:

  approximately 7 cups water, divided

  2 cups (12 oz) fresh or thawed frozen blackberries

  2 tbsp sugar

  4 black tea bags

  8 fresh sage leaves

  1. In a medium pot, bring 4 cups of the water to a boil.

  2. Meanwhile, combine the blackberries and sugar in a medium bowl. Mash well with a fork.

  3. When the water has reached a boil, remove it from the heat. Add the blackberry mixture, tea bags, and sage leaves. Cover and let sit 20 minutes.

  4. Remove the tea bags from the pot and discard them. Carefully pour the tea through a wire-mesh strainer into a 2-quart pitcher, then discard the solids.

  5. Add additional cold water (approximately 3 cups) to fill the pitcher. Stir the tea with a wooden spoon, and chill it in the refrigerator, about 1 hour. Serve over ice.

  [Serves 6]

  Jo

  JO SWEPT THE SHARDS OF BROKEN GLASS INTO THE dustbin, her insides boiling with each new clank!

  That girl Chuck knew about her Talent bracelets. Which meant that soon there would be questions. Phone calls from parents. Trouble, and lots of it.

  Jo patted the pocket of her knitted sweater, where she kept Grandma Esther’s harmonica. Some people, she knew, were skittish about the buying and selling of Talents. But Jo found it perfectly natural. If you didn’t like your hair, you could dye it. Cut it. Have it braided, permed, relaxed, shaved off completely. So why not change your Talent, if you had the inclination?

  Jolene Mallory understood more than most people about Talent, and the lack of it, and how either could define you. Jo had grown up Fair. So had her older sister, and so had the boy next door. Jenny and Juan, both six years older, would pull little Jo around the backyard in their wagon, and climb trees with her, and tell her wild stories. As they grew older, the trio found wilder adventures, getting lost in museums, diving to the darkest depths of the coldest lake. All three of them were Fair—a rarity in a world of Talented people—and they formed a tight-knit club, making plans for their future. Three houses, side by side by side. Gardens out front they all helped tend to.

  When Jenny and Juan fell in love, Jo was thrilled. When they got engaged, she was overjoyed.

  And then Grandma Esther had died.

  In her will, Grandma Esther had left Jo, then thirteen, her harmonica. She’d left Jenny, nineteen, her gold pocket watch. For my two beloved granddaughters, she’d written. So they each may know a Talent. The harmonica and the pocket watch were Grandma Esther’s two most precious possessions, from a lifetime of collecting. Everyone knew that. But no one understood what they truly were until Jo put the harmonica to her lips.

  Gold and tangerine and walnut and sunshine. Those were the colors Jo saw when she played the harmonica. And she was playing for Jenny.

  “You’re Talented,” Jo had told her sister, pulling the harmonica—an Artifact—from her mouth. “Jenny, you’re very, very Talented.” Jennifer Mallory, it turned out, had a Talent for matching orphans with the perfect adoptive parents. As soon as Jo had seen the colors, she’d known.

  And she’d known, almost immediately after, that she herself had no Talent at all. Not without the harmonica.

  “Wind the pocket watch,” Jo had urged Jenny. In order to reap the benefits of an Artifact, a person needed to use it, but even without winding its gears, Jo had seen the colors swirling around the watch when she played—chartreuse and fern, sea foam and pickle. It was a gorgeous Talent, mesmerizing. A Talent for singing.

  But Jenny merely held the watch in her hand, studying its gears beneath the glass. “Maybe it’s best to stick with the Talents we’re born with,” she’d replied—which, Jo would later decide, was easy enough to say when you’d been born with something. And then Jenny had snapped the watch shut.

  Jo did not shut away her harmonica. She played it for nearly everyone she met. She played it for Juan—who, she discovered, was completely Fair, just as she was. But unlike Jo, he didn’t seem to mind so much. He had Jenny, he said, and that was enough. Asking for more would be greedy.

  As the wedding drew nearer, Jenny and Juan made more plans for their future. Once they were married, it was decided, they would open an orphanage—Jenny and Juan’s Home for Lost Children. Jenny would match orphans with their lucky parents, and Juan would run the place, tending the garden, fixing broken steps. For the first time, Jo realized, their plans did not include her. She watched the calendar, her stomach twisting inside her, as the date she would lose her sister loomed ever nearer.

  So Jo, thirteen and fearing the future, began a campaign to stop it from coming.

  “Do you ever worry . . . ?” she’d said to Juan one night, when they were sipping blackberry iced tea on the porch swing. Jenny was inside being fitted for her wedding dress. “Do you ever worry that Jenny might get . . . ?” Jo trailed off, darting her eyes to her lap, as though consumed by words unsaid.

  “Might get what?” Juan asked, taking a sip of his tea.

  “Might get . . . bored,” Jo finished, her voice thick with hesitation. “I mean, because she has such an incredible Talent, and you . . . It’s just that, since she’s so Talented, maybe she’d want . . .” She let her gaze drift to the thick of the woods. “You don’t ever feel bad without a Talent?”

  “Oh, Joley.” Juan slugged Jo in the shoulder, the way a big brother slugs a little sister. “I don’t need Talent to be happy.” He took another long sip of his tea. And then, just when Jo’s heart had begun to sink, he looked up. “Did Jenny say something to you?” he asked.

  “Hmm?” Jo shook her head quickly. Too quickly. “Oh. Oh, no. She didn’t say anything. I promise. I was just thinking.”

  But she could tell that a thought had wiggled its way into Juan’s brain. And when thoughts wiggle their way in, sometimes it can be very difficult for them to wiggle out again. Sometimes, after months of wiggling, after a dozen more similar thoughts, if a little sister happened to leave out a gold pocket watch where her soon-to-be-brother-in-law might find it, you couldn’t entirely say that it was her fault if he decided to wind it.

  The Talent was even more mesmerizing than Jo had anticipated. As soon as Juan twisted the watch key and set the gears in motion, he was singing. Full-voiced and gorgeous.

  Los golpes en la vida

  preparan nuestros corazones

  como el fuego forja al acero.

  The postman stopped his rounds to come listen. The town barber left his post to find the source of the sound. Children ceased their jump-roping. Even the squirrels seemed mesmerized.

  “Remarkable,” they all declare
d.

  Jenny didn’t think it was remarkable. She was angry, as Jo had expected she would be.

  “That’s not your Talent,” Jenny had hissed at her fiancé. Jo listened through the front window, her toes anchored against the porch to stop the creak of the swing from betraying her.

  “But no one was using it,” Juan had argued. “Don’t you think Talents are meant to be used? Joley said . . .” Jo wasn’t sure if Juan trailed off then, or if his words simply grew too quiet to hear.

  The argument continued so long into the night that when Jo’s parents found her, she was curled on the porch swing, asleep.

  Jenny and Juan did not get married. Jenny returned his engagement ring, but left him the watch. By then, word of Juan’s Talent had spread far beyond postmen and barbers, and soon he left on a six-month world tour. He found a new love, Jo read in the magazines, and started a new family, and with each new tour, his fame grew greater. El Picaflor, they called him. The Hummingbird. Journalists were particularly fascinated by his beautiful pocket watch—his good luck charm, they wrote, never suspecting the truth behind it—and how he wound it carefully before each performance, and kept it in a special glass case when he slept or bathed, so no dust or moisture would muss its gears.

  Jenny, in turn, forged a much quieter life for herself. Jo picked up snippets of information here and there, from news articles or bits of gossip around town. Jenny had named her orphanage Miss Mallory’s Home for Lost Girls. She’d found a daughter, Cady, and a home in a peanut butter factory, of all places. But no matter how much time passed, Jenny never forgot the original thought that had wiggled a crack into her relationship, and the person who had planted it.

  Jo had tried to stop the future from coming, but it came.

  Which was why, when she’d found those first jars at the edge of the lake five summers ago, glowing yellow-purple, hope had finally risen in her chest. If Jenny couldn’t forget on her own, maybe Jo could help her along a little.

  There was a knock on the office door.

  “And you are?” Jo asked, tugging it open. The girl before her was short and slim, with light brown skin and shoulder-length brown hair. Hers was a familiar face, although one at the very edges of Jo’s memory.

  The girl gulped. “I’m Lily,” she said. “Liliana.”

  The Pinnacle, Jo remembered now. She’d seen her photo on the camp application. “And what is it that you need, Liliana?”

  Lily wound a swampy length of yarn around her thumb. “I was hoping,” she said slowly, “that you could give me a Talent bracelet.”

  In one swift movement, Jo yanked Lily into the office, slamming the door behind them.

  “I don’t know what she told you.” Jo could tell that the finger she was jabbing in the girl’s face was making her nervous. Good. “But it’s lies, all of it.”

  “What wh-who told me?” Lily stammered.

  Jo wasn’t buying the act. “There are no Talent bracelets here,” she said. And that, at least for the moment, was the truth. “So you can scurry on back to your cabin and stop bothering me.”

  “B-But,” Lily said, “I was standing right here.” She pointed to the spot on the floor where, mere moments ago, Jo had finished sweeping. “And I dropped the jar. And the frog swallowed the bracelet, and then he was . . . Talented. The glass shattered all over my green high—”

  Even as she spoke the words, Lily seemed confused by them. As though she’d begun watching a movie halfway through and couldn’t quite piece together the plot. She frowned at her faded brown sneakers.

  “You broke the jar?” Jo asked, hope rising in her chest.

  “Yes,” Lily said. “I was standing right there.” But she seemed less certain with every word. “Wasn’t I?”

  Jo placed an arm on the girl’s shoulder. “Honey,” she said, with all the sweetness she could muster, “I think you’re having some sort of episode. Why don’t you lie down for a bit?”

  “An episode?” Lily asked.

  “If it persists, have Nurse Bonnie take your temperature.” And she pressed Lily out of the office.

  Well, how about that? Jo thought, patting Grandma Esther’s harmonica in her sweater pocket. After all this time, after all her searching, Fate had sent her a Recollector.

  Jo quickly got to work.

  Dear Jenny, she wrote. Of all the letters I’ve written you, this is the most important.

  A Recollector could take memories from one person—the way Chuck had had her memory taken, right before Jo’s eyes—and, if he or she wanted to, give those memories to somebody else—the way Lily had been given a memory that most certainly wasn’t hers.

  No matter what may have happened between us, I need to you to come now. It’s crucial that I see you.

  It wasn’t so much the giving of memories that Jo was interested in.

  Next Sunday, she wrote, in her neat blocky letters. After my campers’ Talent show. That ought to give her plenty of time.

  I’m begging you, Jenny. Please come. I want nothing more than to be a family again.

  Your sister,

  Jo

  Jo folded the letter into thirds and slid it into an envelope for Del’s next mail run.

  Jenny would come. She had to. And when she did, she’d forget why she’d never come before. All Jo had to do was ensure that the Recollector, whoever the person was, took a good, long dip in the lake.

  Passing beneath the moose head keeping guard above the lodge’s double doors, Jo stepped into the sunlight and pulled Grandma Esther’s harmonica to her lips.

  Turquoise, plum, salmon, teal. Marigold, coral, slate, snow. With every camper Jo played for, she saw colors. An abundance of Singular Talents.

  “Renny, that’s her again,” Jo heard a camper whine. “She’ll make us go in the lake.”

  “You don’t have to go swimming, Miles,” came the reply.

  “No water!”

  Miles shouted the words just as Jo turned to face him, her harmonica at her lips.

  Pearl, alabaster, porcelain, frost. She drew in a breath of surprise, making the colors even more vivid. She never would have guessed if she hadn’t seen it for herself.

  Miles Patrick Francis Fennelbridge, the disappointment of his family, was a Recollector.

  “No water!” Miles flicked his fingers. Flick-flick-flick-flick-flick!

  Jo stopped playing. Pulled her harmonica down from her mouth. Blinked at the bright afternoon sky.

  There was an itch, just below her ear.

  She glanced at the harmonica in her hands, certain she’d been playing it only moments earlier, but befuddled as to why.

  “Jo?”

  When she looked up, Jo saw Del, her head counselor.

  “Teagan asked me to give this to you,” Del said, holding out a thick white envelope. Jo took it and peeked inside. It was the money Caleb had given her earlier. She scratched below her ear. “Got anything for the mail run?”

  There was a hint of something lingering in her mind. A memory, perhaps, although Jo could only catch the flavor of a few remaining tendrils.

  It tasted of buttered popcorn.

  Jo slipped her harmonica back into her sweater pocket and found a letter there, addressed to her sister. Expedited mail, she’d written on the front, in her neat blocky letters.

  “Here.” She handed it to Del.

  There was something Jo had been looking for, she thought, as she headed back to her office. No—something she’d found. But for the life of her, she couldn’t remember what it was.

  • • •

  Sometimes memories hit like a wallop, all of sudden, and hard. Other times, for no reason that anyone can explain, memories take much longer to sink in. They seem to meander a bit before choosing which mind to settle into.

  As Jo made her way back to the lodge, her buttered-popcorn memory was doing
an awful lot of meandering. It tickled the tops of the pine trees, dove back down to the dirt, and darted here and there between the feet of Camp Atropos’s many campers. It meandered throughout the evening, after the sun had set, then spent several days perched on a branch below a nest of friendly birds. Eventually, it would find where it wanted to be. But it was in no rush.

  Some memories are slower than others.

  The Following Week . . .

  Lily

  LILY LAY ON HER BACK, HER ARMS TUCKED INSIDE HER sleeping bag, warm in the chill of the morning, spinning a postcard in circles above her. The sun had only barely poked itself into the sky, and her bunkmates were all still snoring.

  Hallo from Johannesburg! the postcard read, in her father’s tight scrawl. Looking forward to seeing you Sunday!

  For the past eleven days, Lily had been trying to come up with some sort of phenomenal act for her and Max to perform at the Talent show. She’d tried levitating Max’s hair into amazing new hairdos, but none of the hairdos were quite amazing enough. She’d attempted a game of flying pinochle, but that hadn’t ended well for anybody. And then there was the unfortunate juice-juggling incident that got Lily banned from the infirmary for an entire afternoon.

  “I’ll just help Hannah with her punch,” Max had told Lily yesterday. “Really, I don’t mind. You should help, too. Everyone will get to drink it and have good memories. It’ll be a nice thing for everybody.”

  “I do plenty of nice things for everybody,” Lily had grumbled in reply. Although, as soon as she’d said it, she couldn’t think of a single example. “Punch is dumb,” she finished lamely.

  Lily curled the sleep out of her toes, her thoughts focused as the postcard circled above her.

  Looking forward to seeing you Sunday!

  Just two short days.

  If only Jo really were keeping Talent bracelets in her office. The dream Lily had had last week—the “episode,” Jo had called it—felt so real that Lily could taste it.

  Peaches. It tasted like peaches.

  But Lily knew that what she remembered couldn’t be real, because in the dream, the jar had shattered across the toes of her Kelly-green high-tops, and Lily had never in her life owned a pair of—