The Memento

by Christy Ann Conlin

  A few clanks and bangs came from the Water House as we went by and Harry waved to us through the window. “Come in, children, come in, come in,” he called.

  Inside, Harry held up a bottle with clear liquid in it. “The garden is simply celestial in the evening. I could stay here all the time. I was just getting the Water House ready for tomorrow, for our second go at rosewater. I can’t see how it can go any better than this round. This bottle is for your grandmother.” He unscrewed the lid and passed it to Jenny, who took a big whiff and closed her eyes. “Extraordinary fragrance. Truly. I can see why your grandmother is keen, why she wants to continue this, revive the lost art of flower water. The roses in the garden she made with your father are exquisite. What a fitting memorial to him.”

  Jenny held the bottle. “Take a deep breath, both of you.” She passed it under our noses. “This is the essence of flowers that never die. It’s their spirit in the bottle, you see.” She was very serious about this. “So many memories, and now, all in a bottle.”

  Harry seemed equal parts enchanted and unnerved by Jenny. He took the bottle from her and put a cap on it. “I see you have your wind bells. If you leave them here I’ll hang them for you. Pomeline has hers hung out on the verandah. Anyway, children, Sakura and I were thinking we could go down to the beach and have a fire. I’ve already been down and have gathered up some wood. It’s just a matter of trotting through the woods and striking a match. We’ll roast marshmallows and tell ghost stories. What do you say? Sakura has wonderful stories. I’ve already checked, and even Pomeline will come. And Dr. Baker. What do you say? Fancy?”

  I agreed.

  “Splendid,” he said. “Huzzah! Arthur?”

  Art smiled.

  Harry crowed with joy. “Brilliant. We shall ring your grandmother so she won’t worry and we’ll run you home after. And Jenny?”

  Jenny did a clumsy spin. As we turned to go out the door she ran back and gave Harry a great big hug, burying her head in his stomach. He was surprised and looked like he was a missionary visiting an orphanage. Her white kerchief hung off the side of her head as he touched the wisps of her silvery gold hair.

  “Then it’s settled. We’ll head down in a half hour. Now on with the three of you to check on those swans. Better hurry before they roost. And be careful. They’re not like ducks, those things.”

  The hedge labyrinth was perfectly trimmed now, towering dense green walls. We weren’t supposed to go into it without a grown-up around, certainly not in the twilight. One time Jenny went in and we tried to rescue her and the three of us ended up lost in there. She had a proper attack, and we followed the harsh, strangled breaths until we found her. We called and called for help. Charlie and Dr. Baker found us, and Estelle threatened to ban us from the garden. She tried to blame me and Art. We were just six years old. It was the same summer Charlie died. Jenny told her mother she’d insisted we all go in so there was no point in banishing us. I still remember her hands on her hips, breathless, pushing her mother away. You could never banish Jenny from Evermore.

  Jenny slowed down in front of the hedge and Art shook his head. “We’re not going in there. It’s too late. And we want to go to the beach fire.”

  “If you do, Jenny, you are on your own,” I said.

  “You two are cowards.”

  She didn’t know the half of it, of course, of why Art and I might be scared of things in the dark and how not believing, not tempting fate, was working.

  I rolled my eyes at her. “You’re right. I’m scared. Loretta will skin me alive if I get in any trouble. I’m not creeping around in the dark ever again and getting stranded in this stupid garden.”

  Never again, the child says, never again, but never is a long time.

  “Forevermore,” Jenny laughed in her disturbing voice. “Stuck forevermore in Evermore. Don’t you get it? I’m the only one with a sense of humour.” She took off running toward the pond. “Catch me, catch me, catch me if you can.” For a sickly child, as her mother called her, she was fast, disappearing through trees and bushes and towering flower beds, only a flash of her white dress and cap, bright, like she was a firefly. We went running after her.

  Jenny was standing in the water at the lily pond, her sandals on the bank, the swans at the far end, twisting their bodies around to stare at us. “You kind of look like one of them, Jenny,” Art said. I went down to the water. The lilies were closed up tight already. The two adult swans started gliding toward us, Sweet William and Iris White. The babies must have been in bed for the night, tucked up in the swan house.

  “Don’t worry, they won’t hurt you if I’m here. They are mute swans. It’s funny because they make so much noise. After my grandfather’s peacocks, they wanted contemplative birds. I guess they were fooled. What kind of birds do you like?” She took out a crumbling piece of bread she had jammed in her pocket and threw it in the water, and they came and gobbled it up.

  “Oh, I like them all,” Art said.

  “Fancy?” She kept her eyes on the birds. “I bet you like seagulls. You remind me of a seagull.”

  I flapped my arms and squawked and she started laughing.

  “Well, if I didn’t know better, I’d think they knew you, Jenny,” Art said. “Maybe your white kerchief is fooling them.”

  Jenny giggled. “Swans have long memories. They keep in mind who is nice to them and who isn’t, but mostly they don’t like people. My mother enjoys telling me they eat swans where Granny came from. Sweet William doesn’t like Mother.” She beamed at her big birds, like she’d had this conversation with them before. “Your Grampie said swans and crows never forget a kindness and they never forget a wrong. He knew as much about birds as Granny does about flowers. Swans live for a long time. Up to thirty years, he said. That way I’d have them right through until I was a grown-up. You don’t have to feel bad about them dying when you’re a child, the way you would with a dog or a cat.”

  Old Jake wandered through my mind then, his tail wagging, Grampie there on the verandah in his porch rocker, watching me fill the bird feeders. Wild birds were good pets. They came and went and took care of themselves.

  The swans bobbed in the water, cooing as though Jenny’s voice soothed them. “Daddy didn’t bother thinking what it would be like for his children if he died before we were grown up.”

  The big white birds kept looking at Jenny, and she started trilling at them in this odd way she had, and they trilled back. It was hypnotic, and finally, when the copper chimes in the herb gardens by the Water House started ringing and they hollered our names, we realized how long we’d been out by the pond. Jenny put on her sandals and trotted off, a small girl on a summer’s eve. Art and I followed her yet again. I turned and looked over my shoulder, and there on the pond full of the amethyst sky sat the two swans, at the water’s edge, watching us as we disappeared into the dark shadows falling down now as night came waltzing in.

  15.

  The Dead Samurai

  IT WAS easy then, as it still is now, to forget that the world beyond the thick forest of Petal’s End could be different. While we’d stopped at the big house for sweaters and flashlights, Harry had gone ahead to start the fire. We made a parade of light down through the woodland trail to the beach. It was near dark when we came to the shore and we could smell the driftwood smoke on the salty sea air as we came out of the woods. The remains of the day still lingered in a smouldering red line on the horizon. The island was out there, a black silhouette, a large creature that had risen from the waters, waiting. It was hard to imagine anyone living over there. I remembered Grampie describing how the sky had lit up the night the lighthouse burned down all those years ago, before it was replaced with a steel tower and the automated beacon. Pomeline used to say if there was ever a part of Petal’s End she wanted it was the island, that high atop would be the perfect place for a music conservatory.

  Harry called out to us as we came over the rocks. “Hurrah, you’re here! We can’t stay too long. I promised
Loretta you’d get to bed early. We have busy days with the garden party so soon. My, we are working you children hard. I hope you don’t report us, Dr. Baker, for child exploitation.” Harry chuckled and stirred the fire. He was in his khaki shorts, with a wool sweater on. For once his hat wasn’t around his neck. He had wool blankets waiting for us on the big logs around the fire. Waves were breaking on the rocks. A thin white line of surf appeared and disappeared in the dark-blue light.

  “It’s good to see them having some fun, Harold,” Dr. Baker said as he sat down on one of the logs.

  “Where’s Margaret?” Jenny sat down beside Dr. Baker.

  “She stayed with your grandmother. Hector was going to drive her home.”

  “I could have stayed up with Granny and helped …” Jenny’s voice broke off.

  Dr. Baker laughed. “You need to have some fun. Doctor’s orders. Margaret’s happy to stay late. She’s worked out well, I’d say. Your grandmother adores her.”

  Jenny coughed. “Oh rest beside the weary road.”

  Pomeline put her hand on Jenny’s, her long fingers covering her sister’s hands completely. “Jenny, please don’t start up with that. Let’s have fun.” The flames flickered and Pomeline’s face glowed. She took a blanket and put it over Jenny’s knees. “Let’s be proper sisters, shall we, Agatha Jennifer Parker?”

  Jenny coughed again and Dr. Baker leaned forward. “Your breathing is a bit ragged. The sea air will be good for your lungs but do stay back from the woodsmoke. Driftwood fires are the worst, what with all the brine in the logs. You need to slow down, Jenny, or your mother will be apoplectic. We don’t want that.”

  The ensuing silence lingered, only the crackles from the fire popping out. It seemed Estelle was speaking to us from far away in the city, looking into a crystal ball where flame and laughter swirled in wheezy spirals of smoke.

  “Look, children.” Harry was pointing to the east. “Look at the moon rising.” There it was, the enormous August moon coming up over the trees at the top of the hill. “Do you really think it’s that big?”

  “Yes!” Jenny called like she was answering back in church from the Amen pew.

  “Well, when it rises, what happens?” Harry asked.

  “It gets smaller. Late at night it’s like it shrunk.”

  “Yes, Fancy, that’s right. But it doesn’t shrink. It’s the brain playing a trick on your eye. It’s called the moon illusion. When the moon is just above the trees the brain puts it into that same perspective. The eye scales it to the objects around it, houses, buildings, that sort of thing, so it looks enormous. And when it rises higher into the vastness of the sky the magnification ends.”

  “Well, that’s not much fun, the betrayal of the moon. Moon, moon, you were once my friend.” Jenny shook her fist at it, standing up, her little body wobbling.

  “Jenny, really, it’s not the moon doing it. It’s your brain and your eye.” Pomeline giggled.

  Jenny ignored her. “Dr. Baker, you didn’t know that. What kind of doctor are you?”

  “Jenny, don’t be rude.”

  “I’m not being rude, Pomeline. I’m just commenting that our Cousin Harry knows about the moon illusion but Dr. Baker doesn’t.”

  Dr. Baker had that long face that only Jenny could bring out. “Cousin Harry does indeed have a lot of knowledge, but I can assure you, Jenny, I know how the mind and eye work together.”

  “He isn’t your cousin, Dr. Baker.”

  “I stand corrected, Jenny. What I intended to say is that there are many ways to understand the world around us, and only some of them are scientific. I suppose storytelling offers another kind of truth for certain types of people. They certainly are much more fun, aren’t they children? Fancy, you used to tell wonderful tales even if they were rather macabre.”

  “Not no more, I don’t. Busy watching the moon tricking us,” I said.

  Dr. Baker laughed. “Well that’s a pity.”

  Jenny, for once, agreed with him. “It’s true, Fancy, you always told the scariest ghost stories. I remember your Grampie telling the one about the forerunner, the ghost of a ghost. He said they came to remind us that how we live is how we’ll end.”

  “My Grampie’s dead. He was full of foolish stories. I don’t want to talk about him.” I threw a rock in the fire and sparks exploded up. Everyone pulled back.

  “Right, then, I can certainly tell some stories. And Sakura loves the traditional stories from her country. Kaidan they call them, don’t they, darling? All sorts of nasty tales of spirits looking for revenge.”

  Sakura raised her eyebrows but she didn’t say anything, and Harry clapped his hands together. “Let’s have some stories and some marshmallows, shall we?”

  Dr. Baker had the same fixed smile he did when Marigold told her stories. Harry passed the bag of marshmallows to Pomeline, who shook her head. “I’m not feeling hungry. Too sugary for me, but Jenny loves them. I’ll roast one for you, little sister.”

  “You’re practising too much. You barely ate supper,” Jenny said.

  Pomeline stabbed a puffy white blob with a roasting stick. “Well, I’m not getting enough exercise, I agree with that. I’m getting fat, turning into a slug.”

  “I hardly think so, Pomeline. You’re a gorgeous young woman. But you certainly are practising with sustained concentration. It’s good to have a central focus, but you’re eating and breathing this. You can’t live on music alone.” Harry’s voice was tender.

  “It’s hard not to admire such passion,” Dr. Baker said. “The Parkers are remarkable people. That’s what I tell Estelle, that she should be proud of you.”

  “The exam will be over soon enough and I want to go to the conservatory. I haven’t planned for anything else.” Pomeline turned the marshmallow carefully near the coals.

  “When is the exam?” Sakura asked.

  “At the end of August. And again at the end of September, if I make the short list.” Pomeline wrapped her arms around her chest, shivering even with a blanket on her knees.

  Sakura looked up at the sky. “Dr. Baker is right. Passion is wonderful.”

  “How about that ghost story, Sakura? Are they as terrifying as Harold suggests?”

  “Harry likes ghost stories. He thinks we are naive because most people in my country still believe the stories, or what they represent.”

  “Sakura, darling, you’re not being fair. I think they’re astounding stories, so charming.”

  Sakura looked bemused. It wasn’t a mean look but an endearing one. For all Harry’s education, he was the naive one.

  Jenny held her hand up as though she was volunteering and glanced over at me. “I still want Fancy to tell one. There are lots of stories about the Mosher family. Fancy’s grandfather was nice. I’m sorry he’s dead. You might feel better if you tell a story. He called me Jenny Starlight. Mother said that sounded like I was a burlesque dancer. Fancy said it was because my skin is bone white. Samuel Mosher had special ways. Granny was telling me that—”

  “Jenny, don’t repeat Granny’s tales. It’s rude. She’s talking nonsense this summer. Leave Fancy alone,” Pomeline said.

  Art poked the fire with a long stick.

  I whispered, “Other people can tell stories. The ones about us are just all made up anyways.” For the first time it occurred to me that maybe the Parkers had heard more than just rumours about my family.

  “I’ll tell one, then,” Sakura said, breaking the tension. “In my country, at this time, it is the time of Obon. It is a time when we honour the dead. According to tradition, it’s when the spirits come to the human world and we make them offerings, so they will return and rest in peace. We go to the cemeteries, where the ghosts dwell. We leave lanterns for them on the water, the ones who have died at sea. If the body hasn’t had a proper burial, then the spirit will never rest. My grandparents said you must never swim at Obon, as the water will be full of spirits.”

  Dr. Baker chuckled. “Well, we’d best stay out of the bay
.”

  Jenny scowled at him. “It’s very, very rude to interrupt.”

  My bare foot grazed against Art’s and my cold toes gave him a shock. He took off his sweater and put it on my feet.

  Sakura started buttoning up her sweater. Harry used the break to pull out a bottle of wine and plastic glasses. He filled them and handed them to the adults. Then his eyebrows went up as he exclaimed, “We’ll just pause for a toast, to days gone by, and to the adventures still to come.” He poured glasses for all of us and passed them around. “It’s a special occasion. We’re celebrating summer! And life. And childhood. A bit of wine is good for the health, wouldn’t you say, Dr. Baker?”

  “I don’t suppose a small bit will hurt. Red wine has health benefits.” He smiled at Pomeline and raised his glass to her. The rest of us lifted our glasses and we went around the fire clinking them together. I’d never had wine before, not a drop. I drank it all down. It was sour and bitter and it reminded me of autumn. I coughed, and Harry came rushing over. “You don’t drink it like water, my dear. You sip.” He poured me a bit more. “It’s for sipping, dear, sipping.”

  Jenny licked her lips. “It tastes sour. Granny gives me sherry and it’s much sweeter.”

  “Granny should not be giving you sherry. You know how upset that makes Mother.”

  “It’s fine, Pomeline, it’s medicinal. And we certainly don’t have to be reporting that to anyone.” Dr. Baker gazed at Pomeline and held up his glass. “Here’s to beauty.”