The Memento

by Christy Ann Conlin

  When the child was sleeping I took to having a drink with Hector, for I discovered it brought a short reprieve to my mind. At first it was just one. But it didn’t take long for me to find out I was just like my mother. The authorities come in the night with a paper—what they called an order of taking. Hector had been screaming. My girl outside in a nightie on the sidewalk playing, avoiding the arguing indoors. In a flash, our girl had her hands and lips pressed to the back seat window. She was crying, steaming up the window as the car drove away down the dark street. I was drunk running after it and the police came and grabbed me. They took Hector away to jail and they took me off to a shelter for women. They gave our daughter to Loretta, who became her guardian.

  It took me a few months but I was able to find my way again. Loretta brought the child back to me. I could not look either of them in the eye for weeks. We lived in an apartment, just the two of us. She started school. I would walk her there each morning and wait by the school doors each afternoon. We were poor and picked fruit, and I made jams and jellies as my mother had done. I did my embroidery again, pretty pictures of young girls by summer streams. I did one of a blond girl in a field of daisies, twirling about, and three little children playing around her. It made me think of Pomeline so I put it away.

  Hector come back, yes he did. My girl was just turning six. He wanted to see her. A social worker come to see me. Hector had seen the error of his ways again. This was Hector, you see, believing his own lies for as long as he could. But we all agreed it would be good for her to know her father. She started going to see him on Saturday afternoons. We did that right through the autumn and the winter and into the spring. They sent me to the vocational school to be a personal care attendant. My training was in the nursing home in town, where Margaret was the supervisor. She had an opportunity to turn me away. They sent her a list with the student names on it and mine was there. But she hired me.

  She was a hard-looking thirty and I was twenty-two. She had no children and was divorced, for there would be no man telling her what to do. Margaret still had hair hanging down in her eyes and them saddlebags and big breasts that swayed as she wiggled her hips. She did not speak of Petal’s End, not then. Margaret did not mention her burn mark. You’d think it was just a birthmark if you didn’t know she’d had her face scalded in a pot of boiling rosewater.

  It was awkward between us until, one shift, we were folding towels and Margaret said, out of the blue, like she’d been waiting for years to tell me, how she appreciated what I done that day her father drove up and she was smoking. The tension broke, and Petal’s End, the flowers and the delicate scent of scalding steam fell away into the soft white towels that smelled of bleach, the towels piled high and perfect like them blocks of soap had once been arranged in the Water House.

  My daughter and I moved to a house in the country not too far from Hector. She would visit him most Sunday afternoons. We walked through a field by a brook to get to his house. She adored fishing with him, watching him cast his line out over the water, the fish jumping. When Margaret asked me to start the back shift Hector said he’d keep our little girl for the night. I agreed to try it for that first shift.

  I was apprehensive as we walked over to Hector’s. The meadow had grown wild and we held hands as we pushed our way through the high sweet hay until we came out onto the yard. I left her there and I went back through the field on my trail, beside the small empty one.

  The police came to my door later that day before I was setting out for my shift. She had hit her head on a rock by the brook and had rolled into the water. She’d slipped trying to cast her line. The edge of the brook was slimy. He’d left her alone. Hector had a woman there. She had just dropped by. He wept, saying that he’d thought they’d be just a minute, but a minute was all it took.

  She looked so tiny lying there on the hospital table, long dark hair still wet, eyes closed. They sent her away before I could see her again. I was not fit to be a mother. They said Hector came in, beside himself with grief and blame.

  A lady at the hospital knew Ma and called her. She came immediately. I didn’t recognize her at first. She was no longer a drinker, but her face was heavy and lined. She was an elderly lady finally, even with her hair now dyed red, and her lipstick on her wrinkled lips, her hands withered up like dry ferns. Don’t you tell me not to cry, old woman. Hush-a-bye, I will cry and cry. She did not say a word and she did not talk of John Lee. Shush, I said to her, holding my finger to my lips. Don’t you cry now, Mama, don’t you cry. Do you hear me? Just hush up now … hush and be still. For I did not want her to wake my daughter. Ma did not listen. Endless tears spilled from her eyes as though her dry papery skin was just a wrapper for a bottomless pool of sorrow.

  Hector went away. I didn’t know what happened to him for years. Back home I walked through that field time and time again. Our paths were still there, where we’d beat down the flowers and the hay and clover. But the winds came, the seasons changed, and at last it seemed a small dark-haired girl had never walked through the field at all, that not even I had, for our paths through the meadow were swept away.

  Loretta came in with some of the goodly Believers but I could not talk to them. Loretta held me and rocked me and sleep came down and pressed sticky blackness throughout my mind. I woke and she was gone and it was quiet.

  I lived there alone. Ma would leave me food. I would not talk to her, neither. I prayed to Holy Mother Mercy that my daughter would heal and that she would come back to me. I called to Grampie but he did not answer. No red bird come, and I took this as a sign she would recover complete. They would not let me have her back. There was a night when I drank so much whisky that I took a kitchen knife and ended up in a hospital and, later, in a place drying out.

  The Believers came again. “Girly Miss,” Loretta said, stroking my hand. Hideous dry heaves came but no tears, just like Jenny Parker. My mother had stolen them all, I raged. I could not go back to the Believers. There was no salvation for me there. I only wanted Holy Mother Mercy to come. My aim was having my daughter back. The social worker said I had to get a job, had to live clean and straight and narrow. I couldn’t bear to live in the house we’d had together. I moved back into town to an apartment. Each day I walked to the gas station and bought cigarettes and coffee, a wiry shell, wobbling in my high-heel shoes. For long enough I’d had my hair covered and I felt safest wearing a sweater with a hood. I pulled the drawstrings tight, hiding as I staggered down the sidewalk. I did not drink nothing stronger than coffee, as tempted as I was. If Ma could be dry then I could be too. We was one in the same, I knew.

  It was all I could do to get dressed and walk down that street and get my smokes. I would light one up as I walked home and smoke the rest of the pack throughout the day. It was spelled out what to do in order to get her back, my precious girl, to stay on the straight and narrow, to get a job.

  Ma took me back to the hospital. They told me that later. I had not stayed on the clean path as Ma had finally been able to. All the drugs and the drinking. I did not clean or cook. I took up this habit, that when I’d go to the liquor store I’d get a ride home with whatever man would drive me. He’d come in to my dirty apartment. There were times then when I was hungry for warm flesh, for sweating, for the feel of hot skin rubbing together and it didn’t matter whose body it was. They’d leave money for me on the counter. It was too much work for me to see them to the door. Then came the time that always comes, where I drank too much and couldn’t do what the man-of-the-day asked. His hands flew and smacked. Ma come banging on the door, as the nurses told me later at the hospital, hollering through my window. I was not conscious when Ma came up to the glass pane. She called for the ambulance from the neighbour’s. Ronnie was there, waiting in the truck, still driving her around, right to the end, because long ago they had taken her licence away for good.

  They sent in a doctor who talked to me about the dark times. They ran the electricity through me and it was hard to remember anyt
hing, as though my mind was full of pictures left out in the sun too long. When people talked it was like there was a delay. Their lips would move and words emerged eventually but they was drawn out and distorted.

  The doctors had me doing this and that in the hospital. They had programs where I felt like an ancient lady making crafts, singing songs and walking in the gardens. They give me books to read but the words would blur on the page and I just stacked them on top of each other. A doctor would talk to me. I could never remember his name. It didn’t matter, he said. He give me a notebook to write things down, for keeping track of my days and what I was thinking about, but I never did so because my mind was a wide, deep ocean with thoughts that would come out of the fog like islands before fading away again.

  While I was still in the hospital a lawyer came to visit me. He was young but stooped over, tall and thin, wearing round spectacles. His fingers were dry and white like he never saw the light of day. Raymond Delquist was his name. He was from the big valley town. There was lawyers in every generation of his family. Just like I was born into my family way, he was born into the law. He shook my limp hand. His dry fingers made a swishing rasp as they slid over the paper he put on the table between us. It took me time to comprehend what he wanted. He was saying things like look after you, a place to go, resting, caregiver, guardian, healing. He was offering me a job. I could go and work, he said, looking after Agatha Parker. He used her proper name. She was not well.

  Jenny had requested me. She was moving to Petal’s End for the summer. He wouldn’t tell me what was wrong with her. She would pay me more than I could make anywhere else. It would be a fresh start. Raymond Delquist understood we went way back. Agatha had told him we had a childhood bond. I could live there. There were papers I needed to sign. It was hard to follow him. His misty voice made me sleepy. One of the nameless doctors came in and sat with us. He agreed, it was a decent opportunity, he said, to leave the hospital and start anew. The lawyer had the papers there. Agatha needed to know right away. If my mind had been slow before, when he mentioned Petal’s End images came cartwheeling through—the island surrounded by cliffs, the lighthouse and storms, the sky full of lightning, Jenny’s face in the rain and Art’s big hands reaching out. Even in that sterile hospital ward I swore I could smell the deep forest and tangy ocean spray and hear Pomeline scream on a shrieking wind.

  Margaret came to see me while I was still in the hospital deciding what to do. She expected me to come back and work for her, she said. A nurse in the hospital had told her that Jenny was offering to take me over at Petal’s End. Margaret thought it was a joke and she’d come to laugh with me about it—like that was the last place I would go, or should go.

  Margaret was shocked when she realized I had not dismissed it outright. “Don’t go up there, Fancy Mosher. You need to listen to me and you need to listen good. Jenny’s not right in her head. What do you want to go back there for? You don’t owe her nothing. She can’t help you. She’s just up to something, that mutated dwarf of a bitch. That’s plain, isn’t it? You’re not a girl now. And only bad things happen over to Petal’s End. You know that better than anyone. Jenny isn’t any different than when she was a kid. No one changes, no one ever does. You think you’re some smart, don’t you? People don’t want to help you. Everyone’s just looking for what they can get. That’s life. You’re an ignorant little fool. Did you really think I wanted to help you get your life back together? Did you really believe that? It’s too easy tricking you.”

  I wasn’t even dressed, just sitting there in the hospital lounge listening to her tell me how simple it was to get Hector to stop believing, to come into her big fleshy arms and press himself against her wide hips. My noiseless pain brought a smug look over Margaret’s face. It was her, she told me, when Hector went astray. When his precious daughter tumbled into the stream and hit her head, her daddy was in bed with Margaret.

  She believed I had done Jenny’s bidding. We’d tried to kill her with the poisoned rosewater, but we’d got impatient when it didn’t work. If Margaret couldn’t get to Jenny Parker then she would get to me. I could reap what Jenny had sown, for Jenny was sealed away in her castle on the mountain. “Hector really did think you believed their preachings,” she told me. “He hated you for that. He took all his hate for the Believers and he gave it to you.”

  I didn’t tell Margaret that it was me who fooled Hector, for as much as I wanted to believe I could have a good and simple life, I knew I could not. Even the Holy Mother Mercy Grampie called on had forsaken me. I said nothing to Margaret for it did not matter no more, there was no taking back the past for any of us. Having my daughter returned was the only thing that could heal me. I did not weep or wail as Margaret wanted. She walked toward the door, but before she slipped out I saw her crying. It’s a surprise discovering that no matter how satisfying the planning, there ain’t no real pleasure in retribution.

  That is how I came to leave the valley after twelve years and go back up and over the mountain on the Lonely Road, coming down into Lupin Cove, winding into the village and over the bridge and back up the hill on the other side. Lupin Cove was even further in decline, everything looking shabbier and overgrown, abandoned.

  I arrived on a fine June day at the iron gates of Petal’s End. Raymond Delquist drove me and he talked only when there was a reason—an economy of words. He was like a Believer in that way. But he did not look like a man who would ever raise his voice in song, and I told him so. His anemic cheeks lifted on either of his lips like the frail wings of a moth. He said his grandfather was my Grampie’s lawyer. He said my grandfather was a special man. They had a painting he had done of Raymond’s grandmother. She’d been hit by a train. In the painting she was smiling. It made the family happy.

  The lawyer unlocked the gates and pulled them apart, using his whole body, and I got out of the car with my bag. “I’ll walk in from here, sir,” I said.

  His hat brim was wide and his face was shaded. “There’s a telephone. No answering machine, but there is a phone.”

  “Probably the same one as before, that old black telephone.”

  “Agatha has my number, and it’s on your contract, should you need anything.” He tipped his felt hat.

  The leaves closed in on the lane as though it was a tunnel. I took off my shoes and put them in my bag, and as soon as my feet were bare I started feeling better. My daughter was just like me. She loved bare feet. That was the Mosher way. Feeling the dirt between my toes brought me back to life as I walked the lane to Petal’s End.

  As I ambled along, a long shape moved further down the road. My heart hammered as I saw it was a man with silver hair. He came forward and said my name, his low voice cavernous. The melody of the voice was unchanged even though a great long time had passed, twelve years, since that summer when Pomeline died on the island and the forest went up in smoke and Marigold fell down sputtering her strange words.

  3.

  Down the Dark Lane

  THE SLATE-BLUE eyes in his tanned brown face were the only trace of the twelve-year-old Art Comeau I had known. Before me was a grown man with hot blood in his veins. I saw the muscles move under Art’s skin and it made me think for a moment of Hector, but I let Hector bob away in the river of my mind. I stood there with Art on the lane as he took my hands in both of his. Those warm strong fingers cradled my clammy palms.

  Art seemed older than twenty-four years, but the same could be said of me. Lines had laid down upon my face as though I’d walked through fine cobwebs. Perhaps my black hair would turn white also.

  “Fancy, let me take your bag.” He reached for it as he spoke, his hand brushing mine. “I was walking down to meet the car. I knew you would walk down the lane … in bare feet. Some things never change.”

  “What the hell happened to your voice, Art Comeau? Did you start dying your hair? I thought you’d be far away from these parts.” I wondered how much Art knew about me, how my life had gone. I knew nothing of him.


  “I finally sold my grandmother’s house. Jenny offered me a job gardening, a good part-time job. I did a year at the vocational school studying horticulture but then I switched to university.”

  “You always liked the plants and bugs.” I supposed Art would think he was better than me now, me who didn’t even finish high school. “What are you going to be? A plant doctor?”

  “Actually, I’m studying psychology now. I’m going to be a psychologist, not a botanist like Harry.”

  Harry. His name a transparent bell between us, which began to ring, then Sakura’s voice, a tiny wind brushing up against that bell. I had one of my spells and forgot he was there for a time, feeling the laneway on my feet. In the woods were a few of the broken statue pieces from long ago, covered in mint-green lichen.

  “Excuse me, Fancy, are you okay?” I opened my eyes and the man with the silver hair and the deep voice was looking at me. “My grandmother’s hair turned like this when she was young too, but she dyed it black. It started happening when I finished high school. For a long time I thought it was on account of all the stress, even knowing it ran in my family. At least baldness isn’t in the genes.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Studying psychology has helped me. When Yvette took me away I went to see someone, to talk about things. And when she died her cousins kept me. They were good people. It helped me understand that whole summer, as much as I could.”

  Anger came up in me. “The only time we could have done anything was back then and we did nothing. I don’t want to go talking about that. The past is the past. I’m glad you’re all happy and well-adjusted now with your big education and your city accent and your travels. I got things to do now getting my life back in order. Don’t you go giving me a hard time, because I can’t stand that, Arthur Comeau. You don’t know what I been through.”