The Memento

by Christy Ann Conlin

  “Fancy, I ain’t getting out of here. There’s no getting better for me.”

  “Sure you are, Ma,” I said. Ma always got better. She was like me, an earwig. She didn’t never die, no matter how hard you stomped. She stroked my cheek with a puffy finger. Though she hadn’t been smoking there was a faint smell of nicotine soaked into her flesh.

  “I did you a picture,” I told her. Out of my purse I took her needlepoint wrapped in a towel. I unwrapped it for her, shaking because it had changed—it wasn’t a lady bending over, making a bed with a little boy beside her. It was a lady lying on a bed, and she had a yellow face, and there was a boy holding her hand. Ma started crying in such a gentle way, and it plays in my ear even now, as though I’ve opened a music box.

  “Oh Fancy, thank you. You saw John Lee. It was just me all these years wanting to change what happened, the old me just tormenting the life out of the younger me. The past don’t change—just how we look at it.” She paused. “You’re the one who needs to know how sorry your Mama is, Honeysuckle. Your Grampie was right taking you away, giving you a chance, because I couldn’t do it.”

  I held her hand and kissed it. Then I took out my embroidery of Melissa by the little brook and showed her how Melissa was lying with her face in the water, how Jenny went and wrecked it. I burst into tears.

  “It’s okay, Fancy baby,” she said. “You did the best you could. Accidents happen, terrible, terrible accidents, and we can’t take them back. If the dead come looking for you maybe all they want is for you to let them go.” She pulled me close and we stayed like that for a moment, until I heard Ronnie clear his throat. I didn’t even know he’d come in the room. A nurse come in next and Ma cradled my head. “It don’t matter now, Fancy,” she said. “John Lee forgives me. I see from your picture, and he’ll be there to greet me. You found your gift, Fancy, in your pictures.” She sang faintly and I could just make out the words, Baby’s boat the silver moon, sailing in the sky.

  Ma gave a soft moan and the nurse said she needed her meds. It was time to leave. “Farewell,” I whispered, but she didn’t open her eyes. Ronnie nodded at me. It was the best he could ever do.

  The sun was setting in the west by the time I was driving up and over the mountain. A sultry breeze blew in as I looked over to the island. Long shadows fell on the road. There was no consolation for me.

  I understood now it wasn’t Jenny who went and changed my needlework. It was like that the whole time. I would check the others as soon as I got to Petal’s End. That kept hammering through my head as the car came down the hill into Lupin Cove. I drove over the bridge and turned up the road and at last down the long lane to Petal’s End. It was dark in the forest and the car headlights shone a dim beam directly in front. A deer ran into the road and stood there glaring at me. I slammed on the brakes and squeezed my eyes shut. There was a crackling of branches as the deer moved on, and I opened my eyes. That ghastly white thing was right on the hood of the car gawking at me, its fingers scraping against the glass windshield, long stringy hair, grimy and dirty. It was too dark to make out its features but I could hear its piercing singing through the open window. It was Pomeline, I was sure. She had come back to punish us.

  My foot pressed hard on the gas and the car lurched ahead, throwing the creature into the ditch with limbs flailing. I screeched into Petal’s End and parked in front of the big house. Art came out on the verandah and folded me into his arms, and I whispered that Jenny was right, Pomeline had come back to get us. It was her opening the windows and cutting flowers and laying out petals. She was furious we were lying. She’d make us tell the truth, each one of us.

  “It’s bedtime, Fancy,” he said, patronizing me. “I shouldn’t have let you go down to the hospital alone. I’m sorry. I’m not thinking straight. None of us are.”

  I had no time for this and brushed past him right into the sitting room, turning on all the lights as I went. I wanted to see my pictures, but none of them were there, where I had kept them. I ran down the hall to the Annex. The door had been unlocked and opened, inviting me in, terrorizing me. Art was behind me and he kept telling me to calm down, that I needed to have a nice cup of tea, he’d make me a pot. It was all overwhelming, he said, too much for me, too many people passing away. He started crying, and I realized I was as well.

  I turned back then and went right up the stairs, taking them two by two even in my high-heeled shoes. Down the hall, Jenny’s door was wide open and she was reading by lamplight. Art was behind me still saying I needed to just take a time-out. Jenny placed her bookmark and closed the book. She was waiting for me.

  “Why didn’t you tell me earlier about what Marigold did if you knew for so long? That John Lee was your uncle, that your Granny let him drown?” I was sobbing.

  “Oh, now you listen to me,” Jenny said. “She killed him. She stood there and watched a child drown. It’s no different than if she had shot him in the head. It’s no different than letting Pomeline fall down over the cliff. And it’s no different than how Granny stood there as my father died. Remember? When you came down the hall and found us? My father was wiggling around like a helpless spider caught in a web. My grandmother did nothing. I was too young, too weak, to help. Even so, when I rushed toward him she stood in front of me, and her strong arms scooped me up like I was nothing more than a kitten rolled up in a quilt. She screamed and cried, yelling at Daddy that it was his fault for not being the right kind of son. He was to blame for not being a real man like his father wanted him to be. It was his fault John Lee died because she did it all for him, but he was like the rest—ungrateful. He had wasted the life she gave him with his perversions. Being stupid enough to marry Estelle, letting his father down.

  “Daddy finally stopped moving. I kicked Granny in the shin and ran free. I was trying to hold his legs up so he could breathe. But the dead can’t breathe. Then you and Art came along and you found us.” Jenny took a big breath of air, wheezing violently, then continued. “When Marigold was dying she told me that John Lee had come back for her, she could see him. It was him that tripped her in the gazebo, and she said that you saw him, too.”

  “But I didn’t see him. I saw you. It was you.” We was both hollering, and Art came right in the room and shouted for us to calm down. He was going to have us both committed to a mental hospital if we didn’t get a hold of ourselves.

  I needed answers. I ran back down to the Annex and right into the big room at the end where the curtains blew long and white. There was nothing but the wires in the ceiling, no chandelier any more, no Charlie Parker hanging with his eyes bulging. But on the walls Jenny had hung every embroidery picture I done, and they had all turned bad, every single one. I saw all my stitching, intricate and perfect, but they was all distorted now, serene pictures from a child’s imagination turned into nightmares on display. Jenny had made the room into a revolting art gallery. The space had been many things over the years—a chamber of wrongdoing.

  I looked at my embroidery of Grampie on his sofa, but he wasn’t napping with his arms hanging down like they did. Grampie was lying there dead, in the same position I found him in, his arms crossed over his chest. The small miniature of Marigold wasn’t of her napping but of her lying there dead. And there was Pomeline, but she wasn’t sitting in a field of white flowers while we ran around laughing. She was falling through the mist as we thrashed about in the flowers screaming. Each a memento of a time to come. While I am the one who can capture those moments, it is how each of us lives that guides the needle in my hand.

  Art had come up behind me without me noticing. “We should go sit down and talk.” He was desperate now, his low voice breaking.

  He told me this was how they always looked, that my perspective was finally getting clearer, that being cooped up in this house alone was changing how I was able to comprehend. We were ignoring things because it was all we could do. Art looked exhausted as he went on about stress and lack of sleep and worry. I looked over at the embroidery of Je
nny by the lily pond with her swans, and she was in a lawn chair in her kerchief with her eyes open, a pink flower in her hand. That one wasn’t no different, at least, but it was the only one. I wondered why. I had a tantrum trying to figure out what I was seeing, and Art slapped me right across the cheek. My head flew back. My skin, my scar especially, was burning. There was stars in my eyes, but I was suddenly calm, like he’d knocked the panic out of me and what was left was a dull fear.

  There was a thud. Art held his hand up to his lips, which at first I misread as guilt from hitting me. But his eyes revealed that he could hear it too, the steps in the hall, the wood creaking. Then running, and a bitter laugh, the door slamming. I threw on a light switch by the door and we hurried out in the darkness but there was nothing there. We heard a crash upstairs and ran up. Jenny was on the floor in her nightgown.

  “Was that you running around down there, listening, spying?” She was groping for her glasses. I kicked them out of the way. “What kind of game are you playing, Jenny Parker?”

  Art moved past me, picked up Jenny’s glasses and handed them to her and helped her up. “We need to stop this,” he said.

  Then came that shrill singing and we all heard it, almost no tune, words we could not make out. Rushing into the hall, I pointed as a shimmer of white descended the stairs. It stopped, waiting there at the bottom in the semi-darkness. Art came out behind me with Jenny at his back, as fast as she could be with her cane, leaning on the door frame. “There,” I said, pointing.

  They looked and said in unison, “Where?”

  They did not see, but they could hear it singing. Jenny furrowed her brow and listened closely to the words, and then she started singing almost perfectly along with it, “… with one star awake, as the swan in the evening moves over the lake.”

  “I’ve been hearing that song since I turned twelve,” I said. “Whatever it is, it’s at the bottom of the stairs singing. Can’t you see it?”

  They both shook their heads, but they kept their ears cocked. There was not a doubt in my mind that it was Pomeline.

  As it disappeared, I put my hands to my eyes. It was time for me to face Pomeline. Art was shaking his head. He wanted me to stay in the house. But when he realized I would not stay, he said he wasn’t going to let me go alone. He took a lantern from the kitchen and we went out outside.

  I remember standing on the stepping stone mosaic made with the broken teacups. Art turned the lights on in Evermore. The door was closed, and that seemed to reassure him. He was still hoping it was stress that was breaking us—and that if it was closed nothing could have gone inside. Art opened the door. We walked along the path holding hands and we could both hear the loud tinkling of the glass wind bells. We heard the humming surround us, and Art kept shaking his head as though that might send the music off on the breeze. The night air was toasty but still I shivered, and my scar tingled. There were no lights near the pond but the bright moon reflected on the water. Art whispered that maybe it was just one of them wood creatures we had believed in when we were children. That was easiest to believe, I suppose, that a childhood story had come to life.

  I left Art there on the path with his lantern and went down to the pond’s edge. Bats ricocheted all about. In the moonlight I saw petals scattered on the water and I knelt down there on the bank. The humming all around me became song blending with the bells:

  My love said to me, “My mother won’t mind.

  And my father won’t slight you for your lack of kind.”

  That song I had heard so long ago in the Tea House, and in the Annex, the ballad Pomeline had been playing early that summer in the music room.

  She stepped away from me, and she moved through the fair,

  And fondly I watched her move here and move there.

  Cold, vile-smelling breath blew on my neck and the scar on my face blazed as I sensed her lean forward over my shoulder.

  And she went her way homeward, with one star awake,

  As the swan in the evening moves over the lake.

  “Pomeline,” I said, “we’re sorry for what happened. We were only children. You must go away. You can’t stay here any more. You should never have let Dr. Baker touch you. That could only ever have led you to heartache, don’t you see?” The breath was in my ear, relentless, unsettling. I heard Art calling to me as though he was far off in the brambles.

  Last night she came to me, my dead love came in,

  So softly she came that her feet made no din.

  It came ever closer, and there was its image in the moonlit pond.

  She came close beside me, And this she did say:

  It is deep in the pond, the place where they’ll lay.

  There were gleaming ponds in its eyes, glassy pools with moons and white swans, and I saw then it was not Pomeline back from the dead to haunt us. A disfigured version of Jenny was reflected there, singing her lifeless tune. The swans came squawking out for me at that moment, as if on cue, and I stood up and turned to find nothing but Art back on the path, coming toward me, his voice clear and loud, the lantern swinging in his hand. We looked behind us and the mansion was completely illuminated, every room in the house. We ran back, screaming Jenny’s name.

  Jenny was in her room reading when we came rushing in, the same as before, as though she was expecting us for an appointment. I sat at the edge of her bed with Art. I did not know how to tell her it was not Pomeline who was haunting us, but Jenny herself, that she was that little white thing that had showed itself to me throughout the years. She was so unsettled in herself for all of her days that her spirit started rising early. I had told Art all this as we came in the house. And all the while I had been thinking of the man in the shade of the sugar maples at the Tea House the last two weeks before Grampie died. Grampie said in his letter it was the memento stirring in me, and I understood that now, the ghost of a ghost. Grampie had begun to rise, and, perhaps because I was a Mosher too, I had sensed him even as such a young girl.

  I looked at the photographs Jenny had there on her bed. She’d taken them out of an album bound in black velvet. “This is what my mother has been looking for,” Jenny said. She laughed grimly. “Granny must have taken them and tucked them away so no one could ever find them. That’s why they were afraid of her. Now my mother knows I have them.” Splayed out were unholy black-and-white photos of Dr. Baker and Estelle, much younger, naked and doing things in positions I had never imagined.

  Art carefully pulled out Pomeline’s journal. It had weathered poorly in the swan house, warped and mildewed from moisture. He tried to read it aloud but couldn’t get words out. Art handed it to me. He and Jenny listened while I read. It wasn’t no journal entry I was reading, but words to a song, lyrics, about a girl who found out that her love was a ruin, and poisonous, the girl whose baby was ill got. Her lover had spurned her, he had turned from her, had been with her mother, although he was her father, and the man who dangled, choked and tangled, was, la la la, not of her blood.

  It was poetic, a ballad she might sing at the piano wearing a pretty summer dress as the piano keys tinkled the melody, but nothing could make sentimental the fact that Dr. Baker was her father, and the father of the baby that died with her when she crashed down in the surging waters and was bashed into them red rock cliffs. Jenny explained to us, as we sat there in utter shock, that Estelle never told Dr. Baker, and he was too wrapped up in himself to even think Pomeline wasn’t Charlie’s child. Estelle didn’t let Pomeline know, at least not until the damage was done.

  I thought of the Pomeline of that summer, the bright Pomeline who wilted before our eyes, with her drawn, tired face and tender stomach, the Pomeline with no one to turn to but three children who held her over the pounding waves and tossed her away into the sky.

  There was a gust then at the window and the white lace curtains blew in and pulled out. Jenny gazed at the two of us with her big, pleading eyes. She did not know until it was too late that some things you can never take back. And we were
only children. We renewed our pact in that dishevelled and cluttered room never to say a word about what happened so long ago. Pomeline was now a part of memory and the island and the moody water forever circling it. We linked our hands together and as we took our vows Jenny whispered, Peace on earth and mercy mild. She took her hands away from us and clasped them to her heart.

  We did not discuss that night. Raymond Delquist came over each day in the week that followed to meet with Jenny. She was getting weaker and was not expected to live beyond the autumn. On good days she could walk around, and on bad days she would lie in bed or sit in a chair. She was quiet in a way she had never been previous.

  I still saw the thing in white. I could hear it singing in the night, and I could see it flitting through the garden in the twilight, and peering in the windows. But there was no longer fear, for I understood that some spirits who knew they would be passing would show themselves to me. Their stories would find their way into my bones and my fingers, and into my needle and onto the muslin. Quaint and final, once I put the last stitch down and encased it in a frame. This was the memento as it stirred and came to me.

  They took Grampie’s house, piece by piece. They rebuilt it in the art gallery in the city, the Tea House, even with his sign. They had a bench right outside the house, like it was on the lawn instead of in a gallery room. I went there once, watching people coming in and out, as though we’d never lived there, those Moshers who saw the dead. They took my embroideries too, and they called it grotesque art.

  The one of Jenny and her mother and Dr. Baker by the pond in Evermore is in the exhibit. No one but Art knew it was stitched before they found them there. I sat on that bench and looked at it on the white wall beside our little house now in this big stone art gallery in the city. While the ghosts of ghosts found their way into my needle, in all my years holding the memento it was only ever Grampie and Jenny who I saw beyond my pictorials. Perhaps Grampie’s war horrors and Jenny’s childhood malady and agony conjured up some part of them seeking witness to their lives and suffering … and to their end. I thought of the day of my mother’s funeral, when we come back to Petal’s End after she was put in the ground. I stood by Art on that late-August afternoon when the sun was already far around in the sky. I wore a black dress from the closet at Petal’s End and I wore black everyday thereafter, to remind me we have to fear but what we let hide in the shadows. We threw dirt on Ma’s coffin and we laid down flowers by her tombstone beside John Lee and my grandparents. We left Ronnie there, alone, as he wanted to be. Jenny paid for the tombstone but she did not want to come to the graveyard.