The Forgetting

by Sharon Cameron

  “Don’t worry,” he says, “I’m not going pry out all your secrets. Can I look?” I nod, and he sets down the pot, gets off the counter, and studies the bracelet, lifting it, running a finger over the carving, touching the links. “It’s so fine,” he says. “Do you know what the symbols mean, or the numbers?”

  I shake my head again, and Gray straightens.

  “I don’t think you should wear this. Not where anyone can see it.”

  “Why?” It’s underneath the cloth when I stand or walk.

  Gray looks at my outstretched leg. “If you don’t want to be asked about it, then you shouldn’t offer it up for questions, that’s all. I’ll get you a cord or a string, you can wear it underneath your tunic. Okay?”

  I’m puzzled by this. But then he grins at me.

  “Let’s go see about a key.”

  There’s another door at the end of Gray’s storeroom, leading out into the open, covered workshop. Before he lights the lamps, he gives me a stool behind the tool shelf, where I’m invisible to the street, but have an unobstructed view of the covered, orange-glowing furnace. I also have a bowl of broken glass in my lap, a jar sacrificed as my excuse for being here, should either of Gray’s parents come home. We always bring them our broken glass.

  I look around my little corner. There’s a makeshift mattress back here, and the green shirt Gray was wearing yesterday. Is he sleeping in the workshop? I glance at him putting on the apron, testing the heat of the furnace. I’m glad he’s sleeping out here, even if the weather is cool. The resting rooms in his house are on the second story. If the Council came for him, he wouldn’t be able to get out. This way, he can run.

  The clay with the key impression has dried by now, Gray measuring it carefully over several days to make sure it didn’t shrink. He made a key from it already, out of resin, while the clay was still soft. To be safe. The resin key isn’t strong enough to turn a lock, but it will make another mold if we have to start over. In case this doesn’t work. And it might not work. The glass could shatter while it cools, break in the lock when we use it. But the key is small and thick, and Gray says he filled the mold with the pulverized glass his father calls the “strong stuff,” which is exactly how my father always referred to the moonshine. Gray fired the mold, filled it again, fired it, filled it again, and fired it again before I ever got here. Now he’s taken it out, dunked it quick in water on the end of some tongs, making a huge puff of steam, and laid it carefully on a metal tray. It sits there, too hot to touch, taunting me.

  Gray picks up a long tube of glass, a dark color, holds it in the fire, spinning it until there’s a luminous molten ball on the end. The heat of the furnace almost feels good from where I sit, but it must be unbelievable right in front of it. He gets another tube of glass and uses it to work the first one, every few seconds pulling it out of the fire, then back in, pressing it with metal, then back in to glow again. The glass seems alive, lit from the inside, and he looks like he’s playing. Play that is calm and concentrated. I have no idea what he’s doing. He takes the glass out of the fire again and bends the top with tweezers, making a loop, as if the glass is really only very hot, very sticky string.

  He breaks his piece of glass off the other tube and sets it aside, somewhere near the furnace, and then he starts blowing bottles to replace the ones his father took for the moonshine. The way the glass changes form fascinates me. I watch him manipulate the shape of something too hot to touch, coax it into doing what he wants with a roll or turn or puff of air. One minute it’s brittle and breakable, the next fiery, glowing, and malleable, becoming something new. It reminds me of me. I watch him shape the glass again and again. With ease.

  “You’re a funny sort of company,” Gray comments. There are fifteen or sixteen bottles lined up in the cooling kiln. “More of a presence, really.”

  I hold in my smile. “I don’t want to distract you.”

  “It’s more distracting looking over there to see what you’re up to.”

  I’m pleased that he’s looking. Which means that I’m an idiot. “I’m just … thinking.”

  “I know. How’s anyone supposed to concentrate when you’re doing that?”

  He lays the blowing tube across a rack, hot end pointed away, takes the tweezers, and picks up the bit of glass he played with earlier. He gazes at it, then comes to me. He’s sweat-stained and sooty, the hair that’s not pulled back wet and curling. I’m not sure how he manages to make that look good, but he does. He squats down in front of me. A piece of glass dangles from the tweezers, shaped like a water drop with an open loop at the top, deep blue and sparkling, embedded with one white crystal. Like one moon in the dark day sky.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Just leftover bits. It’s to wear,” he says. “Do you like it?”

  I nod my head. I’ve never seen anything like it.

  “Would you like to have it?”

  I look up.

  “Well, you can’t.”

  He closes his fingers around the glass, and I raise my brows. The glassblower’s smirk is all over his face.

  “Unless,” he continues, “you come to the festival. Dance with me one time, to prove that you came, and you can have it. Very simple.”

  I think my brows actually rise higher. “So it’s a bribe.”

  “No. Well, yes, it’s a bribe.”

  “I thought we weren’t being seen together.”

  “I’ll dance with all the girls and be above suspicion.”

  I bet he will, too.

  “It will be a pre-celebration of our crime spree,” he says, “assuming that key isn’t in a thousand pieces. And you have to decide soon, or the potter’s wife will think I’m talking to myself.” He moves the tweezers back and forth, making his creation sparkle. I’ve never seen glass that color blue before. Then I realize that I’ve never seen glass that color because he made that color. On purpose. And I think it was for me.

  “How do you wear it?” I whisper.

  “I don’t, you do,” he says, which sounds like the usual way he teases me, only he isn’t.

  He touches the glass with a finger again, then wraps it with his hand, testing the heat before he reaches back behind him and pulls the string that ties his hair. He goes to his knees, threads the string through the glass loop before putting it around my neck. I lean forward, move some of the escaping hair from my knot of braids to let him tie it.

  Time-out, I want to say, free question. If we can’t stop the Forgetting and you don’t know me anymore, you’ll know you made that necklace as soon as you see it, won’t you, Glassblower’s son? Is that why you want me to wear it? Is it written in your book?

  “How long did it take you to make this?” I ask while he ties.

  His breath is on my neck. “Just a few minutes. You watched me.”

  “You know what I think?”

  “Never.”

  “That you’re the liar this time.”

  He laughs once, leans back to look me over. “Wait.” He picks up my ankle and plays with the latch until he figures out how to unhook the metal bracelet. He hooks the link end to the string right behind the piece of glass, and drops the whole thing gently down my tunic. I feel the metal dangling all the way to my stomach. The necklace is heavy, the glass hanging low, almost inside my neckline, still warm against my body. I’m afraid it’s moving up and down with my heartbeat. I touch it and frown.

  “Did I just let you talk me into dancing at the Dark Days Festival?”

  This time he really laughs. “That’s it,” he says. “No more questions. I’m cutting you off.” And he gets to his feet and walks over to his workbench to put away tools. My hand drifts back to the piece of glass. Something inside me pushes and pulls between aching and pain. The thing is, Gray, that when you forget, whatever it is that made you want to make this necklace for me, you’re going to forget that, too. And I won’t. The thought makes my body shudder.

  Gray is bringing the metal sheet with our mold of f
ired clay and a knife to where I sit, still hidden behind his tool racks. He sets the tray on the ground at my feet, the “NWSE” stamped on it, just like our knife. I lean down, peering at the clay while he touches it gingerly, to see if it will burn him. It will, but not badly. He uses the end of his apron to hold the brown lump, slips the knife between the pieces, and twists.

  The top half of the clay comes off, and inside, as if it grew from a stone, is a key of white glass. I watch his smile grow.

  “We’re going to steal a book, aren’t we, Dyer’s daughter?”

  I think we are.

  I wish it was time to steal it already. But it’s not. It’s the Dark Days Festival, and Janis will be reading from the First Book to everyone in Canaan. The Archives is closed, and the Learning Center, and by the fourth bell of waking, everyone will be gathering in the amphitheater seats, and in the streets surrounding, waiting to listen, waiting for the moons to rise to start their eating and dancing under the stars. For fun, or so I hear. But something about the laughter, the smoke of the torches, tends to conjure feelings I don’t want to remember. I’ve taken out my nervousness on the storeroom, scrubbing it like it’s seldom been scrubbed.

  Mother is up now, puttering around the house, checking our beds, sometimes coming to watch me clean. For the past five or six festivals she’s been my welcome excuse for staying home; she gets confused with so many people at once, needs someone to be with her. This time she needs to be watched. I haven’t spoken to Liliya, but I’m sure she isn’t planning on staying home, and I would never ask Genivee to. I don’t know how I could have made that promise to Gray, if that’s what it was. Or what I’m going to do about it.

  I showed Genivee the necklace of blue glass after I came back from Gray’s, since she was going to notice it anyway, explaining how it was actually a bribe to make me dance. I’d thought she would think this was funny. Instead she’d just set down her pen and listened, wide-eyed and serious. I couldn’t understand her reaction.

  I don’t understand her now, either, standing in the sitting room, nearly jumping up and down with excitement as she beckons me forward. She’s been holed up ever since waking, and when she drags me back into our room I discover why. My mattress is covered with … things. Brushes and little pots and colored cloth, and there’s a white tunic, long, with leggings to go underneath it. I’m not sure this is actually my side of the room. Genivee shuts the door and, for my second surprise of the day, drops the bar across it.

  “Now you listen to me,” says Genivee, hands on hips. “Nope! Not a word. Just listen. You have a boy”—she says the word “boy” as if it were something as odd as Kenny the beetle—“a boy who went to a lot of trouble to bribe you just so you would dance with him once.” The word “once” gets the same treatment as “boy.”

  “Genivee, it isn’t like—”

  “It isn’t? What’s it like?”

  I don’t actually know what it’s like. Not exactly.

  “Nadia.” She speaks very slowly. “Eyes on my eyes, and try to understand. You like him. You talk to him. He climbs things. And he made you glass the color of your eyes.”

  I touch the necklace hanging just beneath my tunic. Is that what it is? We have a mirror, in Mother’s room. But I don’t spend any time in front of it.

  “Of. Your. Eyes. Nadia. Do not be such a zopa.”

  She doesn’t understand. How could she? Taking that book next waking is what has to be focused on. The Forgetting is what has to be focused on.

  Genivee closes her eyes. “You are so worried about what’s happened before and what will happen next that you forget there’s a now, Nadia. Do you know”—her voice trembles—“how hard it is to watch your own sister miss every opportunity for her own happiness?”

  I think she’s going to cry. I reach out a hand.

  “Oh, seriously!” Genivee stomps her foot. I step back. “What else do I have to do? Get on my knees and beg? Sit!”

  I gaze at my spitfire of a little sister. Despite her dramatics, I’m considering what she’s really saying. Why does every “now” have to be ruined by what will be?

  Genivee clenches her fists. “I will fight you if I have to. Sit, Nadia!”

  I sit. And I enjoy myself. I think it’s funny how I know Genivee loves me the same amount she did at the last resting, and yet something about this, about the attention, makes me feel it more keenly. She has me strip down into an old, big tunic I’ve always suspected might have belonged to Anson, washes my face like I am a baby, and uses Liliya’s lotion on my arms and legs. I’m guessing Liliya’s room is where most of these supplies have been confiscated from. Then Genivee puts me directly under the lamp and starts painting my face, chatting about her friends, and who won the spelling competition, which was her, and how her teacher really isn’t as smart as she is. It doesn’t surprise me that Genivee thinks this. It’s probably true.

  At some point the thought arises that I’m letting a twelve-year-old paint my face right before I go out in public, and that paint is not really the best word for what’s she been using. That little pot of dark brown now smudging my lashes and lining my eyes has blacknut in it, and maybe, it suddenly occurs to me, if I’d been more prone to painting my face, I wouldn’t have spent all those hours concocting the stain beneath our floor. The marks on my knees have only just faded. Some of these thoughts must show on my face, which Genivee is paying very close attention to, because she says, “Please. I am an artist,” and goes on chatting.

  When she’s done, Genivee takes out all my tiny braids, tilts her head, squints a critical eye, and says it’s fluffy and that we are going to go with that, except for two pins to pull the front pieces back, so they won’t drive me crazy, two long strips of blue cloth attached to each of the pins. Genivee informs me that all the girls wear these. Then she makes me step out of the old tunic and into the white one. The material is thin, a cross between a dress and a shirt, the top mid-length and wide, flowing with a low collar, leggings for underneath.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Requested it a week ago. Jemma the Clothesmaker was very”—the “very” gets the same emphasis as “boy” did—“excited to make it for you. In fact, I think she was dying to.”

  “A week ago?” I ask.

  “You should always have hope. That’s what I think. And white looks good in moonlight. Why are you wearing this here instead of on your ankle?” She rattles the piece of metal hanging from my necklace.

  “Just am.” My answer must have been defensive because Genivee pretends to shudder. When I have my sandals on Genivee steps back, looks me over. I reach down for my pack, to tie my tether.

  “No!” she yells.

  I jump.

  “You can’t take that dirty old thing! Don’t be stupid.”

  “Genivee … ”

  “Can’t you wear your book on the outside for once?”

  Nope. That book is stolen. But now that I look at my pack next to the new white of my dress, I do see that it’s a little … battered.

  Genivee waves her hand. “No. Of course you can’t. Okay, okay. Thinking … ”

  A moment later she unbars the door, dashes from the room, and comes back with the knife. This means she’s been in the potatoes, where we’ve hidden it. Mother doesn’t like potatoes. Without hesitation or remorse, Genivee takes Liliya’s dark blue dress and slits a huge piece of cloth from the bottom of it. There will be wrath tomorrow, but today I have a piece of blue cloth like a sack to wrap around my book. Genivee cuts another long slit to use for a tie, and lets my tether run out of the tied blue sack to attach to a white belt. She steps back and smiles. Very satisfied. Then she narrows her eyes.

  “Okay, Nadia. It’s time to go out there. Can you do it?”

  I’m not sure. “Wait, who’s staying with Mother?”

  Genivee rolls her eyes. “I am, of course. Now, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to visualize. This party is a wall. A wall that you must climb. Go climb your wall and d
on’t think about anything else until you’re done climbing the wall. It’s one day. For once in your life, have fun. For one day.”

  I look at the mess of paint and cloth and discarded clothes, and know I’m going to try. “Thank you, Genivee,” I say.

  “Of course you should thank me,” she replies. “It took me the whole last resting to think that up. And anyway, you look really good.”

  When I open my front door the streetlights are glowing, the air chill, sky dark blue, and the noises of the street are different. Quiet around me, loud in the distance. Music, voices—many, many voices—beyond the buildings, footsteps moving in the same direction. It’s strange, like a city I don’t know, which is a feeling from the Forgetting I have to push away. I’m self-conscious, nervous, and I decided not to look in a mirror or I might lose my courage. I’m determined not to lose my courage.

  I take my first step into the street and move directly into the path of Janis.

  I remembered something today. A woman came to our door after the Forgetting. She asked our names, asked after our books, after our stores. Did we need anything? She told my sister that the Learning Center would be open again by sunsetting, encouraged us to go read our old books as soon as the archivist was retrained.

  I couldn’t speak to her or answer her questions. I pretended to be asleep. I did that a lot then. I hurt, and I was so tired. But she made Mother smile, and even I could see that this woman, unlike my father who left me, unlike my mother who forgot me, cared about what happened to me. Today, I realized for the first time that woman had been Janis.

  NADIA THE DYER’S DAUGHTER

  BOOK 13, PAGE 2, 11 YEARS AFTER THE FORGETTING

  Hello,” Janis says, taking a graceful step back so I don’t knock her down. “It’s a Dyer’s daughter, isn’t it? Which one?”

  “Nadia,” I whisper, though the book covered up in a piece of Liliya’s dress at my side says a little different. I’m shocked that Janis knows even part of my name, that she knows where my mother lives. And then I’m not shocked at all. Liliya. She may not approve of her, but then again, I don’t approve of her grandson.