Small Forgotten Moments

by Annalisa Crawford

  Occasionally, back home, Nathan would watch me work. He’d appear at the door with mugs of coffee, as though he didn’t have anything better to do. When I catch movement in the corner of my eye, I illogically expect it to be him. But it’s Zenna staring back—a permanent fixture in my head. No more does she vanish and reappear; no more does her voice make me start. Sometimes she’s close and overbearing, forcing my brush a certain way, taking over. At others, she gazes out to sea, lost.

  The red paint drools to the floor, onto the newspaper laid down to protect Mum’s rug. I scoop the remainder from the palette with my fingers and smear it onto the picture. I generate ambiguous outlines, shimmering ghosts. They’re slithering and vengeful, these figures—all of them Zenna, in one form or another. This is a portrait of her, for her—a true representation of what I drove her to become.

  I scrape my hands down the painting, color pooling beneath my nails, snagging the canvas. All the Zennas blend together, becoming one, the way she and I are merging. I have her rage, her repugnance of me from within. The fury of being denied an existence, the chance to grow up.

  ***

  “How did such a sweet child become so evil?” I ask.

  It’s much later; the room’s growing dark. The half-finished painting is still on the easel—Mum and I glance at it periodically.

  “She’s not evil. This version of her isn’t real—it’s all in your head. It’s your guilt twisting her this way.”

  “No. No,” I moan, because Zenna’s right here beside me, her voice a relentless presence, like waves rolling on the shore, wind rushing through trees, or a predatory hiss in tall grass. I’m fleetingly dizzy and hold my head until it passes.

  “Come on, we’re going out.” Mum rises and expects me to do the same.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I didn’t ask. You need to get out of this house—it’s not healthy to be shut away.”

  There’s pain when I stand. I drag myself toward the hall because I don’t have the impetus to argue. It’s an arduous task, a long excursion, as though I’m wading through water. She won’t let me forget. In the mirror, as I let Mum coerce my arm into my coat sleeve, I’m gaunt and gray and hollow—Zenna has superimposed herself over me, shrouding me. I wonder if Mum sees it too.

  “Not to the beach,” I say as Mum locks the door.

  “The pub?”

  Trepidation presses into my stomach. Too far, too many people. Too much, too soon.

  “You’ll be fine. We’ll just have one.” She touches my hand, and I flinch. She pulls back with a troubled smile.

  Mum chats lightly about her day, people she’s spoken to, how beautiful the sunrise was this morning. Her conversation muddles with Zenna’s until I can’t keep track of either. My feet are soundless on the pavement, as though I’m not walking at all.

  “So …” Mum says, when we’re sitting with our drinks in front of us. She stretches her fingers out on the table, her attention caught for a second. “Are you hungry? I am. Is it dinner time? I never checked the time.” She peers over my shoulder. “The chocolate cake in the cabinet looks good. Is chocolate cake dinner? I guess it can—”

  “Mum, you’re waffling.”

  She takes a breath. “Sorry.”

  She eyes me intently, studying me. Her fingers drum the table. I drink, holding the glass with both hands to quell the trembling. I smooth out the knots in my hair and shift discomfited in my chair. Several times, she starts to say something, then stops. She sips her own drink, while I’m finishing off mine. I run my finger around the rim of the glass. Just one, Mum said, but already I need another.

  “Is it hard?” she asks.

  “It’s impossible.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to close my eyes and make it stop … make her stop.”

  I close my eyes, but it doesn’t stop. Zenna whispers, telling me how I held her beneath the water—how my fingers dug into her neck. She shows me the rocks; I walk toward them.

  Mum downs her drink from almost two-thirds full. She shudders at the sharp sting hitting the back of her throat. She sets the glass down. “I can help with that.”

  Around us, the pub pauses. A glitch in time where everyone momentarily freezes—as if I could walk between the statues of fellow drinkers and reposition their hands so they’d pour beer into their laps when time begins again.

  In a flash, the room is abuzz. I flinch, pulled from my daydream. Mum’s still talking—her lips barely moving, concealing her words in a whisper.

  “… Do you remember him?”

  “Sorry, who?”

  “Doctor Wheeler,” she says with a hint of exasperation.

  “I don’t …”

  “I don’t suppose it really matters.”

  She fumbles in her bag, pausing and staring inside, before pulling out a leaflet. It’s crumpled and frayed along the folds, like it’s been opened and closed many times. Her frown deepens, and she tentatively slides it toward me. She doesn’t remove her hand, and I wrest it from her.

  The cover shows a large house, a country hotel perhaps—MADDON HALL. It’s stone-fronted with picture windows, a glass foyer, and a tree-lined gravel driveway leading up to it. Three grinning people have been amateurishly photoshopped in front of the building, pasted on with no regard for scale or harmony. Helping You Make a Fresh Start.

  The gray stone portico is vaguely familiar. I have faint recollections of walking up the three wide steps to the entrance with an overriding sense of foreboding. Our thoughts are interwoven, Zenna’s and mine. We both recoil.

  “What’s this?”

  “The clinic where Doctor Wheeler works.”

  I flick through it, reading the trite endorsements, scanning the remarkably happy faces in the pictures. Am I supposed to be as joyful as these models?

  “Have I been here?”

  “Yes. He made the pain go away.”

  “What pain?”

  Mum runs her fingernail across the grain of the table, scratching at the varnish. “The pain you’re in now.”

  “So, it didn’t work? It hasn’t gone away.”

  She pauses, gathering her words. “For a while it did.”

  Craig brings two more drinks, which I’m sure we didn’t order, and I’m already glugging mine as he sets Mum’s in front of her. He squeezes her shoulder as he leaves. She smiles after him and returns her gaze to me, nervous and resigned.

  “What do they do? How does it work?”

  “They isolate the memories involved, and they remove them.”

  “Remove my memories? So, they took everything about my life from the age of nine?”

  Mum glances away, contritely.

  “No,” I say, watching her avoid my eye. “Younger. I didn’t know she existed.” The sums are too difficult for my sleep-deprived, addled mind to handle. “Just wiped Zenna away like she never mattered? Is that what you’re saying? No wonder she’s pissed off.” I laugh—sharp and hostile.

  My stay at Maddon Hall unfolds like the petals of a flower.

  I’m there—we both are. Mum helps me from the car because I can’t manage by myself. We stare up in amazement at this grand stately home. Vacant faces watch us from the first and second floor windows or gape blankly across the endless fields of flat countryside which surround the place.

  By then, Zenna had control—paralyzing me. My only movements were ones she allowed. Bit by bit, she’d taken over and pushed me aside. My thoughts were her thoughts, and they were dark and despairing.

  “Are you sure?” Mum asked. Like I had a choice.

  My reflection in the windscreen no longer resembled me—my features in continual flux.

  “Just get her out of my head,” I whispered.

  My voice was hers.

  Mum heard it too.

  Each step took a lifetime, each second warped as Zenna tried to impede me. Mum linked her arm with mine and bore my weight.

  Inside, it was bright and airy, with Matisse print
s lining the corridors. In each window and mirror we passed, I glimpsed Zenna struggling to escape. Tears rolled down our face, bereft and grieving, but my cheeks were dry. She was crying.

  All these years I’ve been searching for a reason for my amnesia, and here it is. Not illness or a head trauma, or any of the other reasons Google gave me. A procedure I agreed to.

  We’re back in the pub with our drinks in front of us and a rendition of Happy Birthday floating from around the corner.

  “Wait.” A thought, drip-dripping into my head. So close, but elusive.

  Too much commotion. I need to think. Counting the years on my fingers, fluttering them in the air as though playing a piano. So close.

  “When I came home, I only remembered three or four years—nothing about university or my twenties.” I run the logic out loud, but I’m talking to myself. “If Zenna was affecting me so badly, why would I wait so long?”

  She runs her hands through her hair and fusses with the beer mat and squirms in her chair like a naughty child.

  “Oh. Because I didn’t. That wasn’t the first time, was it?”

  It isn’t the first time Mum’s explained this to me. We’ve been in this pub, at a different table; we’ve been home while I curled into the corner of my room and wept. I’m wearing different clothes; Mum’s hair is long and short, brunette and auburn, and this time with a dust of gray. I lose count of the number of times we’ve had this conversation.

  “How many?” I ask.

  She takes a tortured breath. Every fact needs to be fought for, and I’m tired. “Three.”

  So many! I’ve made this decision three times. I’ve agreed people could meddle with my head, three times. And I didn’t consider it to be wrong. Three times.

  Mum watches the birthday group gathering their things and leaving. It’s a sixtieth. Family members help to carry the presents and the large helium 6 and 0.

  “Is it an operation?” I imagine the Swedish Chef from The Muppets arbitrarily cutting into my skull and casting aside slivers of pink brain tissue.

  “No. No! I wouldn’t … You take some medication and undergo a course of hypnotherapy —it’s a civilized process.”

  I snort softly. Civilized? Not exactly the word I’d use. I stroke the edge of the leaflet until it curls. “And I’ll forget you?”

  She takes a moment to reply. A tear rolls down her cheek. “You’ll return to your previous conviction we’re estranged.”

  “What about my career, everything I’ve been working for?”

  Mum shakes her head. Naturally, it will be forgotten. Or should that be, unnaturally? I’ll go back to being a barista who’s fairly good at painting. Perhaps I’ll move to a new place, and the manager will spot my talent and offer to hang my work on his walls. An affable lady, who may or may not have terminal cancer, will buy one or two of them and befriend me.

  “What about my friends?” I hold up my hand to stop her replying because I can guess.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Late afternoon turns to evening. Craig collects glasses and puts out the dinner menus. He lights candles in the center of each table; Mum blows ours out and we sit in shadow.

  We’ve stopped talking, despite there being so much more I want to say. I’ve been tricked, conned out of the life I should have lived. I’m half a person. The words stack up, jamming themselves into a bottleneck.

  “Are you hungry?” Mum asks when I absently pick up the menu. I’m not, but I ask for chips.

  While I’m sat alone, my head fills with Zenna’s voice. I fight to control the agony and dread rising inside of me. I’m losing myself, becoming Zenna, having previously lost myself by ousting her. It’s a stark choice—not one I want to make again.

  At the bar, Mum’s laughing with Craig and a couple of regulars. Not her usual laugh—she’s polite and muted, glancing back to me while I stare at the beer mat and remember when I could flip five of them at once. A halo of darkness gathers around me.

  “Are we drinking to oblivion then?” I ask acerbically when she returns with two more glasses.

  “We’ve never tried it before.” It’s almost a joke. She smirks, but I don’t.

  “How does this work for you? Every time I come home you just pretend you don’t know what’s happening? How can you do that?”

  She nods, appalled and righteous in equal measure, with a slow-burning realization in her eyes. “I don’t have a choice. They can’t determine how it would affect you if I blurted it all out. Doctor Wheeler says if your memories start to come back, the process should run its course. I have to wait. I have to watch you disappear piece by piece.”

  “Does that even make sense to you?” In the few short minutes I’ve been acquainted with Doctor Wheeler, I despise him. What right does he have to reprogram people, to delete their lives as though they’re just a file on a computer?

  “I don’t pretend to understand it.”

  “But you’re happy to put me through it again?”

  “I don’t put you through anything.” Her voice rises. Several people glance up from their meals and conversations. Mum shrinks into her seat. “You chose this. You found the website, and you showed me, and you begged me.”

  It’s too big; I can’t handle this. Zenna laughs—in my head and all around. Mum balls her hands into a fist, and I wonder if she hears her too.

  “But I forget everything. I forget you—I leave you alone.”

  “I have friends,” she says lightly. “Craig,” she adds in a deeper, warmer tone. “And you have Nathan. Mothers and daughters who don’t speak aren’t uncommon—we’re no different to lots of other families.”

  “Stop it!” The couple on the next table stare; I smile apologetically. “Wait. Nathan knows about this? You know Nathe?” I’m winded, punched in the stomach. How much more of this shit can there be!

  “I do. He contacted me a long time ago. You were at uni, suffering, and he didn’t know what to do. It was the first time, so it was new to us all—I was so scared for you.”

  Mum leans back in her chair so the barmaid can put our plates down. She thanks her and asks after her parents, then turns back to me. “He keeps me in the loop. He helps you more than you realize. He’s a good man.”

  He is. But he knows. He can’t—he’d have said something. He wouldn’t just let me suffer. Yet, he has—that’s exactly what he’s done. I’ve poured my heart out to him, and he’s heard it all before but said nothing. And then reported back to my mother!

  The leaflet is more crumpled than it was—did I screw it up in fury? The people on the front are laughing, mocking me with their empty heads and unencumbered lives. And I’m there again, inhaling the scent of antiseptic and fear, hearing people wailing in their rooms. Covering my head with my pillow to muffle the tears and screams as their demons are yanked out of them. I observe the compliant zombies they become, and I’m one of them.

  “This is so fucked up. Our lives all shaken up over something which doesn’t even work. Can’t you see it? Are you in so deep you don’t even question it anymore?”

  “I hate what Zenna does to you, what she’s doing to you. She’s not your sister. You create her. Your guilt manifests into something hideous. When Selena died—you wouldn’t talk, you buried your grief so deep, it became too much for you to handle. You were nine, of course it was too much. I should have done so much more for you.”

  She takes a chip and swirls it into the ketchup. She drifts away, jolting herself back with a sorrowful smile.

  “You were right though—she was your imaginary friend for a long time, and she was real for you. You were about fifteen, sixteen when you discovered the clinic and asked me to help you. You said she was still talking to you, and I knew we had to try something drastic.”

  She’s not imaginary, she’s not my guilt manifested. She’s inside me, forcing herself into every crevice of my body. She’s pushing me out, overpowering me. I’m disappearing; I’m an empty vessel, a pencil sketch being slowly erased. She’s haunting
me from within.

  My head fills with Zenna’s voice, a loud crescendo of laughter and contempt. I stumble from the pub and out into the cold, dismal night.

  The clouds break in small patches and stars flicker. I lean on the sea wall and stare into the blackness. Lights from ships on the horizon flicker. They change color while I stare at them, although it’s just an illusion, just my eyes playing tricks.

  I want to stand on the sand, one last time—feel the pebbles grind underfoot and dance with the waves. Would it be the last, or will I be back here next year, the one after that, asking the same questions, suffering the same anguish? Can denying Zenna existed be right? After all these years, doesn’t she deserve better? Mum says we’ve got no choice. And Zenna, inside my head, begs me not to suppress her again.

  I want to stand on the sand, but it scares me. Like on my first day, when the world spun around me.

  Mum followed me from the pub. She’s behind me, probably with my bag and coat which I left in my haste to be liberated. It’s cold; my breath curls on the frosty air, but I don’t turn. I don’t take my coat from her.

  She rests against the wall, looking toward the road rather than the water. She takes a packet of cigarettes from her bag and slides one out. She turns it between her fingers for a moment before lighting it. “We should have moved away. Maybe none of this would have happened. We could have had a fresh start. But my baby died here, I couldn’t leave her.”

  Heartache and anxiety circle the hills; death lurks in the water.

  “Every time you come home,” she continues, “I think I’ll be able to handle it, that it’ll be different this time.” She smiles ruefully and blows smoke into the wind. “I live with it every single day, but I forget each time is the first for you.”

  Every time, each of the three times, she loses a second daughter while reliving the death of the first. No one takes her memories away. She deals with it all alone. Why do I get special treatment?

  “Why did you let me do it?”