by Aleo, Cyndy
4: Cracks
Vance can feel someone he assumes is his mother before they’re even to the house: a connecting string that had been pulled too taut starting to relax. He has vague memories of a place they lived before this one: a small Colonial with warm wood trim and leaded glass in the doors that separated the rooms. The cut-glass door knobs always felt heavy in his hands and the gumwood trim warm with memories of those who'd lived there before.
But his mother hadn't been happy there. Snow covered the ground for months in the winter, and she couldn't grow much. It made her sad, and she spent a lot of the time crying. When he looked up planting zones one day to see if there was anything he could help with, he saw that south was better, that she could grow things longer. He showed her the zones on the computer, and the next thing he knew, they were here.
The high school is close to the house, but the college is farther. For a brief time, there were thoughts of a dorm room and college somewhere exotic, like New York City, but it was too far from his mother, and he can't imagine her without him. She seems so lost in the world: no family other than him, and no friends. Not that he has any besides Donovan, but at least he sees other people. He talks to the owners of the shops where his mother sells her herbs, to Donovan's family on the rare occasions she’s with them, to his professors. Even to fellow students during group projects. His mother has no one else.
He steps out of the car and imagines he can hear the trees welcoming him home. He'd mentioned it once to Donovan, but the look she gave him frightened him. If she decides he's insane, he'll have no friends left.
She says the house is creepy, back here in the woods where you can't even see neighboring houses, but it's comfortable and private. No one will ever notice if the local herbalist does her gardening sky-clad or whatever they're calling it these days. Back in high school, one of the few people who'd tried to befriend him asked if his mother was a nudist after they'd walked through the woods to find her out in the trees, naked as the day she was born. He hadn't known how to answer then, and he still doesn't.
Donovan, who’s taken a few psychology courses, claims his mother has problems with sensory processing and doesn't like the feeling of fabric against her skin. His mother thinks Donovan has no idea that she seldom wears clothes when she's alone, but sometimes she's too distracted to hear them come in. Vance has perfected the “re-enter with door slam” to get her dressed faster.
He knows better than Donovan's theories, though. There is more to his mother's little quirks than a simple label can answer for him, but she's not ready to give him those answers, so he has to wait. He just isn't sure what he's waiting for.
He walks inside without looking back, knowing somehow that Donovan will follow behind. Making enough noise on his first entry so his mother has time to pull on clothes if she didn't hear the car coming down the gravel driveway, he calls out a hello and walks upstairs to his bedroom. The route is a little more familiar than it might seem from leaving the house that morning, and Vance doesn't have to think twice about which way to go.
“Closet or video?” he asks Donovan without looking back.
“You don't ask me that,” she says. “You make me wait downstairs.”
He's already doing things incorrectly.
“Do you want to wait?”
Her face says she doesn't, but she backs down the stairs anyway. He watches her heading toward the kitchen, toward his mother. He continues on to his room. Video first.
With the door closed in case the information shouldn't be heard, he finds the video file and checks the date. Yesterday, which must mean a new file.
The screen fills with an image of himself. His hair is a wreck, and dark shadows circle his bloodshot eyes.
“Hey, dumbass,” video Vance begins.
“If you're watching this, it means you did something incredibly stupid, like start to remember. Or even worse, curiosity is getting you from the beginning. Stop doing that. Stop trying to get the answers. Every time you — well, I — start to remember, this has to happen all over again. It can't be good health-wise, and it's definitely not good Donovan-wise.
“In case you haven't noticed already, Donovan hates this. It's been getting worse each time. You don't see it yet, but I do. It's hard on her, having a best friend who forgets who you are all the time, but at least that part of it wears off pretty quickly. It's okay to remember that. It's the other stuff that's the problem.
“Donovan will always try to find out what's going on, and she’s getting more curious, and has less patience, each time. I have no idea how many of these videos there have been, but I know it's been a lot, and sometimes the same video is left behind. The video always says she's in danger, and Ma, too, if you remember. Worse if you remember and tell someone else.
“I want so badly to tell Dee.”
Vance watches himself choke up on-screen and squirms uncomfortably in his chair.
“You have no idea how hard it is, not telling her. She's here every day, asking questions. All she wants to do is help, but she can't. No one can. Matka knows this. You can see it in her eyes when she looks at Dee. You have to protect them both. Don't remember.”
Vance pauses the video. Matka. The word sounds familiar, but it's nothing he can ever remember calling his mother. He calls her “Ma” or sometimes “Mama” which Donovan teases him over, saying it’s old-fashioned and babyish. But that word, Matka, trips something in his chest. He starts the video again, hoping for more clues.
“If you ignore me and keep looking for answers anyway, like I — you — we — always seem to do, you'll know what you have to do. Another video is stored in a hidden directory on the hard drive that gives instructions. Only you'll know the password, and by then, you'll have remembered. The username is the name of your favorite stuffed animal.
“I'm begging you — really, myself here when you think about it — to listen, for once. I never do, but maybe this time, I will. It always seems like a mystery that's begging to be solved, and it bugs you, and you think you can fix it. Maybe there's something you missed all those other times before. Maybe everyone could have a normal life.
“It's just never going to happen. I know that before we started doing this, we were in danger all the time and we had to move. This keeps us safe, and everyone we love safe. It's not a lot of people, but for those few, please don't do it again. Or go ahead. Do it, for all I should care. One of these days, that damn machine will malfunction and fry my brains out or I'll OD on that medication. At least then all of this would be over.
“But maybe we could have a happy life if I'd just stop looking for answers. And maybe this is the video that gets me to stop doing that.”
The video ends. Vance drags the file over to the trash as quickly as he can and empties it. Danger. He puts them in danger. He puts them all in danger because he wants answers, then he hurts Donovan, and for what? For reasons he doesn't even know or understand.
Nothing makes sense. The move from the north was for growing seasons or was it fleeing from danger? Amnesia is to protect his mother and Donovan, but knowledge couldn't bring danger on its own, could it?
He’s trapped in a vise, afraid to move in any direction because something may tear loose. If he asks questions, he might bring everything down upon them. But if the answers would make him not seek more, then maybe asking questions is the right thing to do. Maybe the video is wrong, and he just needs answers to a few of the questions to be content. He won't try to find out more than that.
5: Closet
Donovan knows there’s a box hidden somewhere in Vance's closet. It calls to her whenever she's in the house, although she's never seen it. It's referenced in every video he’s shown her: a mystery box with instructions on how to use whatever is inside buried in a file hidden in a directory on Vance's laptop he can never access until he remembers enough, and by then, it's too late. By the time he remembers how to get to the file, she'll find him an empty shell again the next day.
He waxes an
d wanes like the moon: One day there’s nothing but black, then slowly a bright sliver appears. Each day it grows bigger and brighter until finally he’s there and whole and she thinks she could love this man. When he is everything, he reflects light — hers and everyone else’s around him -- and it's beautiful. It never lasts, though.
The secrets inside begin to chip away, taking him bit by bit until she knows it's coming. She may not ever know the exact day, but the twists and turns of her stomach alert her that he'll be gone again, a puppet left in his place, with her there to play Wizard of Oz and fill his straw head with a brain.
She wants to freeze time at the height of the cycle and see where things might go. They've been friends since high school, but this strangeness has always been between them, and the repeating cycle of being forgotten would be enough to make anyone else — anyone sane —run.
She remembers a time when she had other friends. Not a lot, but enough that she could decide to go to a movie on a Friday night and there would always be someone to go with. Once Vance moved here and she entered his orbit, everything shifted, and she found the rest of her life consumed little by little. Being his friend is one thing, but being his memory is a full-time job.
Grace drifts in from the kitchen, her feet dusty from the dirt floor in her greenhouse, and the full skirt of the tie-dyed gauze dress she wears fluttering behind her. Donovan thinks — not for the first time — that Vance's mother is not entirely of this earth. Donovan presses herself further into the pilled gray corduroy couch cushions and hopes Grace doesn't even notice her.
Naturally, because it's that kind of day, she's disappointed.
“I was hoping you'd stay.”
Grace never says hello. Conversations with her always seem to begin and end in the middle, as if they’re a constant flow she's stepping in and out of. Donovan is never sure whether they’re picking up where they left off the last time or the conversation simply continues in Grace's mind when she's not around.
“I need some help with the next order, and I hate to ask Vance all the time. Would you be willing to help with some of the invoicing work? And maybe a little in the greenhouse, too, if you have the time?”
Donovan nods, and Grace hums contentedly, this part of the conversation over for now. It will start up again — mid-stream — when Grace actually needs the work done. Or, more likely, when she wants to give Donovan the money to fix her car, which is probably what this is all about. She knows Grace wants to give her things, but Donovan can't bring herself to accept Grace’s charity, especially when she has no idea where the money comes from.
It might be one thing if Vance and his mother simply had more money than they should probably have from Grace's herb business, but when you add in the regularly disappearing memory, things get a bit … concerning. Donovan feels better at least doing whatever work Grace gives her for the money.
Pulling her feet up underneath her butt, she makes herself into a small ball on the couch, as if she can hide her thoughts inside if she can just get smaller. More pieces of the puzzle are there for her; she just needs to slide them into place. But there are no easy finds here, no flat edges to show you a frame to build against. If she puts them all in one place though, spreads them out and looks at them all at the same time, maybe some will begin to fit.
Grace and Vance only ever have one car between them, and it's always expensive. Unlike the furniture in the house, it's brand-new and cutting-edge. All-electric, the car charges off either the solar panel system or the wind-power system Vance and his mother have installed. She knows from Vance's incessant lecturing that the car can travel up to a hundred miles before it needs to be recharged, but he never drives it to campus; he insists his mother needs to have a car with her during the day, even though Grace rarely goes past their property line, much less anywhere she'd need a car.
She doesn't think about it much, but now that she's poking at everything, Donovan wonders why someone who rarely leaves the property always needs a car at her disposal. It's like Vance thinks his mother might need to flee at any moment and would need the car to do it. Put another check box in the "creepy possible place the money comes from" category.
Then there's the matter of Grace's accent. It's faint, but it's there. Donovan can't place its origin, and whenever she asks Vance, he tells her he can't hear it, and it's probably a natural result of them moving around so much. In his defense, Donovan can often hear slight nuances in his speech, but not nearly as noticeable as his mother's. Grace isn't from here, and Donovan is sure she'd grown up speaking another language entirely. Maybe Vance speaks the language as well, although she's never heard them speak anything other than English in her presence. There are times when she's sure Grace is translating in her head before she speaks, or rolling a word around in her mind, over and over, as if its meaning will become clear on the third —or tenth — pass.
And then there are the moves. Vance sometimes talks about one of the places they’ve lived: a tiny house in New York, he said, where it snowed a lot in the winter and his mother cried all the time because she couldn't grow things for long periods because of the short growing season. But it didn’t seem like they’d lived there long, and they’d left when he was a teenager. He had no more memories of the place than if it were a mere blip in his life. How many other places had they lived? How much had they moved around?
Too many pieces, and nowhere to put them. Donovan has always been the kind of girl who works off the picture on the box: find the pieces of the pink flower or the yellow butterfly, and the background will fill in as you work. Here, there's no picture, nothing to work from, and no hope of filling in the rest when nothing is coming clear.
Still, she keeps pushing the pieces around and around in her head. She needs the box, both figuratively and literally. She needs to find out what's in Vance's closet.
6: Inertia
Grace moves past Donovan, one task ticked off in her mind. Donovan will have money to fix her car, and Grace won't have to worry about her son and Donovan’s safety when they’re driving around in it. She wants to talk to the girl more, but she can feel the noise surrounding her. Too many times he has forgotten her. Too many questions are left unanswered, and the noise grows bigger until it takes up the whole room.
There's no space for Grace in the room at all, so she keeps walking until she is in the room beyond and then out the front door. Once outside, she can hear the voices of the trees, and surrounded by her mother, she feels like she can breathe again.
All this time, and she's still not used to being inside houses, especially not with people other than Jakub. Their thoughts and emotions fill up the space so quickly and then everything gets trapped inside. No wonder they hurry from place to place, from box to box. They must always feel crowded no matter which box they go into. They have forgotten all about the mother with their boxes and their errands and their jobs, doing so much of not much at all.
Even her skills are considered “strange” and “alternative.” They allow people to put poisons into themselves in attempts to cure diseases they cause in the first place with other poisons and pass to each other because they're too close to each other in the tiny boxes. Using what the mother provides for good health and easing pain and healing injuries and illnesses is “odd” and left to “crazies” and “hippies.”
She wonders what most of them who laugh at what she knows and does for a “living” would say if they knew her true age, or knew the full extent of what she can do. Run, most likely. Everything has to be explained by science here: pictures and proofs and tubes and things you can touch and see and smell. Yet they argue about gods and ignore the presence of the mother that's evident every time they walk outside: in the warmth of the sun on their skin or the coolness of the rain dripping down the open neck of a jacket. They drive in cars and mow grass with machines and ignore what's right in front of them the whole time.
Even thinking about it makes her want to yank the dress off again and head into the woods, to i
magine for even a few minutes that she is back with her sisters and not pretending to be one of the box dwellers with their machines and their poisons. Were it not for her son, she would leave here now and beg them to forgive her, to accept her back, to promise she'd never do it again.
Oh, but she would.
She would do it a thousand — a thousand thousand — times again to save her son. It was worth everything, even living in these boxes, to keep him. And soon, he will be fully mature and he will be able to make decisions with her, including what to do about the girl.
Logic says they should leave now, before Donovan can ask any more questions. Find another place to live, somewhere no one will know them. Maybe somewhere even more remote where they could live off the land and not interact with as many people. She lets her mind wander, forgetting her son is inside. That Donovan has so many questions.
Until she feels it. She looks around, seeing how far she has wandered from the house and begins running. She knows it's too late. What's been seen cannot be unseen, and she cannot ask the girl to do things against her will. Without a stronger desire to protect than to seek answers, she will never allow it. She has seen, and she will remember.
Grace runs back to the house anyway.
~
Bożena slips out after dark has fallen. She keeps her mind carefully full: woods, darkness, trees, the sounds of the animals native to the forest, her full bladder. She thinks these same thoughts constantly until she is out of their range, until she is at the edges of the forest and pulling on clothing and getting into a car.
Grażyna isn’t the only sister who can break rules.
The car is dark blue, and she smells the leather of the seats, the tang of the tobacco of his cigarettes, the spicy scent of his cologne. She runs her fingers through his hair when he leans forward to kiss her once she’s in the car, and she can smell the sharp bite of alcohol from the things he puts in his hair.
