The Museum of Us

by Tara Wilson Redd

  She couldn’t stop remembering.

  Sadie, at sixteen, was back in the truck again. She could never get away from this day. The crash drew her back to Day Zero, the bomb blast that shattered her entire life.

  The moments passed, every one a framed photo to look at safely from where she sat. She knew it wasn’t happening, she was just replaying it again.

  And again, she was eleven. She lived through it again: her milk shake splashed against the roof of the car, pooling in her hair, and how it was still hot and summery. How she still thought about the weather even while people were dying. The humidity was terrible. The ceiling was covered in blue broken glass diamonds, glittering like stars in the sky.

  She replayed it again, and again, and again. Her parents, shouting. The other car. The crash. The waiting. Again. And again. And again.

  She remembered knowing that she was alone, utterly and completely alone, without control. And she whispered to herself:

  I’m not here

  I’m not here

  I’m not here

  I’m not here….

  She stared up at the stars, which were made of broken blue safety glass on the roof of the car. Her hair was floating, like she was underwater. She was sixteen and eleven, outside of time. She looked into the sky of stars that she had imagined and saw George—her George, in his royal white jacket and pure white gloves—beckoning. She reached up and took his hand.

  And off to the Star Palace she went.

  * * *

  “Sadie?” called Dr. Roberts, snatching her back to reality. The verdant garden smell became bleach and latex. Sadie shook her head, and she was in the hospital again.

  “Yeah?”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone what you remembered?”

  Sadie shrugged, and George paced nervously behind her.

  “She’s asking too many questions,” George said. “You know this is getting too dangerous.”

  “I just didn’t,” Sadie said. But it wasn’t that simple. She hadn’t wanted to remember herself.

  “Does this have to do with George?”

  Sadie looked away.

  “You mean the other driver,” Sadie said quietly.

  “Is there another George?”

  “There’s…my George,” Sadie said. But then she was thinking about the first George: no more than a teenager. He had said, “Please help me. I don’t want to die,” until he didn’t say anything else. She knew he wasn’t talking to her, but to no one, because he was alone too. All alone, with no one to help him.

  They were all like that. Her parents, herself. Trapped together, completely alone.

  And the whole time she heard The Tape going on and on and on…Blackbird fly…Blackbird fly…

  “Sadie!” Dr. Roberts called, but Sadie didn’t answer. “What happened that day wasn’t your fault. Maybe it’s time to let George go.”

  “I can’t….I love him,” Sadie said. George put his head in his hands.

  “Sadie, who in the world are you talking about?” Roberts asked.

  “George.”

  “Sadie, I’m confused. You didn’t know George. Are you talking about the other driver, or someone else?”

  Sadie closed her eyes so the world wouldn’t vanish.

  “I want my parents,” Sadie said softly. “Where are they?”

  “Sadie, please. Please don’t,” said George.

  “I need help,” Sadie told him. “I’m trapped and all alone.”

  * * *

  Sadie wheeled herself down to the cafeteria and found her parents sitting at a table, their accounting all spread out around them. They’d been working for hours.

  “Can I talk to you?” Sadie asked, surprising them. They had an extended eyeball conversation that Sadie could not interpret, but she said: “It’s important.”

  “Of course,” said her dad. “Even if it’s not important, you can tell us anything.”

  As she gathered all her strength, the cafeteria became the ER from the first crash, and her parents were back in their beds, bloodied to within an inch of their lives but somehow listening to her. She couldn’t keep it straight. She was sixteen and eleven, falling in and out of time.

  “Do you remember the crash?” Sadie asked. Her parents fidgeted with their IVs and bandages, like actors in a hospital scene. They weren’t really hurt, in this memory. It was all pretend.

  “I don’t really,” her mom said. “It never came back to me after the accident.”

  “Me neither,” her dad said.

  “So you don’t know what caused it.” Sadie sighed. She could feel the truth raging to be let go. She tried to say it. Instead, she relived it.

  They were all exhausted at the end of a long drive.

  She saw her parents in the front seat, and she felt herself saying their names over and over because they weren’t listening. She wanted to hear The Tape. She felt a rage she couldn’t explain, being strapped into the backseat for hours and hours, ignored. She was trying to behave.

  The Tape was in the stereo already. All they had to do was press play. It had seemed so simple. She just wanted to listen to it.

  Her mom was saying, “No, just wait,” and “Sadie, stop, we’re driving,” and looking into the backseat, and her dad was saying, “Okay, just quiet down,” as he pressed play and then he was yelling and Old Charlotte slammed headfirst into a green Honda Civic.

  “You were distracted because I wanted to listen to my Beatles tape,” Sadie admitted.

  “No, Sadie, that’s not what happened. We’ve talked about this. The other driver wasn’t paying attention. He was in our lane.” Her mom was so certain that Sadie almost believed her.

  “No, I remember what happened.”

  “You always said you didn’t remember anything.”

  “I remember every day,” Sadie confessed. “Trying not to remember is remembering.”

  “The accident didn’t happen because of your tape. You didn’t know how to drive. How would you have known who was in the right?” her dad asked.

  “But it doesn’t matter. If you’d been paying attention you might have gotten out of the way! It was my fault all this happened. I killed that other driver. You know he was only eighteen?”

  “Of course we know that. You probably don’t remember all the legal stuff, all issues with the insurance. We know a lot about him,” her mom said. She hesitated. “His name was—”

  “George,” Sadie said. “I know.”

  “That’s right. How did you know that?”

  “Because it was on the news. You can look it up in the paper. Everyone knows. I heard him, when we were in the car. Before the ambulances came. He was crying and crying and crying. No one heard. No one remembers but me. No one else knows what really happened. I have to carry it forever.”

  “Stop, Sadie. Before it’s too late,” George begged. But she couldn’t stop. She saw his face on every nurse, every doctor, every patient, every relative who had been in the ER that terrible day. The ceiling disappeared and became a starry night, just like the ceiling of the Star Palace rising above. The ER ground to a halt around them, and all these Georges watched as she betrayed him.

  “Sometimes I wonder if maybe we all died,” she said, choking on tears. “I worry until I make myself sick. Or maybe just I died and that’s why I don’t feel anything. And I play that day in my head over and over and over and over and over and I wish I hadn’t been asking for my tape and I wish you hadn’t been arguing and I wish and I wish and I wish and nothing changes. Nothing changes. I’ve told myself this story a million times and nothing changes.”

  “Sadie, nothing can change the past,” her dad said. “And it’s not a story. It’s a terrifying thing that happened to us. And to that boy.”

  “That must have been frightening for you,
being awake in the car after the crash. It must have been horrifying.” Her mom wiped away a few tears, choking on her words before she could continue. “I can hardly bear to think about it. But you know, it was an accident. It was an accident and we’re all okay now.”

  “But the other driver died.”

  “He did,” her mom admitted, but there wasn’t anything she could say to make that better. They sat in silence.

  “But we’re okay now,” her dad said finally.

  “Don’t you get it? Don’t you understand? Everything can fall down in an instant. You can’t control anything. And then you have to wonder, is it fate or could we have changed it? I ask over and over, could it have been different? Life only goes one direction, and this moment, and the next moment, once they’re in the past you can’t change them and there’s no reason for anything that happens. You can’t stop time and it paralyzes me. I mean, what if we hadn’t been okay? What if?”

  “But that didn’t happen,” her mom said. “What happened, happened. And here we are.”

  “And it was scary. Tragic,” her dad added. “But everything is okay now.”

  “Nothing is okay,” Sadie said, putting her head in her hands. “And I don’t know why.”

  “What do you mean?” her mom asked.

  “Nothing feels real,” Sadie mumbled. “I feel empty and worthless and cold. All the time. And no one sees. I feel like a ghost. Like I’m just pretending to be alive. I don’t even know if it was the accident or if I just am this way. There’s no reason for it. But I think there should be a reason for everything and there isn’t. I don’t get why I have to be this sad. I don’t know.”

  Sadie’s parents looked at each other, but their telepathic conversation seemed to fail them.

  Sadie stared up at the ceiling she knew so well: the Star Palace’s beautiful glass false sky. Here in the real world, to real people, she couldn’t explain what it felt like. Words could never carry the shattered feeling she lived with out of her body and into another mind.

  Only George knew how she really felt. His many hospital guises stood like a jury around her.

  “They’ll never understand,” all the Georges said at once.

  “I don’t understand!” I shouted back.

  I shouted. Me.

  I looked up, but I had to cover my eyes. It was blinding.

  The shattering roof made horrible music. All around me, broken glass stars were falling. The palace roof was falling down, abandoning me to reality in a shower of stars. They burned bright as they died, a thousand wishes going out.

  The soft bustle of the hospital cafeteria began again, and my parents were looking at me, shocked.

  Because I was there, suddenly. In a way that I’m usually not. I was there despite the darkness that had taken over, through the dreaming, in the real world. My words were like the staff that strikes the water, parting the sea. Magic, powerful words.

  “I need help. I really, really need someone to help me,” I sobbed, and they put their arms around me, sheltering me from the black water that was already coming back, that too-familiar cold.

  “It’s okay,” my parents said over and over as I sank back into the ocean of sadness, and I knew they just didn’t know what else to say. “Sadie. We’re here.”

  How can such a world-destroying whirlwind exist in a span of twelve days? You can create a world in seven, I guess. We used to go to church for Grandma and Grandpa’s sake, and Mom used to say Genesis was a metaphor: a device to tell the story, to make a point. The right story can be more true than the truth. Why is that?

  But then, stories can also lie.

  I don’t know how to sort out the difference between a true story and a story that lies, when no one ever has the whole story. If you can’t trust your memory, what can you trust? I don’t know how anyone is ever certain about anything.

  I am writing the truth in my journal, and it’s building a storm of words I can barely see through. Some are just fragments; others are thoughts I’ve been holding in for too long. At the heart of the storm is the truth I know already, though I can’t write it down, and when the center falls, all the scary beautiful magic I’ve been building will fall too.

  It isn’t a perfect metaphor, I think. The eye doesn’t cause the storm. It is the consequence of it. You have to let the storm die out to free what is at its center.

  How long have I been living in this tempest? It’s time to go home.

  My mom walks in just as I’m writing that, sneaking up on me while I’m lost in thought. Today I don’t mind, though. Maybe it’s okay if she sees my funny thinking faces.

  She’s got a couple of our old suitcases we haven’t used in forever. She’s taking home half of my stuff today, because tomorrow I’m getting out of here (for real this time). Between Henry and my mom and my team, we brought so much stuff into this hospital that she wasn’t sure she could take it all at once.

  She sits down on my bed and puts a book-sized present in front of me wrapped up in pretty pink paper.

  “I know you know you didn’t cause that crash,” she says. “But I also know that maybe it feels like you did.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “I do think I remember a little. For some reason, all those old Beatles albums gave me a chill. I never knew why. But you messing around with the tape player didn’t cause the accident.”

  “I guess.”

  “But it’s not just the accident, is it?” she says. I shake my head. “Sadie, I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell us. I don’t understand what’s wrong. But I want to.”

  “I don’t know if you can,” I say. “I don’t know if it was the crash or if I’m just blaming everything on the worst thing that ever happened. But since then, I’ve been broken in a million pieces. Everything seemed wrong after that.”

  My mom nods. “Well, you started going to school, and we started a whole new life. And that was partly the crash, and partly just because things change. It’s hard to figure out who you are when life hands you a new adventure.”

  “A consolation prize.”

  She scoffs.

  “I know you liked being on the road. All those ‘road years,’ like you used to say. But you don’t remember how hard it was, pulling together a living that way. All you remember is the fun parts. And we’re glad you do; there were a lot of them. But I don’t think that this life, the one we ended up with, was a consolation prize at all. Sadie, we chose this. It wasn’t forced on us. We took what happened, and we made a choice as a family, and we moved on. You were part of that choice.”

  “But everything…broke,” I say. I don’t know how better to say it. Our whole lives, my sense of certainty, my future…

  “I don’t believe in broken. Neither does your dad. But I do believe in change. Do you remember, when you were little, we were at a museum and there was all this Japanese art and pottery? I don’t even remember if it was Chicago or Detroit. One of those long trips. There were so many they just blend together.

  “There was this blue cup you absolutely loved. It had been broken and sort of glued back together with gold. It was amazing, because it was so beautiful after it had been broken. And I felt stupid liking this cup that was such an obvious metaphor: that the cracks made it stronger and more beautiful.” She swats me gently. “I can see you rolling your eyes, you smart aleck.” I laugh a little. “I mean, it’s trite. But now I think about it sometimes and I like it. Because sometimes the truth really is just completely cliché. And I think this is one of those times. There is beauty in fixing something. There’s beauty in restoration. And there’s room for broken things to be better than they were before.”

  “That is super-sappy,” I admit. “But I like it too.”

  “Anyway,” she says. “This is for you. Because you’re not a ghost. You’re someone special and your story is just begi
nning.”

  I open it. It is a beautiful leather-bound journal exactly like an explorer would have.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “And your dad is taking the Beatles records out of the basement as we speak,” my mom says. “We’re on a huge nostalgia kick, and you can’t beat vinyl.”

  “That’s what Henry says.”

  “Henry knows a good thing when he sees it.”

  She kisses me and leaves. There’s nothing more to say, nothing she could tell me that would make me happier than that. I repeat it to myself, rearranging it. “I am a good thing, seen.” I want to write those words down in my new journal, but when I open it and face those blank cream-white pages, I realize I’m not done with this story yet. So, I take out the battered green one, flip past the mess of thoughts I’ve scribbled today, and think of the true things I know.

  I think I love old things because I want to know the ending before I start. I love the Beatles because they’re already over. There can’t be any more. No one can make a new Beatles song. There are no surprises and you are safe. That’s why it hurts so much to discover:

  You can always add meaning to something, even if it’s in the past. A tape playing during an accident becomes a memory, and the song means something new.

  Of course, I think, that isn’t always a bad thing.

  What is a cover? Somewhere between an old song and a new one. Everything builds on everything else. Stories never die. There really isn’t an end.

  My story, the one that’s in this notebook with its cracked green cover and tearstained pages, is a red and black mess of lines. It’s not even really a story. It’s just facts I wish weren’t true. Boring, mundane existence on cheap paper. It’s fragments. I flip into the very front and look at Day 1: a few sentences. It isn’t the whole truth, with all the depth and complexity of living through it. It’s just what I thought were “facts.” It’s embarrassing to be distilled down into so few words, and for those words to be…nothing. Boring. But in a way, that’s the truth too. I’ve been writing the truth all along.