The Memory Tree

by John R. Little

  How could that be? I could also remember those things happening. The cops finding her body. Attending her funeral.

  But I could just as easily remember that she never died. She left Nelson shortly after I did, went to live in Los Angeles, married an unknown actor, divorced him a couple of years later. She was still as skinny as ever and still wore her hair in a ponytail. She even wore a baseball cap sometimes.

  I knew all these things, and I also knew she died when she was a young girl.

  “She’s so great,” Jenny was saying. “I wish she lived closer so we could see her more often.”

  All I could do was nod.

  “She’s seeing a guy, but you ask me, it doesn’t sound promising.”

  “But she died,” I blurted out.

  Jenny snapped back to me. “What?”

  “She died. When we were young. She was murdered. They never found out who did it. Not a clue. Whoever it was -- ”

  “What? Whoever it was? What?”

  The last piece of the puzzle fell into place. “Uncle Bob must have killed her.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “That’s the only thing that makes sense. I warned him to stay away from kids. Threatened to come back and kill him if he ever went near another boy or girl.”

  “You think he would have murdered Mel?”

  I nodded. “It’s the only thing that makes any sense. He didn’t do it after I threatened him.”

  “Oh, Sam, this is so strange to hear. You introduced Mel to me more than twenty-five years ago. Now you’re telling me she was killed but you went back and saved her? How could I remember knowing her all these years?”

  “I remember both versions,” I said. “The memories

  co-exist quite comfortably.”

  She drank her lemonade and rubbed her cheeks with the cold glass.

  “Guess it’s a good thing you went through all this.”

  “Ready to go do our errand?”

  “Ready? I’ve been dying to do it ever since you told me about the third demand you made of Bob.”

  “He sure didn’t understand it. Now we’ll just have to see if he actually followed through on it.”

  Jenny drove us again, this time to the National Trust Company on Pike Street, near the waterfront. National Trust had been an institution in Seattle since they first rolled out the wooden sidewalks in the late eighteen hundreds.

  When we walked in, an ambience of wealth covered us. This wasn’t a bank for a normal Joe. Only the finest customers were accepted. Nowadays, that meant tech giants or coffee barons. In 1968, there was a broader client base, including at least one City Councilman from Montana.

  I remembered the stunned look on Bob’s face when I told him my third and final demand. “I want you to get your ass over to Seattle and open up a fifty year trust for this.” I then handed him Claire’s Remembrance Diary, packed tightly in newspaper, inside a small box. “You tell them Sam Ellis will be looking for this in about forty years. And you pay them enough fucking money to keep it safe until then.”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “It’s your fucking life. This doesn’t get paid for, you’re a fucking dead man.” I had stared into his eyes and left him not a shadow of a doubt I was serious.

  And I was.

  I explained to the Customer Service Representative what I was there for. She looked puzzled and then went to find a manager.

  After a few minutes, an older man of about sixty came out, smiling, wire glasses perched on his nose. “Mr. Ellis! It’s nice to finally meet you.”

  “Same here,” I said. “Does that mean you have my package?”

  “Yes, sir. I must say this has been an oddity for the company. We’ve often wondered if you were ever really going to show up, but we’ve been paid for another several years, so we didn’t have to worry about that yet.”

  “Great. Please give it to me.”

  “There are just a few formalities, sir. I’ll need to see proper identification, and then of course we have some forms to fill out. You know how it is.”

  I did.

  After a short time, Jenny and I were back in the car, heading for home. Shredded newspaper lay at my feet. In my hands was my mother’s Remembrance Diary.

  Chapter 48

  Three weeks passed. Jenny read the Remembrance Diary front to back, twice. By the end of it, I think she knew more about Claire than I did. She knew her moods, her colors, her wishes and desires. And her fears. She knew how much Julie meant to her -- how much I meant to her.

  I knew those things too, but somehow Jenny sucked all these characteristics in, breathed them. She knew who Claire was, deep down inside her.

  One day, I found Jenny crying over the Diary. “It must have been so hard.”

  “What was?” I asked. I pulled her to me.

  “To live alongside her real child, to never be able to say she loved you. To be so close, but so far away that a single hug was out of the realm of possibility.” She wiped her eyes. “And then to leave you, being so frightened that she left the one thing precious to her.”

  During those three weeks, I completely regained my strength, although I was careful about any physical activity I did. Nothing would hurt me, but it could make my rehabilitation a bit longer.

  It took most of that time to find Claire.

  I found her by googling. When I first searched for her name, I got back more than 10,000 hits. Most of them had nothing to do with anyone named Claire Williamson, just web sites that happened to have both words nearby. I refined my search by including quotes around the name, and that reduced the hits to a few hundred, but I wasn’t really very optimistic. Claire would be close to seventy now and may never have found her way onto a web site of any kind.

  If she was even alive.

  I did go through each hit, but nothing jumped out at me that seemed to be about her.

  I kept looking, trying different variations. I was near giving up when I thought of the phone book. She would have a phone wouldn’t she?

  But probably not under her entire name. It would more likely be entered as “C. Williamson.” That made me think of 411.com. I went there and they had a way to find people given their name and birth date.

  Birth date. That was in the diary somewhere. I knew I could find it again, but Jenny would likely know it off the top of her head.

  I called to her and asked her.

  “June 22, 1938,” she answered without hesitation.

  Bingo.

  “She’s back in Montana. Great Falls.”

  Jenny stared at the monitor with me. “We must have been so close to her when you were in the hospital there.”

  The web site gave her address and phone number.

  My real mother.

  We drove the Camry to Montana, our third drive there this year.

  We had no way to know how Claire would react, whether she would even remember me. I had no real idea of what I was even going to say when we knocked on her door.

  She lived in a four-story apartment building, third floor at the back.

  I was surprised there wasn’t any security. We just opened the door and walked up.

  The building was just awful. We could hear people talking through the walls as we walked towards Claire’s apartment. There were a few holes and areas where the paint had been picked off the walls. “Must be dirt cheap,” I said. “There’d be no other reason for her to stay in a place like this.”

  Jenny held my hand tightly as we got to the door. My heart was pounding as hard as it could.

  There was a peephole in the door. Before I could knock, I saw a shadow cover the hole and then the door opened.

  “Hello?” she said. “Can I help you?”

  There she was.

  Claire.

  Her hair was dark, exactly like the cover of the Remembrance Diary. Only the odd strand showed a bit of white. She wore her hair hanging loose, longer than the photo on the cover of the diary.

  She stood tall and
strong. She wasn’t quite eye to eye with me but not far from it. Now I knew where my height came from.

  I hesitated so long in saying anything that Jenny finally jumped in there. “You’re Claire Williamson?” she asked.

  “Yes, yes, and who might you two be?” She looked a bit annoyed but also curious.

  Jenny looked at me pleadingly, and I finally regained my composure long enough to talk. “Claire, my name is Sam Ellis.”

  Her mouth opened in surprise at my name, and she studied my face for a few moments. It wasn’t quite like looking in the mirror, but I could see my eyes on her face, and a hint of my bone structure. She must have seen the same. “Sam . . . ” She swung the door open. “I don’t know where my manners are. Please come in.” She never stopped staring at me.

  “Thank you. This is my wife, Jenny.”

  “So nice to meet you. You’ll have to forgive me. It’s just that it’s been such a long time.”

  Jenny shook her hand warmly and we all went into the living area and sat. The apartment didn’t look much better on the inside than it did on the outside. I wondered if there were rats, then shuffled that thought from my mind. Other than the obvious rundown nature of the apartment, Claire had tried her best to keep it neat.

  “Claire, I have something for you.” I handed her the Remembrance Diary.

  “Oh, my Lord.” She carefully took the diary and held it lovingly in her hands. “Sam, how did you find this?”

  I smiled at her. “It’s a long story. The most important part of which is that I know I was Julie. I know you’re my mother.”

  She just looked at me. I could see her mouth trying to form words but nothing came out.

  Jenny came to the rescue. “Claire, we only found this out recently and have been trying to find you.”

  Claire started to sob, lowering her head to her hands. I moved to her slowly, uncertainly. This was such a shock to her, I knew, as it was originally to me. I’d had a few weeks to let everything settle in my mind. The shock of seeing me would take her a long time to get over.

  “Is it really you?” she finally asked.

  “It really is.”

  She clutched me, silently crying. After a minute, she pulled away and wiped the tears from her face.

  “I’ve never let you go, really,” she said. “After I left Nelson, I tried to keep watching what you were doing without you knowing it.”

  I kept quiet, just wanting to hear her words. Her voice wasn’t like I imagined it. She had a gravelly, throaty voice, as if she didn’t talk a lot and was out of practice.

  “I attended your graduation, you know. Sat in the audience and you never knew I was there.” She pointed over to a small room behind me. “Come look.”

  She led us to a table that had a dozen books all identical to the Remembrance Diary. Oversized scrapbooks, all with the same brown leather cover. The only difference was that these books each had a strip of masking tape on the side and years were marked on each. The earliest had “1968 -- 1971” written on the tape. The most recent had just “1992 -- ”.

  I opened one of the middle volumes. It was full of handwritten pages in Claire’s unmistakable small and clear handwriting. Every once in a while I could see the word “Julie” jump out.

  “You kept writing the diary,” I said.

  She smiled. “I could never allow myself to truly let you go. But, I lost track of you in 1993. I never knew what happened to you after that.”

  “Why did you send the Diary to your mother?” I asked. “It was so important to you.”

  “I tried to break with you, knowing I could never really be your mother. I hoped that by sending the diary back to Nelson, I might be freed of you.” She laughed and looked at the other volumes. “Obviously that didn’t happen.”

  Jenny took Claire’s hand. “We all have a lot to catch up on.”

  Chapter 49

  More than two years have passed since my last dissolving. Life is good. No, more than good. Life is amazing.

  So, to catch up on a few loose ends before I

  finish . . .

  My father and my mother died the same way I first remembered them. Nothing changed with my memories there except a bit of sadness, knowing my mother could have been a really good person. I never saw the attractiveness in her when I was growing up, nor the care that she obviously was capable of. She remained a bitter woman until the day she died.

  Marty ended up in Calgary. After about ten years there, he moved to Vancouver, not far from Seattle. I had many new memories of times we traveled to each other’s homes to visit. He is as close as a brother could be. When he first received the gift of $10,000 in the mail all those years ago, he was bewildered and held on to it for more than a year. After that, he just decided to spend it. He opened up a small second hand goods store and has been successful at it ever since. He never found out where the money came from.

  Bob? I don’t know what ever happened to him. I could probably find out if I wanted to trace him on the Internet, but he isn’t worth my time. I never saw him again after that horrible summer, but I don’t know if he stayed in Nelson or moved on. I just didn’t care.

  Mel lived! We keep in touch a lot. She’s living with that guy she met in Los Angeles and seems happy. With Mel, “seeming” happy is probably as good as it gets, so we’re glad for her.

  Claire moved in with us. We couldn’t stand to see her in that firetrap she was living in, and Jenny talked me into bringing her into our home. It frankly didn’t take a lot of convincing. Claire is a kind and gentle woman, and I love her more than I ever loved the parents who I had lived with all those years.

  And Jenny.

  My wonderful Jenny. Still the strongest person I know, and the best.

  After everything was long over, I looked back at how I had treated her in the past and shook my head in abject horror. How could I have ever hurt her so badly? I finally asked her why she had stayed with me through those terrible times.

  She answered me, “Sometimes the times were bad, but I always knew there was a different you, just waiting to climb to the surface. I kept wishing that was going to be a quick transition, but it turned out to be longer than I hoped.” She paused and then added, “It was worth the wait.”

  And the source of all these strange adventures?

  I read a lot of books about quantum mechanics when this was going on, as I mentioned earlier. It’s hard to believe this is “real” science, but it is. Unfortunately, I don’t remember every last detail. It’s so strange, and it just doesn’t seem to want to stick in my memory. I know there’s something called the “many worlds interpretation” that says there are an infinite number of universes, all slightly different.

  Suppose I flip a coin. Half the time it comes down heads and half the time it’s tails. The many worlds interpretation says both events truly happen, and the universe splits into two identical copies. Every possible choice we make causes more and more splits, an infinite number of splits making an infinite number of universes.

  Could I have somehow been jumping between these similar universes? Mel lived in some while dying in others?

  When I thought I had all the concepts straight about all this, I tried to explain it to Jenny, and she got lost within about two minutes. Within three, she was asking me questions I had no answers to. Since then, I decided the details don’t matter. I don’t have a clue if that’s even close to the right track.

  What about God? Could a God have simply decided I needed another crack? I don’t know. But, I do know I joined a Unitarian Church and attend most Sundays. To look for answers? Maybe. I’m not sure about that, either.

  Could all of this have been dreams brought on by the dissolvings? That’s one idea I’m ready to rule out. Where did the Remembrance Diary come from?

  I know all this happened, just as I’ve written it down in these pages.

  At the end of the day, I’ve decided that the “how” of it simply doesn’t matter.

  What matters is tha
t for once in my life, I’m settled and truly happy with Jenny and Claire. We laugh and chat and never seem to be bored with one another.

  My mother still calls me Julie.

  THE END

  Afterword

  I sometimes get asked where I got the idea for The Memory Tree. Depending on who asked the question and the circumstances, I might give different answers. I sometimes talk about always being interested in time travel stories and wanting to write one myself. Or I might talk about some of the books that have influenced my writing over the years, such as Replay by Ken Grimwood or The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold.

  What I don’t often talk about is the genesis of the child sexual abuse that is at the heart of the novel. I’m actually surprised that in the years since the original publication of the novel, nobody has come out and asked me about that part of the book directly.

  So, where did that part of the story come from? Simple: I lived through it. Much of the abuse described in the story actually happened to me. In many ways, I wrote The Memory Tree to try to exorcise some terrible memories and events that I suffered through.

  What happened after publication, though, surprised me a great deal.

  In the first year or so that the book was published, I heard from many readers who loved the book. That was very gratifying. Several hundred people took the time to e-mail me or post comments on various web sites praising the book.

  That was very humbling and incredibly cool.

  Of those hundreds of comments, there were a dozen or so that seared my soul. They were from people who had been victims of child sexual abuse themselves and who had read my novel and who were affected by it. In some cases, the e-mails were full of heartfelt thanks for writing the book. Many felt that the book actually made a difference in how they viewed their own terrible experiences and helped them to move a step closer to true closure with their situations.