The Memory Thief

by Rachel Keener

  “Wait,” Mother said. She went to Hannah. Pulled off her headcap, unbound her long braid and smoothed the length of her hair. She twisted fuzzy pieces down around Hannah’s face, until the old halo shone again.

  “Oh, daughter,” Mother whispered lowly, as Hannah left the room, “yes, he is.”

  Hannah found Daniel in the Great Room. He was standing by the mantel with a piece of her art in his hands. It surprised her. There was a clearly marked plaque on the mantel. Do not touch the pottery. Thank you for your cooperation. The Reynolds Family. Mother ordered that plaque after a guest broke one of her favorite vases.

  She knew Daniel saw the sign. He was standing right by it. And yet there he stood, holding her vase up to the light, turning it slowly round and round as he studied the paint. Like he already owned it.

  “Your mother has something similar to that already,” Hannah said.

  Daniel turned toward her and nodded. “But I like how you used so much green in this one. It might match my office.” Hannah was looking at the vase as he spoke, but Daniel wasn’t. He was looking only at Hannah. It was the second time he had seen her with her hair unbound. She was standing in front of the Great Room window, and the last bit of sunset fell over her shoulders. Made her shine.

  “Would you like a tour? I could show you the different pieces that decorate the house. There are some bowls across the dining table that might interest you. I made them last year and matched them enough so that they are clearly a set. But I also made certain that each one would always be a bit out of place among the others. I think they are some of my most unusual work, and I haven’t ever shown them at the fair or offered them for sale until now.”

  Hannah was surprised that he shook his head no even as she spoke. She had never wanted to sell those bowls. She could still remember the way the clay felt inside the rim of each one. She could still remember the pictures inside her mind as she painted them. She had worried all night about what she could offer him that would be special enough, unique enough, to justify the trip up the mountain. The bowls were her best pieces.

  “I want to see where you work,” he said.

  “I don’t have anything there you’d like. Most of it’s unfinished. Much of it I’ll destroy before I finish.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I’d still like to see it.”

  No guest had ever set foot inside the workroom. Hannah locked the room whenever she left and carried the key inside her apron pocket. Daniel noticed the way she was wringing her hands as she held them behind her back. “I’ll keep your secrets,” he said, and smiled.

  She led him up the stairs. Inside the room, Daniel smiled again when he saw all the colors splattered across the floor. Years of mist, layers of drops and mistakes, swirled across stone tile. Hannah watched with interest as he stepped carefully around the swirls of color on the floor. As though even the mistakes, the spilled paint, the dust of old mud, were somehow special.

  Daniel looked at the pile of broken pottery. The corner where Hannah would toss a dried piece that didn’t satisfy her. He looked at the potter’s wheel in the corner. At the large metal box with a three-inch pipe coming out of it. The metal baker shelves, lined with dozens of drying pieces.

  “Those are unfinished,” Hannah said, when she noticed he was looking at the shelves. “Most of them special orders. Seems all people want these days are plates and sushi sets.”

  Daniel noticed a piece sitting alone in the corner, near the potter’s wheel. It was empty and looked like a tray of sorts. Almost a long rectangle, but with rounded unbalanced edges, and a shallow well in the center. What struck him most about the piece, was that it wasn’t painted. It was only covered with a standard glaze. The clay, the shape of it, had to speak for itself.

  “Look at this,” he said, as he walked over and picked it up. He ran his hands into the well of the center. “What could this be? Why didn’t you paint it?”

  Hannah was silent.

  “It’s so different from any of your other work. So… what’s the word I’m looking for… so bare? What do you use it for? Does it hold supplies or something?”

  “No. It’s just a piece for me. It reminds my mother of an old dough tray.”

  “But you didn’t let her have it,” he said. “You kept it here, instead of giving it to her.”

  Hannah nodded.

  “Because,” he continued, “if you give this to her, she’ll set it out in the hotel. Place apples in it. Or maybe little tea bags and coffee stirrers. And so you keep it here, empty in the corner. Where no one can see how beautiful it is.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want it.” He held the tray tightly against his chest. “I’ll take the bowls from the dining table for my mother. This one’s for me.”

  “What would you do with it? Perhaps tea bags and coffee stirrers for your office?”

  Daniel pressed his hands into the well of the piece and shook his head. “No. You were right to keep it empty. That’s where the beauty lies.” He looked at her. “Can I have it?”

  She nodded, her eyes staring down at the floor. “Yes.”

  As they left the room, Father was coming down the hall. He stopped to introduce himself. And, since dinner service was beginning soon, invited Daniel to stay.

  During dinner, Hannah stared at her plate. When Daniel spoke to her, asked her about the pieces that decorated the buffet table, Hannah whispered replies. But as he talked with Father, she snuck glances. And she couldn’t help but like the way he agreed with Father. Liked the outrage they shared over a proposal for a new mountain highway.

  “How long have you known Hannah?” Father asked.

  “More than a year. My mother collects her art. I do keep a few pieces for myself, though.”

  “What do you like about her art?” Father asked.

  “Henry,” Mother whispered, and shook her head. But Daniel smiled.

  “Nobody can solve it. None of us can ever know what she was thinking when she made it. When you look at most art, you can usually guess the artist’s thoughts. Perhaps just by the color choice, or the choice of shape. But with Hannah’s art, especially pieces like this,” he said, as he held up the cradle, “all we can know is that there is something vaguely familiar about it. Somewhere there in the shape of the mud. Somewhere in the confusion of the color. It’s like looking at one of my dreams. Everything seems familiar, but still so far away.”

  Hannah watched Daniel carry her cradle out the door. Watched as he put it on the seat next to him. She liked that he didn’t put it inside his trunk.

  “We all like him,” Bethie signed.

  Hannah shrugged her shoulders.

  “Maybe he’ll come back.”

  “He won’t,” Hannah said. “I showed him all my pieces today. There’s nothing left for him to see.”

  “You gave him the cradle.”

  “Yes,” Hannah said, and sighed.

  “He’ll be back.”

  Two weeks later, Bethie’s promise came true. Daniel returned without an invitation. He carried a cracked plate from his mother’s collection.

  “How long will it take to make a new one?” he asked.

  “I can throw it tonight, but I’ll need to let it shelf-dry before I fire it.”

  “I want to watch.”

  “Sometimes I leave the door open so the guests can watch. Mother has set hours for that. Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Would you like me to wait until then?”

  He laughed. “No, I don’t want to wait.”

  “But Mother has a schedule for guests—”

  “I’m your guest, not hers. And I don’t want to stand outside the room, watching with a bunch of… of tourists.”

  Hannah laughed. “You almost said Yankees.”

  It was the first time he had ever heard her laugh. The sound of it, the effect it had on her sad eyes, amazed him more than her pottery.

  They went to the workroom. He walked in after her and closed the door behind them. When she went to grab her a
pron from a hook near the door, she propped the door about six inches open. “Seems a bit stuffy,” she explained. She walked over to a box and began cutting out some clay. “I don’t know how to do this. I’ve never had a guest in here before.”

  “Just do what you always do, but tell me about it.”

  Hannah walked over to the metal rectangle that sat on the counter and put the clay inside. “This is a pug mill. It twists the clay together, mixes it, and pulls most of the air from it.”

  With her back to him, Hannah talked about the different types of clay. How the white clay could be used straight from the box. How she liked to work with different clays at different times, depending on her mood and what she wanted to make. Daniel was surprised at how much she talked, never looking at him, always watching the clay. She said more to him as she worked than she had in the entire time they had known each other.

  She took the clay over to a work surface and pushed it down and over. “I’m cow-head wedging,” she called out over her shoulder, and laughed again. She held the piece up to him and motioned him over. It was a slightly bumpy, triangular piece. “See the cow head?” she asked. And he nodded as she pointed to different spots on the piece that she thought looked like ears and eyes. “My teacher taught me to look for this shape as I wedge. It means I’m working the clay correctly. Mixing it well.”

  She shaped the clay into a small loaf. Took a wire and sliced a piece from it, rounded it with her hands. “Now we’re ready to throw your mother’s plate.”

  She carried a bucket of water over to the wheel, sat down on a stool, and began slapping the piece of clay from one hand to the other. “Everything here starts as a cylinder. The jugs, the vases, the bowls, the plates.” She held the piece of clay in her hands and looked up at him. “And if this clay isn’t centered well on the wheel, it won’t work. A piece can only be as strong as its center.”

  She threw the clay firmly onto the wheel. As it began to spin, she dipped one hand into the bucket of water and pressed the other into the clay. She kept adding water with the one hand, and pushing up and down with the other.

  “But how do you know,” Daniel asked, “if it’s centered right?”

  “By the rhythm. I feel the spin of the wheel,” she said. She put the palms of her hands around the edge of the wheel. “This wheel is centered, and I want my clay to feel the same way. So I feel this wheel, I feel for the rhythm of it. And then I put my hands on the clay and keep working until they match.”

  Hannah stopped talking then. She was focused on the shape of the clay, on the pattern of her hands. Sometimes she whispered things. About how she wanted the clay a bit thinner. Sometimes she told the clay what it was, or what it should be. “You are a plate,” she whispered.

  Daniel watched her face as much as he watched the clay. She was so easy to read, so open before her work. He saw her love for the clay. He felt her desire to see it beautiful. He wondered about the gentle sadness that veiled her eyes.

  When she was finished, she felt awkward, embarrassed. It was just occurring to her that she had worked before a close audience. Instead of one fenced safely in the hall. It felt odd to be so visible, after so many years. She had grown used to hiding on that mountain. She had grown comfortable in her somber polyester. But as she stared at the formed plate on the wheel, and thought of how long he had watched her while she was unaware, she couldn’t help but remember. All those nights of washing steam buckets, that long canvas apron hiding her CSM T-shirt. All those times she turned around to see Sam staring at her while she worked.

  And now there was another. Standing across from her, watching her blush as she mumbled an explanation of the drying process. Even as she spoke, she wondered for the first time in years whether or not she was pretty. A part of her, the older and wiser part, hoped that she wasn’t. But there was still something left behind from the girl she used to be, that bicycling James Island Holy Roller.

  “Thank you,” Daniel said, after she told him when he could pick the plate up. “I’ll see myself out while you finish up.” He walked through the door, and Hannah couldn’t resist the urge to call him back.

  “Wait.”

  He turned toward her.

  “Does your mother want it glazed simply, the same as the original?”

  He stared at her and nodded slowly, his arms crossed in front of his chest. “I wish for once you’d paint to order.”

  “Why? She wants something different?”

  “I do,” he said, as he turned to leave. “I want you to paint yourself. Just as you are now, across that plate.”

  After he left, Hannah went to Bethie’s room, where there was a mirror. She saw the mud smeared from her hands to her elbows. The bit of mud smeared across her neck. She saw her forehead, damp with sweat from the effort of her work. She saw her hair twisting into golden fuzz around her face.

  She repeated his words. “Just as you are now.” It wasn’t a common gift. Like a smooth line about sweet corn. Or like an arrogant, casual touch. Daniel made her the compliment. She alone was the pretty thing. Just as she was.

  VI

  Hannah made another plate. When it was ready, she dragged the mirror from Bethie’s bedroom into her workroom. She stood in front of it and studied herself, as her hand began to reach for paints.

  She grabbed gold for the stubborn halo she saw. Black for the polyester. White for her skin. Brown for the mud on her hands. Green for her memories. And blue for the haints that always seemed to be looking over her shoulder.

  And then she painted to order, for the very first time. When she was finished, she held up the plate and saw herself. All the things that make a portrait—eyes, lips, mouth, and hair—none of it was distinct. Instead, she relied on colors and their location. The gold covered the full-circle edge of the plate, for her hair was long and overwhelming. The blue splashed randomly across the surface, for no one knows where haints come from or where they go. She traced a silhouette, complete with the flowing drape of long polyester in wispy lines of black. And then she added green. A perfect circle of green, right in the center of the plate, right in the heart of the black silhouette.

  When it was dry, she wrapped it together with the plate for Daniel’s mother. She wondered what Daniel would think when he saw it. Would he know it was her? Would he care?

  Hannah had the hotel driver deliver the plates to Daniel’s office at the arranged time. And then she waited. When Mother came that evening to tell her Daniel was in the lobby, she felt victorious. She had painted to order. It had brought him back.

  It’s enough, Hannah warned herself. It was time to end the game, especially since she was winning. Especially before he hurt her.

  “Tell him I’m too busy,” Hannah said to Mother. “He doesn’t have an appointment, and I have no pieces ready for him yet.”

  “What are you doing?” Mother demanded.

  “Finishing this order. And then I have two new sushi sets to make. Sushi, can you believe it?”

  “Hurry and dress yourself. I’ll have Tabby press a new sweater while you wash up. Daniel is waiting.”

  “Tell him to leave.”

  Mother’s eyes narrowed, she held her hands out palms up. “But he is your chance, Hannah. Your only one. You are grown up now. Others may not come. He is a decent man and he’s taken an interest in you—”

  “But I’m not.”

  “You’re not interested?”

  “Decent.”

  Hannah turned her back, so Mother couldn’t see her face. How it twisted into something painful and wounded. They hadn’t spoken of it in so many years.

  Mother walked to her, placed her hand gently on Hannah’s back. “He will never know, Hannah,” she whispered. “You shouldn’t think of it, not even once. I worked hard for you, daughter, to make it as though it never happened.”

  “But I do,” Hannah said, choking back her sobs. “Think of it. All the time. Don’t you?”

  “Even if I did, I wouldn’t let my heart be blind to new
blessings. Don’t refuse the second chance God has offered you. Now go to him. Groom yourself and then go to him.”

  Hannah sighed. “Send him here.” She brought her hands to her face and smeared a bit of mud across her chin. “He likes me best this way. Send him here.”

  That night Hannah taught Daniel how to wedge clay into a cow head. And Daniel taught her how to be alone with him, talk with him, and feel almost comfortable. She was still afraid, of course. Of him, and the pain he could cause her. The lies he could tell. She was afraid of his happiness, and that he knew how to find it on his own. She was afraid of the bridge she had built inside her. And how shaky it seemed whenever he was around.

  Slowly, carefully, something began to bloom on the mountain. Mother started sewing soft yellow sweaters. She hid the headcaps that Hannah had grown fond of. Bethie made sure to fill all the vases around their home with flowers. She tied Hannah’s hair back with one of her patchwork sashes. And Father, more exhausted and shaky with every day that passed, managed to leave his study whenever Daniel came to visit. Hannah watched them sit together on the porch and talk of ordinary things. Like weather and politics. She thought of Sam, and how Father liked everyone. How he would have liked Sam, too.

  Hannah was careful. A true, deep water Yank. She stayed on the mountaintop. She made Daniel come to her. She ignored the invitation that came in the mail to an office party at his firm. She ignored the messages he left at the front desk for her during the morning, asking if she wanted to meet him in town for lunch.

  But Daniel kept showing up in the Great Room. Mother came to him once, determined to protect Hannah. Determined to thoroughly sound out his intentions. She pulled him into the library, and bluntly asked him why.

  “I’m here to see Hannah, of course.”

  “But why do you keep coming back? Your art collection is full, I’m sure.”

  “No, there’s one piece left I must collect.” He looked her squarely in the eyes. He was one of the few, one of the only, that could do it without having to look away.