The Memory Thief

by Rachel Keener

  The receptionist was staring at her hair. She could feel her hands trembling, the tray inside the box she carried began to shake.

  “Can I help you?” the lady behind the desk asked.

  “I’m here to see Daniel.”

  “Mr. Phillips?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No.”

  “Is there some type of emergency?”

  “No.”

  “Then we don’t accept walk-ins. Mr. Phillips is a very busy man. You’ll have to make an appointment. Let me pull his calendar. What type of consultation do you need? A will? Criminal? Custodial?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m not a client.”

  “Well, you still need an appointment.”

  “Maybe I could wait?” Hannah asked, looking at the couch behind her. She saw a shelf built into the wall above the couch. It was filled with her art.

  “Listen, honey,” the receptionist said and leaned forward. “I’ve been here ten years for this reason: Everyone, everyone, has got to come through my desk to get to Daniel. And unless there’s an emergency, like I just killed somebody and I gotta go tell the cops, then I don’t let anyone by without an appointment. No matter how long they wait. It’s what gets me the nice Christmas bonus.”

  “Oh,” Hannah whispered. She started to turn and go, but hated to leave without seeing him. “Do you think, maybe—,” she said, and blushed.

  “Yes?”

  “Can… love be an emergency?”

  The receptionist shook her head. “We don’t handle domestic cases.”

  Hannah laid the box on the receptionist’s desk. “This is for him.”

  Outside, she walked up the street and found a pay phone. She called for the hotel driver’s return. As she waited, she walked and looked in the windows of the shops. At all the ski gear and hiking tools. At all the sweatshirts and trinkets for tourists to carry home. She walked to the end of the street, to the famous scenic overlook. She followed the path to the end. And, as always when she saw the world below, she wondered at how it all kept going.

  “Hannah!” she heard someone call out behind her. “Hannah!”

  She smiled, but she didn’t answer. She knew he would find her. And this time, with this love, she wanted to be the one sought.

  When he took her in his arms she felt his strength surround her. She felt the chill, the one she carried like a trophy inside her heart, start to thaw. She pulled her tired eyes from the world below her, and looked only at him. For the first time, she dared to hope on Mother’s promise. Everything, someday, might be okay.

  “Yes,” Daniel laughed softly before he kissed her. “Love is an emergency.”

  VIII

  Hannah’s pottery brightened. She chose reds and oranges far more than she used to. Green was rarely the center anymore. Blue was a hazy memory.

  She accepted fewer special orders and began creating more things for herself and for Daniel. And even on lonely nights, when she hadn’t seen Daniel in days because he was locked away working on a heated trial, she resisted the urge to return to old habits. She did not build clay babies. She did not search the mountain for the crying that sometimes still woke her.

  When Daniel asked Father for his blessing to propose, Hannah knew. Even before Daniel had so much as whispered the word marry to her. She knew by the joy, the absolute radiance, in Mother’s eyes. She knew by the way Father spent more time in the Great Room instead of locked away in his study. She knew by the way Bethie raided Mother’s lace collection. She sat gently fingering it and telling Hannah, “You’d be so lovely in this.”

  Hannah had never thought she’d be golden again. She never thought she’d be the one to please her family so well. The one on whom they pinned their pride and staked their hopes. No longer Hannah the Ruined, she was something new. Something altogether lovely. She was Hannah the Bride.

  Daniel asked her in her workroom. The place where their love first took shape. And when he said it—Marry me, Hannah—her past, the ugliness, took on new meaning. Because without the pain of Sam, Hannah wouldn’t have found the love of Daniel. And in that moment, when he said those words—Marry me—the love was worth the pain. The love was equal to the pain.

  She spent three months making her own wedding dishes, while Mother sewed her gown. In the end, everything matched. The dishes were simple but perfectly formed. The gown was nearly unadorned but made of the finest white silk and trimmed in handmade lace.

  Hannah winced over the white. An old reflex, a habit of savored guilt. Bethie saw and shook her head. “White is for new love. White is for miracles. Like you. Like me, too.” Bethie pointed to her own new outfit. A breezy white cotton skirt. A pink T-shirt and sandals. Bethie had replaced her blacks and grays, after her miracle happened. After her tongue finally grew up and she began to talk. Bethie wore rainbow colors. Bethie cut her hair to just at her shoulders and got a job at the hospital downtown. She never wore gray again.

  Mother came to her room, just after she had finished dressing for the ceremony. Hannah sat quietly on the bed as Mother kneeled before her and adjusted the lace of her hem.

  “You may choose something,” Mother said. “It is a wedding-day tradition in our family, passed down from generation to generation. You may choose anything you want from your father’s house to take to your new household. Perhaps you want your grandmother’s silver tea set?”

  “I want the bridge.”

  “What?”

  “The bridge. The one in Father’s study, that he drew in college. I want that.”

  “Really,” Mother said with an amused smile.

  “You used to make me and Bethie stand with our noses to it. You pressed our faces against it and told us to pray that the bridge would become a part of us. Hold us up forever and ever.”

  “You can’t have it,” Father called from the doorway. “Perhaps you would like the sitting chair from my study. It’s nearly one hundred years old.”

  “Why not the bridge?”

  “I don’t want your wedding prize to be something untrue.”

  Mother glared sharply. “Don’t start. Not today.” She hurried past him, to make sure everything was ready for Hannah’s entrance.

  “Hannah,” Father whispered, as he took her in his arms. “My wedding gift to you is this: There is a bridge. Built for us. All along, we were just supposed to walk across.”

  Hannah noticed how badly Father was shaking, how weak his grip seemed. She led him to the bed and he sat down. She sat down beside him.

  He patted her hand. “You’re a good girl. Always have been.”

  Hannah started to cry. “Don’t,” she whispered.

  “We’ve worn ourselves out,” he sighed. “Trying to build our own bridge. Today is your chance, Hannah. There is a bridge builder. It’s not us.”

  Mother returned and pulled Hannah to her feet. “It’s time.”

  Hannah looked to Father, panic in her eyes.

  He offered his arm to her. “Oh, it’s not so hard,” he said, and smiled. “The first rule is Believe. The second is Love.”

  Hannah stepped outside then, and the rule of Love covered the mountain that day. Mother and Father, the tension that lived between them, melted as they stood together and watched Hannah. She was beautiful. Not just her hair, which radiated the light of the mountain sunset under her long veil. And not just her milky skin, like porcelain, from all the years of hiding behind polyester. But Hannah’s face, the happiness that glowed across it, was beautiful.

  “We did all right after all,” Mother whispered tearfully, as she reached for Father’s hand. “It was hard. It was so hard, but just look at her today. She’s happy.”

  Father nodded and wiped the tears from his eyes. “She’s going to be okay, in spite of us.”

  When the minister announced Hannah’s new name, when he declared to the family around them that she was Mrs. Daniel Phillips, Hannah stepped out of her old name. She decided that maybe Father was r
ight. Maybe she should try walking, instead of building. Maybe, Mrs. Daniel Phillips could have a good life. A husband. Children.

  They spent their honeymoon on the mountain. Daniel had wanted to take her far away, but she begged to stay. More than anything, Hannah told him, she just wanted to be home with him. She didn’t need to run away to celebrate.

  So Daniel took her to his home, a small mountain condo near the ski lodges that overlooked the winter slopes. He held her through the nights while she lay sleeping in his arms. Sometimes he thought of her childhood, the bits and pieces she shared with him. About the dark days, locked within the gated neighborhood. About the horrible days doing the Holy Roller shuffle at school. Sometimes he hated his in-laws for it all. And yet he couldn’t deny that it had all worked together somehow to make Hannah. Beautiful, fragile, mysterious Hannah. Whose eyes had a shadow of sadness pass over them at the most surprising times. Like when he suggested just a weekend at the beach. “You don’t have to swim,” he told her, when she said she couldn’t. “We could just search for seashells. We could just count the waves.”

  He lay awake and dared to wonder about that shadow that appeared without warning and vanished just as suddenly. Whatever it was, she was his now. And so was that sadness. Maybe she wasn’t strong enough to defeat it. But he promised himself—he pledged to his sleeping bride—he was.

  IX

  They bought a house down in the valley, at the end of a long gravel drive and built against the base of the mountain. It looked like a great white ship, one that was about to be swallowed, doomed even, by the green wave swelling behind it.

  The first thing Hannah noticed when she saw it was the flowers. So thick she suspected they were more than an ornament. They were a disguise, for age or rot. Hydrangeas, up to her waist, stood shoulder to shoulder around the porch. Jasmine vines twisted messily around the railings, and window boxes overflowed with dizzy rainbows. It was a wild garden, and all of the things that make a home—the walls, the doors, the tire swing out back—seemed to rise by accident.

  “What a mess,” Daniel said.

  “It needs us,” Hannah whispered.

  It needed their marriage, their love. All the babies they would surely fill it with. It needed them to take it from the sadness of neglect and make it what it was supposed to be. A home. A restored historical mansion.

  Daniel bought it for her, even though Mother warned it might be too big, too much work for one woman to manage. The first thing Daniel did was hire a crew to renovate one wing of the house into a workroom for Hannah. She kept up with her art, but there were other things to keep her busy, too. She had her own nest now, and there were weeds to pull, old floors to strip, varnish, and wax. So many errands to run. She spent her afternoons practicing to get her license, driving up and down the long gravel drive.

  They agreed to wait a year before starting a family. And as their first anniversary approached, the expectation of it, the significance of it, was heavy on both their minds. Daniel started reviewing his investments. He increased his life insurance policy. Hannah scrubbed and scrubbed their home, and wished she had paid more attention to Mother’s knitting lessons.

  But on the night of their celebration, Daniel knew they would be okay. He had planned well for them. And Hannah knew that floors would always get dirty again, and that clothes could be bought as well as made.

  Their love that night had new meaning. It was more than pleasure. It was creation itself. A promise between them. To fill the rooms in that great empty house. To multiply their love until it surrounded them in the form of little round faces, tricycles, and dimpled knees.

  Of course it was supposed to happen at once. That was the way it happened before. Just once. But the month passed by. Then two more. Hannah mentioned it to Mother, who reacted calmly. “It took me over twenty years to conceive you. Who are we to rush God’s time?”

  So Hannah waited. And waited. And then still waited. She prayed Please and begged Soon and promised I’ll do anything. Daniel tried to ease her worry. He’d run his hand over the skin of her stomach. “Cheer up, our baby might already be on its way.”

  But a year and a half passed, and Hannah was not pregnant. She made a doctor’s appointment. Her first exam since the one in the hotel.

  “What happened to you?” the doctor asked after the exam.

  “What?”

  “You must have had one of the worst cases of infection I’ve ever seen. Was the placenta left inside you? I don’t see how you escaped death.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Hannah whispered.

  “Look, you don’t have to tell me,” the doctor said kindly, as he laid his hand on her shoulder. “But whatever happened to you has left your reproductive organs terribly scarred. I’m afraid, my dear, you need to explore other options.”

  “What?” Hannah whispered.

  “Adoption. Surrogacy.”

  “What are you saying?” Hannah choked.

  “You will never conceive.”

  The doctor saw the look on Hannah’s face and called for the nurse. “Bring a Valium!”

  Hannah left the doctor’s office and drove straight up the mountain. She collapsed in Mother’s arms. “It’s because we sent her away,” she cried. “How could I deserve a new one? We sent her away.”

  Daniel found her that night. He held her as she told him pieces of the truth. She had been sick long ago. It had scarred her organs. She would never conceive. She cried Sorry all through the night.

  Each time he answered her. Each time he said the same thing. “You’re enough for me.” And though she wanted to with all her heart, Hannah could not whisper back the same thing.

  They began their life together as a childless couple. Just as he promised early in their marriage, Daniel stayed strong. He fought against that desperate sadness that threatened to swallow his wife. He found ways to be close to her, to watch over her. He fired his secretary. Begged Hannah to “rescue” him by helping him out at work. He let her answer phones, type up notes. He took her shopping on his lunch break.

  He rented a new booth at the artisan’s fair. After their engagement, she had stopped taking orders and stopped attending the fair. But he took her back, watched over her as customers swarmed her again. He went to the workroom with her late at night. Stayed up with her as she worked with a fury, throwing paint across the mud.

  But in spite of his efforts, something was missing from Hannah. From their marriage. Before, there had always been the hope between them. The inevitable promise. The discussions that began with the words, When our baby comes…

  With hope gone, new introductions were needed. Hannah stared at their great big house and no longer felt excited to own such a perfect nest. Instead she wondered, Who really owned who? Entire rooms remained unfurnished. And despite the parties Daniel began throwing, the crowds and wine and music he filled their home with, it seemed more empty every day.

  They kept to certain corners. The workroom when Hannah needed to escape. The bedroom for sleeping and love. The kitchen and breakfast room for food. The small den off the breakfast for lounging. But there were no sleeping babies to carry to the dozen other rooms. No toy-filled Christmas mornings to need the great room for. Even her art brought Hannah little pleasure. It hurt her to think that she could create anything except a child with Daniel. Winded from so many years of wanting, Hannah decided she had only pretended to have found a home.

  Home. When she thought about that word now, and all the ways that she had failed Daniel, one memory always surfaced. She was seventeen years old, just a baby herself, laying inside a shack on the marsh. Her baby was with her, though. Welcome home, she wished that she had whispered.

  Late one Friday night, it happened. It started when the phone rang.

  “This the Phillips residence?” a man asked.

  “Yes,” Hannah said.

  “Don’t know how these things are done.”

  “If you have a legal emergency, then call the af
ter-hours number of Brooks, Goodman and Phillips. My husband isn’t on call this weekend, but somebody will get you in touch with an attorney.”

  “Don’t need a lawyer.”

  Hannah waited.

  “There’s a baby. Heard through friends you can’t have any. Thought you might want it.”

  Lightning. That was what Hannah felt. She remembered a storm back on James Island when she was pregnant. She was craving honeydew and had walked down to the market when the clouds turned dark. Everyone ran to their cars. Hannah ran, too, her hips aching with new weight, one arm across her heavy breasts. In one second, she was soaked. Lightning blinked and someone behind her screamed. She dropped the fruit, forgot about her painful breasts, and ran faster. Until a flash of white heat, as bright and painful as any vision could be, stretched the length of the sky and ended at her muddy toes. She stopped. Rubbed her eyes and looked at the new glowing, blurry world around her. She crouched low, near the mud and water, felt the relief of her hips and turned to look for the lost fruit. God was going to kill her for her sin. Or not. She might as well taste the honey.

  “Whose?” Hannah whispered into the phone, looking around her at the new glowing, blurry world.

  “My fifteen-year-old baby girl’s,” he sobbed.

  Hannah sucked in her breath as Daniel’s hand grabbed her shoulder. She sank to the floor, whispering promises.

  It was clear that Daniel did not approve. And she knew why, though he’d never admit it. It was because of the weeks after the doctor. The weeks she spent in bed and wouldn’t move. The weeks she begged him to leave her. To find another woman that could give him children. He had asked her to consider adoption during those dark weeks. “There’s still a way,” he had begged her. “Lots of little babies out there that need us.” But she would always shake her head. “No, there’s a reason, Daniel. A reason I’m not supposed to have a baby.”

  “I thought you weren’t interested in adoption?” Daniel asked her. “You seemed so set against it, but now…”