The Memory Thief

by Rachel Keener

  But it wasn’t five minutes before I opened it again, even though I felt guilty. Even though I knew I was breaking the most basic rule of Black Snake trailer: Don’t take too much. It was something I’d remind myself whenever I came across Momma passed out. Her mouth would be open. She’d be snoring. Sometimes spit or vomit would be pooled beside her. I’d pull that bottle out of her hand and pour a bit into my empty coke bottle. But always just a bit. Never enough for her to notice. It’s not that she would have cared that I was drinking. That I was an eleven-year-old drunk. I was a careful whiskey thief simply because more than anything else, more than anything I could ever steal, whiskey was Momma’s favorite prize.

  I found an old tray of food from the day before. Ate the cold chicken and potatoes. Ate the little cup of banana pudding. Never once did I gag. Never once did my mouth go dry and close up with a craving for something that burned. I fell asleep in bed, clutching the bottle tightly to my chest like a best baby doll. Like a green baby blanket.

  I woke up the next afternoon. Realized the vomit was still in my bed. I stripped the sheets off and went to inspect the tray that had been pushed inside sometime that morning. I ate the eggs and biscuits. Poured a bit of whiskey into the coffee. And spent the next few hours wishing the old woman would return. So I could lie and say, “You were right. I’m strong like never before.”

  I was happy when it turned dark outside and gave me an excuse to go to bed. I wrapped myself in that quilt and finished that first bottle of whiskey. I let each sip sit on my tongue until my eyes watered with the burn. I adjusted my pillow but it still didn’t feel right. It was too big. Too comforting for what I was used to. I pounded my fists to try and make it smaller. I covered half of it and pretended the other half was being used by someone else. Janie. Sometimes, back at Black Snake trailer, I’d wake up and her long dark hair would be all tangled up with mine. There’d be a soft little nest of white and black swirled in between us as we slept.

  When I was really young, and before the farmhands found her, she used to whisper stories in the dark when we couldn’t sleep. She never made them up, they were always almost real. About our day, about our life. Only they sounded better, prettier somehow, with the words she chose.

  “Once upon a time,” she whispered in the dark one night, “there was two sisters named Janie and Angel. They followed tractors through the fields, watched magic seeds dropped down into rows. Them seeds started to grow. Taller and taller, till they made a big green castle in the fields. It was a magic place. Only princesses were allowed.”

  I’d giggle, and she’d hush me so I wouldn’t wake Momma and Daddy. And then she’d ask me to tell her a bedtime story, too. I’d always repeat something that I’d heard at school, something read during storytime.

  “Not Snow White,” she’d complain. “Make it ’bout us.”

  But I couldn’t pretend the way she could. I couldn’t find the right words, the pretty ones, that bedtime stories deserved.

  That all changed that night I was locked away in Red Castle. I rested on a half-hidden pillow and sipped whiskey. I turned in the bed, until my body was the perfect angle to keep a mattress, one held up with cinder blocks, from sagging low.

  “Once upon a time,” I whispered to the darkness, “I had a princess sister. She handed me a brown bottle. A magic one. It was my first thick blanket. It was a full belly and peaceful sleep. It became the Hush baby, things’ll be awright that I needed to hear. It was my childhood lullaby. One I can’t outgrow. It sounds like bacca leaves wavin’ in the wind. Like Tennessee stars, singin’.”

  IX

  I walked over to the stage in front of the bed. I wore my black bra and panties. My long white hair was teased into a crown. I twirled around to show myself off. Nearly spilled the bottle in my hand.

  I looked down at my body. Ignored the ribs rising higher than my breasts. Ignored the hip bones that jutted out as I swayed back and forth. I pinched my face until I was sure color returned. I smiled and hoped my cheekbones didn’t cut through any happiness. Didn’t make me look hungry or sick.

  I arched my back the way Momma always did. Men appeared all around me. They were eating biscuits, drinking beer, and aiming their shotguns at my hips. I took a long sip of whiskey, took a deep breath, and danced. Whoo-eee, they yelled, as they clapped.

  I twirled around the bed. Tossed my long white hair over my shoulders. “It’s why they call me Angel,” I lied. My brown bottle was empty. I threw it across the room and laughed as it hit the wall and shattered.

  “More!” the men yelled. I nodded as I opened my last bottle. After all my years of trying, I was Momma leaned so sexy against a green car. I was Janie, dancing in a shed and smelling like dead flowers.

  Boom! Boom!

  I turned to the noise. Fell as I walked toward it. Hit my head on something and tasted blood in my mouth.

  Boom! Boom!

  It was coming from my door.

  “Angel?” someone yelled.

  I crawled back to my stage but couldn’t find my bottle. Someone had stolen it. I looked at the men in the crowd. Their mouths full of biscuit crumbs. I looked at the slot in the door and wondered if old hands had somehow reached through.

  “Which one of you took my whiskey?” I yelled. My head hurt. I brought my hand to my face and felt wet blood. I remembered Momma’s face, twisted, ugly, and yelling for whiskey. “Tell me who took my damn whiskey!” I reached for the dirty dishes that were stacked on a tray in the corner of the room. I picked them up and threw them at the men, at the slot in the door. I smiled at that old familiar sound. Of something breaking. Of something being ruined forever.

  There was knocking again. Someone yelled for me to go to bed. I ignored it as I searched for my whiskey. I looked under the bed. In the shower. Behind the dresser.

  “More!” the men yelled.

  I looked in my bag. Under the covers. I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t hear anything but the boom on the door and the shout of the men all around me. I picked up the tray and threw it against the wall.

  I curled up on the floor and sobbed, “More.” Cried “Whiskey” until my body trembled. The heat swarmed over me again. Like the Tennessee sun rose in the middle of that room. I tried to open the window to cool off the room. But I couldn’t push the lock. I yelled for the men to open my window. To give me whiskey.

  When they didn’t come, I turned toward them, furious. But they were gone. I was alone, surrounded by piles of broken dishes. By the blood that dripped across the floor. By that lace bed, covered in vomit.

  I ran back to the window and leaned hard against it. I stared at the stars outside and pretended to know them. Pretended to name them. But just as I started to draw your picture with sloppy drunk hands, something else caught my eye. Blue. There in the window, just a slight tint of the glass. I remembered the antique and hardware store in Tennessee. The shelves of blue mason jars. How I had picked one up, held it toward the light so I could look through it at a new blue world.

  “Careful,” the old man working the front called out. “That’s older than your great grandpap, I bet.”

  “Sorry,” I said, as I set the jar back down.

  “Don’t worry ’bout it. You like ’em?”

  I nodded.

  “Most people pass ’em by. There are so many fakes out there now. Prettier than these real ones, too. People don’t care so much for what’s real as for what’s pretty these days.”

  “Why are they blue?”

  “Keeps the bad out,” he said, as he shrugged his shoulders. “Ever seen a woman can food?”

  I shook my head.

  “Take the lid off. See that old seal? Most of it’s rotted by now, but that jar wasn’t made to toss loose change in, be stuffed with smell-good cinnamon sticks, or even sit on the shelf in this antique store. Long ago, before these shoppin’ centers full of tin cans, a woman had to work hard to make her food last past its season. She had to work hard to keep it safe, stored inside jars. There w
as one thing, though, that was easy enough. Start with blue. It keeps light and heat out of the jar. That stuff can make food rot so that it would kill a person.”

  “Blue keeps the bad out,” I whispered to the window inside Red Castle. I studied it. The clear pale blue. After a childhood lived out in green, it seemed to glow like a promise. Like sweet peace.

  “Blue’s keepin’ me from you,” I cried to the stars on the other side. “I’m too bad to git to you.”

  I backed up all the way to the wall on the other side of the room. I closed my eyes and ran. I ran as hard and fast as I could. Like a baby running into the bacca. Like a black snake running from the hoe aimed at its neck.

  I never stopped.

  BETHIE

  I

  It didn’t take much to remind Bethie of her sister. Sometimes it was something as small as a stack of T-shirts on a department store shelf. She’d stand and let her hand touch them softly. She’d hold one up over her own T-shirt and remember days on James Island, nearly eighteen years ago, filled with sweet sister secrets. She’d remember that though Hannah was buried away somewhere, she was still alive.

  But alive is not the same, or nearly as good, as together. Hannah was gone. Maybe forever. And all Bethie had of her were memories of T-shirts, and the promise of a redneck girl staying with Mother on the mountain. In Hannah’s old room.

  And then one day, Dr. Susan Vaughn called to invite Bethie for a visit. She said yes before the question was finished, and agreed to come the very next morning. As she drove to the hospital, she remembered the last moment she shared with Hannah. How dirty the jail cell had been. How incoherent Hannah was. Bethie tried to communicate with her. She resorted to old tricks and tried signing, hoping Hannah would grab onto those signs like the secret language of their youth. But Hannah only cried as she shook and mumbled broken sentences about sweet corn. And velvet corners. About the color blue.

  Bethie wondered as she left the jail feeling so helpless, if that was what her own mother felt that day on James Island when she had refused to talk. She drove from the jail straight to Daniel and Hannah’s home. She needed him to tell her it was going to be okay. He was an attorney, after all. She needed him to tell her that he could fix it.

  She found him sitting on the couch, his head in his hands.

  “Daniel,” she called from the open front door.

  He looked up at her and shook his head, clamped his hand over his mouth. She saw the strain in his face from holding back his grief. She went to him, put her arms around him, felt him sob against her shoulder. He pulled away and nodded toward the hall that led to Hannah’s workroom. “All her pottery,” he whispered hoarsely.

  Bethie followed him to the workroom door. It was the one place Hannah never fully left. Standing inside her workroom was almost the same as standing next to her. Hannah’s energy, her love, her mysterious sadness, all of it pounded down into the mud that lined the shelves.

  But that day, something was different. Orange dust was scattered across the room. Orange pebbles, orange rocks… orange shatters everywhere. Daniel walked in and picked up half of a loose rectangle.

  “This was my favorite piece,” he said. “She gave this to me the first time I visited her workroom, up on the mountain.”

  Bethie stared at the piece and remembered it well. It was the old cradle, the one Daniel carried away. It looked like it had exploded.

  Daniel sat down in the dust and wept. “It’s all ruined.” Bethie watched as he took a box from the closet in the hall. Picked up all the pieces from his favorite works and lay them gently inside the box. He carried them out, shut and locked the door to the workroom for good. Years of Hannah’s work, years of the art she and Daniel loved, lay broken on the other side.

  “Can you get her out of jail?” Bethie asked him. “We can help her, if you can just return her to us.”

  “She won’t even look at me,” Daniel said. “She’s lost somewhere, inside her own mind. She keeps mumbling nonsense. I tried over and over to get her to speak to me. But I don’t think she knew I was there. She didn’t even know I was there!”He shook his head, panic in his eyes. “How am I supposed to help her like that? How?”

  “I don’t know,” Bethie cried.

  And she still didn’t, even as she drove toward the asylum determined to somehow help. She checked the map and tried to shrug off the memory of Hannah’s first day in jail. It was a skill she had learned over time and polished on a daily basis. She’d take a deep breath, raise her shoulders, give her head a slight shake, and push the air forcefully out of pursed lips. With the air went her heavy thoughts.

  She replaced the thought with a sweeter one. About her own wedding day. Hannah helped her zip her dress. She adjusted the lace around her veil.

  “Remember that time I said I wanted to be a slanteye?” Hannah asked.

  Bethie laughed. “Yes.”

  “I meant it.” Hannah turned the mirror that stood by the closet toward her sister. “Look at you. You are so beautiful, Bethie.” The two sisters stood in front of a long oval mirror, one of them pale with glowing hair, the other golden with hair the color and gloss of wet ink. Bethie leaned her head against Hannah’s shoulder.

  “In a way you are,” Bethie said.

  Hannah laughed. “How?”

  “No one else on this entire earth knows as well as you what it’s been like to live in my skin.”

  A car honked its horn as it passed her. Bethie looked down, saw how slowly she was driving. She sped up and set the cruise control. She was only an hour away. She glanced in the rearview mirror, and had that pain of loneliness that she always felt when she saw the empty car seat. Little Corbin was home with his daddy for the day. They were probably digging in the backyard sandbox. Or maybe going to the pizza shop for lunch. She always thought it odd that she could spend all her days with that child, rock him to sleep every night, be driven to a frazzle by his constant wants and demands and tantrums, and then miss him when he wasn’t near. Miss him whenever she spotted his empty car seat. She reached her hand down to her tummy. Felt the firm rise beneath her waistband. It was too soon for the new baby to move, but already she was rubbing the skin of her belly with anticipation. Longing for the day she’d feel that first turn or swish. Longing for the day she’d feel something entirely new to this earth taking hold within her.

  It wasn’t that she romanticized babies. She knew firsthand the work, the total exhaustion, they brought with them when they entered the world. But she also knew, better than most, how important it all was. Life within her. The tending of that life. And the protecting.

  She hadn’t known how to dress for the visit with Hannah. The doctor advised subtle colors, and she wondered why. Hannah had never seemed sensitive to color before. But the doctor was very clear with her instructions. No Reds. No Purples. No Yellows or Oranges.

  One thing was for certain, Bethie didn’t want Hannah to know she was pregnant again. The day she told her about Corbin had been hard enough.

  “I’m pregnant.” They were at lunch with Mother, and Bethie surprised them all by blurting out her news. She had guessed, or hoped, that Hannah already knew. She was nearly six months along by that point. But Bethie would never forget the shatter that spread across Hannah’s face. Or the way Hannah’s teeth bit deeply into her bottom lip. Bethie saw blood.

  Mother saw it, too, and started talking fast. About redoing the wallpaper in the foyer. About installing a garbage disposal and all the plumbing challenges it presented. About plans for new tile. Everywhere. The bathrooms. The kitchen. The laundry room.

  “Hannah?” Bethie had whispered, tears welling up in her eyes. “I wanted you to know. You’re going to be an aunt. We’re going to have a baby in our family.”

  Hannah leaned over the table and vomited.

  Oh, how Bethie was angry that day. As Mother half-carried Hannah to the car. As they let the door fall back on her on their way out. She was the one having to waddle for all the pain and pressure that
was settled in her hips. She was the one having to heave herself into the car, the hot backseat no less, because Hannah felt nauseous. She sat back there, the window rolled down, and whispered hate to the mountain wind. Later she’d remember her words and blame them on hormones. How they make you say things you don’t mean. How they make you do things that embarrass you. But the truth was, she was sick of the game. That old family game that made everything,even her own blessed pregnancy, somehow all about Hannah.

  “No,” Bethie whispered, as she drove toward the asylum. She would not tell Hannah she was pregnant again. She would not tell Hannah that the baby’s heartbeat was much faster than Corbin’s had ever been. That Mother promised a fast heartbeat meant girl. That Mother sewed a lace gown, complete with the tiniest lace booties.

  If Hannah noticed that she’d gained weight, she’d laugh and say she never lost the baby weight from Corbin. But then Bethie winced and wondered bitterly whether it was safe to mention Corbin. She would always wonder if he had been the trigger. It had only been two weeks after Bethie announced her pregnancy that Hannah ended up in jail. When it first happened, when Bethie first learned what Hannah had done, she felt guilty. She felt a sharp sense of responsibility. Maybe her joy broke her sister down.

  The next thing she felt, though, was something more true than guilt. She lay in bed and felt Corbin swishing inside her like the magic bean he was. She started sobbing. Not because she was sad. Not because she felt guilty. But because in the end, it was right. It was right that Hannah was locked away. It was right that Hannah was in a dirty jail cell mumbling crazy words. She deserved it.

  Bethie started having nightmares. She mentioned them to her doctor. “It’s hormones,” the doctor assured her. “From a biological perspective, it’s just your body’s way of preparing you to be up all night feeding a little one.” She didn’t tell him what they were about. How she saw herself carrying her baby to the park. Or to the store or the library. She walked looking down on a sweet blanket filled with love. But when she looked up it was always the same. She was surrounded by thieving monster women. With reaching hands and guilty eyes. Women like her sister. Like her mother.