As Luke and I gingerly step behind the crunch, crunch, crunch of Santa’s work boots, at least one of us wonders about the sanity of someone who chooses to work at a cemetery. As he moves, Santa mutters under his breath about Jo Lane’s funeral.
“Sad turnout, that one. Only just the man and the priest. Poor woman.”
Blameless, I’m guilty just the same.
I’m preoccupied by the eeriness of the passing graves, now that it’s officially dark outside. Low-hanging trees make it even darker. It feels like the dead of night, even though it’s barely six thirty.
Abruptly, the caretaker stops moving, and Luke grabs my waist to keep me from running into the old man.
“Here she is, two hundred thirty-seven,” Santa says, gesturing to the simple rectangular granite grave marker at his feet. I can’t help but think that he’s standing on my grandmother.
“Thank you,” I whisper, edging closer to the stone.
“No trouble,” Santa says, turning back toward the shed. “Take your time; I’ll close up when you leave.”
I hear his boots crunch away as my eyes lock on the piece of stone like it’s going to grow a mouth and tell me all the answers.
WIFE, MOTHER, GRANDMOTHER, FRIEND
JOSEPHINE LONDON LANE
JULY 10, 1936—DECEMBER 10, 2009
Tears sting my eyes for a woman I never knew. My namesake, apparently. Luke wraps his arm around my shoulders and pulls me close to his chest.
“You okay?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I answer truthfully. I feel like I’m outside the scene, watching it unfold instead of living it.
We stand there a short while, and when it feels right, I take a step back.
“Let’s go,” I say to Luke.
He quietly leads me back the way we came, through the graves and toward the caretaker’s shed. It’s impossible for me not to picture the darkness: I can see the younger, handsome, and seemingly out of place groundskeeper smoking now, consoling me from afar. In my memory, I’m looking at him from the direction we’re now facing. In my memory, I am standing way over…
My heart leaps and my feet stop as I see it: the green stone angel who cries that day in the future.
Luke turns to face me and asks what’s wrong. Instead of answering, I take off running.
“London?” Luke calls after me.
I hear him running, too; I’m reassured by the heavy thud of his steps in my wake. At least if I hit a tree or encounter a ghost, he’ll find me quickly.
My North Star in the expanse of graves, the crying angel stands tall above her silent neighbors, keeping watch in the night.
As I approach, the butterflies in my stomach breed and multiply in fast-forward. My side aches from sprinting, and vomit threatens to rise in my throat. I don’t know if it’s the exertion or the anticipation that’s making me feel sick, but I swallow hard to keep it at bay.
Soon enough, I am at the angel’s base. Instead of lingering, I turn in the direction I remember, facing the location of the funeral in my mind.
Instead of the nothing I expect—the vacant plot waiting for the helpless being, the child—there is something.
Slowly, trying to catch my breath, I creep toward it, my mind clicking and spinning and working on the problem it can’t seem to sort out. Until there it is.
The answer.
I find myself standing in the exact spot as in my dark memory, facing not a freshly dug hole but a tasteful, polished headstone surrounded by mature plantings. Light from the street lamp outside the iron fence bounces just right; I can read the ornate lettering plain as day.
I swallow back bile as Luke stomps up next to me. At least I think it’s Luke. I don’t turn to check.
“I lost you back there for a second,” his familiar voice pants as he catches his breath.
Staring, I’m not sure whether I’m still breathing at all.
I stand motionless, eyes locked on the letters. Out of my peripheral vision, I see Luke read them, too, then glance up toward the groundskeeper’s shack in the distance and to the green angel to the left.
“Wait, is this…” His voice trails off midquestion, and, finally, he joins me in the realization. “Whoa,” is all my boyfriend says, before taking my hand and staring right along with me.
When the groundskeeper approaches and scolds us for running through the cemetery and disturbing the peace, I turn to realize that it is him.
He’s older now, fatter and bearded, but were he smiling in sympathy instead of scowling and annoyed, he would look the same. I can see now what I couldn’t see before: I can see him beneath the years.
Luke and I grudgingly agree to leave, but not before I take one last long, hard look at the engraving that will derail my life forever.
SWEET BABY BOY
JONAS DYLAN LANE
NOVEMBER 7, 1998—MAY 8, 2001
34
It punches me in the gut once more, just like the first time I read it and the time after that.
The funeral was in the past.
The past.
And I remember it.
I was so focused on the who that I completely missed the when.
Walking toward the cemetery gates, my head spins so much it aches. Inside the van, Luke cranks the heat and we begin to defrost as we drive in silence toward my house. I am paralyzed by emotion. Not until we exit the freeway and turn left into my development does Luke speak.
“You have to talk to your mom,” he says.
I watch the houses that I remember from tomorrow go by and wonder whether a part of me remembers them from yesterday, too. All the rules to my world are being challenged with this one discovery. The simplicity of knowing what’s coming isn’t so simple after all.
I find myself wanting to call Jamie. Wishing I could. I shake off the thought and watch the houses some more.
As Luke pulls into my driveway, the porch light blinks on. I glance at the dashboard clock and realize that it’s nearly eight o’clock, which is not so strange, except that I left before eleven this morning and haven’t called since.
“She must be worried.” Luke says what I’m thinking.
“She should be,” I say.
“Go easy on her.”
“I’ll try,” I reply weakly before I slide out of the van and head inside to confront my mother and discover the truth about my missing memories.
35
“Who was Jonas?” I ask again, somehow guessing the answer but needing confirmation.
My mother’s eyes share a mixture of shock and sorrow that makes me want to look away.
But I don’t.
“Who was he, Mom?” I ask a third time, softer now.
“How do you know…” She looks down at her hands. I stay still, watching her realize that how doesn’t matter.
Mom lifts her gaze once more, but though her head is high now, her posture has cracked.
“Jonas was your brother,” she says in a near whisper.
I am silent, unable to ask her to go on, but she does anyway.
“He died.”
“I know. I was at the cemetery. I saw his tombstone.”
“Why…” She stops herself. “Well, that part doesn’t matter.”
“I’ll tell you how I ended up there after you tell me what happened to my brother,” I say, a tear racing down my cheek, “and why you lied about him. Lied about me.”
“Oh, London, I didn’t lie. I kept a very sad truth from you. I thought…”
“What, that I should be blissfully stupid my whole life?”
“That I could save you the pain,” Mom says, touching her hand to her cheek in anticipation of tears to come. I can see that I’ve exposed an old wound. A very deep, painful one.
“Something terrible happened to him a long time ago,” Mom begins, glancing at me every so often but mostly watching the patterns in the carpet, as if they’re feeding her lines. “Your brother was taken. And killed.”
I inhale sharply. “Who did
it?”
“We never knew.”
My mother’s shoulders are heaving now, and I’m the parent for a moment as I walk over to the couch and hold her in my arms. She cries on my shoulder for a brother I can’t remember.
I want to know more, but I can see that talking about it is devastating to her.
When she composes herself, she pulls back, hands on my shoulders.
“I wasn’t trying to deceive you, London, you have to know that,” she says, looking right into me. “You lost your memory of the past, and I saw that as the one bright spot in all the darkness. You wouldn’t have to know the pain of loss. I could protect you from it. That’s what I’ve tried to do all these years.”
When she says it like that, though I may not agree, I can understand. A little.
I break free from my mother’s grasp and move to one of the cushiony chairs opposite the TV. I fold my legs up under me, even though I’m still wearing the shoes that carried me through the cemetery.
The notes told me that my mom has been keeping secrets, but I’ve been keeping them, too. It’s time to come clean.
To ask for help.
“Mom?”
“Yes, sweetie?”
“I want to know all about Jonas. I know it’s hard for you, but I want you to tell me everything. It’s important.”
I grab the tops of my shoes and pull my feet closer to my body.
“I know it is, London. I know you want to understand your life.”
Taking a deep breath, I look into my mom’s dark eyes. For the first time, I understand the tinge of anguish that will always be there, even during happy occasions.
I don’t remember him. I don’t remember anything. But she remembers all of it.
“Mom, it’s more than wanting to understand. I think I need to hear about him. I think it might help me.”
“What do you mean?” she asks, confused.
Finally, I share with my mom what’s been building, what I know from notes that I’ve kept from the one person I should have opened up to long ago.
“I want you to tell me everything, because I think it might help me remember my past,” I say.
My mother sighs and rubs her eyes.
“London, you’ve been to doctors who have tried to jog your memory. I even took you to a hypnotist once. Why do you think that my telling you the story of your brother’s death will change things now?”
And here it is: the moment of truth. I check the clock on the wall for no particular reason. Then I shift in my seat, and pull myself tighter into a knot. I take a deep breath, and, finally, I tell my mother what she needs to hear.
“Mom, I remember Jonas’s funeral.”
Written 2/19; include in notes every night.
This morning I woke up remembering a memory I’m sure will stay with me forever. It’s a funeral… it was my brother Jonas’s. It’s the one past memory I have.
Mom kept it from me for years. She wanted to protect me. It’s hard not to be mad at her, but I try not to be. She didn’t think I needed the pain on top of the stress of the memory thing. She has to live with it every day and didn’t want me to have to, too.
Mom wasn’t there when it happened but told me the story. Jonas and I were with Dad. I was six and Jonas was two. We were at the grocery store and Dad went over to get a cart. He left us in the car alone for two minutes. He just walked across the parking lot, and when he came back, Jonas was gone.
I guess Dad told Mom I was screaming about a van and pointing at one leaving the parking lot, so Dad jumped in the car and chased it. She said it’s all he could do. But after a couple of blocks, the van made a light that turned red as Dad and I approached. He tried to floor it. There was an accident. Mom says our car was demolished; I was hurt pretty badly. I was in a coma, and early one morning, at 4:33 a.m., I died. Obviously, they brought me back, but Mom thinks that’s why my brain resets then.
After that, apparently my normal memory was gone. I didn’t remember the accident. I didn’t remember Jonas.
Mom kicked Dad out. She blamed him for losing Jonas and seriously hurting me. He probably blamed himself, too.
I asked Mom about the birthday cards from Dad in the manila folder in the desk drawer. I found them in her closet last fall. She was a little mad about the snooping, but she said that Dad tried to get in touch three times, but each time she told him to leave us alone. She explained that she was very bitter then. She just seems sad now. Maybe Mom and Dad should talk. I might need to talk to Dad, too.
Two years after he was kidnapped, police found a few of Jonas’s bones and his clothes in the mountains west of town. We buried him then. That’s the funeral I remember.
I’m writing this down so I can leave it for myself every night. I know it will be hard to read each morning, but it’s important. I owe it to Jonas.
I owe it to my brother to remember him.
36
By all accounts, it’s a beautiful April morning.
Tomorrow is Monday, so today is the weekend.
I sit on a swivel chair at the glass-top table on the patio, drinking a latte that my mom made unprompted. The sun is up on the other side of the house, so I sit in the shade with a light breeze rustling my unkempt hair.
I’m still wearing pajamas—a supersoft T-shirt and lightweight drawstring shorts—with fuzzy fleece slippers that I don’t remember breaking in on my feet.
I’ve just finished a delicious toasted bagel with cream cheese, and I’ve just read through a pile of notes about a megawonderful boy named Luke. Apparently I’ve been dating him for almost six months. It’s too nice a day to dwell on the fact that I don’t seem to remember him, backward or forward.
I sigh, in the manner of Snow White before the whole apple thing, and pick up the other letter that was left on the nightstand this morning. It is weathered and smudged, and I can’t help but wonder how many mornings I’ve read the words before me now.
Sighing again, I shake my hair out of my face, take a slow sip of latte, and smooth the page. The words hit me like a sledgehammer.
Tears upon tears splat onto the lined pages in my hands as I discover a nightmare come true. Quickly, I wipe away the salt water so it won’t fade the ink. Because even as my chest caves in and makes me hate the chipper birds and everything else, I know that I needed to read this today, and I need to read it again tomorrow.
For me, reading is remembering.
37
“Does it ever get easier?” I ask my mom before I open the door to the Prius. We are sitting in the drop-off area at school. My eyes are red and puffy.
“I don’t know, London,” my mom says softly, placing a hand on mine. “For me, time lessens the pain. I don’t know how it will be for you. It’s new to you every day.”
My mother looks tormented as she says this. I don’t answer. She hesitates like she wants to say something, like she’s debating with herself. The side that wants to speak wins.
“Sweetie, I think you should consider getting rid of that letter,” she says carefully.
“No.”
“London, think about it. Jonas wouldn’t want you to be so hurt on his behalf every morning. He wouldn’t want you to grieve for him anew each day.”
“How do you know? He was a baby.”
“A happy baby! A baby who giggled constantly and made you laugh and was your biggest fan. I’ll show you the videos again, if you’d like.”
“There are videos?”
“Of course, London,” Mom says quietly. “Anyway, the point is that I know his little soul wouldn’t want his big sister to be so miserable.”
I unbuckle my seat belt and open the door, ready to go inside.
“I feel like I owe it to him,” I say quietly. “To remember him today and every other day.” I’m quoting myself from the note I read this morning, but it’s how I feel.
My mother sighs deeply. A car beeps behind us and I know I need to get out. I know I need to go have my normal day at school.
My mom glares at the impatient parent in the car behind us, then looks back at me. Her hand is still on mine.
“Why, London?” she asks. “Why do you owe it to him?”
I pull back my hand and open the car door. With one foot out on the pavement, school bag in hand, I say to my mother, “Because I’m alive and he’s not.”
* * *
“Ms. Lane? Uh, Ms. Lane? Excuse me? London Lane, are you in there?”
I look up to find two rows of gawking students and a slightly agitated Mr. Hoffman staring at me expectantly.
I completely missed the question, but after a quick glance at the board, I know what he asked.
“F prime,” I mutter, thankful that I managed to remember the benign parts of this morning’s briefing in addition to those very, very cancerous ones that were distracting me in the first place.
“Very good, Ms. Lane. Feel free to zone out again,” Mr. Hoffman says, with a wink that tries too hard to be cool.
Poor Mr. Hoffman. He will never succeed.
A girl with poodle hair in front of me leans back so far in her creaky, overused chair that her locks rest on the pages of my open notebook. The tangled tresses obscure nothing, since I’ve taken no notes. My blank notepad and mechanical pencil are props, like the backpack in the basket below my seat and, quite frankly, the schoolbooks inside of it.
I brush her hair off my paper anyway, and she twists around with a stern look on her face. She combs her fingers through her hair as the bell rings.
I gather my things and head toward the door of the classroom, then merge into the swarm of students buzzing from this class to that one.
When I make it to my locker, I see Jamie across the hallway, standing on her own. I adjust the metal door so I can see her reflection in the mirror.
Jamie shuffles a few books around, then sets her bag on the floor and grabs a lip gloss off the top shelf. After carefully applying it, she hoists her bag on her shoulder and slams her locker shut.