The Impossible Knife of Memory (19 page)

“Doesn’t matter. I’m getting on the first bus out of here.”

“What if it’s going to Poughkeepsie?” he asked. “Nobody in their right mind would go to Poughkeepsie.”
“Stop following me.”
“You’re following me,” he said. “I’m in front.”
“I’m not playing, Finn.”
“I know. That’s what’s scaring me.”
Just walk
.
“You’re going in the wrong direction, you know,” he said. “Unless you were going to walk twenty-five miles to the Schenectady station.”
“If you get your car, you could drive me.”
“If I go back to get my car, you’ll disappear.”
I kept my mouth shut, head down, and feet moving because he was right.
Five minutes. Ten
.
We left the last streetlight behind, but the road was lit by the stubborn moon. We passed an abandoned farm and walked through the smell of something dead and rotting in the weeds.
Without any warning, Finn suddenly tripped and went down hard.
I wanted to walk past him, over him if necessary, but the sound he made when he hit the ground, a soft “ow,” was so real that I almost felt it.
I stopped. “Break anything?”
He sat up. “Not sure.” He reached forward and felt his right ankle, then slowly flexed his foot, wincing a little.
I put out my hand and helped him up. He dusted off the back of his coat and took a few steps.
“Ankle’s okay, but I think I sprained my butt bone.” He walked a few paces and turned to look at me. “Let’s go.”
The Halloween wind that had blown us all over town hours earlier cut through me, slicing through my clothes, biting my skin, and breaking the fever that had been boiling in me ever since I opened the door and saw Trish at our table.
“Do you think we’ve crossed the border yet?” I asked.
“Canada is that way.” Finn pointed north. “A very long walk.”
“I meant the border to the next town.”
“Why?”
The moon chuckled. It did. I heard it.
“I wish they painted black lines on the ground to show you where the borders are, like on a map.” I wiped the tears off my face. “You know, like when you’re little in an airplane, and you look down and you expect to see fat lines on the ground dividing one state from the other?”
“The company that made the giant paintbrushes to do that went out of business,” Finn said quietly, stepping closer to me. “Sabotage, I think.”
I shivered. “Why are you doing this?”
He pulled a feather out of my hair and held it between us. “I have this thing for Sexy Big Birds.”
I tried to keep my face hard, my fists clenched, but a smile crept up. We kissed, gently at first, then harder. Hotter. We kissed in the moonlight in the middle of nowhere, our arms winding around each other like vines. For a moment, I didn’t feel lost.
“Are you hungry?” he finally asked.
“No.”
“Good.” He lifted my hand and kissed the knuckles. “Let me cook you breakfast. I’ll call Topher, tell him to stay away. We’ll eat and then I’ll take you to the bus station, Scout’s honor, whatever bus station you want.”
“You were never a Boy Scout.”
“Pancakes or waffles?”

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58
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Night vision goggles turn the dark into shades of green, Oz-like, but they can’t see everything. Thermal-imaging goggles show the heat signature of the hidden enemy. Kill him and you can watch the heat leave his body like a spirit reaching for the moon
.

I am a good soldier, a good officer. I believe in my country and my mission. I still believe in honor
, but s
and plugs my heart. It sifts through the holes in my brain. Some days I see the world in the green of night vision. Some days I see the heat
.

I blink and I forget why I walked in the room. I forget why I am driving on this road. The remembering takes up every breath until there is no room for today. I pour a drink, ten drinks, so I can forget that I have forgotten today. I smoke. Choke down pills. Pray. Eat. Sleep. Shit. Curse
.

Nothing chases away the sand or the memories engraved on the back side of my eyelids. They play on a continuous loop, with smells and sound and sorrow
.

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59
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Finn’s house was a narrow condo in the middle of a row of other condos lined up like slices of white bread in a plastic bag.

“You won’t believe how much they charge for this place,” he explained, unlocking the front door. “Mom’s moving as soon as I graduate.” He flipped on the lights as we walked in.

“You’re positive she’s won’t turn up?” I asked. “She hates driving at night, don’t worry.”
In the bathroom, I tried to repair the damage the tears

had done to my makeup. The past rushed in through the mirror

.  .  . Trish taking me on a city bus to get my library card, riding bikes under tall dark trees, baking lopsided birthday cupcakes,

. . . me wiping the tears off her face with a little-girl hand, her wrapping me in a blanket and carrying me to the car,
.  .  . running from the beast daddy who roared and threw bolts of lightning, her holding me tight . . .
I turned the light off.

Finn opened the refrigerator. “Milk, chocolate milk, orange juice, or the red diet stuff my mom likes? Or I could make hot chocolate.”

“Vodka.”

“Milk, chocolate milk, orange juice, red stuff, hot chocolate,” he repeated. “Or tea.”
“I’ll buy vodka off a homeless guy outside the bus station.”
He sighed, took the orange juice out of the fridge and a vodka bottle out of the cupboard above it. He set them both in front of me, with a scratched plastic cup. I unscrewed the vodka cap and poured a couple inches.
“Aren’t you having any?” I asked.
“Chocolate milk is my drug of choice.”
I looked him in the eye, squinted, and looked closer, under the bright light. “Are you wearing eyeliner?”
“Took you long enough to notice,” he said. “Like it?”
“Yeah.” I chuckled. “Kinda hot. But no mascara, okay? I can’t be seen with a dude whose lashes are longer than mine.”
He stared at the plastic cup, then kissed the end of my nose. “Are we really talking about this?”
“No.” My gut made a decision for me and before I realized it, I had poured the vodka back in the bottle and filled my glass with juice. “Definitely not.”
As Finn cooked the bacon and pancakes, he tried to keep me distracted by chattering about his years as an apprentice chef at an emir’s palace in the middle of the Sahara Desert. It didn’t work. Worries boiled up, wrapped in a twisting gray ribbon of panic.
What was Trish’s plan?
She always had one, always stayed four or five steps ahead of everyone around her, especially my father. Was she after his disability check? She probably thought it was huge. Was she going to make him to fall in love with her again, let her move in? Get on his life insurance and then help him kill himself?
“Hey!” Finn snapped his finger in front of my face. “You need to eat.” He set down a steaming plate of pancakes in front of me, a smiley face of butter melting on top.
“Cute.”
“And bacon,” he set down a separate plate of crispy bacon strips, “and real maple syrup.” He poured dark syrup from a leaf-shaped glass bottle.
“Is that all you have?” I asked.
“My people come from New Hampshire; we only eat the real thing.”
“Your last name is Ramos.”
“There are Hispanics in New England, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean . . .”
He grinned and raised a hand. “No worries. It gives me permission to say stereotypical things about white girls.”
“Great,” I said. “What about your mom’s family? Do I dare ask?”
“WASPs from Conway.”
“Where people like funny-looking maple syrup.”
“Which you are now going to try.” He speared a forkful of pancake and swished it in syrup. “Open up.”
“Forget it. I only like the cheap stuff they make out of corn syrup.”
“You’ll stand on the edge of a cliff, but you’re too chicken to try the best maple syrup in the world?”
He was being a pain to cheer me up and it was starting to work, even without the vodka. “Maybe you’re trying to poison me.”
“Wuss.”
“Now you’re picking a fight.” I dipped my pinky finger in his syrup and lightly touched it to the tip of my tongue. “People pay money for this?” (After putting up such a fuss I could hardly admit that it tasted amazing.)
“It’s boiled-down sap, totally natural,” he said. “No chemicals or preservatives.”
“It’s tree blood. That makes you a tree-sucking vampire. I bet you have splinters in your lips.”
“Maybe you should check,” he suggested, swooping in for a bite.
The doorbell rang.
“We’re ignoring that,” he murmured.
“All trick-or-treaters should be in bed,” I said.
But it kept ringing, and then came the heavy pounding. Finn cursed and sat back, his shoulders slumping.
“Damn,” he said. “I forgot to call them.”

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60
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Gracie tripped over the threshold. Topher trailed behind her with a stupid grin on his face. Both of them were redeyed and buzzed.

“Did you drive?” Finn asked.
“Got a ride,” Topher said. “We escaped just in time.” “So many police cars,” Gracie said with a giggle. “Police?” Finn opened the door again to check. “They busted the party at the quarry.” Topher grinned

like a ten-year-old. “We ran. They didn’t see us.” “We flew,” Gracie said, eyes wide. She pointed at Finn. “We
have to sleep here tonight. In fact, we’re moving in. We’ll be
hippies and have a commune and raise chickens. And goats.” Topher put his arm around her. “Sorry, dude,” he said.
“She’s a little messed up.”
“You two,” Gracie’s swayed her finger back and forth
between Finn and me, “are good. Friends.”
“I made pancakes,” Finn said.
“Dude!” Topher let go of Gracie and headed for the
kitchen.
“Hurry up,” Gracie called after him. “I want to talk to
dead people.”
Finn looked at me. “What did she just say?”

By the time we finished eating, Gracie had somehow convinced Finn to take the big mirror off the wall of his mom’s bedroom and set it on the floor of the family room with a fat red candle in the middle of it.

Gracie curled up under an afghan on the couch, her head on Topher’s lap, her fogged eyes losing the fight to stay open. Topher tilted his head back and fell asleep, too. I thought about dragging the two of them outside and letting them sleep under the bushes, but that could create massive deposits of bad karma for me and I needed all the help I could get in that department. By the time Finn came in from the kitchen with the rest of the bacon and a small bowl of maple syrup, the two of them were snoring, Gracie’s soft alto alternating with Topher’s bass.

“Turn off the lights,” I said.

Finn muttered something I didn’t catch, but shut the lights off and groped his way back in the dark. He sat across from me, the mirror between us.

“Now what?” he asked.
“Haven’t you ever done this?” I wrapped my shawl of feathers around me to shield me from thoughts of Trish and my father. “The veil between the worlds is thinnest on Halloween night. We’re supposed to be able to see dead people in the mirror.”
Finn crunched a piece of bacon. “My mom would never buy a mirror that had dead people in it.”
“You can be an old fart sometimes.” I leaned forward and lit the candle, holding my shawl away from the flame.
He pointed at the mirror’s surface. “See? You and me, very much alive.”
“Take off your glasses,” I said. “Let your eyes go out of focus.”
“If I take my glasses off, my eyes go out of focus automatically.”
I snorted. “Just do it, okay?”
Finn removed his glasses. “All right,” he said. “Bring on the dead. They better not like bacon.”
I took a deep breath, half closed my eyes, and let them go blurry until I could only see shapes. Oval silver mirror. Square red candle. Circles and then crescents of flame colored blue, yellow, white, and then gray until it faded into the lanky Finn-shaped shadow that melted into the darkness.
Time stretched itself like a cat waking from a long nap, luxurious and patient. I took a deep breath, held it while I counted to seven, and let it go. The candle flame jumped. I tried to lose myself in the light rippling across the face of the mirror. Another deep breath,
hold it.
 . . .
An owl hooted a long, eerie call.
Hooo-hooo-hoo-hoo!
“Whoa,” Finn said.
I put my finger to my lips. “Shh.”
The owl hooted a second time, much closer, and then a third time, so loud it seemed like the bird was about to shatter the window and fly into the room. A shadow crept into the mirror, a vague shape trying to take form. I was afraid to look at it directly, afraid that if I did, it would vanish. I wasn’t cold, but I shivered again, my feathers shaking.
Finn broke the spell. “This is creepy.”
My eyes snapped back into focus. “You ruined it. Someone was trying to get into the mirror.”
The owl hooted again, much fainter, like she was flying away.
“Sorry,” he said after a moment.
I didn’t answer.
“Think it was it Rebecca?” he asked. “Your mom?”
I stared at him through the waving, watery candlelight. “How do you know her name?”
He pointed at Gracie.
“Did she tell you anything else?”
“No.” He unfolded his legs and lay on his side, his arm propped up on his hand. “Just that she died when you were little.”
I waited, hoping the owl would come back.
“Tell me something about her,” he said.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something fun. Something you never told anyone else.”
I pulled a long feather out of my shawl, slowly thinking over the tiny handful of things I knew about my mother.
“True story about Rebecca,” I said. “She jumped out of an airplane when she was pregnant with me. She didn’t know she was pregnant, of course. Teaching people how to parachute was her job. She had to give it up when she realized I was on board, too.”
I dipped the tip of the feather in a pool of melted wax and dragged a shiny thread of it across the mirror. “I swear I can remember that jump. That’s impossible, right? But I do: the falling, the rush of air, the jerk of the parachute, and then the sound of laughing, her laughing. I think she gave me the memory, like it was the first thing she wanted me to k now.”
Finn put his fingertip in the cooling wax and carefully lifted it, leaving a fingerprint behind. “So who is Trish?”
They were coming, on wings from far away, all the pictures and voices, smells, tastes, all the everything from the past was flying toward me as fast as it could
.
I passed my hand through the flame.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “You’ll get burned.”
“So?”
Finn blew out the candle.
“I told you a secret,” I said in the dark. “It’s your turn.” “Only if you tell me about Trish.”
“Only if your secret is true.”
“True,” he echoed, playing with his lighter. He rolled the striker wheel slowly, sparks leaping out like miniature fireworks, the flame never quite catching. “You already know I have a sister, Chelsea. The secret is that she’s an addict. She’ll smoke or snort anything she can get her hands on.”
“Wow, really? I . . . I don’t know what to say. Where is she?”
“Boston.” He set the lighter on the mirror. “That’s why Dad took that job and why Mom drove there this morning. Chelsea is claiming she’s had another ‘big breakthrough.’ Woo-hoo.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means she wants to screw my parents over again. They burned through their retirement money to pay for her first two rehabs. She ran away from both. The third time, they took out a second mortgage to pay for a clinic in Hawaii. She didn’t run away from that one. She came home with a great tan and stayed clean for eight whole days.”
His voice sounded older in the dark.
“Now she says she wants to ask forgiveness so we can all start the, quote, unquote, healing process. Such bullshit. She’ll guilt Mom into giving her money and then she’ll take off again.”
The lighter flared, breaking his face into waves of light and shadow.
“True enough?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
He lit the candle. “Your turn, Miss Blue. What’s so awful about this Trish beast? Why did you freak out?”
She put me on the bus, lunch box packed with a peanut butter and banana sandwich, crusts cut off. She coached my soccer team. She fired the babysitter who spanked me. Took me to work with her for a week until she found a new sitter. She drank wine, not vodka. Sometimes forgot to eat. She only smoked cigarettes when I was asleep. She forgot to answer the phone when I called for a ride home. She forgot to lock the door when she left
.
“She used to be my mom,” I said. “And then she quit.”