The Memory Book(51)

When it was over, and Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy had finally kissed and gotten married, I told her, “I’m glad you’re my mom. Not someone like that.”

Mom had wrapped her arms around me and held my head to her chest. “I’m glad you’re my daughter,” she said.

“Even if I’m sick?” I asked.

“Especially because you’re sick,” she had said, the vibrations of her voice soaking into my cheek. “I don’t think anyone less strong would be able to handle it.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I said, and burrowed deeper.

“My first baby,” she had said, and kissed the top of my head.

I remember it so well.

If nights like last night are going to happen again, it makes me glad I’m recording all this. Movie night isn’t just staring at a screen, it is also laughing, and crying, and fighting, and snuggling.

And I’m glad I’m writing the good and the bad. I’m glad I didn’t delete anything. What about all the moments that surround the good things? If you can only remember your aspirations, you will have no idea how you got from point A to point B.

That’s the reason why I’m writing to you, I guess, as opposed to just taking a bunch of pictures. A picture can only go so deep. What about the before and the after? What about everything that didn’t fit in the frame?

What about everything?

Life is not just a series of triumphs.

I wonder how many movie nights I missed for studying, or debate, or just complaining. I don’t want to miss any more.





LUCID DREAMING


Days look like this: Mom creaks open my door and I open my eyes and it takes me a second for everything to come into focus, a sort of heavy wet cloth draping my vision because if I don’t take a pill before I fall asleep, I wake up with shooting pains, so I sleep well, almost too well. But then Mom leans over me to open the curtains, smelling like tea tree oil like she always has, and like basil, always like basil in the summer, because she picks thick clumps of it from our yard to put in her omelets and on the sandwiches she takes to work.

I stand at my dresser with a cup of yogurt (because I’m not supposed to have an empty stomach) and swallow eleven pills.

Dad comes in—Dad’s smell is Mitchum deodorant, like an old-fashioned mint smell—and gives me a kiss on the cheek.

Smells make things more clear than anything. So after the smells hit me, everything begins to make sense.

Harry gets picked up by one friend or another to go to camp or to go play video games.

Bette and Davy sometimes go to the Linds’, sometimes they stay and Mrs. Lind comes over with lunch, sometimes Coop comes over with lunch (but never stays or says anything, maybe because Stuart is there and last time we really talked, he said all those mean things), sometimes a random on-call nurse comes over when no one can come, who mostly just sits in our living room and plays on her phone. Sometimes Mom takes me into town with her, and I stay in the waiting room until her shift is over, reading or watching Lord of the Rings on my laptop.

Sometimes I go with Stuart to the reading room at one of the bigger libraries on Dartmouth’s campus, which Mom and Dad let me do because it’s close enough to Mom’s work at the Dartmouth Medical Center. Stuart and I like to share a big leather chair on the balcony while he reads what he’s reading and I read what I’m reading.

Once I told him how I used to try to read all the same books he read in high school because I had such a huge crush on him.

He told me he loved that idea, the idea that he and I were trying to go to the same fictional places at once, and asked what if both of us tried to dream of the same place so we could meet while we’re sleeping? Then, that night, Stuart called me and we tried to do exactly that.

“Okay, where should we go?” he asked.

I could feel the medicine tugging me to sleep. “How about the mountains?” I said.

“Which one?”

“On top of my mountain,” I said.

“What does it look like?”

And I don’t remember what came next, but Stuart told me I described it in detail, the rocky path that is barely a path and the red scrub grass that grows in the cracks and the layer of clouds that sits on the peaks. He went that night, he said, and I was there. I wish I could have been there.

On the days we sit together and I don’t feel like reading, I look at books of photography or read old, trippy comics or just stare out the enormous arched window at the people on the lawn.

Sometimes I cry and that is okay.

At first I was embarrassed to do that in front of Stuart, but he told me he cries, too, sometimes for no good reason.

As he reads, Stuart moves his thumb across my hand. These are good days.





CAPTAIN STICKMAN


Maddie came to get me the other day in her two-door Toyota, kicking up dust on the mountain and honking to get Puppy to move out of the way so he didn’t get run over. It was late June in the Juniest way, hot and bright, bees everywhere, sticky sugar spilling from the hummingbird feeder. It was Saturday and Maddie gave Harry and Bette and Davy high fives, all in a row, and waved to Mom where she was weeding in the garden and took me off the mountain.

We pulled up to her house, where Maddie’s relatives, or more like various versions of Maddie at different ages and with different hair, were sipping lemonade under a banner that said CONGRATULATIONS MADELINE. To be among people who weren’t my family, even strangers, I could have sung just like Davy, “People come from everywhere because I’m almost there.”