The Impossible Knife of Memory(41)

“How is asking for help on an English paper slutty?” I asked.

“Are you kidding me? It’s Shakespeare! Look at Romeo and Juliet; they’re what, like, fourteen years old, and they meet at a party and bam, jump in bed. They hook up in her bedroom with her parents in the house, and then they get caught and everybody dies.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that.”

“Slutty fourteen-year-olds and gang violence. I can’t believe they make high school kids read it.” She kicked a rock down the street. “I hate Zoe.”

I decided to wait for a less bitchy moment to tell her what happened when Dad met Finn. I had already decided not to tell her—or anyone—about what had happened at the quarry. I still hadn’t figured it out myself. If I’d been afraid of heights like Finn, it would have made sense: dizziness, followed by a drop in blood pressure brought on by anxiety. But heights didn’t make me dizzy, they made me laugh. Maybe there something in the rock, a weird magnetic pulse that messed with my brain or my sense of balance. Maybe nobody ever planned to kill themselves there. They’d just gone up to enjoy the view and the rock energy messed with their heads and they’d tried to fly.

At Gracie’s house, we baked cinnamon scones and chocolate chip cookies and bread that refused to rise. As the first batch of cookies went into the oven, her mom pulled into the garage, where she stayed for ten minutes, sobbing and yelling into her phone, before she backed out again and drove away.

Gracie told me to leave the mess that we’d made, but I couldn’t. I said that I liked washing dishes and then Topher called her and she walked up the stairs yelling into her phone at him, her voice sounding so much like her mother’s that it gave me goose bumps.

When we’d moved back to town, Gracie had taken me all over the place to help me remember living there: the church basement where we went to Sunday School (Gramma had played the organ, she said), the graveyard where we once played hide-and-seek and got hollered at by guys with shovels, the grocery store where we’d push our kidsized carts behind her mom, the park where the slide got so hot in the summer that it would burn the back of your legs if you went down it too slow. It was like listening to a fairy tale or the life story of a total stranger. It upset Gracie when I said I didn’t remember any of it so I started lying and pretended that, yeah, of course I remembered the time we made cookies with salt instead of sugar, and the time Gracie’s old dog got skunked and we poured all of her mom’s perfume on him to cover up the smell.

Gracie and Topher were still arguing when I finished the dishes. I wandered down the hall, past the school pictures of Gracie and Garrett hung in chronological order, and into the family room.

(Is it still called a “family room” after your parents split up?)

The photos on the wall and on top of the piano were of younger Gracie and toddler Garrett and Mr. and Mrs. Rappaport, all four of them at Disney World and a zoo and on a beach, always squinting into the sun. There were no photos of Gracie’s grandparents or anyone else. It was like the four of them had magically appeared and lived, happy for a while, in a plastic bubble with bright lights. I picked up a photo of five-year-old Gracie in an angel Halloween costume and carried it to the coffee table.

The house smelled like a bakery. Gracie was still arguing upstairs, but at least she wasn’t cursing anymore and her voice was quieter. I curled up on a couch and flipped through the shiny pages of Mrs. Rappaport’s magazines. The pic of little angel Gracie watched me. I kept looking up, half expecting her to flap her wings.

I didn’t like admitting it, but the truth was that my memories were starting to surface. First in Ms. Rogak’s class after I got Trish’s letter and then in the quarry. Maybe Gracie was right. Maybe visiting childhood places helped. Or maybe it was because I was older or angrier, or maybe because I was forgetting how to not-remember. It was also possible that we’d finally stayed in one place long enough for our yesterdays to catch up with us.

And now. Sitting alone in the not-family room, paging past recipes and haircuts and celebrity baby sightings, there, just out of the corner of my left eye, I was seeing myself playing with a cat, with a kitten, black and white. I kept turning the pages (fifty fabulous turkey recipes, whittle your middle like the stars) because if I looked at it head-on, the memory would evaporate. . . .

. . . a black-and-white kitten playing with yarn,

. . . yarn in my hand, the sound of needles clacking,

. . . clicking and the sound of women and the smell of lemons and face powder, clicking,

. . . clacking, the yellow yarn in my hand and the green yarn that went from the basket up to Gramma’s needles,

. . . her voice with other women chattering like birds in a tree, laughing, the laughter floated down to the floor like feathers and

. . . I leaned my head against my grandmother’s knee.

I went back to the kitchen to rewash the pans in very hot water.

When Gracie stopped fighting with Topher, I piled a plate with chocolate chip cookies, put it on a tray with a quart of milk and two glasses, and carried it up to her room.

“Well?” I asked.

“He promised never to speak to her again.” She blew her nose and tossed the tissue on the pile by her desk. “He’s mad at me for not trusting him.”

There was no safe reply to that. I bit into a cookie.

“Wanna watch a disaster movie?” she asked, picking up the remote. “Something where everybody dies?”