Short Story by Pam Eason
Image by Pittigrilli available @ Wikimedia Commons
My mother died January 5, four weeks ago, ten days before her eightieth birthday. Alzheimer’s. For five years I’d watched her memories come and go like the scent of springtime jasmine that drifts across our back porch until the autumn winds blow away the last of the flowers.
She was the keeper of memories, memories of me, memories that did not belong to me, my first steps, words, the time I was six when I pulled the comforter under my bed and hid, demanding her to search my whole room. She’d moved the bookcase with drooping shelves loaded down with dinosaur books.
“If that monster elf is behind here,” she’d said, “he must be mighty skinny and strong.”
She’d taken everything out of my closet: superhero capes, lab coats, sticks, a big bucket of rocks, roller blades. She swiped ferociously at the empty closet’s air with my plastic sword.
“No evil elf lurking about in here.”
But I’d refused to come out, so she’d crawled under the bed and slept with me ‘til morning.
She remembered the time I hid a package of Oreos under the sofa cushion. “I knew I had bought them. I’d searched everywhere, the car, even the garbage. And then, when your granny sat down, ‘crunch,’” and she would laugh. She knew parts of me, I didn’t know until she didn’t know me at all.
The week after my mother’s memorial service, my sister, Betsy, the organized, productive one had already digitized all the photos that my mother kept in the end table drawer beside her bed. My wife was staying with our daughter, helping her with our third grandchild. What else was there to do? I opened the file.
There were the baby pictures, Betsy, sitting straight holding a pink rattle, me with a goofy smile and a tuft of red hair sticking straight up like a Troll doll. I paused at the one with my cousin Jeff leading Applesauce, the beige and brown spotted Appaloosa Grandaddy had bought for all us grandkids. Who was the little boy straddled across the horse, clothes covered in mud? Me. I was the only red-head in the family, and those were my eyes – downturned ones set with what … stubbornness? Mischievousness? What had happened that day? I made a mental note to ask Betsy. She was a keeper of memories too – usually the ones of my worst moments.
I scrolled. Me in cowboy boots, holding my BB gun. Christmas mornings, Me and Betsy, wide-eyed and pajama-clad, beside the tree. Betsy dragging me and my Easter basket across the front lawn. Betsy’s wedding. I was the reluctant ringbearer, dressed in white shorts, a white laced shirt, and knee-high socks, holding a white, satin pillow, posed in front of the bride and groom.
I don’t remember much about that day other than a general sense of misery, but I remember the cake. Aunt Julia had made it, so it had extra thick icing. I got four slices before someone told my mother. She said, I’d said, “It was just payment for the torture I’d had to endure.” She’d laughed about that too.
There was the picture of me, the nervous groom waving at the wedding guests from the rolled-down window of my red Mustang, cans tied to the back, “Just Married,” surrounded by a heart, written across the back window in shaving cream. That day had been a blur. My best man could recall details I couldn’t recollect if my life depended on it.
It was dark now. I caught my reflection in the widow beside my desk and turned to stare at it, full face. I am here right now, I tell myself. This is who I am. But, that’s not entirely true. I am not wholly here. I am elsewhere too, stretched out over time in fragile memories, crumbs of me there and then, hidden away in dark drawers of God-knows-how-many minds. Memories I may never know. Parts of me that will die like jasmine flowers.
I looked beyond my reflection to the stars and the darkness beyond. The thought came to me like the Hale Bopp Comet I saw streak across the sky that night our family camped in the Arizona desert. My only hope of finding my whole self, knowing who I truly am, is to one day find all of me kept safe in God.
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