The Memory of Forgotten Things, page 9
“That doesn’t mean it was your fault.”
“Oh, I know,” DJ said, too casually.
“Have you ever met him?” she asked.
He nodded. “A few times, yeah. More when I was younger. Not since fifth grade. He lives four hours away now. And . . . it was always sort of weird whenever we did meet. Like he didn’t know what to do with me, and to be honest, I didn’t really know what to do with him, either. He’s my dad, you know? But he’s not the way . . . the way dads are supposed to be, I think. I don’t know. Is there a way dads are supposed to be?”
That wasn’t a question Sophia could answer. DJ gave her a faint smile.
“If there is, I think it’s the way my stepdad is. In my Memories.” His smile widened. “He’s great, Sophia. He’s really, really great. I wish you could meet him. I wish my mom could meet him. I mean, the way she has in the Memories. He makes her so happy. They’re all cute and embarrassing. It’s a bit awkward, honestly.”
He laughed and looked away.
Sophia found herself giggling too. DJ looked at her in surprise. The tension between them cracked and broke away.
“I want that,” DJ said. “For me. For her. For Nicole.”
“I know,” Sophia said.
He took a deep breath and nodded. It was all they needed to say about the matter. Everything else was understood.
• • •
The sun lowered, and the gnats grew more ferocious. DJ finished up his drawing, which turned out to be a portrait of Sophia.
She flushed when she looked at it, even though it was a perfectly non-embarrassing picture. If anything, it showed her looking pretty boring, sitting there slouched on the bench, her hair messy, her shirt too big, her legs stick-skinny beneath her shorts. DJ seemed pleased with it, though, so she tried to be enthusiastic for his sake. It was an accurate portrayal, at any rate, even if she didn’t look particularly nice in it.
Something flashed in the corner of her vision. She straightened. “Hey, that’s her, isn’t it?”
The figure was still two blocks away, so it was hard to be sure. Sophia jumped to her feet, squinting as it meandered closer, became a tiny old lady who walked with her shoulders hunched, her head bent toward her dog. Even from this distance, Sophia could tell she was chattering to the animal.
Soon, she picked up snippets of the conversation—comments about the bathtub-warm air, the never-ending swarm of gnats, the chicken sandwich they’d had for dinner.
“Mae!” Sophia called out.
The woman looked up. For a few seconds, she didn’t seem to recognize the girl waving at her. Her shoulders went stiff, her jaw tight. Then she got closer, and her body unwound again.
“Ah, it’s you,” she said. “Where’s the other boy? The pale, frowny one?”
“He had to go home for dinner,” Sophia said.
Mae nodded. “And what about you two? Don’t you need your dinners?”
“We need to ask you something,” Sophia said. Mae’s dog was snuffing around Sophia’s shoes again, and she resisted the urge to nervously back away.
Mae raised her eyebrows, waiting. Sophia hesitated. She’d promised DJ that she’d ask Mae without offending her, and she intended to keep that promise.
“We’re trying to learn about parallel universes,” Sophia said.
Mae’s eyebrows climbed even higher. “Parallel universes?”
“Some people think you can, you know, travel from one universe to another.”
“Do they now?” Mae laughed. “Well, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Sophia wasn’t sure how she’d expected this to play out—how she’d expected Mae to respond when she asked her about parallel universes. But she’d wanted more than this.
She’d dragged DJ here. They’d waited forever at the bus stop.
She hadn’t done all that just so Mae could laugh in her face.
Sophia swallowed. She’d promised she wouldn’t upset Mae with her questions, but now she was the one getting upset.
“There was an article on it,” she said, as calmly as she could. “About Donway Shallows, and—”
“Here.” DJ held out his phone. He must have taken a picture of the article when Sophia wasn’t paying attention. She gave him a thankful look while Mae scrolled through the article.
“This is ancient news,” she said. “Why’re you kids—”
Her expression fluttered, then shifted. She studied the article a moment longer, then looked up at Sophia.
“Ah,” she said. It was a weighty word. “Are you trying to ask if that was me?”
No, Sophia almost said, but Mae had the sort of eyes that saw through lies, and she couldn’t manage to spit the word out.
She didn’t say yes, either, but her face said it for her.
“Was it?” she asked.
Mae snorted. “Say it was. So what?”
“We want to know how you did it,” Sophia said.
Mae laughed again. “Is this world really so bad, you gotta leave it for another one?” She bent to ruffle her dog’s fur as he panted in the heat. “Sure, not everything turns out the way you’d want. But it is the way it is.”
“It could be better,” Sophia said.
Mae made a hmmmph noise in the back of her throat. “Perhaps. Have you thought about what’ll happen here, if you do cross?”
Sophia hadn’t thought about here, only there. Only about where she wanted to go.
“Say it all works—you do whatever you’re going to do and end up in the worlds you want to be in.” Mae gestured with her hands. “Are you just going to switch bodies with the versions of you that were already there? Are those versions of you going to come here, to this universe? Are you just going to leave a hole behind?”
Sophia had no answers for any of that.
Behind them, the next bus pulled up, the doors whooshing open. A handful of people spilled into the evening heat. None of them paid any attention to the old woman and kids on the corner.
“You think we shouldn’t do it?” DJ said. “Even if we could?”
Mae shook her head. “What do I know? I’m just a crazy old lady.”
Sophia didn’t know what to think. Not anymore. She’d tried so hard to keep herself from wavering, no matter what. But now that was falling apart, and she could see the edges of other things crumbling too—all the hopes she’d hinged on Mae being the crosser.
What now?
“We should go,” DJ said to Mae. He tugged gently on Sophia’s wrist. “Sorry for bothering you.”
Mae nodded. Sophia let DJ guide her back toward the bench. She was too upset to speak. This whole trip had been a waste. Maybe all that time spent looking through newspapers at the library had been a waste too. Because what did they have now?
DJ had been right, and she’d been stupid not to listen. Stupid to think that a silly article written thirteen years ago would be the final piece in the puzzle. The ticket to everything she wanted.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
Fought against the roaring in her ears.
And nearly cried with relief when the Memory hit.
IT TOOK HER A MOMENT to realize where the Memory had whisked her, because it looked so different.
It was her own living room. Except the couches were dark blue, and there were two of them—not the solitary lumpy gray one that usually sat in Sophia’s living room. The goofy pictures of her dad and her above the fireplace were gone, replaced by a funny-looking clock and some wooden knickknacks. Paintings Sophia didn’t recognize hung on the walls: prints of pouncing foxes and sad-eyed deer.
What’s wrong? someone said. Or sort of said. Spoken words were always strange in Memories—more like suggestions of sound than actual voices.
In the Memory, Sophia turned. She sat on one of the blue couches. There was a frayed, eggshell-colored pillow tucked against her, like she was hugging it to herself. She got the impression that she was sad, though she wasn’t sure why.
Her mother, curled beside her, said, Sophie, did something happen at school again?
No one ever called Sophia Sophie except her mother. Or at least she did in the Memories.
Her mother looked worried. Sophia ached to tell her about the frustrating conversation she’d just had with Mae. About the way she couldn’t stop worrying about her father. About the Memories, and the solar eclipse, and how Sophia was going to cross universes if that’s what it took to find her.
About everything, basically.
It’ll be all right, darling, her mother said. You can’t always be friends with everyone.
She smiled and squeezed Sophia’s hands. Just be kind to them, Sophie. Be as kind and as understanding as you can. It’s all anyone can ask.
The Memory receded gently, leaving Sophia with a quiet sort of peace.
It’ll be all right, her mother had said.
Maybe that was all it had taken to make Sophia calm down: a mother to assure her that things would be all right.
She must not have been out of it for very long, because Mae was still shuffling away from them, her head bent to chat with her dog. It was a scene Sophia had seen all her life: Mae and her dog. And yet—
“Be right back,” she said to DJ.
She ran to catch up with Mae. “What’s your last name?”
The old woman blinked in surprise. Of all the questions Sophia could have asked, she seemed to have expected this one least. It startled her even more than Sophia’s probing about parallel universes.
“My last name? What do you want that for?”
She sounded so defensive that Sophia felt a pang of guilt. When was the last time someone had asked Mae anything about herself? Even for something as simple as her full name? “I just—I realized I don’t know it. And I want to.”
Mae gave her a searching look, as if she didn’t trust Sophia’s sudden interest. Didn’t trust that she actually cared.
“My full name is Anna-Mae Kent,” she said finally.
“Okay.” Sophia stuck out her hand. Solemnly, Mae took it. Her fingers were thin, but strong.
“Nice to meet you,” said Sophia.
“Likewise,” said Mae.
Sophia turned to head back to DJ. She got about two steps away before Mae’s hand closed on her shoulder.
“Wait,” the woman said. “I guess I just remembered. I do have something else to tell you about parallel universes.”
DJ must have realized that something was happening, because he’d left the bench and was hurrying toward them.
“It’s not much,” Mae warned. “It’s just a story I’ve heard.”
“Tell me,” Sophia said. “Please.”
Mae beckoned her and DJ off the sidewalk. They followed her to a sunny patch of grass, which she sank down onto with a happy sigh.
“My back, you know,” she told Sophia, then laughed and said, “I suppose you don’t. But you will one day.”
Sophia had zero interest in her future back pains, but she nodded as patiently as she could.
“The story?” she prompted.
Mae nodded. “I can’t even remember where I heard it anymore. Was it Louise? Yes, Louise was always into this sort of thing—the occult, and spirits, and crystals. Oh, that woman loved her crystals.”
Sophia bit her lip to keep from hurrying Mae along. The last thing she wanted to do was offend her, or make her clam up again.
“Anyway,” Mae said. “The point is, Louise was like you. There were things she wanted that she couldn’t get in this world, so she was always looking for other options. Sometimes that was the afterlife. Sometimes it was communing with the trees. And sometimes, it was parallel universes.”
She gave Sophia and DJ a meaningful look. “Personally, I think Louise was a little too eager to believe. She became convinced that parallel universes were not only real, but reachable. That somewhere out there were worlds where her life was entirely different—entirely better—and if she just did the right things, followed the right steps”—Mae waved her hands about—“said the right magic words, then she could cross over and live there.”
She paused, her eyebrows furrowed in thought. “I can’t promise I’m going to tell this next part right. It was so long ago, and to be honest, sometimes I only half listened to Louise when she went into one of her rants about this stuff.”
“That’s okay,” DJ said. “What do you remember?”
“First she had to find a place where the barrier between worlds was thinnest,” Mae said. “That’s how I got pulled into this whole thing, you know. Because I was the one who told her about Donway Shallows, and how special it felt.”
“And then?” Sophia said, when Mae paused yet again.
“She needed something to guide her to the right world,” Mae said. “Talismans or tokens that connected her to where she wanted to go. I can’t remember what she picked. Like I said, it was so long ago.”
Sophia exchanged a glance with DJ. He looked as uncertain as she felt. Could they trust Mae’s story? Mae barely seemed to trust her own story.
“What happened after that?” DJ pressed. “Where’s Louise now?”
Mae shrugged. “She went away.”
“Away?” Sophia said. “Away where?”
Jimmy whined as he discovered an abandoned chocolate bar wrapper just beyond his reach. Mae shifted to allow him more leash. “Difficult to say. Sometimes people just come and go, you know?”
“Didn’t you wonder about it?” Sophia asked. “Weren’t you worried when she disappeared?”
As someone who’d lost someone, even if it was in a very different sort of way, she couldn’t imagine ever being as careless about it as Mae seemed to be.
“It was a gradual sort of disappearing,” Mae said. “Louise and I didn’t see each other every day, you know. So it wasn’t as if she missed a long-standing appointment one day. We met up when we met up, and by the time I thought ‘Where has that Louise gone?’ she might have already been gone a good long while.”
She gave Sophia a smile that wasn’t a smile. “Sometimes, that’s the way it goes. I don’t know what happened to her. Maybe she found a job someplace else. Maybe she found new love. Or maybe, just maybe, she really did cross over into another world.”
The next bus was headed homeward. Sophia and DJ thanked Mae for her story and said their good-byes before boarding.
“What do you think?” Sophia whispered as they went up the stairs.
“I think . . .” DJ trailed off. “I don’t have any tokens for my stepdad.”
Sophia hadn’t thought that would be the part of Mae’s story that he’d zone in on, but it made sense.
“My stepdad doesn’t even exist—at least not here in town.”
“But you have your drawings,” Sophia said. “You have a ton of them, and they’re so detailed. I bet they’d be enough.”
DJ shrugged. “Hopefully. It’s weird, isn’t it? I mean, in that world, this guy came to our town, and met my mom, and they hit it off, and got married and everything. But in this world, he’s not even around. I’ve been looking for years—I used to go sit in the grocery store, or at the mall, and just see if I could find him in the crowd.”
“Maybe he lives in the city,” Sophia said. There were thousands more people there than in their little town. “Maybe in that other world, he got a job here. Or he decided the city was too crowded.”
DJ nodded. “Or a million other things could have happened—a million big things, or a million little things that added up in just the right ways.”
They fell quiet, thinking about all the things that could have been, and weren’t.
The last passenger boarded the bus. The doors squeaked shut, and the driver pulled from the curb.
“Hey—” DJ half stood. “Mae’s trying to tell us something.”
The old woman hurried toward the bus, Jimmy running alongside her.
“One second!” Sophia shouted to the driver. He slammed on the brakes. The other people on the bus gave her exasperated looks, but she ignored them. Together, she and DJ shoved at the rusty bus window until it popped open on its hinges.
“What is it?” she shouted to Mae.
“You have to hold it in your mind!” she shouted back. She was completely out of breath. “The world you want to cross into—you have to be able to picture it as clearly as humanly possible. Louise said that. You have to be able to see it, to believe in it like you believe in gravity or the moon—”
“Get off the bus if you want to chat,” the bus driver called back to them. “We have a schedule to keep.”
“You hear me?” Mae said.
“I heard you!” Sophia said.
“Good luck!” Mae said. She disappeared as the bus zoomed around the corner.
MAE’S PARTING WORDS ECHOED IN Sophia’s thoughts.
You have to be able to see it, to believe in it like you believe in gravity or the moon.
Could Sophia see life with her mother that clearly? She had the Memories, of course, and that made things easier. But they were still just snippets. Were they enough to be Sophia’s guide to a whole other world?
Her mother had been a real human being, once upon a time. Since her death, she’d eroded into memories and aching and dust.
Sophia needed better than that.
“You’re spending a lot of time on this solar eclipse project,” Sophia’s dad said at dinner that night.
“Hmm.” Sophia stirred at her chicken and rice, too distracted to say anything else. Today must have been a good day, or at least an okay day, because her dad had finished making dinner by the time she came home, and the TV was on, and he’d scolded her for not giving him a heads-up about staying so long at Luke’s.
“How’s it going? Learn anything interesting?”
Instead of answering, Sophia blurted out, “Did Mom like living here?”
The silence that followed was like the crest of a wave, the held breath before a thousand tons of water came crashing down.
But there was no crash. Only her dad clearing his throat and saying quietly, “Sometimes she did. Why?”
“I was just wondering.” Sophia mushed a piece of chicken into her rice until it was completely buried. “Why sometimes?”
“Why sometimes?” her dad echoed. He stared back at her, and Sophia hated how lost he looked, how unsure. She didn’t want to make him feel that way.
