Memento
2015
The light floated in the air. A perfect golden colour streaming in through the open windows. Dust particles danced freely in the soft breeze. Everything smelled of old oak and mothballs. The floorboards sang under Madison’s feet as she walked through the house, without touching anything. Everything was exactly as it had been on the day it happened. The calendar that hung on the wall was still set to May 1960. A newspaper, now brown and crumped, still lay on the kitchen table, spread open as if someone had just abruptly stopped reading it that morning. Madison could hear the sound of a single drop of water hitting the aluminum sink every few minutes. How long has that kitchen faucet been leaking? Madison tried to tune it out, she didn’t want to be here long enough to get used to the sound.
The longer she stood in the kitchen, the more she felt like she was frozen in time, standing in a photograph of a home. Preserved and protected under a thick layer of dust, this home was something out of a museum. Only, it wasn’t a stranger’s home at all. Madison wandered by photographs of her parents that crowded the bookshelves in the living room, squinting at the black and white silhouettes as she tried to piece together what happened on that day. She reached out and touched the weathered glass of a photograph, pushing the dust aside and revealing a third person in the photo. It was a child in the arms of Madison’s father, resting her small head gently on his shoulder.
1955
Joyce cradled her newborn baby and rocked her to sleep. She paced the kitchen as her husband was chest-deep in the cabinet under the kitchen sink, tapping on the pipes.
“Thank you for finally fixing that leak, Anthony,” she whispered, trying to keep her baby asleep, “It was really starting to drive me crazy.”
Anthony mumbled something incoherently and continued to twist and tweak the pipes until he could no longer hear the dribble of the faucet above him. He slithered out of from under the sink and banged his head on his way out, which caused the baby to wake and wail.
“Sorry,” Anthony mouthed as he rubbed his forehead. He took the baby from Joyce’s arms and continued to rock her as Joyce sat down and munched on a piece of dry toast with raspberry jam slathered on it. Between sips of cold coffee, the baby finally fell asleep. Anthony tiptoed up the old oak stairs of their home and lay the baby down in her room.
Joyce was putting bottles away as Anthony came back down and set a little green velvet box down on the kitchen table. She turned to face him, and caught a quick glimpse of the box. A tired smile crept up at the corners of her mouth.
“What’s that?” She asked.
“Why don’t you open it to find out?” Anthony replied, sitting down at the kitchen table and moving the newspaper aside.
Joyce drifted over and opened the box. Inside there was a beautiful gold chain necklace with the letter “R” dangling at the end.
“For Ramona,” Anthony softly said. “So you can keep her near your heart every day.”
Joyce let a silence fall between them as she looked at the necklace.
“Do you like it?” He asked impatiently when a few more moments had gone.
Joyce leaned down and kissed her husband. “I love it. It’s perfect."
2015
Madison grabbed the photograph with both hands and brought it close to her face. The people in the picture were definitely her parents, but the child was too young to have been Madison, though they had the same bright, round eyes.
“This place gives me the creeps,” Madison whirled around and saw her husband standing in the doorway of the house. He had a brown envelope in one hand, and was rubbing the back of his neck with the other. His eyes darted from room to room. “I can’t believe your parents just left this place to you. They never talked about owning a second house?”
Madison shook her head. “No, I had no idea this place existed until last week when I was looking through the inheritance again. They must have lived here before I was born. I don’t remember anything from this place.”
“Weird,” Jordan paused, and took a few cautious steps into the house. “Do you think there’s anything you want to keep from here? Seems like a lot of old junk from the fifties,” He smelled the air, “and possibly a lot of lilacs. Do you smell that? How could a house be abandoned for sixty years and still smell like lilacs?”
Madison smiled, a memory floating up into the front of her mind. “My mom always had fresh lilacs in the house. My dad would complain that he would go to work smelling like the garden, no matter how much he washed his suit.” She drifted back into the kitchen and touched an empty vase. There was a brown ring around the glass where the flowers would have sat in water for many years, before dying out. “I guess the smell must have seeped into the walls.”
A pinch in Madison’s hand returned her attention to the photograph she still held tightly. She looked down and saw a drop of blood on her thumb dripping down her hand and smearing onto the photograph. The glass on the picture frame was broken, and Madison had pressed her thumb into a small shard of glass without noticing. She wiped the blood from her hand with a towel from the kitchen, and set the photograph down near the leaky sink.
“I’m going to keep looking around. I’ll see if I can find anything from my parents that I want to keep,” Madison called out to Jordan, but he was already distracted by a stack of records in the living room.
She found the stairs to the second floor and nervously took a step.
1958
Purple and orange balloons filled the McAllister’s home. They knocked slowly against each other in the breeze of the open window and made Ramona smile as she watched them sway back and forth. Joyce was icing a cake in the kitchen and Anthony was putting a bow on a wrapped present in the living room. It was a perfect day to celebrate a birthday. Little Ramona was turning three years old. Soon people would be crowded in the backyard of their home to celebrate. It was a peaceful moment between the three of them, one that Joyce would replay in her mind for years to come.
In the evening after the birthday party, as Joyce put Ramona to sleep and met Anthony in the kitchen for a late night slice of chocolate birthday cake, a noise caught her attention. A slow drip from the sink filled the silence in the kitchen. Joyce and Anthony looked at each other and laughed.
“That damn sink, no matter how many times I fix it, it won’t stop leaking,” Anthony muttered between mouthfuls of cake. “I say we just leave it and learn to live with the sound.”
Joyce smiled and took a sip of her wine.
“Absolutely not,” She replied.
2015
Nothing could have prepared Madison for what she saw behind the first door that she opened. Her hand clung to the brass handle as she stood in the doorway of a little girl’s bedroom. Toys were scattered across the ground and a small bed sat unmade in the corner of the room. The curtains were pulled in, not allowing a single streak of sunlight into the otherwise vibrant looking room. Madison stood motionless for a few moments, looking from corner to corner, trying to search her memories for anything familiar in the bedroom. But these were not her belongings. In fact, Madison never had half as many things growing up as this little girl seemed to have had. Only once a year on her birthday did Madison receive toys from her parents. And often times, it was something Madison would outgrow within months. The child whose bedroom this was had enough toys and clothes to last her a lifetime here. Doubt crept into Madison’s heart, taking hold of her quickly. Had her parents been keeping something from her all these years?
Madison walked over to the window and pulled the curtains back. A cloud of dust flew off and into the air, and caused Madison to turn away. Something in the corner of her eye caught the light then. She walked across the room and found a small black box with gold engravings on the front. Ramona McAllister. Her heart was beating fast, but she didn’t know why. Madison touched the golden letters and lifted the cover on the box carefully.
“Jordan,” Madison called from upstairs, “Come and take a look at this…”
1960
The sounds of machines beeping loudly in the hospital room kept Joyce and Anthony up all night. The lights flickered green and red in the darkness of the small room, flashing behind their eyes even when they tried to close them. They lay on the small bed with Ramona between them, trying to avoid laying on the many tubes and wires that were hooked up to their daughter. The bed was not big enough for the three of them, but they squeezed together so tightly that each person could feel the other’s heart beating. Joyce and Anthony watched every breath Ramona took, fixating on the rising and falling of her small chest.
In the morning, she was gone.
When they arrived home, the house felt emptier than the day they had moved in. Every room was heavy with memories that tugged on their hearts as they moved through them as ghosts. People would come and go, trying to repair the damage that was done, but Joyce and Anthony were weighed down by the memories that surrounded them.
Time stood still for Joyce and Anthony as they sat at the kitchen table listening to the rain hit the windows. Anthony had the newspaper laid out but was unable to bring himself to read the words on the page.
“What if we left this place for a while?” He asked, turning to Joyce as she sat with her arms crossed and staring out to the rain. She turned her gaze to Anthony.
“You mean like go on a trip?”
“Sort of. Just to get away from all of this,” He gestured to the space around him, to all of the toys and photographs and things that made up their life before Ramona died.
Joyce looked around her. She dropped her arms to her side. “It would be nice to be away from all the reminders for a while…” Her voice drifted off.
Anthony nodded. “We can pack one bag and leave everything else behind for now. And we can come back when we’re ready.”
Joyce chewed on her lower lip, feeling guilty that they wanted to distance themselves from Ramona’s memories. She gently touched the “R” that decorated her chest. Joyce reached behind her neck, unclasped the necklace, and set it down on the table in front of her, then gave a slight nod to Anthony. She would have to leave everything behind if this was going to work.
“Good,” He said, “Then we’ll leave tonight.”
Joyce and Anthony never came back to the house. The pain of returning to an empty house full of Ramona’s memories was an unbearable thought. So, that night when they packed their few belongings and stepped out of the house into the pouring rain, Joyce and Anthony closed the door on their home forever.
2015
The sound of Jordan’s quick footsteps up the stairs reverberated in the old house. He had the old newspaper from the kitchen table tucked under his arm.
“In here,” Madison said, her voice was distant. Jordan found her sitting cross-legged on the floor of a little girl’s bedroom holding a black box filled with an assortment of cards. “I feel like I’m dreaming right now.”
“Who’s bedroom is this?” Jordan asked, sitting down on the floor next to her and placing a hand on her lap.
“I don’t know. I found this box with birthday cards for someone named Ramona,” She handed a few to Jordan. He sifted through them thoughtfully. “I think my parents might have had a child before they had me. Look, then I found these.” Madison pushed a few cards aside in the box and pulled out a stack of smaller cards that were tucked at the bottom of the box. “Condolence cards. A bunch of them. A few of them are dated May 1960. Seven years before I was born.”
Jordan reached over and took a few of the cards from Madison’s hands and leafed through them.
“Joyce and Anthony, we are so sorry for your loss. Ramona was an incredibly sweet little girl. We are thinking of you during this difficult time.” Jordan read from one of the cards. He paused to look over at Madison. Her brow was furrowed as she continued to look through the box. “I think you’re right. They must have had a daughter before you. Did they ever mention it to you?”
Madison shook her head without replying. She could hear something clinking delicately at the bottom of the box and was trying to retrieve it. A shimmer of something gold flashed before Madison’s eyes, and she sunk her hand into the box to grab it. Madison pulled out a thin gold chain with a letter “R” hanging at the end. The gold charm swung gently in the air as the gold chain draped her fingers.
1967
Happiness takes many forms in life. One of the many things that makes happiness mystifying is that it can exist simultaneously with grief. For Joyce and Anthony, happiness came back to them seven years later in the form of two pink lines on a pregnancy test. It was a new beginning for them. They felt hopeful that their hearts could be full again.
As the years pressed on, Madison became the glue that held them together. She filled their lives with joy and pleasure right until the day both Joyce and Anthony took their last breath. With Madison, Joyce and Anthony let the light enter their lives.
Grief and joy. Heartache and happiness. After Ramona died, these were things Joyce and Anthony never lived without.
2015
“Hand me the newspaper you brought up here,” Madison asked Jordan, without taking her eyes off of the necklace. Jordan handed her the newspaper and Madison began flipping through the pages until she reached the obituaries.
Ramona McAllister - January 1955 — May 1960. Daughter of Joyce and Anthony McAllister…
The house stood still as Madison read out the obituary of her parents’ first child together. A child Madison had never known existed until today. A child that had left a hole in her parents’ hearts that never fully closed.
“Everything makes sense now,” Madison whispered. Her eyes were wide and glossy. She turned to Jordan, “Growing up my parents were incredibly anxious about everything I did. They were always fearful of the future. It made them really overbearing for me as a kid, but now I think I understand why. They were afraid of losing me like they lost Ramona.” Madison looked down at the necklace in her hand. “I didn’t know Ramona, but I feel like she is part of me anyways. Like I carried the burden of our parents’ grief for her when she died.” She closed her fingers tightly around the necklace in the palm of her hand and held it close to her heart. “They must have left this house behind after she died because the memories of her life were too painful. They wanted a fresh start. I guess that’s why they never mentioned any of it to me, too.”
Both Jordan and Madison sat in Ramona’s room a while longer, trying to imagine what her life must have been like. Finally, Jordan asked Madison if she was ready to go.
Madison nodded her head. “Yes, and I think the only thing I’ll take with me is the necklace. That way I can keep a part of her alive.” Madison opened the clasp of her hand and looked down once more at the gold necklace. She was squeezing it so tightly that the letter “R” had left an imprint in her palm.
Excellent!
A very well crafted story! It was a wonderful read.