She was right, of course. And I know myself how difficult it is to defend yourself against my father.
My gaze wanders thoughtfully over the meadows and trees, and it automatically stops on Mom’s memorial. Sammy and Grace are picking daisies in front of the entrance. So many things are going through my mind. About Mom, me, and how the event on the yacht changed my life. Who I am and why I don’t feel other people’s feelings as strongly as I used to. At first, I believed that my imprisonment by Isaac caused it, but then I realized that wasn’t true. It was because of my guilt toward Dad. For years, he had suggested to me that he had sacrificed Mom for me. All my senses had been geared toward perceiving other people’s wishes, mainly Dad’s, of course. As a result, I more or less denied my own needs. Today, I don’t need to do that anymore.
“Willa?” Grandma brings me back. She looks at me sympathetically with her smoky-blue eyes. A graying lock of hair has slipped out of her bun and is curling around her face. “As for your question from earlier: what you should tell her…” For a moment, she stares at the rose beds and I wonder how she feels. Whether she also sees Mom, herself, and me frolicking here through the mirror of time. “Just think about what you would want if you were her.” She looks at me again.
I blink several times and spontaneously hug her. “I’ll do that.” Secretly, I made my decision a long time ago, at least I think so.
As I walk toward the hedge now, it’s almost like it was nine years ago only the sun is a little lower. I wave to Sammy, walk around a juniper tree, and spot Nathan. He’s waiting behind the hedge, the branches of which have been treacherously bent from constantly climbing through them. When he sees me, this smile flits across his lips. His long dark hair falls to his shoulders, but he’s not wearing a headband or black clothes, just blue jeans and a sea-gray hoodie. The color makes his eyes shine as deeply as a winter sea in the sun—mysterious, dark, yet full of glitter.
He gently takes my hand and pulls me through the undergrowth so that leaves and branches brush against me like hands. Again and again, I wonder if this hedge was Mom’s secret passage when she used to sneak into the bayous with me from time to time. I somehow like the thought, but I push it away for now because, at this time of day, there is only Nathan and me.
Hand in hand, we walk along the trail to the enchanted Palace of Shards, which is swamped with ivy, Spanish moss, and kudzu beans. We giggle softly as we fight our way through hundreds of vines, climb the dilapidated steps of the former slave entrance, and finally reach the circular festival hall. I can’t help but marvel at this bygone, enchanted, and broken beauty. The glass of the dome roof has still not been repaired and thick strands of ivy creep down many yards to the ground, making it almost look like pillars supporting the rest of the roof. The stained glass of the windows is spread out around the edge of the hall like the contents of a shattered kaleidoscope.
It is a good place for me, a safe place that makes me feel like I am standing in the middle of my soul. Broken, but still enchanted. Shattered, but not lost. Here, I can voice the many monstrosities that I cannot even think of anywhere else.
Nathan offers me his hand to dance and we move slowly to a melody that only we can hear.
“I abducted a girl and held her hostage,” he whispers in my ear.
“I betrayed my mom,” I whisper back.
He squeezes my fingers. “I broke an important promise and disappointed my sister.”
The leaves rustle above us and I spot a squirrel scurrying away. “I still think of the man who killed my mom when I hear the word dad,” I say quietly now. “The man who sold me severe food poisoning was an allergy.” I found the doctor’s note from that time, half soaked on the curb of Hudson Street.
Nathan is silent for a while and then finally says, “I called my best friend a traitor.” We look at each other and the memory of Lost Memories is suddenly pervasive as if we were at the center of a carousel that revolves around us displaying images of the swamp. The stilt house on the Atchafalaya, the green-silver air, the thick fog, and the black cypress trees. Pan with sagging shoulders and tears in his eyes.
“I still have nightmares from last winter. And sometimes, Isaac turns into Mr. Hampton,” I whisper in Nathan’s ear so quietly that he has to guess.
Nathan swallows loudly. “I couldn’t help the girl I love when she was in need.”
I would like to say that he couldn’t have prevented it, that it was my fault, and that Isaac would probably have caught me sooner or later anyway, but there is a rule in our game: We let everything the other person says float in the air without answering. And we can say anything we want. Things we did or didn’t do, things that happened that we couldn’t prevent, or things that make us happy or sad. This place keeps all of that for us like a treasure chest.
“Sometimes, I wished for death,” I continue. “And sometimes it seemed to me as if Isaac had completed a self-imposed taskon me, as if he only partially enjoyed it, as if it was a duty, something he had to finish.”
Nathan looks at me for a while, hiding every thought behind a neutral expression. He does that well.
“I…I probably killed my half brother,” he finally says quietly. “And I didn’t mean to.”
Now I squeeze his fingers. I know how hard it is for him to talk about Isaac. He has lost everyone he loves. And he may have killed the only one left in his family. We don’t know for certain because Kjertan—or Rayk—claimed that his brother shot Isaac because he tried to reach for his gun again, but we now know that’s not true. He confessed it to us yesterday. The others didn’t see what happened because the twin was blocking their view. It also happened too quickly. The twin who died shot Isaac out of hatred when he was already lying lifeless on the ground from Nathan’s blows. No one will ever be able to tell us if he wasn’t already dead. No matter what Isaac did, this possible guilt weighs as heavily on Nathan’s soul as a thousand pounds of lead. But I know he will learn to live with it.
We continue whispering.
We come here often. And there is so much we say to each other. And each time, it gets easier, each time the horror behind the words becomes more bearable. I am certain it is also because of this magical place. Sometimes, it seems to me as if it transforms all the terrible memories into new, colorful shards, shards that we dance on the next day and add new ones to.
I pause for a moment to remember yesterday afternoon. I’m almost at the end, and as I’m writing these lines on paper, my real dad is making his way here. We searched for him all summer and finally tracked him down in Sacramento. It wasn’t easy to find him based on the few clues I had. Even Grandmadidn’t know who my father was until the very end because Mom always kept quiet about it; and then one day, she was no longer able to tell Grandma.
To search for my biological father, I pulled the first namePierrefrom my recovered memory. Grandma remembered that Mom had once mentioned a houseboat, so we searched the bayous around Baton Rouge, asked the people on the banks about a Pierre, and finally obtained an address from his former dock neighbor. The rest was easy.
I glance out the window for a moment. I realize that my mom and my biological dad were never saints. He and she were married when they began their fateful affair. My mom met Pierre in the bayous. He spent summers in the South, sometimes with and sometimes without his family of six. I’m looking forward to seeing him. Since we found him, I finally know who gave me my good memory for numbers. My biological dad is a mathematician, a true genius. And I firmly believe that he held me in his arms as a baby or toddler, perhaps there in the bayous on the deck of his houseboat. Only he could have said those loving words that rose from my subconscious on Lost Memories.You are my everything, my day and my night. Mom definitely wanted to show him his daughter.
I shake my hand briefly to loosen my fingers. Writing was Grandma’s idea. She said it would help me sort out my thoughts and understand what had happened. I had to weave the threads of all the stories together to understand the whole thing, so I thought about how it all began. Well, with me, because I could have started with Mom, but this is my story, so I remembered—and thought of Nathan.All great things start with a kiss. That’s how I started months ago when we came here, but now I’m almost at the end. At least, the end of this story.
I smile and put my hand on my round belly as Ivy kicks hard. This little creature—she gets all my love. And she willalways be the link between Nathan, Isaac, and my own family, the Farmers. Today, sometimes it seems to me as if our families’ pasts are tangled like a fishing net of revenge, blood, and love. We can get caught up in it and keep trying to get free, but the truth is: the past will always be part of us. We never escape it and anyone who says otherwise is a liar in my eyes. And if that is the case, if it is part of us, then maybe we just have to let ourselves fall into this net so that it can carry us without pulling us down. We have to learn to forgive. Ourselves and others. I have come to understand that during all the weeks in Rosewood Manor. My hatred for Isaac is losing its edge as I begin to live again and this little being grows inside me. This little being that was probably conceived in the last weeks of my ordeal. This little being that will be related to Nathan as well as to Isaac, to Mr. Hampton, to Grandma, and my biological dad. And my four half-siblings.
She is a miracle. However, it took me a while to see it that way, but that is another story that I will only tell Ivy if she asks me one day.
I thought for a long time about whether she should know the truth, and in the end, I decided to do so even though an Icelandic proverb says:
