Page 10 of Forget Me Not
I round the stairwell to find my mom sitting on the couch, nursing her wine, an expectant smile snaked across her lips. I can’t tell if it’s the same glass she answered the door with or if she’s already helped herself to another but there is a second one on the coffee table now, presumably for me, filled less than an inch to the brim.
“Have you eaten?” she asks, taking a sip.
I shake my head, walking to the couch and taking a seat beside her. The shoebox nestled under one arm and the roll of film still clutched in my hand.
“I don’t have much,” she says, looking around, as if she’s just realized. “I probably should have ordered something.”
I smile, placing the film on the side table before reaching for my glass and taking a drink. This, too, is the kind of thing I’ve come to expect from my mother. Once my sister was gone, she used to parent me like an afterthought. An inconvenient postscript tacked on to her day. I can’t even count the number of times I showed up to school without any supplies, without lunch. Neglect casualenough to shrug off as oblivion, like it was normal for a mother to forget to feed her kid.
“We can get a pizza,” I say.
“Pizza sounds good,” she muses, though she doesn’t make a move and I know I’ll probably end up ordering it. “How’s work?” she asks instead, the perfunctory question when nobody knows what else to say. Sort of like commenting on the weather, it’s a safe topic. Most of the time, anyway.
“Work is fine,” I lie, avoiding her eyes.
“I still don’t know how you can stomach that job. It’s a grisly profession.”
I take another sip, refusing to answer. My parents have never understood why I do what I do, the fact that I marinate in murder for forty hours a week. More than that, really, because it’s impossible not to take this job home with me. Not to see the faces of victims in crowded rooms, hear their names in casual conversation. Stew on the fact that their entire lives had to be whittled down to two sentences in the middle of a mid-tier newspaper, my allotted word count reducing them to their dreariest parts. So I simply recounted their age, their profession. The fact that they died by the hands of a driver so drunk they fell asleep at the wheel or an accidental overdose of laced cocaine. And that’s another reason why I had quit, to be honest: I’ve been desperate for the freedom to tell my own stories. To show that human beings, like Natalie, are so much more than their final moments. That the days that they lived deserve just as much attention as the day that they died… but at the same time, I would be lying if I didn’t admit there was another piece to it. That there’s something about the inevitability of death that somehow soothes me, makes me feel better. Reminds me that if Jeffrey hadn’t gotten to my sister, something else would have.
Sooner or later, it always does.
“Are they letting you work remote now?” my mom asks next,pushing her way through the stubborn silence. “That seems to be the thing these days.”
I pick at my cuticle, still thinking about how it’s not that unusual, really, why I chose this job of mine. In fact, it makes perfect sense. I like the quest for answers, the ability to scrape together fragments of fact and create a narrative that’s logical and true.
“What have you been writing about—?”
“I found something in Natalie’s bedroom,” I blurt out, unable to take it any longer. Her probing questions, my little lies. My mom doesn’t know that I’m not actually employed and, to be honest, I don’t want her to find out. I don’t want her to know that I have nothing to go back to, no concrete end to my stay—but mostly, I just really want to get back to those pictures.
To the memory of my sister’s face, so flushed and alive. Flip through the rest I haven’t yet seen.
“A shoebox full of old photos,” I continue, removing the lid before balancing the box square on my lap. It feels strange, my sudden eagerness to revisit the past after all the years I’ve spent trying to bottle it up. I suppose it’s because the dam has finally burst—this house, her room, two decades of pressure steadily building—and now I can’t stop the memories from pummeling through. “I went in there, just to look around, and I think… I think they might have been from that summer.”
My mom stares at me, her expression blank.
“Look,” I say, eager to show her how good they are, how happy she was, because I know that’s not the way my mom remembers Natalie, either.
I know she remembers the screaming, the crying. Her daughter of that summer like a shadow self that somehow broke loose; a rabid animal with froth and fangs.
“See?” I say, grabbing the picture nestled on top. It’s of Natalie and a girl in the middle of the woods, probably from one of thoseparties out in the boonies where they could drink and never get caught. There are bottles of beer littered in the distance, a single cigarette dangling from between her two fingers, and a flash of metal peeking out from the corner. Some kid’s car parked in the brush.
“Oh, wow,” my mom says, reaching out to grab the image.
She must see it too, then. The Natalie from before. The one that’s gotten lost in the midst of this mess.
“That’s Bethany Wheeler,” she continues, pointing at the second girl as she brings the picture up to her face. “Do you remember her?”
I squint. Of course, I remember Bethany Wheeler. She was tall and blond with bright hazel eyes and I had been jealous of the way she and my sister had clicked, a built-in best friend I could never quite grasp.
“God, she used to be here all the time,” my mom says, tilting her head. “I wonder what she’s up to now.”
I think of Bethany, the way she followed my sister around like a dependent pet. Natalie liked to save people, outcasts she found and tucked under her wing, but the two of them had been truly inseparable for a while. My mother is right: she was always here, digging through our freezer before perching herself on the edge of the counter. Tongue Popsicle-pink as she asked about my day. I could always tell she felt bad for me, too. For the way I was always alone.
I go back to the stack and continue to flip.
“I haven’t seen her since that summer,” my mom continues as I feel my eyes start to water, my gaze zeroing in on another face from my past—only this time, it’s the face of Jeffrey Slater, his arm flung around my sister’s shoulder as she throws her head back in delirious laughter. All the soft spots of her neck exposed.
“I think she got a little strange,” she adds, still staring at Bethany. “Started getting tattoos.”
