The Sweetness of Forgetting (6 page)

The girl with the sad eyes cleared her throat. “No, Mamie, I’m Hope,” she said. “Josephine isn’t here.”

“Yes, of course, I know that,” Rose said quickly. “I must have misspoken.” She couldn’t let them know, any of them, that she was losing her memory. It was shameful, wasn’t it? It was as if she didn’t care enough to hold on, and that embarrassed her, because nothing could be further from the truth. Perhaps if she pretended a little longer, the clouds would go away, and her memories would return from wherever they’d been hiding.

“It’s okay, Mamie,” said the girl, who looked far too old to be
Hope, her only granddaughter, who couldn’t be more than thirteen or fourteen. Yet Rose could see the lines of worry etched around this girl’s eyes, far too many lines for a girl that age. She wondered what was weighing on her. Maybe Hope’s mother would know what was wrong. Maybe then, Rose would be able to help her. She wanted to help Hope. She just didn’t know how.

“Where is your mother?” Rose asked Hope politely. “Is she coming, dear?”

Rose had so many things she wanted to say to Josephine, so many apologies to make. And she feared time was running out. Where would she begin? Would she apologize first for her many failures? For her coldness? For teaching her all the wrong lessons without meaning to? Rose knew she’d had many opportunities to say she was sorry in the past, but the words always caught in her throat. Perhaps it was time to force herself to say them, to make Josephine hear her before it was too late.

“Mamie?” Hope said tentatively. Rose smiled at her gently. She knew Hope would grow up one day to be a strong, kind person. Josephine was that type of woman too, but her character was cloaked in so many layers of defenses, spawned by Rose’s mistakes, that it was hard to tell.

“Yes, dear?” Rose asked, for Hope had stopped speaking. Rose suddenly had an inkling of a feeling that she knew exactly what Hope was about to say. She wished she could stop her before the words did their damage. But it was too late. It was always too late.

“My mom—Josephine—died,” Hope said gently. “Two years ago, Mamie. Don’t you remember?”

“My daughter?” Rose asked, sadness crashing over her like a wave. “My Josephine?” The truth came rolling in with the tide, and for a moment, Rose couldn’t catch her breath. She wondered at the tricks of the mind that washed away the unhappy memories, carrying them out to sea.

But some memories, Rose knew, couldn’t be erased, even when one has spent a lifetime trying to pretend they are not there.

“I’m sorry, Mamie,” Hope said. “Did you forget?”

“No, no,” Rose said quickly. “Of course not.” Hope looked away and Rose stared at her. The girl reminded her for an instant of something, or someone, but before she could grasp the thought, it fluttered away, just out of reach, like a butterfly. “How could I forget such a thing?” Rose added softly.

They sat in silence for a while, staring out the window. The evening star was out now, and soon after, Rose could see the stars of the Big Dipper, which her father had once told her was the saucepan of God. As her father had once taught her to do, Rose followed the line of the star called Merak to the star called Dubhe and found Polaris, the North Star, who was just beginning to open his sleepy eye for her in the endless sky. She knew the names of so many stars, and the ones she didn’t she had named herself, after people she had lost long ago.

How strange, she thought, that she couldn’t hold on to the simplest of facts, but the celestial names were written on her memory forever. She’d studied them secretly over so many years, hoping that one day they might provide a pathway home. But she was still here on earth, wasn’t she? And the stars were just as far away as ever.

“Mamie?” Hope asked after a while, breaking the silence.

Rose turned to her and smiled at the word. She remembered her own
mamie
fondly, a woman who had always seemed so glamorous to her, a woman whose trademarks were red lipstick, high cheekbones, and a smart, dark bob that had gone out of style in the 1920s. But then she remembered what had happened to her own
mamie,
and the smile faded. She blinked a few times and returned to the present. “Yes, dear?” Rose asked.

“Who is Leona?”

The words stole Rose’s breath for a moment, for it was a name she hadn’t spoken in nearly seventy years. Why would she? She did not believe in resurrecting ghosts.

“No one,” Rose finally replied. But that was, of course, a lie. Leona
was
someone. They all were. By denying them once again,
she knew she was weaving the tapestry of deceit a little tighter. She wondered whether one day it would be tight enough to suffocate her.

“But Annie says you’ve been calling her Leona,” Hope persisted.

“No, she is wrong,” Rose told her instantly. “There is no Leona.”

“But—”

“How is Annie?” Rose asked, changing the subject. Annie, she could remember clearly. Annie was the third generation of American in her family. First Josephine. Then Hope. Now the little one, Annie, the dawn to Rose’s twilight. Rose was proud of very few things in her life. But this, this she was proud of.

“She’s fine,” Hope replied, but Rose noticed that the line of Hope’s mouth was set a bit unnaturally. “She’s been spending a lot of time with her dad lately. They spent the whole summer going to Cape League games.”

Rose searched her memory. “What sort of league?”

“Baseball. Summer league. Like the games Grandpa used to take me to when I was a kid.”

“Well, that sounds nice, dear,” Rose said. “Do you go with them?”

“No, Mamie,” Hope said gently. “Annie’s father and I are divorced.”

“Of course,” Rose murmured. She studied Hope’s face when the girl looked down, and she could see in her features the same kind of sadness she saw every time she looked at herself in the mirror. What was she so sad about? “Do you still love him?” she ventured.

Hope looked up sharply, and Rose felt terrible when she realized that it probably was the wrong thing to have asked. She forgot, sometimes, what was polite and what was not.

“No,” Hope murmured finally. She didn’t meet Rose’s eye as she added, “I don’t think I ever did. That’s a terrible thing to say, isn’t it? I think there’s something wrong with me.”

Rose felt a lump in her throat. So then, the burden had been passed to Hope too. She knew that now. Her own closed heart had
repercussions that she had never imagined. She was responsible for all of it. But how could she tell Hope that love did exist, that it had the power to change everything? She couldn’t. So instead, she cleared her throat and tried to focus on the present.

“There is nothing wrong with you, dear,” she told her granddaughter.

Hope glanced at her grandmother and looked away. “But what if there is?” she asked softly.

“You must not blame yourself,” Rose said. “Some things are simply not meant to be.” Something lurked at the edges of her memory again. She couldn’t remember the name of Hope’s husband, but she knew she had never liked him much. Had he been unkind to Hope? Or was it just because he always seemed a little too cold, a little too together? “He has been a good father to Annie, has he not?” she added, because she felt she needed to say something good.

“Sure,” Hope said tightly. “He’s a great father. Buys her anything she wants.”

“But that is not love,” Rose said tentatively. “Those are just things.”

“Right, well,” Hope said. She looked suddenly exhausted. Her hair tumbled in front of her face like a sheet, obscuring her expression. In that moment, Rose was sure she saw tears in her granddaughter’s eyes, but when Hope looked up again, her achingly familiar eyes were clear.

“Have you gone out with other men, then?” Rose asked after a moment. “After the divorce?” She thought of her own situation, and the way that sometimes you had to move on, even if you’d already given your heart away.

“Of course not.” Hope hung her head and avoided Rose’s gaze. “I don’t want to be like my mother,” she mumbled. “Annie comes first. Not random guys.”

And then, Rose understood. In a flash, she remembered bits and pieces of her granddaughter’s childhood. She remembered how Josephine had searched endlessly for love in all the wrong places,
with all the wrong men, when love was right there, in Hope’s eyes, all along. She remembered countless nights when Josephine left her daughter with Rose so that she could go out. Hope, who was just a little girl then, would cry herself to sleep while Rose held her tight. Rose remembered the tearstains in her blouses, and the way they always made her feel empty and alone long after Hope had fallen asleep. “You are not your mother, my dear,” Rose said gently. Her heart ached, for this—all of this—was her own fault. Who could have known that her decisions would reverberate for generations?

Hope cleared her throat, looked away, and changed the subject. “So you’re sure you don’t know a Leona?” she asked.

Rose blinked a few times as the name pierced another hole in her heart. She pressed her lips together and shook her head. Maybe the lie wasn’t as wrong if it wasn’t uttered aloud.

“Weird,” Hope murmured. “Annie was so sure you’d called her that.”

“How unusual.” Rose wished she could give the girl the answers she sought, but she wasn’t ready, for to speak the truth would be to open a floodgate. She could feel the water surging up behind the dam, and she knew it would spill over soon. For now, the rivers, the tides, the floodwaters were still hers, and she sailed them alone.

Hope looked for a moment like she wanted to say something else, but instead, she stood and hugged Rose tightly, promising to return soon. She left without looking back. Rose watched her go, noting that darkness hadn’t entirely fallen yet; Hope hadn’t even stayed for the entire
heure bleue.
This made Rose sad, although she did not blame the girl. Rose knew that this, like so many other things, was her own fault.

Some time later, after all the stars were out, Rose’s favorite nurse, a woman whose skin shone like the
pain au chocolat
Rose used to bring home for her brother David and her sister Danielle so long ago, came to make sure she’d taken her evening doses of medicine.

“Hi, Rose,” she said, smiling into her eyes as she poured a small
glass of water and opened Rose’s pillbox. “Did you have a visitor tonight?”

Rose puzzled this over, trying hard to remember. There was a flash of something, glinting in the background of her memory, but then it was gone. She was certain that she’d watched the sunset alone, as she did every night. “No, dear,” Rose told her.

“Are you sure, Rose?” the nurse prodded. She handed Rose her pills in a Dixie cup and watched as Rose swallowed and washed them down. “Amy at the desk downstairs said your granddaughter was here. Hope.”

Rose smiled, for she loved Hope, who must be thirteen or fourteen by now.
How quickly time flies,
she thought.
Before I know it, she will be all grown up.
“No,” she told the nurse. “There was no one here. But you must meet her one day. She is a very nice girl. Maybe she will come visit with her mother.”

The nurse squeezed Rose’s arm gently and smiled. “All right, Rose,” she said. “All right.”

Chapter
Four

I
never intended to come back here, to the bakery, to the Cape, to any of this.

At thirty-six, I wasn’t supposed to be the mother of a teenager, the owner of a bakery. When I was in school, I dreamed of moving somewhere far away, traveling the world, becoming a successful attorney.

Then I met Rob, who was in his last year of law school just as I’d started my JD. If I thought the magnetic pull of the Cape was strong, it didn’t compare to being pulled into his orbit. When something went wrong with my birth control midway through my first year of law school, and I had to tell him I was pregnant, he’d proposed the next week. It was, he said, the right thing to do.

We’d decided together that I’d take a year off to have the baby before returning to school. Annie was born that August; Rob got a job with a firm in Boston and suggested I stay home with our daughter for a while longer now that he was making more money. At first, it seemed like a good idea. But after the first year, the gulf between us had opened so wide that I no longer knew how to cross it. My days, filled with diapers, breast-feeding, and
Sesame Street,
held little interest for him, and I was admittedly jealous of him going out into the world each day and doing all the things I’d once dreamed of. Not that I regretted having Annie; I’d never felt that way for a second. I just regretted that I’d never had a chance to live the life I’d thought I was supposed to.

When my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer for the first time, nine years ago, Rob agreed, after many nights of arguments, to relocate to the Cape, where he’d realized he could set up shop and be one of the only personal injury lawyers in the area. Mamie watched Annie at the bakery during the day while I worked as Rob’s legal assistant, which wasn’t exactly what I’d dreamed of, but it was close enough. By the time Annie was in first grade, she was frosting cupcakes and fluting piecrusts like a pro. For a few years, the whole arrangement was almost perfect.