Something Always Remembered

Something Always Remembered

Second Draft - Last updated Fall 2008

Jonas drew up the plan while in the shower. He turned the water up until it was nearly scalding and let it drift across his back, then he turned it off and wrapped himself in a towel. His Alyssa was standing by the sink in her underwear sticking earrings into her lobes. Jonas eyed the polished wooden jewelry box by the mirror, it was a nightingale's reliquary.

“Should I wear a ski mask today? Or maybe my steel-toed boots?” Jonas asked, grinning at her through the mirror.

Alyssa grabbed his hand as he left the bathroom and pulled him to her. She wrapped her arms around his lower back and held her stomach up against him. He could feel the moisture on his skin fusing their bodies together. “We have a key, Jonas, we're not breaking in through a window.”

“But we are still breaking in.” Jonas kissed her.

“Charlotte was my best friend, she'd be fine with this. Mrs. Wallace wouldn't, but she's dead now.”

“Don't be coarse.” Jonas lifted his chin to show her his square jaw.

Alyssa grinned slyly. “Don't be so stiff. It's going to be an adventure. How many people get to break into a dead lady's house?”

“How many people want to?” Jonas bent his neck down and kissed her forehead. “Are you okay? You look a little pallid.”

“What?” Alyssa looked thrown off by the word.

“Pale.”

“I hate when you use words I don't know.”

“Just smile and nod.” Jonas left the bathroom and went to his dresser, inside which all the contents of his pockets had been emptied the night before. He put on his jeans and picked up his cell phone. He held down the two button until the screen read home. The phone on the other side of the room began to ring.

“Jonas, can you get that.”

“You know it's for you. It's always for you.” Jonas slipped the phone into his pocket.

Alyssa walked out of the bathroom, only one earing in her left ear and no necklace yet. Once she picked up the phone Jonas walked into the bathroom and shut the door behind him. He opened up her jewelry box and quietly pushed things around until he found it.

“Well I guess it wasn't for me after all, they hung up.” Alyssa walked back to the bathroom and jiggled the knob. “Oh come on, you really gotta lock the door when you poop.”

They took Jonas' car because it was the only one with gas. He drove, because he always drove. Jonas never enjoyed having someone else drive him around, it made him nervous that something would happen. He didn't like the feeling that he wasn't in control.

“This is so exciting.” Alyssa said, rubbing her hands together in anticipation, the way she always did when they would go out to dinner. “I can't believe we get to do this.”

“I don't know why you think this is going to be so much fun.”

“What do you mean? I loved this house when I was little, Charlotte and I hung out there more than we ever did at my house. I've got a lot of fond memories of that place.”

“I guess.”

“Wasn't it fun when we went to see your folks. We got to see where you grew up.”

“Yea, but my parents have changed that house a lot. They put in a pool. All you saw were pictures of the house I grew up in. There is no way that this old house is gonna be anything like you remember.”

“Of course it will. Don't be a grouch, it's gonna be really neat.”

“Whatever you say.”

Jackson brown began to sing Fountain of Sorrows on the radio and Alyssa turned it up. “I don't know how you drive without your sunglasses when the sun is low like this.” She was resting her arm against her window and shielding her eyes with her hand. “Do you want me to get you your sunglasses?” She reached down and opened the glove compartment.

“No, no. That's okay, I'm fine without them. No, really, I don't need them. I'm fine the highway's about to turn.”

“Fine, fine. Go on being miserable.” Alyssa put the case back in the compartment and closed it. “I don't know why you don't just-”

“You aren't wearing your necklace today.” Jonas changed lanes.

“Yea. Yea, I couldn't find it this morning, have you seen it?”

“Nope. Did you have it on yesterday?”

“Yes. I always remember days I can't find it. I must have just taken it off somewhere at home. I didn't really look for it before we left.”

Jonas parked on the street, fearful that the fractured driveway would damage his tires. While Alyssa walked to the front door, Jonas stayed in the car. He took his glasses case out of the glove compartment. Tucked inside with his sunglasses was a plastic bag containing a gold necklace. He put the bag in his pocket and the case in a cup holder between the seats, where he usually kept it.

When Jonas got out of the car Alyssa turned around and asked, “Are you coming?” She stood playfully with her hips at an angle and her arms spread open. Her thin green dress hung in the still air as it would off a wire hanger.

“Just blowing my nose. I should probably take the whole box in with me, this place is going to be so fetid.” He said.

“Fetid,” she said, shaking her head and smiling as she turned back to the door.

The house was two stories with four simple windows on the front, square and equidistance from each other like the ones children draw with crayon. The stucco walls had once been a light eggshell color but were now flaking away, revealing the gray underneath and creating a lattice for some green ivy to cling to. It was like a pimple from the earth surrounded by weeds so thick that from far away the lot appeared to be covered in a healthy grass. The front door was guarded by a square cement porch. The door was bright blue at the top and lighter near the bottom where the overhang no longer protected it in the evening sun.

Elsa Wallace had lived in this house up until two days prior when she had stopped to sit in a lawn chair at her local grocery store and passed away. She was there for three hours before an employee noticed she wasn't breathing.

Alyssa was strangely comfortable there on the porch; Jonas glanced back and forth between neighboring houses in search of spying eyes, but she was calm. Alyssa relished the chance to rendezvous with her memories of that house. Somehow it felt like the house was a part of her, like it was integral to her growth.

She had strung all of her parents spare keys onto one ring so she would have to go through nearly twenty keys in order to find the right one. Jonas waited patiently as Alyssa tested each key on the chain. He restrained himself from saying anything when she tried the ones that were obviously too small, or the wrong shape, because he knew that she liked to try them them anyway. He glanced back and forth between the neighboring houses, looking for faces peeking out from behind curtains but he never saw any.

When the pins finally lined up and the key turned all the way right, Alyssa looked over her shoulder at Jonas and smiled, something childishly sinister.

The inside smelled of a stale perfume, like pollen and dirt. There was a short hallway that became stairs, poorly illuminated by light shining though thin curtains at the top. On the right was a door into the living room, and on the left a dining room. Jonas watched as Alyssa absorbed the hallway and tested the air for memories.

Alyssa took a deep breathe. “I told you it would be the same.”

Jonas followed her into the dining room where she became fascinated with her surrounding, reaching out to touch the woodworkings on the dining table and dragging her foot across the wooden floor. She seemed encapsulated in a world that had existed before him.

“Look here,” Alyssa pointed to one of the larger frames on the wall, “This is Charlotte. She must have been maybe eight here. This is her mom and this is her dad and this is Thomas.”

Jonas looked closely at the picture, first at Charlotte, who looked unsettlingly like herself, and then at Thomas. Jonas had never met Thomas but he heard news of him from time to time through Charlotte. He was married now and his daughter looked exactly like the photo of eight year old Charlotte. Next to the family portrait was a picture from Thomas' wedding and Jonas could see Alysas staring at it.

Alyssa turned around and reached out to run her fingers along the fine woodworkings around the legs of the dining room table.. “This is the same table.” Alyssa got down on her knees and looked up underneath. “Charlotte and I drew picture all over the bottom of the table once. We got in so much trouble for it. You can still see it.” She ran her fingers along the wood, testing for the waxy feeling of the crayon.

Jonas stayed standing above her. He took her word for it that the bottom of the table was scarred.

Alyssa worked her way to the kitchen door. “Oh neat! There are still dirty dishes in the sink. Think about it, she was just here, alive, three days ago.” She said, disappearing into the next room.

The dining room table was covered with boxes of pictures and a stack of classic novels like the ones Jonas had read in middle school. Jonas flipped his fingers through one of the boxes of photos marked 1993. He found a section of pictures from a barbecue which he removed from the box and began to shuffle through. A man by a grill in a pair of grungy shorts and a wife-beater. Two women posing on a sun dried wooden bench swing. A group of children with a slip and slide. A picnic table covered in food, bowls of salad, hamburger buns, chopped fruit, something in a casserole dish. Then he found a picture with Alyssa and Thomas. It was of a young couple nested at the table, they were probably high school age, she was perhaps a year or two younger than he was. She was wearing a pink top with thin straps that showed off her tan lines. Like most girls her age she wore too much makeup, simply because she could. Her unassuming lips were brighter than the patchwork red tablecloth at which they sat and Jonas could not make out the freckles across her nose. She was pressing a bare shoulder up against the his and their arms followed the same path under the table.

Jonas stared at the girl in the photo until Alyssa came back into the room, then he shuffled the pictures back together and put the box back on the table in a distinctly different place.“Whole lot of pictures.” He said to her.

Alyssa placed herself behind him, up against his back, and slid her arms underneath his, so that she could squeeze him and rest the side of her head on his back. “I told you this would be fun,” she said.

Jonas wandered the first floor of the house, investigating knickknacks, furniture, and the colorfully dark wallpaper until Alyssa started up the stairs.

“There's a neat little crawlspace under these stairs.”

“Yeah?” Jonas grasped the trinket in his pocket, rubbing its smooth simplicity through the plastic bag. He wondered how many times he would have to lie to her.

“Yeah, I loved to hide in there when we were little girls.”

“Seems like a pretty obvious placed to hide.” Jonas smiled.

Alyssa laughed. “Yea, I wasn't really good at that game. But sometimes you just like to hide away someplace.”

The first room on the left was the girls room. The walls were faded pink except for a bright square by the door where Jonas assumed there had once been a desk. There was barely room for both the beds in this room. The heads of each were placed on either side of the window that opened to the front of the house. Above each bed a dried bouquet of flowers was hanging. On the right, dried lavender with baby's breath and some kind of once green stick hanging over a bed covered by a blanket with snow white on it and a few large fuzzy bears. It was the childhood of a little girl as preserved by a mother, something shed and collected, like dust on top shelves. Above the bed on the left were white field flowers along with one red rose that seemed out of place. That bed was made with white sheets and a white comforter with light pink flowers, whatever it had been was erased. There were frilly white curtains on both windows that would appear at home in the bedroom of both a little girl and an old woman.

“Ew, she's made this room so girly.” Alyssa leaned over the child's bed to peek out the side window at her old house. “It's all so empty now.” She gently squeezed the fabric draperies between her fingers. “I don't know why she would do this. This room was so much fun.”

Jonas could tell by the look of the room that there was nothing here for Alyssa to connect with. “This was Charlotte's room?” He asked.

“Yeah. There used to be Smashing Pumpkins posters all over that wall.” Alyssa waved her hand through the air trying to envision the room in her mind as it had once been. Then she moved on.

The next room was less empty than Charlotte's. The bed was made but not by an old woman, there was a dark blue sheet over the window to keep out the sun on late mornings. There was a poster for Rushmore on one wall and the shelves under the window were still stacked with books. By the bed there was a nightstand and in the nightstand there was a drawer.

“Whose room was this?” Jonas asked, trying to disguise his voice as sincere curiosity.

“Thomas'. He was a year or two older than us.” She said walking away from Jonas to the closed bedroom door across the hall. “You want to see her bedroom?”

Jonas stared into Thomas' room at the bedside table and played with the trinket in his pocket. “You think she'd mind if I used her toilet.”

“I'm sure it'd make her furious,” Alyssa said through a laugh, “but what's she going to do about it?”

Jonas went into the hallway bathroom and closed the door. He took the plastic bag from his pocket and removed the necklace. He reached over and flushed the toilet. He rinsed off his hands, collected up the necklace, and quietly crossed the hallway to Thomas' room.

Alyssa was still in the master bedroom when Jonas sat on the bed by the table. Jonas pulled open the drawer in the bedside table. Inside was a hardcover Bible like the ones the Gideons leave behind. Jonas put the necklace in the back of the drawer, then he pushed the Bible up against it to hold it in place. Someday someone would find it, someone who didn't remember it. They likely wouldn't notice that the pendant wasn't worth as much as the replacement gold chance on which it hung, all they would see was something cheap and forgotten.

Tucked into the seem where the side of the drawer met the bottom was a wallet sized photograph which Jonas pressed his thumb up against and pulled back into existence. It was a picture of a girl, like a high school photo. She wore a green blouse and around her neck was the gold necklace, bright and new, and hanging high around her neck so that it stood out. Her freckles were still missing but at least her lips were not as bright.

Jonas put the yellowed photograph into his shirt pocket, and closed the door behind him as he left the room.

“This is creepy.” Said Alyssa, standing at the foot of Mrs. Wallace's bed.

“What is?” The room was a tan color, the sheets were brown and all the furniture was made of one stained wood or another.

“She made the bed.”

“You make the bed every morning.”

“Yeah, but I'm not going to any more. It's like she was never here, or like she knew she was going to die.”

“Would it have been any less creepy if the bed were a mess?”

“Well, I suppose not. But its creepy none the less.”

“We're in a dead woman's house.”

“I guess so.”

While Jonas investigated a shelf of books, hoping to find one that was interesting, Alyssa snuck back across the hallway. When Jonas left the old woman's bedroom Alyssa was standing just inside the door to Thomas' room, resting the palm of her right hand on her neckline. Jonas walked up behind her and wrapped his arms around her, grasping her left hand with his right and squeezing her tightly. He could feel the diamond of her engagement ring digging into his palm. She curled in her shoulders and leaned back, trying to push herself into Jonas. If he could have opened his chest and enveloped her in a shell he would have.

After a stretched out moment at the door Jonas squeezed her tighter than before to bring her attention back to him. As he stepped away from the doorway he released her in such a way that she submitted and left with him. When she started down the stairs Jonas went back and shut all the bedroom doors.

Alyssa marched to the car, leaving Jonas to lock up the house. As he closed the front door he listened for his mind, for his clockwork doubts, something irritating. But there was silence.

Jonas sat in a lawn chair in the garage with the door open, listening to the rain while he read a book of short stories and rocked back and forth, creating a rhythmic creaking sound that gave a pace to his thoughts.

Alyssa pulled up into the driveway and opened her umbrella from inside the car. She quickly stepped around to the trunk and pulled out a few bags.

“Reading something good?” Alyssa asked as she shook off the umbrella inside the garage.

“It's brilliant.” Jonas pulled himself away from the pages and tugged on her arm until she bent down and kissed him. “Oh, my beautiful votaress.” He said. Pressing into her wrist was a rubber band, like a chain bracelet with too few links. She must have picked it up somewhere.

“Something inspirational?”

“Yeah, though I wish it could have been mine.”

“It is yours. You bought the book didn't you. Now it's yours.”

“I don't think that counts.”

“You still haven't seen my necklace have you?”

“No. I'm sure it'll turn up somewhere. No big deal, right?” Jonas dropped his book into one of her bags, got up, and hugged her tightly.

“Right, no big deal,” she said, “it'll turn up.”

Jonas took the bags from her and led her into their house. “Nice day at work?”

“Yeah.” Alyssa turned and smiled at him, a toothy, loving smile. Something empty.