The Memory Thief

by Rachel Keener

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

"Burning down Black Snake trailer was easy. The hard thing was walking away, when what I wanted most was to watch it die... " When Angel sets fire to her childhood home, it isn't the end -- it's the beginning. Left with nothing but a few memories in her pocket, Angel escapes into the fields of tobacco, the only place she has ever felt safe. Hidden by those green-gold leaves, she sets her eyes on the mountains and believes someone waits for her there. Angel will do whatever she has to until she finds her. She longs to empty her pockets, hand over the answers to what became of her, and whisper, This is my story. As Angel journeys toward the mountains, Hannah is struggling to tell her own story. The daughter of missionaries who follow the rules of a small and strict religious sect, modesty is prized above all else. Wearing floor length polyester skirts, and never cutting her hair, Hannah is forced to live a separate life from her peers. Until the summer her family moves to James Island, South Carolina. Slowly, Hannah begins to escape the confines of her strict upbringing, and soon makes a choice that will forever change the course of her life. As these two women's paths connect, Hannah's past will prove to mean everything to Angel's future.

Release date: February 17, 2010

Publisher: Center Street

Print pages: 384

Sample

The fire stole everyone’s attention. The newspapers, the gossips, the farmers from miles away. What they overlooked, what
they never got close enough to see, was that the real story was in the smoke. How it hovered low, too heavy to soar. Filled
with too many dead things to ever rise.


Weeks earlier I hid a bag of supplies under the tobacco leaves. A little food and water. The money I stole from Daddy’s glove
compartment. A sweatshirt for warmth. Then I sat and whispered a drunk woman’s story to the fields. I called her Momma. But
if the night was cold enough, and sleep far away, then the drunk woman’s name might be my own. You can call me Angel.


The story was long, but only a few words really mattered. Words like five thousand dollars. Carolina. And rich Holy Roller. I stamped them in black-and-white letters behind the lids of my eyes. Like a map to someplace I was going. Like a key to
who I really was.


With my getaway bag packed, I held a match in my trembling hand. I struck it, and watched it glow against the Tennessee sky.
But then I thought of you, and my lips pressed together to blow out that fire. I’d forgotten something. Memories.


I went inside the trailer and tucked a couple in each pocket. Not the best ones, like good report cards or the birthday candle
Mrs. Swarm gave me in a cupcake. I left those to burn. What I tucked in my pockets were the answers to what had become of
me. To what I had seen and felt. I kept those things because I believed. Because I hoped one day you would ask.


I returned to the matches, read the words across the front of the pack: Keep out of reach of children. It had been seven years since the school safety lecture where the dream of fire first came to me. Local firemen got their
kicks from showing little kids spectacular pictures of barn fires and forest fires. But the ones that I returned to, snuck
back to an empty classroom during recess to see, were the trailer fires. Nothing was left but black ash on the ground. Only
a label at the bottom of the page—Single Wide Trailer, electrical fire—left any clue. When the firemen showed those pictures, they swore that nothing burns as completely or quickly as an old rusted-out
trailer. With the electrical wiring sandwiched in between wood that’s not really wood at all, just some sort of stiff paper
that’s cheaper to make than it is to cut a real tree. And the heat. Pouring down from a steamy Tennessee sun. The rusted metal
sucks it in, the cheap walls trap it, and it’s ready to burn up quicker than a matchbox.


“In five minutes,” the fireman said, “it’s all gone. Every picture. Every memory. That’s why we’re here today. To talk about
a safety plan.” Their point was about naming meeting places, how to open windows and feel for hot doorknobs. But I sifted
through that and started dreaming smoky dreams. Ones where everything disappeared in five hot minutes.


I waited long years to light that match. My own safety plan forming slowly, until it moved and kicked inside me with its own
life. And when the moment finally came, I moved my hand smoothly across the front of the pack. Felt the scratch of friction
inside my fist. Heard the quick hiss of new fire. And I smiled. Burning down Black Snake trailer was easy. The hard thing
was walking away, when what I wanted most was to watch it die.


But I couldn’t stay and risk being caught. So I hid in the bacca and thought of you. Whispered old familiar questions. Where are you? So much time has passed. And where have you been?

Long after the sun had set, I saw smoke still hovering. Unwanted memories burning up the night as I sat whispering with my
heart on fire, shivering beneath the Tennessee moon.


Things go missing in Carolina. That’s what Hannah would remember most about her time there. It started easy, even sweetly,
with small things like words. The wasteful parts, whole syllables, disappeared around her. Charleston became Chah’stun. Hurricane became her’cun. Yankee was Yank, only spoken with a snort. Hard g’s were an insult. Good manners required a softer tongue.


Comfort went missing next. Hannah’s first hour in Carolina left her sweating in a way no powder-soft deodorant could help.
Poor Yank, dressed in stinging polyester. That night, after swatting away palm-size mosquitoes, she walked to the water and
stuck her face close enough to feel its mist. Sucked in her breath like a newborn ready to yell out a first cry.


Her family arrived with one suitcase each. Father’s was everything expected. Clothes, maps, sketches of bridges, and Bibles.
Mother’s was nearly the same. But underneath her clothes and soaps and Bibles was a small wedding picture. The one where her
husband reached under her veil and pulled her out for the kiss.


Hannah had been given the smallest suitcase and told to keep it light. But clothes weren’t a challenge. Gray and khaki ankle-length
skirts, gray sweaters, long-sleeved blouses, and a few pairs of pleated kool-lots—shorts that were so loose they looked like
skirts and fell the required eight inches below her knees. She dug through her nightstand drawer, searching for anything else
she might need. There were pictures of her and her friends at Bible camp. Flowers dried and pressed into an album page. A
folded-up two-inch triangle torn from a magazine page she found loose in a shopping cart. It hid the checklist: Top Ten Ways to Know a Guy Likes You.

Hannah’s mother scanned the contents of her suitcase, pulled out a white shirt and replaced it with a yellow one. Then she
handed Hannah a trash bag and told her to clear the junk and organize her mess of books. Dozens of them were piled in sloppy
stacks around her room.


Those stacks began the day of her sixteenth birthday party. “No more banned books. You’re old enough and smart enough, so
if it’s literature you can read it,” Father announced. Hannah shook her head at him, embarrassed by the shock of her friends.


“Like Psalms,” Father whispered. “People quote happy ones, yet so many speak of suffering.” He handed her a copy of The Grapes of Wrath. “Like this,” he said.


That winter Hannah hid inside the Mission Room and made up for sixteen years of various versions of Pilgrim’s Progress. She loved that room. Maps lined the walls with little red flags pinned to all the exotic places her parents had served.
Shelves were filled with souvenirs—baskets woven by natives, broken pottery, and a hand-painted porcelain doll.


Babies were the last souvenirs her parents had collected. They spent their youth serving the miserable and poor of the world.
But at the age of forty-four they turned up pregnant in the middle of rural Philippines and realized they were more than missionaries.
They were a mother and father. And the first thing on their minds was the safety of their own. They left. For the security
of a hospital and a doctor. For the steady paycheck and good life Father’s PhD in structural engineering could offer. For
a little surprise they wrapped in pink blankets and named Hannah Joy.


All the energy they had poured into missions they now focused on building Hannah a spotless world. They lived in a neighborhood
that sparkled with money. And drove forty-five minutes into the countryside to the church where Hannah’s mother was raised.


They called it Tabernacle. The building’s great marble columns and stone archways set it apart from modern, redbrick churches.
And the women took it one step further. Their devotion to God and holiness was proven by floor-length skirts, high-collared
polyester blouses, and uncut hair.


When Hannah was three, her parents pondered their age. “I’ll be sixty-two when she marries,” Mother said dryly. And they began
to notice how different Hannah was from other little girls in their neighborhood. They watched her struggle to ride her tricycle
in gray baggy kool-lots, while other baby girls splashed naked in tiny plastic pools set in their front yards. It didn’t hurt
them when Hannah couldn’t ride the pony at a neighborhood party because her ankle-length skirt kept getting in the way. But
it made them see her need.


“I won’t conceive again,” Mother said. “I’m forty-seven.” So Hannah’s father took one last flight to the Philippines and came
home with Bethlehem Rose, a two-and-a-half-year-old orphan they called Bethie. Now two little girls struggled to ride a tricycle
instead of just one.


With only six months between their birthdays, the girls were nearly twins. One pale with white blond hair, the other golden
with black hair. Her parents were relieved that Hannah didn’t have to start kindergarten alone. Bethie was there beside her.
Both of them in plain grays and pastels, their hair in long braids down their backs.


It was at school that the real difference began to show. Letters spoke to Hannah before any of her peers, and she was reading
two-syllable words by the end of the first month. She was marked very early by her teachers as excellent. And the other students would sometimes call her Nerd before they would think to call her Holy Roller.


Not so for Bethie. If the teacher bothered to call on her, it was only to be disappointed. Words never came easy for Bethie.
Her parents paid for speech therapy, and when there was no improvement they were told it was a maturity thing. Bethie simply
needed to outgrow her stuttering. Mother tried bribing her for smooth words, but by the time Bethie was eight she had switched
to punishment instead. When vinegar on a stuttering tongue didn’t work, Mother decided not to notice it anymore.


But there was always punishment waiting for Bethie at school. She rode the bus to a long gray building with different teachers
and shuffled classes every hour. She wore a white men’s-style shirt and a dark gray floor-length skirt every day. Her hair
was smoothed back as tight as it could be, her face without a smile. And when people spoke to her, even if it was a curious
stranger asking Gosh, are you hot? Bethie shook her head coolly, her eyes narrowing in anger.


Hannah tried more. She wore yellow because she knew it complemented her hair. And kool-lots, because even though they were
baggy like some joke of a skirt, they at least showed her feet. Hannah’s hair was braided loosely, so strands of gold could
work themselves free and glow around her face, like an accidental halo.


But both of the girls were teased viciously. Their classmates called them Polyester Pollys. And they never drank Kool-Aid
with their lunch. If they did, without fail someone would yell, “Watch out! The Jim Jones girls have gotten to the Kool-Aid
again!” When they jogged the slow mile at PE, where everyone else wore the snazzy gym uniforms of shorts and tanks, someone
always snickered about them doing the Holy Roller shuffle. And it was true. Nobody can run far in a floor-length skirt. Sometimes
Hannah wondered if that was the point.


When Father announced he’d won the lucrative bid to strengthen the bridge that spanned the Cooper River, and that they’d spend
the summer in South Carolina, it was the holy Yes both girls had been waiting for. It was an escape for Bethie. From all the kids that knew she couldn’t speak smoothly. And
from the teachers who wouldn’t look at her, hadn’t looked at her since first grade, when they “socially passed” her to please
her parents and let her stay with her sister.


For Hannah, it meant adventure, like in the books she loved. It meant, simply, the gates were opening.

They left behind a house filled with so many rooms they could spend the day without ever bumping into one another. And traded
it for a shack on the marshes of James Island. A two-bedroom, one-bath, company-owned box that Father insisted on. He’d turned
down the offer of a renovated historic condo within walking distance to the Battery and Rainbow Row. He wanted the mosquitoes.
The mud crabs and the culture. He wanted to feel like a real southerner, even if he couldn’t sound like one.


Each of them smiled as they unpacked. Hannah and Bethie smiled over the joy of escape. Mother and Father over the excitement
of their daughters. Over the pleasure of an extended vacation in a southern beach town. Over the promise of their old life,
waiting for them back home.


One morning their first week there, Father rolled a used bike out to the girls, as they sat by the marsh. “You could explore
a bit, if you want. The tourist traffic hits the other beaches. And the shoulders are wide, so you could stay on those.”


Hannah squealed with joy and ran to the bike. Father noticed Bethie standing behind her. “Both of you girls.”

Bethie smiled, but she never sat on that bike. Even if she wanted to, it was always gone before dawn. Hannah spent her mornings
on the beach. It was two and a half miles from the shack, and if she set her mind to it she could be there in under twenty
minutes. She rarely did, though, preferring instead to take her time and learn the details of her summer home.


Like the pile of oyster shells at the end of a gravel drive that served as the only sign for a motel, a long brick rectangle
hidden in the woods that served fresh-catch steam buckets on picnic tables in the front yard. Or the miles of marsh, with
its smell that turned her stomach at first, until the days passed and she forgot to notice it. And the palm trees that lined
Folly Road, like something from a paradise postcard.


She set her alarm clock based on the tides. And if she reminded herself before she went to sleep, she could usually wake up
just before it rang. She’d turn off the clock and dress quietly in the dark. Bethie would lay perfectly still, her pillow
touching Hannah’s.


Only when the water pulled back from the shore could she find curling starfish, sea urchins, and perfect-circle sand dollars.
She’d pick them up carefully and sometimes take them home to Bethie. “Look,” she’d say, as she showed her sister. “Treasure’s
in the low points.”


She had packed only two pairs of kool-lots, but that was what she preferred to pedal in so that her feet were free to move.
She still wore the polyester blouses, buttoned at her wrists and collar. Hannah had been taught not to care about “pretty.”
Modesty was the coveted prize. Sometimes the competition could even get catty. Young girls at church would go through fads
of wearing head coverings, even though the rules didn’t require them for unmarried women. But pretty took on a new meaning in that beach town. Golden skin was the standard. When Hannah passed nearly naked people on the streets,
her forehead beaded with sweat on a ninety-five-degree day, she knew her polyester confused them.


Sometimes after sunrise, Hannah would relax in the sand and wait for the others. The old lady that walked her little black
dog. The man who liked to jog and treated the rock piles, the ruins of old fishing piers, like enormous hurdles. They knew
her, too, as part of their usual scene, and always gave a curious but friendly nod. Their arrival meant the day had begun
and the world was awake. Hannah would hop on her bike and pedal furiously, letting the wind shake the sand from her. Then
she’d ride down to the fruit market, a collection of little tents where fresh produce was sold. She’d pick up whatever Mother
had requested, usually peaches or sweet corn. Sometimes a bag of boiled peanuts for her breakfast.


James Island taught her how to eat. Showed her what fruit tastes like when it’s still warm from a ripening sun. How fish is
meant to be eaten, no more than a few hours from the ocean. Handing somebody a ripe Carolina peach was the same as giving
them your best smile. Passing a bowl of shrimp and grits was as clear as any Love you could get. Food was a language there.


One evening, Hannah was bored after supper. With her parents’ permission she pedaled down to the market, even though she’d
already been that morning. She was watching people inspect the fruit, how they thumped the melons and squeezed the peaches,
when she saw it. A yellowed paper taped to the market tent pole. OYSTER ROAST! FRIDAY AT SUNSET. FOLLY BEACH. LIVE MUSIC!

She biked to the beach. In the distance was music. At first, just practice runs on old guitars. A few beats of a drum. Then
they started for real, jumpy songs with the moan of a harmonica. There was smoke in the air, and far away the glow of an oyster
fire. She pedaled closer, until she felt the good time rippling from them like the waves at high tide. Bronzed bodies were
everywhere, and Hannah did not try and blend in. She had lived through too many bad days of school to believe that she could.
Besides, she was taught from a very early age that she belonged to a separate and holy people. Compared to holy, separate
was always the easy part.


Past the crowd, toward the shore, people worked furiously. They were icing down beers and sorting buckets of oysters. They
weren’t naked like the others, each of them wearing a black T-shirt with the letters CSM stitched on the pocket. And they
weren’t listening to the music. Instead they were listening to a woman calling out instructions. “They runnin’ outta beer.
C’mon now, ice that down and get it to ’em.”


Money flew their way—for the buckets of oysters roasted with corn and potatoes, for the Dixie cups filled with sweet tea,
for the bottles of beer. The music pulsed louder and stronger, all while the black-shirted CSM team circled the crowd and
weaved through them, passing out goodies in exchange for fistfuls of money.


Hannah kept looking back to the woman. Her black skin glistened by the fire. She controlled everything. From the volume of
the band—They need to turn that speaker up—to the amount of seasoning in the oyster buckets: Don’t get too heavy with that Ol’ Bay. It was her money, too. Boys with young muscled arms were slinging buckets for her and handing wads of cash back. But it was
what was behind the table, just fifteen feet back, that made Hannah stand up and take a step closer.


A full moon hung behind her, its glow bouncing off the white tops of each new wave. She saw naked shoulders pushing into the
water, cutting through the pull of the waves. They crashed over a boy, and he sank low. She stood, waiting for him to resurface.
And waiting some more. Until it was time to return home. She left, uneasy.


Two weeks later she was pedaling down the road when she passed the pile of oyster shells. There was a sign by the shells that
day: Cora’s Steampot Motel. Help wanted.


Maybe it was the way the fire made that woman’s skin glisten like the inside of an oyster shell. Maybe it was the thought
of all those black CSM T-shirts. Or maybe a part of her was still waiting, wondering if that boy had ever surfaced. Whatever
the reason was, Hannah pedaled down the drive and stared at the brick rectangle, a neon sign flashing CORA’S STEAMPOT MOTEL in the front window. A smaller one hung on the door. Rent a Room, Get a Bucket!

The front desk was empty, except for a little bell to ring for service. She tapped it shyly and waited.

“In the kitchen,” a big voice called from inside.

“Ma’am,” Hannah called out. “I’m here about the job?”

“Come on back. Shut the door good ’cause I don’t want no more flies.”

Hannah stepped past the front office, closed the door but kept her hand on the knob. Inside, she noticed the entire middle
of the motel was the kitchen. With each side framed by long skinny halls dotted with four doors each. The kitchen was filled
with a freezer, a double stove, and two double refrigerators. In the corner of the room was an enormous sink, filled with
metal buckets.


The woman from the oyster roast stood by the stove. She looked Hannah up and down and started laughing. “Sissy, git in here.
Somebody’s here ’bout the job.”


A younger woman walked in and burst out laughing, too.

Hannah was used to being everyone’s favorite joke. And there in that
kitchen, she knew she was ridiculous. With sweat staining her shirt, her collar thrown open in a desperate search for relief,
and beige kool-lots clinging to damp thighs.


“Keeps the mosquitoes off at least,” she mumbled, looking down at her feet. “Haven’t had one single bite since I’ve been here.”

“What she talkin’ ’bout? Mosquituhs?” Sissy said, still laughing. The woman at the stove tilted her head to the side, a big
grin still on her face.


“You think we’re laughin’ ’bout your clothes, don’t you? We’re laughin’ ’cause you the most unlikely shrimper we ever seen.”

“Shrimper?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you were hiring a maid or a waitress.”

“You never eat here, have you?” Sissy asked. “We hand out buckets, but after that everybody serve themselves. We just catch
it and cook it. If they need a drink refill, they walk in and git it. They need another bucket? They walk in and git it. We
ain’t needin’ any waitress help.”


“Well now, wait a minute,” the older woman said, as she peeled a potato slowly. “We don’t need a waitress, exactly. But I’m
tired of makin’ beds up, ain’t you, Sissy? And at dinner, there’s always somebody that don’t know the rules. Leavin’ their
bucket on the table. And the boys run late with their deliveries, too, and one of us has to run down to the dock to get the
catch. If we hired her to pick up those loose ends, maybe we could focus on the cookin’ a bit more. Maybe we could finally
start servin’ that key lime pie you’ve been wantin’ to make and charge a robbery for.” She looked at Hannah carefully, and
didn’t laugh this time. “My name is Cora. And this is my steampot motel.”


“I can clean tables very well,” Hannah said. “And I’ve been making my own bed since I was four.” She looked them both in the
eyes, the way her father had trained her. “It proves you’re trustworthy,” he liked to say.


“I believe you.” Cora nodded. “Put this apron on, and I’ll show you the buckets we need rinsed.”

“She’s gonna git hot with that apron on top of all them clothes,” Sissy said.

The apron was a thick, canvaslike material, hanging well below Hannah’s knees. It was made to help protect from steam burns
and hot water splashes, as the buckets were being prepared and served.


Hannah looked at them. Under their aprons they were nearly naked. Braless under their tank tops, big breasts spreading wide
and draping over their stomachs. They wore cutoffs, flip-flops, and long leatherlike gloves reaching up to their elbows.


“Wanna run home and change?” Cora asked kindly.

For a moment, Hannah sounded like Bethie. She stared at the ground and stammered about how the heat didn’t bother her. About
how her skin was sensitive to the sun. But she could feel them staring at her, and she could nearly see her lies swirling
with the hot steam in that room.


“Stuff like this is all I have,” she finally said, shrugging her shoulders.

“I gotta T-shirt in the trunk. It’s an extra-small, too, that’s why I ain’t give it out yet,” Sissy said, and laughed. “We
never had no extra-small person work here before.”


Hannah took that prized T-shirt and held it loosely. An old ache returned, as real to her as the burn of steam as she reached
across hot buckets for the soap Cora held out. It was uncertainty, that pain that settled in her chest and tightened her lungs.
It was the constant wondering, summed up by the simple question her mind was always whispering: Is it a sin? Would God still want her if she wore a T-shirt, if the rules of modesty were broken and fresh air cooled her steamy arms?


She thought about Mother, working furiously at home organizing supplies for the children that passed through the downtown
shelter. Before they even left home, she had contacted the shelter and asked them what they needed most. Immediately after,
she began soliciting corporate donations. And once she settled in and toured the shelter, she started writing letters asking
for help from her Yankee friends.


It was her gift, organizing. And within a few weeks, the living room of the shack had been turned into a closet. With stacks of pajamas donated from
department stores. Diapers from local grocery stores. Little baby blankets from her church sewing circle.


Hannah knew what Mother would say. Standing in the middle of projects to be organized, Mother would give her a memorized,
automatic response. She wouldn’t have time to consider—even as she worked in her own polyester sweat-box—the ninety-two-degree
heat. There were children in the world forced to live naked. What did it matter if she was a little hot?


Hannah held the T-shirt up, saw how it would fit her perfectly. The length falling just to the waist of her kool-lots. She
felt the smooth, cool cotton. And imagined how well it would breathe, letting air flow through it and over her skin. The heat
seemed to burn more than usual. Like hell sat under her skin.


She thought of Father. As he worked, somewhere downtown, being paid for his genius. She thought of the sermon, about honoring
the Sabbath, that they recently attended. Afterward they stopped for gas at a little station where the owner pumped it himself.


“It’s not a sin,” Father said. “For that man to be pumping gas today. He’s doing it because he needs to feed his family.”
Then he reminded her about David, about how he ate the holy showbread meant only for priests. “God doesn’t want his children
hungry.”


That was Father’s gift: mercy. He followed all the rules himself. But not only did he manage to pardon when others around him didn’t—sometimes he found
value in it.


Mother’s way was easier. She never asked questions or raised doubts. Long ago, she had swallowed the rules. They were the
bones that held her up. But on that ninety-two-degree day, Hannah chose mercy. From the heat. From the sweat. From the polyester
that trapped it all inside.


It was the first time she had ever worn a T-shirt. She was sixteen years old, and how she longed for a mirror at that moment.
Looking down at herself, she saw things she normally only saw in the shower. Like the fact that she had a waist. One that
was normally hidden in the boxy drape of a high-collared men’s-style shirt. But in an extra-small T-shirt, the lines of her
body were clear. She was narrow at the center. The hourglass God had designed her to be. And there was something else. Something
that made her blush and quickly look away. Only to look back down again. She had breasts. Round, full, womanly breasts. They
were still covered. But they were no longer hiding.


She put the long apron on and noticed her skin. The nakedness of her arms, all the way up to her shoulders. They were the
color of milk.


“Gonna wash some buckets or stare at that apron?” Sissy called.

Hannah headed to the corner, where Sissy showed her how to take a steel-wool pad and a drop of soap, and scrub the tin bucket
out.


“We don’t fry nothin’ here,” she said proudly. “They ain’t a drop of hot grease you gotta worry ’bout. Just scrub it, rinse
it good, and set it in the rack to dry. Easiest dishwashin’ job you’ll ever come by.”


The buckets were practically clean, having already been emptied of leftovers. There were some bits of corn or potato occasionally
stuck to the side. But nothing that required any muscle to remove. Hannah washed them quickly.


“I knew you were good,” Cora said approvingly. “Now come over here and let me teach you ’bout the steampot.”

On the sto. . .