Shortlist Saturdays: What Red Remembers by Zelda Knapp

Red has three distinct memories of his mother.

            He remembers the first smile she gave him. His twin sister Dahlia says he’s making up the memory from composite later memories, but Red knows he remembers the first time his mother smiled at him. Her forehead was shiny with sweat and her cheeks were pink and streaky-wet. Bits of hair escaped from her ponytail and stuck to her face. Her hair, the summer apple red of it turned dark, heart’s blood.

            When she held him the first time and looked into his face, she smiled big, her cheeks rounding, her mouth opening, her eyes crinkling until they were almost shut. Red looked back at her and burbled. She ran her fingertips lightly along the side of his face and her smile faltered, just for a moment. Just for a moment, her eyebrows contracted in worry and her lips closed. Then she shook her head and looked away, smiling again, not as big this time, and let him be taken by a nurse for cleaning. Dahlia says he can’t possibly remember that happening and he’s making it up and he’s just being paranoid.

But Red remembers.

**

Red’s second memory of his mother nobody knows about. He’d been about eighteen months old at the time and toddling around on his own in the house, leaving Dahlia outside to argue with the ants in the backyard. His mother was out on the back porch, sipping lemonade with a friend, watching Dahlia play. Dad, ostensibly watching over Red in the house, was distracted by the newspaper. Red had gotten bored hiding from Dad and waiting to see if he would come look for him (he didn’t) and so he made his way across the kitchen tiles to the screen door off the back porch. As he got near the door, he could hear his mother speaking quietly with the other grown-up.

            “I don’t think I understand,” the woman said.

            “It’s not—I don’t want you to think I would judge my children,” his mother answered, each word slowly paced, stepping cautiously into the air. “They’re still so young. They’re babies, really. You can’t tell anything at this age.”

            “Then why do you think—”

            “I worry. I always thought, when a child was made, a little piece of your soul went into it to help make the new one. A little piece of both of your souls, so it adds up to make the new soul that’s partly yours and partly his. And I worry, is all … what happens when it’s twins? Is more of your soul taken away, so you can’t love them as well? Or do they get only half of what was given in the first place? Or does maybe one get all of it and the other—”

            “Helen. You don’t really think the boy is soulless?”

            “I don’t—no. No. No, I don’t think that could be true. But why do I feel as if I’ll never be as close to him as I am to Suzy, or even to Dahlia? There’s something strange about him. Or about me.”

            “You’re afraid you won’t love your own son?”

            His mother hesitated, and might have answered, but Dahlia called out at that moment that the ants were cheating, and she got distracted. Even if she had turned to look back toward the screen door, she would have had no idea she’d been overhead. Red slumped down into a ball against the door, holding his stomach. It felt like burning. He didn’t know some of the words the two grown-ups had been using. He didn’t know what soul was or strange was and he wasn’t sure he knew what love was yet either. But he knew that somehow he was missing something, or his mother had taken something. There was a something wrong with him, and his mother blamed him for it.

**

Red’s third memory of his mother is her last afternoon in the hospital. He and Dahlia were five and a half. He remembered it more clearly than Dahlia, who’d had her eyes closed. Dad stood up from the chair by the bed and turned away. Susanna stood near the end of the bed, her hand resting lightly on the stiff blanket, almost touching her mother’s foot. Her other hand half-reached toward Dahlia, parked stubborn and blind next to her mother’s pale hand. Red went to sit in Dad’s chair. His mother focused on him and smiled, but her breath frosted out of her mouth. Red thought if he put his hand in her mouth it might freeze and fall off, like the icicles off the drainpipe in winter.

            “My baby,” his mother whispered, and her fingers flickered, grasping. Red lifted his small warm hand to put it on hers. “My babies,” she breathed. “You’re still so little, aren’t you … too early … to really know.”

            “Mommy?” Dahlia’s little voice asked. Her eyes stayed closed. Her mother did not look at her, but kept focus on the young son, the unloved soulless boy. She twisted her wrist slightly to wrap her fingers around his small hand. “Mommy?” Dahlia’s voice asked.

            “You have to take … care of each other, my babies,” Red’s mother said. Her hollow fingers suddenly squeezed and he cried out from the pain. “You have to take care of her.” Red pulled his hand away and stuck his fingertips in his mouth, biting down on them lightly.

            Behind him, he heard a hiccupping sound from his dad, a huh-huh-huh sound that he seemed to be trying to swallow. “Mommy?” Dahlia’s voice asked. Susanna finally moved to pull Dahlia away, pulled her close, told her not to look, it’s okay, don’t look. She led Dahlia out of the room, then came back and wrapped her nine-year-old arms around Red.

            “It’s okay, Red. Let’s leave her with Daddy.”

            Susanna led Red out and sat him down on a bench next to her, with Dahlia curled up on her other side. Red tucked his feet up and put his head in her lap. Above him he felt Dahlia settle against Susanna, resting her hands on Red’s hair.

            His mother didn’t die right then. She fell asleep and then slipped away sometime after midnight. Red didn’t go back into the room to see her.

            They stayed in the hospital waiting room all night. In the morning, after the nurses took his mother out and after Dad sat to take care of the paperwork, Dahlia went back into the empty room. Susanna went silent and sad, curled up on the waiting room couch and not noticing the little twins. Red had to explain to Dahlia what happened. He followed her into the empty room and looked at the freshly-made bed. As if no one had ever been there. Dahlia stood staring out the window. She could barely see over the sill. Red walked up and stood next to her.

            “Mommy’s not coming back,” he said.

            Quiet.

            “Why not?” Dahlia’s voice asked, small and high.

            “She’s dead. She can’t.” He paused. “She loved you, she said so.”

            Dahlia slipped her hand into Red’s and squeezed.

            “She didn’t want to leave us, though,” Dahlia’s voice said.

            Red watched a leaf clinging to a branch outside the window. The branch kept vibrating in the wind, like one of Susanna’s violin strings. He could almost hear the leaf humming as the branch pulled taut, released, pulled taut again. It was a red leaf, already dead on the tree.

            He thought about his mother and her warm smile and summer apple hair. He thought about the gentle way her hand rested on his head, her other hand rustling through Dahlia’s hair. He thought about the way her smile sometimes faded when she looked at him, as if his presence confused her, and the way she then smiled bigger, to pretend the moment hadn’t happened. The way she tried. He thought about the weird hiccupping sound Dad made and the way Susanna’s face looked kind of melted out in the waiting room. He thought about his mother’s charge to him to take care of Dahlia. He wondered if he hated her.

            Red squeezed Dahlia’s hand back. “She didn’t want to leave.”

            He waited for the leaf to pull free of the violin string branch and flutter down, fly free, fall. It pulled taut, released, pulled taut.

            He stood there for two hours, staring up.

**

            Red has three distinct memories of his mother. He doesn’t nurse them to exhaustion, chewing them raw like Dahlia chews on her cheek when she’s taking a test. But he carries them with him, like a forgotten photo tucked into his wallet: foxed edges, but somehow still crystal clear at their center. And when he looks at himself in the mirror to adjust the cowlick in his hair  or to shave what little stubble is finally growing in, he avoids looking into his eyes. He avoids the ghost of his mother’s fading smile, mirrored in the soulless black of his pupils. Dahlia says his eyes are the same as hers, and the only memories he could have of mom are in the pictures in the album. But Red has these other pictures in his wallet, pictures of a mom who saw too much of him to love him the way she loved his sisters. Red would like to forget.

            But Red remembers.

Zelda Knapp’s literary fiction and poetry have appeared across a variety of publications, including a prize-winning piece for The Standard Culture and a Pushcart Prize-nominated piece for Celestial Echo’s anthology Behind the Revolving Door. Her articles on musical theater are published in Rutledge and a number of academic journals, along with chapters for two other upcoming books. She’s produced four plays in New York and writes weekly posts about theater. Her first collection, This Is What They Made It Out Of: tales from the end of the world, is available for purchase. www.zeldaknapp.com