#TeaserTuesday: Memory

 

 

Memory was a sneaky thing. It crept on silent cat’s feet, waiting for the oddest of stimulants, and then pouncing, claws and little cat fangs pricking. For Mercy, memories of his father sprang so often, and in response to such certain stimuli, that they couldn’t truly be counted as unexpected anymore. Because Remy, and Gram, had been the poles of his childhood, the only two fixed figures with which he’d spent any significant time, memories of them were conjured by even the most mundane experiences. When he heard a wheezy cough, or the croak of a porch floorboard, the hum of a sewing machine, or the sizzle of onions in a pan of fat, he thought of his grandmother. The scent of chewing tobacco and the roughness of a hand-knitted blanket sent her ghost ambling through the corridors of his mind, a benevolent, stooped spirit that no longer – most of the time – carried the weight of her violent death.

Remy, too, had become a friendly ghost, in the years since he’d put New Orleans behind him for good, one scried into existence by the high whine of cicadas in the afternoon, or the leap of a fish, the lapping of water against the hull of a boat. He would always associate the scents of fresh, male sweat and underwater algae with his father. Sometimes, he caught notes of Remy in his own booming laugh; noticed him in the slim, brown quickness of his own little Remy’s fingers. It had stopped piercing him through when he saw Colin smile, and the white, coy slice of it belonged to their father. He could think things like that now: their father. He could accept Colin as his brother now, and even give voice to the truth of it.

Nothing about this room, which smelled of coffee and baked goods, and was warm not with the summer sun’s heat, but an overactive furnace, should have dredged up the past. The air was dry, rather than saturated with the green-black water of the bayou. No flies, no waving stalks of cattails, no groan of bullfrog or gator. Nothing here reminded him of home.

But a stranger turned around to face him, and suddenly he was a boy, struggling to drag the big tackle box across the grass toward the bateau, Daddy whistling the Allman Brothers and swinging a packet of plastic marker flags that fluttered with each swing of his big arm. Remy glanced back at him over his shoulder, and his smile was easy and eager, white against the deep tan of his face, the premature sunlines around his eyes deep as the grain of old wood. Come along now, Felix. Those lines won’t bait themselves. Over his other arm, a sack dangled, full of cold chicken carcasses that would be warm and stinking by the time they set the last line.

Daddy wasn’t smiling now, though. He wasn’t here – only a stranger wearing his stolen face, shifting his weight from foot-to-foot in a way Daddy never had. Daddy was still, was patient, was a man who moved with purpose. He wasn’t nervous, like this doppelganger. This skin-suit thief.