"Mom was crazy. All this religious stuff mostly," Bear said through a mouthful of sandwich, crumbs scattering on the table. He didn't seem to notice the irony of calling his mother crazy while sitting in the pristine garden of a psychiatric facility, "but yeah –she was crazy." The irony of his calling his mother crazy as they sat in the manicured backyard of an upscale psychiatric facility seemed to be lost on him. Charlotte hid her discomfort behind a long sip of tea, hoping to keep her expression neutral. She didn't want to risk putting Bear off from talking. Her mother had always described the man sitting across from her as contrary, but he'd more or less always been sweet to her and Noah.
"I'm glad I still have most of my teeth," Bear said for the second or third time since she'd been there. Charlotte just smiled and nodded, knowing that it was best not to remind memory loss patients that they were repeating themselves. "That's when my dad stopped eating. He was a waste anyway. But always take care of your teeth."
"I will Uncle Cub," she promised, bringing him back to something he'd lit on earlier. "You said before that Mom and Mimi had a big fight in high school because of the crazy religious stuff?"
He looked momentarily blank and she was worried she might be losing him, but she prodded a bit more. "She told mom to go to hell?" Bear shook his head and waved a hand in the air as if to bat the statement away.
"She didn't tell her to go to hell, she said she was going to hell if she used it. Mom said it killed her sisters and Anne." He sounded disgusted, like the teen he may have been at the time he'd witnessed this. "Rissa was crazy too. She wanted to be special so bad they were in this like shared delusion. Like she thought she could do stuff, like she was a witch or something."
Bear laughed without humor and took another bite. "Could she have been?" Charlotte posed the question as innocently as she could and received a scathing look. I thought you were smarter than that, the look said. "I mean, of course not," she amended, "but why do you think, I mean apart from wanting to be special, why might she have bought into that?"
"Who knows—Frig off Alice!" Bear aimed a middle finger at an elderly woman who was preparing to sidle up next to Charlotte. "Crazy bitches everywhere…" he shook his head and took a drink. "Glad I still have most of my teeth," he was muttering again.
She'd been momentarily sidetracked by the attempted intrusion and her uncle's outburst and was trying to collect her thoughts again to decide which way to steer the conversation. "She's trapped you know," he said then, drawing her attention back, "trying to do shit she has no business with. Now she's got herself stuck and she's not coming back."
"What do you mean?" Charlotte asked with a bit too much eagerness. "Mom? What didn't she have business with?"
Bear looked confused but she refused to let her hopes sink from where they had risen to. "You said mom was trapped? That she got herself stuck because of stuff she had no business with?" Her tone was insistent and she knew she was on the verge of losing him again, but this sounded too promising. He was shaking his head and Charlotte tried to soften her own anxious features. She reached out to reassure him, but as soon as their hands touched, a jolt of energy surged through her. Her vision blurred, the garden around her dissolved, and she was pulled into another place, another time…
It was like electricity this time, not like the easy flashes she'd had from her mother in the hospital the past week. Those, it had been easy to wonder if it was her own mind's creation. There was no way of knowing what her subconscious knew, afterall, and no way to prove that her dreams were shared or if that was just what she wanted to believe. When she saw her uncle's memory, it was like an electric surge had fused her hand to him.
She was in a room she didn't recognize, with a distinctly teenage boy aesthetic–and aroma. There was yelling from downstairs, it was loud enough that even though there was music blaring in the room, it could still be heard. Next were slamming doors and suddenly she was getting up, turning the CD player off and slamming the door before stomping downstairs to put an end to it. She could feel the anxiety and irritation boiling over from her uncle in the memory, and fear too, she thought.
"I don't want you to have it. I just didn't want it anymore. I want anyone else to get hurt because of this. I want to see you again in heaven." Mimi was crying, she was younger but still looked like the woman Charlotte had grown up around. Her mother looked startlingly like herself in the memory. Aside from the almost over the top 90s getup, a flannel hugging her hips and her cut off T-shirt showing a waist thinner than her mother had ever let onto being.
"Riss, she's crazy just leave her alone!" Her uncle shouted at the two of them, but the women ignored him.
"Barb's cancer—that was the tax. The fire…it took Anne and her father. Nancy lived just long enough to understand before her lungs gave up. Playing God isn't a gift, Clarissa. It doesn't help—it only takes."
"You can't know that!" Her mother argued back shrilly in her teenage voice. She's younger than me, Clarissa realized. The scene didn't make any more sense to her than it did to her uncle who was shaking his head in the memory. "You're both crazy."
There was a feeling beneath the surface that Charlotte was picking up on. She tried to focus on it, to figure out what it meant but her grandmother's words from inside the house caught her attention as her uncle was walking away.
"Jonah wasn't supposed to make it out of that lake." Charlotte wasn't sure she'd heard the words right, but the memory was already slipping away. Her uncle was heading toward his truck, the weight of his words hanging over her. Charlotte was still feeling the frustration of having no control over any of it when she realized that she wasn't looking at the steering wheel in the old Ford pickup anymore but at a very alarmed Uncle Cub.
At first she thought he still looked lucid, though somewhat bewildered. She thought he looked like a deer that knows the hunter's got him, but isn't sure exactly where the danger is. He gave her hand a ginger pat but very obviously did not want her touching him any more. He was starting to stand up. "Look miss," he was saying, "I don't want to be a part of no research or college in high school now." Charlotte thought he was pretending not to know her rather than actually experiencing an episode, but it was drawing the attention of the staff regardless and she knew their time was up.
"What happened to Jonah?" she asked, her voice shaking now. Bear's face darkened, his eyes narrowing as if weighing whether to answer. She got the impression that he wasn't entirely sure where, or when, he was now. Finally, he stepped back, whispering, "Jonah... never should have made it out of that lake."