Bottle of Memories

Emily rushed to Pap’s side, wrapping her arms around him, sending cats scurrying in all directions. Burying her face against his shoulder, she felt his leathery hand reach up to touch her hair, his fingers pressing against her scalp as if to convince himself of her solidity. “Oh, Em, blessed be,” he said again.

She knelt before him, looking up into his face, her violet eyes searching his white-rheumed, sightless ones. He looked awful. His face was heavier, older, new-lined with worry. The spiderweb of old scars stood out on his face, pale with tension.

“It’s all right, Pap.” She reached up for where his hand trembled against her hair. “What’s wrong? What’s happened? The earthquakes and Aberrancies—have they been up here?”

Pap looked at her, his sightless eyes quizzical.

“Earthquakes? Aberrancies? We ain’t had none o’ them. That’s all happening down in San Francisco.”

Emily pressed Pap’s hand with hers. “Then what’s wrong?”

“They came after you, Em. All those men! They meant to kill you, I know they did …”

Emily sat back on her heels, releasing a pent-up breath. The Maelstroms—the Army’s division of blood sorcerers, led by Captain Caul. Emily had forgotten just how recently they had stormed through Lost Pine, searching for her and Stanton. Was this what she’d come all the way from New York for?

“They won’t be coming anymore,” Emily explained. “They wanted the stone—you remember, that stone I found up at the Old China Mine? Mr. Stanton and me, we took it to New York and … well, we got rid of it. It’s gone now.”

“But they’re still looking for you,” Pap said, his voice low and urgent. “They was up here just a few days ago, asking questions.”

Emily’s brow knit. “Who was here?”

“Russians,” Pap said softly, his sightless eyes gleaming. “Em, they had so many questions. So many questions about her …”

At the back of the cabin, there was a sound; the slow creak of the door. Emily tensed, looking up—but it was only Mrs. Lyman, the red-faced mining widow who had taken to keeping house for Pap. When she saw Emily, she dropped an armload of firewood with a resounding crash and clatter. She then burst out in screams of delight, enfolding Emily in a bark-dusty embrace.

“Emily! Why, I can’t believe it, you’re home! Oh, we read the book!”

She babbled more words as she spun Emily around the small room, but Emily could barely hear them, for Mrs. Lyman was squeezing her so tightly that the blood was beginning to pound in her ears.

“Abby …” Pap said. When the words and spinning didn’t stop, he barked, “Abby! Enough!”

Mrs. Lyman stopped and stared at Pap in surprise.

“Why, Ignatius, I don’t—”

Pap made his voice milder. “Could you give Em and me a little while to talk? Then she can tell you all about things later. Over dinner, maybe?”

Mrs. Lyman was silent for a moment, then nodded.

“Why, sure. Dinner! That’s a lovely idea. I’ll run back over to my place and chop the head off that old hen that’s stopped laying. And there’s new potatoes from the garden, and half a pie left …”

Muttering to herself, Mrs. Lyman bustled out as quickly as she’d bustled in. Emily rubbed her cheek with her hand to see if the old woman’s kisses had left bruises.

“Emily, come on over here.” Pap reached for Emily’s hands. When she gave them to him, his fingers traveled inquiringly over the smooth ivory of her prosthetic.

“What’s this?”

“I lost my hand.” Emily always hated saying that. It sounded so careless, as if she’d just misplaced it. But she didn’t want to explain what had actually happened—the clang of steel, the smell of blood … not to Pap, most of all.

“That’s the hand the stone was in,” the old man said softly.

“Yes.”

Pap said nothing for a moment, letting his calloused thumb play thoughtfully over the intricately carved fingers. Then he let out a long breath.

“But you’re all right now, Em? You’re not … you’re all right?”

“I’m all right,” Emily said softly. “Tell me what’s happened.”

Pap was silent for a long time, as if debating something with himself. Then he made a decisive movement.

“Em, you know how you came to me. You were just a little thing, not five years old. Your mother, she came through the pass in the middle of winter with you wrapped in her coat, and then she died without saying a word. That’s what I always told you.”

“Yes,” Emily said warily, not liking the sound of Pap’s last sentence.

“I didn’t tell you everything, Em. I couldn’t. I didn’t want you to grow up remembering—” He stopped abruptly. “There was bad things around you, Em. I had to protect you from them. If you could have seen yourself, just a little girl, sweet as could be—you’d understand. You’d forgive me. You’d understand that I couldn’t let anything hurt you. And after what she’d done to you—”

“She?” Emily interrupted. “My mother?”

“She was bad, Em.” Pap’s voice became a whisper, as if the very air around them could coalesce into the remembered badness just by speaking of it. “And it wasn’t just bad around her, it was bad in her, bad down to her bones. Wicked bad.”

“Wicked bad?” Emily echoed softly.

“Evil, Em.” Pap clenched her hands hard. “I know evil. I seen it, in the eyes of the men who tried to burn me back in Kentucky, all them years ago.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Your mother, she was on her way to San Francisco. To be with them Russians who come to see me … the Sini Mira, they call themselves.”

He paused expectantly, waiting for her to make some sound of astonishment. But Emily had already met the Sini Mira—a shadowy group of Russian scientists who had tried to kidnap her on her way to New York. She remembered the iceberg-blue eyes of their leader, a man who called himself Perun, whose white hair and pale skin made him seem to be carved of snow and frost. But he’d said they just wanted the stone, the fragment of the Mantic Anastomosis that had been lodged in her hand. Now that that was gone, what could the Russians possibly want with her?

“I don’t know how they found out about her, after all these years.” Pap continued hesitantly, through Emily’s heavy silence. “They came up here and asked about her—what did she say, and what did she have with her when she died. I told them she didn’t have nothing with her, that she didn’t leave nothing behind. I wasn’t going to tell them about you, Em, honest I wasn’t! But they already knew.”

“They have ways of knowing things,” Emily said. She was thinking suddenly of the brown man, the Russian in San Francisco who’d given her the too-convenient train ticket. Then it had seemed strange. Now it seemed downright sinister.

“Have they been back?”

“No. They rode off, and they ain’t been back,” Pap said. “But it made me scared, Emily. It made me scared that I ain’t told you everything you need to know. Secrets don’t die. You can bottle ’em up, but they don’t die.”

Pap stood, dislodging the last of the grumpy cats, and felt his way to the locked cupboard. Emily knew it well; it was where Pap always kept his most dangerous and precious magical supplies. He fumbled for a key around his throat and unlocked the cupboard. He felt around within it until his fingers found a small bottle. He carried the bottle as if it were a poisonous snake that might bite him.

He gave the bottle to Emily. It was very heavy glass, cobalt blue, with an iron stopper. Around the bottle’s throat was tied a card. It was hard to discern in the half-light of the fire, but it was, she realized, a calling card like the ones the ladies in New York traded as a part of their mystifying rituals. On it was engraved four small words in thin, elegant type:

Miss Catherine Kendall. Boston.

“What is it?”

“The card, that was your mother. The bottle … that’s you. It’s you at five years old, Em,” Pap said softly. “It’s all your memories.”

Emily swallowed hard, turning the bottle over and over in her hand.

“It’s called a Lethe Draught,” Pap said. “It’s memories distilled down. The light and sweet ones float to the top. The bitter and dark ones sink to the bottom. It’s everything I didn’t want you to remember. It’s all the nightmares you had, those first few weeks you was here. It’s all your fear, and all your misery, and—” He faltered, rubbing his hand across his eyes. “I had to do it, Em. Those memories, they’re all so bad. I don’t know the half of them and I never wanted to. I just wanted to see you happy. And you were once I took them away and locked them up. Then they couldn’t hurt you anymore.”

Emily held the bottle away from herself, looking at it with horror.

“I hoped you’d never need them back,” Pap continued. “But if these Russians … these Sini Mira … if they’re after you, and looking for you … you may have to know, Em. If you don’t know, then you might not know how to stay away from them.”

“If I drink this, I will get the memories back?”

Pap nodded.

“It was all right, you not knowing, while you was staying here in Lost Pine,” he said. “Bad things can’t hurt you if they don’t know where you are. But now they do. And even if they didn’t …” He paused. “Well, you ain’t back to stay. Are you?”

“I’m going to marry Mr. Stanton,” Emily murmured, still staring at the bottle.

Pap smiled. “Decided to fall in love with him, did you?”

“Afraid so,” Emily said, and Pap chuckled, nodding. He let his thumb play over the ring she wore on her thumb, the Jefferson Chair ring Stanton had given her.

“Tell me you forgive me, Em,” Pap said. “Tell me you don’t hate me.”

“I couldn’t hate you,” Emily said. “And there’s nothing to forgive. You did what you thought was best.”

But as she crouched there before the man who had been the only father she’d ever known, she was painfully aware that doing one’s best was never assurance that it wasn’t the wrong choice anyway.