The Memory Tree

  It was never easy being married to one of the preeminent science fiction writers of our time, let me tell you. Emmett lived more for the interview and the adoring fan than he ever did for me. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a whining session or a pity party. I knew all this going in. I knew that the world had stolen his heart long before I’d gotten there, and that I would forever be relegated to the back seat of his life. I made my peace with that early on, and he and I learned to love each other in our own unique way.

  One Friday afternoon he called me up at the office and told me he was taking me for a weekend, just the two of us, to the cabin out on the lake. I worked part-time as a bookkeeper for a small drilling company to keep busy, and I had work to finish before I could just up and leave, but this wasn’t what concerned me. What concerned me was that we had never had any cabin on any lake. I tried to respond but he had already hung up.

  He arrived an hour later in the Bentley and we headed out. We wound through the countryside, Schubert on the stereo enhancing the beauty passing us by, blue skies and radiant green pines. There was an elegance and a precision to everything Emmett did, as if his life weren’t so much an adventure as a choreographed event.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I don’t want you to get upset,” he said. “I bought a cabin out on Reindeer Lake.”

  “Why would you do that?” I wasn’t as upset as another wife might have been. It wasn’t that he’d made a large purchase, as we had the funds. I didn’t like being left in the dark about things. I was okay with always being his second thought, but I couldn’t abide being left behind entirely.

  “I did it for you,” he said, one of his common lines. “It’s really very beautiful. Rustic.”

  “We’re not rustic,” I said.

  “I want us to try,” he said. “Just for this weekend.”

  We arrived, and I couldn’t deny that it was a pleasant spot. A gravel road weaved through dense forest to a clearing on the water. A light breeze carried the fragrances of pine and earth that I had once known as a child, or thought I’d known – much of my childhood had faded on me over the years like a forgotten dream. The lake beat a lazy rhythm against the shore. The cabin itself was a humble rectangle made of thick interleaved logs slivered with age, the roof shingles discoloured to form an abstract collage of green and yellow.

  “Did you even look at this place before buying it?” I asked as we unpacked the car. When we opened the door an overpowering mothball smell assaulted us. There was a quarter inch of dust on everything, so, like Snow White arriving at the dwarfs’ house, I found a cloth the previous owner had left under the sink and began to clean.

  “No,” Emmett said. “I didn’t have to. I grew up here.”

  I put the cloth down and walked over to the kitchen table where Emmett sat. I sat down beside him.

  “You grew up here?” Emmett didn’t talk about his past, his family. It sometimes felt as if he hadn’t been born at all, that he had somehow popped into existence fully formed, like something out of one of his novels.

  “Yes. Every summer my family came here. At least until my uncle Paul passed away. That would have been ten years ago now.”

  The idea that Emmett had family -- an uncle with an everyday name like Paul -- was overwhelming. I wanted to ask a million questions, to see what else would come pouring from his mouth. But Emmett was an enigma around which you walked lightly; I knew that if I was too forward he would wave a slender arm and change the subject. As it turned out, I didn’t need to prod him. What he said next held more mystery than anything I could have anticipated.

  “You came here too, once,” he said.

  I stared at him.

  “What? No, I would have remembered.” Would I have, though? We think that our memories are the fabric of us, that they come with a lifetime guarantee. But they are only stories with no solid substance, and without positive feedback they can fade away. “When was that?”

  “I want to say ‘75.”

  “I would have been seven years old. You would have been eight. Did I meet you here?”

  “You did indeed.”

  “How did we get on?”

  “I think we might have fallen in love. Puppy love, of course.”

  I smiled. I liked it when Emmett spun tales. He muddled the border between reality and fantasy very well, of course, and I loved being taken along for the ride. Whether or not I had ever been there as a child had little bearing on my appreciation for the tale. Emmett liked to say that everything past is inspired fiction.

  “Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

  We changed and went out to the water. The ground cover ended near the shore in a ragged line and a steep drop-off. A worn path allowed one to side-step down the drop to a thin shore of small rocks, where several large white birch trees bowed from the shore and hung over the water. In the lapping waves they had grown green moss beards. Emmett walked me over to one of them.

  “Do you remember this tree?” he asked me. I wanted to say yes, but I needed my answer to be compelling. The handful of times that he had engaged with me like this, he had told a story and expected me to hold up my end. If I wasn’t convincing, he would wave the whole thing off and spend the weekend writing in whatever room of the small cabin gave him the most privacy. So, I closed my eyes and tried to remember. After a moment I thought I did.

  “We straddled the trunk and shimmied until we were over the water. You stood to turn around and face me. I thought you were going to go head-first into the lake,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Emmett said. He smiled, not just with his mouth but with his entire face, and for a moment he was unrecognizable as the serious figure who lived in his own room at home and occasionally padded out to get a snack and mumble a quick hello. “I told you about my family and about this tree.”

  “This is the Memory Tree,” I said, covering my mouth with my hands.

  “That it is,” he said, and patted the trunk.

  It was all coming back to me now. I ran my hand along the bowing trunk, which was smaller than I remembered. It probably wouldn’t support my weight now, not out at the tip. I saw that the tip had actually been cut off; it had once been a good ten feet longer. Perhaps the Memory Tree was dying, and someone had trimmed it before it could fall and hit some unfortunate swimmer on the head. Could the Memory Tree die? I didn’t know.

  A year before my parents were both killed in a car accident, they had rented a cottage nearby and had befriended the people in this cabin, who had made a point of telling me and their own young son not to go down to the shore and definitely not to play on the trees. We had gone down and climbed the trees anyway, and the boy had told me an incredible story. This had been two decades before I’d met adult Emmett at a book signing.

  “We knew each other as children!” I said, unbelieving. “How have we never talked about this?”

  “I didn’t want to talk about it,” Emmett said. His smile disappeared and his face grew dull. “Not until now.”

  According to the boy who had straddled that tree trunk with me so many years ago, the Memory Tree remembered everyone who touched it. Moreover, its memory was unbounded by time; it remembered everything about you, from your birth all the way to the death you had yet to experience. According to the boy, every person in his family knew about the Memory Tree, and also knew about a special knot in one of the tree’s roots, which passed under the path that Emmett and I had just taken to get to the shore.

  “Polly, I’m dying,” Emmett said quietly. It was obvious from his tone that this was no longer part of the story.

  Of course, I was shocked. I was numb. But then that gave way to anger. I should have known. Emmett had never made a romantic gesture like this, so I was a fool not to expect terrible news. I took in a deep breath as my mind struggled with the concept. He might as well have opened my belly and spilled it onto the forest floor.

  “The doctor says that a brain tumour is pushing on my cerebellum.” He touched the back of his head and chuckled, and I hated the sound of it, hated him for making it. “I asked how much time, but he couldn’t tell me. Apparently these things can be unpredictable.”

  He hugged me, and I hugged him. I kissed his neck even though it felt awkward to do so. I felt like the ultimate fool. Why had we not clung to one another like this every day? How could we have possibly thought that anything else was more important? 

  “You wanted to visit your childhood one more time,” I said. “That’s why we came here.”

  Emmett chuckled at some joke I didn’t get.

  “I’ve been here countless times before,” he said. “I’m here to see the tree.”

  I frowned. Was he still telling a story? This was nothing but an old dying birch tree, one that lake management would probably cut down in a year or two.

  Emmett hurried over to the pathway that we had used to get to the shore. He fished a pair of gardening gloves out of his shorts pocket and slipped them on. He crouched and began to dig in the dark moist earth with the tips of his fingers, like a squirrel digging for a nut, and it was at this point that I thought he might not be right.

  “Emmett, please stop,” I asked in as calm a voice as I could muster.

  Ignoring me, he kept digging, frantically, creating a hole in the vertical ground about an inch deep and a few inches across. It resembled an empty eye socket. Then the socket suddenly had its eye, as something bone white came into view under Emmett’s scrambling fingers, something resembling the side of an enormous, pale worm.

  “There it is,” he said. “The root knot. Every time I’m here I worry that it won’t be.”

  “Emmett, you’re scaring me,” I said.

  “There’s nothing to be scared of,” Emmett said as he stood and put his now dirt-stained gloves on my shoulders. “Polly, I’m a time traveller, as are all my relatives. Once the Memory Tree knows you, when you touch this knot, you are taken back to the first day you touched the tree. You get to live your life over, and the best part is that you remember your past lives. You remember your mistakes, and you’re given a chance to fix them.”

  The day had suddenly grown dark and chilly. I hugged myself and asked, “What are you trying to fix?”

  Emmett stared at me as if I were mad.

  “I’m trying to fix us,” he said.

  I wanted to tell him that we weren’t broken, but the words caught in my throat. Of course we were broken. We barely touched each other; we barely spoke. We had play-acted that this was normal until we’d convinced ourselves. But the idea that Emmett could fix that on his own seemed a notion of the skinny child I'd first met on this beach and not that of the bald, bespectacled, middle-aged man before me.

  “So how does this work?” I asked. “What, you touch the knot and you just disappear?”

  “I don’t know,” Emmett admitted. “I’ve never experienced anything past touching the knot.” His attention suddenly shifted from the hole in the ground to me.

  “Come with me,” he said. “Maybe we can fix this together.”

  I shook my head. “Emmett, I think you’re having some sort of… event. I’m going to call for help.”

  “No,” he said. I already had my cell phone out, and he batted it out of my hand. “There’s a trunk. In the cabin, under the bed. It’s proof. Once you see that, then decide.”

  He stripped the gloves off, and before I could stop him he’d bent down and pressed his palm to the exposed root.

  At first it seemed like nothing had happened. Then he turned to me and I could see that his nose was bleeding.

  “Where am I?” he asked. I was too shocked to answer. Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell like a rag doll, and that was it. That was how my husband passed away of a massive brain hemorrhage, leaving me to carry on in the world alone.

  I checked for a pulse and for breathing and found neither. I arranged his body in a more natural position, because there was just no way I would be able to get him back to the cabin, so for the time being I would leave him here.

  In a daze, I found my phone. Luckily it hadn’t landed in the water, although a rock had cracked the screen. I didn’t think I’d seen a land line in the cabin. I held my phone to the sky and caught a signal, though it wasn’t strong.

  I called for an ambulance, although I was certain that Emmett was gone. I couldn’t give them an exact location, but they were able to pinpoint me via my signal.

  I made my way back to the cabin, to sit down and collect myself. I remembered what Emmett had said, and I found myself going to the bedroom.

  It was there, just as he’d said. As soon as I saw its pale wooden sides I knew that he’d built it from the end branches of the Memory Tree.

  Inside the trunk were hand-written notebooks, their pages jammed so full with words that on first inspection they looked black. The trunk was large, the size of an old-fashioned travelling trunk, and the books were packed in so tightly that I had trouble removing them. It seemed more than Emmett, despite his prolific output, could ever have produced in one lifetime.

  I skimmed several of them. They were the tales of Emmett’s alternate lives. I was in all of them, although stories varied. In one I died before this day; in another we were never married. I must have looked through a half dozen, and in my opinion none of them were any rosier than the life Emmett and I had lived. I couldn’t go through them all, but the sheer volume told an overarching story of endless yearning for something that could never be found. I imagined Emmett coming back to this trunk and forcing yet another book into it, one that contained the story of us, his most recent attempt to capture some elusive happiness with me or some version of me he had in his head, and I felt numb. I suddenly wanted our life together to have ended on a note far less bitter than this one.

  The ambulance arrived and I went with my husband’s corpse to the hospital, then to the morgue. I signed about a hundred pieces of paper. Then I came back to the cabin. It felt more like home now than my home ever had.

  That night I burned the trunk and all the books within it. The next morning I called a company in the area that did brush clearing.

  “How much would it cost to get your boys out here today to remove a tree?” I asked. I was quoted a price and I read the man my credit card information.

  That evening, as the light began to fade, I took a chair down to the dock. I had to be careful because the ground was torn up; I had paid extra to have them remove the stump and much of the surrounding root system. As I sat looking over the calm lake, I thought about my life with Emmett. It wasn’t a perfect story by any means, but it belonged to me. And, maybe more importantly, I belonged to it.

  I watched the sun methodically dip below the horizon. Eventually the mosquitoes came out in force, and I had to pack up and head to the cabin.

  I hope that Emmett isn’t mad when he finds out what I’ve done. I hope he realizes I’ve given him a gift.

  Even if he doesn’t, I’ll always know.

THE END