The Memory Jar Read Free Page A

to open.”
    â€œMy mom gets the grocery store brand,” he says, and of course I know this. I’ve spent hours on his family’s couch sharing chips and sour cream dip. With Joey at times, in fact. He takes a deep breath. “Scott didn’t want to marry you,” he says.
    I breathe, too, and he twists the bag around toward me, the pickle smell wafting out of the wide mouth—the greasy invitation that, for the first time in weeks, makes me feel honestly hungry, with no hesitant swirl along for the ride. I reach for one, and I take several.
    â€œIt’s okay.” I crunch down on a potato chip, talking with my mouth full. “I didn’t want to marry him either.”
    But I didn’t mean to almost kill him. I mean, I’m almost certain.

Then
    The first time we went to the island, it’s funny to think of it, really. It was summer, and it was hot, and I didn’t know how to swim. That’s stupid, right? I live in the land of 10,000 lakes or whatever, and I didn’t know how to swim. It was Mary Ellen’s fault, really. She was my counselor when I was a kid and I got chosen to go to this science camp for girls on Arrowhead Lake, an abandoned mine-turned-
swimming beach. Mary Ellen knew all the really scary stories about that old mine pit, like have you heard the one about the ghost of Otto Jarvi and the Hanging Shack? All the girls held hands around the fire and giggle-screamed while Mary Ellen told us about the ghost of his ill-fated daughter, Petra Jarvi, who grabbed hold of the ankles of girls if they jumped off the end of the dock.
    Mary Ellen said that Petra Jarvi took one eleven-year-old girl every eleven years to keep for her own in the depths of the old iron mine, and this was the year.
    I was eleven. I refused to put one toe in the water after that.
    So Scott had this little canoe, which is not as romantic as a little rowboat, and I told him so. It was our first date, and he sat behind me to paddle and steer. “If this were a rowboat you could face me, with your hands on two oars, and you could row me all the way around the lake while singing sweetly,” I said. I could be so brave, since I couldn’t see his face. I pretended to sit all prim in the bow of his canoe, wearing the stiff life preserver he insisted I wear, and to be truthful I was so glad he did because like I said, I couldn’t swim. The canoe wobbled beneath us and I put my hands down on the sides. “Islands are overrated,” I said, but he insisted.
    He had some kind of alcohol, I can’t remember what it was, some stupid bottle he’d stolen from his aunt or his grandma or something, but I remember he gave me this plastic cup, and he was really protective of how much I drank, like he rationed it out so I wouldn’t get very drunk. He seemed so harmless.
    Harmless . That’s just what he was. Is .
    So the snowmobile ride to the island was not completely unexpected, though it pretty much made it impossible to go through with my plans for the evening, which had been to break up with him. I hadn’t quite decided on what to do about the other thing, but it seemed clear all of a sudden that this was something I wanted some space to figure out, on my own.
    He drove us out to the island and I rode on the back, my arms loosely around the waist of his puffy down parka. We didn’t wear helmets, which is something that people would later point out with a sad sort of pursed-lip pity, but it was the one safety measure Scott didn’t believe in. It was because of some cousin of his who got into a motorcycle crash and the doctor told him that if he’d had a helmet on, he would have died. I don’t know how many doctors are going around telling people that, but from the looks of the traumatic brain injury ward in Scott’s hospital alone, doctors should be telling people to walk around wearing a helmet at all times, night and day. Anyway, he drove slowly, and