The Memory Thief

  For Harry, who has rescued me too many times to count

  PROLOGUE

  In a stone courtyard at the edge of the woods, a ghost with glowing red eyes floats back and forth past the windows of Saint Ignatius Hospital, waiting for a baby to be born.

  In the decades that he’s been haunting this place, the ghost has seen it all: visitors and patients coming and going, the hopeless cases, the lucky people with small complaints. He’s kept his glowing eyes on the hospital doors in peacetime and during terrible stretches of war. He’s seen more babies born than he could ever count.

  So when cries drift out through the far west window of the maternity ward, and then relieved laughter, and another set of cries, the ghost knows exactly what it means: a particularly rare event, a miracle magnified. The other ghosts in the courtyard go about their business as usual, unnoticing, but the ghost with the glowing red eyes floats to the window for a glimpse.

  Only, then something else happens that the ghost does not expect. Something that, in all the years he’s haunted the stone courtyards of Saint Ignatius, he’s never seen.

  The night, all at once, becomes still. A silence falls over the woods; the dark sky—already moonless—dims. An owl calls to the stars and then goes quiet. A cat consults with a mosquito, eats it, and then scampers off in fear. Leaves whisper to each other a little lower than before. Sensing an approaching darkness, knowing the signs of the presence of a witch, all the ghosts of Saint Ignatius flee—zipping off through walls and into woods, vanishing in the night. All except one… who hides… and watches.

  Slowly two women emerge from the edge of the trees.

  The first looks sad and mournful, with a forgettable face, and hands that reach through the air as if grasping for something that isn’t there. Strange, translucent moths flutter behind her, and a faint cloud of dust, as if she’s just stepped out of a closet full of antiques. The other is far more frightening—with empty powder-blue eyes, the pupils like pinpricks, smudged all around in dark purple circles. She smiles with a hungry mouth full of sharp teeth. From around her neck dangle pocket watches, too many to count.

  While the sad, grasping witch flicks a wrist and drifts in through the slowly opening doors, now obscured in a kind of misty haze, the blue-eyed witch waits. The night waits. The animals wait. The air waits. Nurses, doctors, patients coming and going—none of them notice two witches in their midst. The living remain blind to them, as they always are.

  Finally, silently—the sad witch emerges through the doors, this time with something bulging under her cloak.

  “Is it done?” the second witch asks, and the meek, empty-looking one nods.

  “I’ve laid my curse. The Oaks woman’s memories are mine now,” she says, moths fluttering out of her sleeves as she speaks. “She won’t remember anything—not us, not our secrets, not the sight, not even herself.”

  The second witch considers for a moment, her mouth crooked in bitterness. She glances at the ghostly moths fluttering through the air, then turns her eyes to the lump under her companion’s robes.

  “And this?” she asks.

  “No one will remember him, either.” The sad witch waves a hand, and the folds of her cloak part to reveal a baby, hovering in the air just in front of her stomach. She smiles down at him. There is something terribly needy and desperate about the smile.

  “Strange. The Oakses are always girls,” the blue-eyed witch reflects.

  The grasping witch clearly longs for the baby. She appears to be the kind of witch who longs for everything. “Can I keep him?” she asks.

  The blue-eyed witch fingers the pocket watches around her neck and looks down at the baby with disgust. Then she waves a hand, and the baby floats across the space between them. He begins to cry as the blue-eyed witch glares at him.

  “I want no more of this family. The last of them comes with me.”

  “What will you do with him?” the grasping witch asks.

  The other witch smirks, her eyes as blank and endless as a reptile’s, and then she gazes in the direction of the sea, though it is too far off to be seen. “It’s a fine night for sinking to the bottom of the sea,” she says before waving the child toward her, into the folds of her own cloak, which close around him like curtains.

  The two witches look at each other meaningfully, their dark hearts beating a thorny, unsteady rhythm. And then, as quickly as they appeared, the witches drift into the forest from which they came.

  And—but for the trees and stones and spiders and crickets and cats—nobody sees. Nobody but one curious haunt with glowing red eyes and a rash around his neck.

  Ghosts have endless time to fill with talk: stories and rumors and legends to pass the long nights. But because the ghosts have fled, there will be no whispers of this moment later—no rumors of what’s occurred—drifting amongst the spirits of the seventh ward.

  No one will whisper that when two witches came to Saint Ignatius Hospital to settle an old score and take the memories and the firstborn child of a woman named Annabelle Oaks, Annabelle Oaks saw them coming… and had just a flash of a moment to hide an infant away. There will be no one to reveal the fatal mistake of a sad and grasping witch confusing one baby for another (a quiet baby, as it turns out; a baby who knew how to keep to herself)… of one innocent baby doomed and another saved. Only one ghost knows of these things, and—for reasons of his own—he will not talk.

  For now, the crickets in the grass listen in silence for a few moments longer, but then they go back to their chirping. The forest resumes its usual noises. A moment is swallowed into the past.

  And a restless, angry spirit keeps his secrets. For a time.

  CHAPTER 1 Rosie

  It’s on the night I burn my stories that the danger begins. Or maybe that a life begins that’s different from the one I knew before.

  It starts with me and Germ, the way most things do. I am in the backyard reading Germ a story I wrote.

  The story is about a woman asleep in a pile of white feathers. No matter how her daughter tries to wake her, the woman is so deeply asleep, she won’t stir. She sleeps for years and years and years.

  Then one day the daughter finds a beautiful black iridescent feather buried deep amongst all the white ones. She plucks the black feather, and there is a shudder as all the feathers begin to move. And the girl sees that the pile was never a pile at all but instead that her mother has been sleeping on the back of a giant feathered beast who has been holding her captive and enchanted.

  The girl’s mother stirs as the beast does. She tumbles off the back of the beast, and together they escape to a remote village at the edge of the earth. Safely hidden, they live happily ever after.

  Germ listens in silence and stares out at the ocean as it crashes against the rocks far below my yard. She wraps her coat tighter around herself to ward off the early fall chill. She’s got a new look today—thick black eyeliner. It looks weird, and Germ is clearly aware of this, because she keeps swiping at it with her thumb to wipe it away. She’s trying to look older but not doing a very good job. I don’t know why she tries, because her eyes are pretty as they are.

  When I finish and look up at Germ, she frowns out at the water, her brows lowering uncertainly. I can predict something like 1,021 of Germ’s moods, and I can tell she’s reluctant to say what she’s thinking.

  “What?” I ask. “You don’t like it?”

  “I do,” she says slowly, stretching and then settling herself again, restless. (Germ never looks natural sitting still.) Her cheeks go a little pinker. “It’s just…” She looks at me. She scratches the scar on her hand where—at my request—we both cut ourselves when we decided to be blood sisters when we were eight. Her freckles stand out the way they do when
she’s feeling awkward.

  “Don’t you think we’re getting too old for those kinds of stories?”

  I swallow. “What kinds of stories?”

  “Well…,” Germ says thoughtfully, “the mom waking up.” Germ looks sheepish. “The happy ending. Fairy tales.”

  I look down at the paper, my heart in my throat, because it’s so unexpected. Germ has always loved my stories. Stories are how we met. And what’s the point of writing a story if there isn’t a happy ending?

  “It’s just…” Germ flushes, which again makes her freckles stand out. “We’re in sixth grade now. Maybe it’s time to think about real life more. Like, leave some of the kid stuff behind us.”

  If anyone else said this to me, I would ignore them, but Germ is my best friend. And she has a point.

  Suddenly I find myself studying the two of us—Germ in her eyeliner and the plaid coat she saved all of last year’s Christmas money for; me in my overly large overalls, my too-small T-shirt, my beloved Harry Potter Lumos flashlight hanging around my neck like a bad fashion accessory. I’ve been doing this more and more lately, noticing the ways Germ seems to be getting older while I seem to stay the same.

  “Well, I’ll revise it,” I say lightly, closing my notebook. Germ lets her eyes trail off diplomatically, and shrugs, then smiles.

  “It’s really clever, though,” she says. “I could never come up with that stuff.”

  I knock her knee with mine companionably. This is the way Germ and I rescue each other—we remind each other what we’re good at. Germ, for instance, is the fastest runner in Seaport and can burp extremely loud. I’m very short and quiet, and I’m stubborn and good at making things up.

  Now Germ leaps up like a tiger, all athletic energy. “Gotta get home. Mom’s making tacos.” I feel a twinge of envy for Germ’s loud, busy house and for the tacos. “See you at school.”

  Reaching the driveway, she hops onto her bike and peddles away at top speed. I watch, sad to see her go, and thinking and thinking about what she said, and the possibility of a choice to make.

  * * *

  Inside, the house is dim, and dust scuttles through the light from the windows as I disturb the still air. I walk into the kitchen and tuck my story away into a crevice between the fridge and the counter, frowning. Then I make dinner for me and my mom: two peanut butter and banana sandwiches, some steamed peas because you have to eat vegetables, Twinkies for dessert. I use a chair to climb up to the top shelf over the counter and dig out some chocolate sauce to drizzle onto the Twinkies, scarf my meal down—dessert first—and then put everything else on a tray and carry it up two flights of stairs.

  In the slanted attic room at the end of the third-floor hall, my mom sits at her computer, typing notes from a thick reference booklet, her long black hair tucked behind her ears. Her desk is littered with sticky note reminders: Work Eat. Take your vitamins. On her hand she has scribbled in pen simply the word “Rosie.”

  “Dinner,” I say, laying the tray down on the side of her desk. She types for a few more minutes before noticing I’m there. For her job, she does something mind-crushingly boring called data entry. It’s mostly typing things from books onto a computer and sending them to her boss, who lives in New York. There is a sticky note on the corner of her computer where she’s written down the hours she’s supposed to be typing and the contact information of her boss; she never stops early or late.

  Against one wall, a small TV stays on while she works, always on the news. Right now there’s a story about endangered polar bears that I know will break my heart, so I turn the TV off; Mom doesn’t seem to notice. She does that strange thing where she looks at me as if adjusting to the idea of me.

  Then she turns her eyes to the window in dreamy silence. “He’s out there swimming, waiting for me,” she says.

  I follow her eyes to the ocean. It’s the same old thing.

  “Who, Mom?” But I don’t wait for an answer because there never is one. I used to think, when I was little, she was talking about my dad, a fisherman, drowned at sea before I was born. That was before I realized that people who were gone did not swim back.

  I fluff up the bed where she sleeps to make it look cozy. She sleeps in the attic because this is the best room for looking at the ocean, but her real room is downstairs. So I’ve decorated this one for her, lining the shelf with photos of my dad that I found under her bed, one of my mom and dad together, one of me at school, a certificate of archery (from her closet) from a summer camp I guess she used to go to.

  I don’t have my mom’s artistic skills, but I’ve also painted lots of things on the walls for her. There’s something I’ve labeled Big Things about Rosie, which I’ve illustrated with colored markers. It stretches across years, and it’s where I write the things I think are big and important: the date when I lost my first tooth, the date of a trip we took to Adventure Land with my class, the time I won the story contest at the local library, the day I won the spelling bee. I’ve decorated it with flowers and exclamation points so that it will get her attention. I’ve also painted a growth chart keeping track of my height (which goes up only very slowly—I’m the shortest person in my class). I’ve also drawn a family tree on the wall, though it’s all just blanks except for me and my mom and dad. I don’t know about the rest of my family. I guess we don’t really have one.

  Still, as strange as it may sound, none of it means anything to her—not Big Things about Rosie, not the family tree. It’s as if none of it’s there. Then again, most of the time it’s as if I’m not here either.

  “Tell me about the day I was born,” I used to say to her, before I knew better.

  I knew the when and where of my birth, but I wanted to know what it had felt like to see me for the first time. I wanted to hear my mom say that my arrival was like being handed a pot of gold and a deed to the most beautiful island in Hawaii (which is what Germ’s mom says about her).

  But eventually I gave up. Because she would only ever look at me for a long time and then say something like, “Honestly, how could I remember something like that?” Flat, exasperated, as if I’d asked her who had won the 1976 World Series.

  My mom doesn’t give hugs. She’s never excited to see me after school or sad to see me leave for the bus. She doesn’t ask me where I’ve been, help me shop, tell me when to go to bed. I’ve never in my life heard her laugh. She has a degree in art history, but she doesn’t ever talk about her professors or what she learned. She never says how she fell in love with my dad or if she loved him at all.

  Sometimes when she’s talking to me, it’s as if my name is on the tip of her tongue for a while before she can retrieve it. Before meetings with my teachers or my pediatrician, she asks me how I’m doing in school and how I’m feeling, as if to catch up before a test. It’s all she can do to keep track of the facts of me.

  I’ve known for a long time that my mom doesn’t look at me the way most moms look at their kids—like a piece of light they don’t want to look away from. She barely looks at me at all.

  Still, I love her more than anyone else on earth, and I guess it’s because she’s the only mom I have. My paintings on her wall are one of my many ways of trying to love her into loving me back. And I guess my stories are my way of pretending I can change things: a pretend spell and a pretend beast and a pretend escape to somewhere safe together. And I guess Germ is right that they’re never going to work.

  And the thing that bothers me is, I’ve been thinking that too.

  I head out into the hall. I flick my Lumos flashlight on because one of the chandelier bulbs has burned out, and go down the creaky old stairs to the basement. I throw a load of laundry in, then run up the stairs two at a time because the basement gives me the willies.

  On my way through the kitchen, I pick up my story from where it’s wedged by the counter.

  I have a plan.

  And, though I don’t mean it to, it’s my plan that makes it all begin.

  CHAPTER 2
r />   My bedroom is something special, decorated for me by a mom I feel like I’ve never met. Long ago—before I was born—she painted it in bright beautiful colors, creating rainbows and guardian angels on the ceiling. There’s a window around which she painted the words “Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness,” which—I found out later—is a quote from Anne Frank’s diary. I love the person who painted that on my wall. I dream of that person, but I certainly don’t know her.

  I’ve added lots of my own touches over the years. For one, I’ve filled the room with all the books I’ve stolen from my mom’s room: fiction, histories, biographies, art books, piled on shelves, tucked willy-nilly wherever they aren’t supposed to fit, perched on my nightstand. (Other things I’ve stolen from her include a silver whistle engraved with a shell, a pair of silk slippers, and a matchbox from a restaurant she must have gone to once.) There is a second bed in the room, and a second set of blankets and pillows that my mom has stored in the closet, as if she’s always expecting company. I’ve made the bed a fort for all my old stuffed animals. There’s a loud, ticking old clock on the wall.

  I’ve put lots of my own sticky notes on the wall around my bed. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite. And Sweet dreams, sweetie. On the mirror: You look taller today, sweetie. And Those crooked front teeth make you look distinctive, sweetie. I try to encourage myself with things a normal mom or dad would say, because if I let myself feel sad about not having a normal mom or dad, I’d fall into a black hole and never climb out.

  Now I sit on my bed and pull onto my lap the story I was reading to Germ.

  I open my closet and take out the pile of others; there must be a hundred or more. My heart gives a lurch. These stories have always felt like they fill in a half of me that’s missing. (I don’t know whether it’s missing because of my mom, or my dad, or something else, just that it is.) They’ve always been my way of spinning my feelings into something comforting, like spinning grass into gold. I also retrieve, from my dresser, my lucky pen and my blank notebooks.