I was only two when it happened (I’m ten now). Dad stood me up in the back of the orange shopping cart and he wasn’t watching me and I leaned over the edge and fell. My head slammed onto the concrete and Dad yelled out, not like he yells at other drivers but like he yells when he doesn’t use an oven mitt and his hand touches the top of the toaster. He lifted me off the concrete and rushed me out of the store.
But I don’t tell any of this to Miss Caroline because she’s too busy looking at her clipboard. Her finger is sliding down the page to where it says emergency contact.
“Who’s Jack Sully?” she says.
“My grandpa.”
She pushes her lips out like she’s being forced to kiss an ugly man.
“I can walk home,” I say. “I don’t live far away.”
“I can’t let you do that, Joan.”
She calls Grandpa and leaves him a message. She’s already called Mom. “Has this ever happened before, where you can’t get in touch with anyone?” Miss Caroline asks.
“No,” I say and it’s true. Sometimes people can’t believe that I can go through all my memories so quickly, but it’s not like trying to find the one pen that works in Mom’s junk drawer. It’s more like turning on a light, and the switch is always right under my finger.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” Miss Caroline says. “At five twenty, we’ll call everyone one more time. If we still can’t get in touch with them, we’ll see if we can get some help.”
“What kind of help?”
“Maybe someone can drop by your house.”
“Who? Your friend?”
“No,” Miss Caroline says. “But let’s not jump the gun just yet.”
I wonder who she’s talking about and why she wants to keep the person a secret and then I think about the words emergency and help and gun and I know who Miss Caroline wants to call. I keep my eyes on the street because I’m worried that if I look over at Miss Caroline a tear might accidentally slip out.
I can probably make a run for it because I pretty much know my way around Jersey City, but even if I did make it home I don’t have house keys. I look around for that tiny ant but she’s gone. I hope she made it back to her family.
I hear a rumble like light thunder and I look up to the sky, but the sun is still shining. The rumble gets louder and closer and it’s coming from an engine. The engine is inside a big white van that appears up the street. It honks its horn and stops right in front of us. Sully & Sons is written on its side and I’m expecting Grandpa to step out of it, but it’s Dad. He tells us there was an accident on the turnpike and his phone died. “I’m really sorry,” Dad says. “Thank you so much for staying with her.”
“It’s totally fine,” Miss Caroline says, but it’s not even a little bit fine. What was Dad doing on the turnpike anyway? He was supposed to be home, working in his studio.
Dad helps me into the passenger seat and belts me up. There are no seats in the back of the van, which is why Dad is letting me sit up front. It makes me think of when I sat in the front of Dad’s old van four summers ago and watched him fill it up with all his drum equipment. I asked him if I could go with him to Boston and he said, “Maybe when you’re older.” I’m older now but he sold his van last year and he doesn’t really play shows anymore.
“Why are you driving Grandpa’s van?”
“I was helping him out today.” The way Dad says it, it’s like he isn’t too sure about the words he wants to use. Songwriters like Dad and me are very careful with our words.
The back of the van is full of tools, which makes me think of Home Depot, which makes me think of the one way I can lose my gift or condition or disease or whatever you want to call it. If I can’t get other people to remember better, maybe I can force myself to remember worse.
“I don’t want to go home,” I say.
“Okay,” Dad says, trying to be cheery. “Where would you like to go?”
Maybe it’s finally time to go back to Home Depot. I could climb to a high spot and dive down so my head would hit the concrete. It would hurt a lot, but only for a little while. Afterward I’d finally know what everyone means when they say I don’t recall and I’d always have an excuse for why I didn’t do something I said I was going to do, like pick my daughter up on time from Young Performers class.
But I don’t really want to go to Home Depot. I just want to feel better. Maybe I’d be okay if it were just small forgetting, like when people miss my half-birthday or they don’t remember to put suntan lotion on the tops of my ears or they forget that my least favorite saying is Forget about it. But it hurts too bad when the thing people keep forgetting is me.
We’re at a red light and Dad is trying to get my attention by waving his hand in front of my face. Instead of looking at him, I grab the newspaper that’s lying on the floor of the van and pretend to read it.
“I saved that for you,” Dad says.
The newspaper is folded back to show a certain page. “What’s my name, Dad?”
“What are you talking about?”
“My name. What is it?”
He answers very slowly. “Your name is Joan.”
“Sure, you say that today. But who knows about tomorrow.”
Dad breathes out like he’s really tired. “Joan, I’m sorry I was late. I don’t know what else you want me to say.”
I look down in my lap and spot something in the newspaper that Dad saved for me. There are tons of little boxes on the page and inside one of the boxes are five words in big capital letters:
THE NEXT GREAT SONGWRITER CONTEST
I read all the information in the box and I start to get a brand-new idea.
“Tell me where I’m going, Joan. I need an answer.”
Grandma forgot a lot of things at the end, including me, but not music. Just like Dad will sometimes forget to buy almond milk at the store even when it’s on his shopping list, but he will always hum along to every single note of the guitar solo in Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” even if he hasn’t heard the song in years. The best part about music is that it keeps playing. When Dad forgets about someone like Michael Jackson for a while, he’ll hear one of his songs and all of a sudden he’ll remember how much he likes him. That’s because songs are like reminders.
“I can’t drive around in circles, Joan.”
“Go home, Dad.”
“I thought you didn’t want to.”
“I changed my mind.”
Dad mumbles something as he spins the wheel and the big white van spins with it. My head is spinning too, like the top of a helicopter, and I’m lifting over all the bad feelings, because I might have just found a way to make sure that Dad and Mom and Grandpa and Miss Caroline and everyone else in the world never forget me.
2
There’s this idea of the phantom limb. A man who’s lost his arm still feels the arm and behaves as if the arm is intact. What I have, then, is a phantom love.
We lived together for four years. Two years in Sydney’s West Hollywood apartment and two years here, in our house in Los Feliz. He died one month ago and ever since, I’ve lived alone. But I don’t feel alone. Everywhere I turn are reminders, some three-dimensional, others invisible, all of them speaking and taking up space.