The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken (acx book reading txt) 📕

but with roses in his cheeks. He overdosed and detoxed five times before dying in the parking lot of the Safeway at sixteen, brought down to earth for good.

Perhaps he had died somewhere else and been brought there, the police said, as though that might be a solace.

The children weren’t friends any longer, thank God. Fate and their mothers had kept them apart—Florence most of all. She decided that he was contagious—he must have caught his troubles from some other, worse boy—and this was the way she failed her son. Wasn’t caution catching, too? Shouldn’t he have been exposed to plenty of it?

That’s what Thea guessed, anyhow.

The funeral was open casket, which surprised Thea. They’d combed the curls right out of his hair, though maybe he’d done that himself, alive; maybe they’d been working from a recent photo. On the church pew Thea and Georgia slid on the needlepointed cushions and did not know whether they were supposed to pray aloud with the believers or not. It was jam-packed. People wailed. You’d think the whole world would never recover.

Afterward, at the house, Florence held them by their elbows. How different did she look from the day they’d met thirteen years before at the converted fire station, the groovy mother, the mother of many colors? (How different would she look now, her child gone nearly that long?) This was the last time they might see each other, thought Thea. She wished she had done something, slept with Loren, loaned Orly money for his fatal dose, something that could not be forgiven. She didn’t want Florence to come looking.

“He loved you,” Florence said to Georgia, caressing her elbow, squeezing it.

“He loved everybody,” said Georgia, who’d had to borrow a pair of her mother’s pantyhose for the occasion.

“No,” Florence said. “He loved you particularly.”

Florence knew what she was doing. She was the sort of person, thought Thea, who said a thing aloud when she suspected it wasn’t true. Not lying exactly, but as though she were wrestling with an immense and troublesome and essential emotion, and in telling you, gently, that it was a thing to be venerated, an unusual variety of love, she was handing you the corners so you could help gather. He loved you particularly. You always loved each other.

And then she let go, and Georgia was left holding that unwieldy feeling. It blew back over her, and she was caught.

She was sixteen. Not a prodigy at annihilation, like Orly, but a quick study.

The store on Burnett was not a mineral cave but an animal den, carved out by a creature partial to must and floral sheets and PEZ dispensers. A junk shop, a proper one, like walking into somebody else’s disordered brain, which operated on this lie: it was good to collect ephemera because if things were worth saving—if a volume of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books with abridgements of Ngaio Marsh could persist—why not all of us?

Thea peered into a display case full of drinking glasses that had once been jelly jars, with pictures of the Flintstones on them, another thing Georgia had begged for, and Thea could taste cloying grape on the crest of her tongue, bad jelly that you had to suffer through so you could drink later. They’d only ever gotten one, which Thea would have jettisoned when she’d left Portland. She had boxed up the board games and the stuffed animals, the decks of cards and bowling trophies, all of it now seemingly, eerily here, mangled and for sale.

The emptied rooms of dead children, she saw now. Or whose parents had given up on them. It wasn’t really a store; it was too dense, too personal for that. A hoarding. Evidence of damage. You hoarded because you lost someone. Lost someone, and decided, never again, not a person, not a thing.

From the back room of the junk shop stepped the proprietress, a shopworn woman in her fifties with long knotted hair. The authoress of the hoarding. She wore gunmetal blue jeans and a plaid cowboy shirt with pearl snaps. Thea realized, with the feeling of a dropped package, that the woman must have been about her own age. It wasn’t that Thea forgot she was fifty-two, only that people who were her own age were also fifty-two.

“Want something, darling?” the woman asked.

“I’m looking for a doll.”

“We got dolls!”

“A particular kind,” said Thea. “It was big in the seventies and eighties.”

The woman covered her mouth, the way already quiet people do to listen, and nodded encouragingly.

“Baby Alive,” said Thea.

The woman looked at Thea with a wet-eyed, accusing, marsupial expression. This went on for a while. It was like being on the phone with someone and not knowing whether you’d been disconnected. The longer Thea looked, the more varieties of emotion she detected: sorrow, fury, a tiny sense of humor trying to fill its sails with wind.

“If you don’t—” said Thea at last.

The woman took her hand from her mouth. “Do,” she said. “Think so. This way.”

Longing always did bring you worse and worse places, to junk shops and deserted parks; longing had in Georgia’s life taken her to unfamiliar dorm rooms when she was still in high school, to group houses and dingy apartments, to drink in, smoke in, shoot up in, and finally overdose, which she did for the first time in an abandoned house in East Portland. First time, that’s what Florence called it when she phoned Thea. How had the news found her? But Thea was glad to hear Florence say, in the calm voice of a driver spinning into a ditch, “Here we go.”

“Listen,” said Florence. They were driving around the city. Georgia was locked up in rehab near Medford, but Florence was showing Thea the places she would need to look next time: the public parks, a particular arch under a particular bridge, the empty houses, the old communes gone off the rails. “You can’t blame yourself, and you can’t blame Georgia. She’ll lie to you. I mean, obviously she’s already