What You Carry

In the memory, I am seven, standing at the back of a closet, running shoes on the hardwood floor, the mothballed smell of my grandmother’s lambswool coat pressed into my face. I am little, but my sister is smaller still, a year and a bit younger than me. In the memory, I have pulled the closet door shut, and this seems against all odds because the knob is on the outside. I know I am afraid because I have almost caught my fingers in pulling the folding door tight, leaving a little gap where the light comes through—a place where I can put my fingers again to push the door out afterward. After he’s passed by.

The closet can’t be very big, but it seems so in memory because I am small. If I look down, I can see blue summer shorts, a striped T-shirt, a skinned knee that’s healing from a fall off my bike, and my feet are far, far below me. How am I able to be there while I’m also—at the same time—in this body now, at forty-eight? I wonder how I’m back there in my grandparents’ bedroom closet, while I’m meditating in a friend’s borrowed house in St. John’s, on a Thursday morning in May. It’s short, the little film in my head. It shouldn’t, by all logic and reason, be something that will suddenly emerge after forty years without warning. But it does.

In this one memory, there is terror. This is not a first time, then, but one in a series of moments, one of many memories that have not been allowed out. In time, in this time, I am in my woman’s body, sitting cross-legged on a hardwood floor, a pale beam of light splicing across the sofa and then spilling onto the patterned blue swirl of a rug. My legs are tired after a long walk down Duckworth Street—past Queen’s Road, then Bond, Gower, and back up by way of Prescott Street and so many tipsy, coloured houses. There’s takeout coffee from the Parlour on Military Road sitting next to my knee, half-drunk and growing cold.

In this, my adult body, a seven-year-old’s memory sets fire to cells that jitter; muscles that twitch, ready to run; lungs that go staccato— breath quiet, then hyperventilating; and a woman’s heart that hammers as a child’s in her chest. No hide-and-seek. Just fear. In this, my own body but not my own, I am somehow seven again. There is the floor beneath my feet, the feeling and texture of the coat against my skin, the smell of cardboard shoeboxes, and the slight, weighted press of my sister’s body behind me.

I have pushed her to the back of the closet, turned her round so she can’t see. She trembles. I feel that now, the press of the backs of her summer-bare arms against the backs of mine. I hush her, slow my breathing, knowing he isn’t far. If we hide here, he will go past. If we hide, I will see his shadow pass by the crack in the door. There are two doors to my grandparents’ bedroom. I will wait until he has come in by the room’s first door, gone by the long closet, and moved out through the second door. If we are quiet, we will be safe, able to run once he has gone out. If he doesn’t find us, this time, we will escape, tracing the path he has just walked: out through the kitchen, past the small, pink-tiled bathroom, down the short flight of stairs, and out into the backyard. I will be able to save the littler one. Where to go, afterward, I don’t know.

The girl who is seven doesn’t know. She only feels her heart, trapped in her mouth; feels sweat, dripping down between her bony shoulder blades. She faces out, arms wide, too sacrificial for seven: a saviour, in her stiped T-shirt and solid blue shorts, in guise of crucifixion. Her face is my face. In memory, this breath—caught like a bird in my chest—is only ever hers.

My paternal grandfather’s house stood next to my parents’ house. If you asked me to describe it, I would begin by telling you that the furnace was always on, too hot. The air always seemed to smell of over-boiled carrots and dried-out roast beef. The 1950s chesterfield was turquoise-blue, raised fabric with carved flowers, discreetly tufted in design. There were tiny china vases full of sculpted flowers. There were cheap sliding windows that were never opened, so that the house seemed trapped within itself, unable to breathe. The curtains were always drawn, so sunlight never entered. There was a television with an antenna on top, and the sounds of Lawrence Welk’s creepy cult of matching blue dresses and tuxedos singing on a Sunday night. And there was a guest bedroom with two twin beds that wore matching mustard-coloured coverlets, the only art being a few framed images of women in pink and green gowns with parasols, as if life had stopped in the late 1800s.

There was a copy of a children’s Bible, with pictures of a glowing, haloed Jesus who seemed to hover in midair like a strange superhero, and a drawer with board games. There were endless bowls of summer peas to quietly hull in the shadowed dark of a garage, and endless cobs of corn to pull tassels from in preparation for quiet, uncomfortable suppers. There were dark corners in a shadowed basement, full of woodworking tools and machines that hummed, coughed, and ate wood faster than anything else I’d ever seen.

And then there was my grandmother, who wore cheap flowered housecoats with snap buttons over her underwear on hot days, and there was my grandfather, whose face never really opened itself to kindness, intimidating us at the best of times. There was silence and fear, along with hard-to-remember rules and regulations. If you forgot them, there were punishments. Sometimes you’d be locked outside, not let back inside the house until you had cried for some time, until your tears had dried on your face, and then you had to promise to try harder to be better. Being locked outside was normal to me then, even though now I know it was anything but all right. When you’re seven, you trust the grownups.

Children were meant to be seen and not heard. We were meant to fall asleep quickly, and my grandfather would always stand—silhouetted in the doorway as a shadowy figure against the brightness of a hall light—listening to our breathing, to be sure we were sleeping. Talking after the lights were turned out wasn’t acceptable. Sometimes pretending to be asleep led to us falling asleep, which was easier than being terrified while awake.

Sleep was linked to fear, so sleep never came easily. Years later, as an adult, well-meaning friends would say, “Try a sleep clinic,” or “It must be perimenopause,” but I knew that there was something else under there. And so, even sleep—which was a country into which you were supposed to be able to fall into as easily as you would fall into love—was taken from me. Innocence, too, would find itself stolen, without warning, and not even remembered until much later, not until forty-eight, when my life had just seemed to settle into itself.

People say the first memory opens a door to others, that they will slide into one another, push through your mind until a slow-motion film plays on the inside of your eyelids when you try to sleep. Sometimes, though, it’s just one memory.

The trigger will be a dagger stuck under your ribs in the replica of a Shakespearean duel: it will hurt—a quick jab and thrust—and take your breath away. Your lungs collapse and your breath will be taken. What comes after it, the memory, will take you to your knees, to the floor if you aren’t already there yet. You will shake, your body feeling as if it has broken apart from you, splintered. Everything will feel sharp and bloody. You will not know why it’s happening, this tsunami, and for the first weeks you will wander around trying to look as if you haven’t lost your mind.

You will think that you are mad, wonder whether your mind is splitting into alternate personalities. You will question your own health and well-being, think that others will, too, and so you won’t be able to bear being around other people for a while. Nothing will seem real in the first weeks and months after a memory surfaces. Everything will seem uncertain and unanchored. You will fear those friends who are closest, because they will be the few who are able to see through your mumblings of “I’m fine.” They will know you too well, and you will not have the energy to maintain a facade of normalcy. You will tell very few because the shame of the memory makes you both angry and sad, and you cry when you least expect it.

You can’t bear to be held because you feel weak. If someone shows you kindness, you weep. You cannot let down your walls, for fear of further breakage. It explains so much of why you do what you do. You build walls. You don’t know how to receive love, but only how to give it. Afterward, you’ll begin to understand that you’ve been weeping for the little girl whose innocence was stolen.

I couldn’t tell how much time had passed on the morning of the memory’s arrival. I didn’t know the time, but I wandered upstairs, past the photo of an iceberg, and took a long, hot shower. I cried, knowing that the sound of water pounding would stop anyone in the house next door from hearing me through the thin wall. I didn’t know why I was crying, except I suddenly realized that none of the memories I had in my head from my childhood would ever match the new one. That didn’t make sense, so I wrapped a towel around my body and sat shaking on the edge of the tub for another period of undefined time, finally getting to my feet to text my sister.

“Do you remember this?”

It was a simple question followed by a short description of a scene in a bedroom closet, of someone protecting someone else, an older sister with arms outstretched to stop whatever was outside the closet door from coming in and causing harm. Then the quick response: “Yes. I never forgot, and now you’ve remembered.” Breath caught, knowing that she had known for decades, but not shared or spoken of it. Another kick in the gut, blow to the heart. It was not her memory to tell, but mine to remember. She knew that.

Winded, wrapped in that bath towel, hair wet and curls tousled, I walked down the short hall to the bedroom, wrapped my arms around myself. I felt the hem of the towel with my fingers, knowing its fabric and texture was real. I perched on the bed’s edge, alone and broken. I kept looking down at my feet, bare against the floor. I kept trying to breathe.

Days later, there was a long trip from Newfoundland to Ontario, followed by weeks of hiding, nesting, gathering in to feel safe. Therapy, to try and sort out how things work, and why they work (or don’t), and trying to figure out how I could put myself together again after I’d been broken. Long nights spent sitting, two dogs next to me on a mid-June sofa. My eyes wandered, searched the walls, the sharp corners of familiar rooms, looking for answers to questions that I knew I’ll likely never find.

Sometimes, you carry things you can’t remember, or that your body doesn’t want you to recall. Therapy says: “Not your fault,” “buried deep in your mind, to protect you,” “not you now, but just a memory,” and “can’t hurt you.” And then Therapy says: “Find a picture of yourself when you were little. Write a letter to her.” And you feel your stomach clench, heart ache, eyes prick with tears. You think of Newfoundland, and of time spent sitting on a shoreline, watching icebergs, just a few weeks ago. You think “how has this happened?” and then “can I erase it?” But you can’t. It’s arrived, Therapy tells you, because you are healthy, ready to heal deeper wounds. You scoff when Therapy asks you to write letters to yourself as a child, or even worse, to your grandfather. What will you say?

To the first, you will say this: “I tried to protect you, but I was too small then.” To the second, you will say: “Bastard,” “You ruined me,” and “You left me in pieces.” Neither letter will solve the problem or heal any wound. There are darker memories that hide behind the bedroom closet one.

You will sit in a therapist’s office and stare at a painting on the wall above her head. You will not be able to look her in the eyes.

“Why can’t you look me in the eyes?”

“I can’t ...”

Further prodding. “Why not? Remember when you were sick, you couldn’t look people in their eyes? What was it?”

A sigh. “Shame. Embarrassment.” A litany of words, a string of rosary beads that leads back forty years or more.

And then, your question to her: “Why? Why now?”

Her answer, “Why not now? When better?”

So much anger, a wave that rises, catches in your throat, makes your hands clench up into fists. “What?”

The brain, she tells you, is complex. It buries memories that threaten your survival. It boxes them up, draws curtains around sharp edges so that you can survive, grow up, be productive. It’s only when you’re older, healthier, that the mind relaxes, lets down its guard, thinks it might be okay to breathe.

Memory is a liar. The time you thought was safest, healthiest, was that time before you were ten. Now, you know that it was that time that caused you the greatest harm, made you sick and led you to be suicidal and depressed in your thirties, only releasing its grip on you in your forties, as you began to live in a healthier way.

Memory is a liar, and who can tell what’s real? The grandfather who stood on the other side of the closet doors knew it was wrong. The grandmother also knew. Churchgoing folks, steadfast. Made pies for church suppers, built wooden pews, seemed like upstanding citizens.

The little girls knew it was wrong, too.

Inside that house, though, God looked the other way. Maybe He couldn’t see because the sun was too bright one day, got in His eyes and blinded Him. Or maybe He was too busy singing hymns in the church on the hill. Or maybe it was so hot that He thought it was hell in the house, didn’t much like it, and so didn’t think to look twice. It doesn’t matter. What happened did happen, can’t be altered or erased.

What you thought was real just isn’t. The maps have been blown apart and the people you thought you knew and loved aren’t the ones you remember. The centres cannot hold. The poem unravels, the sweater unfurls, the flower wilts. Trust will always be a hard thing to navigate, for how can you trust anyone when the people you thought loved you actually hurt you?

And how can you trust a man after one has so badly hurt you? Who would have the patience?

The things you carry with you are heavy and painful. The memory that steps forward—of two little girls hiding in a closet from a grandfather—doesn’t need a sequel. It doesn’t need other memories to follow because it is damaging enough. It upends a woman’s life. It leaves her spinning in a storm, without an anchor, lost at sea.

Things you carry are ghosts of the past. They are invisible to anyone but you because you feel them as they carve a hole out in the centre of your chest. You must carry them. You must speak with them, acknowledge that they happened—these darker things—so that you can put them down on the edge of a northern lake. You must offer them some pale shade of acknowledgement, for having helped to make you who you are, even if who you are right now feels more broken than whole.

There comes a place and a time, too, when you must put them down.

You will put them down, on the shore of a lake, at the base of a pine, and you will look up to the sun, shading your eyes with your hand.

You will put them down, these things, and you will breathe in some kind of peace.

You must believe this will happen.

You must.

In the memory, I am about seven. What age I am does not really matter, not after all these years. I am little, but still bigger than my sister. I am lost, but brave, willing to take the brunt of it all to protect the littler one.

In my life, now, I am older—brave, stubborn, and persistent. In my life, now, I take the memory down to the water and place it under a tall pine. The little girl who I was then sits inside me, watching. Her heart beats in my chest, a caged bird trying to escape. Her heart flutters, breath catching.

I breathe in, then out. I open my mouth and close my eyes. I open my mouth to speak with my voice, to sing, to let her fly out—this little bird, wings wide, stretched out over blue water.

KIM FAHNER

lives in Sudbury, Ontario. Her novel, The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46), was published in 2024, and her next book of poems, The Pollination Field (Turnstone), will be published in 2025. Kim is First Vice Chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada, and was a finalist for the 2023 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Contest.