The Mnemonivores

The map, which I absolutely should not have followed, lay spread across my passenger seat, pinned beneath two sweating cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

The paper was butcher block. The kind they wrap meat in at the grocery store. It had soaked up the sweat from my palm so the ink feathered at the edges, and it smelled faintly of blood, although that was probably my imagination. Probably.

The lines were too careful. Too deliberate. Whoever drew them had used a ruler for the roads and a steady hand for the circle with its X dead center. At the bottom, in block letters, were the words NO SATELLITES. The ink was darker there, pressed so hard the pen had nearly torn through.

Someone was angry when they wrote that, I thought. Someone was scared.

I didn’t want to think about what could scare the kind of person who drew maps on butcher paper and handed them to strangers.

My cigarette kept dying. I’d get it lit, watch the cherry glow against the darkening pines, and then the wind through the open window would snuff it out. Every time I leaned into the truck’s lighter—a factory original from 1987, the year my F-150 rolled off the line in Dearborn, Michigan—the element took three tries to catch. I was dusting the map with ash. Adding to the general ambiance of what the hell am I doing out here.

You know what you’re doing, the voice in my head said. It sounded like my mother. You’re running away, Olive. You’re running away and you’re not planning on coming back.

“Shut up,” I said out loud, to nobody.

The sun bled out across the sky in that flat, defeated orange you get in October. Giving up. Going down without a fight. I knew the feeling.

I’d been driving for three hours. Asphalt to gravel. Gravel to dirt. Dirt to ruts that grabbed at the tires like hands. The light was almost gone and I still hadn’t found the quarry, which was what the internet had insisted the X had to be. That was back when I’d still had cell service. Back when I’d still had a connection to the world I was leaving behind.

The world you already left, Mom’s voice said. The world that left you.

The radio was playing Delilah.Some woman dedicating ”Wind Beneath My Wings" to her husband of twenty years, her voice thick and trembling, saying things like he’s my rock and I couldn’t do it without him.

I jabbed the knob so hard the whole radio rocked in its housing.

“Fuck you, woman,” I said. “Fuck you and your husband and your twenty years."

The silence that followed was better.

Bette Midler, I thought. That’s who sings that song. From Beaches. The one where she dies at the end.

I started laughing then, a sound that surprised me. I hadn’t laughed in three months. It came out rusty, like a hinge that hadn’t been oiled.

Everyone dies at the end, Olive. That’s the whole point.

The map came from a barista named Brenda.

That wasn’t her real name. I knew that now. I’d known it then, too, on some level, the level where your hindbrain sends up signals that your conscious mind is too civilized to understand. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Her name tag was blank. That was the first thing I noticed. The white rectangle pinned to her green apron was empty and there was no indentation from peeled-off letters and no ghost of old adhesive.

She’s new,I told myself. They haven’t made her badge yet.

Except I’d been going to that coffee shop for six years. It was the one across from Sacred Heart, the one with the red awning and the bathroom that always smelled like mildew and lavender air freshener and I couldn’t remember the last time they’d hired anyone. It was always the same three women, rotating shifts. Deb, Maria, and the skinny, goth one whose name I always forgot. That was it. That was always it.

But I didn’t think about that then. I didn’t think too hard about a lot of things.

This was three months after the accident. I’d stopped going to the coffee shop right after it happened. Stopped going most places. For twelve weeks I made Folgers in my own kitchen and watched the clock tick through the hours I should’ve been dead, and I thought about the sound the other car had made when it crossed the median. A sound like the world tearing.

But that’s not—

I’m not ready to talk about that yet.

When I finally went back to the coffee shop, three months later, and saw Brenda behind the counter, I told myself it was good. Good to see someone new. Good to see proof that things are still moving. That the world didn’t freeze around you, Olive. That your life isn’t going to keep pretending everything’s the same.

Nothing should be normal. Nothing should be the same.

Brenda did not disappoint, that is for sure. Brenda was not normal.

Brenda’s dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail so tight it stretched her skin pale at the temples. It almost looked like the hair was glued on. It made her look like she was wearing her face a size too small. Her complexion had that drained, underground color, the color of things that live in caves or beneath rocks, of mushrooms and earthworms and roots.

When she spoke, her mouth moved with careful precision and intention, like she was learning the language as she went.

"Olive,” she’d said. “You look like a woman who needs to start over.”

I hadn’t told her my name.

She saw it on your card, I thought. You paid with a card.

Except I hadn’t. I remembered fishing two crumpled singles out of my scrub pocket. I remembered thinking I wished she would keep the sixty-seven cents because I hated having coins in my pocket.

“I made you something extra,” she said, and smiled. Her teeth were very white and very even, like a dental model. Like teeth that had never been used for actual eating. “Follow this here.”

She handed me my coffee. She handed me the map, folded small, tucked beneath the receipt.

She wrote Olive on the cup.

And here’s the other thing—I don’t go by Olive to strangers. I’m Olivia.Olivia Blankenship, RN and BSN. I’ve been Olivia the entire eight years I worked at the ICU at Sacred Heart. I’m Olivia on my driver’s license and Olivia on my credit cards and Olivia when I introduce myself at parties, which I don’t do anymore,go to parties, because everyone who used to invite me either doesn’t know what to say or says too much.

Olive was what Pete called me. What my boys called me when they thought it was cute to call their mom by her first name.

Don’t, Mom’s voice said. Don’t go there.

I didn’t. I took my coffee and I left.

But I remembered the way Brenda watched me walk away. That patient attention. The way you watch an animal in a trap. Like the struggling was the point. Like she was waiting for the moment I’d stop.

And her smell. Jesus, her smell.

She smelled exactly how she looked, like damp earth. Not garden soil, which was a clean dirt smell you get from repotting houseplants. This was something wet and sweet in a spoiled way. Like something had been buried and then unburied. Like something had been in the ground and then decided to climb back out.

I left the map on my kitchen table for two weeks.

It sat there under the overhead light I always kept on even during the day, curling at the corners, soaking up the smell of frozen dinners I heated but didn’t eat. I didn’t touch the map. I didn’t look at it, except when I did, which was constantly.

You’re going to follow it, the voice said. Not my mother this time. This one was darker. The voice that had started talking to me in the weeks after the accident, when I lay awake at three in the morning and stared at the ceiling and listened to the house fall in around me.

You know you’re going to follow it. You know there’s nothing else left.

“There’s plenty left,” I said out loud. Talking to myself. To the empty kitchen. To the ghosts. “There’s work. There’s Ethan. There’s—”

There’s what, Olive? What’s left that matters?

I didn’t have an answer.

When I finally went back to the coffee shop and asked about Brenda, they looked at me like I’d grown a second head.

"Brenda?” Deb said. She was the manager. Fifty-something with gray roots showing and a wedding ring digging into a finger that had gotten fatter around it. “We don’t have anyone named Brenda, hon.”

“Dark hair,” I said. “Pulled back tight. Really pale.”

Deb looked at Maria. Maria looked at the skinny one—Kylie, I suddenly remembered, without looking at her name tag, her name was Kylie—and Kylie looked back at Deb.

“Nobody like that works here,” Deb said slowly. “Nobody like that has ever worked here. I would know, sweetheart.”

They were looking at me the way people had been looking at me for three months. The sorry look. The poor thing look. The she’s not handling it well look.

I left without my coffee.

I told myself to forget the map. Forget Brenda. Forget the whole thing. Obviously my brain had invented it, a grief-induced hallucination, a crack in the pavement of my sanity. I was restless. I was tired. I was so damn bored with being sad that I would’ve believed anything, followed anyone, gone anywhere.

I tried to go back to work. I thought that would help.

Nobody else thought that, though. I could see it in their faces, my coworkers, my manager, even Dr. Chen with his sad eyes and his carefully neutral voice. It’s too soon, Olivia. Take more time. We understand.

They didn’t understand shit.

What was I supposed to do? Sit in that house? The one with the photographs on the walls and the toys still in the boys’ room all over their floor where they last played and Pete’s razor still sitting on the bathroom sink in my master bedroom with his tiny little beard hairs stuck to the porcelain because I couldn’t bring myself to clean it all up? Was I supposed to sit there and wait for the grief to get smaller, when every day it just got bigger, fatter, more demanding, like something feeding on me?

I went back to work.

And then I stood in the middle of the nurses’ station in the general ICU where I’d spent eight years and realized I couldn’t remember what I was doing there.

My hands shook as I built the med bag. Alcohol wipes. Flush. Syringes. Normal saline. And things I’d done a thousand times automatically now took all my thinking. I spent too long at the omnicell, pushing buttons, trying to figure it out.Which meds to give? Which to hold? This one or that?

Dr. Chen was heading out for the night and had seen me. He slowed and then stopped. I guess there was something on my face he wasn’t used to seeing.

“You okay, Olivia?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Just tired.”

That’s what you always say, the dark voice whispered. That you’re tired. You’re fine. You’re handling it.

I walked into my patient’s room with the med bag. The monitor washed everything in a blue glow, and for a second it wasn’t my patient lying there.

It was Pete.

The rise and fall of the chest. The stillness around the mouth. The ET tube in place with the strap and the bite guard, holding his jaw at that unnatural angle.

I blinked and it was Henry. My oldest. He was nine years old. The waveform up on the monitor screen was his, the sharp peaks repeating, stubborn and quick but fading and unreliable—

I blinked again and it was Sawyer. My four-year-old. Still in his booster seat. Still buckled in.

Mom?

The IV pump started alarming. Upstream occlusion. That shrill beeping that drills straight through your skull and makes you want to get a running head start and barrel straight out the fucking window. The room closed in. The plastic. The monitors. The hiss of the ventilator-controlled breaths, the whirl of a mediair fan I’d started across the room.

I couldn’t tell which body I was supposed to be saving.

None of them, the dark voice said. None of them, Olive. Because they’re already gone.

I finished the shift. Don’t ask me how. I remember giving report and the clock hitting seven-fifteen. I remember my body walking toward the front door exit like it had decided before I did. I remember the smell of the parking garage, the exhaust and concrete and something rotten in the corner, and I remember thinking, very clearly: I can’t do this anymore.

Not the job. Not any of it.

I stopped at the coffee shop. It was Deb behind the counter this time, with her gray roots and her tired smile. I ordered my usual cup and I didn’t ask about Brenda and I drove home and forgot to drink it.

I called my manager from the driveway and quit before I turned off the engine. I called my brother. Ethan, who didn’t answer, and he never answers before noon, even now, even after everything, because he is not a morning person and neither was I. So I left him a voicemail.

“Hey. It’s Olive. Look, I need you to stop by the house when you wake up. I’m leaving some stuff for you. Don’t freak out. For the love of god don’t fucking call the cops. I’m okay. I’m just... I need to go somewhere. I need to get away. I’ll explain later.”

No you won’t, the dark voice said. You’re never coming back.

I hung up. I went inside. I packed a duffel bag. I took the map off the kitchen table.

I left a note on the counter: Ethan—I am not kidnapped. I am not dead. I am taking a trip. I’ll be gone for a while. Please leave me alone.

I underlined trip three times.

P.S.—The house is yours. The furniture, the mortgage, all of it. The life insurance too, whatever’s left after the lawyers. I’ve already updated the beneficiaries. It’s not enough. It was never going to be enough. I don’t want their money.

I didn’t say goodbye to the house. I’d been forced to say goodbye a million times over the past three months. I just left.

The map sat on my passenger seat, pinned under two cans of Pabst so it didn’t fly away, and I followed it out of town.