The Memory Painter

*


Grace and Rhys Jacobs had been buried at Mount Auburn, one of the country’s oldest cemeteries. A National Historic Landmark, it was only a fifteen-minute drive from Boston.

They had died in a car accident before Linz had turned one, tragically severing their family in half. Linz had no memory of either of them and had only visited Mount Auburn once when she was sixteen, after she had accidentally found the paperwork for the plot in her father’s desk. She knew it was something she was never supposed to see, and she had been too afraid to ask her father why he had never taken her to see their graves.

In their household, there was an unspoken agreement that her mother and brother were never to be discussed, ever. As a child, Linz had naturally been curious about them, but her father would always divert her questions. Over time, she had come to understand that the past was simply too painful for him to discuss, but still, she wished he would share stories about the years before they had died. She would often daydream about how her father and mother had met, what her older brother had been like, and imagine that fateful day when the two of them had gotten in the car and driven away forever.

Linz had gone to the cemetery with Penelope and Derek during her junior year in high school. She had worn a dress and brought flowers. Now as she knelt at her mother’s grave, she felt the same energy she had felt then coursing through her body.

Here, beneath the ground, lay someone integral to her life, someone who had given birth to her and then vanished. Had her mother known about Renovo and that her father had suffered from recalls? Had she loved him?

Had he killed them too?

Linz closed her eyes and a soft breeze brushed across her face, as if whispering to her to let go of the thought, and she wondered about how different her life would have been if they had lived.

The headstones were cold reminders that she was not yet through the journey, that she had not remembered what she needed to know. But she was getting closer to the truth.

Linz stood up, strengthened. She would return home and take one last dose, come what may. She would remember it all.



THIRTY-SIX