living memory

living memory Grace Deaton

My name is Ida Elizabeth and I am an only child. The kids in my class make fun of my name. They call me a grandma and ask how many times I had flunked to be a grandma who hadn’t graduated fifth grade. I don’t know what to say to them. My mom tells me to ignore them because my name is special and they will never understand, no one will ever understand.

My mom and dad work a lot. They work even more than I go to school. I get lonely when they aren’t around, but that means I get to watch a lot of TV. Sometimes I wish I had someone to watch with, but then I imagine a little brother yelling at me to change the channel like dad does to mom, and I decide I’m happy on my own.

Today I decide to be bad. Mommy always tells me that I can’t have a TV in my room because watching TV in bed will turn me into a zombie, eating other people’s brains instead of using my own. She and Daddy have always had a TV in their room which I think means they are already zombies. According to my science class, if two zombies have a baby then that baby has to be a zombie, that’s how genes work.

I climb up onto Mommy and Daddy’s bed. The duvet swallows me whole like the time I swallowed an entire grape without chewing and Mommy cried and cried and cried while I coughed it up and told her everything was fine. But she didn’t stop crying.

I reach for the nightstand on my mom’s side of the bed where the remote always lives, but it’s not there. I crawl over to Daddy’s side, thinking he finally stole the remote away from Mommy. But he didn’t.

It’s not on the bed, nowhere on the floor. I can’t find it in the bathroom, nor in any of the dresser drawers. The digital clock on the nightstand blinks 3:26pm. Four minutes until my show starts, an hour until my mom gets home. I am losing time.

I swing open the double closet doors. I’d never been in my mom’s closet before. It’s big. I didn’t know she owned this many clothes. I run my hand along the dresses, imagining their soft fabric brushing my own legs. I take a pair of tall heels and slip my tiny feet into them. My ankles wobble as I try to step and I fall to my knees. 11

Suddenly I don’t care about my show anymore.

With my head now close to the floor, I see something that from any other vantage point would have been obscured by long skirts. A box. Me and the box are at eye level. In big sharpie letters across the brown box is my name. Ida. I poke my head out the door. Red numbers flash 3:38pm. I still have time. I pull the box into the light, feeling slightly guilty but overwhelmingly invigorated.

The flaps are torn. I pull out the contents one by one. First is a baby onesie covered in little pink flowers. I pressed it to my nose, expecting the sweet scent of a baby, but instead it just smelled dusty. Mommy showed me a photo of me wearing this one time. I told her it was pretty and she smiled but she didn’t look happy. It made me feel weird.

I look on the inside where the tag should’ve been but instead of a tag, Ida was embroidered along the back collar. I frown. My name is Ida Elizabeth. I don’t like it when people leave the Elizabeth part out. My parents never left the Elizabeth part out. I set the onesie down.

Next is a picture. It’s of Mommy and Daddy standing on a front porch holding me between them. It’s not our front porch. I wonder where we were. Mommy looks young, pretty, less tired. The wispy hair on my tiny baby head is almost blonde. I pull a piece of my hair in front of my face and see a deep caramel brown curl. I wish my hair was still that blonde color, then maybe I would grow up to be pretty like Mommy used to be.

I pull out a framed document next. Curly letters spell out the words Birth Certificate. It says my name, Ida Elizabeth Ingles. I crinkle my eyebrows. My birth certificate has been hanging above my bed for my whole life. I saw it there when I woke up this morning. I mean, right?

I drop the frame and scramble to my room. Sure enough, there it is hanging on my pale yellow wall. Can people have more than one birth certificate? Maybe the one in the closet is a replacement, just in case something bad happens to the first one.

I walk slowly back to the closet and sit back down. I scan the backup 12

birth certificate over and over. And then I see it.

October 1st, 2004.

That’s not my birthday.

My birthday is in February. It’s always been in February.

I am nine years old. I count backwards on my fingers to make sure. I land on 2011. This piece of paper is seven years too early. Or am I seven years too late?

I tear through the box. I find another picture. My mom and dad are in a field, my dad in a suit and my mom in a black dress. They’re standing in front of something. A box. Not like the box in my lap. But maybe everything like the box in my lap.

Their faces are long. These are the faces I know, nothing like the faces on that foreign front porch.

They are standing in front of a coffin.

“Ida Elizabeth, what are you doing?” When I turn around, Mommy’s face is white as a ghost. She’s home early. She marches into the closet in a daze and snatches the photo from my hands.

Before she can stop me I dig my hands into the box and pull out the first thing my hands touch. A newspaper article with that same coffin picture.

Tragic Accident Befalls Local Family- Six Year Old Daughter Found Dead.

“What is this?” I hold up the flimsy paper. It trembles in my hands. Mommy is crying uncontrollably now. I feel my heart beating in my chest, in my stomach, in my ears.

“I don’t have a sister,” I say, but lacking confidence.

“Neither did Ida!” She yells back, voice hoarse.

But I’m Ida. My name is Ida Elizabeth and I am an only child and my mom just said my name but she isn’t talking about me.

More loud crying wracked her body. “We just wanted a second chance,” she said, dropping to the floor like me. I gently placed the newspaper back in the box, then pushed the box as far away from my body as I could reach. “What’s wrong with that?” She looked at the ceiling like she was asking God.

Maybe I’m forgetting things. Maybe we moved when I was a baby so I never knew that porch. Maybe I’m not in fifth grade. Maybe my birthday is in October. Maybe I’m a zombie who rose from the dead and climbed out of my coffin on February 18th, 2011.

No. None of those things are true.

I start crying with her, but we don’t cry together. I don’t crawl over to her. I don’t reach out for her comforting arms. I cry alone on the scratchy carpet on the floor of a closet I wish I’d never opened.

The Mommy in front of me isn’t the Mommy I know, but even less is she the Mommy in the picture in front of the porch with baby Ida who isn’t me.

But I think I am supposed to be her.