Escape from Memory by Margaret Peterson Haddix Page A

her anymore, but this white, worried face in front of me was so familiar, I couldn’t believe that names mattered.
    “Explain,” I said tersely.
    Mom looked down at the concrete beneath us, and for a minute I was afraid that, after everything that had happened, she was still going to stonewall me. But then she looked straight at me and grimaced.
    “I don’t know where to start,” she admitted.
    “Aunt Memory—I mean, the woman who told me she was my Aunt Memory—she started with the Romans,” I said. All these switched identities were too confusing. I had a mom who wasn’t my mother, an Aunt Memory who wasn’t my aunt, a mom who really was my Aunt Memory…. And to think, some of my friends back home thought their families were complicated just because they had a stepparent or two.
    “The Romans?
She
would,” Mom said bitterly. “Her realname is Rona Cummins, and she’s not even Crythian. Or wasn’t, to start out with.”
    I must have looked confused already because Mom laughed.
    “Okay” she said. “The Romans. That’s the legend, that Crythe was started by a noble, highly advanced group of Roman citizens fleeing the fall of the empire. But there’s no proof, of course, because it’s all oral history. Nothing was ever written down. I’ve suspected, since I left Crythe and became more, uh, cynical, that that’s just a story someone chose to tell. If you don’t know who your ancestors are, why not claim someone impressive, make yourself feel good?”
    “But is it true or not?” I asked impatiently.
    “Who knows?” Mom said. “The legend was passed down for generations, and so it’s what Crythians remembered about themselves. So maybe it sort of became true, for Crythians.”
    I rubbed my forehead. Mom’s explanation was going to be hard to follow.
    “Crythe—the original Crythe—was high up in the mountains,” she said. “It was achingly beautiful—oh, if you could see those peaks, covered in snow! Even a non-Crythian would not be able to forget Crythe. But it was not an easy place to live. For centuries, I think, people barely got by, barely managed to eke out an existence.”
    “Why didn’t they just leave?” I asked.
    “Oh, Kira, you are such an American,” Mom said scornfully.
    I felt scolded, put down.
    “It’s not my fault,” I protested. “You’re the one who made me an American. Right?”
    Mom shook her head, but she looked amused.
    “I deserve that,” she said. “But you are so much what you are that I’m not sure you can understand Crythians. Americans believe that if you’re not happy where you are, you pack up, you move, you go somewhere better. Or you go through a twelve-step program, you improve yourself. You leave the past behind. You think you’ve got a right to happiness, and you’re going to make yourself happy even if it kills you.”
    “You’re an American too,” I pointed out.
    Mom shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “I think I’m still more of a Crythian. Crythians believe in the past. They believe in memories. They do everything for memory, not for happiness.”
    “Yeah, yeah, I know,” I said, not interested in all this philosophizing. What about my parents? What about my kidnapping? But I was still curious about one other detail. “Aunt Mem—I mean, Rona—told me Crythians remember everything that ever happens to them. But that’s not possible, is it?”
    “Probably not,” Mom admitted. “From the beginning, I think there were always details that Crythians forgot. The things that nobody cared about—the angle at which each blade of grass grew, the exact placement of each button in a button box—what did it matter if we remembered or forgot? But Crythians did have good memories. One Crythian left early in the twentieth century, and he created quite a stir, out in the Soviet Union. He worked as a journalist, and he could remember every interview without taking a single note. He did vaudeville-type shows, memorizing long strings of