The Memory Closet: A Novel (10 page)

“Storage unit, bookshelves, loveseats … sounds like you’re not planning on saying goodbye to this place anytime soon.”

“Goodbye!” Petey mimicked from the other side of the room. “Hello, goodbye.”

“Well, hello yourself … ?” Dusty looked a question at me.

“Petey.”

“Petey. You’re certainly looking green today.”

Our eyes met.

“And it’s not easy being green,” we said with the perfect unison of a Greek chorus. I smiled and Dusty chuckled. It was a warm, comfortable sound.

“So, you’re an artist?”

“Sort of. I write and illustrate children’s books.” I leaned over and picked up a Filbert book off a stack of them on the floor. “Sir Filbert Wellington Frog III.” I handed Dusty the book. He turned it over in his hands, examining and admiring it.

“You’re a published author?”

“Let’s keep this in perspective here. I write about a little green frog, not a great white whale.”

“Can I keep this? Will you autograph it for me?”

“Well sure, I guess.” I was flustered, a permanent state of being, it seemed, whenever the sheriff was around. “Let me find a pen.”

I scratched around on the desk, looking for a writing utensil and finally located a Sharpie. That would do. Dusty handed me the book, and as I struggled to think of something to write on the jacket, he picked up the stack of kid art on the roll-top desk and began to go through it, picture by picture.

“I see what you mean about monkeys in a paint fight.”He held up a page that was a riot of unrestrained color. “There are others here,”--he held up one that showed a family and a house, and another that was obviously a person’s face--“that are more realistic. But I know Karen. Even the paint-fight art will tell her something.”

Karen. Dr. Carlson was a woman.

Why do I feel like somebody just shoved the business end of a sledgehammer into my belly?

I handed him back the autographed book. I’d played it safe and just wrote my name and the date. He took it, gathered up the stack of drawings and started for the stairs.

“I’m not going to tell Karen these drawings are 25 years old, just that I got them out of the attic of a house where two little girls lived.” He paused and granted me that grin again. “I guarantee she’ll see things in those pictures we can’t see.”

The parlor that had been bright and cheery when we went upstairs a few minutes earlier was now shadowy gloom.

“The day I got here, I asked Bobo why she kept all the drapes drawn and she said—” I started to tell Dusty about her “I’m practicing being blind” remark but Bobo finished my sentence for me. She was sitting in the platform rocker in the semidarkness.

“I don’t want nobody looking in, that’s why.” Her voice was quiet and somber. “Ain’t nobody’s business but ours what goes on in this house.”

She stood slowly and hobbled toward me, ignoring Dusty as if he weren’t there at all.

“Most of the time, I don’t remember much. And what I do remember is all cloudy. Price you pay for being around so long.”

She paused, her gaze fixed on me; her rheumy eyes appeared remarkably clear and focused. Then a look came into them and I froze. It was the same look I’d seen in my mother’s eyes in the moments before she died.

“But sometimes I do remember, sometimes the clouds clear away and I can see it all, everything.”

She took my arm and squeezed with remarkable strength.

“You don’t want to see it,” she hissed. “You think you do, but you’re wrong. Don’t go digging 'round in what’s dead and buried, Annie girl, 'cause you can’t un-know the truth. Once you see it, you’ll have it in your head forever. And it’ll haunt you—like it done your poor mama, haunt you ‘til the day you die.”

She loosened her grip and let go, turned without ever acknowledging Dusty’s presence and started up the stairs.

“There’s a long ole trail a’windin’ to the land beyond the sea … “

Dusty and I stood together, listening to her mournful hymn as we watched her climb the steps. I couldn’t speak. My mouth had gone suddenly dry, and my tongue stuck to the roof of it like I’d been gargling peanut butter. Dusty stared at the spot where she disappeared at the top of the stairs for a moment, then looked back at me.

He wasn’t smiling anymore.

“I’ll send these pictures over to Karen today, and I’ll call you when I hear what she has to say about them.”

Then he fit his Stetson in place on his head, opened the big oak door and was gone.

T
he rest of my life showed up in a truck on Friday—all the things I had stored at Mama’s. The furniture I’d ordered from Ikea hadn’t come yet, but I could start painting without it. All I needed was an easel, paint and canvasses. I was mixing cadmium yellow, cadmium yellow light and a pinch of burnt umber into shades of gold in the soft north light of the studio ten minutes after the delivery truck pulled away.

In the days that followed, my life gradually defined itself the natural way a stream finds its own path down a hillside. Bobo and I developed a routine. She had breakfast set out on the table every morning when I went downstairs. Nothing elaborate. Grape Nuts in a bowl, two teaspoons of sugar on the top, and a glass of orange juice. She called my choice of breakfast cereal “gravel” when she was in a good mood and “kitty litter” the rest of the time.

Though she literally got up with the chickens, she usually waited to eat with me, gumming her Rice Krispies sans and downing black coffee the consistency of road tar. She worked in the garden or with the chickens until it got so hot she had to come inside. Even the early spring heat was more than she could handle.

And I painted. But I didn’t paint as I always had painted before— an end in mind, a task to finish, a job to be done. I painted with total freedom and abandon. No Filbert illustrations. No children’s art. The images came from some place in me beyond my own awareness, and I painted one thing and one thing only, over and over again. Eyes. I didn’t plan it that way; it just happened. And I knew whose eyes they were. Laughs in the Wind was staring out at me from my canvasses.

The first painting was a collage, sets of eyes, all sizes, jumbled together in a haze of warm golden light. All the eyes had the same quality. They followed you. No matter where you stood in the room, they were looking at you.

Another was a doorframe, white paint flaking off. The door was open only a crack, and the shaft of light illuminated nothing but the dirty tile floor and dust particles suspended in the air like mini snowflakes. But in the darkness just beyond the light, the eyes shone.

The largest painting, on a 36- by 48-inch canvas, was a lone eye, dark chocolate brown with long lashes and a feather of eyebrow above it. The eye was full of unshed tears, welled up, the instant before they spilled down the cheek, and a lone teardrop hung suspended at the end of an eyelash, pear shaped, ready to fall. The silver sheen of tears on the black iris mirrored what the eye was looking at. An image, a silhouette, the dark outline of hands reaching out, holding something.

Something, but I wasn’t sure what.

I must have redone that part of the painting half a dozen times. My hand created what my mind’s eye could see, but what I could see didn’t make sense. In my head, the hands appeared to be holding a sack or a bag of some kind.

All the eye pictures were haunting, full of darkness and sorrow and pain. But I didn’t feel sorrow when I looked at them. I felt joy. It was like there was someone on the other side of a glass and we both reached up and touched the glass at the same time, our fingers connected but not connected, separated by an invisible, impenetrable membrane.

Windy was there, in a parallel universe behind my canvasses. And I struggled every day to paint a window for her to enter my world.

Bobo seldom came into my studio. Her initial dislike of Petey had gradually downshifted into genuine loathing. She hated the bird, mumbled under her breath that one of these days Butch the cat would swallow him whole, or “that baby-puke green bird’s goin’ to turn up hung.”

But she happened to stop at the studio door when I was painting the collage. It wasn’t finished. I had the gold background done but only three or four sets of eyes. She stood looking at it for a moment and then recognition dawned on her face.

“You hadn’t ought to wake her up,” she said softly. “Just leave her be.”

I expected the eyes to spark memories, that I’d look into them and see a truth there, fall into the depths of them and the world would begin to brighten, like the room with the dimmer switch, until I could see it all, everything illuminated, everything clear.

That’s not what happened. Nothing happened. The pictures didn’t spark any recollections and neither did anything else. I hadn’t unearthed a single memory since the children on the prairie pouring water down holes in the dirt.

Julia came five days a week, a half day sometimes, a full day others. I couldn’t figure out her schedule, and I suspected she set it around whatever Bobo needed. The bank cut her a check every two weeks from the trust Mama set up for Bobo. I didn’t know how much Julia was paid, but whatever it was, it wasn’t enough.

Lunch was a wander-into-the-kitchen-and-stare-into-the-refrigerator affair for me, then I read, painted or ran errands. For Bobo, afternoons were reserved for crocheting and taking long naps, though when she woke, she swore she hadn’t slept a wink: ”I was just resting my eyes is all.”

And
Oprah
, of course. Julia set a tray of food in front of her door every afternoon and now that she actually ate it, I thought she looked better, but maybe it was just wishful thinking.

Some evenings, Julia made supper for us; other evenings, Bobo cooked. She still wouldn’t let me touch anything in her kitchen— especially her precious it’ll-cut-your-thumb-off butcher knife. The kitchen was her world, her little fiefdom, and she reigned there supreme. The seasoning in most of what she prepared was off, too much or too little of something, or missing key ingredients. Anything that required a full-bore recipe was a disaster.

We sat together on the front porch most evenings—her in the swing, me in the rocker—watching the fireflies blink like Christmas lights on the willow tree. Bobo filled the warm, satin darkness with stream-of-consciousness babble; whatever entered her mind fell out her mouth.

“I keep losing time and I don’t know what happens to it,” she told me one evening as she shelled black-eyed peas into a metal bowl on her lap. “It’s just gone. An hour. An afternoon. A day. Some days I’ll look outside and it’s dark, and I can’t remember nothing that happened since I brushed my teeth that morning.”

Bobo hadn’t had a tooth to brush in 30 years.

She stopped swinging then, stopped shelling the peas.

“I’ve lost pieces of me, too.” Her husky voice was soft. “Getting old does that to you, breaks you apart and things fall off. And you get wore out tryin’ to hold it all together.”

She let out a long, slow sigh.

“I ain’t a day older’n 16.” She tapped her temple with her bent finger. “In here, I ain’t. Then I look in the mirror and I don’t see me; I see a witch a’starin’ back at me.” She shuddered and there was no chill in the air. “All wrinkled up, no hair, face a ruin … and I don’t know where I went, the me inside. I lost her someplace.”

“I think ‘me’ is a moving target, Bobo. Like you put a bunch of rocks in a kaleidoscope, and every time you turn it, the pieces look different, but it’s still the same rocks.”

Bobo was quiet for a moment, pondering, then turned and looked at me.

“That don’t make no more sense than sittin’ on the TV to watch the couch.”

She picked up a handful of unshelled peas. “I was a pretty little girl and
wrinkled
ain’t what I dreamed of bein’ when I grew up.”

Her gnarled fingers deftly popped open the pods and let peas drop into the bowl. The swing’s wreek-wreek, wreek-wreek melody harmonized with the drone of the cicadas in the juniper trees and the first timid chirping of the crickets.

“I hadn’t ought to a'got old.” It was a ragged whisper. “I should have died with the rascals ‘stead of falling apart piece by piece for all these years.”

There were times she talked nonstop about her garden, the minutia of planting and weeding and harvesting. She talked about people who may not have existed and events that may never have occurred. When she was telling the stories, it was impossible to tell what was fact and what was fantasy.

She often talked about the past—not the recent past—about growing up in Tahoka, Texas, and the years when her children were little. Some of her memories were incredibly detailed; I marveled at her ability to recall specifics—the color of the dress she wore the Sunday she met Granddaddy Cecil; how a pot of pinto beans she’d left on the stove burned dry while she listened to President Roosevelt describe “a day that will live in infamy.”

I just sat quietly, asking a question now and then. She never made any reference to the time when I was growing up, and I didn’t pick at the scab. I had grown comfortable with the rhythm of our lives; I knew we’d talk about those things when the time was right.

She never asked about me and didn’t seem even remotely interested in my life or my world. I couldn’t blame her. Compared to what hers had been, my life was pathetically hollow.

We usually went to bed early.

Not a very exciting existence but it was just what I needed. Every day, I felt peace soak into me like lotion on dry, chapped skin. The pressure that built up in my head until it produced blinding migraines was sighing away. I’d had only one headache three days after I arrived. It kept me in bed all day, but I’d had none since. Some coil of tension was gradually loosening inside me. I was beginning to feel at home, really at
home
for the first time in my memory.

Joel phoned often to see how I was getting along. His concern was touching.

“Did you remember anything yet?” he’d ask eagerly and when I’d tell him, “not yet,” he’d let out a long, disappointed sigh. For some reason, finding out about my amnesia had planted a burr under my little brother’s saddle, and he was frustrated that he couldn’t do anything about it.

“I tried to remember living in that house, thought as hard as I could so I could tell you about it. But I couldn’t.”

“Joel, you were two years old when we moved away from Goshen. How could you possibly remember anything about it?”

“I just want to help, that’s all. I want to help you remember.”

“Oh, I’ll get my memory back,” I assured him. “You can count on it. Just give me time and I’ll remember.”

Almost a week later than scheduled, a truck finally pulled up out front one morning, and two burley men unloaded my Ikea order in the front yard, flat packed, and, of course, “Assembly Required.” I tried to talk them into hauling the boxes up the stairs, and when my persuasion didn’t work, I played the Bobo card. I got her to do her pitiful-old-lady-with-arthritis shtick and I managed to guilt-trip them into depositing the boxes and the two loveseats in the studio.

I showed them where I wanted the couches, one by the hall door and the other on the wall between the back stairs door and the window overlooking the backyard.

In less than half an hour, I had one corner of the room piled high with packing materials, and all the pieces-parts of the whole order laid out on the rag rug. I’d obviously bitten off way more than I could chew. It had been a risk to order all this stuff with nothing more than a vague notion that I’d figure out how to assemble it when it arrived. And Anne Mitchell didn’t do risks.

But I didn’t feel anxious. I was excited. And proud of myself.

I wasn’t a complete novice; I had built an Ikea computer desk in England. Of course, it had taken me a week. It could be Christmas before I got all this assembled. The shelves would be easy and I decided to start there to build up my confidence before I tackled the storage cabinet. Then I discovered that the tool kit which was supposed to accompany the order was missing—the
metric
tool kit—so I trudged out to the garage to collect replacements.

But they weren’t there.

I stood in the cool, windowless building, the florescent bulb in the ceiling fixture popping and snapping, and stared at the wall above the workbench where the tools hung neatly inside their Magic Marker outlines. The hammer was gone. So were two large, flat-head screwdrivers. I didn’t need the flat-heads, but I couldn’t do the job without a hammer.

Where had they gone? Who could have taken a hammer and screwdrivers? Why would Bobo want them? Julia? Must have been Julia. I’d have to ask her what she did with them.

I looked over the remaining tools and selected a couple of small, Phillips-head screwdrivers and a set of Allen wrenches.

As sure as God made little green apples, the tools wouldn’t be the only thing missing from the Ikea order. Some essential nut, screw or bolt would be AWOL, too, and I’d have to come up with a substitute, so I began to dig through the drawers on the far end of the workbench to check out what was there.

Then my glance fell on the shelf in the cabinet unit. The can of WD-40 was gone. It had been there a week ago. It had been the only thing on the cabinet shelf so it wasn’t like it was stuck behind something else and I couldn’t see it. The cabinet was empty.

I passed Julia on my way through the downstairs parlor and asked her about the tools and the WD-40. She shrugged her shoulders.

“I didn’t move them. But there’s a tack hammer under the sink in the kitchen if that will help.”

Actually, the tack hammer was better suited to the task at hand than the one I’d been looking for. It was smaller, closer to the size of the hammer in the missing Ikea tool kit. I deposited the hammer, screwdrivers and wrenches on the floor in the studio, intent on getting to work.

Julia appeared in the doorway.

“I forgot to tell you; I think you may need to call the exterminator again,” she said. “I was on the third floor putting sheets away in the linen closet, and I heard noises in the attic. The squirrels must be back.”

“Goody. I’ll go take a look.”

Using the-shortest-distance-between-two-points-is-a-straight-line logic, I should have popped up the creepy, dark, back staircase to the third floor. The attic door was right beside the back stairs door in the third-floor bedroom above me, as the cellar door was right beside the back stairs door below me in the kitchen. But I didn’t use the back stairs. I went out into the hall and up the front stairs.

Yeah, yeah, that facing my fears thing. It’s on my to-do list.