The Memory Closet: A Novel (17 page)

“What’s happening, Anne?” she asked softly. “You sick? All this rememberin’, it’s done something to you, ain’t it?”

My knee-jerk response was to pull up the drawbridge and keep Bobo at a safe, don’t-worry-about-me-I’m-fine distance. I wanted to shut the door of my comfort zone and lean back against it. But I didn’t.

“I don’t know, Bobo.” My voice was a shaky whisper. “I don’t have any idea. I wish I did.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “But I
do
know I wasn’t sleepwalking.”

I looked back over my shoulder at the little green bird, just to be sure, then crossed to the loveseat and sat down beside her.

“Petey was dead, Bobo. I swear he was; I saw him! But …”

I couldn’t hold onto the tears any longer and I started to cry. Bobo put her arm around me and drew me close.

We sat together on the porch after supper, listening to the wreek-wreek, wreek-wreek of Bobo’s swing cut jagged little holes in the night silence. I leaned my head back on the cushion of the wicker rocker, closed my eyes and tried to let the motion of it, like a boat in a rolling sea, ease the tension out of me. So far, it wasn’t working.

I’d painted all afternoon, worked on just one piece: Petey, dead, hanging limp in his cage. Painting a portrait of a murdered parakeet was probably deeply disturbed—definitely a sign of severe mental illness—but it was the only way I knew to deal with it. The image was the only image in my mind, anyway; if I’d tried to paint anything else, I probably would have painted a dead bird hanging somewhere in the background of the picture. Might as well get it out in the open.

I painted his wings hanging limp. The gold thread around his neck in a tiny hangman’s noose. His head twisted to the side at an unnatural angle. I painted the scene as clearly as I saw it when my mind took a digital photograph of it, as real as it looked in that glimpse I caught of it. And the whole time I painted, I was trying to reconcile myself to the reality that I didn’t really see the scene at all. It never happened. Petey was fine; I was the one with the problem.

Painting Petey focused my attention, distracted me from an even uglier scene that was just as clear in my mind. Windy, so tiny, stands with her arms at her sides; her head covered by her stained, white panties. My mother, her face twisted in disgust and rage, smashes the underwear down on Windy’s head. And a little girl with blonde braids, holding her Barbie doll tight in her small hands and watches it all happen right in front of her.

I’d never paint those images. Three people captured in a flashbulb glare, frozen in a nightmare moment. Two of those people were dead. I was the lone survivor, the only witness, and I would never tell a soul what I saw. Those images would go with me to my grave.

I remembered a news photo I saw once of a cat clinging with the strength of desperation to the trunk of a tree as it washed down a river in a flood. That was me; I was that cat. An ugly, black, churning river was taking me wherever it wanted me to go, and if I didn’t hold on tight, I would be washed away.

“I used to make white gravy with fried chicken.” Bobo’s husky voice broke the silence. “So’s you’d have something to pour over your mashed potatoes.” She sighed. “Anymore, I can’t remember how. Some mornings, I open my eyes and the first thing I think is, ‘Wonder what’s gonna to be gone today.’”

“What memories are going to be gone?”

“What pieces of
me
are going to be gone. All the stuff you’ve seen and done and thought—when you lose those things, there’s holes in you, pieces missing.”

The silence returned.

Wreek-wreek, wreek-wreek.

“Bobo, Mama was"--I had to force myself to finish the sentence--“mean to Windy, wasn’t she.”

She flinched like I’d poked her with a sharp stick. “Yeah.”

“Always?”

“She never did like that child, not from the first moment she laid eyes on her. It wasn’t so bad at first, just making her go to bed without supper or always findin’ some tiny little thing she done wrong and punishin’ her for it. But later on … it got worse as time went by.”

She looked at me and continued urgently.

“I tried to stop her but I wasn’t always around when she went off. And there was no gettin’ in Susan’s way when she lost her temper. Sometimes when she drank, she become a wild woman, all glassy-eyed, talking crazy, wouldn’t listen to nobody.”

“But Windy was just a little girl! Why would—?”

“'Cause Windy was Jericho’s and Little Dove’s. She was what kept Jericho tied to Little Dove. Least Susan convinced herself that was the way of it. But I knowed he wouldn’t have let go of Little Dove with or without Windy.”

“You think Jericho was having an affair with Little Dove?”

“I don’t think so, I know so.”

“How?”

“Sometimes, Susan and Jericho’d both get drunk, and he’d say things. If she’d a’been sober, she would have figured it out, too. Or maybe she did know, but she just couldn’t own up to knowing 'cause then she’d have to do something about it and she just … couldn’t.”

A cricket somewhere under the porch took up the wreek-wreek melody of the swing. Either cicadas were buzzing somewhere in the distance or my tinnitus was applauding.

“And she acted funny with Jericho, Windy did.”

“Funny how?”

“Hard to describe. She just didn’t act like a little girl ought to act toward her daddy. There was something wrong, like she was older, not a little girl at all.”

Of course she did! She was being molested! Inappropriate behavior toward the opposite sex was a classic symptom of sexual abuse. Assaulted at her mother’s house and mistreated here—no wonder she messed in her pants and acted strange.

“What did Jericho do when she acted that way?”

“He
liked
it.” Bobo’s voice was cold. “He’d throw it up in your mother’s face, made over what a pretty little girl Windy was, flirted with that child like she was a …”

She stopped crocheting.

“I begged Susie to leave him. Pleaded with her! But 'stead of leaving him, she had Joel. So she’d have her own tie to Jericho. It was worse then. Jericho paid any attention a’tall to Windy, Susan made out like he was ignoring his own son.”

Bobo got quiet, studying me. “You sure you want to keep talking 'bout this?”

That’s when I realized I had curled up in something like a fetal position in the chair, drawn my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms tight around them. Images of my screaming mother and a dead parakeet flitted around in my head like water bugs on the glassy surface of a still pond.

I needed to go to bed; I’d had it.

I got up, walked over and planted a kiss in the middle of Bobo’s forehead.

“I love you, Bobo.”

Then I went inside. Just as I closed the carved oak door behind me, I thought I heard Bobo’s husky voice.

“I love you, too, Anne.”

But it could have been the tinnitus.

I
opened my eyes and for a moment I was disoriented. I had tossed and turned, been up and down all night. I’d had nightmares, too, but gratefully I couldn’t remember any of them except the last. I dreamed that Petey…
Petey!

I leapt out of bed and dashed across the hall to the studio door. Then I didn’t want to open it. My hand trembled as I turned the knob, pushed the door slowly inward.

Oh, please, don’t let him be …

There sat Petey, perched on his cage swing. He saw me and jumped over to the bars on the side of the cage, then began to climb them using his claws and beak.

My relief was so profound it made my knees weak, and I leaned against the door frame.

“Hello, pretty boy, hello,” he said in parakeet-speak as he dangled almost upside down from the upper bars of his cage. “PeteyPeteyPetey.”

“Yes, you are a pretty boy.” I crossed the room to the windowsill, picked up the box of birdseed sitting there and poured a little bit into the feeder on the side of his cage. “And after breakfast, I’ll let you fly around the room—and deposit little dookey presents anywhere you want.”

I made my bed, then inspected my face in the bathroom mirror. I was pale; the dark rings under my eyes gave them a sunken look, like Bobo’s eyes. Was I thinner? How could I possibly be thinner than I was when I got here? I looked like I had come to Goshen direct from a refugee camp or a homeless shelter.

I filled the sink with cold water, leaned over and scooped the water onto my face with my hands. The cold was refreshing, it felt …

Suddenly, my face hits cold water, but it’s so abrupt I don’t have time to hold my breath, and I suck in a nose full and start to choke.

I can’t came up. I can’t breathe! I kick and struggle, my heart pounds in my chest, my lungs cry out for air. And then my head breaks the surface and I gasp in a breath, coughing and choking and crying at the same time. And there’s a face, blurred by the water pouring into my eyes, a little girl with blonde braids is standing in the doorway. She’s holding a Barbie doll.

I stood in front of the bathroom mirror with water dripping off my face and the whole scene formed at once, the way I thought all the memories would—downloading into my mind like a file off the Internet. This memory was not on a dimmer switch that brought the light up gradually. It went from dark to a harsh, halogen-white, glare in an instant.

Mama was on her knees in the downstairs bathroom off the parlor, shoving Windy’s head down into the toilet. My night terror was the distortion of a real event, a twisted perspective so I experienced it in Windy’s body, saw it through her eyes. Now, the memory and the night terror melded in some way so I saw the scene from my point of view and Windy’s at the same time.

“ … then I have to clean your stinking crap off. You belong in a toilet!”

Mama shoves Windy forward again, and she grabs a breath before her face hits the water. She goes deeper this time. Her forehead slams into the cold porcelain of the toilet. She can’t come up! She’s screaming in her head, “Help! Help me! Annie, help me!”

Mama won’t let Windy up!

The little girl with the blonde braids takes a step backward in horror, and her eyes fall on the antique clock on the mantel. Mama’s most prized possession. She won’t even let anyone else dust it. The child drops the Barbie doll and races to the mantel. She stands on tiptoes, grabs the crocheted doily the clock sits on and yanks. The huge clock tumbles off the mantel to the floor with a shattering crash that sends a jagged crack up the center of the clock face, and the little girl screams, “Mama!”

Mama runs out of the bathroom, and the little blonde girl clasps her hands on the top of her head and starts to cry.

“I didn’t mean to pull it off,” she sobs. “I’m sorry! I was only trying to see what time it was. It hit my head and it hurts!”

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Windy on the bathroom floor, gasping, her wet hair in her face.

She turns her tears up to hysterical level to keep Mama engaged, and drops to her knees. “It hurrrrts!”

“Calm down, Annie, let me see!” Mama leans over and tries to pry the child’s fingers off her head so she can see the wound.

“No! It hurts.” She squirms away. “Don’t touch it, it hurts!”

Bobo suddenly appears.

“What’s all the commotion about?”

“Annie pulled the clock off the mantel, and it hit her in the head.”

“Here, let me see, Sugar.”

The little girl looks into Bobo’s eyes, then cuts her eyes to Windy, who stands soaked in the bathroom doorway. Bobo sees Windy, her eyes widen, then she looks back at the little girl. The whole exchange takes less than two seconds.

“Why, Susan, she’s got a lump a’comin’ up,” Bobo says as she feels the top of the little girl’s head. “A goose egg, sure. That thing’s awful heavy to land on a child’s head. You might ought to get some ice right quick and put it on this lump so it don’t swell no bigger.”

Mama pauses long enough to shake her finger at the little girl. “You’re in big trouble, young lady! Do you hear me.” Then she turns and rushes toward the kitchen, unsteady on her feet.

“No, get some frozen peas, not ice,” Bobo calls after her. “If you got any peas in that freezer of yours in the garage, get a sack of them. They’ll made a better ice pack.”

The little girl, who is still crying, motions Windy upstairs as soon as Mama is out of sight, and the tiny, dark-haired child darts away as quickly as a baby rabbit. Then the little girl gets up off the floor, throws her arms around Bobo and continues to sob. But the tears are real this time. Bobo holds the child in her arms and lets her cry.

I stood staring with sightless eyes into the mirror, so horrified I’d have vomited if there’d been anything in my stomach to throw up. I suddenly turned to the toilet and dry-heaved anyway. I gagged at the taste of yellow bile; my throat burned from pure stomach acid.

Then I collapsed on the floor, leaned against the bathroom wall, put my head in my hands and cried.

Just when you think it’s safe to go back in the water.

Just when I thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, a shark comes up and bites me in the butt. Mama wasn’t just mean to Windy; she almost killed her.

My mother was a child abuser. That reality rumbled around in my head, a drunken steam roller, crashing into everything I held dear. Was this how it felt to find out your kindly old grandfather was really a sadistic guard in a Nazi concentration camp?

Reason finally stood up in the courtroom of my mind and demanded to be heard.

This isn’t all black and white, you know. It would be convenient if life worked that way, but it seldom does. It’s shades of gray, Anne, always shades of gray.

Who was my mother? Was she a monster or was she a woman in a tortured marriage, battling alcoholism, who lashed out at an innocent little girl? I’d say the safe money was on monster. Maybe someday I’d be able to grant more grace, but as I sat on the cold bathroom tiles, I couldn’t reconcile the woman who shoved Windy’s head into a toilet with the woman who told Joel she loved him all the much, any more than I could reconcile the little girl in braids with the skinny woman who was obviously staring down into the abyss of a mental collapse.

Petey was dead! I saw him.

It was midafternoon before I finally slipped into a pair of jeans and a paint-splattered T-shirt and started downstairs to talk to Bobo. She saw both women, knew them both, loved them both. I wanted to know how she managed it.

I detoured into the studio on my way. Just to check, to make sure. My little green friend was hopping around, fluttering his wings, making a fine mess of feathers and seed shells on the floor around his cage. I stuck my finger between the bars and let him peck at it.

When I turned to go, I noticed the clock on the mantel, and horror reached out through 25 years to set my nerves tingling. It was the clock that used to sit on the mantel in the downstairs parlor, moved up here because it didn’t work--never worked again after I shattered it to save Windy’s life.

I crossed to the fireplace and confronted the clock for a quiet moment. It didn’t seem nearly as large as it did when I broke it. It was huge then. I put out my hand, traced with my fingers the crack that ran the whole length of the clock face.

“I broke this clock, Petey,” I called out to the bird on the other side of the room. “I pulled it off the mantel on purpose. I
remember
pulling it off the mantel. And nobody fixed it, even after all these years. Some things get broken and they can’t be fixed—ever.”

When I was halfway down the stairs, the doorbell sang the ding-dong song and I got there before Julia. It was the mailman, I was sure, with more of my redirected mail. My credit card bills were still going to Oxford!

I opened the door and it was a man in uniform all right. Not the mailman, the sheriff. Dusty. I could tell by the startled look on his face that I looked as beat up on the outside as I felt on the inside. Had I even combed my hair today?

“Dusty.” That was it. That was all I could manage. I hoped he intended to do all the talking because I’d just fired my only shot. I tried to smooth my hair down without looking like I was smoothing my hair down.

“Hi, Anne, hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time.”

“No, I … I just wasn’t expecting … “

“Are you OK?”

The rebel camp in my psyche made a break for it.

Tell him! Tell him your mother almost killed you little sister. Tell him you laughed hysterically for three hours and then thought your parakeet had been murdered. Tell him you’re not doing well, no not well at all, thank you very much. Don’t tell him you’re fine!

“I’m fine.”

We stood there.

“Why, come on in this house, Sheriff,” Bobo announced from behind me. “You want some lemon meringue pie? I just got it out of the oven.”

I stepped back where she couldn’t see and shook my head no.

“I’m sorry, I’d love to have some,” Dusty said, “but lemons don’t agree with me.”

“They give you gas or the trots?”

“Bobo!”

“Oh, don’t get your panties in a wad, Anne.” Bobo gave me a long-suffering look. “I’m trying to be neighborly. You sure ain’t. Just a’standin’ there like you don’t know whether to scratch your watch or wind your butt. Was you ever planning on invitin’ him in?”

“Well, yes, I was …”

Dusty took his hat off and stepped inside. He leaned over and whispered in Bobo’s ear. “Gas.”

She nodded knowingly.

“I’m frying up a chicken for supper and you’re more’n welcome to stay and have some. I’m making white gravy, too, if I can figure out how.”

At the current mortality rate, Bobo’s flock of chickens would be extinct in another couple of weeks.

“Thanks for the invitation, but I can’t stay that long. I’d love to have a rain check, though.”

He turned to me. “Could we go somewhere and talk for a few minutes?” He held up two folders. “There’s some information in here I think you’d be interested in.”

I was still untying the knots in my tongue when he suddenly continued. “If your studio’s set up, I’d love to see it.” 
Before I could stop him, he started up the stairs. 

“Actually, it’s not done yet. I assembled some of the Ikea stuff, but I still have a long way to go.” I followed him up the stairs as I babbled. “It’s really a mess.”

I suddenly remembered the paintings I had out, leaned against the walls. And the one in the easel!

“Dusty, wait!”

But it was too late, he’d already opened the door and stepped inside. He saw the canvasses and stood stock still, staring at them. Then he turned back to me.

“Oh, Anne …”

He walked slowly around the room, examing each one. The collage of eyes. The eyes in the dark in the back of the closet. The crying eye, with the silhouette reflected in the tears.

Then he saw the painting on the easel. He stood and looked at it for a long time.

I was frozen by the door. What did I say to a man who had just toured the bowels of my tortured soul? When he turned back to me, I couldn’t read his expression.

“Anne, I had no idea you were this talented.”

That wasn’t exactly the response I’d expected, and I managed to bleat out, “Thank you,” before my throat seized up again. He crossed back to where I stood.

“The eyes are haunting. They’re Windy’s eyes, aren’t they?”

“How did you know?”

“The pain in them breaks your heart.”

He turned back to the easel where the painting of the dead bird rested, with the paint still wet. “There’s no pain in Petey’s painting though; just terror, raw terror.”

When Petey heard his name, he sang out, “PeteyPeteyPetey. Give me a kiss. Pretty boy.”

“It’s a painting of a nightmare.” It was the only thing I could think of to say. “So … you have something to show me?” I crossed the room to the blue sofa on the wall by the back stairs door and sat down. “Bobo thinks I’m not very hospitable. Please, have a seat.”

He looked at the painting for a few more moments while I waited for him. “It’s so real.”

It
was
real. Petey was dead! I saw him.

Then he came and sat down beside me.

“These are case files from 1981.” He showed me a folder. “I had to dig through some dusty old cabinets in the basement of the courthouse to find them.”

He held up a second folder. “And these are NCIC reports.”

When he saw my blank look, he explained. “National Crime Information Center.” Then he grinned. “Obviously, you don’t watch nearly enough crime drama on TV. The NCIC is a national computer data bank operated by the FBI. We use it to do criminal background checks. Enter a name or a fingerprint and you can get a rap sheet on anybody.”

“From 1981? That’s the year Windy died.”

“This is the case file on the accident.”

My breath caught in my throat. My hand went to my mouth, like maybe I was afraid I’d scream. The wreck I was in. The wreck that killed Windy. Right there in that folder in Dusty’s hand.