The Memory Closet: A Novel (19 page)

I said nothing, hoping he’d drop the discussion of abuse. He didn’t.

“You look at the rap sheet on this guy, and it’s not hard at all to believe he was capable of child abuse. He was a violent man and …”

“It wasn’t Jericho.”

Let it go, Dusty, please just let it go.

“How do you know it wasn’t?”

“I just know, that’s all. I remembered some things and … I know the abuse … it wasn’t Jericho.”

There was an odd look on Dusty’s face, but he said nothing, just flipped the file folder shut and didn’t push it any further.

“Have you seen Edgar?” Bobo’s voice from the doorway startled us both. For the first time since I’d returned to Goshen, I was sincerely grateful for her craziness.

“Edgar?” Dusty didn’t know about Bobo’s clandestine relationship. I’d been true to my word; I hadn’t told a soul.

“He was here a little while ago.” She glanced around the room, like maybe he was hiding behind the desk or the loveseat. “I just caught sight of him 'fore he went up the back stairs.” Suddenly, she looked stricken. “You don’t reckon he’s gone back home to Barbara, do you? He don’t care nothing 'bout her. It’s me he wants.”

Maybe Bobo was suffering small strokes. Surely, there was some explanation for lucid one minute, nobody’s home the next. Of course, there was a compelling argument to be made that the periods of lucidity were as illusory as conversations with Elvis, that the woman had been neither sane nor normal, even on a good day, for years. And who could blame her? I’d have been a walleyed, drooling, howling-at-the-moon lunatic if I’d lived her life, if I’d buried a husband and six children.

She hobbled toward us, so distracted she didn’t even bother to give Petey a dirty look.

“And Barbara don’t care nothing 'bout him, neither. After they wired his jaw shut, it was me took care of him, not Barbara. She wouldn’t have nothing to do with him. I was the one fixed him milkshakes, Jell-O, pudding, anything he could suck up through a straw—that’s how he lost the 300 pounds. And he hadn’t ought to be up and around yet. He just did get out of the hospital from them a’cuttin’ off 10 feet of loose skin.”

Oprah
. Had to be
Oprah
.

She suddenly focused on Dusty. “You’re a police officer. You got to help me. I want to file a missing person’s report. I bet poor Edgar’s lost somewhere on the prairie and can’t find his way back home.”

Lost on the prairie? It’s so flat and empty out there, if your dog ran away you could see it for three days.

Dusty didn’t drop a beat. “I’ll be glad to take down the information for you, but I need to go back to the office first and get the right form to fill out. Could you wait a couple of hours?”

“I guess so, but Edgar don’t usually wander off like this. I’m scared he’s gonna rip out all them stitches. You know it took more’n 1,500 stitches to—”

“Ma’am, we’ll get right on it. I promise. I’ll personally oversee the investigation.”

Bobo nodded, satisfied, and limped away. When Dusty turned back to me and saw my face closed as tight as the front door on a submarine, he took that as his cue to exit as well. He got to his feet and I stood with him. He tried to look me in the eye, to read something there, but I wouldn’t meet his gaze. He reached over and took my hand again for a moment.

“There’s only so much emotional pummeling the mind can take and then systems start to shut down,” he said. “You be careful, hear.”

I’ll get right on that. Careful. And exactly how am I supposed to manage careful?

S
pringtime always sneaked up on me in England. I’d be driving into London from Oxford and suddenly I’d notice that the pastures were green and that bluebells and crocuses were in full bloom all along the roadside.

The background of my childhood formed in my mind like that, too—without me noticing. One day, it were just there. Translucent memories, the kind that probably aren’t crisp and clear in anybody’s mind, formed in the swirling mist of my nothingness like an image on photographic paper gradually taking shape in a developing tray.

Life in a West Texas summer: running through the sprinkler in the backyard and eating Bobo’s homemade Popsicles—Kool-Aid ice cubes with toothpicks stuck in the top.

Windy and I—and Dusty!—once rescued a bowl full of wiggling tadpoles from a shrinking puddle of water in a low spot on the prairie.

An assortment of neighborhood children built sculptures in our front yard the winter of the big snowstorm. Not boring snowmen. We created giant smiling snails, Mexican hats and fire hydrants that melted into shapeless lumps as soon as the sun came out again.

As cold rain smacked the playroom windows, Windy and I drew pictures, made finger-paint handprints and used acrylics to create expressionistic paintings, our work spread out on newspapers on the floor.

We played Barbie dolls there, too. Windy had this silly little giggle, sort of a “tee hee hee hee,” that made me laugh every time I heard it.

There was one memory, though, that was as crisp and clear as a digital image. Windy and I were riding bikes. Hers was a boy's bike, so she must have borrowed it from somebody. Maybe it was Dusty’s. We were going fast, side by side in the middle of the street, and I let go of the handlebars and held my arms out to the sides, like I was an airplane. When I looked over, Windy had let go of her handlebars, too. She was so much shorter than I was that she couldn’t sit down on the seat of the bike, so she stood, balanced on the pedals, her arms out like wings. The wind blew her black hair back, the curls dancing behind her; the smile on her cherub’s face was as bright as the West Texas sun. Then she laughed. Not the little tee-hee giggle. A laugh of pure, innocent joy.

Laughs in the Wind. Click-click. A mental photograph of my little sister.

Someday, I’ll paint that.

As I dressed, I heard a lawn mower crank beneath my open window. A teenage boy from down the street, Billy … something—I couldn’t remember his last name—had come to mow the front yard and the strip of grass on the side of the house that stretched back to the garage. Like waves breaking on the shore, the ebb and flow of the mower—closer, closer, closer, farther, farther, farther—filled my room with the sweet aroma of new-mown grass.

I reached into my purse for money to pay him. Was $20 too much? Not enough? Well, it was either that, a $50 bill or a handful of change. That was all I had. I zipped my jeans, padded next door to the studio, then hesitated at the door. Surely, Petey was all right.

“Pretty boy, Petey. Hi there,” he called from his perch on the swing in his cage when he saw me.

The intensity of the relief I felt made it clear my attempt to put the Petey alive/Petey dead episode behind me had bombed. The sight of him hanging there had been so real that it called into question the nature of reality itself, or at least my perception of reality.

I’d looked up the word “hallucination” in the
Encyclopedia Britannica
in the study before I went to bed. The definition was chilling: “the brain’s reception of false sensory input, experiencing an event through one or more of the senses that is not occurring in the real world.”

The only thing more chilling than the definition was the list of causes, from hallucinogenic drugs to schizophrenia. Severe emotional distress was in the list—stuck out like it was in boldface type—cuddled up next to poisonous mushrooms, temporal lobe lesions and brain tumors.

As usual, Bobo had set my breakfast out for me. We’d missed having our cereal together the past couple of days. But my Grape Nuts was still waiting for me, poured in a pottery bowl with sugar on top, set on a Home Sweet Home placemat. A spoon lay neatly on a folded paper towel beside the bowl, next to a jelly glass of orange juice.

Billy was on the back porch, his hand poised to knock on the screen door as I came into the kitchen.

“I’m all done, Miss Anne,” he said politely. He was a tall, lanky kid wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap backward, a University of Texas Longhorns T-shirt, jeans and cowboy boots. “I didn’t have to put no gas in the mower.” He gestured to the red gasoline can beside the lawn mower, which was parked in front of the garage bay door at the end of the last strip of mowing. “You still got the whole five gallons.”

“Thanks, Billy.” I handed him the $20. He looked down at it, lifted his eyes and gave me a huge smile. Too much. I closed the screen and sat down at the table to have my breakfast.

When I poured the milk over the cereal, it didn’t look blinky.

But it tasted like it was going bad, and I poured the remainder of the carton down the drain after I set my empty cereal bowl in the sink. Bobo was going to get sick eating bad food one of these days. Obviously, her sense of taste was rapidly going the way of her sense of smell, or she couldn’t choke down her sugarless lemon meringue pie.

Julia wasn’t here yet. Today was a half day; she’d be here at noon. Bobo was out in the chicken yard. And I was a woman on a mission.

Ikea storage cabinet, prepare for battle. I will take no prisoners.

The pieces for the storage unit—nuts, bolts, screws—and the tools I’d need to assemble it lay in neat piles on the studio floor. I still wanted a hammer, though. The tack hammer worked on the bookshelves, but I might have to drive some dowel pins into precut holes for the cabinet unit, and for that I’d need a hammer with a bigger head. Maybe Bobo or the Mystery Hammer Thief had returned it to the garage.

Bobo emerged from the chicken house as I went down the back steps. She had a bucket of chicken feed and was crooning, “Here chick-chick-chick, here chick,” as she tossed handfuls of feed on the bare ground inside the chicken yard fence. I waved and hollered hello, but she took no notice of me.

I stepped into the garage through the side door and flipped the light switch. Waiting in the cool dark for the buzzing florescent bulbs overhead to stop blinking, I inhaled the smell of sawdust. Some smells are universally revered. Coffee brewing. Bacon frying. Burning leaves. Baby powder. And sawdust.

Even so, I was overwhelmed by the intensity of the aroma; the fragrance was so thick and powerful it was intoxicating. I breathed in a great lungful of it, savored the nuances, the different aromas of different woods. The sweet smell of pine. The tart smell of hickory. And cedar! No words could describe the sensory delight of cedar, so extraordinary I could actually see the smell as a color in the air. The others became colors, too, spinning around me like the rings around Saturn. The robin’s-egg blue of pine, golden hickory, and cedar glowing like a brilliant amber stone. A warm, exquisitely fragrant breeze ruffled my hair as the colors swirled past, filling …

Scratch! Scratch! Scratch!

The smells and colors were instantly terrified by the noise. In panicked disarray, they bolted into the shadows and hid there, trembling. All the warmth in the room ran away, too, leaving me behind in the cold. The frigid air tingled on my skin, and my breath frosted in puffy clouds in front of my face.

Scratch!

Something behind the chest freezer by the door was scratching to get out. The waist-high, white box began to scoot away from the wall; something was pushing it from behind.

And suddenly, I wanted to hide, too, or get out of the garage. But the freezer was between me and the door.

Scratch! Scratch!

Slowly, a black stick rose up over the back of the freezer. It was about the size of the extension hose on a vacuum cleaner and limber like that, too, only it was fuzzy. Hairy. It bent over the top edge of the freezer almost like an appendage, feeling around. A finger.

I backed toward the far wall of the garage as a second hairy black stick appeared over the top of the freezer.

And a third.

The freezer continued to inch away from the wall, sliding across the dirt floor with a grating sound that set my teeth on edge. Something big behind it was shoving it forward. A fourth hairy leg grabbed hold of the top of the freezer, and the four of them began to heft something up from behind it, to pull something out of the tight space where it had hidden, biding its time, waiting for me.

When the head of the giant spider peeked over the top of the freezer, I began to scream. To shriek. But I could hear no sound but my heart hammering in my chest, explosively thud, thud, thudding in my ears. I stared in fascinated revulsion as the bulbous body climbed all the way up to the top of the freezer, and the creature sat glaring at me. A tarantula spider the size of a washing machine.

Its voice was a grating rumble, something metal dragged through gravel.

“We’ve come for you, Annie.” Pure evil in a sound. The stench of rotting corpses on its breath filled the cold air, thick and overpowering. I gagged reflexively, again and again, and tasted vomit in my mouth.

Other spiders, all different sizes, appeared on the aluminum ladder by the freezer, crawled out of the spare tire leaned against the wall, climbed over the tops of the two brown plastic garbage cans and dropped down off the rafters in the ceiling above my head. The dirt floor was suddenly alive with smaller ones the size of tennis balls. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them, an invading army of black, hairy tarantula spiders marching in unison toward me.

I backed away, my legs barely able to hold my weight, until I hit the metal shelves on the opposite wall of the garage. There was nowhere else to run. I screamed, shrieked until my throat was raw, but the thundering pounding of my heart drowned out the sound. I could smell myself, the acrid fear-stench of the sticky sweat that suddenly slathered my body like a coating of oil.

The smaller ones began to crawl up on my shoes. I kicked them off, jumped away, lurched toward the back of the garage.

And I stepped on one. It made a squishing sound beneath my shoe.

Like the sound of the tarantula I grabbed off Windy and stomped into the dirt.

A communal cry of pain and rage rose up from all of them, a moaning, wheezing wail from their pitted throats, their mouths open, dripping.

“You’ll pay!” They screamed, glaring their hatred at me with glowing red eyes, all the voices different. Rumbling, raspy, growling terrors.

Something touched my cheek, and I jerked away. A hairy, black leg dangled down from a spider the size of a watermelon perched on the rafter above me. It dropped onto my head, and I grabbed at it, caught one leg and jerked to pull the monster off me. But the leg came off in my hand and green goo ran down the side of my face. The creature shrieked, and I shook my head violently, knocking it onto the floor.

The small ones had reached me again, climbed up my legs, and I couldn’t kick them off fast enough. They clung to my clothes, skittered up my body, and I batted at them, writhed away. The big one crawled down off the freezer as I fought the others. The ranks of smaller spiders parted to let him pass until he was standing in front of me.

Then he lunged, slammed into my chest with the force of an attack dog, knocked me flat on my back in the dirt in front of the shelves. His legs pinned me down. I squirmed and twisted, trying to knock him off me, beating him with my fists, only dimly aware of the pain, all over my body, from dozens of tarantula bites.

I smelled the rotted stench of his breath, saw the dripping, open maw of his mouth coming toward my face. I shoved at him with the strength of desperation and knocked him aside. I sat up, tried to stagger to my feet, but he jumped at me, hissing like a cobra, and slammed me backward into the wall. I heard something scrape above me.

Blackness.

The pain on the top of my head throbbed with every heartbeat. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. I opened my eyes and had trouble focusing for a few seconds. Lines. Were they … boards? Then the lines resolved themselves into wooden rafters high above my head. Something cold—gray metal—rested against my cheek; something lay across my chest. I touched it. A wooden handle. I moved it aside. A rake? An iron rake.

What was a rake doing on my chest?

Where was I? Lying in the dirt, the smell of sawdust …

Sawdust. The garage.

Spiders!

I sat bolt upright, instantly hysterical, screamed and feverishly slapped at my arms and legs—all in one movement.

Crawling on me. Biting me! The big one …

I jerked my head from side to side, looking frantically around the room, trying to see everything at once. Searching for … they were gone. The spiders weren’t there.

But they’d be back! I had to get out of that garage while I still could.

I lurched to my feet, wobbly, and staggered toward the door, my eyes darting. The spare tire. The ladder. The rafters. The garbage cans. I expected to see black, hairy monsters crawl out of hiding at any second. The freezer was no longer scooted away from the wall where the big one had climbed out …

I couldn’t breathe if I thought about that! I was making little hitching, sobbing sounds as I banged into the side of the work bench, tried to get my balance and dived for the door.

His breath smelled like rotted flesh. If I think about him, I’ll go crazy!

I yanked the door open, leapt outside and stumbled, fell face first into the dirt, rolled over and scooted backward on my butt away from the garage as fast as I could. Panting, gasping for air. Not taking my eyes off the door.

They were in there, hiding. The garage was full of them, a nest of tarantulas, and they’d come out again. They’d crawl out from behind the freezer and the tire, drop down from the rafters and swarm out the door. Any second now, they’d come looking for me!

Close the door! Quick, close the door!