The Memory Closet: A Novel (23 page)

“Shoot, it wouldn’t matter what I told that man. He don’t believe a word I say 'bout nothing. He thinks I’ve lost my mind.”

“Bobo, I think maybe I
have
lost mine.” I wiped my tears away with the dish cloth. It smelled like sunshine.

“It’s all about what you can’t remember, ain’t it?”

“What other explanation is there? Before I came here, I may not have been the poster girl for
Hug a Sane Person Month,
but I wasn’t having conversations with a spider the size of a washing machine. I wasn’t hallucinating.”

I sighed, my breathing still shaky.

“Maybe it’s all coming at me too hard and too fast. Mama’s drinking. What was happening to Windy at her mother’s house. And other awful things.” I didn’t tell her what I saw Mama do to Windy in the playroom that day.

“Don’t you think you ought to quit? Stop remembering? If what you already recollected has done all this to you, what’s goin’ to happen to you when you find out … ?” She stopped. “If there’s other bad stuff—maybe
worse
stuff—how you goin’ to stand it?”

Her eyes were clear and focused, like the fog that clouded her thinking had lifted. “All them people’s gone now, dead and buried.” Suddenly, her voice turned sharp and cold. “None of what happened back then matters no more. You rememberin’ it won’t change nothing. What’s done’s done.”

She patted my arm and looked off into the distance. “Honey, some people’s just … fragile. I’ve knowed folks who was crushed by life, by the hurt of it. The load was just too heavy for them to carry.”

Maybe she was right. Maybe the Boogie Man was too strong for me. Until that moment, it had never occurred on me I might not survive my past. I could actually die. Not in some psychic sense, some loss of self. But literally. This quest to know could kill me.

“I’m not sure I could stop remembering now even if I wanted to. I think I’ve set something in motion, knocked out some chock in my mind, and it’s all going to break through the dam and come washing down on me whether I like it or not. If it’s not already too late to turn back, it’s close.”

She sat patting my hand absently, momentarily not engaged at all. Her eyes were seeing something besides me and this room. Then she looked back and focused on me, a determined set to her jaw.

“When my Sam was just a little tyke, four or five maybe, Cecil got this wild hair that we’d ought to go by and visit his Aunt Inez on our way home from church. It was ‘fore I got pregnant with the twins and long ‘fore your mama was even a gleam in your granddaddy’s eye.”

She continued to pat my hand as she spoke. “Inez was old as dirt and eat up with ugly, hair all crazy-like, smelled like a goat. She didn’t never marry, lived in a shack didn’t have no water, had a outhouse right up side her kitchen window. When me and Cecil finally got up to leave after we was done visitin’, she wouldn’t hear none of it. Nothing would do but that we had to stay for coffee.”

I tried to imagine Bobo as she’d have looked then. It would have been during World War II. I pictured her with platinum blonde hair like mine, but thin. It would have been after she and everybody else in Tahoka had been poisoned by dead birds in the water tank. Maybe she’d pulled her hair back in a bun, or had a hat on and square-toed shoes.

“Coffee should a’warned us. It was so strong you could have trotted a mouse across it. Then she asked Sam if he liked candy. That boy had a sweet tooth like no little kid I ever seen. He got all excited, was a’jumping up and down, and she brought out this black thing for him, said it was fudge.
Humph.
It looked like something a dung beetle rolled onto a plate. Soon as I seen it, I knowed he hadn’t ought to eat it, but he pounded it down, and I just sat there, watchin’.”

She shook her head, ashamed even now, 60 years later.

“I didn’t say nothing 'cause he wanted it and I just couldn’t stand to tell him no.”

She let out her breath in a long sigh.

“Well, that boy was sick for two days. He throwed up 'til I thought his stomach was going to turn wrong side out, had the bloody trots. It was awful.” She turned and looked at me. “And the whole time I was holdin’ his head while he erped into the toilet, I was a’thinking, ‘It’s my fault he’s sick.’”

She looked off into the distance again. “But I learnt my lesson. I didn’t never again give my kids something I knowed wasn’t good for ‘em—no matter how bad they wanted it.”

Maybe there was a reason that particular story had come to her mind, but I had no idea what. It was even possible it never happened, that she’d imagined the whole thing.

She picked up the dish towel I’d used to wipe my face and wound it back around the ice pack, then stood and began to adjust it on my head again. The cold felt good on the lump.

“I could have made a better ice pack if I’d had me a sack of frozen peas or corn, but I ain’t got none.”

Frozen peas. That’s what she told Mama to get to put on my head the day Mama tried to drown Windy!

“Bobo, do you remember the day the big clock on the mantel got broken?”

She stopped to think. “No,” she said slowly. “I don’t recall how that happened.”

“I pulled it off the mantel, Bobo, don’t you remember, pulled it off because Mama was … and I pretended it hit me in the head and you told Mama to get a sack of peas—”

“That’s not how I remember it,” she said firmly. “Best as I can recall, didn’t it get broke when Jericho was winding it? Yeah, I’m sure that’s what happened. Jericho broke it.”

She didn’t look at me, just turned and shuffled out the door. She reached to pull it shut behind her, but before it was all the way closed, she stopped.

“You and Joel. You’re all I got.”

“Bobo, you’re all we’ve got, too.”

She looked a little startled. “Why, I am, ain’t I.” Then she gave me a pink-gum smile. “What kind of cereal you want? I’ll set it out for you.”

“Grape Nuts, Bobo. You know that. You always set it out for me.”

“I ain’t never done no such thing. I ain’t never give you none of that gravel, but I’ll fix you a bowl of it right now if you want, you feeling peak-ed and all.”

“Thanks, Bobo, but I didn’t sleep well last night. I think I might try to go back to sleep. I’ll be down later.”

“You let me know if you need more ice,” she said and closed the door.

I lay back on the pillow, careful not to dislodge the icepack, as the morning sun poured golden light into the room through the blinds. Reality felt as brittle as the ice on my head, so thin it could crack at any moment and dump me into deep black water.

I saw spiders in the garage, but they weren’t there.

I saw Petey dead, but he’s alive.

I saw myself pulling that clock off the mantel, but Bobo said Jericho broke it.

Suddenly, the double-sided sword of elation and terror sliced into me again. I
saw
Mama smash feces into my little sister’s hair. I
saw
Mama almost drown Windy. If I imagined the spiders and Petey, then I’d imagined the terrible things I saw Mama do, too.

I was wrong; Mama wasn’t a child abuser!

I’d have jumped out of the bed and shouted hurrah if the lump on my head would have allowed such sudden movement. My mother was the woman I remembered!

But the razor edge on the other side of the sword quickly drew blood. If she didn’t do those things, I’d imagined them. Which meant you could add all my memories of Mama to the ever-growing list of Anne Mitchell’s breaks with reality.

So what had I accomplished by coming to Goshen? All I could count on as reality was what Bobo had confirmed—that my memories of Mama’s drinking were real. She was an alcoholic; maybe that was the Boogie Man. Maybe the fact that my mother brain-damaged my little brother was the horror my mind had been dodging all these years.

Then why had my amnesia started at the wreck? Why had that been the demarcation line between memory and emptiness?

Well, why not? Maybe the wreck was just the final straw, the awful final straw. After all, people forget traumatic events all the time. Normal people. It wasn’t crazy that I couldn’t remember the wreck that killed my little sister.

Of course, the shrink that Dusty had me hooked up with might not agree with Anne Mitchell’s assessment of normal and abnormal. If I told her the truth about all the things I had imagined—that the Jack and the Beanstalk giant was chasing me, that my mother abused and tried to drown my sister, that my parakeet was hanging dead in his cage, and that a spider the size of a baby buffalo had attacked me, she’d think I was Fried Frieda the Looney Bin Lady.

The woman would have me locked up!

But maybe that’s what I needed. A cold chill ran down my spine at the thought, but I’d set it free and there was no calling it back. Maybe I did need to be hospitalized. Seriously. Maybe I really did need to be locked away.

No!

Someone deep inside me yelled the word so loud I wasn’t entirely certain I hadn’t shouted it into the room.

No. I had issues, sure. I had problems, big time. I was fighting for my life with the Boogie Man that gobbled up my past. But I wasn’t crazy. I was
not
crazy!

Earth to Anne: you burned down the garage!

That was so stunning that a part of me still wondered if I’d imagined it, too. I got out of bed, holding the ice pack in place on my head and padded on bare feet into the studio. When I looked out the window into the backyard, the charred black bomb crater was still there. I stared at it in fascinated horror, at what
I
had done.

Which, of course, begged the question: what else was I capable of? The next time I broke through the ice and fell into the deep, dark water beneath reality, what would I do? Burn down the house, maybe?

With Bobo in it?

I was suddenly weak all over, too weak to stand. I sank down onto the arm of the Ikea loveseat and the icepack slid off my head and landed with a soft plop on the hardwood floor. I stared in renewed horror at the tangle of charred lumber, an abscessed sore on the backyard.

How could I put Bobo in danger? How could I stay here when there was no telling what monstrous thing I might do? Should I pack right now and leave—before something tragic happened?

And go where?

The windowpane mirrored my pale, thin face. I tried to see in the reflection the little girl I used to be. Her cheeks were fuller, chipmunk cheeks. Her eyes were different, too. There was fire in the eyes of the little girl who led the ground squirrel hunt, who stomped the real tarantula that crawled on her sister.

Oh, how I wished for some of that fire in the dead eyes that stared back at me now. I needed that little girl’s courage.

If little Annie Mitchell were here, she’d know what to do.

A
fter I showered, I pulled my hair back into a ponytail and dressed in jeans, a T-shirt and running shoes. Then I went back into the studio and stared out the window at the ruin of the garage. I couldn’t leave; where would I go?

I couldn’t stay; what if I hurt Bobo?

If I left now, the Boogie Man would haunt me the rest of my life.

If I stayed, the Boogie Man might kill me--
and
Bobo.

I sat brooding the rest of the morning. The doorbell sang its ding-dong song in the middle of the afternoon, and even before Julia opened the door, I knew it was Dusty. He’d said he would come by to see how I was doing. I shook my head at the irony; I wasn’t even flustered that he was here. I was so emotionally maxed out, I didn’t have the strength to defend my comfort zone or the energy to be shy. I was too worn out to man the guns of perpetual embarrassment. I was just too tired to care.

Julia called up to me, and Dusty was standing in the parlor with his hat in his hand when I came down the stairs.

“Hello there. Feeling better?” His smile was so warm and engaging, I found myself smiling back.

“Much better, thanks. It was thoughtful of you to check on me, but you didn’t need to go to so much trouble. I’m fine.”

“It was no trouble. But if it’ll make you feel better, I’d be glad to haul out the I-was-in-the-neighborhood-anyway line. And I was. Goshen’s only got one neighborhood.”

I was on the bottom step now, looking into eyes the green of trees budding in the spring.

“Would you like to sit down?” I gestured to the parlor couch. “Could I get you anything? Coffee? At least I think Bobo has coffee. Tea, I’m sure of. I bought the teabags—Earl Grey. A soft drink?”

Listen to me. I sound like Vanna White introducing the letter A.

I’d never realized how much effort it took to be awkward; I thought it was natural. Maybe ease was the default and awkwardness was the overlaid function.

Dusty sat down on the couch. “I’m not thirsty, thanks. Maybe later.”

Later? He was planning to be here long enough for later?

I sat in the chair across from him and turned on the lamp, splashing light into the gloom.

“Bobo was either a hoot owl or a vampire in a previous life.”

When Dusty didn’t respond to my lame attempt at humor, I braced myself.

Here it comes.

“Bobo did tell you, didn’t she, that the fire in your garage was deliberately set, that it was arson.”

Is it still arson if the owner’s willing to pretend she wanted it burned?

“Somebody poured a five-gallon can of gasoline—Billy said it was full—onto the building and used a butane lighter and charcoal lighter fluid to start the fire. We found the charred lighter fluid can and the top of the lighter—it was the long-nosed kind—in the rubble, but the plastic barrel had melted.”

Suddenly, my heart began to tap dance in my chest. “Did you get any fingerprints off the gasoline can?”

Dusty rolled his eyes. “Nope. It’d been wallowed around in the mud and handled by half the fireman on the squad by the time I got to it.”

He paused.

“And you don’t know anything about any of this, right?”

He was studying me, watching my response. I actually managed a tired smile. “Like I told you the other day when there was a crack the size of the San Andreas Fault down the middle of my forehead, I was too sick to see or hear anything.”

“Well, at this point, we have no witnesses, and I’ve talked to everybody on the block. I can’t find anyone with a motive; it was such a senseless act—”

Yeah, I’d call burning down a building infested with imaginary tarantulas a senseless act.

“—the kind of thing a kid would do, as a prank maybe. That’s the rabbit I’m chasing right now.” Dusty smiled and shifted gears. “So tell me the latest on your quest. Making any headway excavating your buried childhood?”

That was it? No more questions about the fire? All I had to do was tell him I didn’t know anything about it, and he believed me. A sudden wave of guilt washed over me. Obviously, I had mastered a new skill set—effective lying.

“I thought I was getting somewhere, but it turns out I was chasing the wrong rabbits.”

“How so?”

I picked up the glass ball filled with bubbles of color sitting beside the lamp. It was a gift Granddaddy Cecil brought his fiancé from the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

“I just thought I’d remembered some things, but it turns out I didn’t. They weren’t real memories, just my imagination.”

“How do you know what you remembered didn’t really happen?”

“I think the better question is how would I know it really
did
happen?”

“Well, I told you my memories of you, and either they’re real or we’re sharing a common hallucination.”

I shuddered at the word and Dusty picked up on it.

“Did I say something wrong?”

“No, I just … uh … “ I was suddenly tongue-tied and awkward. So much for ease as the default setting.

“You looked like something upset you.”

“No, I’m not … “ I set the ball back down on the table. “Next time you share one of my hallucinations, clue me in that we’re hallucinating—OK? I need somebody to substantiate what’s real and what isn’t.”

“Bobo’s no help?”

“You got that right: Bobo’s no help. One minute she’s lucid, and the next minute she’s giving her afternoon snack to the wicked witch of her own reflection in the mirror.”

Dusty looked confused and I didn’t have the energy to explain. Then I thought of the broken clock on the mantel. “But sometimes when she seems fine, she tells me what I thought I’d remembered didn’t really happen. So who do I believe—crazy Bobo or crazy Anne?”

“I vote for crazy Anne, because I don’t think she’s crazy at all.”

“Well, I do!” 

I jumped. Bobo had slipped up on me again.

“I think Anne’s crazier’n a gunnysack full of lunatics—anybody’d kiss a bird the color of what comes out the south end of a sheep going north!”

“Speaking of …” Dusty turned to Bobo. “Do you remember the time you caught us in the chicken house—Annie and me? We said we were in there looking for eggs, but that wasn’t the real—”

“'Course it wasn’t. You think I was dumb enough to believe that? You young-uns was in there a’playin’ kissy face.”

Color flooded my face and the room temperature rocketed 30 degrees.

“Busted!” Dusty’s smile was so wide I was afraid the corners of his mouth would meet behind his ears and the top of his head would fall off. “Actually, the whole thing was Annie’s idea.”

“Don’t surprise me none.”

“It was my very first kiss,” Dusty told her.

“It was Anne’s first kiss, too.”

“How do you know that, Bobo?” I smiled sheepishly at Dusty. “When I first remembered our little rendezvous, I thought maybe I was some kind of chicken house floozy, that maybe you were just the last in a long line of neighborhood boys I’d met there for … a game of kissy face.”

I turned back to Bobo. “How can you be so sure he wasn’t? Did you hide surveillance cameras in the eggs?”

“I know 'cause that’s what you wrote in your diary, that Dusty was the first boy you every kissed.”

A roaring sound filled my head so loud it drowned out my tinnitus.

“You said it felt good, but you probably wouldn’t never do it again, now that you wasn’t curious 'bout it no more.” Before I had time to respond, she looked me up and down and shook her head. “And appears to me you never did.”

“Sounds like maybe you really did have a diary,” Dusty said.

“You didn’t just find my diary, you
read
it?”

“No!” Bobo was indignant. “'Course not. I wouldn’t a’done nothing like that—read somebody else’s diary!” She paused. “At least not all of it. Best as I recollect, it was just boring stuff about what you done in school that day anyway.” Then she brightened. “There was times, though. You always did look at life funny, was always asking questions like, ‘Can you cry under water?’ and ‘Where does dirt come from?’ You asked me one time how important you had to be to get assassinated and not just kilt. Stuff like that.”

While Bobo prattled on about the idiosyncrasies of Annie the Wonder Child, a bulldozer in my head methodically knocked the pilings out from under this morning’s interpretation of reality— while the mortar was still wet.

Time to regroup. Obviously, I really did have a diary, and Bobo really did find it.

So what did she do with it?

She was regaling Dusty with a colorful account of the leaking third floor toilet and bemoaning how much the guy charged to re-plaster the ceiling when I finally found my voice.

“Bobo, where did you put my diary?”

She looked thoughtful and I held my breath. If she went off about Edgar’s wife’s lost red scarf …

“I don’t rightly know,” she said slowly. “I can’t recall where I finally did put it. At the time, I had me more work to do than I could shake a stick at, what with all my chickens having cholera and—”

“Your chickens had
cholera
!” 

Dusty might get suckered in but I wasn’t about to let Bobo wander off into those high weeds. 
“Ok, so you were busy. Where did you put my diary?”

“I remember I considered long and hard where I could put it that it’d be safe for years like it was under that drawer.” She sighed. “But for the life of me, I can’t recall what I finally done with it.”

She suddenly looked at her wrist, which still didn’t have a watch on it. “I got to be getting along. There’s this new show on the TV. A colored woman named Oprah just sits ‘round talking. Don’t fidget or nothin’; just sits there. And folks’ll tell that woman
anything.”
She started toward the stairs and then turned back to us.

“You thought I forgot 'bout that missing person’s report on Edgar, didn’t you?” If looks could kill, Dusty would have been a corpse in a brown uniform. “How’d a man get to be sheriff that don’t care nothing 'bout a old man wanderin’ around on the prairie all by his self? You ought to be ashamed!”

She marched out of the room in a huff.

“So close … sometimes all the answers are so close.” I struggled not to cry. “Then
poof
and everything vanishes in a puff of smoke again.”

“She wanted to find a place to put the diary that was as safe as the place she found it.” Dusty was staring into space, thinking out loud. He suddenly turned and looked at me. “Maybe she decided that was the safest place in the house. Maybe she put it back where she found it.”

We stared wide-eyed at each other for a heartbeat, then I bounded up the stairs, taking them two at a time, with Dusty right behind me. The armoire was still in the middle of the floor in my bedroom. I’d had neither the energy nor the motivation to unload it and try to scoot it back into place.

Dusty took no notice of it, just followed me to the mirrored dressing table next to the bathroom door.

“This it?” he asked.

I glanced at the ceiling to confirm that this was where the water from the upstairs bathroom leak would have landed. A dark smudge showed through the paint.

I nodded. I couldn’t seem to find the air to speak.

Dusty tossed his hat on the bed, moved the stool in front of the dresser, got down on one knee and pulled out the center drawer. It slid easily into his hands, and he turned it upside down, casually dumping my underwear into the floor. Taped to the bottom of the drawer with two pieces of silver duct tape was a thick spiral notebook, its brown cardboard cover scuffed and bent and yellowed with age.

I gasped.

Dusty pulled the taped notebook free from the drawer and gently peeled off the tape, leaving behind two clean stripes on the notebook cover.

I started to tremble. He wordlessly placed the book in my hands, but I was shaking so badly I could barely hold it.

He stood, took my arm and guided me the few steps to the bed.

“Here, sit down.” Then he sat beside me.

I cradled the book like it was blown glass, turned it slowly over in my hands. On the side that had been facing the drawer bottom, the words “My Diary” were printed in faded black ink.

“Open it,” Dusty said quietly. “I’ll sit here with you while you read it if you want me to. You don’t have to tell me what’s in it. I’ll just be here.”

I thumbed through the yellow lined pages filled with the deliberate penmanship of a child. Most of the entries were dated, but there weren’t daily entries. Two or three days in a row, then nothing for a month. Random. You could watch the penmanship improve over the course of the book as the little girl … as
I
matured and became more proficient with a ballpoint.

I returned to the first page in the book and began to read out loud.

I got a baby brother today.

“There’s no date, but Joel was born Feb. 9, 1979,” I told Dusty. “I was nine years old.”

I got this book and I am going to write down his life in it. Jericho took me and Windy to see the baby at the hospital and the baby was with Mama and she let me hold it but not Windy. It was kind of ugly. It Baby Joel had a red face and black hair but not much. The nurse said he looked like his big sister. She meant Windy and that made Mama mad. Mama said I could hold him and help her change his diaper when he gets home but I don’t want to if there’s poop in it.

I looked up and Dusty was smiling.

“Can you remember that now, going to the hospital to see your baby brother?”

“No, it’s like reading about something that happened to somebody else. But maybe that’ll come.” I tapped the book. “Even if it doesn’t, even if nothing in here sparks any memories, maybe it will show me whether the memories I’ve already had are real.”

Perhaps my diary would help me gauge the nature and severity of my own madness.

I continued to read out loud. The next entry was the following day. I had to stay after school for talking too much, and I considered that highly unfair given that I had a brand new baby brother to talk about.

The entry after that was probably five days later, on a weekend. I’d been allowed to hold Joel and feed him. Windy was there, but she was not allowed to touch him because she was too little and might drop him.