The Memory Closet: A Novel (25 page)

Taking care of Joel is the greatest joy of my life. I look after him so well, in fact, that Jericho calls me a “half-pint Mama.” My mother doesn’t like it when he says that. I love to rock Joel to sleep. He’s so warm and soft in my arms, a giant baby doll with chubby little arms and legs and curly hair that tickles my nose. Usually, I sing to him, but today I have no voice. He falls asleep quickly anyway. Bobo says none of her babies were as easy as Joel. I lay him down in his bed in the nursery and leave his door open to keep the room as cool as possible, though the heat doesn’t seem to bother him; neither does noise. Once he’s asleep, even Jericho and Mama’s fights don’t wake him up.

Then I go upstairs to my bedroom and sit on the edge of my bed. I can’t distract myself anymore with Joel, can’t back away from what happened in the kitchen like you back away when a fire’s too hot. And the image of Windy with the garbage sack tied around her neck gobbles up my whole mind.

She’s downstairs in that hot closet—in a plastic bag! She must be melting. I can’t let her stay down there like that! But what can I do? How can I help her?

The vivid memory video stopped abruptly. No warning. It was there and then it wasn’t, like leaving a movie before it was over. I had no idea what happened next, but I did know how the movie ended. Dusty told me about the morning the police brought Windy to our house when they couldn’t find her mother. Windy died that afternoon!

I sat on the edge of my bed, holding the diary written by the child who’d sat in the same spot 25 years ago trying to figure out a way to help her little sister. I desperately wanted to believe that the nightmare sequence I’d just witnessed was as imaginary as the spiders and the dead bird, but I knew that wasn’t true. My memories were real; the diary proved I wasn’t imagining my mother’s abuse. My mind might be churning out hallucinations like Oscar Mayer turning out wieners, but I was certain my mother really had done that to Windy.

Bobo called to me from the foot of the stairs. “Anne, supper’s ready!”

I realized that long shadows had reached out across my room. Time didn’t mean anything anymore. A whole afternoon could pass between one heartbeat and the next; a single painful moment could last all day. I got up off the bed and went downstairs. Bobo was bustling around the kitchen putting food on the table.

“Julia left us a plate of that taco salad she makes with that cheese on the top that’s not really cheese—the stuff in a box, what’s it called?”

“Velveeta.”

“Yeah, Velveeta. I wouldn’t let her put none of them Mexican peppers in it though, those jalapeños--pronounced ja-LAP-a-noes. One of them little things got under my teeth the last time she made it and like to set my whole mouth on fire.”

Bobo was uncharacteristically cheery and it occurred to me that her joviality was probably tied to catching the sheriff and me playing kissy face in my bedroom. But that was a lifetime ago.

“I wouldn’t let her use my good butcher knife to cut up them peppers neither. That hot stuff’s like acid. It’ll eat the sharp edge of a blade quicker’n …” She stopped when she got a good look at my face and the smile drained off hers. “What’s the matter, Anne?”

“I remember what Mama did to Windy the day Windy died.”

The handful of silverware Bobo was holding clattered to the floor in noisy protest. She reached over to the table for support and eased herself down into a chair.

“Tell me what you remember, Sugar.” I could hear the dread in her voice.

“I remember the police bringing Windy here all bunged up and upset, and you gave her a bath and then went to the bake sale at church. And I remember sitting at the table about to bite into my peanut butter and jelly sandwich when Windy suddenly had diarrhea and Mama put her in a garbage bag and threw her into the closet.
That’s
what I remember!”

The volume of my voice had risen with every word; by the end I was shouting. An emotion stronger than anything I’d ever felt in my life surged through me with every thump-thump of my heart; a bright white light bloomed in my head like a flare. I had never been so furious!

“Mama put a sick, traumatized eight-year-old child into a garbage bag with her own crap and shut her up in a closet!” In crazed fury, I grabbed a glass off the table and slammed it down on the floor. It shattered like a small hand grenade. “My mother, your daughter, abused …” I stumbled and stuttered, unable to find words graphic enough to describe what she’d done. Abuse was way too tame.

“You didn’t see the look on Windy’s face when she was standing in the doorway of my bedroom. She was terrified. Her mother’d run off and left her and then the police brought her here—and dumped her smack into the middle of a real-life, Technicolor nightmare.”

I grabbed another glass and exploded it on the floor with such force that shards of glass flew out from it like shrapnel. Bobo sat very still, looking up at me with sad eyes.

“What was wrong with Mama? How could she--how could
anybody--
do something like that? Who was that woman I thought was my mother all these years, that imposter, that monster in a human being suit?”

I grabbed a plate and lifted it above my head. Bobo flinched.

And the rage drained out of me like water out a hole in a bucket. I placed the plate back on the table carefully, my hands shaking.

Annie, I’d like you to meet the Boogie Man. His name’s Mama.

“I’m sorry Bobo,” I whispered, suddenly tired, exhausted. “I’ll clean this mess. Just sit still; don’t move or you’ll cut yourself.”

I walked carefully through the war zone, stepping around the silverware Bobo had dropped. Pieces of broken glass crunched under the soles of my Reeboks. I opened the closet to get the broom and dust pan.

Windy lay in a garbage bag of crap in here!

It felt like someone punched me in the belly, punched a hole right through me.

The day I met Julia, that little slice of memory. Kneeling on the floor by this door, the sewer smell, the fear. I’d peeked into Windy’s hell that day.

It was hard to move with the throbbing emptiness in my gut, but I forced myself to pick up the broom and walk carefully to the dining room doorway. I started to sweep—and a heartbeat later the floor was clean and I was pushing the last little bit of broken glass into the dustpan. I had no memory of the time in between. The task could have taken two minutes or two hours.

I dumped the contents of the dustpan into the little can with the flip lid under the sink. There was no large garbage can in the kitchen anymore.

Then I set the broom and dustpan against the wall beside the closet door. I couldn’t go in there again.

“Was that all?” I heard Bobo’s soft voice through the squeal of tinnitus, bleating like a smoke alarm in my ears.

“Was that all of what?”

“All you remembered?”

There’s more?

My knees turned to water. If there hadn’t been a chair to collapse into, I’d have fallen in a heap on the floor.

“She did something
worse
?”

“Oh, I didn’t mean … I just wondered if … the wreck, if you remembered …”

“I didn’t remember the wreck, just Mama putting Windy in the closet.” I couldn’t read the look on Bobo’s face. “But I’m sure the wreck memories are right around the corner. Yes sir-ee, the accident that killed my little sister is coming soon to a theatre near me.” I let out a long sigh and leaned back in the chair. “Just a matter of time now. The logjam’s busted. I’m going to get a top-deck-of-the-bus tour through hell any time now.” I looked into Bobo’s sad, tired eyes. “Well, that’s what I came here for, isn’t it?”

And suddenly I was exhausted to the point of collapse. I pulled myself out of the chair and turned toward the dining room door.

“Anne, I got your supper just about—”

“I’m not hungry, Bobo.” The hole in my belly was a throbbing ache that filled my stomach more full than Thanksgiving dinner. “I just want to lie down for a while.”

I
kicked off my shoes and stretched out on my back on my bed. It was dusk; the room was dim. I watched shadows dance on the ceiling, the streetlight on the corner dappled by a forest of swaying willow tree branches. I tried to empty my mind of all thought, every memory, each individual image. I concentrated on blankness, like a pristine canvas on my easel.

The empty silence I created in my head lasted about 30 seconds before it was shattered by nightmare images that raced around between my ears on souped-up Harleys, rumbling and roaring past each other, every one meaner and nastier than the next.

I squeezed my eyes shut tight. It was going to be a long night.

When I opened my eyes, it was morning, very early, just after sunrise. I hadn’t so much slept as passed out. And as soon as I came fully back to consciousness, the emotional pain of the past few days settled into my heart like the throbbing of an abscessed tooth. Emotionally, I was a wreck, but physically I felt pretty good. Sleeping like the dead will do that for you.

Tea. Must have tea!

I slipped quietly out of my room and down the stairs. Bobo wasn’t up yet. I flicked the light switch in the still-dim kitchen. I hoped I’d gotten all the pieces of broken glass off the floor; I was barefoot.

My breakfast was sitting out for me on a Home Sweet Home placemat. A small glass of orange juice and a bowl of Grape Nuts already sugared, with a spoon on a folded paper towel beside it. Bobo must have set it out last night before she went to bed. I was stabbed by a pang of remorse.

I throw a temper tantrum; she fixes my breakfast.

But right now, I was all about tea, so desperate for a burn-your-throat cup of it that I refused to wait for the kettle to boil. I just stuck a mug of water into the microwave for 90 seconds, then dipped a tea bag up and down in it until it was transformed into the deep amber liquid I had come to cherish. I dipped out two teaspoons of sugar from the canister into the mug, and as I started back upstairs to my bedroom with it, I snagged the orange juice and took it with me.

I set the steaming tea on the wide sill of the window overlooking the front yard, and took little sips as I settled into the soft cushion of the spindle rocker beside it. The antique rocker in my room used to be in Mama and Jericho’s bedroom downstairs; it was the one I sat in to rock Joel to sleep the day …

I think I groaned out loud. The savage razor blades of yesterday’s memories sliced into my soul if I got anywhere near them. I shook my head hard, took a sip of orange juice and tried to conjure up the feeling of Joel in my arms, his curls tickling my nose. I didn’t know he’d been such an adorable baby, that he’d …

Wait a minute.

I lifted the orange juice to my lips again. The liquid was cold; the glass wasn’t. Obviously, the juice had been poured only a few minutes ago. Bobo was asleep. Had she gotten up, set my breakfast out for me and then gone back to bed? Why? Of course, nothing Bobo did or said should surprise me anymore. She could just as easily have whipped up a stack of pancakes and left them beside the cereal bowl—still hot, but missing some key ingredient.

Bobo. Over the course of a three-minute conversation, she could change from sweeter than Glenda the Good Witch to meaner than a serial killer with a sinus infection. But she was authentic, you had to give her that. Bobo was what-you-see-is-what-you-get real. She might not know what day it was, but there was no guile in her. And in my world of shifting realities, where all I once held to be true had been called into question, Bobo was a constant.

Dusty was a constant, too.

The realization slid as easily into my mind as a letter dropped into a mail slot, and I felt a comforting warmth deep in the chill of my heart.

I waited for the alarm claxon. Nothing. Apparently the Thought Gestapo either hadn’t noticed I was thinking about Dusty or it wasn’t a crime anymore.

I saw his face, not Dusty the sheriff, Dusty the little-boy. I was looking at him through the eyes of Annie with the long blonde braids. This was the image she saw, what
I
saw when I was a little girl. He had freckles; those were gone now. But he had the same light green eyes in a forest of black lashes and the same cinematic smile. No wonder I’d asked him to kiss me!

The night we’d had dinner together—was that 50 years ago or 75?—Dusty had been real with me. As open as Bobo. He’d told me about going to seminary and being divorced, admitted he’d screwed up his marriage and his ministry. But it had been desperately important to me to hold up my guard.

I was just beginning to figure out that the sentries I posted at the drawbridge over the moat didn’t just keep Dusty out. They kept me in. Alone.

Little Annie Mitchell had negotiated her life just fine without any guards at all.

I wondered if Annie would be there to help me tomorrow morning when I had to bare my soul to a shrink. I hoped so; I needed her strength. There was so much more soul now to bare than when I got here; every day I descended into a deeper level of awful. And it wasn’t over yet.

Somewhere deep in the purple haze where the Boogie Man lived, the wreck that killed Windy was tuning up, the fat lady getting ready to sing the final jagged song.

I looked out the window at the bright blue bowl of sky overhead and decided that I really ought to run this morning.

Bad idea. Really bad idea.

The degree to which I absolutely did not want to do it told me how much I needed to. I stepped out of the clothes I’d slept in and put on my running shorts and the Reeboks that had tiny pieces of glass imbedded in the rubber soles. When I passed through the kitchen, Bobo was seated at the table, nursing a severe case of bed-head in a wrong-side-out robe and matching on-the-wrong-feet slippers. Her teeth were lying beside her cereal bowl, and she was gumming Rice Krispies. Julia was separating clothes in the laundry room.

“Good morning, Julia,” I called out.

“Buenos días.”

“The workmen you recommended called yesterday and said they’d be here sometime this morning to start hauling off the mess in the backyard,” I said. “Thanks for taking care of that for me.”

“De nada.”

Bobo gave me a blank look, her eyes not quite focused.

Even money says she has a date with Edgar today.

“I’m going for a run before it gets too hot,” I told her. “I’ve already had tea and juice; I don’t want any breakfast.”

As the screen door slammed shut behind me, I heard her grumble. “Then what’d you get it out for?”

After about half a mile, a surprisingly pleasant rhythm took over, like riding a bike—some effort required, but not enough to spoil the view. As soon as I passed the house where Dusty used to live, every house, porch and garage began to look familiar. Not I’ve-driven-down-this-street-a-couple-of-times familiar, but I’ve-spent-days-of-my-life-on-this-street familiar.

Familiar but changed, aged. All the trees were huge now, some of them had been saplings
when I was a little girl.
There used to be a red brick house on the corner; now it was an empty lot. The house across the street had a fence around the yard that hadn’t been there before. All the houses had mailboxes by the front doors instead of on poles by the street. We used to ride our bikes down the street with our hands out, slapping every mailbox as we passed it.

Up and down the streets of my childhood, images formed that were both brand-new and very old. The porch step where the little girl with the ponytail that nobody liked—what was her name?— fell down and broke out her two front teeth. The empty field where we’d played baseball. The kid-sized tunnel we’d hollowed out between the hedge and the fence beside the house where Joey Callison used to live had grown shut, gobbled up by years of disuse.

I sprinted the last 50 yards to the front porch and tagged it: home base. Our porch had always been home base. When I closed the front door behind me, I could hear Julia singing from the laundry room. How could Bobo not notice that she sang in perfect English?

On my way to take a shower, I glanced through the open door of the studio. Petey was hanging in his cage with a piece of gold twine tied in a hangman’s noose around his neck.

The world cranked down into frame-by-frame slow motion.

Click-click
. My legs gave way.

Click-click.
My knees clunked on the hardwood floor when I crumpled.

Click-click
. The air went thin and I gasped like a fish on a dock.

Click-click. The turbine generator hum of my tinnitus ramped up to a lion’s roar in my ears.

Petey!

I sucked in a lungful of empty air and staggered to my feet. I lurched to the studio door and dug my knuckles into my eyes to make the image disappear. But it remained, only clearer. Little green bird, wings limp, head twisted at an unnatural angle. Dead.
Dead!

I couldn’t make myself go all the way into the room; I grabbed the door frame to hold me up. I could smell myself, my body odor—not dried running sweat but the fresh, acrid stink of fear. Orange juice flavored bile rose into the back of my throat and I swallowed hard to keep from vomiting. I could feel myself hyperventilating, but I couldn’t stop gasping. Or shaking.

Petey hung there, dangling from the center bar of his cage, the gold twine so tight around his neck it disappeared into his feathers.

Nooooo!
I screamed silently and turned my head away, squeezed my eyes tight shut and felt hot tears flow down my cheeks.

When I opened my eyes, I was facing the clock on the mantel. There was no crack in the glass on the front.

Like a sleepwalker, I floated through the thin air to the fireplace and ran my fingers across the smooth surface of the glass plate covering the clock face. It was as flawless as a new marble.

Anne, it’s not real, none of it. You’re hallucinating.

I couldn’t be. I turned toward poor, dead Petey. That was real; he was hanging right there!

Anne, you’re imagining this.

No! This wasn’t some sort of dream. It was really happening. My bird was dead. And the clock wasn’t broken anymore.

Something like panic gave me strength and I turned and bolted down the stairs and across the parlor.

Wait!

I stopped in the dining room, almost skidded to a halt. Not again, I couldn’t do this to Bobo again, drag her up the stairs to see … a dead bird! This time, a dead bird! Shouldn’t shock her too bad. She killed it!

I forced myself to stand still, catch my breath. Waves of nausea washed over me. My temples were throbbing in a staccato, heartbeat rhythm. I wasn’t just trembling; I was vibrating.

Calm down!

I clenched my jaw, balled my hands into fists at my sides. I took a deep, shaky breath and let it out slowly and somehow managed to
walk
into the kitchen. Bobo stood on the back porch, staring at the blackened pile of rubble in the backyard. Julia was in the laundry room, belting out some crying-in-your-beer country ballad.

“Uh, Julia.” I said from the doorway, my voice weak but surprisingly level.

I startled her and she burped out a little “Oh!” and dropped an armload of neatly folded towels.

“I didn’t hear you coming. You’re getting to be as light on your feet as your grandmother.” Then she got a good look at my face; I must have been as white as parchment. “Are you OK?”

“I’m fine. I just ran a little too hard at the end.” I squatted down and gathered up the towels Julia had dropped and set the pile of them on top of the dryer. “Uh … could you come up to the studio for a minute? I’ve got something I want to show you.”

“Sure,” she said, “just let me get these folded back, and I’ll take them up to the linen closet.” Julia probably didn’t traverse the stairs any more often than absolutely necessary.

She quickly refolded the towels, her movements practiced and sure, chattering about how she was probably going to have to wash all the curtains in the house to get the smell of smoke out of them.

I said nothing, just concentrating on keeping my hands in fists so she wouldn’t see how badly I was trembling.

When she finished, I led the way up the steps, grateful that she kept up a white-noise babble. Julia was a talkative woman and couldn’t say more than a few words to Bobo. She was probably enjoying our little chat and didn’t even notice it was one-sided.

At the top of the stairs, I leaned over and pretended to tie my shoe, motioning for her to go on ahead. I wanted her to see for herself. I didn’t want her to catch some warning sign in my face; I wanted her to be as unprepared and shocked as I was.

I waited a moment, two, my heart hammering like a timpani drum. I watched her walk into the room. As soon as she was out of the doorway, I could see Petey’s cage. He was hopping around in it, fluttering his wings, scattering seed pods all over the floor.

The bottom fell out of the pit of my stomach, but somehow I managed to stand and propel myself across the hallway into the room. I turned toward the mantel, but I already knew what I’d see there. Sure enough, a giant crack sliced across the glass plate on the front of the clock.

Julia turned around and looked at me. “What was it you wanted me to see?”

I was blank, utterly and completely blank.

“I just wanted … you to smell the curtains in here. Do you think they smell smoky?”

I could tell that struck her as an odd question.

“Well, if they don’t they’re the only ones in the house that don’t.” She waddled over to the curtains and pulled a handful of cloth up to her nose. “Actually, these aren’t as bad as the ones in the kitchen and Miss Katherine’s room. Those windows were open, guess this one was closed. But if the smell’s bothering you, I can take them down right now and wash them for you.”

“Oh, no, that’s OK. Just wanted to make sure I wasn’t … imagining the smell, that’s all. Let’s wait and see if it goes away by itself.”

Julia eyed me again. “You sure you’re OK?”

I forced a laugh that came out like a dog bark. “I haven’t been running in a while; I’m waaay out of shape.”