The Memory Closet: A Novel (6 page)

I’m on my knees on the floor outside the closet, my long braids hanging down, dangling, blue ribbons tied in bows on the ends. I’m whispering through the crack between the almost-closed door and the jamb to someone inside the closet. I’m holding something. A glass, maybe.

The image was there one second, gone the next, so quickly I was startled. And frightened. Not frightened by the image, frightened
in
the image. The little girl on her knees in that snapshot was terrified.

Julia gathered what she needed out of the closet, turned around and saw the fear on my face.

“Are you OK? Did you see a mouse? All these old houses have mice. I’d put out traps, but I’m afraid Miss Katherine would—”

“No, it’s all right. I didn’t see a mouse.” I wanted to tell her I saw myself, but that would have taken too much explaining. “I thought I saw a spider. I hate spiders.”

Fifty percent of that was true. Leading the charge in my large and ever-growing list of fears was a full bore case of arachnophobia. I once knocked over a six-foot-tall, revolving postcard rack in the Phoenix airport when I caught a glimpse of a gift shop paperweight with a tarantula suspended in an acrylic bubble.

“Then don’t ever go down in the cellar—it’s full of spiders!”

“Thanks for the warning.”

She took the cleaning supplies and headed for the downstairs bathroom, the one Toto and I landed in last night, and I sat down in a kitchen chair to regroup.

I hadn’t expected to get ambushed like that, not just by a memory but by the emotion in the memory. In fact, remembering wasn’t turning out to be at all what I’d pictured. Seeing myself as a child was going to take some getting used to, and so was observing “me” with the objectivity of a stranger. I wasn’t at all sure how I felt about that.

Oh, yes I am. I don’t like it. Correction: I hate it!

I’d been so focused on finding out what happened that erased a decade of my life that the implications of finding the missing Annie Mitchell blew right by me. Now that the rubber had actually come in contact with the road, I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to get to know the little girl with blonde braids. What was I supposed to do with her? What if I didn’t like her? There was a lot to be said for ignorance.

What if this kid’s a bully? I hate bullies. Or a tattletale? Or one of those whiney little brats you always sit next to on trans-Atlantic flights who whimper and mewl to their comatose parents until every passenger in economy class is ready to skin them alive with a potato peeler?

And then there was the shock-and-awe question: Would finding out who the little blonde girl was
then
change who I am
now?

Duh!

So why am I just getting around to addressing that reality
?

I should have been glad she was emerging out of the shadows. After all, I’d abandoned my predictable, safe, hermetically sealed life in England for just that purpose—to find my past. But every time it leapt out at me and shouted, “Boo!” I wanted to run, to haul my skinny butt out of here so fast it’d take a week for the dust to settle out of the air. I didn’t like living in the Discovery Channel. I was … scared.

That’s it, isn’t it?
 
That’s what’s going on. I’m afraid. OK, that’s progress. So what am I afraid of?

I wallowed that one around in my mind for a few minutes and finally decided my fear was a two-headed monster. One head was a generalized, all-over fear. I’d been too dense to figure out going in that these innocuous little memories, piled one on top of the other, would equal a human being and a life I somehow had to integrate into my own. I hadn’t come here prepared to do that; it had never occurred to me I’d have to.

The other head of the monster was a specific fear, a knitting-needle-in-the-side fear: neither of the “innocuous little memories” had been innocuous at all. There was a subtext of darkness in both of them. The little blonde girl was afraid of something; the little dark-haired girl had been scared of something, too. Eventually, I was going to find out what they were afraid of. And I was sure my mind hadn’t shielded me from that knowledge for a quarter of a century for nothing.

I got up and headed upstairs to get my dirty laundry out for Julia. As I passed where she was cleaning the bathroom, I remembered the conversation Bobo and I’d had before the crack appeared in the memory closet and a couple of brave little recollections climbed over the barbed-wire fence and escaped.

“Julia, have you ever seen a brown notebook laying around the house anywhere, real old, with a little kid’s handwriting in it?”

I figured the diary Bobo described was no more real than Maria, Butch the cat or Edgar, Bobo’s virtual boyfriend who was married to Barbara of the lost red scarf. Still, there was just a chance Bobo hadn’t dreamed it, that she didn’t imagine it, she just lost it.

“I don’t think so. What is it?”

“It was my diary when I was a little girl. Bobo said she found it, but maybe she just made that up. She said she put it ‘somewhere safe,’ and can’t remember where. If it really exists, it would mean the world to me to have it back.”

“I’ll look for it as I clean, but you know what that’s like in an old house like this.”

“Inhabited by the original packrat.”

Julia nodded. “I’m sure Miss Katherine still has every birthday, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, Hanukkah or Kwanzaa card she ever got. Boxed up next to the sacks full of stamps she steams off letters so she could reuse them.”

“And string! ‘You never know when you’re a’goin’ to need a piece of string,’” I mimicked in a deep voice.

Bobo hoarded strands of anything she could lay her hands on— yarn, string, thread, twine—especially the gold twine that used to come on mailed packages.

“I think I’d remember something like a little kid’s diary if I’d ever seen it.” Julia said. She squirted Windex on the mirror above the sink and began wiping it with a paper towel. “The only thing I’ve ever seen around here that looks like a child did it are the pictures in the attic.”

“There are pictures in the attic?”

“Uh-huh. Drawings. Some in pencil, some colored with crayons. Some painted—watercolors and oils. They’re tacked all over the walls. At least they used to be. I only saw them once. There were noises up there, something scratching around. I went up and found a hole where squirrels were getting in, and I called an exterminator. Even he noticed the pictures, called the attic a ‘kiddie art gallery.’”

Though it was a spring morning, it was already sweltering on the top floor of the old house. The attic door was one of a pair of identical doors in the back corner of the third floor bedroom above the playroom. The door on the right led to the back staircase that wound down through the playroom to the kitchen on the ground floor; the door on the left led to the attic stairs.

When I pulled the door open, it protested with a grating
screeeech
on roughly the same decibel level as a jet engine, drawing a rousing round of applause from the tinnitus in my ears. The steps were steep, opening up in the north end of a narrow room that extended long ways across the top of the house.

Though the ceiling slanted upward from the attic floor to the peak of the roof in the gloom above my head, there was an open space in the middle of the room, probably ten feet across, running the whole length of the house, where it was possible to stand upright. Subdivided into alcoves by four brick chimneys that rose up like oak trees out of the floor, the attic was filled with all manner, size, shape and form of junk, enough for half a dozen yard sales, the proceeds of which would likely fund a college education.

Cardboard boxes, some labeled, most not; two, no, three old trunks; an assortment of ugly lamps, shadeless atrocities; two tacky plaid wingback chairs; an overstuffed couch that surely served as a five-star hotel for mice; card tables, folding chairs, two artificial Christmas trees dangling aluminum icicles—
When did those go out of style
?—a vintage set of TV trays on a rolling stand, a pile of ratty, moth-eaten stuffed animals and other shadowy items back in the gloom.

The last scene from
Raiders of the Lost Ark
flashed into my mind, the one where they’re hiding the Ark of the Covenant in a “safe place”—a gigantic warehouse filled with endless rows of boxes.

If Bobo decided the attic was a safe place for the mythical diary, I’m toast.

Four sets of double windows, the kind that open outward, interrupted the slant of the ceiling, two on the front of the house, two on the back. I dug my way through the flotsam and jetsam to open them so some air could circulate in the hot, stuffy room. None of them cooperated without protest; the one on the back of the house above the honeysuckle trellis refused to budge at all. After I almost dislocated my shoulder trying to open it, I noticed that the inside catch and lock were broken and it had been nailed shut on the outside.

Two lightbulbs with pull chains dangled from the rafters high up in the ceiling on each end of the attic. Only the one by the stairs worked, and it didn’t illuminate much that I couldn’t already see in the shafts of dust-freckled sunlight that slanted onto the floor like flaming arrows. But I didn’t need any additional light to see the artwork Julia had been talking about.

Pencil drawings on yellowed notebook paper, what looked like finger paintings on big sheets of butcher paper, pictures colored with crayons on typing paper—people, houses, unrecognizable shapes, bright colors and dark colors, and stark black-and-white. They were thumbtacked or taped to the slanting walls, starting so close to the floor only a very small child—
the little dark-haired girl—
could have fit in the space, and rising like wallpaper to a fairly uniform height of about six feet, like there was an invisible chair rail there, probably as high as the bigger child—
me—
could reach. The art covered all the open wall space I could see and corners of it peeked out from behind boxes where junk had been stacked in front of it over the years. I’d have had to move a lot of stuff to find out, but I suspected that kid art wallpapered the whole attic.

I reached out and touched a crayon drawing that might have been a red cat or a brush fire. I waited for a thin slice of dark purple haze to peek out between the door and the jamb in my mind, a tiny opening just big enough for one little memory to escape. Nothing.

I touched another picture that had no recognizable shape or form, just explosions of blacks and reds and dark greens. Again, nothing. Obviously, memories would appear, if they appeared at all, when it suited
them.

I went to the kitchen to get a knife—not Bobo’s precious it’ll-cut-your-thumb-off butcher knife—and used it to take down as many of the pictures as I could get to, cutting the tape or prying out the tacks that affixed them to the wall.

When I brought the stack of pictures back downstairs and laid them on the floor by his cage, Petey chirped a happy greeting. Relentlessly cheery, he made little clucking noises as he hopped around from the bars to the swing. I studied the images on the old yellowed pages and was stabbed by a sudden yearning to hold a brush in my hand again.

My easel and most of my art supplies were on a truck that would arrive Friday, and I’d already placed a call to Ikea’s 800 number to order furniture to turn the playroom into a proper studio. But right now, the big vacant room was just that—a big vacant room. I felt lost in it, at loose ends.

I got up off the floor and wandered to the window. Petey responded to my absence with a litany of bird-speak: “Petey-Petey-Petey, pretty boy, hi there!”

The window overlooked the backyard, enclosed by a thick, natural barricade of bushy evergreen trees, with a chicken house and its fenced-in chicken yard in the left corner, a small, one-car garage in the right, and Bobo’s garden in the middle. There were no neighbors on the garage side of the house, just an empty lot overgrown with weeds.

I watched the hens—maybe three dozen of them—doing their herky-jerky chicken walk, their beaks jabbing at the ground.

There have been chickens scratching at that same piece of dirt daily for half a century. How could there possibly be anything left there to peck?

Of course, on the farm next to my stable cottage near Oxford, chickens had been pecking at the same piece of earth since the Middle Ages.

I’d gone back to England briefly after Mama died, packed my things and put my sixteenth-century stable-turned-into-a-house on the market. Mama had loaned me the money for the down payment on it four years ago. Although she seldom talked about her finances, I knew Granddaddy Cecil had left an inheritance that she collected shortly before we moved back to Louisville when I was twelve. She’d used it to set up a trust fund for Joel to pay for his special tutors and private school and for my art lessons and college education. Joel’s share of Mama’s estate would be placed in his trust; my share would keep me going until I could resurrect Filbert. Or get a job.

McDonald’s is always hiring.

I looked out past the backyard trees to the vast, open prairie beyond. The house had been built on the last street in town and there was nothing behind it but an endless expanse of flat dirt stitched to the blue sky at the horizon. Nothing stirred there, not even a chicken hawk. It was totally empty—which made two of us.

But the emptiness in me was not a hollow void, a nothingness. It was a living, breathing entity that polluted my world, spoiled my solitude and swallowed my joy whole. Sometimes in the midnight dark, the emptiness crawled out and curled up beside me on the bed, a lazy rat snuggling close under the covers.

I leaned my forehead against the windowpane and pounded my fists on the glass in soft, defiant protest.

No, not anymore.

I heard a noise behind me and turned to see Julia set a tray down in front of Bobo’s door across the hall. On it was a sandwich, chips, a drink and a cookie. The clock on the mantel was dead, but my watch registered 3:50 p.m. Ten minutes to showtime.

I
got up early the next morning, determined to start setting routines, scaffolding I could stand on to build a life here. Running was a good place to start; I had run three miles every day for years.

I crossed the slat porch, veered through the yard to pass beneath the dangling weeping willow boughs, then punched the button on my running watch, setting its insides twittering with artificial synapses. My running shoes sang a rhythmic slap-slap-slap melody on the concrete sidewalk. My ponytail danced back and forth to the same tempo. My breathing matched the beat, huffing in and out in harmony. Ah, running; how I loathed it.

I’d always hated to run, despised every step I took. If I’d enjoyed it, I’d have given it up years ago. Running was a rebellious act, a singular mutiny against the tyranny of my rigid life. It was also a strict discipline I clung to as a piling of order on the days when I felt adrift in a sea of emotional chaos.

It was odd to run up and down streets teeming with ghosts, through a world I’d occupied for years and a universe of memories that were now lost to me. Did I fall off my bike in that driveway or play hide-and-seek in that garage? Did I skin my knee on this sidewalk or roller skate here with the other neighborhood children—with Wendy maybe?

The ghosts were silent. The ancient stone houses I’d passed on the streets of Oxford sparked more memories than these.

When I got back to the house, Bobo was puttering around the kitchen, her hair a skimpy bird’s nest of disarray. She wore a cotton dress that was either spotted or checked—hard to tell which because she had it on inside out. I stared at the frayed tag dangling from under her collar and the row of buttons that marched all the way down the front. How did she get the dress on? Did she fasten the buttons from the outside? Or pull the dress over her head inside out with the buttons already fastened?

She glanced at me when I came into the room but her eyes didn’t quite focus, and she couldn’t locate the cereal bowls stacked on a shelf in an open cabinet three feet from her nose.

I opened the refrigerator, poured myself a glass of orange juice and sat down at the table to drink it.

“I’ll pass on the cereal this morning, Bobo.” I took a big gulp of juice. “I’m going into town later and I’ll pick up a box of my brand—Grape Nuts.”

She set a bowl down in front of me, wordlessly filled it with Rice Krispies and poured milk over it from a white plastic carton.

“What’s the matter, Bobo? You don’t seem yourself today.”

“If I ain’t me, God help whoever is.”

“Is anything wrong?”

“When you get to be my age, something’s always wrong.”

“Are you sick? Do you hurt somewhere?”

She lifted her eyes to meet mine. “I’m 84 years old … or 85, I forget. I figure I’ve earned hurt.”

Hard to argue that. I wondered if I should mention her clothing or just let Julia handle it.

“She done it again yesterday.” Bobo said.

“She who did what?”

“That woman who steals my food. She took my tuna sandwich.”

“Are you talking about the snack Julia made for you to eat while you watched
Oprah
?”

“Who’s Oprah?”

I looked at my wrist—and I
did
have a watch on it. The blinking, neon-green digits made it clear I needed to get busy.

“I’m going into town in a little while to run some errands. Do you need anything?

“Yeah. Get me some toothpaste, the kind that fights cavities.”

After my shower, I stood in front of the steamy mirror putting on makeup with trembling hands.

“Oh come on; this is ridiculous,” I said to the pale blonde woman who needed mascara so desperately she was willing to risk putting out an eye.

How could I possibly be tense about a meeting at lunchtime when it was only ten o’clock? Maybe because I had invited the immediate world to the reunion of an organization that never existed. But I’d had to call it something in the classified ad I put in the
Goshen News:

“Were you a member of the Wathen Street Gang? When you were a child, did your family live on Wathen, Phelps, Thomas, Richards or Burkhead streets? If you played in that neighborhood between 1974 and 1981, you are cordially invited to attend our 30-year (give or take a little) reunion celebration. Even if you’ve lost your magic decoder ring and don’t remember the password or the secret handshake, join the other gang members at noon Friday at R’s Steak House.”

I had a childhood to recreate. I’d placed the ad hoping I could find somebody who’d shared that childhood to help me fill in some of the blanks.

It took me an hour to decide what to wear.

Jeans and boots?

Sure, this is Texas.

But I’m not a Texan. I’ll look like a poser.

A skirt?

Too dressy.

Shorts, then.

Are you kidding? With my albino legs—not a chance!

I stepped out of the car two hours later into sunshine that made me squint even with sunglasses.

This was a bad idea, a really bad idea. Nobody’s going to be here. Or maybe a whole bunch of people are going to show up, which will be worse. I bet I’m the only one in khakis.

The interior of the small restaurant Roger Reynolds and his wife, Ruth, had opened in the 1950s was extraordinarily dark until I remembered to take off my Foster Grant wannabes. Half a dozen bar stools sat in front of a counter on the far wall of a long, narrow room beneath a sign proclaiming: “R’s Steak House” in large red letters, and under it the slogan: “If the steak’s bad, it ain’t R’s.”

Booths lined the other walls and a handful of tables occupied the center floor space. The red-and-white checkerboard design of the curtains, tied back from the windows along the wall by the door, matched the plastic tablecloths. A metal pail full of peanuts sat in the center of each table, and the floor was an inch deep in sawdust and shells.

Haven’t these people ever heard of a peanut allergy? You could drop dead of anaphylactic shock just pulling into the parking lot.

A sign on a metal stand in front of the unmanned cash register proclaimed “Please wait to be seated” on one side and “Please seat yourself” on the other. It was flipped to the seat-yourself side, so I picked a table by the door and studied the cardboard menu that had a picture of a bull on the front. Every food item listed was some form of steak—sirloin, rib-eye, T-bone, New York strip. There was even a chart to help you select how you wanted the beef cooked. Rare was the color of recent road kill.

Even though I was a few minutes early, it was clear my idea had completely bombed. The restaurant was empty except for two old ladies in the back and a young couple with a baby up front, and
 a policeman who sat on a bar stool at the counter talking to a redheaded waitress.

Nobody’s coming!

I was so relieved that I was positively giddy. A Hispanic waitress brought me a glass of water and I ordered a cup of coffee. While she got it, I searched the menu for something light—a salad, maybe. All I saw was meat.

The policeman got up from his seat at the counter and started for the door. But he stopped at my table instead. He had his hat in his hands.

“Amy and I figured it had to be you. You’re the only person in here we don’t recognize.”

I looked up into an open, smiling face—and froze. My entire vocabulary drained out of me like water out of a cracked pot, and I couldn’t manage to snatch a single word from the torrent before it was all gone.

“Besides, the hair’s a dead giveaway. It looks the same as it did when you were 10 years old. I never met anybody with hair as pale blonde as Annie Mitchell’s.”

I just looked at him.

He must think I’m mute.

“It is you, isn’t it … Annie? Remember me? Dusty. Dusty Walker. I lived on the other side of the street at the end of the block.”

He wasn’t a big man, probably not more than three or four inches taller than I was, but he was powerfully built, as thick and dense as a fireplug, his arms and shoulders so heavily muscled they strained the fabric of his shirt. His hair, cut “high and tight,” was deep, chocolate brown with gray at the temples and in a streak like a lightning bolt above his left eyebrow.

“Dusty?” I croaked.

His smile broadened, a wide, engaging smile, the kind that showed gums above his teeth. He turned to the waitress at the counter. “It’s Annie, all right. You owe me five bucks.”

He looked back down at me. “Amy was sure it was Sarah Pritchard put that ad in the newspaper. Just as a joke.”

So far, I’d managed to choke out a single, two-syllable word. That did not a conversation make.

Say something!

“You lived at the end of the block?”

“Yeah, next door to that crazy old coot who waved his shotgun at us every time we walked across his grass.”

I could tell he had begun to feel a little awkward standing there. My face glowed hot enough to set my hair on fire.

“Well, Dusty,” I stammered, stumbling to my feet. “It’s … so good to see you … again.” I stuck my limp, sweaty hand out in front of me like a dead fish on a stick. He ignored it and grabbed me in a friendly bear hug. It must have felt like hugging a lamp post.

“Good to see you, too, Annie!”

“Please, sit down.” I pointed to the chair across from me.

As he pulled out the chair, he spoke again to the waitress at the counter. “You got time now, don’t you? To talk for just a little while?”

She looked a question at the other waitress, who nodded, then she took off her apron, put it down behind the counter and joined us at the table.

“Here’s your five.” She handed Dusty a folded bill and stood with her arms crossed in front of her, wearing a look of mock disapproval.
 “Isn’t gambling against the law in Texas?”

He grinned and slipped the money into the pocket on the other side of his shirt from the spot where a shiny gold star proclaimed: Rutherford County Sheriff.

“I’d a’sworn Sarah Pritchard was the one did it,” the woman said, and gave me a bright smile. “I’m Amy Douglas. I’m not an official member of the Wathen Street Gang, though, 'cause I lived over on Bonham. But I used to sneak across the tracks to play with ya’ll every chance I got. There weren’t any kids my age where I lived.”

“You don’t remember the secret handshake, then?” Dusty teased.

“I don’t see no decoder ring on your finger.”

I sat as speechless as a door stop, unable/unwilling to hold up my end of the conversation. They exchanged a glance, then Amy said, “Well, Annie, I haven’t seen you since … when was the last time?”

Since I had absolutely no memory of this woman whatsoever, it was a little tricky to come up with an answer. I indicated the chair between Dusty and me—”Have a seat, please.”—and danced a jig around the question. “I don’t remember exactly when, do you?”

She sat down as the other waitress brought my coffee.

“You want anything?” the waitress asked the two of them. Both shook their heads no and Amy turned back to me.

She’d been pretty once, 20 years and 50 pounds ago. She had a round face and dimpled elbows, and a bust that strained at the buttons on her black waitress uniform. Silver rings with Indian reservation turquoise stones adorned her pudgy fingers and big hoop earrings danced beneath her ears when she talked. Her hair was a color Bobo would have called “Sears red,” shoulder length and teased into a classic, Texas big-hair style.

“I was a year older than you, and it was before I went into junior high. When did you move away?”

“In 1982, I was about 12, but I didn’t get out much the last year we lived here, so 1981 maybe.”

“You were in a wreck, weren’t you?” Amy said slowly, as the memory formed in her head. “It happened out by the grain elevator south of Lariat didn’t it? And your little sister--"

“Wendy was killed in the wreck,” Dusty finished for her. “I remember. Her death—that’s when I realized I wasn’t bulletproof, that a little kid could die just like somebody’s grandmother. It hit me hard. I thought about her for years—and she was just my playmate, not my little sister. “

He looked at me with such compassion I couldn’t meet his gaze. His eyes were striking, disturbing. A pure, light green, with long, black eyelashes beneath a thick unibrow.

“I don’t remember seeing you much after that,” Amy said. “Then you moved away.”

That was as good a segue as I was likely to get, so I grabbed it.

“The accident, that’s sort of why I put the ad in the paper.”

I steadied myself and tried very hard not to sound like the chairman of the board of the lunatic fringe.

“I was in the accident that killed Wendy and the wreck caused amnesia.” I watched their faces; so far they were merely curious. “Of course, that was years ago, but there’s still a big hole in my childhood memories.” 
Roughly the size of Belgium
. 
“My grandmother still lives here, in the old house on Wathen Street. And my mother died recently—”

“I know, I’m sorry for your loss,” Dusty said. He sounded like he actually was sorry.

“So I’ve come here to live with Bobo for a while.” I burped out a nervous little laugh. “I guess ‘Bobo’ is a weird name for a grandmother, but that’s what everybody always called her. I don’t remember anymore why.”

“I always liked Bobo’s name.” Dusty reached into the metal bucket in the center of the table, took out a peanut, shelled it and tossed the shell on the floor. “I thought it was a whole lot better than Mee-Maw or Mam-aw.”

Amy punched him in the shoulder. “My grandmother is Mee-Maw, thank you very much.”

I plowed doggedly ahead.

“I thought since I was here, well maybe I could, maybe it would be a good time for me to …"
Focus! 
“I put the ad in the newspaper hoping I’d find somebody who still lived in Goshen who had been one of my playmates when I was a little girl,” I blurted out in a rush. “So maybe they could help me, maybe
you
could help me remember things.”

Dusty didn’t buy that it was that simple. I could see it in his eyes. Without being intrusive, he was studying me, trying to read me. But Amy obviously had no reservations at all.