Open Me (23 page)

The salt box is about ten inches deep, narrow and heavy, but Mem can tell it is not filled with salt. She sits on the floor, puts the box on her lap and fits the key into the lock. It slips in and turns without any resistance. The lid creaks when Mem lifts it.

Inside the box, at the top, is Mem’s mother’s dimpled locket on a chain, resting on part of an old greeting card decorated with flowers and trees.
Mem puts the locket aside and pulls the card out to reveal a stack of paper money, hundreds of bills all going in one direction, enough to be every fee Mem has ever collected. There are scores of wrinkled twenties, thumbed-over fifties, crisp one-hundred-dollar bills as thick as the box is deep. On the other side of the greeting card Mem’s mother has written,
For Mem, so you will never have to weep again
.

Mem turns the card over, examines the jaunty lilies and daisies that thrive in the picture. She strokes the flowers.

Something bright red shoots through the short block-glass window at the top of the stairway wall and whips across the basement. This is immediately followed by an identical thing but this time blue. Then red again. Then blue. Mem realizes she is holding the salt cellar so tightly against her chest that the corners are digging pink grooves into her forearms. The police lights enter and sweep, enter and sweep.

Mem thinks, this could be Rome, four thousand years ago, those lights could be torches, this could be Fiji as the men came to civilize us all to death, or the gallows in England, or a witch-hunt, a chase. There is a knocking at the front door. Breathing steadily, Mem slides the box under a tool table and makes her way up the stairs.

T
he police are at the door. Mem sees one of them through the foyer window. He has burnt-orange hair and a thin-lipped mouth. Sofie is whimpering. “Don’t open it!” But Mem does, and the sound of voices and radios blur together into a puddle of meaninglessness, like something exotic. Mem looks at the policeman, his ruddy hue, his thin lips. He looks familiar and not-familiar, out-of-focus. Mem looks again and his face wavers like a reflection on water, shrinking smaller and tight till she sees it, finally. The face of the boy who had pissed his pants when they buried his father, one of her earliest funerals.

There are the same green eyes. The same furtive blink.

There is the same carrot-colored hair.

Mem remembers the face, the hair, the tears that had bathed his face till it shined while patches of urine bloomed through the crotch of his shorts. At the time, the girls had been pretty impressed. They had pointed and whispered about the boy sobbing and peeing and cowering behind his mother’s black-stockinged legs and they wished with all their might that they, too, could be so moved. Mem had watched the boy cry with such envy, thumbing her doole’s bell-shaped layers and small blue flowers. Behind them she could hear her own mother sob, wailing, the burst tearing of hems. Young Derasha, still healthy and rude. The mothers wept almost in unison, like the rounds of a folk lyric. Like a duet.

She lets the man in. He returns Mem’s stare and asks, “Are you Mirabelle?”

Sofie has run into the kitchen. Mem follows her, sees her sitting on one of the kitchen chairs, her body rocking back and forth. This is real rocking, the kind that madness brings as you try to find balance again. A chaotic soul set on a rocking chair. Sofie is loose and watery, without her mother to tell her what is happening and thicken her soul like stew.

“What are you going to tell them?” Sofie whispers before the man follows Mem in.

“I don’t know,” Mem whispers back. “Maybe the truth.”

“Which truth?” Sofie asks.

“What do you mean, which truth?” says Mem. “How many can there be?”

Mem watches the redheaded policeman’s beetle-shiny shoes pace from one end of the plank-patterned linoleum floor to the other. The policeman has been following Mem’s work for years. His questions do not surprise her, they are the same ones she has been asked by strangers since she was six years old.

“Is it true you worship goddesses and never went to school?”

“Is it true your mothers torture you to teach you how to cry?”

“Do you know it’s against the law?”

“Have you ever lived in hiding?”

“Where is your mother now?”

As always, Mem doesn’t answer but she is very polite. She listens to his questions and stares at the little mounds her knees make under the black cloth. Her kneecaps start to ache from sitting in the same position for so long because her mother’s kitchen chairs are made for a much taller person, a normal-sized person whose heels reach the ground when they sit. The redheaded policeman is tall enough to comfortably sit in a chair, but he doesn’t sit. He stands stiffly, hands awkwardly clasped on his belt. He stares, as if he is expecting Mem to burst into tears, or song, or tell him a long and eloquent story.

Of course, she could do this. She could tell stories.

But the policeman doesn’t want stories, he wants secrets. He wants her name.

Mem thinks,
What is the difference between a secret and a lie? A secret is a lie you tell yourself
. Now Mem thinks that secrets are really just lies waiting to be searched for and found, that every secret is shielded by and conjoined to a succulent, flowering lie, so the true story is always made up of what has been hidden, and what has been left behind. Mem tries to not look at the policeman’s mouth, at the five long red hairs growing from the tip of his nose, but his smile looks so artificial, sewn into place the way a corpse’s lip-drift is repaired by mending the mouth with thread, like a cushion, from inside and then pinned through a nostril. He says,
You girls are the real victims here. We only want to help you
, and his lips are so thin they are almost not there. She watches those lips ask her for her secret name so many times that the name seems more important than the real reason why the police are there, as if not telling him her name is the true crime.

A few times Mem catches a different expression on the policeman’s face, a quick look of sheer disbelief. He must be wondering how it is possible that this scared and scrawny child is the famous young woman they’ve been hunting for so long. He glances down at Mem’s face, her hands, her posture, her dress, trying to figure out how she does it, as if she is rigged with tubes, like a weeping statue of Mary. The look on his face says,
This can’t be the one
.

Still he hopes. This is probably the case that could make his career, the first successful interrogation of an infamous Wailer, and in her own home. This is why he’s being kind, but not too kind, hoping to carefully push her into defending her mother or her history. He cannot wait for her to start talking so that he can tilt his head to the side and nod while he writes. He will look very concerned.

When the policeman checks his watch for a second, the soles of his shoes crunching against the salt on the floor, Mem looks at Sofie who mouths the words,
DON’T TELL
. She is rocking back and forth, worrying her own black lace hem as if she is polishing her fingertips, which are
usually peeled down and raw from the biting that is her habit when she weeps. At that moment, amazingly, she is not weeping, and her eyes are the color blue before blue disappears, almost no-color, rimmed with red and hard water. Exposed like skinned and parboiled fruit.

No don’t cover your face, you have to feel exposed!
Mem remembers when she saw her first news show on Aunt Raziel’s TV and learned about a group of homeless men who had died of exposure. Mem didn’t understand that
exposure
had to do with the cold weather, the slow losing of your self through fingertips and toes. It had just made sense to her that someone could die from feeling exposed. Or from being exposed by someone else. Overexposed, like a negative in too-bright light.

There is no bright light in Mem’s mother’s kitchen. Out of the kitchen window, between the sweeping red flash of the police lights, the half-moon has begun to secrete a vaguely radiant hoop. Mem thinks about Aunt Ayin’s story about the moon, but she remembers the part of the story everybody forgets to tell, how the moon’s loss wasn’t caused by things taken away or denied. The moon did this all to herself, because she would not listen. She had first been loved, then warned, then shut off and left behind. Now the moon is ashamed of her early bravado, her childish conceit, because this is what she really was underneath that loud pageantry after all—an overcast planet of scars and bone. An old mothball no longer useful. An embarrassed hung head. A disreputable daughter.

In the midst of the strange fog of unreality that has settled about her, Mem hears,
It’s better this way. You have to let go. So sorry for your loss
. Mem has heard these words a thousand times, a litany of useless things the mourners say, but she knows now that none of them work. Those ideas are based on untruths and fear, a culture that puts stock in sudden emotional catharsis. When they pay her to perform they are hoping that somehow there will be a deliverance through tears, a passageway through which things will be better, they will learn to let go, whatever is lost will be found. They never expect to be stuck in a place where the things or people they love are never coming back.

“When is your mother coming back?” asks the policeman.

What Mem really wants to see is what the policeman looks like now when he cries. Mem wonders how long it would take to make it happen, how much of her sad story he would viciously scribble onto his pad before he decides that it is unbearable to go on. How long it would take to make him fall apart, for Mem to find the fissure, wiggle it open, drop in some salt. Mem thinks she should use a stopwatch. She should take bets. First she would bet that he doesn’t even know what he looks like when he is crying. Like all of the unprofessionals, Mem thinks, he probably doesn’t want to know. All they ever seem to want to know is how to make it stop.

Mem, jiggling her legs under the table, is the only one left who knows how to make it stop. If she answers his questions it will stop the whole thing, all six thousand years of it, right here, forever. No one will realize this until it is too late, until the articles and exposés and books are out, and people are holding her story in their hands. Like the policeman, the readers will say,
tell me
. They will ask the same questions that have been asked for thousands of years. They will be so moved they will read it twice.
Tell me again
. Where would Mem begin?

The policeman cocks his head to the side like the mourners do when they talk to widows, an approximation of what they think sympathy is supposed to look like.
It’s not your fault
, he says. Cocked head, repetitive nod, knit brows.
We don’t know how your kind even managed to survive
.

Mem looks at Sofie and is suddenly surprised to see how much she still looks like the little girl she used to be. There is the same plain brown hair. The same small feet. The same old lady’s chin poking through a soft bigness-waiting-to-get-out. As if you could cut her in half lengthwise with a butter knife and it would sink right through, hitting no bones. Sofie looks wet. Worried. Like herself, only more so. How old is she? How young? Mem looks at Sofie and knows that all her ages are still there, solidified in layers like the colors of a jawbreaker.

The policeman rubs his thumbs against the bones above his eyes and finally sits down, sighing. He says,
You know we’ll find your names by morning
, but Mem looks past the kitchen window with its strawberry-patch curtains and cannot even imagine the morning. The hard blue light pulls tendons
across the sky and spreads inky fingers over the house. The sky was still bright when the policemen had emerged from the edges of Mem’s court that day, driving their wagons right up onto the grass.

If Aunt Ayin were there in the kitchen she would say,
Cross those legs Sofie this instant before a ghost flies up in between them!
But Aunt Ayin is probably out alerting the rest of the Aunts, sweating and shaking her two chins and adjusting her too-tight doole. Aunt Ayin is probably sobbing, out-of-key, cracking the hems of her blacks with her hips. Syrupy makeup dripping down her face in sticky slow motion as her bulbous heft rises and falls.
Overdone. Unprofessional
, Mem’s mother would have muttered.
What would the ancestors say?

Of course, they would have said, “Don’t tell.”

Mem thinks about telling the policeman that her name is Aurora, but he will not get the joke.

The policeman scratches the underside of his chin, which is bearded with dozens of little pink pimples. He, too, gazes stupidly out of the little window. In a moment, the policeman is going to turn toward Mem, lean closer, and ask her for the secrets. In a moment, for the hundredth time that night, he is going to rub the bones above his eyes and ask Mem for her name.

And for the millionth time in her life she will not know what to say.