The Memory Closet: A Novel (8 page)

“What else are you doing to help yourself remember?” he asked.

I tensed.

Please don’t give me the you-really-need-professional-help speech.

“I’ve talked to my grandmother. But … well, she’s 84 years old and has a lot of fried circuits.”

Dusty picked up on the tension. The man didn’t miss a thing. Amy blew right by it.

“My Mee-Maw’s got a weak bladder,” she said matter-of-factly. “In the wintertime, she stands on the floor furnace and you can hear it going
pssst, pssst!”

There was a beat of silence, then Dusty and I burst out laughing! His was a rumbling, unrestrained laugh that warmed up the air around him.

“What?” Amy asked indignantly, looking from one of us to the other.

That made us laugh even harder. It felt good to laugh. I’d forgotten how good.

“Thank you so much for that mental image, Amy,” Dusty said as soon as he had enough air to speak. “I’ll treasure it always.”

“Well, I don’t know what’s so funny about it,” Amy said, pouting. “It stinks!”

That set us off again.

She looked at us, shaking her head. “You two … “ Then she spotted the other waitress motioning for her. “I got to boogie. Don’t have too much fun without me, hear.”

Then she was gone, and it was just Dusty and me, and he continued the natural flow of the conversation. Easy. Gentle.

“If your grandmother’s anything like mine—and like Amy’s—I suspect you didn’t get much dependable information out of her.”

“Actually, she told me she found my diary, the one I kept as a kid, but I don’t know if there really is a diary or if she’s just out there cruising off the coast of Fantasy Island. She says she doesn’t remember where she put it.”

“You kept a diary as a kid?” Then he realized what he’d asked and smiled. “How would you know? Guess you’ll find out if the diary turns up, huh?”

“And I have the artwork Wendy and I did. We wallpapered the whole attic with sketches and crayon drawings and finger-painted masterpieces.”

I reached over for the first time and picked up a peanut. When I squeezed the shell, one of the nuts squirted out and hit Dusty in the chest.

“Nice shot.”

I smiled.

“I took the pictures down yesterday, all the pieces I could get to.” I popped the remaining nut into my mouth. “But I haven’t had a chance to sit down and look at them and see if anything rings a bell. I don’t remember a thing about painting them.”

Dusty leaned forward, rested his forearms on the table and said earnestly, “I think I know somebody who could help you.”

I froze.

Here it comes, the shrink speech!

“I have a friend, a child psychologist, who has testified for me at lots of trials over the years, cases where the victims were children.” He took a sip of his coffee and grimaced; it was cold. “Dr. Carlton uses art therapy to get at what’s bothering the kids. You’d be astonished at what a trained therapist can tell you from some stick-figure drawing. If you want, I could get the doc to look at those pictures, might be able to tell you a whole lot about the kids who drew them.”

I relaxed. A shrink, yeah, but to probe the pictures, not me.

“Thanks, I’d like that very much. A lot of the pictures look like the floor after a dozen monkeys had a paint fight. They don’t tell me a thing but maybe a child psychologist could make something of them.”

Suddenly, the radio clipped to a strap on his shoulder bleated out a burp of static. He reached up, turned it toward his mouth and spoke into it. Code this, unit that, a language I didn’t understand. He stood as he talked, then looked back down at me, but his mind was already somewhere else.

“Sorry, I’ve got to answer a call,” he said. “I’ll swing by your house sometime tomorrow and pick up the pictures, OK?”

He took the $5 bill out of his shirt pocket and placed it on the table. “Coffee’s on Amy.”

Then he turned and headed out the door, left me with half a pail of peanuts, three cups of cold coffee and a wealth of information I didn’t have when I sat down there just a little over an hour before.

Wendy was an Indian. Why didn’t anybody tell me?

“W
ell, did you ever ask? It ain’t like nobody was trying to keep it a secret. I thought you knowed she was a Indian.”

Bobo was crocheting, swinging slowly back and forth in the rickety old front porch swing. Her flipper fingers deftly maneuvered the hook, creating an intricately woven thread, like a spider spewing out a strand of web.

After I’d carried the groceries into the house and put everything away—Grape Nuts, granola bars, yogurt, a big bag of Granny Smith apples, Jif Peanut Butter, Earl Grey Tea and three vanilla-scented Yankee candles to minimize the Mentholatum/Vicks VapoRub stink—I sat in the wicker rocking chair across from the front porch swing and told Bobo what Sheriff Walker had told me.

“Her mama wasn’t nothing special—Apache or Comanche or Arapaho or nothing like that.” Bobo’s voice was as scratchy as the creaking of the swing. “Just plain old Navajo. Full blood, though. She and Jericho wasn’t never married. But they was living together in some little house in Socorro when Wendy was born, and she went to court to get child support—and Jericho’s last name.”

Her dress was on right side out now and she smelled clean, at least the Mentholatum smelled fresh. Her wisps of hair were shiny. I could hear Julia in the house running the vacuum cleaner.

“Folks said Wendy was the spittin’ image of her mama, 'cept her hair was curly instead of straight. I ain't never seen the woman, but those that had said she was so pretty she’d take a man’s breath away.” She pulled more thread off the ball beside her on the swing. “It was sure a lead pipe cinch Wendy didn’t take after her daddy!” Jericho’s hair was red and his eyes a faded blue, the color of old denim. “Course that was part of the problem, that she looked so much like her mother.”

“What problem?”

“Between Jericho and your mama. I think 'ever time Susan looked at that child she seen Little Dove.”

Little Dove. Wendy’s mother was Little Dove.

“Jericho made it worse. He never stopped talking about that squaw and course he was over at that trailer house of hers all the time a’picking up Wendy.”

“How often did he get her?”

“Friday night to Monday morning on weekends, that’s what the judge said. But it was usually a sight mor’n that. Little Dove worked off and on in the commissary at Cannon Air Force Base, and sometimes she’d leave Wendy with Jericho—'cept he wasn’t never around to see to her, didn’t spend no time with her. That’s why your mama never believed for a minute that the reason Little Dove moved to Goshen when Wendy was just a pee-tincy thing was so’s Jericho could see his baby girl. Little Dove was here 'cause Jericho was here, that was the truth of it. Wendy was just an excuse.”

I rocked back and forth slowly, staring out into the front yard. The air was warm, without so much as a sigh of breeze. Huge black-green thunderheads gathered in the west. A storm was brewing.

I tried to appear only mildly interested in the conversation. I was learning how to walk softly with Bobo, not push. Put on any pressure at all and it was like squeezing a bar of wet soap—her mind would squirt off in some other direction.

“Mama didn’t like Wendy much, did she?”

Where did
that
come from?

My heart was suddenly pounding, my mouth dry. I didn’t know why I’d asked the question or why it was so important. I just knew it was.

“Oh Lord, no, she couldn’t stand that child! Hated every minute she was here.”

Though I should have been shocked by Bobo’s response, I wasn’t. Some part of me had known the answer before I asked. But her answer begged another question: if Mama hadn’t even liked the kid, why had she totally fallen apart the one time I tried to talk to her about Wendy?

Bobo was quiet, concentrating on unwinding more thread off the ball. I forced myself to be patient, to rock back and forth, watching the dappled shadows beneath the willow tree dance like flickering flames on a burning log.

“Wouldn’t even call her by her right name, her Indian name.” Bobo’s gnarled, lumpy fingers worked the hook again, feeding the thin, crocheted strand into a growing pile on her lap. “Said she wasn’t having no child in her house called Laughs in the Wind, so she shortened it to Windy.”

Windy! With an i. Not Wendy. My little sister was Laughs in the Wind.

“Susan couldn’t stand the way Windy was with Jericho, kinda flirty like. I felt sorry for the poor little thing. Her life with her own mama was … well, I don’t know. It wasn’t right’s all I know. That child would come here all tore up, wettin’ her pants—and worse.”

Bobo suddenly looked at her wrist. There was still no watch there, but apparently she saw one because she gathered up her crochet materials and stuffed them down into a small canvas bag. Julia said Bobo never forgot
Oprah,
and even without a watch she knew it was time.

“So what did Windy do that was ‘worse’?”

“Windy never done nothing bad. Now you …
you
was a handful, into everything. There wasn’t nothing you wouldn’t try. Windy just followed along after you like a puppy.”

She stopped the swing by dragging her feet on the worn slat porch, then began to ease herself slowly out of the seat. I stood and took her elbow to steady her and help her balance, but she shook her arm free.

“You’ll know I need help standing up when you see me fallin’ down. And you’ll know I’m ready for the boneyard when I fall down and then start looking 'round for something to do while I’m down there.”

Then she marched past me into the house, and the big oak door swung shut behind her.

Laughs in the Wind, but Mama called her Windy. And Mama didn’t like her. At least Bobo
said
Mama didn’t like her. I wondered how much of what the old woman said was true and how much of it emanated from the same cluster of damaged synapses that produced Edgar, Butch, Maria, and Bobo’s conversations with resurrected relatives.

But like it or not—and I definitely didn’t like it—what she said about Mama and Windy had the ring of truth. It was just hard to imagine my sweet, gentle mother not liking any child.

The image of the little china-doll girl flashed into my mind, standing with her forehead leaned against the chicken wire when Mama came out onto the porch. This time, when I examined the memory, I didn’t concentrate on Mama. I studied Windy. And there was no denying the look in her dark eyes. She was scared.

I got up from the rocker, went upstairs to the soon-to-be-an-art-studio and looked through the kid pictures to see if I could make any sense of them before I gave the artwork to Dusty. I’d see him again tomorrow. The thought warmed me and planted a smile on my face.

Danger! Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!

I was 36 years old and I’d never had a serious relationship with a man. OK, I’d never had a relationship of any kind, serious or otherwise, with a man. And no, I was not gay like Uncle Ben.

It was just that there was nowhere in me that understood how people did that, did
relationships.
The thought of being emotionally intimate with another human being was absolutely terrifying because … well, because … I couldn’t come up with a reason. I didn’t know why. Why was I afraid of what the rest of the world considered perfectly normal behavior?

I sat down on the floor next to Petey’s cage, flipped through the pile of pictures and considered the sense I had that things were coming loose inside me, things were wobbling that once were battened down, secure and immovable.

I’d never questioned fear before. Fear just was. Like the dark ditch of midnight, or the bubbling green clouds of a hailstorm. It was just there, a force profoundly more powerful than I, a relentless predator that stalked the halls and alleyways of my mind. Now, I suddenly wondered
why
I was afraid and why other people weren’t.

Who was that little girl who stuck a water hose down into a ground squirrel hole, who actually touched a tarantula?

I shuddered uncontrollably at the memory, because I could even remember how the hairy spider had felt in my hand! I wasn’t just hearing somebody tell a story, I
remembered.
And I remembered how I felt, too, seeing that thing crawling up on Windy, hearing her scream. I wasn’t the slightest bit frightened. I was mad. I was furious!

How could that little girl have grown up to be me?

“I’m leaving now,” Julia said from the doorway. “Miss Katherine’s tray is on the floor in the hall.” She gestured toward Bobo’s bedroom door. “And I think there’s something, well, something smells funny in her room. I’ll sneak in tomorrow when she’s downstairs and see what the problem is.”

When I passed Bobo’s room a few minutes later, the tray was gone. I paused and stepped closer to the door. I could hear voices, an audience laughing. And Julia was right! Something stunk in there, so bad I could smell it through the closed door.

I was about to knock when I heard Bobo’s voice above the others.

“It ain’t yours; it’s mine!”

I turned the knob slowly, opened the door a crack and peeked inside. Even through that small opening, the stench was nauseating.

A 20-inch television set rested on top of a chest of drawers by the door, on the opposite wall from the bed. But Bobo wasn’t looking at the television set. She had her back to it, and to me, and she was talking to the wall by the window. There was no one there, just a low dresser with a tall mirror.

“It belongs to me; Julia made it for
me
.” She was whining like a little kid.

I pushed the door open an inch farther and could see that Bobo was holding the tray of food Julia had left outside her door.

“You hadn’t ought to take it; I want it.” She walked slowly toward the wall, toward the dresser, and suddenly I could see what she was looking at, who she was talking to. It was her own reflection in the mirror!

“Why should you have what belongs to me?” she said to her own image. She set the tray on the dresser in front of the mirror. “Oh, all right. Here.” She picked up the sandwich and cookies and held them out to the reflection. “Here it is. Go on, take it, take it all.”

Then she began to get angry. “I hope you choke, you ugly old witch—all dried up, all shriveled up. Wouldn’t no man want you, homely as you are. I got me a beau and I’m going to tell my Edgar what you done. You’ll be sorry then. You’ll be sorry!”

She turned away from the mirror in a huff and set the empty tray on the foot of the bed. I pulled the door closed quickly before she saw me peeking.

Bobo stayed in her room for the rest of the afternoon, as the sky darkened and the wind picked up and rattled the tree limbs. When she finally went downstairs to start supper, which consisted of heating up the casserole Julia had left for us, I slipped into her room.

A fetid, cloying reek assaulted me as soon as I opened the door. How could Bobo stand such a stench? There was only one possible explanation, of course. Somewhere along the line, she’d lost her sense of smell.

I pulled back the curtains and opened the window to let in some air, then went to the mirrored dresser, grabbed one end and pulled it out from the wall.

The reek of rotted food was so foul that I gagged, turned away and swallowed hard to keep from vomiting. Decaying goo was smeared down the wall behind the dresser and milk had puddled and soured on the floor beneath it. Today’s sandwich and cookies were still recognizable, and I could definitely distinguish the olfactory delight of yesterday’s tuna, but the other mold-covered piles of gunk were impossible to identify.

There was no way to determine how long Bobo had been shoving sandwiches and cookies and cupcakes—whatever was on her
Oprah
tray—into the three-inch space between the mirror and the dresser, giving her afternoon snack to the “ugly witch” of her own reflection.

When I went down to the kitchen to get cleaning supplies from the closet opposite the cellar door, Bobo was busy at the sink.

“I’m making dessert tonight. You like lemon meringue pie?”

The thought of eating anything made the bile rise in the back of my throat again, but I coughed out a “Yeah, I love it!” and then took two bottles of spray cleaner, rubber gloves, washcloths, a scrub brush and a small garbage can liner up to her room.

Holding my breath, I scooped up handfuls of rotted food and dumped them into the garbage bag and then scrubbed scum, mold and clabbered milk off the back of the dresser, the wall and the floor. It took half an hour to clean the mess, and Bobo was still working in the kitchen when I finished and went out to the garage.

The building doubled as a woodshop, and the smell of sawdust still lingered in the air even though nobody had sawed a board in there in a quarter of a century. I flipped the light switch. The dusty florescent bulb high in the ceiling sputtered and flickered before it caught. The yellow glow from it revealed two brown plastic garbage cans and a spare tire on one side of the door and an aluminum extension ladder propped against a huge, old-style chest freezer, waist high and probably five feet long, on the other.

A wheelbarrow leaned against the far wall. Yard implements—a spade, a grubbing hoe, a small shovel, an old iron rake and a leaf rake—hung from a rack next to a set of metal shelves lined with cardboard boxes. At the end of the workbench spanning the full length of the back wall, there was a large cabinet with shelves and drawers. Each drawer contained a different size nail, screw or bolt, but the shelves were empty except for a dusty can of hinge lubricant, WD-40.

All manner of hand tools hung from hooks on the wall above the workbench, where their shapes had been outlined in black Magic Marker. A hammer, saws, screwdrivers, small wrenches, pipe wrenches, C-clamps, a plumb line, a level, a T-square, a sledge hammer. I found what I was looking for easily enough—an adjustable wrench.

The mirror where Bobo’s witch lived was attached to the dresser by two brackets resting on a two-inch-thick board that stretched all the way across the back of the dresser. Each bracket was attached to the dresser with four bolts, and to the mirror with two.

After I removed the nuts, I eased the four dresser bolts out of the holes carefully and lowered the mirror, with the brackets still attached, to the floor. Then I turned it on its side facing the wall, shoved the dresser against it to pin it in place, and stepped back to survey my work. The mirrorless dresser looked perfectly normal.