by Ninie Hammon
“She ain’t going to be so welcome when you see what she’s got upstairs in the playroom.” Bobo leaned so close to Julia it was a wonder the woman didn’t swoon from the Mentholatum stink. “A big, green parrot—that’s what! And you’re the one’s going to have to clean up after it.”
“It’s not a parrot, it’s a—”
“Un pájaro? Bien! Muy bien. I love pájaros!”
Bobo rolled her eyes and started for the stairs.
“We’ll see how much you love pa-haros when you’re scrubbing bird dookey off the floor. And don’t you be running that sweeper. It’s too loud.”
“Bueno. Later the sweeper, sí?”
Bobo stopped in her tracks, turned slowly and looked at Julia.
“If I’d a meant later, chances are I’d a said later. Not later. Not now. Not at all. I don’t want you runnin’ no sweeper, period. That thing makes so much noise it feels like somebody’s cuttin’ my ears off with a cheese grater.”
Bobo turned and marched out of the room. Julia watched her go, smiled and shook her head.
“In a little while, she’ll forget she told me not to vacuum,” she said quietly. “I’ll clean the rugs upstairs first so there’s no noise to disturb her Oprah this afternoon.”
“Bobo watches Oprah?”
“Every day at four o’clock. She forgets a lot of things but she never forgets that. She likes to have something to eat while she watches it, so I fix her a sandwich, cookies or chips and set it on a tray on the floor outside her door. She does not want to be disturbed. I think sometimes she has her ‘friends’ over to see the show with her. I hear her talking in there all the time.”
Speaking of talking, Julia’s English was perfect.
“Is it my imagination or did you just lose your Spanish accent?”
She chuckled.
“It’s easier to manage Miss Katherine if she thinks I don’t understand what she’s saying, that I’m a dumb illegal. I can get her to do things like take a bath or wash her hair or put a slip on under her dress, and she doesn’t even bother to argue.”
Her smile broadened.
“She’s always talking about the Immigration Service hauling me back to Juárez. I’ve never been to Juárez, or anywhere else in Mexico for that matter. I’ve never even been to El Paso. My parents were born in Lubbock. I learned Spanish in high school.”
“Still, I’m sorry for what she said.”
“Your grandmother always says exactly what she thinks. I like that. I hope I’ve got half her spunk when I’m her age.”
“She mentioned something to me earlier about not paying you, if that’s a problem, I can—”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. Your mother set up my salary as an automatic draw from your grandmother’s account.” She paused. “Your mother was a lovely lady, Miss Anne, so beautiful and kind. You must miss her very much.”
It was a sucker punch. Tears sprang to my eyes so quickly I couldn’t keep them from pouring down my cheeks. Julia reached out and patted my shoulder.
“I’m so sorry.”
I struggled for composure, tried to breathe around the hard lump in my belly, the ashy sadness.
“Your pay … “ I stammered. “You were saying Mama set up a bank draw?”
“Almost two years ago. But Miss Katherine still thinks she gives me money. Threatening to dock my pay gives her a sense of control over her life, I think, and she needs that. So I don’t disagree with her; I just try to look properly sorry for whatever she says I did. Some weeks, she actually gives me a check. I just tear it up.”
Mama was right; Julia’s a saint.
The big woman set her purse on the dining room table, ready to get busy.
“I usually start in the bathrooms.”
She waddled into the kitchen for cleaning supplies while she talked and I followed after her. “When you’ve got laundry you want done, just pile it outside your room in the hall.”
The door to the cellar was located under the back staircase that opened out into the far corner of the kitchen. There was a small closet across from the cellar door where furniture polish, paper towels, toilet bowl cleaner and bathtub bubble scrub were stored on shelves; mops and brooms rested on the floor. When Julia opened the closet door, an image appeared in front of my eyes with a flash, like a camera had just captured it.
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.
Th
e 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, ju
st 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.
