by Ninie Hammon
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.”
Chapter 21
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 Ri
ce 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, th
at’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.”
That satisfied her. She turned and lumbered to the hall linen closet and dropped off the towels, then headed back down the stairs.
I looked at Petey. He’d made a mess on the floor. Whenever he fluttered his wings, he became a little green leaf-blower, propelling empty seed pods and feathers in a cloud out of his cage.
“Petey?”
“PeteyPeteyPetey. Give me a kiss. Pretty boy!” he chirped, hopped down off the swing, bird-walked to the bars of his cage and stuck his beak out, waiting for me to stroke it. I turned and walked out of the room.
I went into my bedroom, took off my running clothes, stepped into the shower and turned the hot water up full blast. It scalded my skin bright red, but I stood with it running into my face until it started to cool—meaning I’d used all the hot water in the water heater. When I wiped the steam off the mirror with a towel, I studied the pale face that stared at me with big, hollowed eyes.
“Are you crazy?”
No answer, not that I really needed one.
This morning’s sense of well-being was gone. My insides were tied in a knot—a hangman’s noose!—and I was hunkered down, cringing, tensed for a blow I knew was coming.
In other words, I felt perfectly normal again.
The work crew showed up about two o’clock, which was not my definition of “in the morning,” but I said nothing. I’d been sitting in Bobo’s platform rocker in the parlor for hours, pretending to read. All I was really doing was examining the image of a dead parakeet that appeared in bright, living color on every page of the nameless book I held in front of me.
Bobo and I went out onto the back porch as soon as we heard the rumble of the truck. Julia had gotten Bobo clean and presentable before she left for the day.
