The Memory Closet

by Ninie Hammon

  “You answered, and I could see you standing near the back, the light caught your blonde hair, and I thought you were the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.”

  “You didn’t get out much, did you.”

  “Nobody got out much in Goshen, Texas.” His laugh was easy and relaxed. And I felt the color draining back down out of my face. “So I made my way to where you were standing. You always stood so tall and straight, a source of much angst for a short, prepubescent boy.”

  “You said it was hot in there and I told you to stop complaining. I was a bossy little brat, wasn’t I.”

  “Not bossy, but you were usually in charge. And the kiss was your idea, not mine. Not to say I hadn’t thought about it.”

  I started to laugh. “I told you to hurry, didn’t I? That it was hot in there and it stunk.”

  “You just closed your eyes and stood there.”

  “Like a cigar store Indian.”

  He was laughing now. “You were a lot prettier than any wooden Indian I ever saw. So I got up on my tiptoes, vertically challenged as I was at the time, and kissed you. I was aiming for your cheek, I think, but at the last second I just went for it.”

  “And then you stepped on a chicken.”

  “Yeah, when I floated back down to earth from my tiptoes, my heel landed on a chicken’s claw! And it started squawking and that set the rest of them off and Bobo caught us before we could get out of the chicken yard. We told her we’d been looking for eggs but she didn’t buy that for a minute.”

  “Not much got past Bobo.”

  The chuckles wound down.

  “That was my first kiss,” Dusty said.

  “Mine, too, I guess.”

  The required beat of silence.

  “But how would I/you know?” spoken together in a sing-song rhythm so perfect it sounded rehearsed.

  Dusty smiled. “Have you had any luck remembering? Things coming back to you?”

  He could tell by the look on my face that he’d put his foot down in the wrong place again. Not on a chicken’s foot this time, on an emotional land mine.

  “This accident report could trigger some awful stuff, are you sure you’re up to it?”

  “I am absolutely, positively not up to it. Won’t ever be up to it. But this may be the Boogie Man, and it’s either him or me.”

  “Well, I’m not sure what this accident report will tell you. I’m certainly not sure what it tells me!”

  “Huh?”

  He sighed.

  “An accident report is supposed to describe in detail how an accident happened. This one does a really lousy job. The investigating officer should have taken particular pains to get it right because it was a fatality. But what it says—and doesn’t say— makes no sense, it doesn’t add up.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  He reached into the folder and pulled out a paper, a form with fill-in-the-blank spaces on the front, and paragraphs of handwriting on the front and back.

  “Says here the car went over an embankment into a gulley and burst into flames. Two people survived, one died.”

  He pointed to a paragraph of handwriting.

  “Jericho’s statement to the officer was that when he swerved to dodge an armadillo in the road, he lost control of the car, couldn’t hit the break hard enough to stop it because he had stitches in his foot, and it went over an embankment and instantly burst into flames.

  “He said Windy was in the back of the station wagon and the accident knocked her unconscious, that he got you away from the car because he was afraid it was about to explode, but when he started back to get Windy, the gas tank blew up.”

  There was an absolute black hole in my mind. Not a single image formed there. I not only couldn’t remember the event, I couldn’t even manage to imagine what it must have looked like from the description of it Jericho had given the police.

  Dusty waited for me to say something. He must have expected his account to upset me because he seemed a little surprised at how well I was dealing with what he’d said. He didn’t understand that there was nothing for me to deal with.

  “Nothing” was the key word here. There was a profound nothing in my head. An emptiness. A vacuum. I had no emotional reaction because there was nothing for me to react to. It was the difference between getting stabbed, feeling the pain of the knife slicing into your chest, and reading the annual report on the violent crime rate in your neighborhood. What Dusty had told me was just information.

  I didn’t even try to describe to Dusty what was happening to me.

  “I can’t remember a thing—not a thing. I’m sorry.”

  He tried not to look disappointed.

  “I was hoping to get some questions answered today. Hear what really happened from an eye-witness.”

  “What questions?”

  “There’s just a lot about this that doesn’t add up.”

  “Like what?”

  He began to tick off one thing after another, rapid-fire. He’d obviously invested considerable time and energy into trying to make the pieces fit.

  “Like the gulley the car ran off into was the only one for 50 miles in every direction. It was a bright, sunshiny day and the road was dry, yet Jericho lost control of the car … “ he paused, and said the rest incredulously, “… dodging an armadillo?”

  I didn’t connect.

  “Annie, who dodges armadillos? Come on, the roadside’s littered with armadillo carcasses. Nobody cares about rabbits in body armor. The drivers who don’t plow them down accidentally are aiming at them. But Jericho loses control of his car trying to miss one?”

  “And what was he doing on that road anyway? It’s 15 miles out of town and there’s nothing out there but ranchland—snakes, lizards and armadillos. And that one gulley. Where was he going? A guy comes home with …” His eye scanned the report looking for a fact. “Yeah, it says here he’d been in the emergency room getting 19 stitches in the sole of his foot, stepped on something that sliced it wide open to the bone. So he just got his foot sewn up and what’s the first thing he does when he gets home from the hospital? He grabs his two little girls and takes them for a ride out in the middle of nowhere—why?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’ve been out there, looked at the wreck site. He should have had plenty of time to stop and there’s no evidence anywhere on this report that indicates he even tried.”

  “It says there weren’t any skid marks?”

  “No, it doesn’t say that. It just doesn’t say there were skid marks.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “The guy who worked this wreck couldn’t have found his butt with both hands and a flashlight. I don’t know how he made it out of the academy. But if there had been something as important as skid marks, I can’t imagine that he wouldn’t have noted it here and measured them. He drew in all sorts of other things—where the car left the road, the path it took to the rim of the gulley, where the two of you were standing when the gas tank blew.”

  “Jericho didn’t try to stop? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It also doesn’t make sense that this report says Jericho was on crutches when the officer arrived.”

  “Why is that odd? I thought you just said he had stitches in his foot.”

  “His car’s about to explode and he has time to get his crutches out of it but not his little girl?”

  Dusty was totally in police officer mode, asking the questions he’d have asked if he’d worked the wreck, the questions the other officer should have asked, but didn’t.

  “Jericho said the car instantly burst into flames. A car fire starts from leaking gasoline. It usually takes several minutes for leaking gas to hit a heat source and ignite. Unless the gas tank’s ruptured on impact, in which case flames would have enveloped the car so fast you and Jericho would have been lucky to get out at all. But he didn’t have so much as a broken fingernail; you had a bruised cheek and a black eye, and neither one of you was burned.”


  He tapped the report.

  “Assuming the officer took his statement down correctly, and with this idiot that’s a major assumption, Jericho’s description of the accident—I don’t see how it could have happened that way.”

  Then he held up one finger.

  “For starters, Jericho said he wasn’t able to hit the brake hard enough to stop the car because his foot was cut.” Dusty made a humph sound in his throat. “Listen, you’re in a car with your two little girls headed for a drop-off, the adrenaline dump into your system would turn off all your pain sensors so you couldn’t feel it if somebody sliced your foot off with a chainsaw.”

  He held up two fingers.

  “He said he got you safely out of the gulley before he went back for Windy. Why on earth did he haul you up to the road? And how did he manage that on crutches? If you’re trying to get away from something about to explode, why climb an embankment? The bottom of the gulley was flat. You could have gotten a long way down that gulley in the time it took to climb out of it.”

  He held up a third finger.

  “And why ‘get you to safety’ at all? You weren’t hurt. Why not just yell, ‘Annie, run!’ Then get his other little girl—who is hurt— out of the car before it explodes?”

  “Dusty, what are you saying?”

  “I don’t have any idea what I’m saying. I wish I did. I was hoping you could help me, that you’d remember what really happened out there that day.”

  He stopped. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, Anne, but you don’t look too good.”

  So much for smoothing my hair down.

  “All these memories surfacing. It’s getting to you, isn’t it?”

  I just nodded my head, chewed in the inside of my lip and didn’t meet his gaze.

  “I’m worried about you, Annie.” He put his hand on my shoulder and I resisted the urge to pull away. “The mind can only take so much.” He paused again. “I told you I’d speak to Karen, get her to recommend someone for you to talk to. She put me in touch with a doctor, a psychiatrist in Amarillo. Dr. Grace Kendrick has had really good results with regression therapy.”

  “And regression therapy is … ?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what it isn’t. It’s not taking a person back to a past life, so they remember when they were a standard-bearer for Charlemagne or a yak herder in Tibet!”

  Dusty had obviously done some research on the subject, I suspected a lot of research.

  “In layman’s terms, a psychiatrist uses hypnosis to move you backward in time.” When he saw me begin to retreat emotionally, he reached out and actually took my hand. “Annie, you don’t have to do this alone. You need someone to be there with you when all the awful stuff surfaces, somebody who can help you deal with it.”

  I don’t want to see a shrink! No way. I don’t want to spill my guts about all this to anybody! No, I won’t talk to her!

  “Ok, I’ll talk to her.”

  Did I say that out loud?

  “Great.” He was a little surprised; he’d expected me to put up more of a fight. So had I. And he’d come armed. “I’ve already set up an appointment with her for nine o’clock Friday morning.”

  Before I could protest, he squeezed my hand. “I’ll come by here at six and we’ll stop at the steakhouse and have a cup of coffee with Amy before we head out. And after your appointment, I’ll take you to lunch in Amarillo, to a restaurant that serves something besides tacos.”

  I didn’t agree, but I didn’t argue either. He took that as a yes. Then he shifted gears, let go of my hand and picked up the other folder in his lap.

  “I dug up some other information besides the accident report. Some information that might shed some light on who was abusing you and Windy.”

  Bam!

  The emotional sucker punch hit me so hard in the belly I almost groaned out loud. Dusty was looking at the report and didn’t see me flinch. I didn’t need a police report to tell me who was abusing us. I knew: my mother.

  “I ran an NCIC check on your stepfather. Jericho’s been a busy boy. Petty crimes—scams, bad checks, even shoplifting. And there’s lots of violence in his jacket—assaults, fights, domestic abuse. The police were called to Little Dove’s half a dozen times when Jericho lived with her in Socorro. He was beating the crap out of her but she refused to press charges.”

  You’re not scared? Well, you better get scared. Piped through the heat register intercom.

  “Did you know the police found Windy wandering down the road beside the trailer park the morning of the accident? They took her home, but her mother wasn’t there so they brought her to your house. Apparently, Little Dove ran off and left her. Nobody was surprised. Yellow Moon said she was stunningly beautiful, way too pretty to spend her life in a town like Goshen. He said she wouldn’t even come back home for Windy’s funeral.”

  I said nothing, hoping he’d drop the discussion of abuse. He didn’t.

  “You look at the rap sheet on this guy and it’s not hard at all to believe he was capable of child abuse. He was a violent man and …”

  “It wasn’t Jericho.”

  Let it go, Dusty, please just let it go.

  “How do you know it wasn’t?”

  “I just know, that’s all. I remembered some things and … I know the abuse … it wasn’t Jericho.”

  There was an odd look on Dusty’s face, but he said nothing, just flipped the file folder shut and didn’t push it any further.

  “Have you seen Edgar?” Bobo’s voice from the doorway startled us both. For the first time since I’d returned to Goshen, I was sincerely grateful for her craziness.

  “Edgar?” Dusty didn’t know about Bobo’s clandestine relationship. I’d been true to my word; I hadn’t told a soul.

  “He was here a little while ago.” She glanced around the room, like maybe he was hiding behind the desk or the loveseat. “I just caught sight of him ‘fore he went up the back stairs.” Suddenly, she looked stricken. “You don’t reckon he’s gone back home to Barbara, do you? He don’t care nothing ‘bout her. It’s me he wants.”

  Maybe Bobo was suffering small strokes. Surely, there was some explanation for lucid one minute, nobody’s home the next. Of course, there was a compelling argument to be made that the periods of lucidity were as illusory as conversations with Elvis, that the woman had been neither sane nor normal, even on a good day, for years. And who could blame her? I’d have been a walleyed, drooling, howling-at-the-moon lunatic if I’d lived her life, if I’d buried a husband and six children.

  She hobbled toward us, so distracted she didn’t even bother to give Petey a dirty look.

  “And Barbara don’t care nothing ‘bout him, neither. After they wired his jaw shut, it was me took care of him, not Barbara. She wouldn’t have nothing to do with him. I was the one fixed him milkshakes, Jell-o, pudding, anything he could suck up through a straw—that’s how he lost the 300 pounds. And he hadn’t ought to be up and around yet. He just did get out of the hospital from them a’cuttin’ off 10 feet of loose skin.”

  Oprah. Had to be Oprah.

  She suddenly focused on Dusty. “You’re a police officer. You got to help me. I want to file a missing person’s report. I bet poor Edgar’s lost somewhere on the prairie and can’t find his way back home.”

  Lost on the prairie? It’s so flat and empty out there if your dog ran away you could see it for three days.

  Dusty didn’t drop a beat. “I’ll be glad to take down the information for you but I need to go back to the office first and get the right form to fill out. Could you wait a couple of hours?”

  “I guess so, but Edgar don’t usually wander off like this. I’m scared he’s gonna rip out all them stitches. You know it took more’n 1,500 stitches to—”

  “Ma’am, we’ll get right on it. I promise. I’ll personally oversee the investigation.”

  Bobo nodded, satisfied, and limped away. When Dusty turned back to me and saw my face closed as tight as the front door on
a submarine, he took that as his cue to exit as well. He got to his feet and I stood with him. He tried to look me in the eye, to read something there, but I wouldn’t meet his gaze. He reached over and took my hand again for a moment.

  “There’s only so much emotional pummeling the mind can take and then systems start to shut down,” he said. “You be careful, hear.”

  I’ll get right on that. Careful. And exactly how am I supposed to manage careful?

  Chapter 17

  Springtime always sneaked up on me in England. I’d be driving into London from Oxford and suddenly I’d notice that the pastures were green and that bluebells and crocuses were in full bloom all along the roadside.

  The background of my childhood formed in my mind like that, too—without me noticing. One day, it were just there. Translucent memories, the kind that probably aren’t crisp and clear in anybody’s mind, formed in the swirling mist of my nothingness like an image on photographic paper gradually taking shape in a developing tray.

  Life in a West Texas summer: running through the sprinkler in the back yard and eating Bobo’s home-made Popsicles—Kool Aid ice cubes with toothpicks stuck in the top.

  Windy and I—and Dusty!—once rescued a bowl full of wiggling tadpoles from a shrinking puddle of water in a low spot on the prairie.

  An assortment of neighborhood children built sculptures in our front yard the winter of the big snowstorm. Not boring snowmen. We created giant smiling snails, Mexican hats and fire hydrants that melted into shapeless lumps as soon as the sun came out again.

  As cold rain smacked the playroom windows, Windy and I drew pictures, made finger-paint hand-prints and used acrylics to create expressionistic paintings, our work spread out on newspapers on the floor.

  We played Barbie dolls there, too. Windy had this silly little giggle, sort of a “tee hee hee hee,” that made me laugh every time I heard it.

  There was one memory, though, that was as crisp and clear as a digital image. Windy and I were riding bikes. Hers was a boys’ bike, so she must have borrowed it from somebody. Maybe it was Dusty’s. We were going fast, side by side in the middle of the street, and I let go of the handlebars and held my arms out to the sides, like I was an airplane. When I looked over, Windy had let go of her handlebars, too. She was so much shorter than I was she couldn’t sit down on the seat of the bike, so she stood, balanced on the pedals, her arms out like wings. The wind blew her black hair back, the curls dancing behind her; the smile on her cherub’s face was as bright as the West Texas sun. Then she laughed. Not the little tee-hee giggle. A laugh of pure, innocent joy.