The Memory Closet

by Ninie Hammon

  “Spiders,” I whispered to the ceiling with tears running out of my eyes and into my hair. “Spiders.”

  “And you burned it, poured gasoline on it and—?”

  “I had to!” I heard myself shouting, but I couldn’t stop. “Don’t you see, I had to. I had to kill them before they killed me, before the big one that smelled like a rotting corpse—”

  The shock and fear on Bobo’s face stopped me cold. All the energy drained out of me. I put my head in my hands and continued to cry, softly now, tired and defeated. Saying it out loud like that, it sounded so crazy.

  That’s because it is crazy.

  “I’m sorry, Bobo,” I choked out the words. “I’m so sorry.”

  She reached over and pulled my hands away from my face and held them firmly in hers.

  “You look a’here at me, young lady.” I lifted my eyes. “Now, you listen up; you ain’t got nothin’ to be sorry for. You hear me! That garage belonged to me and I’m glad it’s gone. I never did like it. Fact is, I been thinking ‘bout burning it down my own self.”

  “Bobo, you can’t tell anybody!” I looked around for something to wipe my face and picked up the dishcloth wrapped around the icepack. “Especially not Dusty. It’s bound to be against the law to set a building on fire and I’d just as soon not go to jail right now.”

  “Shoot, it wouldn’t matter what I told that man. He don’t believe a word I say ‘bout nothing. He thinks I’ve lost my mind.”

  “Bobo, I think maybe I have lost mine.” I wiped my tears away with the dish cloth. It smelled like sunshine.

  “It’s all about what you can’t remember, ain’t it?”

  “What other explanation is there? Before I came here, I may not have been the poster girl for Hug a Sane Person Month, but I wasn’t having conversations with a spider the size of a washing machine. I wasn’t hallucinating.”

  I sighed, my breathing still shaky.

  “Maybe it’s all coming at me too hard and too fast. Mama’s drinking. What was happening to Windy at her mother’s house. And other awful things.” I didn’t tell her what I saw Mama do to Windy in the playroom that day.

  “Don’t you think you ought to quit? Stop remembering? If what you already recollected has done all this to you, what’s goin’ to happen to you when you find out … ?” She stopped. “If there’s other bad stuff—maybe worse stuff—how you goin’ to stand it?”

  Her eyes were clear and focused, like the fog that clouded her thinking had lifted. “All them people’s gone now, dead and buried.” Suddenly, her voice turned sharp and cold. “None of what happened back then matters no more. You rememberin’ it won’t change nothing. What’s done’s done.”

  She patted my arm and looked off into the distance. “Honey, some people’s just … fragile. I’ve knowed folks who was crushed by life, by the hurt of it. The load was just too heavy for them to carry.”

  Maybe she was right. Maybe the Boogie Man was too strong for me. Until that moment, it had never occurred on me I might not survive my past. I could actually die. Not in some psychic sense, some loss of self. But literally. This quest to know could kill me.

  “I’m not sure I could stop remembering now even if I wanted to. I think I’ve set something in motion, knocked out some chock in my mind and it’s all going to break through the dam and come washing down on me whether I like it or not. If it’s not already too late to turn back, it’s close.”

  She sat patting my hand absently, momentarily not engaged at all. Her eyes were seeing something besides me and this room. Then she looked back and focused on me, a determined set to her jaw.

  “When my Sam was just a little tyke, 4 or 5 maybe, Cecil got this wild hair that we’d ought to go by and visit his Aunt Inez on our way home from church. It was ‘fore I got pregnant with the twins and long ‘fore your mama was even a gleam in your granddaddy’s eye.”

  She continued to pat my hand as she spoke. “Inez was old as dirt and eat up with ugly, hair all crazy-like, smelled like a goat. She didn’t never marry, lived in a shack didn’t have no water, had a outhouse right up side her kitchen window. When me and Cecil finally got up to leave after we was done visitin’, she wouldn’t hear none of it. Nothing would do but that we had to stay for coffee.”

  I tried to imagine Bobo as she’d have looked then. It would have been during World War II. I pictured her with platinum blonde hair like mine, but thin. It would have been after she and everybody else in Tahoka had been poisoned by dead birds in the water tank. Maybe she’d pulled her hair back in a bun, or had a hat on, and square-toed shoes.

  “Coffee should a’warned us. It was so strong you could have trotted a mouse across it. Then she asked Sam if he liked candy. That boy had a sweet tooth like no little kid I ever seen. He got all excited, was a’jumping up and down, and she brought out this black thing for him, said it was fudge. Humph. It looked like something a dung beetle rolled onto a plate. Soon as I seen it, I knowed he hadn’t ought to eat it, but he pounded it down and I just sat there, watchin’.”

  She shook her head, ashamed even now, 60 years later.

  “I didn’t say nothing ‘cause he wanted it and I just couldn’t stand to tell him no.”

  She let out her breath in a long sigh.

  “Well, that boy was sick for two days. He throwed up ‘til I thought his stomach was going to turn wrong side out, had the bloody trots. It was awful.” She turned and looked at me. “And the whole time I was holdin’ his head while he erped into the toilet, I was a’thinking, ‘It’s my fault he’s sick.’”

  She looked off into the distance again. “But I learnt my lesson. I didn’t never again give my kids something I knowed wasn’t good for ‘em—no matter how bad they wanted it.”

  Maybe there was a reason that particular story had come to her mind, but I had no idea what. It was even possible it never happened, that she’d imagined the whole thing.

  She picked up the dish towel I’d used to wipe my face and wound it back around the ice pack, then stood and began to adjust it on my head again. The cold felt good on the lump.

  “I could have made a better ice pack if I’d had me a sack of frozen peas or corn, but I ain’t got none.”

  Frozen peas. That’s what she told Mama to get to put on my head the day Mama tried to drown Windy!

  “Bobo, do you remember the day the big clock on the mantel got broken?”

  She stopped to think. “No,” she said slowly. “I don’t recall how that happened.”

  “I pulled it off the mantel, Bobo, don’t you remember, pulled it off because Mama was … and I pretended it hit me in the head and you told Mama to get a sack of peas—”

  “That’s not how I remember it,” she said firmly. “Best as I can recall, didn’t it get broke when Jericho was winding it? Yeah, I’m sure that’s what happened. Jericho broke it.”

  She didn’t look at me, just turned and shuffled out the door. She reached to pull it shut behind her, but before it was all the way closed, she stopped.

  “You and Joel. You’re all I got.”

  “Bobo, you’re all we’ve got, too.”

  She looked a little startled. “Why, I am, ain’t I.” Then she gave me a pink-gum smile. “What kind of cereal you want; I’ll set it out for you.”

  “Grape Nuts, Bobo. You know that. You always set it out for me.”

  “I ain’t never done no such thing. I ain’t never give you none of that gravel, but I’ll fix you a bowl of it right now if you want, you feeling peak-ed and all.”

  “Thanks, Bobo, but I didn’t sleep well last night. I think I might try to go back to sleep. I’ll be down later.”

  “You let me know if you need more ice,” she said and closed the door.

  I lay back on the pillow, careful not to dislodge the icepack, as the morning sun poured golden light into the room through the blinds. Reality felt as brittle as the ice on my head, so thin it could crack at any moment and dump me into deep black water.

  I saw spi
ders in the garage, but they weren’t there.

  I saw Petey dead, but he’s alive.

  I saw myself pulling that clock off the mantel, but Bobo said Jericho broke it.

  Suddenly, the double-sided sword of elation and terror sliced into me again. I saw Mama smash feces into my little sister’s hair. I saw Mama almost drown Windy. If I imagined the spiders and Petey, then I’d imagined the terrible things I saw Mama do, too.

  I was wrong; Mama wasn’t a child abuser!

  I’d have jumped out of the bed and shouted hurrah if the lump on my head would have allowed such sudden movement. My mother was the woman I remembered!

  But the razor edge on the other side of the sword quickly drew blood. If she didn’t do those things, I’d imagined them. Which meant you could add all my memories of Mama to the ever-growing list of Anne Mitchell’s breaks with reality.

  So what had I accomplished by coming to Goshen? All I could count on as reality was what Bobo had confirmed—that my memories of Mama’s drinking were real. She was an alcoholic; maybe that was the Boogie Man. Maybe the fact that my mother brain-damaged my little brother was the horror my mind had been dodging all these years.

  Then why had my amnesia started at the wreck? Why had that been the demarcation line between memory and emptiness?

  Well, why not? Maybe the wreck was just the final straw, the awful final straw. After all, people forget traumatic events all the time. Normal people. It wasn’t crazy that I couldn’t remember the wreck that killed my little sister.

  Of course, the shrink that Dusty had me hooked up with might not agree with Anne Mitchell’s assessment of normal and abnormal. If I told her the truth about all the things I had imagined—that the Jack and the Beanstalk giant was chasing me, that my mother abused and tried to drown my sister, that my parakeet was hanging dead in his cage, and that a spider the size of a baby buffalo had attacked me, she’d think I was Fried Frieda the Looney Bin Lady.

  The woman would have me locked up!

  But maybe that’s what I needed. A cold chill ran down my spine at the thought, but I’d set it free and there was no calling it back. Maybe I did need to be hospitalized. Seriously. Maybe I really did need to be locked away.

  No!

  Someone deep inside me yelled the word so loud I wasn’t entirely certain I hadn’t shouted it into the room.

  No. I had issues, sure. I had problems, big time. I was fighting for my life with the Boogie Man that gobbled up my past. But I wasn’t crazy. I was not crazy!

  Earth to Anne: you burned down the garage!

  That was so stunning that a part of me still wondered if I’d imagined it, too. I got out of bed, holding the ice pack in place on my head and padded on bare feet into the studio. When I looked out the window into the back yard, the charred, black bomb crater was still there. I stared at it in fascinated horror, at what I had done.

  Which, of course, begged the question: what else was I capable of? The next time I broke through the ice and fell into the deep, dark water beneath reality, what would I do? Burn down the house, maybe?

  With Bobo in it?

  I was suddenly weak all over, too weak to stand. I sank down onto the arm of the Ikea loveseat and the icepack slid off my head and landed with a soft plop on the hardwood floor. I stared in renewed horror at the tangle of charred lumber, an abscessed sore on the back yard.

  How could I put Bobo in danger? How could I stay here when there was no telling what monstrous thing I might do? Should I pack right now and leave—before something tragic happened?

  And go where?

  The windowpane mirrored my pale, thin face. I tried to see in the reflection the little girl I used to be. Her cheeks were fuller, chipmunk cheeks. Her eyes were different, too. There was fire in the eyes of the little girl who led the ground squirrel hunt, who stomped the real tarantula that crawled on her sister.

  Oh, how I wished for some of that fire in the dead eyes that stared back at me now. I needed that little girl’s courage.

  If little Annie Mitchell were here, she’d know what to do.

  Chapter 19

  After I showered, I pulled my hair back into a ponytail and dressed in jeans, a T-shirt and running shoes. Then I went back into the studio and stared out the window at the ruin of the garage. I couldn’t leave; where would I go?

  I couldn’t stay; what if I hurt Bobo?

  If I left now, the Boogie Man would haunt me the rest of my life.

  If I stayed, the Boogie Man might kill me.

  I sat brooding the rest of the morning. The doorbell sang its ding-dong song in the middle of the afternoon, and even before Julia opened the door, I knew it was Dusty. He’d said he would come by to see how I was doing. I shook my head at the irony; I wasn’t even flustered that he was here. I was so emotionally maxed out I didn’t have the strength to defend my comfort zone or the energy to be shy. I was too worn out to man the guns of perpetual embarrassment. I was just too tired to care.

  Julia called up to me and Dusty was standing in the parlor with his hat in his hand when I came down the stairs.

  “Hello there. Feeling better?” His smile was so warm and engaging, I found myself smiling back.

  “Much better, thanks. It was thoughtful of you to check on me, but you didn’t need to go to so much trouble. I’m fine.”

  “It was no trouble. But if it’ll make you feel better, I’d be glad to haul out the I-was-in-the-neighborhood-anyway line. And I was. Goshen’s only got one neighborhood.”

  I was on the bottom step now, looking into eyes the green of trees budding in the spring.

  “Would you like to sit down?” I gestured to the parlor couch. “Could I get you anything? Coffee? At least I think Bobo has coffee. Tea, I’m sure of. I bought the teabags—Earl Grey. A soft drink?”

  Listen to me. I sound like Vanna White introducing the letter A.

  I’d never realized how much effort it took to be awkward; I thought it was natural. Maybe ease was the default and awkwardness was the overlaid function.

  Dusty sat down on the couch. “I’m not thirsty, thanks. Maybe later.”

  Later? He was planning to be here long enough for later?

  I sat in the chair across from him and turned on the lamp, splashing light into the gloom.

  “Bobo was either a hoot owl or a vampire in a previous life.”

  When Dusty didn’t respond to my lame attempt at humor, I braced myself.

  Here it comes.

  “Bobo did tell you, didn’t she, that the fire in your garage was deliberately set, that it was arson.”

  Is it still arson if the owner’s willing to pretend she wanted it burned?

  “Somebody poured a five-gallon can of gasoline—Billy said it was full—onto the building and used a butane lighter and charcoal lighter fluid to start the fire. We found the charred lighter fluid can and the top of the lighter—it was the long-nosed kind—in the rubble, but the plastic barrel had melted.”

  Suddenly, my heart began to tap dance in my chest. “Did you get any fingerprints off the gasoline can?”

  Dusty rolled his eyes. “Nope. It’d been wallowed around in the mud and handled by half the fireman on the squad by the time I got to it.”

  He paused.

  “And you don’t know anything about any of this, right?”

  He was studying me, watching my response. I actually managed a tired smile. “Like I told you the other day when there was a crack the size of the San Andreas Fault down the middle of my forehead, I was too sick to see or hear anything.”

  “Well, at this point, we have no witnesses and I’ve talked to everybody on the block. I can’t find anyone with a motive; it was such a senseless act—”

  Yeah, I’d call burning down a building infested with imaginary tarantulas a senseless act.

  “—the kind of thing a kid would do, as a prank maybe. That’s the rabbit I’m chasing right now.” Dusty smiled and shifted gears. “So tell me the latest on your quest. Making any headw
ay excavating your buried childhood?”

  That was it? No more questions about the fire? All I had to do was tell him I didn’t know anything about it and he believed me. A sudden wave of guilt washed over me. Obviously, I had mastered a new skill set—effective lying.

  “I thought I was getting somewhere, but it turns out I was chasing the wrong rabbits.”

  “How so?”

  I picked up the glass ball filled with bubbles of color sitting beside the lamp. It was a gift Granddaddy Cecil brought his fiancé from the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

  “I just thought I’d remembered some things, but it turns out I didn’t. They weren’t real memories, just my imagination.”

  “How do you know what you remembered didn’t really happen?”

  “I think the better question is how would I know it really did happen?”

  “Well, I told you my memories of you, and either they’re real or we’re sharing a common hallucination.”

  I shuddered at the word and Dusty picked up on it.

  “Did I say something wrong?”

  “No, I just … uh … “ I was suddenly tongue-tied and awkward. So much for ease as the default setting.

  “You looked like something upset you.”

  “No, I’m not … “ I set the ball back down on the table. “Next time you share one of my hallucinations, clue me in that we’re hallucinating—Ok? I need somebody to substantiate what’s real and what isn’t.”

  “Bobo’s no help?”

  “You got that right: Bobo’s no help. One minute she’s lucid and the next minute she’s giving her afternoon snack to the wicked witch of her own reflection in the mirror.”

  Dusty looked confused and I didn’t have the energy to explain. Then I thought of the broken clock on the mantel. “But sometimes when she seems fine, she tells me what I thought I’d remembered didn’t really happen. So who do I believe—crazy Bobo or crazy Anne?”

  “I vote for crazy Anne, because I don’t think she’s crazy at all.”