The Memory Closet

by Ninie Hammon

  “Well I do!” I jumped. Bobo had slipped up on me again. “I think Annie’s crazier’n a gunnysack full of lunatics—anybody’d kiss a bird the color of what comes out the south end of a sheep going north!”

  “Speaking of …” Dusty turned to Bobo. “Do you remember the time you caught us in the chicken house—Annie and me? We said we were in there looking for eggs, but that wasn’t the real—”

  “‘Course it wasn’t. You think I was dumb enough to believe that? You young-uns was in there a’playin’ kissy face.”

  Color flooded my face and the room temperature rocketed 30 degrees.

  “Busted!” Dusty’s smile was so wide I was afraid the corners of his mouth would meet behind his ears and the top of his head would fall off. “Actually, the whole thing was Annie’s idea.”

  “Don’t surprise me none.”

  “It was my very first kiss,” Dusty told her.

  “It was Annie’s first kiss, too.”

  “How do you know that, Bobo?” I smiled sheepishly at Dusty. “When I first remembered our little rendezvous, I thought maybe I was some kind of chicken house floozy, that maybe you were just the last in a long line of neighborhood boys I’d met there for … a game of kissy face.”

  I turned back to Bobo. “How can you be so sure he wasn’t? Did you hide surveillance cameras in the eggs?”

  “I know ‘cause that’s what you wrote in your diary, that Dusty was the first boy you every kissed.”

  A roaring sound filled my head so loud it drowned out my tinnitus.

  “You said it felt good, but you probably wouldn’t never do it again, now that you wasn’t curious ‘bout it no more.” Before I had time to respond, she looked me up and down and shook her head. “And appears to me you never did.”

  “Sounds like maybe you really did have a diary,” Dusty said.

  “You didn’t just find my diary, you read it?”

  “No!” Bobo was indignant. “‘Course not. I wouldn’t a’done nothing like that—read somebody else’s diary!” She paused. “At least not all of it. Best as I recollect, it was just boring stuff about what you done in school that day anyway.” Then she brightened. “There was times, though. You always did look at life funny, was always asking questions like, ‘Can you cry under water?’ and ‘Where does dirt come from?’ You asked me one time how important you had to be to get assassinated and not just kilt. Stuff like that.”

  While Bobo prattled on about the idiosyncrasies of Annie the Wonder Child, a bulldozer in my head methodically knocked the pilings out from under this morning’s interpretation of reality— while the mortar was still wet.

  Time to regroup. Obviously, I really did have a diary and Bobo really did find it.

  So what did she do with it?

  She was regaling Dusty with a colorful account of the leaking third floor toilet and bemoaning how much the guy charged to re-plaster the ceiling when I finally found my voice.

  “Bobo, where did you put my diary?”

  She looked thoughtful and I held my breath. If she went off about Edgar’s wife’s lost red scarf …

  “I don’t rightly know,” she said slowly. “I can’t recall where I finally did put it. At the time, I had me more work to do than I could shake a stick at, what with all my chickens having cholera and—”

  “Your chickens had cholera!” Dusty might get suckered in but I wasn’t about to let Bobo wander off into those high weeds.

  “Ok, so you were busy. Where did you put my diary?”

  “I remember I considered long and hard where I could put it that it’d be safe for years like it was under that drawer.” She sighed. “But for the life of me, I can’t recall what I finally done with it.”

  She suddenly looked at her wrist, which still didn’t have a watch on it. “I got to be getting along. There’s this new show on the TV. A colored woman named Oprah just sits ‘round talking. Don’t fidget or nothin’; just sits there. And folks’ll tell that woman anything.” She started toward the stairs and then turned back to us.

  “You thought I forgot ‘bout that missing person’s report on Edgar, didn’t you?” If looks could kill, Dusty would have been a corpse in a brown uniform. “How’d a man get to be sheriff that don’t care nothing ‘bout a old man wanderin’ around on the prairie all by his self? You ought to be ashamed!”

  She marched out of the room in a huff.

  “So close … sometimes all the answers are so close.” I struggled not to cry. “Then poof and everything vanishes in a puff of smoke again.”

  “She wanted to find a place to put the diary that was as safe as the place she found it.” Dusty was staring into space, thinking out loud. He suddenly turned and looked at me. “Maybe she decided that was the safest place in the house. Maybe she put it back where she found it.”

  We stared wide-eyed at each other for a heartbeat, then I bounded up the stairs, taking them two at a time, with Dusty right behind me. The armoire was still in the middle of the floor in my bedroom. I’d had neither the energy nor the motivation to unload it and try to scoot it back into place.

  Dusty took no notice of it, just followed me to the mirrored dressing table next to the bathroom door.

  “This it?” he asked.

  I glanced at the ceiling to confirm that this was where the water from the upstairs bathroom leak would have landed. A dark smudge showed through the paint.

  I nodded. I couldn’t seem to find the air to speak.

  Dusty tossed his hat on the bed, moved the stool in front of the dresser, got down on one knee and pulled out the center drawer. It slid easily into his hands and he turned it upside down, casually dumping my underwear into the floor. Taped to the bottom of the drawer with two pieces of silver duct tape was a thick spiral notebook, its brown cardboard cover scuffed and bent and yellowed with age.

  I gasped.

  Dusty pulled the taped notebook free from the drawer and gently peeled off the tape, leaving behind two clean stripes on the notebook cover.

  I started to tremble. He wordlessly placed the book in my hands but I was shaking so badly I could barely hold it.

  He stood, took my arm and guided me the few steps to the bed.

  “Here, sit down.” Then he sat beside me.

  I cradled the book like it was blown glass, turned it slowly over in my hands. On the side that had been facing the drawer bottom, the words “My Diary” were printed in faded black ink.

  “Open it,” Dusty said quietly. “I’ll sit here with you while you read it if you want me to. You don’t have to tell me what’s in it. I’ll just be here.”

  I thumbed through the yellow lined pages filled with the deliberate penmanship of a child. Most of the entries were dated, but there weren’t daily entries. Two or three days in a row, then nothing for a month. Random. You could watch the penmanship improve over the course of the book as the little girl … as I matured and became more proficient with a ballpoint.

  I returned to the first page in the book and began to read out loud.

  I got a baby brother today.

  “There’s no date, but Joel was born Feb. 9, 1979,” I told Dusty. “I was 9 years old.”

  I got this book and I am going to write down his life in it. Jericho took me and Windy to see the baby at the hospital and the baby was with Mama and she let me hold it but not Windy. It was kind of ugly. It Baby Joel had a red face and black hair but not much. The nurse said he looked like his big sister. She meant Windy and that made Mama mad. Mama said I could hold him and help her change his diaper when he gets home but I don’t want to if there’s poop in it.

  I looked up and Dusty was smiling.

  “Can you remember that now, going to the hospital to see your baby brother?”

  “No, it’s like reading about something that happened to somebody else. But maybe that’ll come.” I tapped the book. “Even if it doesn’t, even if nothing in here sparks any memories, maybe it will show me whether the memories I’ve already had are real.” />
  Perhaps my diary would help me gauge the nature and severity of my own madness.

  I continued to read out loud. The next entry was the following day. I had to stay after school for talking too much and I considered that highly unfair given that I had a brand new baby brother to talk about.

  The entry after that was probably five days later, on a weekend. I’d been allowed to hold Joel and feed him. Windy was there, but she was not allowed to touch him because she was too little and might drop him.

  Mama caught Windy in Joel’s room while he was asleep. She was looking at him through the bars of his crib. Mama got mad and she sent Windy to her room and wouldn’t let her have any supper. I sneaked her a banana and one of Jericho’s apples. He got mad at me for eating the last one but I didn’t care.

  “I do remember that Jericho was absolutely nuts about apples, ate half a dozen a day—just the green, tart ones though, the kind you make pies out of.” I smiled at the memory. “That may have been the lone impact the man had on my life—I love green apples, too. I’ve got a bowl full of Granny Smiths in the kitchen.” An image formed, a round little memory with no sharp edges on it anywhere. “We’d sit on the porch in the evening, watching Joel toddle around trying to catch the fireflies in the willow tree, chomping on our apples together.”

  The next few entries were about school and the broken pedal on my bike that I kept trying to get Jericho to fix for me. No specific images appeared in my mind when I read those entries. But a sort of background began to form, a muted wallpaper of scenes painted with a watercolor brush. A vague picture of my classroom at school and the playroom, full of girly toys—dolls and doll houses. Eating supper and how little Windy looked, so short Jericho had to pile books in the chair—two dictionaries and a picture book of New Orleans—so she could reach the table.

  Nov. 20, 1979. Words leapt off the page at me.

  Mama slapped Windy and cut her lip. She got mad when the blood dripped on the rug and she made Windy stand in a corner.

  I looked at Dusty and he was as disturbed as I was. But he said nothing. The knot in my gut, so recently untied when I figured out I had imagined all Mama’s abuse, tightened like a hangman’s noose.

  As I flipped through the pages, it was like Mama’s treatment of Windy was colored florescent red. The words, a sentence here, a few words there, jumped out at me, page after page. I read to Dusty only those sentences.

  Mama wouldn’t let Windy go swimming with me and the other kids.

  Mama wouldn’t let Windy dress up and go trick-or-treating.

  Mama sent Windy to bed without any supper.

  Mama spanked Windy with the flyswatter. When the plastic end came off, she kept hitting her anyway.

  I didn’t have enough air to read any more and I sat staring unseeing at the pages.

  Dusty patted my knee and spoke softly. “I’m sorry, Annie. I was afraid of this.”

  “What do you mean? Why would you think—?”

  “Because I remember that your mother was always … “ he chose the word carefully, “unkind to Windy. We all watched it happen, all the neighborhood children. A lot of the kids were mean to Windy—just because she was different—but I always felt sorry for her, felt bad about the way your mother treated her.”

  “You mean the neighbors knew?”

  “I don’t know what the other neighbors knew. I only know what I overheard my parents say. They didn’t like Jericho one bit. And they thought it was so sad for Bobo that … “ he didn’t want to finish, but he did, “ … that her daughter had a drinking problem just like her son who got drunk and ran into a tree.”

  I began to cry silently, didn’t make a sound. My shoulders shook and tears streamed down my cheeks.

  “Dusty, the abuse in the pictures …” The truth was as jagged as a broken bottle. “It was Mama!”

  The reality of it, the finality of it, kicked me in the belly with a pointed-toe boot.

  “Windy, poor little Windy! When she wasn’t being molested by Little Dove’s johns, she came here and my mother …”

  I turned to face Dusty. “She hurt Windy and I watched her do it. I remember what she did. And I thought—hoped—I’d imagined it. But I didn’t; it was real.”

  Images flashed like lightening bolts in my mind, casting everything else into harsh relief in their glaring white light. Mama smashing Windy’s underwear down on her head; Mama shoving Windy’s head into the toilet. Twin booms of thunder sparked by the lightening rumbled inside my skull.

  I dropped the book into my lap, unable to hold onto it with my trembling hands.

  “Oh Dusty,” I almost wailed. “My mother was …”

  I couldn’t finish the sentence. Dusty finished it for me.

  “A woman you loved very much. She was, wasn’t she?”

  “Not her. Not the woman who … I never even met her. The woman I loved was kind … gentle … good! She used to stand in my bedroom doorway at night and just look at me when she thought I was asleep. But this woman. Dusty, what she did to Windy … “

  “Did you ever think that maybe your mother spent the rest of her life trying to make up for what she did to Windy? A lifetime of remorse is a pretty stiff sentence.”

  I burst into tears; it all let go. I cried in great heaving sobs that wracked my whole body. Dusty put his arm around me, pulled me close and held me while I cried, just like Bobo did the day Mama almost drowned Windy.

  I cried for Windy. For Bobo. And for myself. I cried for the mother I had just buried and for the tortured woman I had only just met. I cried from a great well of pain I hadn’t even known existed, a deep dark hole where other hidden terrors still lurked.

  But mostly, I cried for Windy, for a little wisp of a girl with a china doll face who never had a chance in life. I cried because I remembered, I remembered how much I loved her. Finally, after all these years, I grieved the death of my little sister, Laughs in the Wind.

  When I was all cried out, I felt weak. And strangely peaceful. It was like finally getting the cancer diagnosis. It’s awful, but at least you know.

  I pulled back out of Dusty’s embrace and looked into his pale green eyes. “Thanks, Dusty. I—”

  “You’re not allowed to thank a cop, didn’t you know that? Helping people’s what we get paid for. It’s in the job description.”

  “This wasn’t your job.”

  Surprisingly, Dusty was caught a little off guard this time. He stood abruptly and picked his hat up off the bed.

  “I’ll be by to pick you up day after tomorrow, you haven’t forgotten, have you?”

  “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Dr. Kendrick. In Amarillo. You have an appointment at nine o’clock. I said I’d take you, remember? I’ll have to pick you up before Bobo’s chickens are awake—six o’clock. But I’ll pump you full of caffeine at R’s. Amy puts the coffee on at five-thirty. And I’ll feed you lunch, too. If you recall, that’s another promise I made: no tacos.”

  I’d forgotten about the shrink appointment. All I remembered was that I had sort of agreed just to shut Dusty up, and fully intended to come up with an excuse not to go.

  “Sure. Six o’clock sounds dandy.”

  “You’re really looking forward to this, I can tell.”

  “Like having my sinuses drained.”

  Dusty chuckled.

  “Ok, worst case scenario. You hate every second you spend with Dr. Kendrick. Fine. Smile your pretty little smile at her as you walk out the door and you never have to go back. And you get all the coffee you can drink and a free lunch out of the deal—maybe dinner, too, if you play your cards right. Can’t beat that.”

  He reached over and lifted my chin so I was looking at him.

  “Best case scenario. You’ve found somebody you can unload it all on—every awful detail, somebody who can help you sort out real from illusion. That’s better than a sharp stick in the eye, isn’t it?”

  I smiled. “Yeah, better than poison
ivy, an income tax audit, and sand in a wet bathing suit.” And in truth, it really didn’t sound bad. To finally tell another human being about the Boogie Man. Actually, that didn’t sound bad at all.

  We were walking out of my bedroom when Bobo emerged from hers across the hall after her daily Oprah fix. As soon as she saw us, she burst into a one-hundred-watt smile, which wasn’t a black hole experience as long as she had her teeth in.

  “Well, well, well …”

  My face was instantly the color of a fire truck. “Bobo, we were just—”

  Dusty cut me off. He gave Bobo a big wink and stage whispered, “We were playing kissy face, Bobo. It’s a lot more fun without all those chickens watching.”

  He put on his hat and tipped it at me, “See you Friday morning.” Then he bounded down the stairs to the door.

  As soon as he was out of earshot, Bobo asked, “Was you really? The two of you, playing kissy face in there?”

  Her astonished look was so comical I laughed out loud, even though there were still tears on my cheeks.

  “Here, chick-chick-chick,” I said.

  Then I turned around and went back into my room to read the rest of the diary.

  Chapter 20

  Windy stood in the doorway of my bedroom. She was there as soon as I sat down on my bed and picked up the diary. The memory materialized full blown in my mind as bright and clear as a flare tossed into the night sky.

  “Windy!”

  When I look up and see her standing there, I’m overjoyed. She wasn’t supposed to come until tomorrow and she’s here a day early. A whole extra day to be together! We can play Barbies all day. And after supper, we can try to catch one of the huge toads that come out at night to eat the bugs beneath the street light on the corner. We can … well, we can do whatever we want to do. Windy’s here!

  But something’s wrong. Windy doesn’t look right.

  “Windy, are you Ok?”

  She doesn’t say anything. Just stands there, her eyes vacant, her long black hair tangled, like it hasn’t been combed in a couple of days. She’s barefoot, her shirt is dirty and torn, her arms are scratched and there’s dried mud on her knees and the palms of her hands.