The Memory Closet

by Ninie Hammon

  It’s all I can do to control the rage in my voice.

  “You have to let Windy out of the closet.”

  She looks at me like she’s never seen me before. “What? What did you say?”

  “You have to let her out. It’s too hot in there. She’s sick. You can’t leave her in there.”

  Mama sits up slowly on the edge of the bed and her face changes, fills with a rage as violent as mine.

  “What do you mean I have to do this and I can’t do that? Who do you think you are, coming in here ordering me around. I can do whatever I want, Little Miss Annie. Don’t you dare talk to your mother like that.”

  “But Mama, Windy…”

  “Windy, Windy, Windy, Windy,” she wails. “I’m so tired of hearing about Windy!” She mimics my voice in a sing-song whine. “‘It’s too hot in there.’ Good. I’m glad it’s hot in there. Serves that little rat right, crapping in my clean kitchen. Like some kind of … of animal!”

  She’s on a roll now, her words slur together in one long stream.

  “She’s a little rat, a rat in a bag, a maggot in the slop and I’m going to just toss her out with the rest of the rubbish, one more stinky bag of filth, let the trash men haul her away, a sack of garbage.”

  “She’s not garbage and she’s not a rat! She’s my little sister!”

  Mama slaps me in the face!

  The force of the blow knocks me backward, my head bangs with a sickening thump on the wall and I slide down it into a heap on the floor. Black spots appear in the air in front of my face and the room goes momentarily dark. My left cheek is on fire, my eye throbs and there’s a sudden loud ringing in my ears.

  Mama is standing over me screaming, but her voice sounds far away, at the other end of a water pipe.

  “Don’t you dare say that little Indian rat is your little sister! Don’t you dare! You’re my daughter. Her mother’s a whore and she’s going to be one, too. If she’s not already.”

  I had heard the word “whore” before. Mama used it all the time with Jericho. But I didn’t have any idea what it meant. Just that it was bad. Very bad.

  Mama sways, reaches out and grabs the edge of the dresser for balance. “You get out of here! You get up to your room and don’t you come down until I tell you.” She leans over and rage so twists her face I don’t even recognize her. “You ever talk to me like that again, you say one more word to me about that piece of brown crap and I’ll whip you with a belt—with the buckle end!”

  The sheer magnitude of her fury strikes terror into my heart.

  “Now get out of here!”

  I scramble across the floor until I’m out of her reach, terrified she’ll grab me and make good on her threat, and I race up the stairs to my room. I can hear her through the pipes in her bedroom below mine, screaming and crying, semi-hysterical and making no sense.

  “ … loved that child and took care of her and this is the thanks I get.”

  Sometimes she’s sad, “My little princess, my baby, calling that Indian rat her sister.”

  Other times she’s raging at me and at Jericho.

  I hear something fall, clunk to the floor. She must have knocked the lamp off the nightstand, then she starts to cry. And I hear her sobbing big slobbery tears.

  I’m crying, too. I reach up and touch my cheek where Mama slapped me. It feels hot and tender. It will make a bruise. She hit me so hard I may even have a black eye. And my ears. There’s a buzzing ring in my ears.

  But it’s not the pain in my face that fuels the hitching sobs. It’s the pain in my belly, a throbbing ache like that’s where she hit me instead of my face.

  Mama hit me. Mama said she’d whip me with a belt, with the buckle.

  For a long time, I sit in the middle of my bed, my arms wrapped around my knees, rocking back and forth. I don’t know how long my tears mingle with Mama’s downstairs before I finally hear Jericho’s station wagon pull in behind Mama’s car, parked in the gravel in front of the garage. I run to the window, but he has pulled so far into the driveway on the side of the house that a tree and the porch roof block my view. Between the tree branches, I can see the bottom half of the driver’s side door but nothing else.

  The door opens, but it takes Jericho a long time to get out of the car. His left foot touches the gravel. Then I see the right. It is a white ball with toes sticking out the front and he doesn’t let it touch the ground. His whole foot is wrapped in a 2-inch thick layer of bandages, going around and around it all the way up to his ankle.

  He hops on his left foot out of the way and closes the door, hops again and he’s out of sight. I go back to my bed and sit on the edge. My crying is reduced to ragged sobs that make my side hurt, but Mama is still going strong downstairs.

  Time derails then, goes off the track and skids to a halt. Every minute I sit there feels like an hour. There’s no clock in my room, but if there were, the second hand would be moving in slow motion. Or maybe not at all. Even my own breathing is slow. It takes such a very long time to take in a breath and then to breathe it out again. I can feel my heart, each beat a separate event. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Then I hear the front door open. Mama weighs into Jericho before he even has time to shut the door behind him. The fight explodes like a bomb. They don’t even say hello, just start screaming at each other. She accuses him of sleeping with Windy’s mother; he responds that she’s too drunk to sleep with anybody. She shrieks that he’s a lousy father to their son, and he yells back that she’s a worse mother. One of them slams the door with a loud bang, and they go on and on and on.

  It’s almost like Jericho’s baiting her, like he’s trying to see how angry he can make her. She’s screaming and crying at the same time, either throwing things or falling into them because there are thumps and crashes.

  He slaps her! She wails. Then she’s sobbing and he’s shouting some more.

  What about Windy?

  I want to run down the stairs and shriek at them, “Doesn’t anybody care about Windy?”

  But I can’t do that. Mama said she’d spank me with a belt.

  I jump off my bed, run through the playroom and down the back stairs to the kitchen. The closet door’s directly across from the back stairs door. I thought I left it open but it’s closed.

  I race to the refrigerator and get out the last tray of ice, dump the cubes into two glasses and fill them with water. I figure I’ll let her drink one and then I’ll pour the other one over her head.

  I have to set one glass on the floor so I can open the door. I pull it open, gasp at the stench, then pick the glass back up and …

  The bag with Windy in it is lying on the closet floor. But her head is no longer sticking out the top. The draw strings are pulled tight, the bag tied shut.

  Mama did what she threatened to do! She said she was going to throw Windy out with the rest of the garbage!

  Icy tentacles of dread grab my stomach and squeeze the breath out of me.

  “Windy?”

  I have no voice; I can only whisper. I put out my foot and gently poke the bag. She is motionless.

  I drop the glasses of ice water, fall to my knees and call her name as I tear at the draw string ties.

  “Windy? Windy!”

  The draw strings are tied with big knots, three or four of them. I’ll never get them untied so I claw at the bag itself, digging my fingers into the plastic. It’s a heavy-duty garbage bag, thick like a leaf bag. But I manage to poke a hole through it with one finger, then rip it open all the way down the side.

  Brown liquid oozes out of the hole into the puddle of ice water on the floor. The stench is staggering!

  Windy is lying on her side. I grab her slimy shoulder, roll her over onto her back and shake her. Her head lolls on her neck like a broken doll. She’s no longer panting; she’s not breathing at all.

  I scream! Shriek! A piercing wail that savages my throat with shards of glass as it explodes out of my chest.

  Suddenly, Jericho is kneeling b
eside me. He shoves me aside and gasps at the stench.

  “Windy, Windy, talk to me, Sweetheart.” He doesn’t touch her; there isn’t a clean spot on her anywhere, not even her face.” He leans over her and calls her name again, yells it so loud the sound reverberates off the closet walls.

  “Windy!”

  When she doesn’t move, he sits back on his heels and all the air goes out of him.

  “She’s dead,” he says.

  A dam in my chest bursts and hysteria consumes me.

  “No, no! Windy! Noooo!” I reach for her to shake her.

  Jericho grabs me and won’t let me touch her. I struggle in his arms to get to her. “Somebody’s got to wake her up, Jericho. Let me go, I have to wake her up!”

  “It’s too late, Annie,” he says softly and hugs me tight to his chest. “It’s too late.”

  Mama staggers into the room, leaning against the countertop for support.

  “What’s going on? What are you …?”

  I pull out of Jericho’s arms, stumble over one of the crutches he dropped on the kitchen floor and run at her, snarling like a rabid dog.

  “You monster! You killed her!”

  I pummel her with my fists, knock her back against the wall.

  “She’s dead, Windy’s dead. You killed her!” She has her hands up in front of her, trying to fend off my blows, a look of confusion and alarm on her face. “You locked her in there in the bag in the dark and you killed her.”

  “I never … I wouldn’t …”

  “I hate you!” I growl the words with a loathing so intense and powerful it hits her like a slap in the face. “I hate you! You monster. You murderer!”

  All the color drains out of her cheeks, her knees give way and she sinks down the wall to the floor.

  I am only barely conscious of the sound of the front door closing and Bobo’s voice calling from the parlor. “Susan, I’m home.” She suddenly appears in the doorway. I am standing over Mama, screaming at her. The shock on Bobo’s face turns into a grimace when the stench from the closet hits her.

  “Annie, Honey, what in the wor—?”

  “Mama killed Windy! She murdered her. She put her in the closet in a garbage bag. She killed her. Windy’s dead!”

  Windy’s dead. The finality of it releases the steam powering my hysteria and I collapse in tears on the floor.

  Bobo rushes past me to Jericho, who is still kneeling beside Windy in the doorway of the storage closet. She gasps at the foul stench. A little squeak of a scream escapes before she covers her mouth with both hands. And then she stands there, her eyes huge, staring dumbstruck at Windy lying in a ripped-open garbage bag, slathered from head to foot with diarrhea.

  “Oh … oh!” is all she can manage. “That poor child. That poor, dear child.”

  Jericho looks up at her. His voice is trembling, like he’s trying not to cry. “Heat stroke, I guess—must be 120 degrees in that closet. Dehydration maybe, or she suffocated.” His voice cracks. “She’s dead; Susan killed my baby girl!”

  Mama lurches to her feet and staggers to the closet doorway. She shoves Bobo aside and looks in at Windy.

  “Oh my G …” she staggers backward like she’s taken a right hook to the chin. She looks pleadingly at Bobo. “Mama, you don’t believe I’d … I wouldn’t do a thing like …” Then it hits her. “Oh Mama, I did.” She gasps. “I did, I killed her!”

  She falls to her knees—upright, like she’s praying—and starts to cry, in big blubbering drunken sobs, with her head thrown back and her eyes squeezed tightly shut.

  Shock finally overtakes me, all my breakers trip and I’m wrapped in the fuzzy cotton of unreality. I sit up and stop crying, but tears continue to run down my face and drip off my chin. From where I’m sitting, I can only see Jericho’s back. And Windy’s hand, lying limp and still.

  The consequences of her act suddenly dawn on Mama and her eyes pop open.

  “Will I be arrested?”

  For just a moment, she can’t seem to find the words or the air to continue.

  “I killed a little kid. They’ll lock me up, won’t they? I’ll go to prison and never get out.”

  She turns to Jericho, a look of absolute desperation on her face.

  “Please, Jericho, don’t let them put me in prison. Please! Do something.”

  The horror has finally made it through the booze to the higher centers of her brain and she begins to grasp the enormity of what has happened.

  “I can’t go to prison! What about Annie?” Even drunk, she has the sense to play the best card she has. “Jericho, what will happen to Joel? Huh? You want that sweet little boy to grow up without a mother? Jericho … are you listening to me? You have to help me. You have to—”

  “Shut up, Susan!” he snaps, with such force it’s like a slap across the face and she falls instantly silent.

  Now the room is quiet, so quiet I can hear Mama’s rapid breathing, and the slow, thud, thud, thudding of my own heart. No one speaks or makes a sound.

  I stare at Windy’s hand.

  Bobo stands in front of the closet, her mouth covered, her eyes huge.

  Mama is on her knees, her eyes fixed on her husband.

  Jericho reaches up for the doorknob on the closet door and uses it to pull himself to his feet. Foot. He puts all his weight on his left foot, holding the doorknob for balance, and keeps his right knee bent so his bandaged foot doesn’t touch the floor.

  He looks from one of us to the other. Bobo, me and finally Mama.

  “If we don’t do something, Susan’s going to prison.”

  Bobo sucks in a gasp of air. I just sit there. I don’t care what they do to my mother. Whatever it is, she deserves it.

  “What, Jericho, what can we do?” Mama gushes. “How can we—?”

  “Shut. Up. Susan.” He drops each word like an individual stone into a pond.

  Mama puts her hands over her mouth to keep herself from speaking. Jericho looks at Bobo, then me.

  “We have to make it look like an accident.”

  I speak for the first time since I called my mother a murderer.

  “An accident? Windy accidentally crawled into a garbage bag and accidentally shut herself up in a closet and accidentally—”

  “That’s enough, Annie!” Jericho growls.

  “It was no accident. Mama killed her. Mama murdered her!”

  “I said that’s enough! Do you hear me. Not another word out of you, is that clear?”

  The menace in his voice is impossible to miss, but I don’t shut up because he said to or because I’m afraid of him. I shut up because I have nothing else to say and nowhere to say it from. A giant hole has opened in my gut, so wide and deep that I can feel the wind blowing through it. I am empty, a shell, sitting there hollow, with nobody inside at all.

  Jericho turns to Bobo, the only other functioning person in the room.

  “A car wreck, we have to fake a car wreck, make it look like she was killed in an accident.”

  It’s all moving way too fast for Bobo and she’s not tracking with him. “A car wreck? But how—?”

  “Not just a wreck, a fire.” Jericho has figured it all out with remarkable speed and clarity. “A car fire. We put Windy in the car and set the car on fire and tell people we tried to get her out but we couldn’t and she died.”

  “A fire?” Bobo can barely get the words out.

  “And they’ll think it was an accident?” Mama can’t keep quiet. “They will, won’t they!” Mama has latched onto the idea like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood. “They won’t suspect me. Why should they suspect me? And if we burn her up …”

  I put my hands over my ears and start shaking my head. No. Back and forth silently. No. Rocking my body back and forth. No!

  “If her body’s not recogniz—” Jericho glances at me and rewords what he was going to say. “With all that gasoline, a car fire burns real hot. Hot enough to melt metal. They won’t be able to determine the cause of death.”

/>   It is quiet again. The silence is broken only by the noise Mama is making. A moan, a deep, monotone groan like an injured animal.

  “Bobo.” Jericho gives her a penetrating look when he says her name. He turns and does the same to me. “Annie.” Then he engages us both. “You’re going to have to help me. I can’t do this by myself. We have to get Windy into the car, the station wagon, and I can’t carry her.”

  He pauses.

  “Bobo?”

  She stands there, saying nothing.

  “It’s up to you, Bobo. Either we do this, or your daughter spends the rest of her life in prison.” Mama bleats an aborted scream and covers her mouth again to remain silent.

  “Or maybe …” He stops, looks at Windy’s body. “It’s a kid.” He turns his gaze back to Bobo. “Susan could get the death penalty.”

  Mama shrieks and crawls on all-fours to Bobo’s feet. She sits back on her knees and grabs Bobo’s dress.

  “Please, Mama, you’ve got to do this; you have to help me. Mama, look at me!” Bobo had been staring straight ahead, but she lowers her eyes and looks at her daughter. “You think I meant for this to happen? I didn’t mean to, I don’t even know how …” She stops, then buries her face in Bobo’s dress. “Please, help me,” she begs softly. “What about Annie and Joel? Please! Mama, you can’t let them kill me!”

  Bobo lifts her eyes to Jericho.

  “So you want me … you need me to carry her—Windy—to the car, to put her in the car?”

  “I can’t do it,” he says, gesturing to his foot. “I can barely walk, let alone carry something.”

  “We’ll wrap her body in a sheet.” he’s thinking out loud, planning. “Annie, go get a sheet.”

  I look at him but don’t move. I’m not being defiant. It’s just that there’s no air in me anymore, no strength, no will.

  “Annie!”

  “I’ll do it,” Bobo says quietly. She turns and has to pry Mama’s fingers off her dress so she can go into the laundry room where a stack of linens rests on top of the dryer. She returns with a big, white sheet, unfolds it and flaps it out in front of her to straighten it out. Then she holds it, looking at Windy.