A Thief in the House of Memory

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  He nodded but he was confused. Didn’t she trust him any more? “I never tell Daddy any of our secrets,” he said. “Honest.”

  She smiled and made a kissy face. “I know you don’t, Skipper.”

  Her hands cradled his face. She smoothed back his hair. “My, my,” she said, combing it out with her fingers. She took it in her hands on either side of his head and pulled it out like bird’s wings. She pulled and pulled.

  “Owww!”

  She stopped and leaned forward until she was eye to eye with him. “A boy should never have so much hair a girl can pull it,” she said.

  Through the tears in his eyes, he gazed at the expectant look on her face. He knew what that meant.

  “Time to get scalped?” he said.

  “And who scalps Chief Big Hair?”

  “Birdie does.”

  “And who is Birdie?”

  “The bestest friend a girl ever had?”

  “You got it, Skipper.”

  She held him close. The bodice of her dress felt crinkly and stiff against his cheek. It smelled old. He pulled away from her and she pouted.

  “You don’t love me any more,” she said. And before he could say a word – before he could say that he loved her more than anything in the world, she found her whistle again and started blowing it so shrill and loud, Dec had to wrap his arms around his head. His eyes filled with fresh tears and he yelled at her to stop, but she just kept blowing till her face was as red as her hair.

  Future Perfect

  DEC STARED across Forester Street at the freshly painted façade of Birdie’s Hair Ideas. There was a new logo on the plate glass, a chirpy bird sitting on the busty upper loop of the B, looking as if it had just escaped from Snow White. Through the window he saw a customer pay Birdie at her desk by the door. The woman stopped to admire her new do in the storefront glass, tapping the bird on its cute little beak as she walked by. There was no one else in the salon.

  As he crossed Forester, Dec felt he could still hear Lindy blowing her toy whistle in his ear. He turned, expecting to catch a glimpse of her following him, spying on him.

  A bell jingled as he opened the door. There was new country playing on the radio, and Birdie was humming along as she swept up.

  “Hey, Dec,” she said, cheerily enough. Then she looked at the clock on the wall — another bird, this one bright blue and electric. “You’re a little early if you’re looking for a ride.”

  He looked around the salon, so familiar to him, but different from the one he was remembering right now. He placed his backpack by the low table littered with magazines. The room he remembered was bigger. Or was that just because he had been so much smaller?

  “Something the matter?” she asked.

  “Was it here Mom used to bring me?”

  Birdie frowned. “What is this, National Lindy Polk Month?”

  Dec ignored the crack. “1 remember lots of gold.”

  Birdie looked wary. “That would’ve been Mimi’s Cut ‘n Curl,” she said. “Up on Dunlop. Least it used to be. She closed up shop a while back.”

  Dec sat down on a cream-coloured Naugahyde chair, felt the cool vinyl surface with his hand. The waiting-room chairs at Mimi’s had been gold.

  “Mimi, was she the tubby one with the sparkly hair?”

  Birdie smiled despite herself. “You got her.”

  Dec smiled, too. “She used to give me Tootsie Rolls,” he said.

  Surprise brought on another smile. “Tootsie Rolls was how she got so tubby,” she said, leaning on her broom. “But that was a long time ago. I’m amazed you can remember.”

  Dec was amazed, too. “All those women. They were all over me. Scared me to death.”

  Birdie laughed. “You were a cute little tyke.”

  “But I was promised to you, right?” he said. “The bestest friend a girl ever had.”

  For a fleeting instant, Birdie looked overcome with sadness. Then her expression changed. She looked kind of guilty, as if she had been scolded.

  “If it sounded like I was bad-mouthing Lindy the other day,” she said, “it was just the whisky talking. You’ve got to know that.”

  “You didn’t bad-mouth her.”

  “Didn’t I?” She shook her head as if she really couldn’t remember. “I guess I just feel like I did. Left a bad taste in my mouth. Anyway, I’m sorry. It didn’t go so well, eh?”

  “It was a bad day all ’round.”

  She nodded, but looked only vaguely relieved. “Maybe seeing your dad in such a state reminded me of what it got to be like with them. I loved that girl, you know, but she could drive a man crazy.”

  Is that what had happened? Had Lindy driven Bernard crazy? Get me out of here. Declan, before it’s too late. Did she really just run off and leave Dec behind, or did she have to go — running for her life?

  Birdie put aside her broom and came towards him. He couldn’t read her eyes but they looked filled with purpose. She stopped across the low table from him, and her resolve seemed to abandon her. She smoothed out her tight skirt, straightened her belt.

  “You were going to say something. Something about Lindy.”

  “No,” she said. “I was just caught up in… in remembering.”

  Hesitantly, she touched his unruly hair. Her fingers caught in a snag. He pulled his head away.

  “There are women who’d kill for hair this shade,” she said.

  He pushed the hair out if his eyes. “You told me once I looked like an Irish setter who’d been playing in a briar patch.”

  She smiled, but her gaze was distant.

  “Birdie, please. Something’s going on. I can see it in your eyes.”

  Again she looked as if she was about to speak and stopped herself. “Nothing’s going on,” she said, more forcefully now.

  “It’s just you.

  Dec threw himself against the back of the chair.

  “Don’t get your shorts in a knot,” she said. “It’s just seeing you, right now. I mean, really seeing you. I’m so used to thinking of you as Bernard’s son, I forget how much like her you are.”

  He swallowed the lump in his throat. “I don’t have her hair.”

  She took a balled-up tissue from her pocket and dabbed at the corner of her eyes. “Sunny got the hair, all right,” she said. But you got her eyes. That kind of blue with just enough hazel in them to make a person look twice.” She looked a little bashful. And then, suddenly, overwrought. “And you’ve got that kind of accusing look she used to throw around when things weren’t going her way.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Just so you know.”

  With a little shudder, she seemed to recover from whatever reflection or memory had held her in its grip. “You even sound like her,” she said. “Funny how I never noticed before.” She looked thoughtful.

  Dec shrugged. “Sometimes I think I can hear her. I mean, remember her voice. Do I really sound like her?”

  Birdie perched on the seat beside him, her knees pressed tightly together. She brushed lint from her skirt.

  “It’s not your voice so much as the kind of things you say. Lindy couldn’t wait to get out of here. Just like you. For her, everything happened too slow.”

  Too slowly, he thought, but he kept it to himself. “Maybe she was just bored.”

  “I remember the day after her fifteenth birthday she started telling everyone she was sixteen. I said to her, ‘Lindy Polk, you’re a damn liar.’ And she said, ‘BV, I am now officially in my sixteenth year.’”

  “You were really close,” said Dec.

  “I remember this other time,” said Birdie, barrelling on. “It was right after English class and she said, ‘BV, finally we learned something worthwhile.’ I asked her what that might be, and she said, ‘The future perfect. Now there’s a tense a girl could get to love.’”

  “There’s no way she would have just forgotten you,” said Dec.

  “She wanted the world and she wanted it on the double, please and t
hank you.”

  “She would have at least let you know where she was,” said Dec.

  Birdie was staring — not at him, not at anything. He held his breath. On the country station, somebody was leaving somebody, but that was always happening in country songs.

  Finally her eyes focused again. She sighed. “She did not tell me where she was going,” she said. “Lindy was always going and leaving a mess behind. I spent half my life picking up after that girl.”

  Then Birdie rose, found the dustpan and brush and finished sweeping up.

  “The thing I could never understand was that she saw perfectly clearly what your dad was like. She saw how kind and gentle he was, how settled he was. But she thought she could change him anyway.” She swept a bit and stopped. “Well, she changed him all right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She hurt him bad.”

  “Maybe he hurt her.”

  Birdie glanced at him unsmilingly. “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk,” she said, and went to put the broom away.

  When she returned, Dec said, “I didn’t mean he hurt her on purpose. It was just his lifestyle. She thought there was going to be more.”

  Birdie nodded and looked down at her shoes. “She sure never dreamed she was going to rot away in a huge empty house in the middle of nowhere.”

  Dec thought about it a moment. Then he nodded. “So I guess it all worked out in the end,” he said. “She got away and you got Dad and everybody’s happy.”

  He wasn’t sure what it was about this simple summary that made the tears well to Birdie’s eyes.

  “If only that were true,” she said. Then, with one last look around to make sure her little kingdom was tidy, she headed to the back room for her coat, sobbing the whole way.

  The House of Stone

  THE HOUSE looks like Steeple Hall, but when he opens the great front door the interior is made entirely of stone. The Oriental rug in the hall is stone, the stairs are stone, the chandelier is stone. Even the keypad of the new alarm by the vestibule door is made of stone. He punches in the code numbers, which he knows, somehow. He makes his way down the front hall towards his grandfather’s study. The corridor is a great deal longer than he remembers it being, and it’s tilted so that he feels all the time as if he’s falling.

  Falling into the dark.

  What light there is comes from thin cracks between the great slabs of polished granite. Above his head, statues stare down at him from the top of stone bookcases.

  “Lindy?” he calls, and his voice echoes all around him.

  It is so cold that he shivers uncontrollably. He is in his pyjamas. He wishes he had thought to dress warmly. He wishes he did not feel so alone. He wishes he had never set out on this journey.

  He hears whispering and follows the sound.

  “Mom?” he calls.

  The whispering grows until it seems to engulf him. Finally he stands outside a door to a room he did not know was there. He tries the handle but it will not budge. He presses his ear against the cold, polished surface. He hears his fathers voice.

  “Lindy was beyond caring long ago.”

  He hears whispering farther down the corridor. At another door he stops to listen.

  “She never dreamed she was going to rot away in a huge empty house in the middle of nowhere.”

  He moves on.

  “Dec?” someone calls. “Dec!”He runs until he comes, at last, to the door at the very end of the corridor.

  “Mom?” he whispers.

  “Dec,” she says breathlessly. “Get me out of here, before it’s too late.”

  The Hole in the Wall

  NOT MANY kids hung out at the Hole in the Wall. Dec and Ezra liked it for the salt and pepper shakers. Each table boasted a different set. In the corner booth where Ezra was sitting, the salt shaker was a fat lady in a dressing gown with her hair up in curlers. The pepper shaker was a refrigerator with the door open. The little ceramic salt shaker lady had her hands on her hips and she looked as if she was trying to decide on a midnight snack.

  When Dec entered the café, Ezra was intently looking over the painted contents of the refrigerator.

  “She should definitely go for the cake,” said Ezra.

  Dec plumped himself down across from him. He had a bundle of mail wrapped up in a thick rubber band. “Dad’s taken out a post office box until the ‘media blitz’ is over,” he said. “You’d think he was Michael Jackson or something.”

  “It’s a Thriller day in the neighbourhood,” sang Ezra.

  Dec cast him a scornful glance. “The Mr. Rogers’ thing is getting pretty old,” he said.

  Ezra looked over the top of his glasses. “Did somebody miss his nap?”

  Dec wasn’t in the mood for jokes. He slipped off the rubber band and flipped through the letters. Only the magazine at the bottom of the pile interested him, the latest issue of Architectural Record. There was a house on the cover that looked as if a forest was growing inside it. He thumbed through the pages.

  “I thought this was urgent,” said Ezra.

  Dec paused when he saw the reminder of the student design contest — “The Shape of Things to Come.” He closed the magazine and stared dejectedly at his friend.

  Ezra cleared his throat. “Has anyone told you yet today that you look like refried dog food?”

  “Thanks for noticing.”

  The waitress came and Dec ordered an Orangina. Ezra had already ordered a carrot muffin and a cappuccino. The drink sat before him in a bowl the size of a birdbath. He held it with two hands and took a long, noisy sip. Dec winced.

  Ezra said, “Either you’ve got a hangover or things are not good on the annulment front.”

  Dec shook his head. “That’s old news.” The annulment now seemed like the least of his worries. But how would Ezra know? There was too much Ezra didn’t know. That was the problem. He had to tell him about his dream — he had to tell someone. But in order to do that, he had to start a long way back.

  “I’ve been seeing a lot of my mother lately,” he said. Then he launched in, not caring if he sounded like a raving lunatic. He clammed up when the waitress brought his order and started up again as soon as she was out of earshot. He poured out everything and felt his loneliness drain out of him as well.

  When he was done, he gulped down some Orangina, concentrating, as if drinking soda required a lot of serious attention. But he was also avoiding Ezra’s gaze. That was the trouble with spilling your guts: you felt exposed, stupid. Finally, he dared to look up, and Ezra was waiting for him.

  “You’re not crazy,” he said. “Well, maybe a little crazy, but not beyond help.”

  “Thanks, Doc,” said Dec.

  “All part of the friendly service,” said Ezra. “The thing is, I’ve been thinking and I realized something. That big old house of yours is one giant mnemonic device. It’s like a memory-making assembly line. Remember that I Love Lucy show where she’s working on the assembly line and she can’t keep up?” Dec nodded. “Maybe there’s such a thing as too many memories.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “I guess it would be pretty hard to talk to your dad, huh?”

  “What am I supposed to say? ‘Uh, Pops, I was just wondering. Did you by any chance kill Mom?’“

  “I see your problem.”

  Dec rested his head on his arms and closed his eyes. He was so sleepy. He had woken from last night’s nightmare in the clutches of an inescapable certainty. It had all seemed to make terrifying sense. He had lain in his bed panic-stricken, scarcely able to breath. Then Sunny had started fussing — her ear again. Birdie had gotten up to comfort her, and Dec had drifted off to sleep, finally, only to be awakened at the usual hour by, “Hit the deck, Dec.”

  The dream was so horrific, the reality so banal. Where did the truth lie?

  He opened his eyes. Ezra was observing him closely.

  “What about motive?” he said. “Your mother sounds totally nuts to me. But
you don’t kill someone just because she’s nuts.”

  “Maybe it was accidental.”

  “Like the ‘accidental’ death of Denny Runyon?”

  Dec swallowed hard. “Maybe I am crazy after all. Maybe I caught it from my mom.”

  Ezra got a thoughtful look in his black crow eyes. “Think of the dream. Forget the other stuff for the moment. What does the dream tell you?”

  “That my mother is dead,” said Dec. “That my dad and Birdie both knew about it. That maybe he killed her or maybe they both did, and buried her in the House of Memory.”

  “Okay. So your mother is dead. What does that mean?” Dec looked confused.

  “It’s a dream, Dec. It’s not literally true. Read between the lines.

  Dec thought about it. “That my mother is…dead.” He shook his head. “Sorry, Ezra, but I’m kind of brain-dead myself.”

  “Okay, let me throw on my Cling Wrap hat here and try an idea on you. If you think about it, your mother is dead in a way, isn’t she? You haven’t seen her — really seen her — for years. You didn’t think about her much, as far as I know, until this happened. All I knew about her was that she wasn’t around any more.”

  Dec’s brow knotted. “So you’re saying the dream was just me admitting something to myself?”

  “A delayed reaction.”

  “Delayed a long time.”

  Ezra shrugged. “Grief is like that. My bubby said she didn’t really mourn Zaida’s death for ten years. Then one day it just came over her. Whoosh!”

  Dec smiled wistfully. “Maybe you should he a shrink.”

  Ezra frowned. “I think I’ll stick to physics. Subatomic particles are weird enough.”

  Dec felt utterly exhausted. “I feel like somebody’s holding me by the legs and shaking and shaking and shaking and all this crap is coming out of me. I just wish I knew what to do.”

  Ezra peered at Dec, his eyes narrowed behind his tiny glasses. “You need to separate the data from the interpretation.”

  “What data? There’s nothing here you could call evidence. Just memories stirred up by a very bad feeling in my gut.

  Ezra nodded. “Have you ever thought of looking for her?”