He Never Forgot

by P. D. Workman

  Zachary nodded.

  The woman looked past him again. Zachary heard a squeak and, turning around, he saw Burton coming in through the gate. He left it ajar and walked up to join Zachary.

  “I told him, I don’t know anything,” the woman said to Burton, raising her voice. “You call the owners.”

  “Could I see inside?” Burton asked, his voice gravelly like he was hung over again. “Could I just take a minute or two to look around? Then we won’t bother you anymore. I’m sorry about all of this. I just need to see it.”

  “You don’t need to see anything.” She motioned to him. “You’ve seen the outside. You don’t need to hang around here and you don’t need to see inside.”

  “Just for a minute,” Burton begged. “Please.”

  “I don’t know who you are. I’m going to call the police.”

  “We’re not doing anything wrong,” Zachary pointed out.

  “I could pay you,” Burton offered, taking another step forward, crowding so much that Zachary was forced to take a step back, away from the door.

  He was going to tell Burton that they should go before the woman decided to make trouble for them, but the woman was looking at Burton, her eyes narrow and suspicious, and was no longer trying to shoo him away.

  “How much money?”

  Burton looked at Zachary. Zachary wasn’t sure what to offer. What was an appropriate amount to pay someone for a look around the inside of their house? He’d never had the opportunity to ask before, despite all of his private investigation experience.

  Burton pulled out his wallet and looked in it. He tweezed out a wad of bills between finger and thumb and held it toward the woman. She reached out eagerly to take it, but at the last moment, he pulled back, keeping it away from her. “Let me in first.”

  16

  And just like that, they were into the house. No police were called. The woman allowed them both to enter and then closed the door behind them. The windows were covered with blinds and, with the door closed, the interior of the house was dim. The low wattage bulbs were not up to the task of lighting it properly. Many of them were still turned off or were burned out. Zachary could understand if it had been the middle of summer and they were trying to keep the house cool but, in the cool spring weather, it felt dismal and oppressive.

  Burton looked around, his eyes wide. Zachary tried to imagine what he was feeling and thinking as he looked around. How similar did it look to what it had been thirty years ago? Probably a different paint color and carpet. Different furniture. But the bones of the house were still the same. Burton walked around the main floor, looking at the living room, kitchen, and bedrooms. He poked his head into the bathroom but didn’t go inside.

  “Do you remember which room was yours?” Zachary asked, when he walked around each of the smaller bedrooms.

  Burton shook his head and brushed past Zachary like he was an irritating child.

  Zachary followed him back out to the kitchen and to another door. The door to the mudroom and back door, Zachary assumed. And to the basement. Burton opened the door and stood at the top of the stairs, facing the back door. Zachary waited, thinking that he would probably step out into the backyard, where he had undoubtedly played when he was a child. Maybe there would be things back there that were familiar to him.

  But Burton didn’t step out the back door. He turned his body slowly and looked down the stairs.

  It was a narrow stairway. Not well-lit. To a child, it had probably been scary. Though maybe his parents had installed brighter bulbs and the walls had been freshly painted an ivory or cream color instead of the odd beige and brown that decorated them now. Beige on the top and brown on the bottom like wainscoting.

  Burton looked back at Zachary, wide-eyed like the child he would have been back then. Would you go down with me?

  Zachary took a few steps into the back entryway so that he was close behind Burton.

  “Thanks,” Burton murmured.

  They both stood there for a moment, looking down the stairs, while Burton worked up the courage to go down the dark stairway into the unknown.

  Then he started walking like it was perfectly natural and there was nothing to be afraid of. Because of course, there wasn’t. Even if it had been a frightening place full of imaginary monsters and too real spiders when he had been a small boy, there was nothing that posed any threat to him as an adult. Zachary followed him down.

  Neither had to hold on to the handrail as a five-year-old boy might have done, clinging to it all the way down and taking one uncertain step at a time.

  Zachary tried to shake off the feeling that there were ghosts there, specters of the past. Of course people had lived there, had come and had gone, Burton among them. But there was nothing sinister about that.

  They got to the bottom of the stairs. There was a doorway right in front of them, one on the same wall as they turned into the basement hallway, and then a closed door at the end of the hall when they turned the corner. Burton paid little attention to the first two rooms. Zachary glanced in as they walked by. A combination bathroom and laundry room, followed by a storage room with shelves lining the walls and boxes stacked high.

  They looked at the third door. Closed. Zachary waited for Burton to either decide he didn’t feel like going any farther or to open the door. Eventually, Burton reached out and touched the door. Not the doorknob, just the door itself, as if he didn’t quite believe that what he was seeing was real.

  “Are you okay?” Zachary asked quietly, wondering if he was having flashbacks. Did he remember this place, or was he so tentative because he didn’t? Maybe none of it seemed familiar and he was disappointed.

  Burton turned his head slightly to look over his shoulder at Zachary. In the dim light of the basement hallway, his face looked skeletal. Zachary tried to look relaxed and confident. Like any normal adult would be. There wasn’t any reason for him to have second thoughts about the basement. He was a grown-up and he had no history there. No bad memories. Whatever had happened to Burton there, the abuse and the neglect, it hadn’t happened to Zachary. He had his own memories, some of them accessible, and some of them not.

  Eventually, Burton lowered his hand and grasped the doorknob. He turned it.

  “It’s unlocked,” he said, surprise in his voice.

  “Do you want to go in?”

  Burton pushed the door open and let it go. It was dark on the other side. He reached around the doorframe, grasping for a light switch.

  He apparently found one, and in a moment a couple of bare bulbs in the beams above them came on, filling the space with more dim light.

  Zachary looked around. It was furnished as a den or entertainment room. A ratty old couch that should have been taken to the city dump. A TV that had probably been expensive ten years before, but now looked small and old. An ancient videotape player was hooked up to it and some Disney VHS videos scattered nearby. The carpet on the floor was thin and Zachary could feel the cold concrete beneath it. No subfloor or underlay. It didn’t even go all the way to the walls; it was just a big piece of carpet discarded from some other project that someone had laid down there on top of the concrete to make the room more comfortable. But it didn’t do much to make the room cozy.

  The walls were still bare concrete, and a chill poured off of them. The windows were covered with black garbage bags, eliminating any light or view of the outside.

  Burton stood there looking around, searching for all of the details in his memory. He shook his head at Zachary. “It’s not right. It’s been changed.”

  “People do change things over the years. Replace things, renovate, try to make things more comfortable for themselves.”

  “It was… I don’t know what you call it. Not a crawlspace, but…”

  “Unfinished?” Zachary offered.

  “Unfinished. But…” Burton shook his head. “There was no floor.”

  For an instant, Zachary had a vision of a bottomless pit in the basement. A dark, terr
ifying hole. But he shook his head, reframing it, understanding what Burton was saying.

  “Just a dirt floor? The concrete hadn’t been poured?”

  Burton nodded slowly. “Yeah.”

  “Were there rooms, or was it all just one big area?” If there was no floor, then they wouldn’t have developed the utility room or storeroom. They wouldn’t put up studs for the dividing walls until there was a concrete floor, at least.

  Burton looked around, his eyes uncertain. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Was there storage down here? Maybe it was just a cold room. A root cellar.”

  Burton sat abruptly. Zachary wasn’t expecting it and reached to grab him and help him to the floor, thinking he had stumbled or fainted. Burton sat there on the thinly carpeted floor, looking around him with wide eyes.

  “This is… this is not right,” Burton whispered. He swallowed, looking up at the ceiling and the covered windows, down at the floor, around and around. “Where is… where is the furnace?”

  Zachary glanced around and listened for the hum of the furnace. “Over here.” He walked to a folding door that looked like it was a closet and opened it up. The large furnace was situated behind it, fan whirring loudly. Burton crawled along the floor on his hands and knees until he was at Zachary’s side. He looked up at the furnace. On his knees, he probably had a similar perspective to that he’d had as a boy. Looking up at everything.

  He pushed past Zachary, crawling past the ragged edge of the carpet onto bare concrete once more. He looked at the furnace, all around it, a prominent frown line between his eyebrows.

  He reached and craned his neck around the furnace, trying to see around all sides of it. It was a few inches away from the wall, so there was a small space behind it. Burton touched the wall, touched the sides of the furnace, like a blind person trying to recognize his surroundings. He reached behind the furnace, into the space between the furnace and the outside wall, and Zachary heard something shift.

  17

  Burton’s hands were big and clumsy compared to what they would have been when he had been a small boy of five. He knocked it down, then finally managed to get his fingers around it and pulled out a skinny glass jar. Something that might have previously held olives, pickled onions, or maraschino cherries. He held it close to his eyes, studying the dusty, cobwebby jar. He held it up to show Zachary.

  “What is it?” Zachary asked, afraid at what he might see if he examined it too closely. What looked like pieces of brown, dried leaves filled the first inch of the jar.

  Burton held it in front of his eyes again, then looked at Zachary.

  “Bug jar.”

  “Oh!” Zachary laughed. “Of course. You said that you caught bugs in the basement.” Looking around the room and picturing it the way that it had been when Burton had lived there, with only a dirt floor, he could believe that there had been plenty of centipedes, beetles, and earthworms for a young boy to catch, if he weren’t squeamish.

  Burton put his bug jar carefully to the side where it would not get knocked over, and looked back at the wall. He held his hands flat against the wall and held his nose just an inch or two away from it.

  “Look,” he breathed.

  Zachary got closer, but he couldn’t see anything on the wall and Burton was blocking him from getting any closer.

  “What? I can’t see.”

  Burton backed away until he was out of the little closet. He picked up his jar and motioned for Zachary to go into the closet and have a look for himself. Zachary was much smaller than Burton and it was easy for him to fit into the space. He looked back at Burton, unaccountably worried that Burton was going to close the door on him and imprison him in the small closet.

  He hated closets.

  He swallowed and crawled in on his knees, wanting to get in and out quickly. He pulled out his phone and turned on the flashlight utility. Shining it at the wall, he looked for what Burton had seen.

  Then he saw it. A crayon scrawl across the concrete, almost hidden behind the furnace.

  Bobby

  Aurelia Pace had said that Burton’s name had been Robert. Bobby. He had left his mark there thirty years before and it was still there.

  Zachary’s eyes slid down to the word beneath Bobby to read his last name.

  A different crayon. Maybe it had been red at one point, before all of the dust and dirt had caked around it.

  Allen.

  18

  Bobby Allen,” Zachary said. “That was your name.” He couldn’t help the smile that spread across his face. Burton now knew his full name. Robert Allen.

  They had set out to find the house, but Zachary knew that it had been more than just the house that Burton was looking for. Maybe Burton himself didn’t know, but he was looking for his identity. Who he was. And now he had his name.

  “Bobby Allen,” Burton repeated softly, looking stunned. “My name was Bobby Allen?”

  Zachary nodded. He watched Burton to see if he wanted anything else from the furnace closet and, when he didn’t appear to need anything more, Zachary squeezed back out through the door and closed the folding door over the opening once more.

  “It doesn’t feel real,” Burton said, sitting on the carpet, not looking like he had any intention of ever moving from the spot. “I was here. Me.” He picked up the bug jar and held it in his hand like a treasured artifact, looking down at it with wide eyes. “I caught bugs here. I wrote my name on the wall. This was me. I was here.”

  “Yes.”

  He could see Burton becoming. Changing from the two broken pieces into one. Not one little boy who had lived in a different city and another little boy who had been adopted and raised by the Burtons, but one person who was both. Like Zachary’s dream of the identical twins. Burton was suddenly more than he had been when he entered the house. His history went back further. Another five years. He was now whole instead of missing that piece.

  Burton looked like he was going to sit on the floor for a long time. The woman who had let them in did not come down the stairs and shoo them away, and Zachary hoped she would not. If the strange men wanted to sit in a cold, dimly-lit basement, then let them sit there. Burton had paid well for the privilege. They were out of the way, not underfoot.

  Zachary sat down on the end of the couch closest to Burton. He didn’t want to sit on the hard floor.

  “Do you remember more?” he asked. “Being here again, and looking around, and knowing your name, does that help unlock anything?”

  Burton frowned. His eyes moved back and forth, searching. “There is more… but I can’t quite reach it. It’s closer, but I still can’t quite grasp it.”

  “Maybe it will come over time, as you’ve had a chance to think about it. You might want to consider therapy. They can help you to remember and can help with… emotions it brings up. Because it does. It isn’t like just reading a story in a book. All of the emotions come back.”

  Burton’s eyes flicked over to Zachary curiously. He nodded. “Maybe. I’ve been in therapy before. Can’t say it ever helped me very much.”

  “I know. But it can, if you put the effort into it and find the right therapist.”

  Burton waved this suggestion away. He reached into his pocket to pull out his flask, looked at it, and slid it back away again. He held the bug jar in both hands and looked around the room, eyes wide, drinking it all in.

  “I am Bobby. Bobby Allen.”

  They stayed in the basement of the house for a long time. Zachary took pictures of everything he could think of. He had taken a few pictures upstairs, but Burton did not seem to be interested in the main floor. He was in his element. Downstairs, where he had hunted bugs and scrawled crayon on the walls. He didn’t drink the whole time they were down there.

  Eventually, they made their way back upstairs. The lady of the house looked at them with dark, puzzled eyes, and shook her head. “What were you doing down there for so long?”

  Zachary shrugged. “Just taking some time, collect
ing memories. Thank you for your hospitality.”

  She frowned again and herded them to the front door.

  “Did you want to see the back? Before we go?”

  Burton shook his head. He followed Zachary out, moving slowly, somewhat reluctant to again leave behind the place where he had been a child.

  “You won’t forget it now,” Zachary encouraged. “And you can have whatever pictures you want of it. Do you want me to take one of you standing in front of it?”

  Burton considered, then nodded. It might seem a strange thing to do, but this was the only part of his pre-adoption history he had, so Zachary could understand him wanting to memorialize it in some way. It would help when he looked back later.

  They got back into the car. Zachary could see the biker dude who had stopped them down the street, watching them go.

  As they left the neighborhood, Burton’s flask came out again and this time he gulped down several swallows as if he were dying of thirst. Zachary pressed his lips together and said nothing. Drinking wasn’t going to solve anything. But who was Zachary to say anything about dysfunctional behavior? Burton was who he was, and he would have to work his way out of that trap himself.

  “You want me to drop you back at your hotel?”

  “Could you stay for a while? Have supper with me?”

  Burton didn’t say how he was feeling, and his face was an unreadable mask. His voice didn’t quiver or sound vulnerable when he said it, but Zachary suspected he was probably feeling pretty unstable after finding what he had been looking for.

  “Uh… yeah, I can manage that,” he agreed after consideration. “I’ll need to make a couple of phone calls. Then we can break bread.”

  Burton nodded. He let out a pent-up breath. “Thanks.”

  “Yeah, you bet. It’s a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, huh?”

  Burton didn’t answer, staring out the side window.