The Memory Closet Read online

  But Granddaddy Cecil’s bid to round out his herd of sons at an even half dozen had been spoiled when the sixth child turned out to be a girl, Susan, my mother.

  All her life, Mama had heard tales about what rascals her big brothers had been and the shenanigans they’d pulled. When the oldest, Sam, was 2, he bit the tail off a neighbor’s Chihuahua. Joel jammed one of his father’s cuff links so far up Richard’s nose they had to take the child all the way to a hospital in Amarillo to get it removed. Ben and Bob, identical twins, constantly traded identities. They took each other’s tests in elementary school; swapped dates, and sometimes girlfriends, in high school. When one got sick, the other ran a fever. Joel liked fast cars and fast women, but none of the boys ever married. They died young. Or had different inclinations altogether.

  Tragedy first struck the family in 1952 right after Mama was born. Sam was 11 and he’d sneaked off with some friends to go fishing in a farm pond. Four-year-old Richard tagged along behind him. When his little brother fell into the murky water, Sam went in after him, even though he didn’t know how to swim. They both drowned. A neighbor told Mama years later that “Katherine come back from the cemetery after burying her boys that day a different woman. No softness in her no more, nothing left but sharp edges.”

  Bob was listed as missing in action when his plane was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967. It was six years before he was confirmed dead and his remains sent home to rest with his brothers in the little prairie cemetery. Granddaddy Cecil died that year, and folks always said it wasn’t a heart attack but a broken heart that killed him. After Joel’s car wreck in early 1974, Mama moved back to Goshen with me to live with Bobo. She figured her mother needed her after burying two sons and a husband in less than 12 months. Mama was single. My father had bailed on us to go play bump and tickle with one of the ticket sellers at Churchill Downs when I was just a baby. It was in Goshen that my mother was swept off her feet by the dashing Jericho Johnson, a man as colorful as his name implied.

  Ben was Bobo’s last surviving son and by all accounts had always been her favorite. Losing him in 1990 almost killed her. And it was how he died, too. Nobody ever said a word about it, everything was hushed up. But he’d been sick for a long time. We all knew he had AIDS.

  I didn’t know how Bobo was dealing with my mother’s death. She had refused to attend the services, said she was through doing funerals, wouldn’t show up at another one until her own. Mama’s death had been sudden. Two months after they found the tumor, she was gone.

  And Mama never said a word about it to Joel or me! She chatted with me every Sunday and Wednesday, talked about recipes or the curtains she was making or Bobo’s antics. The subject of lung cancer never came up. It was just a few days after I discovered somebody staring out at me from my own paintings that I got a call telling me Mama’d been hospitalized in Amarillo. I packed and flew back to the states. Mama died nine days after I got home.

  We held the funeral in Louisville. Mama owned a plot in Cave Hill, a historic cemetery with huge trees, flowering bushes, gardens, statues and a labyrinth of walking paths enclosed in ancient rock fences. She didn’t want to be buried on the empty, windswept prairie where she grew up.

  Dear, sweet Joel couldn’t understand why Bobo wouldn’t go to the funeral. He’d have done just about anything to get her there. He knew Bobo had vowed she’d never get on another airplane after she was almost arrested last Christmas for demanding to take her crochet hooks through security at Dallas/Ft. Worth International Airport. So he called and offered to take a bus to Goshen and fly with her to Louisville.

  He cried when he told me what she said to him: “She told me, ‘I don’t have to see my baby in a box to know she’s dead!’”

  Bobo and I pushed our food around on our plates in silence for awhile, then she shooed me out of the kitchen, wouldn’t let me do the dishes.

  “You ain’t no help. You don’t have no idea (pronounced “eyedee”) where nothing goes. I don’t want to chase around the whole kitchen looking for stuff you put in the wrong place. And I don’t want you foolin’ with my good butcher knife, neither.”

  I hadn’t even made it to the top of the stairs before I heard her talking to somebody. I went into the playroom and closed the door, but Bobo’s voice drifted up from the kitchen through the hot water register on the wall. I’d forgotten that the ancient heating system piped sound from one floor to another in the big old house as effectively as an intercom. I couldn’t make out the words because of my tinnitus, but I could hear the tone—light and cheerful. Every now and then, I heard her laugh.

  She’s talking to Mama!

  Tears sprang into my eyes and this time I didn’t try to hold them back. Oh, how I longed to be crazy, too! How I ached to go back downstairs and sit at the kitchen table with my mother and all her brothers I never met. I’d tell her things I wish I’d said to her when she was alive, ask her questions I never dared to ask. And I’d listen to her soft, soothing voice explain all the mysteries, tell me all the secrets.

  I didn’t expect to sleep well my first night back in my old bed, my old room, in the house I hadn’t set foot in since I hauled our last suitcase out to the car almost a quarter of a century ago, Joel crying and Mama with that funny, bemused look on her face. But when I finally hit the wall, it was all I could do to snag a nightgown out of one of my still-packed suitcases before I fell into the bed. I switched off the night stand lamp and was asleep in seconds.

  The light’s so bright it blinds me.

  Something’s pinching the back of my neck and it hurts and I struggle to get away. The pinching tightens and all at once I’m falling face-first into cold water. It’s so sudden I don’t have time to hold my breath and I suck in a nose full of water and start

  choking.

  But I can’t come up for air.

  Let me up! Let me up, I can’t breathe!

  I kick and struggle, my heart pounding, my lungs bursting.

  And then my head breaks the surface and I gasp, coughing and choking and crying at the same time.

  I see a face, blurred by the water pouring into my eyes. A little girl with blonde braids stands in the doorway. She’s holding a Barbie doll.

  Then, I’m falling forward again. I know what to expect and I grab a breath before my face hits the water. I go deeper this time. My forehead slams into something hard and cold.

  I can’t come up!

  Help! Help me! I scream in my head. I can’t come up.

  Then the pinching on my neck squeezes so hard it’s agony; the pain pulls my head out of the water. Someone’s yelling. A woman is shouting. I’ve heard that voice before.

  I don’t have time for more than one breath before I’m shoved forward again. I know the water’s coming. And somehow I know I won’t come back up for air this time. I open my eyes and see nothing but white all around.

  I kick and struggle; pinchers dig deep into my neck. The last of my breath explodes out my mouth and I watch it bubble away. I scream silently: Noooo! Let me up. Air. I have to breathe! Then I gasp, but there is only water. It fills my nose and mouth.

  Help! Help …

  “… me! Help me!” I shrieked, and sucked in a breath. Air!

  My eyes popped open and I was so disoriented I grabbed the doorframe and slid down it to my knees on the tile floor, trembling violently. My whole body vibrated; my heart thumped so hard I could see the front of my sweat-soaked nightgown jump. I gasped, sucked in one breath after another, like I’d been … I had been drowning!

  I shook my head savagely to clear it. A dream. It had been a dream. No, not a dream, a night terror. A sickeningly, viscerally real night terror.

  I looked around, dizzy, my mind reeling.

  I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.

  Not Kansas. The downstairs bathroom. I was sitting on the floor in the doorway of the bathroom under the stairs in the parlor. Pale light spilled into the darkened parlor from the nearby study, where a lighted globe
of the earth glowed faintly on the table by the door. A nightlight shaped like a butterfly lit the bathroom wall from a socket next to the toilet.

  Even before the how-did-I-get-here? question formed, I knew; I’d been sleep walking again. And not just ambling around in the middle of the night until I stubbed my toe on something and woke up. This time, I’d done some serious cruising, from my bedroom down a huge, curving staircase. And I didn’t remember a single step of it.

  I got to my feet slowly, holding onto the door frame, surprised at how weak my knees felt. I flipped the switch on the wall by the curved railing and climbed the lighted stairs back to the second floor. I paused at Bobo’s closed door across the hall from mine. All was dark and quiet. I slipped into my bedroom and crawled back in between the sheets. They were still warm.

  Then I lay there, staring at the ceiling. I tried not to think about the night terror as my mind flashed video clips from it on 20-foot image-magnification screens behind my eyes. It was going to be a long night; I’d been here before.

  I’d gone to bed every night that I could remember with my own personal Boogie Man in the closet. I was only able to go to sleep because I was certain the door to the closet was locked. Big padlock. No key. Even so, I never slept sound, innocent like other people. Some part of me always stayed alert, ready to wake the rest of me if the pile of dirty clothes and cast-off shoes in front of the closet door ever began to scoot slowly out into the room.

  I could have done something about the Boogie Man. I could have marched into the dark, grabbed the monster by the throat and dragged him back out into the light—where he’d have gone poof and disappeared! Everybody knows a Boogie Man goes poof when daylight strikes him.

  But what happens if the Boogie Man is bigger and stronger than I am? What happens if he traps me or I get lost in the swirling purple dark and can’t find my way back out?

  Fear of the Boogie Man was the wallpaper of my life, the canvas on which every day was painted.

  Over the years, I offered the monster one peace treaty after another, a host of mutual co-existence agreements. If the Boogie Man would leave me alone, I’d leave him alone. Trouble was, the Boogie Man never lived up to his end of the bargain, the leaving me alone part. He was always figuring out new ways to get at me, to reach out of that dark closet into my wide-awake life. Anorexia. Bulimia. Cutting. Withdrawal. Depression. A period when I actually stuttered, debilitating migraine headaches, scary images on the edge of my vision, a knot in my stomach 24/7, sleep walking and night terrors.

  Eventually, I resigned myself to the reality that the Boogie Man would never stop messing with me; I’d spend the rest of my life dealing with his surprise attacks.

  But his last ambush—eyes staring out at me from my own paintings—became the shot heard ‘round the world for me. And what Mama said right before she died—I told myself I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I knew. She was talking about the Boogie Man.

  I lay in the dark in the room of my empty childhood with my heart hammering like a manic woodpecker in my chest. After all these years, I’d finally stopped running. I’d come home, here, to open the closet door. All I had to do was figure out how.

  Chapter 4

  The next morning, I had to stand at the bathroom sink and splash cold water into my face to shock myself alert. Bobo noticed the dark circles under my eyes.

  “You look like death on a cracker.”

  And you stink!

  She must have smeared Mentholatum on her an inch thick— somewhere. The stench made my tired eyes water.

  Placing two vinyl mats on the table, she reached for bowls in the cabinet.

  “You go out cattin’ around last night after I went to bed?”

  “I had a nightmare and couldn’t go back to sleep.”

  I poured a bowl full of the only cereal in the cupboard and added milk and sugar.

  Note to self: buy some Grape Nuts; Rice Krispies is for 5-yearolds.

  Bobo said nothing, just ate her own bowl of cereal in silence. As far as I could tell, she was rational, grumpy but rational. I noticed she had all her clothing on properly, always a good sign. This seemed to be as good a time as any.

  Bobo held the keys to the kingdom. She was present during all those years I couldn’t remember. If I could get her to talk about the past, maybe that would pry memories out of my locked mind. It made more sense than wandering around this old house hoping I’d get inspired by a light fixture or a doorknob. Of course, the land mines were legion.

  “Bobo, can I ask you a question?”

  “That is a question.”

  It took me a moment to get it, then I plunged ahead. “Do you know why I’m here?”

  “Ever body’s got to be somewhere.”

  I put my spoon down carefully and spoke in a quiet, controlled voice. “Look, can we just talk? I’m tired of being the straight man in your vaudeville act—The Amazing Bobo and Her Trained Chimp.”

  Bobo burst into uproarious laughter. Then I got tickled, too, and we laughed together. When we finally wound down, she was beaming at me. Her watery blue eyes almost disappeared in a web of smile wrinkles deep in the sunken hollows of her face.

  “Well, you got some powder in your musket after all! I was beginning to wonder.”

  She reached over and patted my hand with her gnarled, turtle-flipper fingers.

  “You ask anything you want and I’ll answer best as I can. ‘Course, you’ll have to figure out for yourself whether what I’m saying’s true or not. There’s days I don’t know my own self what’s real and what ain’t. Anymore, I can’t swear to nothing.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “I want to know about my childhood.”

  “What about your childhood?”

  “Everything about my childhood.”

  “It’d help if you narrowed it down some.”

  As casually as taking off a pair of sunglasses, she reached into her mouth and pulled out her dentures, the bottom plate first, then the top, and placed them on the red gingham tablecloth between us. I tried not to look at them, but looking at her face was equally disturbing. Everything below her eye sockets had imploded, sunk into a cavern of wrinkled skin below her nose.

  She looks like an Appalachian apple doll.

  “Sometimes, of a night, my gums get all puffy like, and when I get up my teeth’s too tight and I get blisters under the plates … “

  She made as if to show me, but I held my hand up palm out and shook my head no thanks.

  “ … and I got to take them out ‘til the swelling goes down.”

  Her speech had a peculiar, flubbery, toothless sound.

  “Oh, I ain’t complaining; they fit real good. I ain’t bit into a apple in 30 years, but I do better than most.”

  The corners of her cavernous mouth turned suddenly upward.

  Is she smiling? I think she’s smiling.

  I smiled back, just in case.

  “Now, what was it you was asking?”

  My concentration was a train wreck; I’d totally “lost my plot” as the Brits would say.

  Focus!

  “I don’t remember my childhood.”

  “What is it ‘bout your childhood you forgot?”

  “Everything. I don’t have any memories at all of growing up. Didn’t you know that?”

  She got a far-away look in her eyes and then recognition dawned.

  “Your mind went plum blank, didn’t it? I remember now. You was so tore up after … “ She stopped and bowed her head for a moment. When she continued, her deep voice was so soft I had trouble hearing her. “ … the accident. You got the forgets, didn’t you?”

  The forgets. Yeah, that’s right. I got the forgets.

  “I didn’t just forget the accident. I forgot everything.”

  She looked up, startled.

  “My mind erased my whole childhood, Bobo. I remember absolutely nothing before I was kneeling in the dirt and the burning car was in the gulley.”

  “
Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I did know that,” she said, wonder in her voice. “Susan and Jericho was tore all to pieces, too. What happened was so terrible I don’t think nobody paid no attention to you a’tall for awhile.”

  Her rheumy eyes watched the scene in the air in front of her.

  “But later on, Jericho did. That night, Jericho sat you down right there.” She pointed to the chair next to where I was sitting. “He wanted to talk to you about the wreck.”

  I hadn’t thought of it in years, but I remembered sitting at the table with Jericho asking me questions, his face contorted, full of barely controlled emotion.

  “He’d already talked to your Mama and me.” She stopped. “I don’t recollect anymore what he wanted to know.” She tapped her temple with a crooked finger. “Some things is clear as spring water and others is like day-old coffee. Sometimes, I know things and then they just … go away.”

  “Jericho’s questions?” I prompted.

  “I remember it didn’t do no good to ask you questions. When Jericho got done talking to you, we’d all figured out you didn’t know nothing ‘bout nothing.”

  The wreck that killed my little sister was the event that slammed the door on my childhood. It had to be all tangled up with whatever was hiding in the closet.

  Do I have to go there? I absolutely, 100 percent do not want to hear that story.

  My hands were sweating. I was surprised they weren’t shaking, too; the rest of me was. But I had to calm down. I suspected that if I upset her, Bobo wouldn’t tell me anything. I slowly let out my breath and asked the question calmly, almost casually.

  “What happened that day, Bobo?”

  At first she looked puzzled, like she was rummaging through a cluttered attic full of memories. “I don’t know … “