The Memory Closet: A Novel (22 page)

Then I lay on my back on the bed and stared at the ceiling as the daylight faded. Every time my mind wandered anywhere near the events of the last two days, I poked it hard with a cattle prod and yanked it back to other images, better memories.

The time Mama, Joel and I had a picnic on the floor in front of the TV, pretending we were on a beach in Florida while sleet pecked at the windows.

Joel on his first day of school, a gap-toothed wonder with his hair parted and combed to the side, slicked down with some kind of greasy gunk they probably don’t even make anymore.

Windy and I on bikes, riding free.

Before it got dark, I turned on every light in the room, both the bedside lamps, the overhead fixture and the lights in the bathroom. Then I curled up in the middle of the bare mattress on the bed and went to sleep.

A
bird chirping woke me. Actually, it was not a solitary bird, it was a whole herd of them, baby birds, not softly warbling a haunting whippoorwill melody but bleating a raucous, demanding
chirp, chirp, chirp!

I opened one eye and squinted. My bedroom faced east. As soon as the sun came up over the trees across the street, it fired a shaft of sunlight through the small space between the outside edge of the blinds and the frame of my bedroom window. Laser-beamed it in a direct line to the pillow on my bed. To my face on the pillow. Directly into my left eye.

The birds chirped and the sun began to light the room and I lay in the bed perfectly still. I didn’t want to move, to make even the smallest ripple in the air. Because at that moment I felt good, and if I stirred, I’d break some kind of spell and the pit bull of terror would sink its teeth into my soul again.

But finally I couldn’t stand it any longer and turned my head just an inch to get the dust-freckled sunbeam out of my eye. Something moved on my upper arm! Something tickled. Instantly hyper alert, I tensed to leap out of the bed and swat whatever had crawled across my arm off onto the floor where I could stomp it, crush it with my bare feet, smash …

It was just my hair! A lock of hair on my shoulder had fallen down on my arm when I moved. I had just imagined it was a spider.

I stop breathing.

Imagined.

My hair on my arm. The light cord in the wall. A black sock on the floor. Those were real. The rest …

I sat up slowly and looked around, a baby chick fresh out of the shell. The room was bright; I’d left all the lights turned on last night, and the morning sun was glowing golden through the blinds. The armoire in front of the door. The bedside table. The old spindle rocker by the window. The sheets and comforter piled on the mirrored dressing table by the bathroom door. There were no spiders on anything. There were no spiders lurking under the bed or hiding on the windowsill behind the blinds.

There were no spiders at all. There never had been. I had imagined them.

My heart went into overdrive. Suddenly, I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs because all I could manage were little gasps. I felt sweat form on my brow; my nightgown began to stick to my body. I had imagined the spiders! They weren’t real!

Was it possible to be elated and terrified at the same time? Somehow I managed it.

I wanted to whoop in relieved joy that I didn’t have to hide anymore, didn’t have to look behind every piece of furniture, jump at every shadow, constantly scan the floor, on the alert for an army of giant tarantulas. I shuddered. There was no army of spiders. I’d just imagined that there was.

Which scared me to death!

Recognition flooded my brain like a rain-swollen river blowing through the sandbags and spreading out on the surrounding fields. I imagined the spiders. They weren’t real. Which means …

I burned down the garage for nothing!

I covered my mouth with both hands and proceeded to hyperventilate. I’d poured gasoline on the garage and set it on fire—to kill imaginary spiders.

Guess I don’t have to worry anymore about going crazy. My train just pulled into the station in la-la land the conductor’s yelling, “Last stop for the dotty, daft and demented—everybody out!”

I sat trembling on the bare mattress as reality grabbed a handful of randomly firing synapses, and understanding raced across the connection to the higher centers of my brain. I had been
hallucinating
.

What had happened to me certainly met all the criteria. I saw spiders. I heard the big one scratching behind the chest freezer. I felt them crawling on me, biting me.

Goosebumps popped out on my arms at the memory. Saw, heard, felt. Sensory input. False sensory input. Experiencing an event that was not occurring in the real world. The attack of the giant spiders—
sounds like a horror movie title
—never really happened. It had been a hallucination.

But I hadn’t stopped at mere hallucinating. I’d mindlessly followed the directive that had dropped into my head, so clean and clear:
Burn it! Go on. Do it, Annie. Set it on fire.
The same profound sense of déjà vu washed over me that I’d felt standing outside the garage, waiting for spiders to crawl out from under the door.

I shook my head in awe and wonder at the enormity of what I had done. Anne Mitchell had burned down the garage! Burned it to the ground.

I did, didn’t I? The garage did burn down, right? Or did I imagine that, too?

It was still so early Bobo wasn’t awake yet. I squeezed though the small space my bedroom door would open, tiptoed into the studio and looked out the back window.

I suppose I expected to see a tidy charred spot where the garage used to be, like a round pile of ash the morning after a campfire.

Reality was more like a bomb crater. In fact, the whole backyard looked like it had taken a direct hit in a mortar attack.

A huge pile of charred rubble now occupied the back corner, outlined by blackened support post stumps sticking out of the concrete foundation like a row of rotted teeth.

I could pick out a few recognizable objects in the garage’s gutted carcass—charcoal replicas of a chest freezer, a ladder, a wheelbarrow and a set of metal shelves. I spotted two black lumps that might once have been plastic trash cans. The rest was ash and charred timbers.

The trees on the back and side of the pit of blackened earth were badly seared. The rest of the yard was a mess, too. At least half of Bobo’s garden lay in ruins, trampled by firemen into the mud created by the fire hoses. A pig-wallow had replaced the lawn in front of the garage, and muddy grooves stretched out of sight down the side of the house, gouged by the fire truck when it drove up the stretch of grass that once had been a driveway.

The devastation was absolutely stunning. I sucked in a strangled gasp of air and made a little squeaking sound that was enough to set Petey off.

“Hello. Goodbye. PeteyPeteyPetey. Pretty boy.”

I backed away from the window, turned and ran to my bedroom, closed the door behind me and leaned against the wall beside it trying to catch my breath.

What have I done?

There was a knock at the door and I jumped.

“Annie, are you awake? I thought I heard you up.” It was Bobo, and she sounded so sad, so alone I wanted to cry.

“I’m up, Bobo.”

“Honey, can I come in? I want to see how you’re doin’.”

I’d have to let her in eventually, but I had to keep her out long enough to set the room in order.

“Would you get me an ice pack for my head first? My headache’s almost gone but that sure would feel good.” I reached up and felt the lump where the rake had clocked me. Maybe an ice pack really would feel good.

“I’ll be right back with it,” she chirped and shuffled toward the stairs. I quickly put the sheets and comforter on the bed, but I couldn’t get the leverage I needed to slide the armoire back down the wall where it belonged. If I unloaded it, I might be able to lighten it enough so I could move it. Right now, I’d have to settle for getting it out into the room far enough so the door would open all the way.

I squeezed behind the armoire and shoved it slowly away from the door. Once I’d moved it out far enough, I sat down on the floor, braced my back against it and pushed with both feet. I’d just have to come up with some plausible explanation to give Bobo for why the armoire was in the middle of the room. Nothing leapt to mind.

There was a soft, timid knock, and I hopped into the bed.

“Come in, Bobo.”

Bobo stepped into the room in her nightgown and robe, carrying a zip-lock bag full of ice cubes wrapped in a dish towel. As soon as she saw me sitting in the bed, looking at least mildly normal, a big, toothless smile lit her face.

“Here it is, got it all wrapped up for you. I…” She noticed the armoire and stopped, looking it up and down as I scratched through an assortment of lame explanations.

“You hadn’t ought to be moving that thing,” she scolded. “You’ll throw your back out.”

Then she hobbled over to the bed and insisted on positioning the ice pack on my head.

“Why, you got a lump big as a plover’s egg up here,” she said, and I winced when she touched the bandage on top of it.

“That’s what started my headache. I pulled a hammer off the top of the bookcase onto my head.”

The key to good deception is consistency.

She flinched just like Dusty had at the mental image.

“Lucky you didn’t crack you skull open.” She said it almost cheerily, though. My visible injury was proof that I’d really had a reason to lock myself in my room for two days.

She worried the ice pack back and forth until its position finally suited her. She was just using the ice as an excuse to fuss over me, to stay near me.

“I’ve put me some more water in them ice trays, and it’ll make another batch pretty soon.” Her toothlessness gave her speech that familiar flappy sound. “I ain’t never timed how long it takes, but if you need more before it’s ready, there’s lots of ice on the sides of the freezer—needs defrosting somethin’ fierce—and I could take me a knife and chip off some chunks.”

I patted the side of the bed next to me.

“Sit down, Bobo.”

She sat, examining my face with her cloudy blue eyes.

I took her gnarled, knobby hand in mine, felt the tissue-paper thin skin and I was suddenly so overcome with emotion I was afraid to speak. This woman was 84 years old. She had watched everybody she loved die, one by one. She deserved peace in her remaining years. She didn’t need the stress I’d brought into her life.

“I’m sorry, Bobo.” My words were thick with unshed tears.

“Sorry for what?”

“Sorry I came here. Sorry I’ve turned your life upside down with my questions and my craziness.” I looked deep into her milky eyes, yearning for her to believe me. “As God is my witness, Bobo, I promise I never thought anything like this would happen.”

“What
is
happenin’, Anne?”

I looked away. “I don’t know.”

What could I say? That I’d set the garage on fire because giant spiders had attacked me. And just that flash of memory, the thought of them on me, biting me, drained what little color there was out of my face.

“Annie, you’ve gone white as a sheet!” I hated the fear I heard in her voice. “What’s wrong with you, Honey?”

Oh, how I yearned to slam the door and throw the deadbolt, to keep her at a safe distance. But I pushed through the instinct.

This sweet old lady has a right to more than the top two inches of who I am.

“I’m having hallucinations. I’m seeing things that aren’t really there.”

Bobo’s eyes grew wide. “What things?”

Nope, I couldn’t go there, absolutely couldn’t go
there!
Couldn’t think about the spiders, couldn’t talk about them. I started to tremble.

“Anne?”

Bobo was alarmed. I was making things worse. I yanked my mind away from the garage, forced myself to focus.

“It doesn’t matter what I saw, could have been daisies and butterflies. The point is, what I saw wasn’t really there.”

“You ain’t seen no daisies and butterflies. You was scared to death. What did you see?”

I took a deep, shaky breath. “I don’t want to think about what I saw. What I saw isn’t the issue. I saw—and heard and felt— something that wasn’t real.”

The ice pack began to slide. I reached up, took it off and laid it on the bed beside me. Then I lifted my eyes to meet hers.

“But it
was
real! In my mind, what I saw was as real as you sitting there.” My voice was shaky and I stopped and took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Only it wasn’t real. None of it. I had a hallucination. And I don’t know why, or what to do about it.”

Bobo sat very still. I said nothing. The silence between us drew out, but I didn’t have any words left to fill it.

“Annie … the garage … did you … ?”

In for a penny, in for a pound.

“Yes, Bobo.” It was barely a whisper; I had no breath. “I set the garage on fire … “ Suddenly, the rest just poured out. I grabbed at it, desperate to keep it in, but I didn’t have the strength to hold on and the words slid through my fingers in a strangled sob. “ … to kill the spiders!”

There, I’d said it, and the words so shocked me I felt lightheaded, like I might faint. Then I burst out crying, so hard my whole body shook.

“I thought the garage was full of giant spiders, Bobo.” I shivered involuntarily. “They were all over me, crawling on me, biting me!”

Bobo’s hands flew to her mouth. “Spiders! Oh, sweet Annie, no.”

“That’s what I thought I saw.” I hugged myself, my fingers digging into my upper arms, and rocked back and forth in the bed with my head thrown back, sobbing. I shuddered at memories still so real they made me nauseous.

“Spiders,” I whispered to the ceiling with tears running out of my eyes and into my hair.
“Spiders.”

“And you burned it, poured gasoline on it and—?”

“I had to!” I heard myself shouting, but I couldn’t stop. “Don’t you see? I had to. I had to kill them before they killed me, before the big one that smelled like a rotting corpse—”

The shock and fear on Bobo’s face stopped me cold. All the energy drained out of me. I put my head in my hands and continued to cry, softly now, tired and defeated. Saying it out loud like that, it sounded so
crazy
.

That’s because it is crazy.

“I’m sorry, Bobo,” I choked out the words. “I’m so sorry.”

She reached over and pulled my hands away from my face and held them firmly in hers.

“You look a’here at me, young lady.” I lifted my eyes. “Now, you listen up; you ain’t got nothin’ to be sorry for. You hear me! That garage belonged to me, and I’m glad it’s gone. I never did like it. Fact is, I been thinking 'bout burning it down my own self.”

“Bobo, you can’t tell anybody!” I looked around for something to wipe my face and picked up the dishcloth wrapped around the icepack. “Especially not Dusty. It’s bound to be against the law to set a building on fire, and I’d just as soon not go to jail right now.”