The Memory Closet: A Novel (28 page)

“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.

“Here, give it to me.” Jericho reaches for the sheet but Bobo shakes her head.

“I’ll wrap her.” She puts the sheet on the floor outside the closet door, then gets down on her knees beside Windy. Ignoring the stench and the slime of liquid feces all over her, Bobo tenderly lifts Windy out of the sack and lays her on the sheet. She looks at Windy’s face for a moment, reaches down and brushes a strand of hair back off her forehead, then pulls the rest of the sheet over her and stands back up.

“I’ll be right back,” Jericho says. “Susan, hand me …” He gestures to the crutches on the floor, and she picks them up and gives them to him. He puts one under each arm, elbows the back door open and makes his way carefully onto the porch and down the steps.

The screen door slams shut with a bang, leaving Bobo, Mama and me in silence, staring at the brown-stained sheet covering a lump that is an eight-year-old child’s body.

Mama has her head in her hands, crying softly. Bobo doesn’t go to her and pat her on the shoulder. She stands ramrod straight, not looking at her daughter. Instead she turns to me. I can tell she wants to offer comfort, but she doesn’t know how. And I don’t want comfort anyway. I have nowhere inside to put compassion. A howling wind is blowing through the hollow frame of my body, and there’s no solid substance anywhere.

Jericho returns in a few minutes, carrying a handful of things he has retrieved from the station wagon.

He looks at Bobo. “I pulled the car up beside Susan’s on the grass so you can’t see it from the street. I put the tailgate door down. Lay her in the cargo area back there.”

Bobo looks at him like he’s just said something in Chinese.

“Bobo, if you don’t do this, it’s all over right now.”

She casts a glance at Susan, who is no longer crying. She’s just looking at Bobo, her eyes silently pleading.

Bobo crosses slowly to the closet, squats down and lifts the little bundle wrapped in brown-stained white up into her arms. The stench is overwhelming, but Bobo doesn’t react at all, just cradles it as tenderly as a newborn baby. She turns toward the door, and Jericho holds it open for her.

Jericho hobbles out onto the porch as Bobo carries Windy down the steps, leaving Mama and me alone in the kitchen. I’m just sitting quietly, no tears, no emotion. Shock is a wonderful thing.

Mama speaks to me. “Annie, I never meant …”

“Murderer!” I growl the word with such force it slices into my mother’s soul like a rusty can lid. She drops her gaze and looks away.

Jericho and Bobo come back into the kitchen. Without Windy. She’s gone. Just like that, she’s gone. I’ll never see her again.

“Annie,” Jericho says.

I look up at him.

“Annie, I need you to come with me.”

I just stare at him.

“I need you to get the can of gasoline out of the garage and put it in the station wagon, and come with me.” He glances at Mama in a drunken puddle on the floor and then looks back at me. “Bobo’s got to stay here. Somebody has to look after Joel.”

Suddenly, I can hear Joel crying, the tired cry of a child who has been at it for a while. The sound had been there in the background for a long time; I’d just tuned it out.

When I don’t move, Jericho’s steely composure breaks just a little. “I can’t do this by myself! I can barely get around. And Bobo can’t move fast enough. I need somebody who can run.”

I still sit there, staring at him. Unable to connect what he’s saying to some action on my part.

“Annie, get up, Sugar,” Bobo says gently. “This is a family thing, and we all got to do our part.” She pauses, steps toward me, leans over and says in a whisper only I can hear. “You got to go with Windy now. You can’t leave that poor little thing alone, all by herself. She needs you.”

I feel myself stand and walk like a robot past my mother on the floor. Bobo hugs me, but she might as well be hugging a flagpole. Jericho turns and hobbles out the door and I follow him.

The memory movie stopped. I was sitting on the floor beside my bed, and I didn’t know how I got there. My knees probably collapsed out from under me.

The images were still sickeningly, viscerally real, the past overlaid on the present like a double-exposure photograph—television sets on different channels, the volume turned all the way up. I shook my head violently to loosen the memory’s grip on my mind, but it hung on crisp and clear, held me captive in both worlds at once.

I was the adult Anne Mitchell.

I am the little girl in braids.

The adult.

The little girl.

Anne.

Annie.

Me …
me
.

“Windy!” I wailed, a cry of pain and guilt and grief and longing.

Then the double-exposure of memory overlaid on reality, the past on top of the present, gradually resolved into focus.

Anne Mitchell, the 36-year-old woman sitting on the oak hardwood floor; Annie Mitchell, the 11-year-old child sitting on the checkered linoleum floor. Slowly, they merged and became one. A blend of the two. A hybrid.

No, a single completed whole.

That unified Anne Mitchell had just dragged the Boogie Man out of the closet into the light. And everybody knows the Boogie Man goes
poof
when the light hits him. The secret I’d been keeping from myself for 25 years was that my mother had murdered my little sister.

The remainder of the afternoon dissolved into night somewhere out there beyond my awareness. A big orange moon rose into the black sky as I glided in and out of a time warp like some character in a science fiction movie.

I knelt on the hardwood floor beside my bed for hours. Or minutes. Or days. The chronological ordering of time and events was an abstract concept that had no meaning in the fierce, rumbling tumult where Anne and Annie grieved and raged together.

I cried until I couldn’t catch my breath. Sobbed. The tears flowed from some hidden pit of sorrow buried deep inside an 11-year-old child whose broken heart was now my broken heart. I saw with her eyes, lived in her world—a nightmare place made of jagged glass that sliced open my soul.

Eventually, the here-and-now world made its presence known again. Moonlight shining through my window. The cold hardwood floor against my cheek. I sat up, looked around and took a deep, shaky breath.

With the next breath came the realization that Annie and I had unfinished business in this world, which was now her world, too. The death of my little sister in a stinking, hot closet 25 years ago. The murder of Laughs in the Wind.

A crime my mother didn’t commit.

I
stopped in the kitchen doorway and surveyed the disaster. Bobo was preparing a meal—at ten o’clock at night! She’d left to start supper hours ago. What had she been doing?

An incongruous blend of aromas—sweet vanilla, Vicks VapoRub/Mentholatum and raw meat—rode the warm night breeze from the open back door through the kitchen. The Yankee candle flickered on the windowsill; Bobo stood at the sink slicing up a chicken. Her turtle-flipper fingers wielded her precious it’ll-cut-your-thumb-off knife with the skill of a career butcher.

Pieces of raw, skinned chicken lay in the dish drainer and dripped blood into a pink pool beneath it; the chicken skins lay in a pallid, wrinkled pile on the other side of the sink. An egg floated like a yellow life raft in the center of a bowl of milk with the crumbled, oozing eggshell on the countertop beside it. A plate of flour to roll the chicken pieces in after she dipped them in the not-yet-stirred egg/milk mixture sat nearby, but the flour was not confined to the plate. The countertop from stove to sink lay under a quarter-inch blizzard of it. There was even a dusting of white on the floor, encircling Bobo’s feet, like a little kid’s mouth after a powdered sugar doughnut.

Potato peelings were scattered around the kitchen like New Year’s Eve confetti. A black iron skillet rested on the stove with a white dollop of Crisco un-melted in the middle. An almost-empty milk carton lay on its side, dripping a puddle of white onto the counter next to a pile of peeled potatoes, a Granny Smith apple with a bite out of it and the two heels from a loaf of bread.

I’d never seen Bobo prepare a full sit-down dinner in what her internal body clock would consider “the middle of the night.” Or make such a mess cooking it. Maybe she couldn’t concentrate because she was upset about me leaving. It was equally possible that she’d forgotten all about it.

“Bobo, we need to talk.” No sense pussy-footing around it. “I know what happened to Windy. I remember.”

She froze.

“I know Windy didn’t die in the car fire. She died in the closet after Mama put her in there in a garbage bag.” Suddenly, I couldn’t seem to get the words out. “I know Jericho staged the wreck to cover up what happened.”

She turned around slowly and wiped her hands on her apron. Her voice was soft, and she wouldn’t look me in the eye. “You know, then. You know your Mama killed Windy.”

“No, Bobo, I know my mother
didn’t
kill Windy.”

“Well, then you ain’t remembering it right. Your mama put that poor little thing in a garbage bag in that closet and the heat kilt her!” Bobo’s milky blue eyes got a faraway look. “And then Susie spent the rest of her life trying to make up for what she done.”

She hobbled over to the table, pulled out a chair and eased down into it.

“Do you know she never had another drink after that day? Not one, not even a sip of wine. Ever. That’s when she started going to AA.”

Bobo patted the chair next to her at the table. “Come here and sit, child. You’re lookin’ awful peak-ed. This whole thing’s been real hard on you, ain’t it.”

I sat down in the chair heavily.

“Remembering was like being there, Bobo. I could smell the stink and feel the heat. The memory was so
real.”

“Well, your mama believed it was a gift from God you lost that memory, along with all the rest of 'em!” She reached across the table and rested her gnarled hand on top of mine. “Truth is, she was so drunk she only remembered a tiny little bit of what happened her own self, but she lived in mortal terror that one day you was goin’ to, that it was all going to come back to you. She told me you said you hated her, and that near broke her heart. Called her a murderer.”

“I remember saying that. I believed she was. But I was wrong Bobo. You and Mama were wrong, too.”

Bobo blew by that, intent now on making me understand how sorry my mother had been for what happened.

“For the first few years after Windy died, Susan woke up ever' mornin’ wondering if this was going to be the day her precious little girl opened her eyes and it all come back to her. If this was goin’ to be the day Annie remembered her mama was a murderer. And after you moved back to Kentucky when she divorced Jericho, I’d call and the first words out of her mouth was always, ‘She don’t know nothin’, Mama. She still don’t know nothin’.’”

The image of my mother’s smiling face suddenly appeared in my mind. I wanted to cry and rage, to hit her and hug her, to …

“Oh, Mama,” I gasped. “All those years, everything in your life was about guilt. It must have eaten you up.”

Bobo’s eyes welled with tears. “I ain’t never said this out loud, but when that cancer come, I think Susie was glad. I think she
wanted
to die.”

We sat in silence, our hands clasped tight together as tears ran down our cheeks. She grieved a daughter whose life had been defined by an act of unspeakable brutality. I grieved the little Indian girl nobody in the world missed but me.

“And she wasn’t just guilty 'bout Windy; there was Joel, too.”

Bobo’s deep voice was gruff with emotion. “Why, it tore her all to pieces that Joel was retarded.”

“Bobo!”

Why do I still get body-slammed by the awful things Bobo says?

“Joel was developmentally delayed. He has learning disabilities.” I pulled my hand out of hers, reached up and wiped the tears off my face. “He’s dyslexic, too, but he’s not
retarded.”

“Honey, you can call puke perfume, but that don’t change how it smells.” She leaned over and spoke earnestly into my face. “Now, mind, there ain’t nobody in the world any kinder or more lovin’ than your little brother. But you need to shake hands with the truth 'bout him like the rest of us has already done. He ain’t goin’ to get married and have kids and settle down with a family like other men. He’s goin’ to stay a little boy the rest of his life.”

She straightened up and wiped her face on her apron. "Somebody’s always going to have to manage his money for him. He ain’t never goin’ to have no career. He’s going to water plants and trim hedges and do piddley little jobs don’t amount to a hill of beans. We love him anyway, Annie, but that’s the truth of it. Don’t do nobody no good to pretend what’s real ain’t so.”

Bobo never ran from any truth; I’d spent my life running from a whole congregation of them.

She’s right. Joel’s retarded. You can hang whatever politically correct label you want on it, but that’s reality.

She got to her feet and looked around, as if she’d just noticed the kitchen was a bomb zone. “I need to finish fixin’ supper and clean up—”

“I don’t want supper, Bobo. I’m not hungry.”

“Good. I ain’t hungry no more neither.” She sat back down and took up where her mind had left off. “It’s hard even to think of the other Susan, the one that drank and fought with Jericho, knocked furniture around, screamin’ and the like. It’s hard to think the woman who took such good care of you and Joel for your whole lives killed Windy.”

“She didn’t kill Windy, Bobo.”

“Anne, you can’t run from the truth all the time just 'cause it don’t suit you. Joel’s retarded; that’s the truth. Your mama killed Windy; that’s—”

“Not the truth, Bobo! I know it’s not. In fact, I’m the only person left alive who does know—except Jericho. I’m the only one who saw it all. Bobo, I’m telling you: Mama didn’t kill Windy.”

“Well, if she didn’t, who did?”

“Jericho.”

She sucked in her breath and her hands flew to her mouth. “What are you sayin’, child?”

“I’m saying Jericho killed Windy. I have no idea why he wanted her dead, but he must have had a reason because he killed her on purpose. It wasn’t an accident, Bobo. It was premeditated murder.”

Suddenly, I couldn’t sit still. I got up and started to clean the mess in the kitchen while I told Bobo what I’d remembered, how I’d brought Windy water and listened to Mama and Jericho fight on the phone when she told him the police had brought Windy to our house. How I’d marched into Mama’s bedroom to demand she let Windy out of the closet.

“Mama got mad and sent me to my room.”

I didn’t tell her Mama slapped me and threatened to beat me. That was one of a growing list of things I would never tell anybody.

“I could hear Mama through the heat register, downstairs in her room crying. After a while, Jericho pulled into the driveway. I saw him get out of the car. He was on crutches, moving real slow, and I thought at the time that’s why it took him so long to come in the front door. As soon as he did, he and Mama were at each other’s throats.”

I reached under the sink, pulled out the trash can and set it on the floor at the end of the counter. I picked up the chicken pieces and the chicken skins and tossed them into the can and ripped off a paper towel to wipe the puddle of chicken blood.

“I sat there listening to them fight. Jericho was baiting Mama, trying to make her mad. And neither one of them cared that Windy was still in that bag in the closet.”

As I cleaned up the chicken blood, I told her how I’d gone down the back stairs to give Windy more water and found her tied up in the bag.

“Bobo, Mama didn’t stick Windy down in the bag and tie it over her head.” I chucked the dirty paper towel into the trash can and started to clean off the countertops. “She wasn’t
trying
to hurt her. The lawyers on TV cop shows would probably say Mama showed ‘reckless disregard’ for Windy’s safety, but Mama’s primary purpose was to contain her diarrhea so she wouldn’t make a bigger mess of the kitchen.”

I tossed the empty milk carton and the peeled potatoes into the can.

“When I went into Mama’s room after she got off the phone with Jericho, I left the closet door open and Windy’s head and shoulders were out of the sack.”

“Well, then Susan must have gone back in there after you left and tied … “

“She couldn’t have, Bobo. The drawstrings on that sack were tied so tight—three or four knots—that I couldn’t get them untied. I had to rip open the bag with my fingers. Mama was drunk. She could barely stand; she couldn’t have tied a single knot, let alone three or four!”

I threw the eggshell into the trash, poured the milk-and-egg mixture in after it and set the dirty bowl in the sink.

“When could she have done it? Mama was in the bedroom crying. I could hear her from my room. She cried nonstop until Jericho came in the front door and they started fighting.”

Bobo was beginning to get what I was saying, but the whole idea was a train wreck in her head.

I pitched the apple with a bite out of it and the two pieces of bread into the trash and scraped the flour off the plate on top of them.

“Mama never left her room, and she couldn’t have tied the knots in that bag even if she had. I didn’t do it. You weren’t home. Who else was there?”

I set the dirty flour plate in the sink.

“I saw Jericho get out of his car in the driveway. Before he came in the front door, he must have gone around the house to the kitchen door, tied Windy up in the sack and left her in the closet to die.”

I stopped the compulsive cleaning and stood very still.

“I don’t know why he’d want her dead, but I don’t think she mattered to him when she was alive—do you?” I looked into Bobo’s eyes. “Think back on it, Bobo. Do you really think he cared about Windy? I don’t.”

I now had memories of Mama, Windy and Jericho that had emerged from the shadows into the light in my mind. A background of moments and days and circumstances. Body language. Chance remarks. Things seen through a child’s eyes filtered through an adult’s understanding.

“It was the perfect setup for the perfect crime. Everybody— including Mama—thought Mama did it. But she didn’t. Jericho killed Windy, Bobo. I know he did.”

“Well, if you say so, then I guess he did.” Bobo sounded convinced; I’d finally gotten through to her. But the strain of it must have knocked her connection to reality loose. As I watched, it came unplugged altogether.

“You ain’t said nothing to Jericho 'bout all this, have you?”

“No, Bobo, I haven’t had a conversation of any kind with Jericho in 25 years.” I began to pick up the potato peelings scattered all over the kitchen. “And I don’t intend to. I’ll let Dusty do that. Tomorrow morning when Dusty comes by to pick me up, I’m going to tell him that Jericho killed—
murdered
Windy.” I turned and pointed toward the storage closet. “In this kitchen, in that closet, a quarter of a century ago.”

“I don’t think Jericho’ll like you telling Dusty what he done.”

“I’m sure he won’t!” I dropped a handful of potato peelings into the trash can. “As far as I know, there’s no statute of limitations on murder. When Dusty finds Jericho, he’ll arrest him.”

“Well, he won’t have to look far. Jericho’s right here.”

I sighed. “What do you mean, he’s right here?”

“How many things can ‘he’s right here’ mean?” she snapped. “Jericho’s here. I talked to him just a little while ago.”

“Did he bring Edgar with him? And Maria and Butch?” I was trying to make light of it, but I was suddenly uneasy.

“No,” she said slowly. “You know, come to think of it, I ain’t seen Edgar in a long time.” She looked questioningly at me. “You don’t s’pose Jericho … you know, done something to Edgar.”

I smiled, relieved. “Well, you never know, Bobo. Did he say anything about Edgar when you saw him?”

I scraped the dollop of Crisco out of the iron skillet into the garbage can on top of the potato peels.

“Jericho never said nothing 'bout Edgar. He wasn’t here long. He was eatin’ an apple, and when he heard you coming, he left.”

“Well, if he didn’t say anything about Edgar, then …”

Eating an apple.

I looked at the apple with a bite out of it lying with the Crisco, bread, potato peels and flour in the garbage can. What Bobo said the first time she took out her dentures in front of me reverberated in my head.

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

A Granny Smith apple. Jericho’s favorite kind.

Suddenly, all the lights in the house went out.

The kitchen was dark except for the spill of moonlight through the window over the sink and the Yankee candle flickering on the windowsill.