FORTY-SIX
He’d come back from school and immediately sucked up the last of the blunt he and Zack had lit up behind the bleachers, stepping over used condoms and crushed Budweiser cans.
Weed helped him remember stuff.
He was conducting a kind of experiment.
Toking up and going back to the scene of the crime. Well, technically the crime had taken place outside, somewhere between their house and what used to be Toni Kelly’s. The scene of whatever it was he couldn’t remember.
Things had been poking through lately. Not anything he could actually get his head around. It was like finding those jigsaw pieces he’d forgotten to throw back in the box as a kid—the ones that’d turn up under his bed or mixed in with his plastic Ice Age characters. Scrat, Stu, and Diego the saber-toothed tiger. Was that blue puzzle piece part of the sky or the ocean?
After he’d been sprung from the loony bin—sorry, school—it had taken a while to defog. To come off those horse pills that had seriously screwed with his senses.
It was a little like that now—the fog lifting, so to speak. Ever since she’d shown up.
The experiment would go as follows:
He’d load his brain up on the last of the Skywalker OG—check—walk into his sister’s room—check—then see if anything jogged the old memory bank.
Okay, he’d tried this before without the aid of illegal substances. Shhhhh . . . Peeking into the room at night while she’d been sleeping, as if looking at her on the bed would be like looking at Jenny. Would tell him something he desperately needed to know.
She was out of the house somewhere today—he had a vague memory of hearing them all leave early this morning—voices, doors closing, and the rumble of a car headed down the driveway—like at the crack of dawn, interrupting his dream early. Which maybe was fortuitous—one of last week’s vocabulary words—since his dream sucked. Even though it seemed familiar, like those dreams everyone has of walking into school naked. This dream wasn’t like that—it was all his—but he could swear he’d dreamed it before. Filled with snakes. And fire.
Let’s see . . .
The thing is, the room was different than back then. Not just absent the wide-screen TV and cluttered work desk, but with a different bed that he was pretty sure had been in a different place. Yeah, Jenny’s bed had faced the door back then—so when you opened the door she’d be staring right at you—but this new bed was kind of sideways to the door. Maybe that meant the experiment was working—he was remembering the way the room used to look, which was a start, setting the stage, so to speak.
He tapped his forehead as if he was knocking on a door asking to be let in.
It worked. Sort of.
He suddenly remembered . . . hiding.
Huh . . . ?
He was pretty much doing the opposite of hiding right this second—standing in the middle of the designated crazy girl’s bedroom in broad daylight—but in this memory of his, he had the definite sensation of hiding from his sister, Jenny.
Hiding where . . . ?
Behind the maple tree in their backyard? One, two, three, get off my old man’s apple tree . . . No. They used that tree for running bases, where you had to tear ass from one base to the other—the maple tree to the white fence—while trying like hell not to get tagged.
Underneath the back porch? No way. Ben used to avoid even looking under the back porch because who knew what was down there? Rats maybe.
Wherever it was, it’d been pure black. Not black as in the absence of memory, but black as in the absence of light. And it had smelled like ass.
Okay . . .
Dead leaves?
Peat moss—the dung-smelling crap his dad used to spread around the yard before winter?
Bird shit?
Mothballs.
The distinct odor of mothballs was suddenly front and center as if someone had rolled them out there onto the floor. Right under his nose.
A smell similar to if not exactly the same as dead skunk—which they used to catch plenty of whiffs of on the way to the lake every summer, rolling up their car windows and holding their noses till they were far enough away.
The basement closet.
Wait a minute. He was getting mixed up. His dream had a closet in it, didn’t it? He’d been stuck in a closet in his dream.
So why did he remember hiding in the basement closet for real?
Because they’d been playing . . . hide-and-seek. Yeah.
Jenny and him.
He felt a sudden sharp pang under his ribs.
Why?
It felt less like hiding and more like, well . . . being trapped.
He’d once worn a real straitjacket for Halloween, which after a while he’d begged Zack to get the fuck off him, because he’d had trouble breathing. As if the straitjacket wasn’t strapping his arms to his chest but literally crushing it. Like he was being buried alive.
This memory of hiding was like that.
His mind on pot was like a pinball machine, he thought, one memory kind of bouncing off another, its trajectory directed by that particular memory onto the next one. He had to trust the process.
Let me out!
He suddenly heard himself at eight years old, as if he’d inadvertently stumbled onto an old video locked on autoplay. Hey there, little Ben.
That’s what he’d been shouting that morning.
In the closet.
Hearing it as clearly as if he were suddenly standing on the other side of the door.
And then he suddenly remembered.
What happened.