A Thief in the House of Memory (18 page)

“You shouldn't blame yourself,” he said. “It must have been a shock.”

“I'm not talking about your father's confession!” she said. Her face looked ravaged, her eyes desolate. “Dec, I've done a terrible thing.”

He approached her slowly, took her arm and led her into the room. She came timidly, sniffing and searching in her pockets for a tissue. She was wearing one of his father's cardigans. Mrs. Rogers. He pulled out the chair from his desk and sat her down, her face ghastly in the mica-tinted light. She shivered. He found a blanket and wrapped it clumsily around her shoulders.

“Thank you,” she said, barely audible.

“You want to tell me about it?”

“You're not going to like it.”

Dec pulled over a small yellow chair from the Lego table and sat at her feet. “Probably not,” he said. “But I don't know how much worse things can get.”

Her eyes told him a lot. And with his own eyes he said, I'm ready.

“I didn't mean to be spying on you and your dad,” she said. “I came downstairs to see if you wanted a cup of tea. I was glad you were talking. There's been so much
not
talking lately.” She blew her nose and then jumbled up the wet tissue in her hand.

He couldn't remember if he had ever seen her so un-put-together. She bit her lip. She wiped her bloodshot eyes. Then she dug something out of the cardigan pocket. It was a compact disk. She handed it to him.

“It's from Lindy,” she said.

Dec didn't understand. Lindy had sent him a CD? Then he looked at the picture on the cover. It
was
Lindy. He held it near the lamp. Lindy's face almost filled the cover. It might have been the greenish yellow light, but she looked older, thinner in the cheek. Her eyes seemed paler than he recalled, but there was wind and sunlight in her hair, and she was smiling at something she saw in the sky.

“It arrived in late November.”

“Last
fall?”

“From California.”

He read the title.
“What I Can.”

Dec flipped over the CD. There was another picture. Lindy standing in a field with a guitar in her hand and the sea in the background. It wasn't her old guitar. This one was blue, the same blue as the shard of sea beyond the yellow grass. The same blue as her eyes. She looked worn down. There was a handwritten song list.

He stared at Birdie, not understanding.

“A friend of hers produced it,” she said. As if that explained anything.

“This is great,” he said, wanting it to be so and knowing it wasn't. “Why didn't you show it to me before?”

Birdie pressed her lips tightly together. Dec clutched the CD in both hands and stared at it, willing his mother to speak to him. Then Birdie handed him something else — a cream-coloured envelope.

“This came in March,” she said.

He didn't want to take it. He had a powerful sense that there was nothing in it he wanted to hear. She prodded his arm with it until, finally, he snatched it from her. He held it for a long moment before opening it.

It was handwritten but it wasn't Lindy's hand — someone named Anna. He held the letter near the light and started to read. He didn't get far.

Lindy was dead.

There were other words on the cream-coloured page but that was the only one he took in. Dead. But then he had
already half guessed that from the strange look in Birdie's eyes.

“Lindy sent the CD to
me,”
said Birdie. “Not to Bernard, not to you. She sent it to the salon. I don't even know how she knew about the salon. But she did.”

Dec tried to give her back the letter. She wouldn't take it. He put it on the desk. Then he got to his feet, in case she tried to take back the CD. Wasn't that what she was telling him? That it was hers? That she had something over him, over all of them?

“This Anna — she was the one who produced the album. They were friends, I guess. She must have got the salon address from Denny. They kept in touch, Denny and Lindy. I guess we all know that now.”

Dec was only half listening. Who cared? What difference did it make? Lindy had cut an album and died all in a couple of minutes. He stared at the cover. A moment ago it had seemed like a gift. Now it was a casket. A tiny transparent casket.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“Because I didn't tell anyone. Not about the CD, not about her dying.” Birdie took in a deep breath and then gave it back to the still room. “And not about the other letter, either.”

Again she reached into the pocket of the cardigan, and Dec wondered how deep those pockets were, how many more sorrows she was going to dig up.

This letter was on the same stationery, but the writing was Lindy's, and the envelope was addressed to Bernard Steeple. Dec peered at Birdie in disbelief.

“What can I say?” she said. “The damn thing arrived on a Monday. About a year ago. A Monday. The one day of the week I'm home. By sheer luck — if you can call it that — I was the one who went out to get the mail that day. I knew who it was right away, soon as I saw the handwriting. Maybe I'd always expected it. Anyway, I told myself it was fate that I should be the one who found it first.” She looked down. “Read it,” she said, as if tired of making any more excuses.

The letter was dated August 3.
Dear Bernard
, it started.
I hope you're sitting down!
Dec couldn't read any more. “Just tell me,” he said wearily, folding the letter back up and shoving it in the envelope.

“She was looking for money,” said Birdie. “She had a chance to make this CD and so she was hitting up Bernard. I was so mad, I didn't know what to do. She said she'd been sick, in the hospital a couple times, but she was doing okay and this project was her one big chance to grab onto her dream.”

“So it wasn't just about money.”

“She didn't spell it out, Dec. I didn't know how sick. All I knew was that here she was, again, out of the blue, looking for something.”

Dec stared at Birdie. “She was your best friend.”

“Don't remind me.”

“Was she asking for a million dollars?”

“No. And it wasn't the money, anyway. Bernard's money is his business. I didn't tell him because I was afraid. Afraid that if he got that letter, he'd go to her.”

“You don't know that.”

“I
did
know it, inside,” she said, poking herself in the chest. “And what I learned tonight only proves I was right.”

“It doesn't prove anything,” said Dec, shaking his head sadly. “You didn't trust him.”

She squinted at him through eyes swollen half shut with crying.

“Look who's talking about trust,” she said. Dec looked away.

“Oh, don't listen to me, Dec,” she said. “It's Lindy. Trust gets kind of tied up in a knot where she's concerned. I'd trust your dad to the end of the world, except when it came to her. Anyway, when the letter arrived last August, I told myself, if she doesn't hear from him, she'll try again. But she didn't. Then when the CD arrived, I figured, well, that's that. She found the money some place else. Great. I didn't feel so guilty. I told myself I saved Bernard a lot of heartache.” She looked straight at Dec. “You read that letter from Anna and try to imagine how guilty I felt when I learned the truth.”

They sat, the two of them, in the glow of the little lamp on the desk. An antique flying saucer. The future as it was imagined in the past.

Some time passed. The night moved a little farther along the path to day.

“Did you tell him tonight?”

She shook her head.

“So why are you telling me?”

“I needed to talk to someone,” she said. “Whatever the consequences. I couldn't go on feeling like this. Jealousy is an evil, evil thing. There's no excuse for what I did. But, if you can believe it, I was thinking about your father, too. And you and Sunny.”

“That was kind of you.” He couldn't keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

She smiled wryly. “I watched you cry your little heart out after Lindy took off. You probably don't remember. I tried to comfort you. I tried to comfort Bernard. About the only one I made any progress with was Sunny. Then, bit by bit, you accepted that I was here to stay and we figured out how to get along. We
have
gotten along, Dec. And, bit by bit, your dad came around, too. I couldn't bear the thought of Lindy getting her claws in him again.”

Birdie sighed. She put her hands on her knees and laboriously climbed to her feet. Whatever guilt she might have unburdened, she was weighed down with still more.

“So what am I supposed to do?”

She shook her head. “Whatever you want.”

“Is this supposed to be our little secret? Because I'm sick of secrets.”

“Tell me about it.”

“So?”

She held her hands out at her sides. “I honestly don't know. Tell your dad if you like. I don't care.” She headed towards the door. She stopped and leaned against the door-jamb. Then she turned to look at him. “You're a good kid, Dec. I know I let you down. All I can say is I'm sorry.”

Dec was too worn out to speak. She left, and after a moment he followed her to the door. From the railing he saw her shadowy figure cross the entrance hallway and leave the big house. He listened to her car drive off, listened until it was out of earshot. And he wondered just how far she would go.

T
HERE WAS ANOTHER
picture of Lindy inside the liner notes. She was sitting, leaning against a tree in her suede jacket with the eight-inch cowgirl fringe. There was a cigarette between her lips and she was writing something. Under the picture was a little poem and the play list:

This is how I got here, this is who I am.
Don't always do what's smart or good,
Just do the best I can.

He read the play list.

Killing Me with Kindness
No Room to Grow
Wildcat Love
The Boy I Left Behind
Sunshine
Troubled Me
Out of Eden
The Way of Stone and Sorro
Anna
The Water Is Wide

He couldn't see her face in the picture — it was lost in smoke. It was the jacket he found himself thinking about. He remembered playing with the fringe of it. He remembered how soft it felt. He remembered tracing the Indian embroidery with his finger.

He lay down now in his big red shoe of a childhood bed, with the map-of-the-world comforter pulled over him and his head resting against her picture.

H
E FOUND A
stepladder in the basement. He climbed up to the bust of Plato and carefully — oh, so carefully — laid the statuette on its side. He reached into the cold emptiness of Plato's neck, up into the cavity of his bronze head. There was a little pocket there, made, as far as he could tell, out of paper and glue. There was nothing in the pocket. He hadn't expected there to be.

When Dec went down to Camelot, the Beetle sat in its customary spot in the driveway and Birdie was asleep on a couch in the living room, Sunny was stretched sideways right across the master bed, and his father was scrunched up in Sunny's frilly four-poster, presumably driven there by hard little feet. It was as if the storm of the night before had swept the whole family up and distributed them higgledy-piggledy all over the place. But no one had travelled farther than Dec.

Dec made himself breakfast. The sun poured in like honey on his toast and made his orange juice glow like some
thing with a current running through it. He made a big pot of coffee. He didn't drink coffee but he had a feeling others might need it.

He couldn't explain it, but he felt good. He had found his mother last night. Found her and lost her all in a matter of minutes. Then he had slept deeply and dreamlessly, or so he thought. But leaning against the counter looking out at the crisp yellowness and lush greenness and electric blueness of early June, he wondered if maybe he had been dreaming after all. For he had the strangest feeling, that Lindy had come to him, all played out and not angry any more, and tucked him in one last time. He felt somehow that he had her permission to let her go. After all, she had died a long time ago, really. He had grieved her passing when he was still living in the room with his name on the door. He had built her a boat to carry two when she was not there to sail it any longer. He had missed her and gotten over it.

The smell of coffee wafted through the house, and Birdie stirred from her nest of blankets in the living room. He heard her swear. He heard her fingernails clicking as she scrabbled on the coffee table for something. Her cellphone. He heard her talking to Kerrie, asking if she would open up the salon. By the time she had punched the Off button, Dec was standing in the living-room entranceway with a cup of coffee.

“I figured you might need this,” he said.

She seemed almost shy, pulling a blanket across her, as if he had never seen her in her old cotton nightie.

“Thank you,” she said, avoiding his eyes. A stiff wing of her hair sticking out at a weird angle distracted her, and she cursed again. She grabbed a fistful of it. “This is going to require major surgery,” she said. He was glad to hear her sound like the Birdie he knew. Chewbakka with bedhead. Maybe last night had just been a bad dream. Or maybe he had travelled even farther than he thought. She hefted herself up off the couch. She took the coffee from Dec with a grateful nod.

“Life goes on,” he said.

She drove him to school. She placed a freshly picked spray of lilac in the little vase on the dashboard of the Beetle. She had new country on the stereo. Someone was singing about what you have to do to fix a broken heart.

“You were asking your dad about a missing yearbook,” she said, when they were on the road. “I took it. I was showing Sunny some pictures of her mom and I happened to glance at the stuff kids had written on the autograph pages. There was something of Denny's I didn't want Sunny to see.”