A Thief in the House of Memory (10 page)

His father stopped on the porch and turned slowly back.

“How what?”

“How'd you break your watch?”

His father's hurt expression deepened. “I don't understand.”

“It's a simple question, Dad. A guy wears a watch every day, then suddenly he's not wearing it.”

His father glanced again at his wrist. “I broke it when I was building the wall in my shop, okay? Why do you want to know?”

Dec rubbed his face. “Forget it,” he said. But from the look in his father's eyes, he didn't look as if he was going to forget it any too soon.

With one last worried glance back at Dec, he left. Dec watched him until he had disappeared over the lip of the hill. Then he closed the door and leaned his forehead against it,
his eyes closed. In the dark of his mind he saw his father, his hand grasping the neck of a bronze statuette. He saw him raise the thing high in the air and bring it down with such force on the back of Denny Runyon's head that the watch on his father's arm flew apart.

He opened his eyes with a start.

A rattling sound interrupted his thoughts. It came from inside. He listened, heard a low murmuring: Lindy talking to herself. Or so he thought. Then he wondered if she was talking to someone else, though no one answered her. He peered through the crack of the vestibule door.

She was in the front hall, standing on a stepladder in her flouncy wedding dress and a black cowboy hat. The ladder was near the bookcase. She must have been kneeling on the topmost step because the chiffon of the dress fell down around the ladder, making it look as if she had absurdly long, aluminium legs. He almost laughed but stopped himself. He was upset with her. Why hadn't she come to meet the bus? She always met him at the bottom of the hill. What was she doing up on a ladder talking to herself?

Then he realized she was talking to one of the busts that stood on the top of the book cabinets. She was eye to eye with it — the one with the broken nose and the scowling face. She had one hand on the shelf for balance; the other hand was stroking the statue's bronze head. She was so close — whispering close — and it almost looked to Dec as if she was going to kiss it.

“Mom?”

She jerked her hands away and teetered on her perch.

“Mom!” he cried, afraid she was going to fall.

“Dec,” she said, when she had recovered her balance. “Jeez, you scared me!” She clambered down the steps and turned to him, brushing her hands together, rubbing them down the front of her dress. “Is it so late?”

“What were you doing?”

Her eyes grew large, as if she was holding back a joke. She looked up at the bust and then back at Dec.

“I was sharing a little secret with Mr. Know-it-all,” she said at last.

Dec looked up at the grim face. “What secret?” he asked.

She came and gave him a brisk hug and a smacking great kiss right on the top of his head.

“It wouldn't be a secret if I told you,” she said brightly. She rubbed at the fingers of her right hand. They were grimy but the substance came off easily enough in rubbery strands.

“Tell me,” he said.

She put her hands on her hips as if she was angry. “So now I've got two men around the house I have to answer to,” she said, tapping her foot. “And all the time I thought you were on my side.”

“I am,” he said. “Tell me what the secret is.”

The cowboy hat was a child's thing with a string under the chin to hold it in place. There was a black-and-white whistle attached to the end of the string. Lindy put the whistle between
her lips and blew three times. Dec stepped back, covering his ears.

“Oh, sorry,” she said. “I thought you were deaf.”

“I'm not deaf.”

“Well, then don't keep asking me what the secret is. It's private. A girl's got to have some privacy. Don't you think?”

He nodded but he was confused. Didn't she trust him any more? “I never tell Daddy any of our secrets,” he said. “Honest.”

She smiled and made a kissy face. “I know you don't, Skipper.”

Her hands cradled his face. She smoothed back his hair. “My, my,” she said, combing it out with her fingers. She took it in her hands on either side of his head and pulled it out like bird's wings. She pulled and pulled.

“Owww!”

She stopped and leaned forward until she was eye to eye with him. “A boy should
never
have so much hair a girl can pull it,” she said.

Through the tears in his eyes, he gazed at the expectant look on her face. He knew what that meant.

“Time to get scalped?” he said.

“And who scalps Chief Big Hair?”

“Birdie does.”

“And who is Birdie?”

“The bestest friend a girl ever had?”

“You got it, Skipper.”

She held him close. The bodice of her dress felt crinkly and stiff against his cheek. It smelled old. He pulled away from her and she pouted.

“You don't love me any more,” she said. And before he could say a word – before he could say that he loved her more than anything in the world, she found her whistle again and started blowing it so shrill and loud, Dec had to wrap his arms around his head. His eyes filled with fresh tears and he yelled at her to stop, but she just kept blowing till her face was as red as her hair.

D
EC STARED
across Forester Street at the freshly painted façade of Birdie's Hair Ideas. There was a new logo on the plate glass, a chirpy bird sitting on the busty upper loop of the B, looking as if it had just escaped from Snow White. Through the window he saw a customer pay Birdie at her desk by the door. The woman stopped to admire her new do in the storefront glass, tapping the bird on its cute little beak as she walked by. There was no one else in the salon.

As he crossed Forester, Dec felt he could still hear Lindy blowing her toy whistle in his ear. He turned, expecting to catch a glimpse of her following him, spying on him.

A bell jingled as he opened the door. There was new country playing on the radio, and Birdie was humming along as she swept up.

“Hey, Dec,” she said, cheerily enough. Then she looked at the clock on the wall — another bird, this one bright blue and electric. “You're a little early if you're looking for a ride.”

He looked around the salon, so familiar to him, but different
from the one he was remembering right now. He placed his backpack by the low table littered with magazines. The room he remembered was bigger. Or was that just because he had been so much smaller?

“Something the matter?” she asked.

“Was it here Mom used to bring me?”

Birdie frowned. “What is this, National Lindy Polk Month?”

Dec ignored the crack. “1 remember lots of gold.”

Birdie looked wary. “That would've been Mimi's Cut ‘n Curl,” she said. “Up on Dunlop. Least it used to be. She closed up shop a while back.”

Dec sat down on a cream-coloured Naugahyde chair, felt the cool vinyl surface with his hand. The waiting-room chairs at Mimi's had been gold.

“Mimi, was she the tubby one with the sparkly hair?”

Birdie smiled despite herself. “You got her.”

Dec smiled, too. “She used to give me Tootsie Rolls,” he said.

Surprise brought on another smile. “Tootsie Rolls was how she got so tubby,” she said, leaning on her broom. “But that was a long time ago. I'm amazed you can remember.”

Dec was amazed, too. “All those women. They were all over me. Scared me to death.”

Birdie laughed. “You were a cute little tyke.”

“But I was promised to you, right?” he said. “The bestest friend a girl ever had.”

For a fleeting instant, Birdie looked overcome with sadness. Then her expression changed. She looked kind of guilty, as if she had been scolded.

“If it sounded like I was bad-mouthing Lindy the other day,” she said, “it was just the whisky talking. You've got to know that.”

“You didn't bad-mouth her.”

“Didn't I?” She shook her head as if she really couldn't remember. “I guess I just feel like I did. Left a bad taste in my mouth. Anyway, I'm sorry. It didn't go so well, eh?”

“It was a bad day all 'round.”

She nodded, but looked only vaguely relieved. “Maybe seeing your dad in such a state reminded me of what it got to be like with them. I loved that girl, you know, but she could drive a man crazy.”

Is that what had happened? Had Lindy driven Bernard crazy?
Get me out of here. Declan, before it's too late
. Did she really just run off and leave Dec behind, or did she
have
to go — running for her life?

Birdie put aside her broom and came towards him. He couldn't read her eyes but they looked filled with purpose. She stopped across the low table from him, and her resolve seemed to abandon her. She smoothed out her tight skirt, straightened her belt.

“You were going to say something. Something about Lindy.”

“No,” she said. “I was just caught up in… in remembering.”

Hesitantly, she touched his unruly hair. Her fingers caught in a snag. He pulled his head away.

“There are women who'd kill for hair this shade,” she said.

He pushed the hair out if his eyes. “You told me once I looked like an Irish setter who'd been playing in a briar patch.”

She smiled, but her gaze was distant.

“Birdie, please. Something's going on. I can see it in your eyes.”

Again she looked as if she was about to speak and stopped herself. “Nothing's going on,” she said, more forcefully now.

“It's just you.

Dec threw himself against the back of the chair.

“Don't get your shorts in a knot,” she said. “It's just seeing you, right now. I mean, really
seeing
you. I'm so used to thinking of you as Bernard's son, I forget how much like her you are.”

He swallowed the lump in his throat. “I don't have her hair.”

She took a balled-up tissue from her pocket and dabbed at the corner of her eyes. “Sunny got the hair, all right,” she said. But you got her eyes. That kind of blue with just enough hazel in them to make a person look twice.” She looked a little bashful. And then, suddenly, overwrought. “And you've got that kind of accusing look she used to throw around when things weren't going her way.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“Just so you know.”

With a little shudder, she seemed to recover from whatever reflection or memory had held her in its grip. “You even sound like her,” she said. “Funny how I never noticed before.” She looked thoughtful.

Dec shrugged. “Sometimes I think I can hear her. I mean, remember her voice. Do I really sound like her?”

Birdie perched on the seat beside him, her knees pressed tightly together. She brushed lint from her skirt.

“It's not your voice so much as the kind of things you say. Lindy couldn't wait to get out of here. Just like you. For her, everything happened too slow.”

Too slowly, he thought, but he kept it to himself. “Maybe she was just bored.”

“I remember the day after her fifteenth birthday she started telling everyone she was sixteen. I said to her, ‘Lindy Polk, you're a damn liar.' And she said, ‘BV, I am now officially in my sixteenth year.'”

“You were really close,” said Dec.

“I remember this other time,” said Birdie, barrelling on. “It was right after English class and she said, ‘BV, finally we learned something worthwhile.' I asked her what that might be, and she said, ‘The future perfect. Now there's a tense a girl could get to love.'”

“There's no way she would have just forgotten you,” said Dec.

“She wanted the world and she wanted it on the double, please and thank you.”

“She would have at least let you know where she was,” said Dec.

Birdie was staring — not at him, not at anything. He held his breath. On the country station, somebody was leaving somebody, but that was always happening in country songs.

Finally her eyes focused again. She sighed. “She did
not
tell me where she was going,” she said. “Lindy was
always
going and leaving a mess behind. I spent half my life picking up after that girl.”

Then Birdie rose, found the dustpan and brush and finished sweeping up.

“The thing I could never understand was that she saw perfectly clearly what your dad was like. She saw how kind and gentle he was, how
settled
he was. But she thought she could change him anyway.” She swept a bit and stopped. “Well, she changed him all right.”

“What do you mean?”

“She hurt him bad.”

“Maybe he hurt her.”

Birdie glanced at him unsmilingly. “I don't want to hear that kind of talk,” she said, and went to put the broom away.

When she returned, Dec said, “I didn't mean he hurt her on purpose. It was just his lifestyle. She thought there was going to be more.”

Birdie nodded and looked down at her shoes. “She sure
never dreamed she was going to rot away in a huge empty house in the middle of nowhere.”

Dec thought about it a moment. Then he nodded. “So I guess it all worked out in the end,” he said. “She got away and you got Dad and everybody's happy.”

He wasn't sure what it was about this simple summary that made the tears well to Birdie's eyes.

“If only that were true,” she said. Then, with one last look around to make sure her little kingdom was tidy, she headed to the back room for her coat, sobbing the whole way.

T
HE HOUSE
looks like Steeple Hall, but when he opens the great front door the interior is made entirely of stone. The Oriental rug in the hall is stone, the stairs are stone, the chandelier is stone. Even the keypad of the new alarm by the vestibule door is made of stone. He punches in the code numbers, which he knows, somehow. He makes his way down the front hall towards his grandfather's study. The corridor is a great deal longer than he remembers it being, and it's tilted so that he feels all the time as if he's falling.