A Thief in the House of Memory (11 page)

Falling into the dark
.

What light there is comes from thin cracks between the great slabs of polished granite. Above his head, statues stare down at him from the top of stone bookcases
.

“Lindy?” he calls, and his voice echoes all around him
.

It is so cold that he shivers uncontrollably. He is in his pyjamas. He wishes he had thought to dress warmly. He wishes he did not feel so alone. He wishes he had never set out on this journey
.

He hears whispering and follows the sound.

“Mom?” he calls
.

The whispering grows until it seems to engulf him. Finally he stands outside a door to a room he did not know was there. He tries the handle but it will not budge. He presses his ear against the cold, polished surface. He hears his fathers voice
.

“Lindy was beyond caring long ago.”

He hears whispering farther down the corridor. At another door he stops to listen
.

“She never dreamed she was going to rot away in a huge empty house in the middle of nowhere.”

He moves on
.

“Dec?” someone calls. “Dec!”He runs until he comes, at last, to the door at the very end of the corridor
.

“Mom?” he whispers
.

“Dec,” she says breathlessly. “Get me out of here, before it's too late.”

N
OT MANY
kids hung out at the Hole in the Wall. Dec and Ezra liked it for the salt and pepper shakers. Each table boasted a different set. In the corner booth where Ezra was sitting, the salt shaker was a fat lady in a dressing gown with her hair up in curlers. The pepper shaker was a refrigerator with the door open. The little ceramic salt shaker lady had her hands on her hips and she looked as if she was trying to decide on a midnight snack.

When Dec entered the café, Ezra was intently looking over the painted contents of the refrigerator.

“She should definitely go for the cake,” said Ezra.

Dec plumped himself down across from him. He had a bundle of mail wrapped up in a thick rubber band. “Dad's taken out a post office box until the ‘media blitz' is over,” he said. “You'd think he was Michael Jackson or something.”

“It's a Thriller day in the neighbourhood,” sang Ezra.

Dec cast him a scornful glance. “The Mr. Rogers' thing is getting pretty old,” he said.

Ezra looked over the top of his glasses. “Did somebody miss his nap?”

Dec wasn't in the mood for jokes. He slipped off the rubber band and flipped through the letters. Only the magazine at the bottom of the pile interested him, the latest issue of
Architectural Record
. There was a house on the cover that looked as if a forest was growing inside it. He thumbed through the pages.

“I thought this was urgent,” said Ezra.

Dec paused when he saw the reminder of the student design contest — “The Shape of Things to Come.” He closed the magazine and stared dejectedly at his friend.

Ezra cleared his throat. “Has anyone told you yet today that you look like refried dog food?”

“Thanks for noticing.”

The waitress came and Dec ordered an Orangina. Ezra had already ordered a carrot muffin and a cappuccino. The drink sat before him in a bowl the size of a birdbath. He held it with two hands and took a long, noisy sip. Dec winced.

Ezra said, “Either you've got a hangover or things are not good on the annulment front.”

Dec shook his head. “That's old news.” The annulment now seemed like the least of his worries. But how would Ezra know? There was too much Ezra
didn't
know. That was the problem. He had to tell him about his dream — he had to tell someone. But in order to do that, he had to start a long way back.

“I've been seeing a lot of my mother lately,” he said. Then he launched in, not caring if he sounded like a raving lunatic. He clammed up when the waitress brought his order and started up again as soon as she was out of earshot. He poured out everything and felt his loneliness drain out of him as well.

When he was done, he gulped down some Orangina, concentrating, as if drinking soda required a lot of serious attention. But he was also avoiding Ezra's gaze. That was the trouble with spilling your guts: you felt exposed, stupid. Finally, he dared to look up, and Ezra was waiting for him.

“You're not crazy,” he said. “Well, maybe a little crazy, but not beyond help.”

“Thanks, Doc,” said Dec.

“All part of the friendly service,” said Ezra. “The thing is, I've been thinking and I realized something. That big old house of yours is one giant mnemonic device. It's like a memory-making assembly line. Remember that
I Love Lucy
show where she's working on the assembly line and she can't keep up?” Dec nodded. “Maybe there's such a thing as too many memories.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“I guess it would be pretty hard to talk to your dad, huh?”

“What am I supposed to say? ‘Uh, Pops, I was just wondering. Did you by any chance kill Mom?'“

“I see your problem.”

Dec rested his head on his arms and closed his eyes. He was so sleepy. He had woken from last night's nightmare in the clutches of an inescapable certainty. It had all seemed to make terrifying sense. He had lain in his bed panic-stricken, scarcely able to breath. Then Sunny had started fussing — her ear again. Birdie had gotten up to comfort her, and Dec had drifted off to sleep, finally, only to be awakened at the usual hour by, “Hit the deck, Dec.”

The dream was so horrific, the reality so banal. Where did the truth lie?

He opened his eyes. Ezra was observing him closely.

“What about motive?” he said. “Your mother sounds totally nuts to me. But you don't kill someone just because she's nuts.”

“Maybe it was accidental.”

“Like the ‘accidental' death of Denny Runyon?”

Dec swallowed hard. “Maybe I am crazy after all. Maybe I caught it from my mom.”

Ezra got a thoughtful look in his black crow eyes. “Think of the dream. Forget the other stuff for the moment. What does the dream tell you?”

“That my mother is dead,” said Dec. “That my dad and Birdie both knew about it. That maybe he killed her or maybe they both did, and buried her in the House of Memory.”

“Okay. So your mother is dead. What does that mean?” Dec looked confused.

“It's a dream, Dec. It's not literally true. Read between the lines.

Dec thought about it. “That my mother is…dead.” He shook his head. “Sorry, Ezra, but I'm kind of brain-dead myself.”

“Okay, let me throw on my Cling Wrap hat here and try an idea on you. If you think about it, your mother
is
dead in a way, isn't she? You haven't seen her — really seen her — for years. You didn't think about her much, as far as I know, until this happened. All I knew about her was that she wasn't around any more.”

Dec's brow knotted. “So you're saying the dream was just me admitting something to myself?”

“A delayed reaction.”

“Delayed a long time.”

Ezra shrugged. “Grief is like that. My bubby said she didn't really mourn Zaida's death for ten years. Then one day it just came over her. Whoosh!”

Dec smiled wistfully. “Maybe you
should
he a shrink.”

Ezra frowned. “I think I'll stick to physics. Subatomic particles are weird enough.”

Dec felt utterly exhausted. “I feel like somebody's holding me by the legs and shaking and shaking and shaking and all this crap is coming out of me. I just wish I knew what to do.”

Ezra peered at Dec, his eyes narrowed behind his tiny glasses. “You need to separate the data from the interpretation.”

“What data? There's nothing here you could call evidence. Just memories stirred up by a very bad feeling in my gut.

Ezra nodded. “Have you ever thought of looking for her?”

Dec stared at him dumbly. “My mother?”

“No, Dec. Amelia Earhart.”

“Look where? She hasn't written since March 8, 1998.”

Ezra began typing on the tabletop.

“The Internet?”

Ezra nodded and then, as if his work was over, he took a big bite out of his muffin.

Dec looked down at the table, surprised that he had never thought of it. He wrapped his arms around himself. Did he really want this?

Meanwhile, the architecture magazine on the table diverted his attention. A house with trees growing inside it; or was it a grove of trees that a house had grown up around? It was brilliant. It elated him — the magic of it. Then it made him ache inside so much that he had to hold his stomach. He turned the magazine over.

“I'll never be an architect,” he said.

“That's true,” said Ezra with his mouth full.

Dec's head snapped back. “You missed your cue,” he said.”

This is where a best friend says, ‘Sure you will, old buddy, old pal.'“

Ezra swallowed and wiped the crumbs off his mouth.

“Ah, but we have a different sense of what Τ means. You think of ‘I' as part of a continuum, the locus of which you call Declan Steeple.”

“Now I'm a locust? Thanks a lot.”

“A locus, Dec. A set of points, the position of which — ”

“Cut to the chase, Dr. Harlow.”

“I'm talking about how a person is really a succession, a series of selves. These selves are connected in what seems to be a unique and discrete entity by a mysterious but none the less quantifiable link called the andthen.”

“And then?”

“Exactly. And your dream of being an architect is still a couple of andthens away.”

Dec grinned. “So, you saying I'm a
couple
of andthens short of a load?”

“Well, three, actually,” said Ezra, looking thoughtful. He lined up the sugar bowl and what was left of his muffin beside his half-finished bowl of coffee. “This is andthen number one,” he said, touching the coffee bowl. “This is andthen number two and number three,” he said, opening his hands above the sugar bowl and the muffin in the manner of a magician indicating a couple of rabbits he has just pulled from a hat.

“Great,” said Dec. “My future is a half-eaten muffin?”

Ezra smiled condescendingly. “Work with me, Dec. This coffee cup is andthen number one: that would be the rest of your secondary school education. The sugar bowl is andthen
number two: college. Which brings us, finally, to andthen number three: international acclaim. Ta-da!”

Dec's eyes wandered back to the coffee bowl. The contents looked tepid and unappetizing. This was now? He picked up the salt shaker and plunked it down beside the coffee bowl.

“You forgot something,” he said. “I've still got this to deal with.”

Ezra stared at the lady in her dressing gown and rollers with her hands on her hips and the perplexed look on her face.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “That messy midnight marauder. The past.”

T
HERE WAS A
missing person's cyber-centre. There were missing person's helplines, message boards, registers, indexes and clearing houses. There were missing Irish people and missing Yugoslavian people. Lots of missing Yugoslavian people. There were kidnappings and unidentified bodies and unsolved mysteries and fugitives.

Dec surfed aimlessly for hours. Where to begin?

With a photo of Lindy. He could post it on line. And he knew where to find one, even though it would mean going back up to the big house.

He made his way upstairs to the room with
Lindy
on the door. He opened it, stood on the threshold.

There wasn't much there. She had never lived in this room. It had been a place for her to hang her clothes, play her guitar, write her songs. The guitar was long since gone — one of the few things she bothered to take with her. There were photo albums on a bookshelf along with her high-school yearbooks and a few romance novels. He sorted
through the photographs, found himself trembling a little, hurrying. He picked what he needed, then he closed the drawer. He should go — go right away. But it was too late.

He heard his name being called. The voice seemed to come from far away. He looked around in alarm before crossing the room and looking out the window.

She stood on the back lawn by a birch tree, beckoning him. She was wearing a short, cotton-print summer dress with spaghetti straps. She was shoeless. By the time he had made his way outside, she was at the far end of the garden. There were steps there cut into the steep bank leading down to the Eden River. She disappeared down the hill. He ran after her, tumbling down the steps like a bruised-knee child, laughing at the headlong speed of his descent.

As soon as he reached the bottom, he gathered a pile of lumber: scraps of two-by-four and off-cuts of plywood, a few cedar logs. He had a big wooden-handled hammer from his grandfather's workshop and bottles of the biggest nails he could find. He was building a raft.

“Now, that's some boat.” She was squatting on the last earthen step. “You reckon that thing could take us out to sea?”

He stopped hammering and looked at his handiwork. He shrugged.

“Maybe as far as the Tay.”

“Good enough,” said Lindy. “The Tay connects up to the
Rideau, doesn't it? Then there's the canal to the St. Lawrence, and after that you're laughing. Next stop Gay Paree.”

Dec looked out at the lazy river. All he wanted the raft to do was float. If he could pole his way across to the other bank, that would be something. There was an apple orchard there that he could plunder like a pirate. But Lindy wanted so much more.

“Build me a boat that will carry two, and both shall row, my love and I.” It was one of the songs she played on the guitar, but not as much lately. The guitar didn't seem to take her where she wanted to go, either.