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.
FORTY-SEVEN
Jenny’s standing by my bed.
She says she can’t sleep. “Get up, sleepyhead.”
“Get lost, doodyhead.”
She keeps standing there. She won’t leave. She wants to play.
Play what?
Hide-and-seek.
I’m up already from the itching under my stupid cast and Mom won’t be making breakfast for hours—it’s still dark. Okay, I tell her.
We go down to the basement.
Tiptoeing. Jenny says we shouldn’t wake Mom and Dad.
She says, “You’re the hider”—we usually flip for it, but I guess she wants to be the seeker and hiding’s more fun anyway.
Fine.
Jenny turns around and closes her eyes and starts counting.
I sneak into the closet. Into the back where I’m completely hidden by these old clothes.
I hear her count “eighteen . . . nineteen . . . twenty . . . ready or not, here I come.”
It’s creepy in the closet because it’s completely dark and smells of mothballs, and I’m thinking I should’ve hidden somewhere else, like behind the boiler maybe.
At first Jenny doesn’t know where I am—it sounds like she’s looking everywhere but the closet, and I’ll be stuck in here forever.
When I hear her outside the door—finally—I try holding my breath.
“Ben,” she whispers, “are you IN there, Ben?”
She just keeps standing there and asking if I’m IN there, and finally she finds out YEAH, I am—I can’t hold my breath anymore. I have to let it out.
“Got you,” she says.
“Your turn.” I start climbing out from the back. I hear this sound—like this metal clicking.
The door won’t open.
I try it again. It STILL won’t.
“Stop playing around, Jenny,” I tell her.
There’s this old latch on the closet because the people who lived in the house before us kept TREASURE there—that’s what Dad said.
We were never supposed to touch it.
“Very funny, Jenny. I’m dying laughing.”
She’s locked it.
“Open the door, doody-face.”
“No.”
“I said OPEN the door.”
“Got you.”
“Want me to wake Mom and Dad? You’re gonna
get punished for a whole YEAR.”
“Go ahead.”
“HELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLPPPPPPPPPPP!”
When Mom yells at us to come up from the basement and we don’t hear her she always says, “Are you guys DEAF?”
No. You just can’t hear anything from all the way down here.
Jenny has started talking to her imaginary friend.
That’s what Mom calls it.
“Shhhhh . . .”
Mom said she started doing it when her REAL friends stopped playing with her. She just made one up.
“He’s in there . . . ,” she whispers. Giggles.
“Open the door, Jenny! NOT kidding . . .”
“Locked in . . .”
“JENNY!”
“Uh-huh,” she whispers. “Be right up.”
She’s singing something.
“Let’s gather round the campfire, and sing our campfire song, and if you don’t think that we can sing it faster, then you’re wrong . . .”
The CAMPFIRE SONG.
The one we sing up at the lake every time we build a fire. You have to sing it faster and faster until you can’t understand the words anymore. That’s the idea. Keep singing it till the fire’s really going and everyone’s giggling and you can’t understand a word anybody’s singing.
“Let’sgatherroundthecampfireandsingourcampfiresong . . .”
“STOP SINGING, MORON.”
“andifyoudon’tthinkthatwecansingitfasterthenyou’rewrong . . .”
I’m sweating. Banging on the door.
“gatherroundthecampfire . . .”
“What’s THAT? What are you DOING?”
There’s this other sound.
“gatherroundtheCAMPFIRE . . .”
“What are you DOING, A-HOLE?”
I hear it AGAIN.
I know what it is.
The sound.
The last time I heard it was when Dad stacked all the branches into this big pile and put little balls of newspaper in there and then pulled them out of his pocket.
The box of matches.
Taking one out and striking it against the side of the box.
“theCAMPFIREtheCAMPFIREtheCAMPFIRE . . .”
“Are you NUTS, JENNY?”
“theCAMPFIRE . . .”
“PUT the matches down! You HEAR ME, retard!”
The box of matches from the kitchen. The ones Mom uses to light the stove. She must’ve swiped them.
“roundthecampfire . . .”
“Please open the door, Jenny . . . PLEASE . . . I’m asking nicely . . .”
Something flicks through the bottom of the closet door.
A lit match. It burns the edge of my big toe before going out.
“singourcampfiresong . . .”
“ARE YOU CRAZY??”
Another match slides under the door.
“JENNY, STOP! PLEASE LET ME OUT . . . NOW!”
“ifyoudon’tthinkthatwecansingitfasterthenyou’rewrong.”
The match has caught a piece of a sweater or coat or something. It’s smoking.
“I’M GOING TO KILL YOU WHEN I GET OUT OF HERE. I’M GOING TO MURDER YOU. I SWEAR . . .”
Another match.
“YOU’VE STARTED A FIRE! OPEN THE DOOR!”
I hear her walking away.
Walking away and leaving me here.
“WHERE ARE YOU GOING? COME BACK HERE!”
Up the stairs. Slowly. One at a time. Like when Mom calls her in from the backyard and she drags her feet—does it for real, moving one foot, then the other in slo-mo, like a windup toy.
I hear the door at the top of the stairs shut.
“PLEASE! JENNY . . . JENNY, PLEASE . . . I WON’T TELL MOM . . . COME BACK! PLEASE!”
I’m coughing. Because of the smoke.
I stick my head down by the crack under the door. I need air.
I gulp it in as fast as I can. I take a deep breath and go back to banging on the door.
Then more air.
I keep doing that. Up and down. Banging and breathing.
Hitting the door with my good arm. The one that isn’t broken. The one that doesn’t have a cast on it.
A HEAVY cast.
As heavy as a BATTERING RAM.
When I hit the door with that arm, the pain shoots straight up into my head. Like a hundred times worse than when I first broke it.
I can’t do it. I can’t.
My arm—it’s killing me.
No. Something else is killing me. For real. The FIRE. When I try to suck in more air under the door, there ISN’T any. I can’t breathe.
You have to do it . . .
You HAVE to.
I start crying even before I hit the door with my cast again.
I hear myself shrieking from the pain. Like somebody else is doing it. It feels like I cracked my arm all over again.
You have to . . .
I hit the door again.
And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.
Screaming each time. Not just from the pain. I’m seeing Jenny’s face there. In front of me. Like I’m smashing it in. “I’m going to murder you,” I’m screaming at her. “I AM.”
There’s this sudden splintering sound.
I’ve made a tiny hole in the door. Just enough to put my mouth there and suck in some air.
I hit it again. Over and over and over and over. Smashing my cast into Jenny’s face. Again and again and again . . .
My arm goes numb after a while.
I keep doing it.
I smash THROUGH. Right through the door. A hole big enough to WALK through now.
But I can still see Jenny’s stupid face in front of me and I want to KEEP SMASHING it, just keep SMASHING it, and. . . .
Watch your back.
I’m thinking if I tell Mom and Dad, if I tell them Jenny LOCKED me in the closet and tried to light it on FIRE, they’d say stop MAKING things up, Ben.
Watch your back.
Be nice to your sister, Ben.
Nothing will ever happen to her. NOTHING.
She’ll just keep TRYING.
Like on the stairs.
And in the backyard when she pushed me into a tomato stake and I had to get like THIRTY stitches.
And I know it wasn’t a WAVE that knocked me under that day at the beach. I know it.
It felt like someone holding me down, not letting me up as HARD as I tried. ’Cause that’s what someone was DOING.
The someone behind me on the STAIRS.
And on EAGLE CLIFF.
Watch your back.
When I walk up the basement stairs I can’t feel my feet. Like I’m floating. Like when I’m playing Zombie Apocalypse and it’s down to one shot. When it’s me or them.
I’m in front of Jenny’s door.
I shove it open.
FORTY-EIGHT
Ben
He’d heard about certain kinds of pot that could cause visions.
Laced with lysergic acid, or Mexican mushrooms, or some other hallucinatory shit.
So you saw stuff that wasn’t real. That seemed real enough, sure, but was kind of a figment of your imagination. And of the pot. Just stuff your mind cooked up.
Please . . .
He saw himself going up the stairs. In his Star Wars pj’s.
His eyes burning. His lungs aching.
He saw himself standing in front of his sister’s door. Right there. It’s shut tight. There’s a picture of Goldy scotch-taped to it.
He rips the picture to shreds.
He slams the door open.
Jenny screams.
“No, Ben! No! GET OUT!”
But Ben doesn’t get out. He doesn’t.
“PLEASE, Ben . . .
“Please, NO.
“PLEASE . . .”
FORTY-NINE
They took me to the clearing first.
Smack in the middle of tangled woods—the trees leafless now, dead vines hanging like brown rope curtains around a small open area of yellow grass. It’d be hard to find if you weren’t looking for it. If you didn’t know it was there.
There was no gravestone. They didn’t dare.
In case Ben decided to tramp through here on his way to Eagle Cliff. Or someone else wandered someplace they shouldn’t. The clearing was part of their property, they said—but you never knew. Someone could go hiking, get lost, take a wrong turn.
There was an old gray stone set into the middle of the clearing—but it might’ve been there forever, part of the landscape. You wouldn’t think anything of it, give it any special significance.
Just a stone.
Unless you knew what was lying under it.
“We come out here from time to time,” Laurie said. “Just to say a prayer.”
* * *
—
Juvenile hall had automatic locks on both hall doors.
Meaning as soon as those doors closed, you were locked in tight. The guards had special door keys they kept in a gray lockbox. The lockbox keys they kept on them. Attached to their belts, mixed in with their house and car keys on NY Giants and Walmart key chains, or if you were Otis, who liked to doze off in his chair just to the right of the south entrance door, attached to nothing but his fingers. I think rolling that key back and forth in his hand helped put him to sleep.
That was the key to me getting out of that juvie hall.
Otis’s key.
Tiptoeing down the hall barefoot, sneaks in hand, Otis’s decibel-busting snoring doing a good job of covering up unintentional sounds, like me bumping into the wheeled cart that somebody had stupidly forgotten to store—then me gently lifting the key from the palm of Otis’s brown, open hand.
It was almost like Otis was offering it to me: Here, Jobeth, go ahead and take it.
I was sitting in the lake house thinking about that. About locked doors. Back from the visit to the clearing. I didn’t know if Jake had locked the front door or not. I’d heard a click.
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