Lost Years
by
Billy Ramone
My knees ache as I
climb the stairs to the bedroom. I pause with my hand on the knob and
contemplate another day's grace. It's hard to start something like this
on a Friday night, with the weight of the week hanging from my bones. But
I’d promised myself I'd get to it today when I put it off yesterday. I know, in
some less-visited corner of my mind, that I've been avoiding the encounter with
mom's stuff for over a year.
I open the door and
step into the room. I'm surprised first by how tight it is. Between
the furniture and the boxes, there are only a few square feet of floor
space. As I move a pile of mom's coats from an armchair and lay them
across a cluster of boxes on the bed, I tell myself I shouldn’t be
surprised. In the rush of sending mom to the care center and moving
myself back in, almost all her things wound up crammed in here. Due to
the ravages of Alzheimer's, mom won't be coming home. Still, the idea of
dividing her things up among her cousins, shipping them to my sister Connie, or
packing them up for the Salvation Army feels like a betrayal. Logically,
I know it doesn't matter: there's no return from the journey she's taken
down that long road of forgetfulness, and the disposition of her household
things is meaningless. That just shows how little logic has to do with
love and family.
I shake my head to
clear it. I'm here on a mission, not for a trip down memory lane. I
scan the room and hope the lay of the land will offer a good search
strategy. I notice a mass of papers mounded on an old end table that I'd
jammed into a corner. I suppose that will do for a start. I’m
not sure what I will find, but I know I’m looking for a man. A man who
lives, for me, only as a hurried glimpse in a distant memory. A man who,
after an absence of more than forty years, I would never have expected to be
looking for until this week. And I would never have imagined looking here,
among mom's things. But sometimes the past doesn't stay in the
past. Sometimes it ambushes us.
I squeeze behind the
chair, drag an armload of papers off the table, and pirouette back into the
seat. The first thing my eyes fall on is a 2014 desk calendar. I
flip the pages. Notes in mom's spidery script flow across the days: a one
p.m. at the hair salon, her Tuesday afternoon bridge club, doctor's
appointments, lunch with Anne. I shake my head and put the calendar
aside. It's a long way from 1978 to 2014. The trail—assuming
there is one—will not be so simple to find. I make short work of the
remainder of the papers: an old grocery list, junk mail, a plumber's receipt
for rooting out the sewer line. I’m sure I’m on the wrong track. If
I’m going to find him, I need to go further back. Closer to '78.
But it's more than that. Whatever I'm looking for isn’t something mom
would have had sitting on the kitchen table with her list of things to do
today.
Family secrets are
kept in safer places.
I’ve only just come
to realize that Lily Marino’s disappearance involves a family
secret. Before that, I would have just called it a mystery, or a
sorrow. Now I am grappling with the discovery that there was more to
the story. I was twelve the summer Lily disappeared. I
remember her only faintly, with the vague recollections of a
child. She's a sunny smile and big brown eyes and a giggle that I
can barely summon, more an idea than an actual memory. If her presence is
not easy to evoke, however, the story of her disappearance is a landmark in my
early memories. The August evening she vanished remains sharp in my
mind. Goodness knows I told my little part of it often enough to the
police: how mom was inside with Lily, a neighbor kid she was babysitting, while
I was out in the garage trying to fix the chain on my bike; how I saw Lily pass
on the front sidewalk holding the hand of a tall, red-haired man; how I didn't
think anything of it, assuming he was some relative or other sent to pick her
up; how mom had come spilling out the back door moments later, looking for
Lily, who had disappeared while mom was in the bathroom.
The missing
eight-year-old became an instant wonder in our quiet
neighborhood. People came from distant corners of the city to help
search. I described the man repeatedly for police: tall, red-headed,
slender, stooped. No one else seemed to have seen
him. For eight or ten days, the tear-streaked face of Barbara Marino
was a nightly sight on the evening news. But despite the pleas of her anguished
family, Lily was never found.
Not, that is, until
last week.
I shuck the pile of
papers from my lap and let them slide to the floor. I need to move a
dusty coffee table and a chair to reach the closet door and sneak it
open. The upper shelf is loaded with old boxes: stuff that's been in
storage much longer than what’s on the table. I grab what I can and
return to my seat, kicking stray papers out of the way. I open a box and
am rewarded with a smattering of old letters, greeting cards, and
photographs. Although I don't find anything of real interest,
I feel as though I am on a better track. I return to the closet for
another round. I reach as far back as I can, grabbing things from
the depths of the shelf, and find myself plowing through boxes of older
pictures, cards, and keepsakes. Postmarks on the envelopes tell me
I’ve landed in the early eighties. Most of the pictures are family
shots from Christmases or birthdays—pictures of me and Connie opening packages
and displaying presents. No strangers. No people I
don’t recognize. I skim through the cards and letters but find
nothing that strikes me as out of place.
In one box I find a
bunch of vacation pictures from Asher Lake. Judging from my age, they
seem to range from the late seventies into the mid-eighties. I don’t
look at myself much—a gangly, awkward kid—or pay attention to Connie or mom,
either. I’m scouring backgrounds, peering into the dark spaces
between trees, searching groups of vacationers gathered around the camp
commissary. I know it’s nuts. But still I look, thinking
that maybe somewhere, anywhere, I’ll catch a glimpse of that stooped,
red-headed figure.
He’s not there, of
course. But he had to have been at Asher Lake sooner or later,
because that’s where they found Lily. That is, they found what was
left of her after forty years. Someone’s dog came trotting back to camp
with what looked suspiciously like the head of a femur. The search turned
up some scraps of clothing, a scattering of bones, and a skull in a shallow
grave a couple hundred yards from a nature trail. In a rotting
backpack they found the remains of Lily’s schoolbooks, and among her
neckbones the thing that helped them identify her—an inscribed locket given to
her by her grandparents on her seventh
birthday.
My family spent a
lot of time at Asher Lake back then. It was only a couple hours from
the city, a small state park that was never too crowded. Mom liked
it because it was small enough for Connie and I to do what we wanted without
having to be chauffeured around. Our vacation in ’78 had ended just
a few weeks before Lily’s disappearance.
It didn’t take long
for the police to come knocking. I don’t think they were expecting
to find me here—the accounts and the property are still in mom’s name—but that
didn’t stop them from questioning me. Had I or any member of the
family returned to the park in late August of ’78? Did I know
of anyone else from the old neighborhood who ever went there? Did I
have any idea why someone would have taken Lily there? I didn’t have the
faintest idea. Even now, sitting here with these snapshots in my
hands, I have no idea what I’m hoping to find. But there’s
something.
The police went to
see mom, too. I told them she couldn’t help, but they needed to see
that for themselves. I don’t know how the interview went, but mom’s
nurses said she seemed upset after they left. When I went to visit
her the next day, she was quieter than usual. Then, she shook
her head and said, “I just couldn't let the police take him. I couldn't. It
wasn't his fault.”
With that, the world
I thought I lived in started to split at the seams. I know she's not
in her right mind, but there's often a germ of truth in her ramblings if you
know where to look. Her oldest memories are often the sharpest and most
trustworthy. I didn’t ask her what she was talking about, because I’ve
learned that questions can agitate her. Instead, I waited, a smile
frozen across my face. What she said next cut right through
me.
“It’s not like he
meant to hurt that girl.”
Horror rose from my
gut and filled my throat, a thousand questions in its wake, but still I said
nothing.
“It was that book,
Doug, that damn book,” she growled.
Doug was my father,
who left the family when I was nine and passed away back in 2002. I
know how much I resemble him, and in the fog of her disease mom has mistaken me
for him more than once. Still, I
had no idea what book she meant.
“I did what I
could. I had to be quick. I wasn’t sure it would take.”
"What _did_
you do?" I asked, unable to contain my anguish.
She hung there a
moment, staring at me as her eyes filled with
questions. "Why," she said, those weighted eyes turning
inward and drifting away across an impenetrable expanse of memory, "I
don't know," and then more faintly, "nothing."
I'm not sure if she
shut me out on purpose or if she just lost the thread, but I'm sure of one
thing: she'd done something. Now I have to figure out what. Oh,
I know—sleeping dogs. But I've spent too many years in social work and
seen too many families destroyed by a kid's disappearance or death to let it
go. I’m single, but I’ve spent most of my adult life taking care of families,
and I’m not going to stop now. Don’t tell me it’s pointless: I’ve been at it
long enough to know how little difference caring makes. Lots of
times I’m not able to do any good for the families I’m assigned
to help. And even when I do, there’s another family that’s just
as messed up right next door. It never stops. I doubt
that knowing the full truth will matter to whoever is left of Lily's family
after all these years, but I still feel like I owe it to them. Even if I
don't really want to know. Even if my mother did something
unthinkable.
I shuffle again
through the Asher Lake photos. I let my mind float, hoping some warm
billow of nostalgia will carry me back there so I can bask, for a moment
anyway, in all that innocent childishness. But nothing comes and I
am left sitting in a cold, dusty bedroom with nothing to show for my efforts
except a handful of smudged pictures. If I want to avoid
self-ridicule, there’s nothing I can do except rise from the seat and go back
to the closet for another round. I do it, shoving a chair and
flinging the door open wider to illustrate my commitment.
I dive back into the
boxes. Outside, a blast of frigid wind rattles sleet against the
window. I pop the top on a shoebox and look
inside. A small black book sits in a nest of yellowing
papers. It looks like an old bible. When I grasp it, a
sudden vibration runs through me, almost like an electric shock; my jaw spasms
shut with a snap and then I’m sitting on the floor with no idea how I got
there. The book is on the carpet next to me. The black
leather front and spine are unmarked. The page edges are stained a
deep red, and I can see a black ribbon bookmark extending from the headband and
marking a place two-thirds through. Although I cannot place the
book, it is familiar, like something glimpsed in a
dream.
I reach for it
slowly and slide my index finger along the spine. The same strange
jolt surges through me again, not as strong but undeniable. I try a
third time, placing two fingers flat on the front cover. This time I feel
nothing. It’s like whatever charge was there has been
exhausted. I slide my palm across the surface, then hold it for a
moment. When nothing happens, I pick the book up.
I’m not sure when
the voice begins to speak. Maybe it has been there all along, whispering
among the wind and sleet. I first hear it when I lift the book and the
front cover lops open to reveal a page covered in chunky black symbols.
Although I don’t know the sounds or meanings associated with them, I understand
that the low, sibilant voice in my left ear is reading the page to me.
Like the sight of the book itself, there is something familiar about this—a
sickening deja vu I can't explain. I close the book.
The voice stops, or at least fades to the point that I can no longer separate
it from the sound of the wind. As if to confound me, the wind gusts more violently
than before and rattles the windows in their frames. I tell myself
that it's best to leave Lily's case in the hands of the
police.
But I’ve come too
far to stop now. I peel the cover back and begin flipping pages.
The voice begins again, soft but urgent. Each page is covered in the same
dark markings, etched into the thick, creamy paper with the nib of an old quill—or
perhaps branded there by some strange fire. I come to the black bookmark
and stop. This page is different: it has a single symbol on it, a crooked
black X poised atop an inverted triangle. The voice grows louder and
says
—_Splenthe_—
And as the voice
speaks, I feel my own lips move along with it. My breath forms the
word.
I try to close
the book, but my hands are no longer my own. Instead, my trembling
fingers turn the leaf to reveal
—_Atgraf xastin
meloka alraba naket_—
I read words I don’t
know, speak sounds I’ve never learned, my voice compelled by forces I do not
understand. Somewhere, far away, my mind tries to grasp how any of
this is possible.
Outside, the wind
hammers the house. A windowpane cracks, and visions sift
through the break, across the room, into me.
—_shetay zenni brabrala
contin xalu_—
My mind turns black,
flooding with darkness, as I read along with the voice. It is
different from the hoarse whisper I heard earlier—it is sharp and
vibrant. Human. It begins faintly. As the
voice grows louder, a pinpoint of light forms in the darkness before me and swells.
—_rutawun calni
calni patat_—
I don’t want to see
what the light reveals. I try closing my eyes, but this blocks out
the bedroom and makes the images in my mind sharper. I open my eyes
again, but there’s no escape. The light swells and leaves me with no
choice but to see Lily’s face etched out of the darkness by a flickering
candle. She is sitting on an old yellow stool that I recognize,
against an old cinder block wall I know. She’s in the
basement. The basement of my childhood home—mother’s house, this house. Her
brown eyes are swollen with fear. She says nothing. She
just stares.
—_valtay baram zenni
baram caloo_—
I realize now that
there is not, and never was, a tall man with red hair. As this
knowledge pulses through me, the light bulb in the ceiling fixture flashes and
dies. There is a snapping crash as more windowpanes give way and the
wind howls into the darkened room. My voice grows louder—my voices, because
I recognize that the other voice I hear is me as well, a younger
me. Time collapses and it is both then and now. I hear
the wood of the window frame splintering as something comes in from the
cold. I know this is all real, that something powerful is coming,
has already come. In a way I cannot explain, I both know and don’t
know what will happen, remember it all without remembering. I see
the flames as they appear and coalesce in a circle around Lily’s head, dancing
on her brow like blue and green and red sprites, just as they dance across the
broken sill and through the wind-tossed curtains. Lily is crying and
excitement fills me and the book is driving the words out of my throat louder
and louder
—_Splenthe al alraba
basget splenthe albraba alrabla_—
and I am trembling
in terror and exaltation. Just when I think the flames will take Lily,
melt her until only a smoking skull remains, they come to me instead, leaping
from her head, from the curtains, and onto me. I shriek as searing
heat runs over my body, into my body, blistering every corner of my
being. The agony pulses and grows and, then, fades into the
background, leaving in its wake a vast hunger. The hunger is the
only thing I know as I pull Lily to me and bury my teeth in her
throat. Her blood is sweet and soothing, but not as satisfying as
her soul, which I suck greedily from between her dying
lips. This morsel diminishes my hunger but does not quench
it. Before I can do more, however, I hear a scream behind me and
turn to find my mother. She claps her hands and shrieks
—_Dransenetti_—
And darkness
falls.
I don’t know how
long I sleep. The storm has ended and the sun is up by the time my
eyes open. The ruined window lets in the cold, and traces of
snow speckle the floor. The book is there, on the floor beside me,
but I no longer need it. I’ve learned what it had to show
me. About Lily. And about mother—how she'd tried to save
me from what she thought was a childish mistake. How she’d weaved
lies into my memories, remaking my mind so I would forget.
She, however, was
the one who was mistaken. I recall it all now. How
father’s book had called to me. How it had taught me its power, and
how I had used it. I climb to my feet and feel that power hammering
through my veins now. Mother isn’t here
to stop the process this time. I’ve become who I wanted to be then,
who I could have been all these years without her
interference. For a moment, I am filled with rage as I reflect
on those lost years. But I push regrets away. I
don’t have time for them. I have things to do.
And I’m very, very
hungry.
