A Night in the Shining Armoire
by Riley Kilmore
I was here, as usual, in this card shop the other day, and was looking over the shoulder of a woman reading a selection plucked from the “Encouragement” rack. The card read:
Dreams take time, patience, sustained effort, and a willingness to fail — if they are ever to become more than dreams.
Boy, did that take me back! Right back to the night my own dream came true. My dream? To escape. “Escape from what?” you ask. Why, my nightmare, of course. Not that there’s anything too odd about that. We all have nightmares. Mine was just a little harder to escape than some, since it was so real. It was so real, in fact, it had a name. I called it Mother.
I suppose I remember that night as vividly as I do because I’ve had to relive it a thousand times. No. No, that’s wrong. A thousand days isn’t even three years. I’ve actually relived that night... let me see... six thousand, five hundred and seventy times. Yeah. It replays in my brain in what feels like an endless loop, each detail a separate, shining jewel against the dark and desperate backdrop of memory.
Reliving it is my punishment. You know what they say, right? No good deed goes unpunished.
Oh, never mind me. I’m obsessed. Attaining a long-sought-after dream can do that to you. You almost become that moment. You’ve had similar moments, no? Ones that reach deep into the core of who you are? Like roots, they anchor you to the soil you sprang from, pinning you there.
Think of it. All of us are like that. Our roots take sustenance from whatever lies beneath, even if it’s a tarry mire, a place of decay. Meanwhile, that part of ourselves we willingly show to the world, our broad canopy of outstretched branches, is just a mask.
My mother was particularly good at that, holding up a mask to the world. But I got to see the rot the roots of her soul were anchored to.
Let me tell you about the night my dream came true, and maybe you’ll see what I mean.
It was early evening, but already dark that time of year, so I’d gone up to bed. Going to bed was a sort of halfway point between imminent danger and far-enough-away to be safe. For me, there really wasn’t a far-enough-away, but sometimes there was Joe, my stepdad. Only, that night, he was working late. Joe working late was always bad news.
The big brick house we lived in was like something out of a Shirley Jackson novel and was painfully quiet that night, as if it cowered in the eye of a hurricane. One storm front had already passed, and a second was approaching, filling the air with palpable anticipation, a hideous humidity of hatred and hiding. The barometric gauge of my mind fell sharply as I lay in bed, bracing for the gale. I closed my eyes, feigning sleep.
I’d been raised to believe another eye was always open, an omniscient one that watched over me, but experience had taught me long ago that the eye was blind. Either that, or it was always looking the other way.
Cars passed outside. I heard their tires drawing long soggy lines of sound as they sped by, their passengers oblivious to my mute terror as I strained to hear the doorknob’s squeal. If only Joe would’ve come walking in just then.
My stepdad, Joe, never openly confronted my mother, but his mere presence had power to break the spells of fear she cast over me, as if he possessed some incomprehensible magic even he didn’t understand. Whatever it was, it sufficed; that was all that mattered. His presence quelled my mother’s demons, the ones that pointed her my way whenever Joe wasn’t around.
That night the doorknob remained mute, like me. The squealing I did hear was my mother’s laughter. It erupted downstairs, reminding me of that empty, ringing tone that would come back to me when I was small and played superhero using a stainless-steel bucket for a helmet. The sound of her laughter carved a hollow place in my heart because I knew no superhero was coming to save me.
All the worst nights started with that laughter. Just like Joe’s absence, it was a bad sign.
I knew she was down there, propped against the smooth Formica surface of our old 1950’s kitchen table as she concocted clever tortures that would leave no obvious marks. I mean, assuming she’d still be sober enough to remember that twisted wisdom when she needed it.
Her laugh erupted yet again, a long sentence of joyless sound punctuated by glass clinking on glass. She’d carry out that sentence on me whether I pretended to be asleep or not, so I opened my eyes.
Low moonlight seeped through the four-paned window at the foot of my bed, casting a shadow cross on the opposite wall. The swim team trophy I’d recently won for the fifty-meter backstroke sat on the windowsill and added to the effect, fashioning a bizarre crucifix on the flowered wallpaper. There he hung: Shadow Jesus come to save me in a swimsuit, his hands pulled free of shadow nails and raised toward shadow heaven, pointing in the direction of freedom.
Except, well, I never quite got there.
The back stairs, dressed in their worn linoleum runners, moaned beneath my mother’s footsteps, a litany of woe I knew by heart. The creak of each step was another knife against my throat.
If I lay there any longer I’d wet my bed, adding unnecessary fuel to the volatile fire already kindled in my mother’s mind. I tried to convince myself that night would be different. That night I’d hide well and skirt the ever-present threat of hell to linger one more day in the perpetual purgatory of the living.
But where? Where to hide that I hadn’t already tried before? My eyes flicked to the window, its four panes alive with slithering snakes of rain. No. I’d tried that once. I slipped and wound up bruising the boxelder bush below, breaking my arm in the bargain.
My mother was still mad about the bush.
I tried to think, but the creaking stairs lashed at my brain like a bullwhip. Bathtub? No. Linen closet! No. Under the bed? It seemed as though I’d already tried every place imaginable. Still, I had to decide; once the closing note of stairsong played out beneath my mother’s unsteady feet, I’d be out of time.
I wrestled out from under the comforter, imagining her whiskey breath wafting down the darkened hall ahead of her like the grey mist I’d seen coiling through graveyards in horror films. Then came the worst sign of all. The silence. When my mother stopped laughing it was an irrefutable warning, like an upside-down flag foisted to the top of a doomed ship’s mast.
I ran.
Moments later I heard her in my room, her heavy breaths revving like a rusty steam shovel working the soft earth of my abandoned comforter.
I glanced around the room I’d run to; it was her room, as disheveled as she on any morning after a late-night date with a bottle. I’d see her standing in her rumpled housedress at the kitchen sink, chain smoking, staring at the tire swing out in the yard, her eyes ringed black like a pair of retreads.
Her bedroom gave me the same ominous feeling I got whenever I looked her in the eyes, which wasn’t often. The smoke-stained wallpaper was old and flowered as in the rest of the house. At places, it hung loose, reminding me of the skin on my mother’s face.
I’d never actually gone into that room before. It was the one place I’d never tried hiding, so maybe I’d be safe, like Daniel in his den of lions. My child’s mind convinced me the devil would never think to hunt for me at the very gate of hell. I told myself she’d look everywhere else until Joe got home, and then I’d be in the clear and could sneak back to bed.
I could hear the boxes under my bed being shoved about, my meager collection of toys spilling as she searched for me. I pictured her on her knees, her anger mounting, the red tip of her lit cigarette drawing hot slashes in the night like the menacing marks she sometimes drew on my skin, connecting my freckles in a constellation of pain.
Maybe you’re wondering why she didn’t just turn on the lights, but I knew she wouldn’t. She hated lights. Said they gave her headaches. Besides, had the lights been on and she happened past a mirror, she’d have come face-to-face with the ugly truth of who she was. Most of all, lights would only hurry along the hunt, ruin the fun. And any stubbed toe or banged elbow she got from bumping around in the dark fed her fury.
Boy, did she love her fury. She loved her fury like some folks love their daughters.
I guess she courted stubbed toes and banged elbows because pain lent justice to her outrage, a twisted justice to match a twisted mind, not that I thought about it that way at the time. I didn’t know I was only making things worse by delaying the inevitable. I just thought I was getting out of the way.
She began calling my name.
At first it was just my nickname, spoken with a sweet sigh as if she’d only come to tuck me in. Then it was my given name, a name no one else ever heard who hadn’t been standing at the baptismal font the day Father Delaney doused my forehead. Next, she added my middle name as she lumbered out of my room and teetered down the hall like a train about to jump track.
My middle name trailed like a coal tender feeding heat to the engine of her anger. And after that came the caboose — my last name — always served with the unspoken reminder that it wasn’t really mine, since Joe had never officially adopted me.
Above it all sounded the wheezy whistle of interjected curses as she chugged nearer and nearer.
The safe haven I thought I’d found suddenly faltered. With dread I realized I’d been drawn to the site of my own undoing like a moth drawn to flame. Had I breathed too loudly? Maybe she’d heard the rolling thunder of my heartbeats. That was the moment when a hulking ghost appeared across the unlit room, a broad behemoth with open arms, backed against the far wall: Grandma’s vintage armoire.
The crusty chifforobe, painted in swirls of faux white antiquing, looked like an old actor in stage make-up who was trying to look even older. Shafts of moonlight stabbed through cracks in the brittle dark green blinds, all drawn, lighting Grandma’s armoire as if showcasing it in footlights for my consideration.
A nauseating scent of cedar and mothballs filtered out through all the polyester pantsuits the beastly thing had already swallowed but, without further thought, I dove in and closed the door behind me. Like a little bird nested beneath a camouflage of feathers, I curled beneath the pile of crumpled clothing at its base.
* * *
Three days later, that’s where I was found, smelling of mothballs and misery. You see, my mother put my body back in the armoire after she was through with me.
I told you, remember? That I’d made my escape? My dream-come-true? So, this is where I hang out, now: this Hallmark shop. I can’t leave. It’s my shadow heaven and my purgatory all rolled into one clipped, syrupy sentiment.
At least I got to choose.
You see, that night — even more than most of the nights my mother came for me — I had a special reason for running. I had poisoned her alcohol.
Now, I can’t say for sure she’s in hell, but I do know this: she isn’t here. And that’s heaven enough for me.
Anyway, I chose this place because I like watching people’s faces, seeing their expressions as they discover evidence that someone, somewhere understands them, someone who earns a living writing greeting cards. When customers wander in, I read over their shoulders, looking for sentiments to sum up my own life, hoping for words that will give my nine years on Earth some meaning. The thoughts in cards are brief, after all.
Ah, here’s a good one! See? This lady over here, holding up another selection from the “Encouragement” rack. The card she’s reading says: Live your life like no one’s watching.
Hah! That was sure easy for me. No one was.
Copyright © 2023 by Riley Kilmore
