The Memory Palace Read Online Free Page B

seventeen years. “I’ll leave you two alone,” I said, and left.
    If you glanced in the room at that moment, you would see two women in tranquil silence, one tenderly brushing the hair of the other, as if she had been doing it her entire life.

    When I called U-Haul, they confirmed our mother had a storage room there. It was at Kamm’s Corners in West Park, not far from our old neighborhood. Early the next day, on Thursday, before heading over to the hospital, Natalia and I drove to the U-Haul on Lorain Avenue. Natalia sat in the passenger’s seat, clutching the map, nervous about getting lost. I expected to get lost. I got lost nearly every day.
    When we arrived, the man at the counter said, “Norma used to change clothes in there sometimes, even in winter. There’s no light or heat in the rooms. She was one tough broad.”
    Natalia and I wound our way through the maze of corridors. I could see my breath and regretted not having brought a hat or a pair of gloves. Fluorescent lights hummed, casting a pale, eerie glow on the high metal walls. I wondered how many other homeless men and women used these rooms to store their belongings, to change, or to catch up on sleep. Finally we came to our mother’s room; it was just like all the others, eight-by-eight feet. I pulled the keys out of the sock. We tried them all. The last one fit; the padlock clicked open.
    I hesitated for a moment before I looked in. I was terribly curious to know what was inside, but I also wished I never had found the key. I was afraid of what we would find, even more afraid to find out what had been lost. Wasn’t it enough that we were here, now, in her final days? I shone my flashlight into the cold dark room. Things were piled up to the ceiling: furniture, boxes, trash, clothes, books, cans of soup. I imagined her changing clothes in the dark, shivering, cursing to herself, taking off one shirt andputting on another, then layering on three more for warmth. Natalia and I began to dig.
    My sister and I worked fast, sorting things into piles. We needed to get back to the hospital and didn’t have the luxury of taking our time. There was that familiar sense of purpose that I hadn’t felt in years, that old “it’s an emergency, let’s just get the job done” kind of feeling. I was glad not to do it alone.
    I first tried to separate all the trash from things that we needed to save. I almost tossed out one of my mother’s old grimy pocketbooks when I felt something hard inside. I pulled out a butcher knife. “Jesus, look at this,” I said.
    “Do you think that’s the one she had when the police caught her at Logan Airport?” said Natalia. “I’m sure she was on her way to find me.”
    Natalia and I excavated. We found a 1950s Geiger counter, and a bag of our mother’s hair with a note taped to it with instructions on how to make a wig. I found a chart she had drawn showing all the nuclear power plants in the world, similar to one she had sent me when I lived in the Norwegian Arctic ten years before. There were boxes crammed with newspaper articles on cryogenics, alien abductions, radon poisoning, global warming, child abuse, train wrecks, and unsolved murders in Chicago. I discovered a huge box labeled “Scribing Books” filled with notebooks devoted to my mother’s eclectic research: geometry, poetry, chemistry, botany, geography, art history, medicine, fairy tales, zoology, car mechanics, physics, and the Bible. For each subject, she made vocabulary lists with detailed definitions, something I would have done even before my brain injury. Her files could have been my files; her notes, mine.
    I came across the chiffon scarf I had bought for her in New Orleans years ago. In the same box were many of my favorite books from childhood. I pulled out a collection of Jack London I’d read when I was about eleven. After reading
Call of the Wild
, I became obsessed with polar exploration. If a man could survive by boiling his boots, or