Oh No. Oh No.

(What are your ghosts like?)

(They are on the insides of the lids of my eyes.)

(This is also where my ghosts reside.)

(You have ghosts?)

(Of course I have ghosts.)

~Jonathan Safran Foer

I can never remember her face. I can only recall pieces of it: her nose or her chin. Or her mouth, which was always blank and emotionless. Sometimes I try to fit these pieces together to form a complete picture, but I never can. My memory cannot reassemble all of these disjointed features into a whole face. She was one of the very first babysitters to take care of me when I was young. That’s pretty much all I know about her. She was one of the very first. I don’t even remember her name. I mostly remember the way her hand felt on my skin when she wrapped her fingers around my wrist.   

I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It’s nothing. It’s just a memory that floats into my head every now and then, usually when I am feeling especially drained. That’s usually when it comes back to me. It’s nothing, though. It’s really nothing.

Really.

She would come to our house every day to take care of me while my mother went to work. I was very young, then, maybe three or four years old. My sister would go to school and then my babysitter would come to our house just as my mother was leaving for work. I remember standing at the front door in the mornings, waving to my mother as she got into her car. She would wave back to me before starting her engine and driving away. I wouldn’t move from the doorway; I would keep waving and waving at her until her car drove all the way down the road and disappeared from my view. Then I would wave at the empty street. I would wave and wave until my babysitter came and grabbed a hold of my wrist. She would guide me away from the door, then walk with me through the hallway and place me in my room.

Be good. She would tell me. Then she’d close the door and lock it from the outside so I couldn’t open it. And that is where I would stay for the entire day. Alone in that room from 8 in the morning until 5 in the evening. Every day.  At the end of the day I would hear her footsteps coming down the hall. She would undo the lock and let me out of my room a few minutes before my mother came home from work, and I would go and stand at the front door again, watching for her car.

Did you ever move from this spot? I remember my mother once asking me when she got home. I would hug her. Very, very tight.

I don’t know how long this went on. Days, weeks, months? I know it went on for a while. I couldn’t begin to add up all of the hours I spent alone in my room like that. And during all that time, it never once occurred to me that I should tell my mother about any of it. It just didn’t seem like something she should know.

My sister would get home from school in the late afternoons, so she must have been with me at least some of the time. In the majority of my memories during this period, though, I am all by myself in the room. I mostly told myself stories. That is what I remember doing. Or I would sing songs to myself. But mostly, I told stories. Sometimes, I would write them down. But because I was so little and I didn’t know how to write many words besides my own name, I would just scribble a series of wavy lines across a page. And those were my stories. Wavy line after wavy line after wavy line. At the very bottom of the paper, I would write my name: Nicole. With a backwards c. I always wrote my c backwards. Always.

Days, weeks, months. I don’t know how long.

The moment I remember the most is the moment all of it ended. The day my mother came home early from work.

Again, I don’t know why I am telling you this. And I don’t know why these memories bother me so much. It’s not the worst thing that has ever happened to me. It’s just something that happened and Oh well. It was so long ago and it doesn’t matter, really, in the end.

It doesn’t matter. There are far worse things that can happen to a person. Far worse. I know that. It’s just that when this memory shows up it makes me feel, for some reason, a mixture of extreme dread and exhaustion and deep embarrassment (of all things, embarrassment). It’s hard to explain and it’s difficult to put into words. I guess the best way I can put that feeling into words is like this: Oh no. Oh no.

I don’t know.  I guess I just want it out of my head. So I will get it out of my head by writing it out of my head. I will write it out and leave it here.

My mother comes home early from work. This is how that day unfolds. My mother comes home early from work. I am in my room scribbling a wavy-lined story. I write my name across the bottom of the page: Nicole. My c is backwards. I hear the front door open. I hear my mother’s footsteps walking down the hall. I hear her say, What is this? What’s going on? And I know she is looking at my closed and locked door. I can’t see this, but I know this. In my room, I put my head against my page full of scribbles. I think, Oh no. I hear my babysitter’s footsteps in the hall. I hear my babysitter say, It’s nothing. I hear my babysitter say, It’s fine.

That is the last day. She isn’t my babysitter after that day.

I don’t know why this memory bothers me. It’s nothing. It’s nothing, really.

It’s nothing and it’s fine. It’s fine.

It’s fine.