Catherine Sheffield

The Blue Room

Memoir extract

I slept in the middle bedroom only a few times in my life.  The blue room had its own scare tactics, but it was nothing compared to the nights I attempted in the middle bedroom.

I began to think I made a mistake choosing to sleep in there all by myself. 

It was around this time I was going through a phase that many young girls go through – I was deathly afraid of bloody mary. It left me petrified of mirrors. I would avert my eyes in every bathroom and didn’t dare to look too closely at any shiny or reflective surface. 

The middle bedroom, I realized that night, was filled with mirrors. 

I saw the first mirror the moment I closed myself into the room. It hung on the wall directly across from where I stood by the door. The wall held it at a distance from the top. It looked at me tilted – its head being pulled forward towards the ground like a body at the gallows. 

The illusion resulted in me losing my balance. My body wanted to fall forward into its reflection. The mirror glass itself was warped, distorting my face like I was in a fun house at a county fair. 

I drug my eyes away from the first mirror only to see the entire left wall mirrored the room. A closet with sliding mirror doors covered the expanse of the wall making me uncomfortable head to toe. No part of me was safe. 

I left the light on and crawled into the bed. It was plastic-wrapped and sweaty like the blue room, but worse. I didn’t even try to fall asleep with the lights off. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it. I told myself that if I could just fall asleep with the lights on, then at some point during the night I would likely wake up, dozy and distracted from the mirrors, and turn the light off in the safety and confusion of wanting to go back to sleep. 

That didn’t happen. 

I closed my eyes in bed, yellow light still shining in front of my eyelids, and all I could see was the bedroom. The familiar darkness of sleep was no comfort. My brain would not let me escape from the danger I was convinced hid itself in my reflection. 

I could see, through my closed eyelids, a set of murky fingers wrapping themselves around the edge of the closet door, one finger at a time, like spider legs wrapping themselves around a fly. She pushed the door sideways away from herself to reveal her face first. Grey and contorted with wrinkles with bright blood trickling from her eyes. 

She looked like a mutant of everything that ever scared me. 

She stared at me maniacally – deliberately – like she had been waiting on me all day to climb into bed so she could get me. Or like she waited in that corner of the closet for years, staring at me each time I ran past the middle bedroom, scared of her without knowing she was there. 

I couldn’t escape the thought of her. I saw her with my eyes closed and imagined her just behind the door with my eyes open. She wasn’t the ghost that haunted the house. What I was seeing in my imagination was so far detached from what we lovingly called Meme’s roommate. She was not a ghost. She was a threat. 

She let her stare linger for a moment, like she enjoyed it. Just long enough to let me know she was there, and she was coming for me. 

Her head hung forward like the mirror, and her eyes reflected mine like a target. She knew everything I feared, and she knew exactly how to use it against me. 

She bent her elbow at a wrong angle to push the closet door open the rest of the way. That mirror slid behind the one next to it revealing her body. She wore bloody, dirt soaked, and tattered clothes that barely concealed her limbs. Legs tucked into her chest, crouching in wait on top of a stack of boxes and old costumes, while her arms contorted, fingers clawed out, and pushed herself out of the closet and onto the ground ready to crawl towards me. 

My heart felt like it was racing and that it had stopped all at once. 

I wondered if I tried to run then, right past her and out the door to my mom, would I make it? Would she stop me by lunging for my ankles and pull me to the ground? Maybe she would drag me into the closet with her, bringing me into her crouched position on the boxes and holding me captive there away from my mom, smiling at me so hard in the dark that her skin cracked and her eyes bled harder. She would stay like that for years before we were unearthed again – her smiling and me eyes-wide and paralyzed in fear. Or would she let me pass if I tried to run? I imagined she might. I could see myself running out of the door, right past her still-crouched body, only turning her head to let her gaze follow me down the hall and into Meme’s room where Mom slept. 

She never made it past the closet behind my closed eyes. I would open my eyes, see the closet door closed with nobody in the room with me, only to shut them again so tightly that I held my breath and tried to see stars. But I could never conjure them. Only the yellow-lit room and the loop of the monster in the closet coming to get me.  

As I got older, the idea of a monster hiding in the closet was less convincing, but I knew something was still there. Maybe another ghost. I slept in the middle bedroom once or twice again if I needed to, but I was smart enough to avoid it. It felt like it was only a matter of time before whatever was in the closet got me. And my time was coming up. 

*

We put off cleaning the middle bedroom for as long as we could. It was the most cluttered room in the house, and to be honest, I dodged the subject anytime Mom suggested we clean it out. She wasn’t over-eager to clean it either, but she recoiled more from the inevitable junk we would have to sort through. 

I followed my mom through the hall and watched as she stepped inside the middle bedroom. She pushed the button for the light, and I lingered in the hall. I felt like a cartoon character holding onto the doorframe with my nails digging into the wood begging not to go in. As I pushed my foot across the barrier to the room, I turned towards where Mom stood by Meme’s sewing machine at the foot of the bed. 

She was opening round cookie tins that were filled with recipe cards and thread. 

I was clenching my teeth. 

“Hey Mom,” I started. 

She looked up. “Yeah?” 

I had never told her about my fear of the bedroom. I looked over to the closet and thought about how I didn’t want to be the only one waiting for the monster to jump out when we opened the doors. “This room always kinda freaked me out. Something about all the mirrors.” I didn’t tell her about what I imagined was in the closet. That was too far-fetched.

“Huh,” she said. She looked around the room and I held my breath as I waited. I felt vulnerable, like I had just shared something very revealing and was waiting to see if it would be accepted or not. “Yeah,” she kept going. “It kinda creeped me out too… I just never thought about why.” 

I exhaled the breath I was holding and felt a gust of relief. Like I had actually been holding that breath for years.

“That mirror is the worst,” I pointed at the one hung on the wall like a body. 

“Oh! Yeah! It always makes my face weird. And it makes me fatter than I am…” 

“A fun house mirror,” I laughed.

We both laughed. We hated what the mirror did to us and consoled one another that we didn’t actually look how we were always reflected to look. 

We shifted gears from Meme’s sewing stand and approached the closet. Mom reached for the sliding door in the corner by the door, and suddenly, I wasn’t so afraid anymore. Whatever was in there wasn’t after me. My mom felt it too, and she was doing fine. Clearly, it was just my overactive nerve making me so afraid all of these years. Mom confirming the creepiness put it all into perspective. Everything was fine. It was just an old room. 

The red curtains were pulled closed across the window, sheer enough to only tease the outside world. I saw a flash that came from the sky, but no rumble to accompany it. Heat lighting. 

Mom wrapped her fingers around the edge of the mirrored door and leaned into it. She had to use the weight of her whole body to exert enough force to move it out of the divet in the carpet it had been buried in. 

With slow painful budges, the door was sliding open with creaks sounding off like a machine gun. The house put up a fight to conceal whatever Meme was hiding in there. 

I joined Mom for one last shove, and the door finally gave in. I saw the corner of the closet I had imagined so vividly years ago, and it was finally opened. It revealed what I always expected to be there.

My dad. At times he came to me with such clarity. 

He spoke like a drill sergeant.  Because he was one. The cruelest one from what I heard. 

When we moved back to Tennessee after Mobile didn’t work out, after only a year, we were trying to find a place to live. The market was awful and we couldn’t find a house in our budget. We ended up at a viewing for a house outside of the military base with the soldier who owned it. When he was showing us the house, he echoed our last name to my mom. 

“Sheffield,” he said. “That name is familiar to me. Did you serve?” 

“No. Well,” my mom said. “My ex-husband did. Christian Sheffield.” 

He stopped by the front door, boots glued to the cheap carpet by the tile foyer. “Sergeant Sheffield,” he said my dad’s name like he was remembering a ghost. He tried to laugh and shake whatever thoughts he was having from his head, but he couldn’t do it. His face hollowed out. I knew the feeling. “He was one of the worst. Son of a bitch kicked my head in a few times.” 

“Sounds like him,” Mom said. I nodded, and he looked down at me. 

“I’m sorry, I don’t meant to talk bad about your dad, I’m sure he’s a good–”

“He’s a jerk,” I interrupted him. I liked hearing that he treated others terribly too. It made it feel less personal, and like I wasn’t making it up, when he did it to me. 

“Hah,” he said, seemingly also pleased by our connection. A soldier and a fourth-grader had nightmares about the same face. “Yeah, okay. He was a piece of shit. We all hated him.” 

He rented us the house. 

Dad tried to kidnap me there a year or two later. 

It was a polite attempted kidnapping. He rang the doorbell and announced he was going to take me to Washington D.C. Not all kidnappers would do that. 

My mom told him that there was no way. I hid behind the door, too horrified to make eye contact with him, but wanting to see what was happening. 

“The court says that I get three days with them. They’ll be back by then.” 

“You’re not taking my kids for three days! You show up with no warning, they aren’t packed, and they don’t even want to go.” 

“They don’t have a choice.” 

“I’m fifteen now,” Cas said. He walked out in front of our mom and into the front walkway where Dad stood. Mom wouldn’t let him near to come inside the house. 

Cas made his voice deeper by stretching his throat. By voice alone, he could pass for a grown adult. In addition to the way he had started to tower up in height, getting more of Dad’s genetics with the potential to surpass his six-foot stance, he knew how to make himself look scary. “The court also says that I’m a teenager now. If I don’t want to go I don’t have to.” 

Dad stood there and sized him up. He was right. According to the court agreement, he had aged into having a choice. 

I was ten. 

“Well then she has to go,” Dad said pointing at me behind the door. He looked at me. “Pack what you need.” 

“I don’t want to,” I said in a small voice to my mom. 

He heard. “It’ll be like Hershey, you had fun then.” 

I looked at my mom and held her arm tighter. “Don’t make me go.” 

I said it every time we had to go out to dinner with him too. One time I cried so hard waiting for him to pick us up that I had my first panic attack when he rang the doorbell. I know it broke her heart to send me off in his truck when I didn’t want to. She didn’t want me to leave either. But she didn’t have a choice. He was legally entitled to me. 

She wouldn’t let him that time, though. 

When he threatened to call 9-1-1 to make me get in the car, finger hovering over his phone’s keypad, my mom matched his move. He dialed nine like it was a threat, and she dialed nine like a promise. She was a cowboy in a western film, guns blazing in a standoff. 

She was hiding her fear so well. 

We all stood outside. They all screamed at each other. I watched. 

It was dark by the time the police pulled onto our street. I didn’t remember it getting dark. I stood in the center of our front lawn and watched as neighbors came out of their houses to see the commotion. Blue and red smeared my vision and I could barely tell which tall figure was my dad and which was my brother. I lost my mom in the blur and felt my chest crack open like thunder. I saw everything as if I were a helicopter circling a storm.  

Something touched my arm and I looked to the street behind me. Ahead of me. We lived there long enough that I should have known the streets, but suddenly I didn’t know which way I was facing. 

A woman crouched down to my level.

“Hey, hon. Are you okay?” She had brown hair and glasses and wore a simple t-shirt and jeans. “I don’t know if now is the right time, but would you want to go painting on Saturday?” 

I didn’t know who she was. Why was she asking me to paint? 

I must have been giving her the strangest look because she leaned back into a normal stance and put space between us. She held eye contact with me before looking behind my shoulder. I heard words. She was talking to someone. Then the woman turned around to leave. She touched my arm one more time. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. 

It wasn’t until she was walking back to what I just noticed was a car parked on the side of the road that I heard the other voice was still talking. It took a second for it to come into focus. It was my mom’s voice. La’s Mom, I heard her say. 

“What?” Mom was standing in front of me then. 

“That was Kayla’s Mom.” 

“Who’s Kayla?” I had a knot in my forehead from pulling my eyebrows together too tight. 

“Kayla, Catherine. She wants you to spend the night and go to Swirls.” I was looking at her like she was crazy before I finally remembered. It was like I came back down from the sky and everything made sense again. 

Kayla was my best friend. I spent the night at her house all the time. Her mom would take us to an art studio where they gave us snacks and taught us to paint animals. It was my favorite part of the week. 

I didn’t even remember I had a best friend that night. 

*

We pulled a dull green plastic storage container from the top of the stack of boxes in the closet. It was heavy. Mom grabbed one end while I grabbed the other, and we hoisted it up and onto the ground. 

We sat down on the floor with it and unlatched the plastic cuffs on each side securing the lid closed. She was rummaging through papers in the box while I grabbed a stack of photos. As I flipped through, I started to notice a worrying pattern. I looked up to Mom to tell her, but my words died in my throat when I saw her. Papers spread around her crossed legs, fingers wrinkling the edges of one in her hands, and her body shaking. My stomach was tense. She was angry in a way I felt I shouldn’t have been witnessing. It was a private rage. Her deepest fears and suspicions were just proven right.      

“This is all your Dad’s stuff,” she said.