Dirty Little Secrets (6 page)

“Then why couldn't we tell her?” I said. “Or Sara?” Sara hadn't bothered to come back once Aunt Jean showed up, spending all her time either at the hospital or at her apartment.

“Well,” she said. “Your sister is busy with her own life, and your mom might have felt bad because she couldn't help. You know that even though she's getting out of the hospital today, she's going to need lots and lots of rest. Isn't it better that she recuperates in a nice, clean house with all of us there to take care of her?”

“I guess,” Phil said, not looking convinced. I didn't know what he was so worried about—it's not like we did anything bad. He shot a glance at me and I shrugged.

“Watch your step, Joanna,” Aunt Jean said as she guided Mom's walker up to the house. “Put your wheels on the stoop and then take the step up slowly.”

“I've got it,” Mom said, clearly frustrated at having to rely on someone else for help.

“I just don't want you to fall,” Aunt Jean said.

Mom stopped her slow progress up the walk and leaned on the handles, her breathing coming hard, like she'd just run a marathon. “I know. I'm sorry. I really appreciate everything you've done for the kids the past few weeks. You must be anxious to get home.”

Aunt Jean leaned over and kissed her sister on the cheek. “It was nothing. I know you'd do the same for me. The only thing that matters now is that you get better.”

Phil and I walked behind the two of them, me carrying several bunches of flowers from her hospital room and Phil carrying Mom's small suitcase.

I was so excited I felt like I was going to explode. We'd worked so hard to get everything finished—even the big Dumpster had been taken away just this morning, leaving only two parallel scrapes in the street to show it had ever been there. “Can we tell her now?” I asked. I was practically jumping up and down, and wished they would hurry up and get to the door.

“Tell me what?” Mom smiled. It was probably the first smile I'd seen since her accident. The worry lines in her forehead had gotten so deep they looked like scars from a lifetime of hurt.

Aunt Jean concentrated on finding the right key on her key ring. “Oh, just a little surprise we cooked up for you.”

Phil hung back and didn't say anything.

“Open the door already!” I practically shouted.

Mom had a confused smile on her face as Aunt Jean swung the door open.

I scooted past the two of them and into the sparkling hallway that still smelled faintly of pine cleaner. “Ta da!”

Mom placed the front legs of the walker in the hallway and pulled herself into the house. She took two tentative steps and stopped, craning her neck to see into the dining room and then back to the living room. “Oh no,” she said quietly. The walker rattled on the tiles as she tried to hurry down the hallway. Her voice got louder and more frantic as she went. “Oh no . . . oh no . . . oh no!”

Aunt Jean followed behind her, but Mom didn't seem to notice. “Now, Joanna, it just needed a bit of sprucing up in here,” she said. “It's no big deal, really. Joanna?”

Mom continued her noisy scraping along the hallway until she got to her bedroom. One hand gripped the walker as the other flew to her mouth. “Where are they? Where are all my things?” She turned and started back down the hallway to where Aunt Jean had stopped. “My papers and photos? All of my quilting supplies—some of those fabrics are irreplaceable!”

“You need to calm down,” Aunt Jean said. “We kept everything that was valuable. It's all put away. The kids did such a wonderful job—”

“The kids? You made the kids do this to me?” Mom looked at Phil and me. He hadn't even made it through the doorway yet—he stood outside with his eyes planted firmly on the ground.

“Phil and Lucy worked so hard trying to make this place livable,” Aunt Jean said, an edge creeping into her voice.

“I knew Sara would never betray me like this!” Mom said. She looked frantically around the living room. We had found the photos and put them on the mantle along with a big vase for her flowers. Mom walked up to it, and, with one swipe of her arm, pulled everything onto the floor with a crash.

Aunt Jean rushed over to the pile. “Lucy, honey, would you grab the dustpan?” she said, the waver in her voice the only sign she wasn't as calm as she looked. She took my fourth-grade picture and gently placed it back on the mantle.

Mom turned on me. “You'll do no such thing,” she said. She turned back to Aunt Jean, gripping the handles of her walker so tight her arms were shaking. “Where is everything? I want everything back in this house by tonight,” she said.

Aunt Jean straightened up to face her. “It's gone, Jo,” she said quietly. “It's gone. You can't get it back. It was garbage. Don't you remember what it was like with Mama when we were kids? Can't you see you were living just like her?”

“I am nothing like her,” Mom said, every word sounding like it had come from the center of her body. She was practically spitting with anger. “I am a
collector
. Everything in this house has . . . had a purpose and a meaning. How dare you come in here and get rid of my treasures!”

I hugged the wall as I crept back onto the porch where Phil was still standing.

Aunt Jean's eyes were wet as she tried to reason with Mom. “But all of the mold and mildew—and what I found in the refrigerator! It's not healthy living like this. Don't you remember when we were kids? What if their friends found out?” She swung around and pointed at me. “Do you want them to make fun of her too? I remember what it was like even if you don't.”

“Get out!” Mom started screaming at her. “Get out! I will not tolerate this in my own house. You took advantage of me! You probably stole my things for yourself. Get out!”

Aunt Jean still didn't move. “Joanna, calm down. It's going to be okay. Look around at your beautiful house.”

“Get out!” Mom screamed at Aunt Jean one last time and, with all the effort she could muster, swung the walker at her. One leg caught Aunt Jean under the eye as she scrambled out of the way.

“Fine!” Aunt Jean said as she made her way to the door, her fingers pressed to her rapidly swelling face. “You're on your own from now on. You don't want help, you just live here and drown in your own filth.” As she passed me in the doorway, she placed a hand on my cheek. “Take care of each other,” she said. “I'll do everything I can to help.” And then she was gone.

Mom lay crumpled in a heap on the living room floor, tears streaming down her cheeks. I walked over to try to help her up, but she swatted my arm away.

“I don't need you,” she said. She looked at Phil still standing in the doorway. “Either of you.”

We both watched silently as she dragged herself to the coffee table and used that to swing herself onto the chair. That night, she spent the first of many nights sleeping on our old green recliner.

These past few years, her room had gotten so cluttered and her bed hidden under such a huge mountain of clothes, it was almost impossible to sleep there. Her life in this house had shrunk down to the space around that old recliner.

Over time, Mom got less angry at Phil and me, but things were never the same as before. Sara loved to suck up to Mom and tell her over and over how she would have never let us do it if she had known. If any of us ever wondered who the favorite was, we didn't anymore.

Aunt Jean might have tried to help, but I only talked to her a couple of times after that. She would call when she knew Mom was at work and ask me how things were. I'd tell her they were okay, and she'd tell me she was sorry, but I always tried to get off the phone quickly. I felt so bad about betraying Mom that I didn't dare keep in touch after she told us not to. Little by little, Mom eliminated almost every “outsider” from our lives. It was better this way, she used to tell us. The only people you can trust were right here in the immediate family. Phil just spent as much time as possible away from home until he could leave for good. That's what we all did—waited until we could leave for good.

It took three people and two solid weeks to clean out Mom's mess. It took her less than six months to return it to squalor.

chapter 5

11:10 a.m.

Two weeks. As much as I tried to be positive, I couldn't ignore the fact it had taken us two entire weeks to clean out the house back then, and there were three of us doing it—now there was just me and a whole lot more stuff.

Mom was lying in the back of the house, but at least she was in the hallway. This way, I only had to clear the places the paramedics would see as they dragged the stretcher through the house to get her. Any room that had a door could be shut away from prying eyes, and I could deal with them later. I didn't have to do the whole house in the next couple of days. Just the visible parts.

Still, I had no idea where to start, and taking it in as a whole made it look impossible. But impossible wasn't an option.

Mom always said you eat an elephant a bite at a time, so I tried to concentrate on one little part of one room. I walked back to the front door and turned around, trying to find the spots that would make the most difference. I tried to see it as someone new would, someone who hadn't gotten used to seeing piles and piles of junk as they expanded over the years until they were as much a part of the house as the couch or dining room table. Not that you could actually see the couch or the table under all the garbage.

Obviously, I would have to start with the front hallway. At some point, Mom had covered this part of the mound with a sheet so it wouldn't look so bad in case someone caught a glimpse of what was inside the house. Cautiously, I lifted a corner of the sheet and peeked underneath. As far as I could tell, it was the same assortment of clothes, mail, newspapers, and plastic grocery bags resting on the ever-popular green bins that were scattered through the house.

As I put the sheet back down, I noticed a familiar box about halfway down the pile. I pulled it out and lifted the cover to see that the slippers were still in there, just as new as they had been when I'd given them to her for her birthday a couple of years ago. I'd looked hard to find some that matched her old ratty ones almost exactly, and she'd seemed happy when she opened them. But here they were in a mound of junk, while her old nasty ones were still snug on her feet.

I walked back into the dining room and opened the first box of trash bags. The bag made a sharp snapping sound as I shook it open—it was the sound of efficiency and organization and somehow it made me feel a little better.

The top of the nearest pile held the mail from the past few weeks. The whole place was like some sort of archaeology site—the layers closest to the top had the most recent stuff, while the layers on the bottom were probably six or seven years old. As I crammed the fliers and ads into the first bag, I started to feel guilty about just throwing it all away. Mom always said she'd recycle all this stuff—it's one of the reasons she had for keeping it. I could at least recycle the newspapers, but they would be too heavy for the garbage bags. Luckily, we had a huge stack of boxes in the garage. Mom never threw away a good box.

On my way to the garage, I tried not to look toward her room, but I couldn't help it. Something moved and I jumped, but it was only a fly. A big, shiny, greenish black fly. It sat on a yellow magazine, changing and shifting direction every few seconds like it was waiting for something to happen. Weren't flies supposed to be hibernating or something when it was this cold out?

I couldn't stand to see it there, rubbing its legs together in anticipation, so I made my way back to the front hallway and grabbed the sheet that was covering the monster pile by the door. With the grimy sheet over my shoulder, I inched my way back down the hall until I was standing at Mom's feet. In one quick movement I flung the sheet over her like it was some sort of magic trick. And it worked. Mom had used the sheet to make the junk in the hallway disappear, and now I used it to make her disappear. The fly was out of luck.

It felt much better to have Mom all covered up, so I worked my way to the garage. It took several minutes of digging to get a couple of boxes from the pile that was stacked against the garage wall. The garage was what the house aspired to. It was so packed full of stuff that it seemed like there was no way to cram even one more tiny item into the overwhelmed space. There wasn't even a real path through the stuff anymore. If something needed to be stored in the garage, most of the time we just stood in the doorway and tossed it as far into the mess as we could. A long time ago, someone had put plywood up in the rafters in an attempt at organization, but now everything that was up there just made the beams in the ceiling sag until they almost met the piles on the ground. The whole space had an air of impending doom.

As I turned to walk back up the concrete steps and into the house, I caught a glimpse of a silver fender sticking out of the pile. My car. At least Mom said it would be once she got it out of here and fixed it up. It was really Mom's old car that she'd put in here when she'd bought the new one a couple of years ago. Maybe someday I could dig the car out and get it running, or even use hers. I could finally get my license and feel like I was free. It would sure beat having to ask Kaylie's mom for a ride everywhere.

I grabbed the boxes from the garage and dragged them back down the pathway to the front door. It only took ten minutes to go through one big stack, recycling most of it and throwing the rest in one of the garbage bags. I picked up the box to take this first load outside, but when I got to the hallway, the sides were blocked by the stacks of newspapers and magazines—the path was way too narrow for me to carry the box through the kitchen and out the back door. I could feel my muscles straining as I stood in the front hallway trying to decide what to do with the heavy, awkward box. The last thing I needed was to draw attention to myself by carrying the bags and boxes through the front door, but until I'd made the main path wider, it was going to be impossible to carry them out through the back.