Ruined. Almost assuredly. I told myself not to fret, those were items going to charity out there, the things I decided to let go of. But I had consoled myself with the notion of someone else enjoying them as much as I had. It made me sick to think of them wasted, worthless.
I shouldered open my basement door and snuck a look behind me. They hadn’t followed, thank goodness. They didn’t need to see this just yet.
I fumbled for the light switch, and the anemic lightbulb splashed pale light on formless heaps all around the cool, dank space.
Jack refused to come down here for anything, and I couldn’t blame him.
It was the first space I filled, and the first chink in the wall of my marriage. Ron had always planned to finish the basement and make it a rec room, when we had more money. By then I’d filled it. The fights we used to get into after the kids were sleeping! He’d holler at me for all the junk, and I’d tell him that basements were supposed to be for storage.
From my vantage point now at the top of the steps I surveyed the mounds, looking for what I remembered to be old clothes of Ron’s that one day had been destined for Goodwill but never made it. Some of my clothes from the dryer would suit Mary, temporarily. I spotted the boxes I thought I remembered in the far corner, near where a workbench used to be. Well, it still was there, I supposed. Under the things.
As I began my descent, something rustled in the corner and I gasped.
Then I was tumbling, objects smacking and scraping me, the room whirling in my vision until I smashed into a wall of full plastic crates and landed faceup and flat on the cement floor.
Air wouldn’t come for three long heartbeats until I finally sucked in a deep breath, which expelled in a weak sob.
I tried to pull up on my elbows, but my body had no strength.
I wiggled my toes. Thank God for that much.
Sharp pain was blazing in my wrist. I turned my head to the side, accusingly, at the stairs, and saw that I’d tripped on one of my small piles at the edge of the steps. A stack of cosmetics boxes had gotten somehow knocked right across the very step I’d been trying to navigate, then something had moved in my basement where nothing should be moving at all. I was distracted, I said to myself. Anyone could fall down the stairs when distracted.
Other body parts were blaring now, joining my wrist in a riot of pain: my head, my elbow, my back. I could finally pull up to my elbows, and I looked down at myself.
A thread of blood ran down the side of my leg from knee to ankle. I touched my face, which felt wet in a different way than rain, and my fingers came away red.
I tried to manage sitting, but the effort made the room start to come unmoored, and I lowered myself back to flat.
“Mary!” I called. “Mary? Can you hear me?”
I listened for the sound of running feet, but all I could hear was my own frantic pulse and shallow breath. A faint booming penetrated the basement space: thunder. What my mother used to call “angels bowling” to get us to calm down.
Mary and Seth were all the way at the front of the house. I could see from down here that the basement door had swung shut behind me. That plus the rolling thunder and the slashing rain would make for a noisy upstairs indeed. Perhaps they wouldn’t hear me until the storm rumbled away.
I thought of my son, clutter raining down upon him. Then my mother, buried in her hoard as it burned around her.
No. No, stop being dramatic, Trish, I lectured myself. You’re just a little banged up, is all; it’s not a fire.
They say it was the smoke that got Mother, not the burning. This was meant to be a comfort, I think, a better way to go. But the fact is they didn’t find her in bed, peacefully asleep. They found her in what had been the hallway, underneath an avalanche of newspapers that were blackened and soaked by the firemen’s hose. They must have been heavy, all those papers stacked as they’d been against the wall.
We knew there’d been working smoke alarms in that house. Mary and I always made sure of that much, at least.
Mother had left a candle burning, they decided, and I could fill in the rest. One of the cats must have knocked something onto it, or knocked it over. Mother would have heard the alarm and tried to make her way from her bedroom. The newspapers knocked her down and she lay there, pinned to the floor as fire leaped up the walls in her kitchen, breathing in smoke until she suffocated, watching her home and her cats and her keepsakes burn.
Knowing this was supposed to comfort us. That the smoke got her before the fire.
“Mom,” I said now, my voice weak in the stale basement air. “Jack. I’m sorry.”
Chapter 30
Seth and I stood dripping in Trish’s entryway, staring everywhere but at each other. I had my arms crossed over my chest, seeing as I’d been wearing white and was therefore an unwilling entrant in a wet T-shirt contest of one.
I gripped my elbows, too, to keep from shivering too hard.
Seth cast glances about the room, and his gaze lighted on an old afghan. “Aha,” he said, and he shook some dust off and draped it around me. His hands rested briefly on my shoulders as I pulled the afghan more tightly around me.
I looked up at his face then. He had some stubble growing in. I saw a scar on his cheek from a rock-climbing accident senior year on spring break. The intensity of his eyes on mine made me feel overwarm in my afghan, but I dared not cast it off after he went to the trouble of finding it. Not to mention my soaked shirt.
We just regarded each other, then, our eyes searching. What was behind this look? I wondered. What was it about my wet hair and wet face that was suddenly so interesting?
“Are you OK?” I asked him.
He swallowed hard, looked down. “I hope Aurora is OK. She hates storms.”
I couldn’t say I’m sure she’ll be fine because how would I know? “Such a pretty name.”
“We thought we’d call her Rory, that it would be adorable.”
The look on his face suggested the nickname never came to pass, that very little about his situation turned out to be adorable. “It’s a beautiful name as it is,” I offered, having nothing else to give him, not daring to ask, Why didn’t you ever tell me she was autistic? Why did you tell me so little that mattered?
“I could call my ex, but she hates it when I check in too much. She says I am undermining her, like I don’t trust her.” Seth looked back at me again, perplexed. “Why can’t I just be worried about my girl? Why is she always so suspicious?”
Seth shook his head, as if coming out of a daze. “Well. What do I know, anyway?”
“You know plenty, don’t you? Being a psychologist and all.”
“Yeah. Plenty.”
I saw his face twist up with bitterness, and I blinked and stepped back.
Seth held up his hand. “What’s that? Did you hear something?”
Seth took off running, and I was at his heels, shedding the heavy afghan as I went.
He got to the doorway first and as he pulled the door open, we heard Trish’s calls grow louder. Her voice was cracked and shaky, and we moved down the stairs as fast as we could manage.
My brain went frantic with input: Trish, bloody and limp at the foot of the stairs. The mountain range of stuff piled higher than our heads. The clutter on the steps themselves, one in particular covered by light pink cardboard boxes.
My hand shook on the stair rail.
Seth got there first and propped her up. “Breathe slowly, Trish. We’ve got you now.”
I sat at her other side and took her hand. Her pulse skittered under my fingers. I stroked her hair away from her face and cringed for her at a jagged gash near the hairline. Her skin was pale and cold, still wet from the rain.
“Be right back,” I said, and dashed up the stairs, looking for the afghan.
As I came back down the stairs, eyes on Trish, she cried out, “Mary, be ca
reful!” just as I was remembering to step over the junk that must have caused her fall.
I snapped the afghan open and laid it across her. She was shivering in earnest now, but propped up on her elbows, under her own power.
“I’m going to find towels,” Seth said, pausing before leaving to look me in the eye.
I nodded at him, giving him permission to leave us.
I moved Trish’s hair again to inspect the cut. It was jagged, but not deep. “Where else are you hurt?” I asked her.
“Everywhere,” she said through a sniff.
“Where is it the worst?”
Trish lifted her left hand out of the afghan. Her wrist was puffing up before my eyes.
“We should take you to the doctor.”
“No, for God’s sake. I’m not going to sit . . .”—her words were coming out in a stutter, whether from cold or fear or both I didn’t know—“. . . in some waiting room for hours on top of this. We can wrap my wrist. Ice it.”
Seth appeared at the top of the steps, then came down to hand out towels. He had one around his neck. Goose bumps marched across my skin. I was still soaking wet myself.
“Let’s get you up the stairs at least,” I said.
At the foot of the steps we helped her to standing. Seth put one arm around Trish and guided her back up the stairs. I followed behind, reaching out my hands pointlessly. As if I could really save them if they started to fall.
Trish and I sat across from each other on her bed. We were both wearing her clothes, our hair up in towel turbans like we used to after a day swimming in the lake. Trish had added another blanket around her and only just managed to stop shaking. Seth had gone to make an ice bag for her swollen wrist, after we’d cleaned out her cuts as best we could.
“I kept thinking of Jack. And Mom,” Trish gulped out.
A stab of guilt jarred me. How long had it been since I’d visited Mom? In the years since her death, I have often tried to grab on to the memory of when I’d last seen her. But the specifics were elusive, and the only memory I could conjure was a sense of desperation to leave her home, crammed as it was full of junk, cats, and the smell of cat urine.
I hadn’t known it would be the last time. How could any of us have known?
Trish added, “Think how terrified Jack must have been.”
I said nothing, sensing that I could only make her feel worse with any comment I could possibly have.
“What kind of mother does this to her children?” Trish groaned, holding her head in her hand, the blanket loose around her like a cape.
“You didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“So what. It happened. No, it didn’t happen. I did it. That’s what we could never get Mom to admit, right? That she did it? That it was wrong and she did it?”
“She was defensive. We put her on the defensive.” I traced the floral pattern in Trish’s bedsheets, and I couldn’t help but wonder when she last changed them. “She probably knew what she’d done, deep down. She wasn’t delusional. She just didn’t want to be reminded.”
Seth cleared his throat in the doorway. “Everything OK?”
“As much as it ever is,” Trish grumbled, suddenly flushing pink. “Thanks for saving me.”
Seth only nodded and handed over the bag of ice. Trish winced as the cold ice met her wrist.
“I still think . . .” I began.
“No.”
“In the morning if it’s worse, you really should go in . . .”
Trish groaned and lay back on her pillows. “I need Motrin and a book to read. Please?”
I left Trish in her bed and went to go find what she’d asked for. Seth was trying to dry himself off. We’d never found Ron’s old clothes.
“Did you check on your daughter?” I asked him, heading toward Trish’s medicine cabinet.
“Yes,” he replied, eyes darting away from me. He walked away, calling over his shoulder. “I’m going downstairs to use the dryer on these clothes. Don’t come down for a while unless you want an eyeful,” he said, joyless despite the joke.
After the storm rumbled away into the night to menace some other town, Seth got in his car to drive all the way home, saying he’d enjoy the solitude. Trish remained in bed with her romance novel, magazine, and iced wrist.
That left me to pick my way across the muddy driveway and climb into the trailer alone. I thought about trying to explain myself to Trish, how yes, I could technically stay in Jack’s room that we’d managed to clean. Only, all the clutter was right outside the door. And it was distinctly a little boy’s space, and that made me uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t articulate.
I closed the door of the trailer behind me and exhaled. It wasn’t that cold inside. I wouldn’t turn on the generator tonight and instead just sink into the silence.
I set about changing from Trish’s old nightshirt into my own pajamas. I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and swallowed a Unisom with a gulp of bottled water. I settled into the small bed at the rear of the camper, with my booklight on over a copy of Sense and Sensibility, and waited for the chemicals to put me out.
Since I’d moved out of Mom’s house I’d never been able to feel comfortable in someone else’s space. I’d once tried staying at a hotel when George and I attended a trade show. I was jumpy the whole time, pondering all the feet that had marched across the floor, all the butts in the bathroom, hairs that had washed down the shower drain. That a housekeeping staff could manage to thoroughly clean a gigantic hotel every day was ludicrous. I’d had to take two Unisom and could barely function the next day.
I hadn’t tried a hotel stay since, until Trish slapped me and drove me out of her house. George just took other managers to the trade shows.
If I stayed in Jack’s room, I’d feel the clutter just outside the door, I know I would. I would feel it creeping up on me, bloblike, and I’d be the crazy sister, or at least just dumb old Mary, the awkward one.
I knew that Dad and his wife were meticulous about the camper’s condition between vacation jaunts. I could thus pretend it existed only for me, and that it was miles and miles away from Trish’s hoard and her warped, demon-possessed brain.
Despite Unisom, Jane Austen, and my aching muscles, sleep eluded me. Untold hours passed while I lay still and silent in the dark, waiting for yet another dawn.
Chapter 31
Morning came too soon, just like it does every damn day.
I’d set my alarm for even earlier than a normal workday. Mary had taken to rousing early in the trailer—still too prissy to sleep in my house, despite Jack’s bed being clear, clean, and empty—and I needed once again to make this phone call without her listening.
I risked a foray across the clothing piles to peek through the miniblinds in my bedroom to see the trailer. All lights off, still.
Branches lay across my lawn like that childhood game of pickup sticks. Yard work I could not begin to deal with, not now. A clean yard would not appease Ayana of Child Protective Services, who was due back today to check on me.
The sun was already inching up. As the shrubs and ferns and saplings had not yet leafed out to keep it at bay, the early sunlight set the dead leaves and mud in a wasteful gorgeous gold.
Magic light, my mom had called that first light of dawn, and the last light of dusk.
I carefully made my way over the tar pit of clothes, gasping once as I’d forgotten my wrist and leaned on my left hand for support as I crawled across my bed. I tiptoed down the hall, blinking away memories of my mother’s demise that had been raked back into the forefront of my mind by my own stupid accident.
I dialed the number by rote and practiced a couple of coughs.
“Kendrick and Adams,” Angela answered, barking into the phone, trying to make herself sound taller than five-foot-nothing.
“I’m”—here I coughed and hacked—“
. . . still sick. I won’t be able to come in today either. Really high fever, too.”
“I’ve got a ton of filing for you to do! And I’m expecting clients all day! Are you taking vitamin C?”
“I’m sorry, I really can’t help it.” I kept my voice raspy and low, as if I could barely muster the effort to speak.
“Hmm. A four-day weekend for you, then.”
“I’ve been sick since Sunday. Not exactly a fun time.”
“And spring break, too, isn’t it?”
“My sons are both gone this week. No fun here at all.”
It was so like the conversation we had yesterday morning I felt dizzy with déjà vu. Only this time the derision in her voice was not even the slightest bit concealed.
“Hmm. And not pregnant, either, you say. Well. If you’re not better by tomorrow, you’d better get to the doctor, don’t you think?”
She didn’t give a damn about my health. That was her way of hinting she would soon ask for a doctor’s note if I didn’t get my ass back to work. I sniffed and faked a sneeze. “Yes, ma’am” and got off the phone as quickly as I could. I looked around to see if Mary had snuck up on me. She could do that, padding around quietly like some kind of monk. All was quiet.
Mary, as an Olympic-level worrier, would fret if I told her the truth. There was no way my boss would have approved a vacation for me at the last minute. Angela wielded the rules like an iron mace because, heaven forbid, as a woman who weighed less than my purse, if she showed any humanity she might be crushed by Men of Business. Not that I’d ever seen evidence of such men waiting to destroy her or her company.
But I needed this done, not only to show Ayana of Child Protective Services but my father, and Mary, and Drew, and everyone else who didn’t believe in me, that I could do this, and I could do it quickly, too. And I had to show Jack that his faith in me was not misplaced after all. Someone would ruin his faith in people, I was sure of that. Someone would break his heart and betray him and make him wary. But it would not be me, by God. Not me. And not over stupid rules at a workplace run by a terrorizing bitch.
Keepsake Page 20
