Keepsake

by Kristina Riggle

  He dropped his hand and lowered his gaze to the gravel driveway. His brow wrinkled a bit: his “thinking” face. “Maybe there’s something in there she wanted to barricade forever, some object that has such a painful memory she literally buried it in things.”

  I nodded. It seemed plausible.

  He continued, “I’d bet that Trish, in her daily life, pretends that room doesn’t even exist. And to have to acknowledge it, in fact confront it, must be incredibly painful. Do you know if something happened to her?”

  “Other than her divorce?”

  “It could be the divorce, I suppose, but it sounds like she started hoarding before Ron left, though maybe not to the same degree.”

  My face burned, having to admit to Seth how I’d let her set me adrift so easily. “We weren’t in touch for years. After Mom died . . . I only found out about her divorce on Facebook.”

  “She never called you?”

  I shook my head, tasting shame now at how I didn’t pick up the phone, either.

  All those years I missed as a proper aunt to Jack, and Drew. I looked away into the dark outside the weak circle of light.

  “I wonder,” I managed, my voice shaky in spite of myself. “I wonder if I could have made a difference. If I could have . . . stopped it. All this.” I remembered small, vulnerable Jack pinned under an avalanche of clutter and felt just as culpable as if I’d pushed the pile down myself. “If Jack had been hurt more seriously, I never could have forgiven myself.”

  When Seth stepped forward and circled me with his arms, my instinct was to pull back from this startling closeness, but he didn’t let go. He hugged a little tighter, just enough to be warm and caring, not enough to be weird.

  I wondered again how other people knew how to do this; how to be affectionate enough without going too far, how to accept kindness without wanting to pull away.

  I gave in and rested my head against his chest, turned sideways. My ear fit over his heart, and I felt it thrumming away. My arms were still locked around my own self, my purse an awkward lump between us. I let go of myself and my purse and wrapped my arms around him. I remembered him embracing me at the funeral. I recalled the quick, giddy hug we’d exchanged at commencement, my mortarboard falling off backward.

  Seth said, “There’s nothing but agony to be had if you review the years gone by and beat yourself up. In the end, Trish is responsible for Trish.” I both heard his voice in my ears and felt it through my cheek, resting as it was on his chest.

  He moved one arm up to stroke the back of my head.

  “The only thing you can change,” Seth continued, “is what you do from now on.”

  A noise inside the house made me recoil. I looked toward the door. No one came out. I pressed my hand over my heart as if I could slow it with downward pressure. I hurriedly wiped my face, ran my hands over my hair to smooth it back.

  I felt queasy with embarrassment.

  I sipped in the cool night air, and this time the chills I felt were definitely temperature related. This I could handle. Cool air causes cold skin causes goose bumps. This much I understood.

  “So,” I began. “Um.”

  “What’s wrong?” Seth asked, hanging back.

  “Other than the obvious?”

  “What do you believe is the obvious thing?”

  He was doing his shrink thing. Well, that is why I asked him here. But I’d expected him to do it only to Trish, not me.

  “I’m just tired,” I offered lamely, praying he wouldn’t pursue my obvious dodge. “But, look, I do think you should know something. A bit of Granger history.”

  Seth folded his arms and assumed a listening face, which he must have practiced across his desk many, many times.

  “You knew my mother was a hoarder.” He nodded, recalling our conversations in the dorm and over breakfast. He and Rebecca were the only ones outside the family I’d ever told, until George. And George never had the whole story. I was saving that for later.

  “Yes?” Seth prompted.

  I shook George out of my head. “Anyway. One day, when we were teenagers, my dad had this idea. That if only we could clean up while she was gone, then she could see how beautiful it all looked, and she’d be able to keep it clean. But we had to get to the baseline first, was how he put it.”

  Seth grimaced; no doubt with his training and recent research he could see coming what we, as naive young women, never expected.

  “So,” I continued, “he took her to Florida on a vacation, which was quite a treat for them. We never had much money for that kind of thing. And then my uncles came—my dad’s brothers—and some cousins and my grandparents who were healthy enough and we cleaned like demons for days. We really tried,” I said, aware I was defending myself though Seth wasn’t accusing, “we tried hard to keep the special things, and to take care of her precious items. We did our very best.”

  “I can’t imagine she reacted well.”

  “We were so proud. We were all standing in the lawn like soldiers for inspection. I knew she’d be shocked, maybe even a little upset for a minute, but when we showed her all her special keepsakes I figured she’d be mollified. But . . .”—I screwed up my face at the memory and sucked in a hard breath so I could go on—“. . . she went bananas, just tearing through the house and screaming like . . . like she was being attacked. Like someone was physically assaulting her. There were some boxes around still, and she started tearing into them. She ripped drawers open, yanked clothes off the hangers. Trish and I hung on to each other and just shook. My dad charged in after her and grabbed her, trying to get her to calm down. She thrashed so hard in his arms that she broke his nose. He still has a bump there. Eventually she cried in his grip until she was limp like a ragdoll, with my dad’s nose bleeding all over the both of them.” I chuckled bitterly. “My dad was a cop for thirty years, and his worst injury was from my mom. He moved out shortly after. I moved in with him soon after that. Mom never forgave us. There were a couple of photo albums she never could find, plus a sweater that had been her mother’s. None of us knew that sweater had been special. It looked just like a mothbally, out-of-date sweater. She haunted the thrift shop for weeks afterward, trying to find it, which she never did. And every time she’d come back with bags and bags full of more stuff.”

  “That must have been traumatic to witness.”

  “You have no idea. Well, I guess you probably do, actually.”

  Seth started to reach out, and I stepped back, and picked my purse up off the driveway. “The point is, we might have a repeat performance.”

  I started to head into the trailer. “Mary?”

  “Yeah?” I said, foot on the little step before the door.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Sure,” I said, stepping inside. “Why wouldn’t I be?” I shut the door and closed out the world.

  Then I collapsed fully clothed on the trailer’s small bed, unable to stop seeing my dad’s bloody nose and my keening, thrashing, unrecognizable mother.

  Sometime past midnight I got back off the bed, and with shaky hands forced myself to put on pajamas and wash my face in the tiny sink. My eyes were puffy, the whites cracked through with scarlet lines. I wondered how different life would be if George hadn’t closed the store. If, instead of accepting his family’s largesse to start a new venture, he’d poured the money into the store, keeping it alive. How I wouldn’t have been able to fly to Trish’s side. I wouldn’t be staying in this tiny trailer next to her hoard, collapsing on an old friend like some kind of ninny fainting heroine. I wouldn’t be thinking about how I shouldn’t have ignored my nephews.

  Instead I’d be back in my old routine of morning treadmill jog, working at the store, errands, dinner, reading, and bed. The days had a sameness that I suppose to some might be dull, but it didn’t feel that way to me. It felt like flannel pajamas and warm milk, my house like a
cocoon. The opposite of my family home, where the walls were literally closing in on me by virtue of more things coming in every day, and nothing ever leaving. I left for school every day feeling lighter than air and came home with a trudging step to the cave our mother had built.

  When I would come home to my own town house after a long day at the bookstore, I could feel my joints loosen, my forehead smooth out from whatever work-related worries might have been crowding my brain.

  I imagined Seth in here now, asking me where George would have fit in with my exacting, ordered, comforting life.

  Excellent question, Imaginary Seth.

  Whenever I’d daydreamed a relationship with George, I imagined it happening within my town house, but with nothing else out of order, nothing disturbed, as if I could superimpose him on my life like in photo editing. That would never have worked, I could now admit. George would have come with his own habits and quirks, and they would have clashed with mine, most likely, because although Trish thinks I’m oblivious, I’ve always been aware that I’m odd.

  So, Imaginary Seth answered, you kept up this faux relationship, at a distance, in your head, because you could keep your life intact, just the way you wanted. You could think you were in love without the mess of actually adapting to someone else.

  With that thought rattling around in my brain, I flicked off the tiny light next to the little sink, and took the three short steps to the bed.

  I dreamt I was buried in Trish’s secret room, only the door wasn’t there, just a smooth wall, and no one could hear me on the other side.

  Chapter 39

  The knocking that woke me up echoed in rhythm to the stabbing in my hip.

  I pulled myself up from Jack’s bedroom floor, squinting in the sun as it blasted around the edges of his window shade. Despite the pain in my joints from sleeping on a floor all night, I scurried to the front door before the pounding woke up my little boy.

  I yanked open the door to see Ron standing there with a cardboard carafe of coffee. “I know you like this kind,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I answered, honestly glad, but also irritated. “Why didn’t you just use the key? I never changed the locks or anything.”

  He moved past me to the kitchen to deposit the coffee. “This isn’t my house anymore.”

  I pulled a mug from my cupboards and offered one to Ron. “Jack slept in his own room last night.”

  “That’s good,” Ron said, pouring the coffee.

  “Just good? That’s outstanding.”

  “Outstanding. Gimme a minute before I do jumping jacks. I haven’t been awake too long.”

  Maybe not so outstanding that I had to sleep on his floor to convince him to stay there. I hadn’t intended to stay the whole night and in fact had never even brushed my teeth. I thought I’d rest there for a few minutes until Jack drifted off, only I drifted first, I think.

  I dug around in my purse for an Aleve.

  “You OK?” Ron asked, squinting at me as I swallowed a pill.

  “Just sore. My wrist still aches a bit. This is hard work.”

  “No shit,” he said, not angrily, just in the casual way Ron had of cursing. I remembered how hard he’d worked to break himself of that habit when Drew was little. He’d worn a rubber band on his wrist and snapped it each time he caught himself, or each time I caught him.

  He tried so hard to change himself for us, and then years later he would leave. Senseless.

  “You gonna be OK today?” he asked.

  I shrugged.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  He was leaning forward on the kitchen counter, hands wrapped around the mug as if it anchored him in place. He stared down at the coffee and cleared his throat roughly. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.”

  I didn’t know what to do with this. “Yeah, well.”

  “I’m really sorry, honey.”

  Honey. He hadn’t called me that in years. “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t come in here today acting all affectionate and sweet, now, years after it would have mattered, just because your girlfriend bailed on you.”

  He straightened up, let go of the coffee. “Hey, now.”

  “You don’t get to be the hero today, got it? You had that chance and you missed it. You rode off into the sunset and left me to suffer alone.”

  “Now, listen here a minute. You say ‘suffer alone’ like someone else was hurting you. No one else filled this house with junk, T.”

  Another nickname brought back to life. “That’s not what I meant by suffering.”

  “I tried. I told you I tried. You know I tried.”

  “You could have tried harder.”

  “You didn’t want me to!” He folded his arms, scowled. “You got madder every time I got near you. What was I supposed to do? I gave you space, you felt ignored; I tried to take care of you, you bit my head off. All the while shopping and picking up stuff and never getting rid of nothing.”

  “So that made it OK to look up your old girlfriend.”

  “We just talked. And I already apologized for that about six million times.”

  “When I was already so vulnerable.”

  Ron leaned in over the counter, closer to me, lowering his voice in volume but not intensity. He stared me down hard, right in the face. “You weren’t the only one who grieved that baby.”

  My heart felt like a trapped animal beating against the walls of a cage as I backed away from my ex-husband, toward the bedroom we used to share, past the door that I never wanted to open again.

  I piled another box on top of the couch in the living room. It was full of school projects, CDs, notebooks, copies of PC World magazine, some old medals from band competitions back when Drew-then-Andy was playing the trumpet. The trumpet itself stood next to the couch.

  “We’ve gotta trash some of this, T,” Ron had insisted.

  “It doesn’t belong to me, it’s Drew’s,” I’d retorted.

  The first layer of stuff out of Drew’s room had indeed been mine. When my filing cabinet downstairs had overflowed, I took to putting important papers in boxes and setting them along the wall in his room. Unopened mail that I had yet to deal with—some of it dating back to before the birth of Jack—was piled just inside the door.

  Those things came out fairly easily, as I realized with bitterness that if there was going to be fallout from not opening the mail, it had already happened long ago. As for important papers, I let Ron guide the sorting. He’d become efficient in filing since he left me and had to do it himself, until he could afford an assistant. He was piling stuff in a giant bag, offering to take it to his industrial-strength shredder at work. “You got a wood chipper? That might work better,” I quipped.

  Once we got down to Drew’s things, though—all those emblems of himself as a funny, ironic middle schooler, before his Goth takeover—I insisted those be set aside.

  I coughed as the dropped box spewed a cloud of dust. The door swung open behind me, and Drew loped his way in, followed by my father.

  “Hi,” he said. “I called Grandpa.”

  Despite our eventual and uneasy truce on Easter, for the sake of Jack and also for Ellen, who was on the edge of a coronary at the slightest hint of conflict, my fury at Dad had only gone from full boil to continuous simmer.

  “I see,” was all I could muster.

  “Well, we’re doing my room today, right? I wanted more help.”

  An ally, I thought. That’s what you really wanted. “Here.” I pointed to the couch. “This is your stuff to sort through.”

  “I don’t want it.” He strode away and looked into his room, which was first down the hall so I could still see him easily from where I stood. He shook his head, folded his arms. “I forgot my walls were blue.”

  “Oh, shut up. The piles weren’t tha
t high. You could still see the walls.”

  “I just hadn’t looked in here in so long.” He tossed his blackened hair out of his eyes and shed his leather jacket, dropping it on a kitchen chair. I noticed with his short sleeves more muscle definition than I’d remembered. He was getting so strong, and I didn’t even know how he was doing that. Protein? Exercise? It wasn’t so long ago I was aware of every calorie, every activity, every hour of sleep my boys got.

  “Drew,” I said, my voice somewhere between pleading and bossing. “Come here and look through this.”

  He stepped back into the living room. “I said I don’t want it.”

  “You don’t even know what’s here.”

  “I haven’t seen it in months and haven’t missed it. Everything I care about is at Miranda’s.”

  Everything?

  I tried a new tactic. “I can’t let it go until you look through it. If you don’t now, I’ll have to store it until you do. I can’t take it, throwing something away without looking.”

  He snarled and stomped to the boxes, whipping through the contents roughly. I couldn’t watch so I returned to the room itself.

  My dad was already inside, working briskly as if he’d been there all week. He pointed to bags full of clothes. “Clothes, never worn. Tags still on.”

  “Donate pile.”

  He pointed to some paint cans. “Paint cans, not sealed properly, probably all dried up.”

  Ron grunted from behind me, where he was hauling out a box of what looked to be Christmas decorations. “I can get rid of those at work. I got a special disposal permit for paint.”

  They weren’t even looking at me. I drifted back to the kitchen. I heard rustling in the bathroom where Seth and Mary were removing papers and tossing things in garbage bags. Probably old shampoo bottles. I had a habit of keeping the last ounce in a bottle, not wanting to waste it, yet too frustrated to squeeze it out, so I’d start a new one. Smack, smack, smack, I heard as the bottles were tossed in a bag. How stupid was I to keep those? With all the other bottles around as evidence that I never used that last bit anyway?