“Fine,” Drew barked, drawing my attention. He was stuffing some old composition books and a handful of his old band medals into the beat-up backpack he’d brought over. “I’m saving this.”
“Not your trumpet?”
“I don’t care about the trumpet.”
“It was your grandfather’s.”
“I didn’t know him.”
I was opening my mouth to protest, something about the importance of legacy, which kids these days didn’t give a rat’s ass about, when I heard an oath from my father.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”
I walked into the hall and shrieked.
My father stood in front of the open door to the Room, the one I’d ordered them not to touch. At his feet was a pile, which looked to me like earthquake rubble. He was gaping at the interior.
“What were you doing in there?” I demanded.
He continued gaping. “I wanted some gloves and Ron said to try the spare room . . .”
“Ron!” I shouted. “How could you send him in there?” Then, immediately I knew why. “You did that on purpose. You wanted my dad to see.”
Ron threw up his hands. He stood on my side of the rubble. “Naw, honest, T. I thought you might have some in there. That was always where you put extra stuff.”
“Bullshit,” I spat, my hands clenched. “You know I’ve got gloves in the garage.”
“What the fuck,” I heard Drew say through an astonished breath. He stepped over the fallen pile to join my father, still staring inside.
I couldn’t see for myself, but I didn’t have to. They were all staring at a wall of things as high as my head, with a door-sized arc just inside on the floor. Some of that wall was collapsed at their feet and would allow a glimpse to the farthest reaches of the room, things that hadn’t been seen by anyone in years.
“Is that a crib?” Drew asked. “Really, Mom?”
Seth and Mary had come up behind me. I could feel their shadows and hear their breathing. I could feel their judgment.
I felt a flush of heat crash over me from my feet up. “What? I told you it was bad.”
Mary, through her hands, said, “It was completely walled up. There’s not even . . . I mean, how?”
“You’ve seen it before,” I reminded her, my voice tight and gravelly.
She shook her head. “It was just a blur. . . . I don’t remember this.”
“Christ almighty,” my father breathed. He turned to me and his face registered disgust, but something else as well. Something I hadn’t seen since the day Mom broke his nose: fear.
“Daylight’s burning,” Drew announced. “Go, people. Get bags. It’ll take days for us to get rid of all this, so let’s move it. We might need another Dumpster, even. Mom, would the social worker get you a second one? Can she do that?”
I shook my head, hard. “We’re leaving it alone. I’m not ready.”
“No way, Mom,” Drew said, squaring his body to me, hands balled up tight. “No. We just can’t. Do you know how long that would take you to do this yourself? There must be”—he looked askance at the door—“thousands of things in there. Maybe a million. If you have to physically touch and look at every single one, you’ll never finish. Ever. We’re here now, so let’s do it.”
“But there are special things in there.”
“Yeah, so special you buried them in junk and shut the door forever.”
“You know why,” I challenged, speaking in code I knew he’d understand.
“That’s the past. This”—he flung his arm at the wall of things—“this is sick. It’s a sick way to deal.”
Seth cleared his throat. “Drew, maybe we should go outside and talk.”
“No one’s talking to you, loser.”
“Drew!” Mary interjected.
Drew whirled on her. “Oh, come on, Aunt Mary. This guy has all the free time in the world to hang out here and dig through a stranger’s crap? Maybe he’s living in his car for all you know. It’s none of his damn business.”
Seth wouldn’t let it go. “Jack is in the room right behind us. . . . If we just stepped out and got some air . . .”
“Like Jack doesn’t know what’s going on anyway!” Drew bellowed. Ron stepped forward, and Drew held up a hand. “Everyone should have thought about poor Jack years ago when you could still walk through our living room. But Aunt Mary was nowhere, Ron took off and left us here in it, and Grandpa acted like he didn’t know anything, never bothering to check up. Thanks a fucking lot, people, and now you’re worried about his feelings because I’m finally sick of all the dancing around the subject?”
Drew grabbed a fistful of clothes, still with tags, half hanging out of a Target bag. He balled it up in his hand, stepped toward me, and shook it. “This is not going to bring your baby back.”
A gasp went through the room like an electric charge: shock from those who didn’t know, pain from those who did.
Mary turned to me. “A baby?”
My voice was gone, and my legs went to string. I leaned on the hallway wall, sank slowly down. Ron was the one who answered. “Trish was sixteen weeks along. At the ultrasound . . .” He coughed. “There wasn’t a heartbeat. Some kind of blood clot problem.”
Ron stared down at the floor and kicked the carpet with his boot. “This was supposed to be the baby’s room.”
I curled up on the floor, making myself as small as possible, feeling my stomach press against my thighs, thinking about how my pregnant belly had felt, how I’d stroked it all day long, already feeling the kicks. The baby had started kicking so early, and I’d been overjoyed. So vital, so big, so strong already! Then the movement slowed down, seemed to stop, and the doctor wasn’t worried but she had me come in for an ultrasound anyway, to put me at ease.
Of the many things I could never forget was the way the lines deepened around the tech’s mouth as she swept the wand across the sticky gel on my belly, the way she excused herself without a smile to fetch the doctor. She’d turned the screen away from me before she left.
We got home, and I yanked that room’s door shut, hard.
I felt someone crouch next to me and did not look up. Then I realized by the gentle touch it must be Mary. My dad would try to pull me to my feet, get me to buck up, and move on.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
I ignored her. There was no answer worth giving.
“I’m so sorry,” she continued.
So what?
Drew, now, from high above me. “I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean it to come out like this. . . . I was sad, too. But this isn’t right. What’s here isn’t right. We have to do it now, for Jack.”
I said into the hollow created by my arms and knees, “Can’t we just close the door and leave it alone?”
“No, because it’s sick,” Drew said. “It would be like an alcoholic leaving all his empty bottles around. And, no, don’t say because the door is closed that makes it OK.”
“I can’t.”
Ron spoke up. “Then let us do it.”
“I can’t do that, either.”
My dad’s voice boomed out in the narrow hall. “Enough of this. We are not debating. We are cleaning out this room, Trish, and you can help or not, as you feel able. End of discussion.”
I looked up to see my father reach his long arm into the room and pull down more of the wall. Another cascade of things rained into the hall, dividing us from each other. Jack had appeared behind his father. Ron had one arm around him and was stroking the side of his good shoulder. Jack looked at me with big eyes, a puckered forehead. He looked wary. When we lost the baby, he’d been too little to understand and kept patting my squishy stomach for days after the D&C to say “Hi, baby,” the memory of which to this day could still stop my heart.
“Is the baby in there?” Jack asked now, regarding the f
illed doorway with awe and fright.
“No, no,” Ron answered for us. “No, the baby is gone, Jack.”
“Gone where?”
“Gone to . . . heaven,” he answered, his voice cracking over the word.
Jack looked up, as if he could see her floating there, a cherub on a cloud. “With Grandma?”
“Get some bags,” my father ordered.
When a man’s hand reached down to touch my elbow, I thought it must be Ron, but it turned out to be Seth. He helped me to my feet, led me to the kitchen. “Let’s talk a minute.”
Mary stayed behind, talking quietly to Jack.
Seth said under his breath, “I think you need to let us help you. Same as we’ve done before, setting some ground rules about what to keep.”
“Not there,” I said, my throat closing up. “Not in there. What if . . . I can’t.”
“Drew is very perceptive for a teenager. You should be proud of him.”
“I am.”
“It’s not healthy to keep this room this way. It would be as if you had cancer, but we left a tumor in place because it would be too painful to get rid of it. It will spread if we ignore it.”
“What are you, some kind of shrink?”
Seth folded his arms. “Now that you mention it.”
I jerked my head up to look him full in the face. “Really? You’re not serious. Are you serious?”
“Yes. I’m sorry we were dishonest.”
“Mary told you to lie, didn’t she?”
“You needed the help, and she predicted you wouldn’t want me here if you knew what I did for a living.”
Mary came out of the hallway then, kicking a stray plastic bag off her foot. She turned to Seth first. “You told her?”
“She figured it out.”
A fiery rage charged through me. “You traitorous bitch.”
“I was trying to help!” Mary yelled, putting her arm up like I had a meat cleaver or something.
Lucky for her I didn’t.
“You orchestrated all this. Put Drew up to challenging me, made sure he called our father who would take over and refuse to listen. Had a shrink on hand to manipulate me without me being any the wiser.” I whirled around to inspect my decimated house. “What have I gotten rid of that I didn’t want to, because he tricked me into it?”
Seth protested, “Trish, I never—”
“Shut the fuck up, liar! I’ll see you disbarred for this. Whatever they do to shrinks.”
I heard rustling of plastic and turned to see my father and Drew energetically shoving things into bags. “No!”
I dimly heard people calling my name, even a “Mommy” from Jack. I yanked at my father’s arm, but he was always strong and didn’t budge. Drew had stepped into the room itself and I couldn’t reach him, couldn’t stop him.
With each thing they threw in a bag I felt stripped.
My dad waded into the room, sweeping his arm across the top layer, not even looking.
It burned, physically burned to see it. I saw the future then. I saw a crib thrown into a Dumpster, the tiny clothes I’d purchased with one hand on my rounded belly, a yellow blanket with duckies meant to swaddle my baby, bottles I’d purchased brand-new, saw all of it swept into bags, all traces of my lost child ripped away from me . . .
I couldn’t hear my own screaming, but I saw it in the faces of my family.
Chapter 40
I clapped my hands over my ears. Seth reached for her, being closest, but she shook him off and tore through the kitchen, out the patio sliding door, and away through the woods. She wasn’t even wearing shoes.
In the ringing echo of her shrieking, I heard Jack sobbing. The men in the hall were arguing. Blaming one another, maybe. Blaming Trish. Maybe me. As if that mattered.
I gaped at Seth. How could he have told her? Couldn’t he have predicted what she would do?
He held his hands up in surrender. “I couldn’t hide it anymore.”
I rummaged for my shoes and headed past Seth toward where Trish was rapidly shrinking at the horizon.
“Maybe I should come,” he ventured.
I ignored him and took off at a dead run across Trish’s yard.
The only sounds were the scraping of my shoes across dead leaves and the puffing of my own breath. I couldn’t go as fast as I needed to; the terrain was rutted and hazardous with roots and rocks and who knows what else. Trish would know it better than me, and she had a head start.
I was beginning to catch up, Trish’s figure growing in my vision again instead of shrinking, when she reached the fence behind the new development. I saw her hop the fence like she did it every day and disappear into the newly planted shrubbery among all the little matching houses.
I tried to kick into a higher gear when it felt like something grabbed my foot, yanked me down flat on my face.
“Shit.”
I detangled my foot from the root that had tripped me. Other than a little soreness from the fall I seemed intact. I tested my foot; ankle not turned. I rose, brushed off dirt and leaves. With my sudden stop a stitch had grown in my side. I breathed deeper, walked ahead.
I’d lost visual contact, but she wouldn’t be able to hide in a subdivision. A woman with wild curly hair and a bandaged wrist, in sweatpants and socks wandering around among new houses with no obvious purpose—no dog to walk, no kid in a stroller—would stick out clearly. Unless she took it in her head to break into someone’s house or hide in a toolshed, I’d spot her.
As per usual, good old Mary had screwed it all up. Having Seth around, yet making him lie about his job, turned out to be a disaster in waiting. “Duh,” I said aloud to the greening woods. Birds chirped back at me.
I reached the back of the subdivision and opted for a house that seemed dark. Spring break, maybe they were gone. I climbed the chain-link fence and then snuck out to the front, letting myself through their unlocked gate, then hustling as fast as possible to the sidewalk.
I walked ahead, hands in the pocket of my hooded sweatshirt, concentrating on looking normal.
When I felt sufficiently far from the yard where I’d trespassed, I looked up and started searching for Trish again. The streets were winding, but I could still see for several yards. There were mothers walking with their kids, some boys on bikes. A couple of teenagers walking while talking and texting at once.
I got to a T-shaped intersection—between Fox Run and Pheasant Ridge—and screwed up my courage to ask a young mother fussing with her baby whether she’d seen a woman my age with long, curly brown hair.
If the young mother was disturbed by these strangers in her neighborhood, she didn’t show it, more preoccupied with her infant in a travel carrier attached to a stroller. She was fussing with a tiny bonnet. The baby seemed to be unhappy with both the bright sun and the bonnet, too. “Um, I did, actually. She went by on a bike. I noticed because she didn’t have shoes.”
The baby finally grasped a teething toy and jammed it in her gummy mouth. The young woman stood back, sighed, and straightened her own sweater with an air of satisfaction. “Is everything OK?”
“Oh, sure,” I lied. “Thanks.”
She headed off, no doubt her head filled with details about teething infants and diapers and what she’d have to cook for dinner later. I’d caught a glimpse of a platinum wedding ring as we talked, with a generous square diamond in the center. I trudged in the direction she’d pointed and wondered what it would be like for one’s days to involve sunny walks and teething rings instead of bookstore inventory? Or, for that matter, unemployment?
What did it do to Trish to see babies everywhere?
I walked to the corner of a busy street, now having to admit I’d lost her absolutely. I’d left without my phone or purse and didn’t know exactly where I was. I turned back in the opposite compass direction from my initial pur
suit, along the busy street, assuming I’d eventually get to Trish’s rural road, and I could turn back to her house and gather what was left of my family to figure out what would happen now.
I was hungry and sore by the time I returned to Trish’s, which seemed distressingly quiet and dark.
A note on the door said: “Ron took Jack and Drew to McDonald’s and the park to keep Jack’s mind off things. Your dad and I went to look for both of you in separate cars. Call one of us when you get back so we know you’re OK. Seth.”
The note was vague, addressed to either one of us. They’d left the door unlocked, and I nudged it open, hoping to find Trish inside on the couch, watching TV.
No such luck. Nor was she in her newly clean bedroom, or Jack’s room, or huddled inside the secret room among her baby’s things. The house rang with her absence.
I drifted into the kitchen to find my phone, to text Seth that I was no longer lost.
As I passed the calendar I noticed Trish had circled tomorrow and written in red: “Ayana.”
It would certainly not be a good sign if Trish hadn’t come back by then, no matter how much progress we’d made on the house. It would look as if she’d abandoned her children. Well, maybe she did. It was hard to know what was going on in her head. How much was the hoarding demon, how much was my sister.
In the end it might not matter. Someone had to take care of her children who could provide them with a safe, stable home, who would not scream like she was on fire and run off into a subdivision at the slightest provocation.
I grabbed an apple from her fruit bowl and settled at the kitchen table to send my text to Seth.
In the unusual quiet, with only the ticking of a distant clock to distract me, I noticed we’d left Mother’s diary at the table. I’d promised to read it only with Trish, true. But we’d all been promised lots of things.
I read through several pages of prom preparations and growing fascination with the migrant workers, particularly Inez, whom she idolized as she would a real big sister. As I might have idolized Trish, in another kind of life.
Keepsake Page 26
