Breakfast with Neruda
Page 16
The three of us stop, as if the world stops spinning. “But Paul claims he doesn’t know him.”
“Paul might be lying,” she says. “You said he tries to protect your mom’s secrets.”
“So what are you proposing?”
“We find a means to look through old yearbooks,” Shelly says. “We might see pictures of her with a guy other than Paul.”
Annie, Shelly, and I gather the pictures and papers up and carefully place them in a Kroger bag. They still bear a sour odor, but I think I can tolerate it.
Shelly and I drive to Wendy’s, order Cokes and fries, and sit at a corner table. “I’m just glad you didn’t see the inside,” I say.
“Maybe next time,” she says.
“Maybe never,” I say. “I like you well enough to never take you inside.”
I drop Shelly off at her house, and go to work at the theater. After I get off, I am tempted to park somewhere in her neighborhood, but my crappy car might attract attention, so I take my usual parking space near the stadium. Sleep comes easily, partly because I can lock the doors from the inside and only crack the windows. Cool nights are best, nights when I can wrap myself in a blanket. And now that Shelly knows my worst, and has not judged me, I feel lighter.
Chapter Fifteen
As I walk toward my car fresh out of the shower, Shelly sniffs me. “Mmm. You’re wearing L’Homme Libre,” she says. “Where did you get that one?”
“GQ left in the teachers' lounge.”
By lunchtime, my fancy cologne smell has vanished. Earl has us waxing the floors. But first we have to strip off the old layer by dissolving it with what smells like embalming fluid. We all reek like dissected animals by the time we go to lunch.
When Shelly pulls out a cigarette, I say, “Aren’t you afraid you’re flammable right now?”
“Yeah, you may be right. Loan me a shirt.”
I find a couple clean shirts in one of my boxes.
“Turn around,” she says. I quickly change my own shirt, and turn back around just in time to see her smooth my Jim Morrison shirt over her hips. The shirt is so long she looks naked underneath. “Nice dress,” I say.
We eat a quick Wendy’s lunch in the parking lot since we’re too stinky to go inside anywhere, and then head back to work detail.
After a day of stripping floors, Shelly and I slog to my car around two, drenched in sweat. My phone buzzes. “I hope this isn’t work,” I groan and look at the text. “It’s Annie.”
-Mom is working today. Do you have to work after school?
-No.
-You have 8 hours to snoop through boxes. If you can stand it.
-Might bring Shelly.
-Let me tidy the house.
-Ha ha
I tell Shelly I’m going to look through boxes at my mom’s. “Wanna come along?”
“Are you sure you want me to?”
“No, but the more people we have searching, the quicker we can find out how futile this will be.”
“Okay. Let me text my mom.”
“Wear ratty clothes,” I say. “Something you’d be willing to throw away.”
She looks at her shorts, and she is still wearing my T-shirt. “I’m not tossing Jim Morrison,” I say.
“I’ll wear what I had on earlier,” she says.
“We should probably stop by your house and pick up something you can change into afterward.”
I park in front of Shelly’s house. She opens her door. “Aren’t you coming in?”
“No,” I say. “I smell so bad I’m emitting fumes.” She shakes her head and walks up the driveway. “Put on shoes other than flip-flops,” I yell from the open window. “Her floors are treacherous. And can you get a couple trash bags?”
She nods and continues toward her house. She comes back a couple minutes later with a sack of clothes, a wad of white trash bags, and two bananas. She hands me one.
Annie sits on the back porch reading Catching Fire. She is halfway through it.
“I love that series,” Shelly says.
“This one is even better than the first.” She stands up and stretches her legs. She looks Shelly over. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?” Shelly nods.
I tell Shelly to leave her extra clothes on the porch. I open the bag of supplies I bought yesterday. I smear VapoRub under my nose and hand the jar off to Shelly. The three of us wear masks and gloves.
“We look like a hazmat team,” Shelly says.
“Believe me, we should be wearing hazmat suits,” I say.
I grasp a trash bag and open the door. It’s been weeks since I’ve been inside my mother’s house. I adjust my mask, but the odor still permeates the gauzy filter as soon as I step through the back door. Shelly follows me in and stops to gaze around.
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
“That this is surreal.” Her voice is muffled through the mask.
The kitchen floor is fairly clear due to Annie’s insistence, but the counters are heaped with the clutter of dishes, pots and pans, and open food containers. The dead-mouse smell lingers, along with mold and rotten fruit.
“Are you okay?” I ask Shelly.
She nods.
“Watch your step,” I say as we move into the living room. Odd name for a room where life can barely happen. Shelly and I climb on top of stuff that sometimes slips under our feet. “Damn,” I say. “I forgot the matches.”
“Seems to be a pattern with you,” Shelly says.
“Maybe I should have tried to blow up this place instead of Rick’s car.”
“Why do you have matches?” Annie says. “Are you planning to have a bonfire?”
“Wouldn’t be a bad idea.” I stop and scan the mountain in front of us. “I really don’t know where to start. Annie, do you have any ideas?”
“How about over by that desk?”
“What desk?”
“The one in that corner.” Annie points to a spot near the picture window.
The boxes and objects are stacked up to the light fixture. “Oh yeah, we do have a desk.”
I remember when we first moved in all three of us kids would sit and color or do homework at the desk, and sometimes Mom would read or pay bills there. I step forward and hear something snap under my feet. I look down. It’s a plastic doohickey now broken under my feet. I open a trash bag and toss it in.
“Will your mom notice?” Shelly asks.
“Probably. She remembers everything.”
I tread carefully toward the corner. “I’m going to move some of this shit by handing it to you guys. See if you can find a spot for it.”
“Wait!” Annie says. “Do you have a camera phone on you?” she asks Shelly.
“Yes. Why?”
“So we can take a picture and move everything back the way it was.”
“Good idea.” Shelly hands me her phone, and I snap a few shots of the corner. I give her back the phone. I reach up and slide the board games off the top of the pile and hand them to Shelly, who passes them on to Annie.
“I remember playing Candy Land,” she says. “I wondered what happened to the game.”
There must be twenty boxed games. “We never played any of these,” I say. I cough as dust spews around me. “She must have gotten them free somewhere.”
“Why would she accumulate kids’ games?” Shelly asks.
“Her logic would be someday our children would play them,” Annie says.
“My children will never set foot inside this house,” I say.
It takes about twenty minutes, but enough space is cleared that I can reach the stacks of boxes resting on the desktop. I open the first box; it’s full of cancelled checks from several years ago. I hand it off. Shelly reaches to place it somewhere and slips. A pile of detritus loosens and pummels her on the head. “Ouch.”
“Are you okay?”
“I think so.”
“Let me know when this gets to be too much,” I say.
“I’m fine,” she says.
Shelly and my sister rummage through a couple piles. “I found a brass lamp base,” Shelly says. “Is it valuable?”
“Nothing’s valuable,” I say.
The lamp has no bulb or shade. Or even a plug. Just the base. I grab it from her hand and whack the drawer until it pops loose. I set the brass lamp aside. I’d throw it away, but it may come in handy again. I slide the drawer open. Part of why it was stuck is it’s overfilled. I reach in and pull out crumpled paper, ripping it as I go. It’s an old grocery list. I wad it up and place it in the trash bag. Inside the drawer are hundreds of pens. “Good God, look at all these dried-up old pens.” I toss those in the bag as well. I grab at everything in the drawer and stuff it inside the bag, clawing until the drawer is empty. I sigh and rest myself against a stack of crap.
“What?” Shelly says.
“It’s all so pointless,” I say. “I emptied one drawer, but it’s like cleaning one tile at a time in a cathedral. This could take years.” I want to throw out everything in sight. “How the hell did it get like this?” I yell. “Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! It’s a needle in a fucking haystack. It’s insane.” I’m angry at the amount of stuff, and that I did nothing to stop it from accumulating.
Shelly places a gloved hand on my back. “Keep going,” she says. Her voice calms me.
I open the next drawer. “More goddamned pens!” I trash all of them. The next drawer is crammed full of paperclips, which I also throw out.
I whack the bottom drawer with the lamp base to open it and find what looks like a ledger book with pink flower decals pasted on the cover. I pull this out and open it. Instead of numbers, it contains pages of writing. My heart starts thumping. “It could be nothing, but I may have found a diary.” I set the trash bag down and thumb through it. “Shit, it is a diary.” I look at Shelly and Annie. “Should I take it?”
“Duh. Yeah,” Shelly says. “It may have some answers.”
“What if she goes looking for it?”
“It’s been in there like a hundred years,” Annie says. “You couldn’t even get the drawer open. Mom’s not going to go looking for it now.”
“You can sneak it back later,” Shelly says.
I nod and hand the book off to Shelly, who passes it to my sister. Annie takes the book and sets it on a semi-clear space on the floor. The rest of the drawer is just more paperclips and a set of keys. I stash those back in and shut the drawer.
“One more drawer,” I say. I grip the top of the desk and lean down to the lowest drawer. Inside is a bulging white envelope. I pull it out and peek inside. “More pictures,” I say. I hand these off to the girls. I start coughing and sit down. “I can’t do any more,” I say. “Let’s put the games and other crap back where they were.”
It takes us awhile to reassemble the mess so it looks undisturbed. Shelly grabs the pictures and ledger, and I drag the trash bag on the way out. As soon as I step outside I whip off the mask and gloves and add them to the garbage. The others follow suit.
“Wow, you filled a bag.” Annie says. “Good job.”
“Yeah, a whole bag,” I say. “It’s useless, though.”
Shelly holds up the book and envelope. “These might give you a clue to your identity, though.”
“Maybe, but not likely.” I go out to my car and change into Josh’s borrowed shirt and shorts as the girls change their clothes on the back porch. I also find my flip-flops. I can’t throw away my shoes, but I can air them out before I wear them again. I won’t reuse the socks, though. As I approach the porch, I open a new trash bag and dump my stinky clothes inside. After the girls dress they, too, trash their old clothes. I pick up both bags to hurl them in the trash bin, but Shelly stops me.
“Leave the bags,” she says.
“Why? We can’t wear them again.”
“I have an idea.”
“I don’t want them stinking up my car,” I say.
She ties each bag extra tight. “They won’t.”
I shrug. “Now what?”
“Let’s go somewhere where the air is pure as sunshine,” Shelly says.
“McDonald’s?” Annie says.
We pull into McDonald’s, and I reach into the backseat for the envelope and book. We go inside to order Cokes. I can’t eat right now, but Shelly orders a sandwich and fries.
I sip the cola, and the aroma of Shelly’s food wafts my way. Those fries do smell good. Maybe a couple won’t hurt, so I steal a few and munch on them.
“So you don’t feel the need to rush home and take a shower?” I ask.
She shrugs. She dips a fry in ketchup and swirls it around. “My hair kind of stinks, but like I said, I’ve been in some crappy places.”
I carefully pull the pictures out of the envelope. Their odor knocks me back. “I think we need to air these out too.” I slide them back in the envelope and clasp it tightly.
“Okay, but first we need to do something,” Shelly says.
Annie and I glance at each other and shrug. “She’s the boss,” I say.
Shelly guides me to Graham Park and tells me to park near a cluster of picnic tables. “Do you still have the matches?”
“In the backseat.”
“Bring the McDonald’s wrappers and bags too.” Shelly grabs the trash bags and marches to a metal dumpster. She dumps the garbage inside the canister. “This is a symbol of your past,” she says to my sister and me. “And what you will let go of. All the crap that has happened to you and what you have no control over, and what you can’t blame yourselves for.” She takes the white paper bags and strikes a match until the bag is a torch. She tosses it on top of the trash. She adds other papers she found on the ground until the canister is aflame. Shelly stokes the fire with a nearby stick. The three of us watch as the stinky shirts and old, dried-up pens sizzle and pop.
“I feel like we should say a prayer or something,” Annie says.
“Let’s observe a moment of silence for . . . what?” Shelly says.
“Finding out who Michael is,” Annie says.
I raise my drink cup. “I’ll drink to that.”
We bump pop cups, drink, and drizzle the rest of our sodas over the embers to put out the fire.
“So who’s up for a swim at my house?” Shelly says.
Shelly loans me Josh’s trunks again, and she tells my sister she has a million and one bathing suits. She and Annie go to Shelly’s room to change. I lie in a lounge chair and enjoy the sun.
Shelly walks out followed by my kid sister, who, wearing one of Shelly’s bikinis, no longer looks like a kid. My sister is beautiful, and this thought both delights and disturbs me. Annie is not the kind of beautiful girl who flaunts it, yet her attractiveness will make her the target of men. We’re awful creatures, really. We see girls and women and immediately assess their do-ability. Even nerdy guys like me who take AP classes and live in their cars.
Shelly sets a stack of towels on one of the lounge chairs beside the pool. She goes into the house and comes back a couple minutes later carrying a basket of clothespins and a wooden contraption that she unfolds.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“It’s for drying hand-washable stuff. I thought we could clip the pictures on here so they can air out while we swim.”
“You’re a genius,” I say.
Annie sets a towel on the ground and dumps the contents of the white envelope on it. An array of people in color and black-and-white photos gazes up at us. “Some of these are really old,” she says.
I glance at each as we clip the edges to the dryer rack with clothespins. I recognize my mother, younger and less skinny. “Mom was really pretty,” Annie says.
I recognize a younger version of my grandmother, standing next to a man I have never met, and a teenaged guy who resembles my mom. “This must be our uncle,” I say.
I pass the photo to Annie.
“Wow, they all look so young.” She hands the picture back to me and sneezes. “Sorry. These things are pretty rank.”
We quickly clip them all onto the contraption.
“Those pictures hanging there remind me of that time Rick and Ashley and I pasted Post-it notes all over your car,” Annie says.
“Right after Paul gave me the car,” I tell Shelly, “the three of them littered it with hundreds of yellow Post-its. I wasn’t living in it then.”
“Some of the notes had messages on them, like ‘Cool car for a dork like you’ and ‘Convenient if you plan to raise a family of whales,’” Annie says.
“That’s how she got named the Blue Whale,” I say.
Shelly laughs. “When I was a cheerleader we used to do that to some of the football players’ cars.”
I open the book halfway and let it sit in the sun as well.
“We need music,” Shelly says. She runs back into the house, and suddenly we are surrounded by sound.
“They have an outdoor speaker system?” Annie says. “This is so cool.”
“I know,” I say. “I keep asking Shelly if her parents will adopt me.”
“And I keep reminding him my parents don’t like the children they have.” Shelly points to an outdoor shower. “We’re all pretty gross. Let’s rinse off before we jump in the pool.”
After the cold shower, the three of us dive into the pool, where I immediately splash my sister, who splashes me back. I recall a time when Annie and I were last in a pool together. So long ago, back when Bob was still alive. One of his colleagues had a pool, and I remember going to this guy’s house for a party. Annie was small, and Mom had to hold onto her in the shallow end while Jeff and I splashed around and played. Annie was fearless, even then. We swooshed water all over her, and she laughed her baby laugh.
Shelly’s pool is bean shaped, so it’s not good for laps, but I still manage to do some breast strokes. I notice Annie and Shelly chatting as they linger at the shallow end. They crawl under the water, knees bent, looking like frogs.
“What are you guys talking about?” I say as I swim up.
“Boys and sex,” Shelly says. She dunks my head underwater. I pop up.