Shade

by Marilyn Peake

She pursued the topic. “No, I mean, anything else new? Like with your friends?”

  I felt my head throb, as though a swarm of wasps were about to burst through my skull. I swear I heard a buzzing sound in my ears. “Mom, my friends? Seriously? You know Annie’s missing, right? My best friend? That’s been pretty devastating. It’s all I can think about.”

  She brushed her hair away from her face. I noticed her fingers tremble. “Oh, sure, sure. I understand. I just wondered if you were hanging out with any other friends right now. How about school projects? Do you have any interesting homework projects right now?”

  I did have a short story to write for Creative Writing class, so I mentioned that. “It’s going to be in the Fantasy genre. It’s going to be about a dysfunctional family visited by a faerie.”

  At that innocent amount of information, my mother’s inner werewolf broke out, completely transforming her. She stood up from the table. She started screaming at me. “What? What are you doing, writing about a dysfunctional family? Are you writing about us? Are you?”

  I didn’t answer. I felt silence might be the best policy for dealing with what I had been told in Al-Anon was the intense, irrational rage of addicts and people with Borderline Personality Disorder. I looked up the definition online and, boy, if my mom wasn’t Borderline, she sure met the criteria. Fear of being abandoned: check. Impulsivity: check. Extreme reactions, including panic, depression or rage: check. And there was more. She fit Borderline Personality Disorder like a teacup fits its saucer.

  That approach didn’t work. My mother continued yelling at me, “Answer me! Are you writing about us?”

  My left eye twitched. My stomach felt like it was going to pitch the little bit I’d eaten. I answered in a voice that ended up sounding like I was a little girl, “No. I’m not writing about us at all. My short story’s going to be about a really large family, ten kids or something, who keep losing all their stuff and fighting about it, and a faerie visits them and makes everything worse.”

  To which my mother responded with extreme rage and panic. “Your teacher will see right through your story, Shade! So will the kids in your classroom! Think about the song Puff, the Magic Dragon. Everyone thought that song was about drugs, even though it sounded like it was just about a sweet little dragon. And what about Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds? Everyone said it was about LSD. People aren’t dumb, Shade. They’ll figure out that you’re talking about us!”

  And, with that, my mother picked up her coffee cup and threw it in the sink. The handle broke off. She then pulled the cup out of the sink and threw it outside into the front yard in the general direction of the garbage can, screaming the entire time.

  I died a million deaths, thinking the neighbors might hear.

  Then my mom came back inside and poured whiskey into a glass. She looked at me and explained, “For my nerves. Just until I get started back in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.”

  Sure. My attendance in Alateen would be a complete waste of my time.

  I went upstairs. I grabbed a bucket, a bunch of sponges and a bottle of cleaning liquid from my bathroom. Then I hopped down the stairs and left the house as quickly as I could, yelling back to my mom, “I have a school club project I’m late for. I gotta run.”

  My mother came to the door and stared out into the front yard, watching me go.

  I walked to the abandoned house we were fixing up that day, rather than try to bargain with my mother for use of the car.

  As I approached the house, I saw it in the brilliant clarity of early day. It was Victorian style, but more beat-up than my own. That was saying something. There were whole patches of tiles flapping up on the roof like flattened birds trying to take off. There was a wonderful old porch that spanned the entire front of the house, but many of the vertical supports connecting the top and bottom railings were missing or rotting. It gave the porch the appearance of grinning widely, revealing missing and rotting teeth. Paint was peeling everywhere—on all the walls and turrets and on the front door.

  When I was about three doors away, I suddenly noticed that Kailee was standing on the sidewalk in front of the house next door, speaking with a woman dressed in a business suit. They seemed to be in a pretty serious conversation.

  My heart sank. That couldn’t be good.

  At that moment, my phone buzzed. It was a text message from George. It said: Come around the back of the house. I’ll let you in the back door. Try not to let the woman talking to Kailee see you.

  Always appreciating the opportunity to play ninja, I slipped behind a line of wildly overgrown bushes. I followed that to the backyard and then walked quickly to the back door where, sure enough, George was waiting.

  Once he had let me in and closed the door, George said, “We actually have some really great news. That woman that Kailee’s talking to? She’s a realtor. Kailee must have been feeling rather gutsy today. She noticed that the woman had a realtor bumper sticker on her car, so she nonchalantly told her that she was thinking about buying this house.”

  My eyes popped. “Wait. What? This house? Shouldn’t we be laying low?”

  “You might think so. But Kailee got some really great news by sniffing around, asking questions. She found out that this house is empty, actually foreclosed upon, but not going up for sale.”

  George was smiling, but I felt scared. Why wouldn’t a house go up for sale? Bats in the attic? Huge rats in the basement, gnawing through the walls? “Oh my God, George, was there some really bad disease here, like when the monkeys got Ebola in that laboratory in Reston, Virginia? Is this house condemned?” I covered my mouth and nose. “Should we be breathing the air in here?”

  George started laughing. “Oh my word, you have such a flair for the dramatic!” After chuckling some more, he explained, “OK, it’s a terrible situation, but not for us. For us, this should actually guarantee that we’ll be left alone from the powers that be.” George’s forehead creased with lines. He looked angry. “I can’t believe that the banks are actually allowed to get away with this. A bank foreclosed on this house after the family living here couldn’t pay their debt. They had racked up a huge number of medical bills when their youngest daughter developed leukemia. She was only four years old.”

  I looked away from the intensity in George’s eyes. “Oh, wow, did she die?”

  George answered, “I don’t know. That’s as far as I heard the conversation. They were talking in the front yard next door, but then the realtor started walking to her car. Kailee followed, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying after that. But the bank’s apparently doing something else to that family that seems utterly despicable. Apparently, a lot of banks have been doing this. The bank owns the house now. But they won’t sell it until the market improves, if it improves. And, until then, the house is still in the family’s name, so they have to keep paying taxes on it. They’re broke, but forced to take on more debt from continued taxes. In the meantime, the house stands empty.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  When Kailee came inside, she filled us in on the situation. The little girl was in remission, but the family was now living in the basement of her grandparents’ home. And they owed an unbelievable amount of money.

  We turned inward to process our own thoughts as we started cleaning the abandoned house.

  We all had assigned rooms to clean. For starters, I had the living room and kitchen. We decided that we should each work on two rooms at a time; then we’d decide which rooms to clean next. George was assigned two bathrooms, one upstairs and one on the first floor. Kailee was assigned a bedroom and an office.

  It dawned on me that I was excited about cleaning. I usually hated it, but this felt more like setting the stage for a grand adventure and less like a chore than it did when my mom made me clean the house.

  The living room was easy to clean, especially since there wasn’t much furniture in it. I took the cushions off the couch and vacuumed the whole thing. I vacuumed the floor-length curtains.
Wow, were they dusty! My nose actually felt like it pinched closed a few times and I had a bunch of sneezing and coughing fits. I was also pretty creeped out by all the spiderwebs I found along the edges of the ceiling, on the curtains and lamps. I sucked them right up with the vacuum hose. I polished the hardwood floors until they gleamed and put new bulbs in the lamps. I wondered to myself if we could find some ways to decorate the room without making it apparent to anyone with a key that there were people using the house illegally. I shivered at the thought that what we were doing was actually illegal. I did not think I had the stuff to survive jail too well.

  Maybe brightly colored throw pillows could be added to the couch without anyone noticing that strangers had changed anything?

  It was a thought.

  After admiring my own work on the living room, I started in on the kitchen. There were some pretty gross things in there!

  Someone had left a package of bread in the oven. Why, I had no idea. Good thing we hadn’t turned the oven on without checking it. We would have cooked plastic wrapping.

  Oh God, I suddenly realized that we had to be very, very careful not to accidentally burn the house down. I suddenly heard the voice of my mother in my head: “I’m sure everything’s fine, dear. You worry too much.” Although that was in response to the lights in my room blinking on and off with a sizzling sound. She seriously worries much too little, if you ask me.

  Anyway, the bread had grown so much mold, it had puffed out and expanded until the bag ripped open. The oven stank to high heaven. I gagged a few times and thought I was going to throw up.

  I ran from the room. I darted into the living room. I breathed in the clean scent of furniture spray still floating around in there. My throat relaxed. My stomach stopped retching.

  Trying to decide how to handle the horrible smell in the oven, I grabbed my purse and fished around for a perfume sample I still had in there. Then I doused a strip of cleaning rag with it and tied it loosely around my neck. I hoped the wonderful scent of roses would drift upward into my face; and, if not, I was prepared to slap the cloth over my nose as I worked.

  Armed with protection, I marched back into the kitchen. I snapped plastic gloves onto my hands, pulled a trash bag out of the box and ballooned it open. I tried to pick up the bread bag with one hand, but that only caused a lump of mold to ooze out of the bag.

  Oh my God, I was going to throw up!

  I smacked the cleaning rag—a long, wide piece ripped from someone’s old powder blue sweatpants—over my mouth and nose and took a really deep breath. I worried the perfume might be too strong at that close range; but, trust me, it just barely covered up the stench enough for me to handle cleaning up the drippy mold and throw the poofed-up bag into the garbage. I took the garbage bag outside right away and wondered where we could dispose of it. It wasn’t something that would go unnoticed if we carried it back to our own houses and chucked it in a garbage can there.

  Back in the kitchen, I scrubbed the oven until it smelled fit for humans and looked as close to shiny as an oven that old can look.

  Then I opened the refrigerator door.

  Oh, my God.

  Someone had left a few bowls of food and a head of lettuce in there before unplugging it.

  Oh, God. I slapped the perfumed cloth back over my nose and mouth until I threw away all the rotting food and had the refrigerator sparkly and no longer smelling like death.

  When I was done, I went to find my fellow comrades in cleaning. Turned out they were just about finished with the rooms they were working on.

  It had taken us four hours to clean just two rooms each. We decided to go get pizza and then return to clean out the attic. We figured the attic and basement might take a long time to clean because there was so much junk in them, but we thought it would be fun to have those areas of the house for places to hang out in the future.

  We were actually able to lock the back door after leaving that way because I had found an extra set of house keys shoved into the back of a kitchen drawer. I was so excited when they worked!

  We walked to the pizza place I had visited with Annie. As we opened the front door of the restaurant, I felt such a sense of sadness wash over me, I thought my chest would cave in from yearning.

  Next thing I knew, my chest was also burning. Goddamnit, Brandon! I told you to use the cell phone! It felt a bit eerie, like he had read my mind, when suddenly the burning stopped, my cell phone buzzed and it turned out I had a message from Brandon: Hey, where are you?

  God, he was worse than my mother sometimes.

  Well, actually, he was worse than a mother, but not necessarily my mother. In reality, my mom nagged me a lot when she was around; but she wasn’t around all that much, at least not in a sober state, and she rarely cared what I was doing. In a way, it was actually nice to have someone care about me enough to wonder where I was. I texted him back: Having pizza with friends.

  Then it dawned on me: I really did have friends here. A couple of live human friends and a ghost friend. I hoped we never moved.

  Brandon texted back: What time will you be home?

  He was pushing it. I texted back: I have no idea. We’re working on a project.

  My phone buzzed. I pictured Brandon typing his message with a touch of magic, stylus floating in the air. His message read: I’m lonely. And he had added an emoticon. I chuckled out loud. It was a little face with dripping tears.

  I joked back with him: Awwwww. Stay there. We can chat later tonight. OK? I added an emoticon with angel wings.

  He typed back OK and added a smiley face.

  Apparently, I had modernized a ghost, introduced him to things in an era that had occurred after his death. Life was strange.

  After the supersized pizza with everything on it and the supersized sodas to wash it all down, we returned to cleaning the abandoned house.

  When we walked out of the pizza parlor, I saw the same homeless man that I had seen when I was with Annie. He was once again sitting on top of a pile of newspapers. And, smoking a cigarette, he once again had cigarette butts glowing red all around his newspaper stack. I realized he must be one serious chain smoker, since all the butts still had a spark of life in them. Sadly, I realized that one of these days that guy was probably going to set himself on fire.

  When we got back to the house, we headed up to the attic. It was large, like my own bedroom except that this one didn’t have a bathroom or closet or anything; it was just one room. There were stairs leading up to it, so it was basically an extra floor of the house.

  We looked around. The attic had clearly been used for storage and a lot of things had been left behind. I wondered why. Were these things the family would no longer use or did they leave in such a hurry, they didn’t have time to pack them up? I wondered if any of these things had belonged to the little girl who had suffered through leukemia only to be kicked out of her home by a bank.

  There was a dollhouse over in a corner that was still in pretty good shape. I walked over to it, sat down and peeked inside. All the furniture was gone, or maybe there had never been any furniture inside it. But it had other really neat details. There were tiny little kid drawings hanging on the walls. I folded one over at the corner to find out how it had been attached to the wall and discovered that it had been stuck there with two-sided sticky tape. The drawing was sweet: an apple tree, a sun, a stick-figure person picking an apple-red dot from the tree. Inside the bathroom, a very tiny plastic doll of a baby was still inside the bathtub. I pictured the little girl who had lived here missing the doll when she couldn’t find it in the things her family had packed up for her. Or maybe she didn’t want that doll anymore; it was hard to say.

  Next to the dollhouse were three larger dolls and a stuffed bunny. Maybe these were just old, discarded toys.

  I stood up and looked around.

  There was a busted sewing mannequin with some straight pins stuck into it. There were piles of books, stuff in boxes, a card table with a broken leg.

>   I volunteered to sort through the boxes. I was curious about what might be inside. Opening up the first box, I discovered old Christmas cards. It seemed a shame that they had been left. All the time that people had spent addressing them, all the time this family had spent packing them up and saving them. Unless they had been saving them just for the pictures on the cards and then decided they didn’t need the pictures anymore. Mary Jane’s Mom collected Christmas cards like that for a few years. She put some of the best ones in picture frames in their house and they looked really pretty. My favorite one had a Christmas tree with snow on the branches and little angels decorating it.

  I looked through the stacks of cards. Some had personal photographs on their covers. It seemed strange to me that these had been left behind.

  After closing that box back up, I sorted through the other boxes. One held an assortment of tape: electrical, masking, Scotch tape. Hmmm ... boring. Another one contained all sorts of instruction manuals—for stuff like toasters and blenders and coffeemakers. Yawn. The next one contained a collection of old coins. Whoa. How anyone could have left that behind, I could not even begin to imagine.