The Girl's Guide to Homelessness

by Brianna Karp

  As for me, these times were the calmest in my existence. There was nothing quite as relaxing as a minivacation from Mom. The horror would only begin again when the sticky double doors to the master bedroom would open and she would reemerge, calmly speaking to us again as though nothing had happened. I never understood how Molly and even Joe regarded her siestas as a negative habit. Sure, it couldn’t be healthy for my mom to hole herself up in bed, her hatred toward all of us emanating through the cracks of the locked doors like oozing pus. But surely, it was better for our mental health to be free of her for a bit, right? So what exactly was the problem?

  In any event, my mother’s sojourn was abruptly curtailed by her curiosity. She couldn’t keep herself mad enough at me to miss out on the excitement of the Saturday matinee production of Brianna’s Fun with the Coroner, so off we went, as a family.

  Joyce Cato was a tiny and calm woman with a soothing voice. I assumed that the soothing voice was a necessity if you were going to work in the Decedent Notification Department. She provided us with a copy of the coroner’s report and kindly explained our options as far as funeral arrangements and cremation. She gave me the public administrator’s contact information, and an envelope containing the only item that had been on the body at the time of death—his cell phone.

  “His keys were in his pocket, but they have to be sent over to the PA first; they need to decide if probate is necessary. I don’t know if you want…the gun, but it’s legally yours if you do. You have to pick that up separately—we don’t give firearms to family members here.”

  Horrified, I hastily assured her that I had no interest in the shotgun.

  “No, I didn’t think you would, but we have to ask,” she explained.

  I winced. I knew how my final request would sound. “I know this is going to seem weird, or gross, but—I’d like to see the mortuary photo, please. If you don’t think he’s too…mangled…or anything. If it’s something I could probably handle, I’d like to see it.”

  “It’s not weird or gross—believe me. Many relatives ask to see the death photo. We get all kinds of requests in here—I’ve heard it all.” She pulled out a piece of paper. “I don’t know what you can or can’t handle, of course. Every person’s threshold is different.” She studied the photo. “I can tell you that it’s not as bad as many that I’ve seen. His face is all still there, there’s no jaw missing or anything.”

  Kindly, Joe reached out and took the photo from her. “I’ll look first,” he said. My mother looked away. She didn’t want to see it.

  Joe looked for about thirty seconds, then handed the sheet to me. “It’s OK. I think you can handle it.”

  I looked.

  The man on the slab looked like nobody I had ever known. I couldn’t find the slightest hint of similarity between him and the scarecrow-gaunt young man with the mop of blond hair and the glittering, often fanatical eyes who had once been my father. This man was obese, well on his way to three hundred pounds, and mostly bald. One eye was closed, the other partially open and rolled up into his head. His mouth hung open, teeth crowded and fleeing in all different directions, like scared goldfish; black blood spatters swallowed most of his face. Offhandedly, I wondered why they didn’t wipe down his face or something before taking the picture. The room suddenly smelled like death, whereas moments before, it had simply been a regular office with a conference table.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, handing back the photo and feeling queasier than I expected.

  For several nights, unable to sleep, my thoughts would revert back to that face on the mortuary drawer, and I would try to imagine what was going through his mind when he pulled the trigger. Was it planned? Spur of the moment? Was he drunk? High? Did he, at any point, feel the cold gun barrel against the inside of his mouth, and think, “I can still back out of this, I don’t have to do it…” before deciding “…yes, yes I do,” and pulling the trigger?

  Once, at fourteen years old, I was left behind at the house while my mother took Molly on a trip to Palm Springs. She had instructed me not to read any books—books were my lifeline to sanity, my passion and my escape, so as punishment, she liked to deprive me of them as often as possible. She drove the hour back from Palm Springs that night and peeked through my bedroom window, to make sure that I hadn’t disobeyed her edict. She discovered me deep in study, preparing for my NMSQT, an optional scholarship test being administered at Troy High School the following week. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not approve of pursuing higher education, the reasoning being that college is a waste of time—after all, the apocalypse is coming any day now. It’s not as if God will understand that you were just too busy getting a degree to convert the poor sinners before it’s too late. Besides, the Governing Body of the Watchtower, Bible and Tract Society likes to point out, going to college turns people into atheists. Mind control of this sort, keeping members in darkness and ignorance, never sat very well with me. I did well in school and part of me wanted to go on to college, even though I knew it was a very heathenish, pagan desire, this frivolously airy-fairy “pursuit of knowledge” that the Witnesses scoffed at.

  I was jolted from my studies by my mother screaming through the window. I was in for it now.

  Fifteen minutes of beating later, she spat on me and stalked out of my room, with the parting shot, “And just think, I was coming back to pick you up and bring you with us to Palm Springs. You don’t deserve it, you little whore.” I lay on the floor in fetal position, keening, the pain and outrage too much to tamp down. I could not be callous and detached that night. I waited for her headlights to dim as she sped off, and I bolted to the downstairs bathroom. I couldn’t explain what came over me. I was just done. I was a fourteen-year-old kid who had been writing bad, angst-ridden poetry for five years just to cope and something had finally snapped. My mother’s medicines were all locked up in her room—otherwise, I would have had my pick of Vicodin, Valium and any number of other prescription sleep aids, which she often unwisely mixed with her cheap boxed wine from Long’s Drugstore. I flung open the medicine cabinet and rummaged. A jumbo bottle of Tylenol. That was it. Bawling like a wounded hippo, I poured out handful after handful, cramming them into my mouth, holding my face under the sink faucet, water splashing everywhere, and swallowing, swallowing, swallowing. Large doses of Tylenol would cause liver failure, right? It couldn’t be all that bad. Maybe it would be easy. Like drifting to sleep.

  Fifty or sixty pills later, I had finished off the bottle, and for the first time qualms set in. Then the first waves of agony hit my abdomen and I cried out, bringing my mother’s tenant, Alfie, running from the guestroom, where he found me sprawled on the bathroom floor, legs akimbo, waiting to die.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  I motioned toward the empty Tylenol bottle. “I…took some Tylenol. All of them.” I clutched my stomach. “It hurts.”

  Alfie dialed my mother’s cell phone and explained the situation. I heard the pause on the other end of the line, the interminable chasm of dead air as she thought. The warped cell phone voice finally replied.

  “Tell her to stick her finger down her throat and throw them up. I don’t have time for this.” Click.

  Alfie propped me up against the toilet and encouraged me to throw up the pills. I dry-heaved for several minutes, but couldn’t seem to make anything come up. Finally, he shook his head sadly and left me there. I laid down on the cool tile and passed out.

  I awoke the next morning, cheek pressed and stuck to the floor, drooling a little, exhausted and aching from head to toe, and from the inside out. Trembling, I climbed on my bike and rode to school. Suicide, I decided, hurt. A lot. Clearly, this had been a bad idea. I wouldn’t be trying that again.

  My mother returned from her trip to Palm Springs a few days later and neither of us ever mentioned the fact that—oh, by the way—I had tried to kill myself. Overdramatic histrionics were to be saved for serious offenses like forgetting to put the lids on the garbage cans or spilling a
glass of water. We danced around all those pesky, silly little issues like suicide.

  Perhaps by scrutinizing the mortuary photo of My Father Who Was Not My Father, I was searching for some kind of connection with this man, attempting to establish even the slightest understanding of his anguish, how he must have felt when he irrevocably, irreversibly, exploded his life out from the back of his skull. But, try as I might, I couldn’t comprehend it. I could only feel ill, as though I had once again overloaded my liver with Tylenol.

  Bob’s death was no longer a game to me, a mystery to be pieced together, an opportunity to experience different facets of the law and the death process from the most fundamental level. It had begun that way, my curious detachment insulating me from any gut-wrenching emotional reactions, but quite suddenly, it all pivoted and began to seem more distasteful than I ever could have imagined. I didn’t want to play anymore.

  The public administrator’s office informed me that, as the house did not belong to Bob, but to his mother, his assets totaled less than $100,000. As such, the estate would not pass into probate and whatever belonged to Bob legally passed on to me, as his next of kin.

  “Do you have any idea what he left behind?” I queried.

  “We haven’t been to the house, but I do think somebody mentioned that there are a few recreational vehicles. You have full permission to go through the house and take anything there that you have reason to believe is his. Perhaps he will have left titles lying around, and any other useful information.”

  Ugh, the house again. My stomach turned a slow flip as I asked when I could pick up the keys that were on Bob’s body.

  That was when I learned that the keys had been lost somewhere between the coroner’s office and the PA’s office. Both offices swore that they didn’t have them. Presumably, they’re still floating in the back corner of somebody’s desk drawer, lonely for their former owner from whom they were so drastically and violently parted.

  “Um, how exactly am I supposed to enter the house or drive any of the vehicles?”

  “We can authorize you to enter the house by any means necessary. That means that you can go in through a window or break the lock, if you like. As far as the vehicles, you’ll need to pay a locksmith. That’s just not our responsibility.”

  Two days later, I found myself hanging half-in, half-out of the window of a tiny house, one of dozens of identical, Crackerjack-box style houses on an idyllic Edward Scissorhands-esque block in Lakewood. It was the same window that the police had entered through. The window screen and the screwdriver that had been used to pry it from its frame had been carelessly tossed to one side on the backyard grass below. The house was on a raised foundation, and the window was quite high and narrow. Joe looked up at me, having boosted me up. This was most uncomfortable. My mother leaned casually against the back gate, chatting with the locksmith we had called to create a key for the Dodge Ram parked on the curb, collecting parking tickets on the windshield issued by a month’s worth of annoyed street sweepers.

  I rolled into the window, landing with an “oof!” onto the vinyl flooring. The bathroom was Pepto-Bismol pink. I remembered how much Jesse loved pink. It was her favorite color.

  The house smelled like rotten meat and decay. I wondered how much of it was my mind playing tricks on me. Opening the bathroom door, I realized something disconcerting. The house was bare. There was no furniture, or anything at all. I assumed that perhaps Carol had gotten there first, or maybe Jesse’s sisters, but I never found out for sure. It was just one of those things that I ended up writing off as too petty and unimportant to create a stink about. Walking into the living room, I saw no sign of the big-screen TV that Patty had told me would be there, no couches or tables. Only an old record player against one wall and a woman’s purse (one of Jesse’s, I assumed). Also…what was that on the floor, near the doorway leading to the hall? I was sickened as I read the word Remington in red lettering across the long, skinny, empty box. It lay where he had left it.

  A shudder ran through me, unbidden, and I hastily scurried to the back door, unlocking it and letting Joe in. My mother did not want to enter the house. I wondered what kind of nightmares, if any, this would all bring back for her, and felt a few pangs of solidarity on her behalf.

  Joe and I examined the house. It was tiny, and it was easy to see at a glance that it had been completely cleaned out. Drawers were half-open in the kitchen, the occasional trinket left behind on the floor, but nothing of value. I poked my head into Jesse’s room, her pride and joy. Only a 1950s crystal prism chandelier remained, kitschy perhaps, but I knew that as a child I would have loved it, a frosted cake sparkling against the pink icing walls, and it must have been lovely to Jesse as well. She had worked at the Vons down the street for over fifty years, scraped together everything she had to painstakingly pay off her tiny house. She had understood her only son’s imperfections too well, but she had overlooked them as only a mother can. She had dearly loved the boy who never strayed far from home, always returning after another ruined relationship, after throwing another wife through a wall. Inexplicably, her chandelier made me sad. Such a simple joy clearly meant nothing to whoever had razed the home—perhaps Carol, or another family member. I would later learn, from Jesse herself and her caretakers, that Carol had not even visited Jesse in the nursing home when she learned of Bob’s death.

  We paused at the closed door to Bob’s room. We had to look for Patty and Penny’s pictures, although I wondered if there would be anything left. Joe pushed the door open, and promptly turned green. Peering past him, I understood why. I also knew why the house was still clogged with the stench of death and rot—it had not been my imagination, after all.

  It was a HAZMAT scene. A month past Bob’s death, and the room had not been cleaned. In my conversation with the coroner, I was given to understand that the responsibility of cleaning the house was the owner’s, which meant that Jesse, or whomever was handling her affairs, would need to hire a crime scene cleanup crew. From some covert calls to the nursing home in Downey, I learned that Jesse’s two sisters had obtained power of attorney, and were in the process of selling the house. I had therefore assumed that they would take care of that very important detail.

  I was wrong.

  The room was cramped, perhaps ten feet by eight feet. A queen-sized bed took up the vast majority of it and an armoire stood just to the left of the doorway. Rivulets of dried blood, like tiny fingers, dribbled down the entire front of the armoire. A long, thick maroon stain, twice as thick as my arm, snaked across the carpet, trailing off as it went. Clearly, this was where Bob’s head had dragged along the floor as the officers who found him had attempted to hoist his considerable mass onto a stretcher. I had read in the coroner’s report that a female officer had been the one to enter through the little window and find him. Was she horrified or was it just another day at work for her?

  The closet was cleared out, racks of hangers still bearing shirts tossed on the bed. The drawers of a dresser next to the closet had clearly been ransacked, clothing still hanging out of it. The mattress had been stripped of its sheets and comforter—they were wadded in a heap by the far wall. Had the police turned it all upside down in search of a suicide note? Or had it been Carol, leeching anything of value, scouring even under the mattress and in the corner of the closet? Could she really have stood it, tramping through the blood-soaked suicide scene of her own brother? She had known him far more deeply than I had. She must have loved him once, mustn’t she?

  At the base of the armoire, I saw scattered, crumbly, gray bits. Pieces of skull? Of congealed brain matter? Joe tried to hold steady, but I could tell he was losing it. I told him I would be OK—I thought I could handle it from here. Blankly, he nodded his head and turned around. Joe had a strong constitution, but I thought I heard him gag a little as he escaped.

  God, the smell. It was putrid. I went into automatic mode. Don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it just do it don’t think
about it. In the kitchen I found two limp washcloths, left behind in the chaos. I held them in my palms like pot holders and returned to Bob’s room. Not thinking about it not thinking about it not thinking about it. I had lost all hope of finding anything of use in here, as someone had clearly already scoured the area, but I still needed the photos that I had promised to locate for my two new half sisters.

  I palmed the knobs of the armoire, carefully searching every drawer, feeling the bloodstains burning through the washcloth to my skin below. Not thinking about it not thinking about it not thinking good fucking god don’t let there be blood-borne pathogens not thinking about it. Nothing in the drawers. I checked Bob’s laundry hamper, the dresser, nothing. I walked over to the corner, avoiding stepping in the pool of blood on the carpet, and lifted the wadded bed linens. Startled, I saw what they had been covering. I inhaled sharply and immediately wished that I hadn’t; tasting decomposed air. The white wall was sprayed with blood. Someone spilled maple syrup. It’s just maple syrup. Look at that, that’s not blood. That looks nothing like blood. That’s maple syrup, even if it smells like death and disease and blood-borne pathogens and my dead sperm donor’s brain fluids.

  Nothing. My search had yielded no photos. I felt angry on behalf of Patty and Penny, and a little bit angry for myself, too. I had gone through all this for nothing. I had failed them. Poking my head out the front door, I called to my mom that there were no photos, and nothing of value left in the room, except for a tiny TV set on top of the armoire.