Dirty Little Secrets

by Cynthia Jaynes Omololu

  Mom turned on me. “You’ll do no such thing,” she said. She turned back to Aunt Jean, gripping the handles of her walker so tight her arms were shaking. “Where is everything? I want everything back in this house by tonight,” she said.

  Aunt Jean straightened up to face her. “It’s gone, Jo,” she said quietly. “It’s gone. You can’t get it back. It was garbage. Don’t you remember what it was like with Mama when we were kids? Can’t you see you were living just like her?”

  “I am nothing like her,” Mom said, every word sounding like it had come from the center of her body. She was practically spitting with anger. “I am a collector. Everything in this house has… had a purpose and a meaning. How dare you come in here and get rid of my treasures!”

  I hugged the wall as I crept back onto the porch where Phil was still standing.

  Aunt Jean’s eyes were wet as she tried to reason with Mom. “But all of the mold and mildew—and what I found in the refrigerator! It’s not healthy living like this. Don’t you remember when we were kids? What if their friends found out?” She swung around and pointed at me. “Do you want them to make fun of her too? I remember what it was like even if you don’t.”

  “Get out!” Mom started screaming at her. “Get out! I will not tolerate this in my own house. You took advantage of me! You probably stole my things for yourself. Get out!”

  Aunt Jean still didn’t move. “Joanna, calm down. It’s going to be okay. Look around at your beautiful house.”

  “Get out!” Mom screamed at Aunt Jean one last time and, with all the effort she could muster, swung the walker at her. One leg caught Aunt Jean under the eye as she scrambled out of the way.

  “Fine!” Aunt Jean said as she made her way to the door, her fingers pressed to her rapidly swelling face. “You’re on your own from now on. You don’t want help, you just live here and drown in your own filth.” As she passed me in the doorway, she placed a hand on my cheek. “Take care of each other,” she said. “I’ll do everything I can to help.” And then she was gone.

  Mom lay crumpled in a heap on the living room floor, tears streaming down her cheeks. I walked over to try to help her up, but she swatted my arm away.

  “I don’t need you,” she said. She looked at Phil still standing in the doorway. “Either of you.”

  We both watched silently as she dragged herself to the coffee table and used that to swing herself onto the chair. That night, she spent the first of many nights sleeping on our old green recliner.

  These past few years, her room had gotten so cluttered and her bed hidden under such a huge mountain of clothes, it was almost impossible to sleep there. Her life in this house had shrunk down to the space around that old recliner.

  Over time, Mom got less angry at Phil and me, but things were never the same as before. Sara loved to suck up to Mom and tell her over and over how she would have never let us do it if she had known. If any of us ever wondered who the favorite was, we didn’t anymore.

  Aunt Jean might have tried to help, but I only talked to her a couple of times after that. She would call when she knew Mom was at work and ask me how things were. I’d tell her they were okay, and she’d tell me she was sorry, but I always tried to get off the phone quickly. I felt so bad about betraying Mom that I didn’t dare keep in touch after she told us not to. Little by little, Mom eliminated almost every “outsider” from our lives. It was better this way, she used to tell us. The only people you can trust were right here in the immediate family. Phil just spent as much time as possible away from home until he could leave for good. That’s what we all did—waited until we could leave for good.

  It took three people and two solid weeks to clean out Mom’s mess. It took her less than six months to return it to squalor.

  chapter 5

  11:10 a.m.

  Two weeks. As much as I tried to be positive, I couldn’t ignore the fact it had taken us two entire weeks to clean out the house back then, and there were three of us doing it—now there was just me and a whole lot more stuff.

  Mom was lying in the back of the house, but at least she was in the hallway. This way, I only had to clear the places the paramedics would see as they dragged the stretcher through the house to get her. Any room that had a door could be shut away from prying eyes, and I could deal with them later. I didn’t have to do the whole house in the next couple of days. Just the visible parts.

  Still, I had no idea where to start, and taking it in as a whole made it look impossible. But impossible wasn’t an option.

  Mom always said you eat an elephant a bite at a time, so I tried to concentrate on one little part of one room. I walked back to the front door and turned around, trying to find the spots that would make the most difference. I tried to see it as someone new would, someone who hadn’t gotten used to seeing piles and piles of junk as they expanded over the years until they were as much a part of the house as the couch or dining room table. Not that you could actually see the couch or the table under all the garbage.

  Obviously, I would have to start with the front hallway. At some point, Mom had covered this part of the mound with a sheet so it wouldn’t look so bad in case someone caught a glimpse of what was inside the house. Cautiously, I lifted a corner of the sheet and peeked underneath. As far as I could tell, it was the same assortment of clothes, mail, newspapers, and plastic grocery bags resting on the ever-popular green bins that were scattered through the house.

  As I put the sheet back down, I noticed a familiar box about halfway down the pile. I pulled it out and lifted the cover to see that the slippers were still in there, just as new as they had been when I’d given them to her for her birthday a couple of years ago. I’d looked hard to find some that matched her old ratty ones almost exactly, and she’d seemed happy when she opened them. But here they were in a mound of junk, while her old nasty ones were still snug on her feet.

  I walked back into the dining room and opened the first box of trash bags. The bag made a sharp snapping sound as I shook it open—it was the sound of efficiency and organization and somehow it made me feel a little better.

  The top of the nearest pile held the mail from the past few weeks. The whole place was like some sort of archaeology site—the layers closest to the top had the most recent stuff, while the layers on the bottom were probably six or seven years old. As I crammed the fliers and ads into the first bag, I started to feel guilty about just throwing it all away. Mom always said she’d recycle all this stuff—it’s one of the reasons she had for keeping it. I could at least recycle the newspapers, but they would be too heavy for the garbage bags. Luckily, we had a huge stack of boxes in the garage. Mom never threw away a good box.

  On my way to the garage, I tried not to look toward her room, but I couldn’t help it. Something moved and I jumped, but it was only a fly. A big, shiny, greenish black fly. It sat on a yellow magazine, changing and shifting direction every few seconds like it was waiting for something to happen. Weren’t flies supposed to be hibernating or something when it was this cold out?

  I couldn’t stand to see it there, rubbing its legs together in anticipation, so I made my way back to the front hallway and grabbed the sheet that was covering the monster pile by the door. With the grimy sheet over my shoulder, I inched my way back down the hall until I was standing at Mom’s feet. In one quick movement I flung the sheet over her like it was some sort of magic trick. And it worked. Mom had used the sheet to make the junk in the hallway disappear, and now I used it to make her disappear. The fly was out of luck.

  It felt much better to have Mom all covered up, so I worked my way to the garage. It took several minutes of digging to get a couple of boxes from the pile that was stacked against the garage wall. The garage was what the house aspired to. It was so packed full of stuff that it seemed like there was no way to cram even one more tiny item into the overwhelmed space. There wasn’t even a real path through the stuff anymore. If something needed to be stored in the garage, most of the time we just
stood in the doorway and tossed it as far into the mess as we could. A long time ago, someone had put plywood up in the rafters in an attempt at organization, but now everything that was up there just made the beams in the ceiling sag until they almost met the piles on the ground. The whole space had an air of impending doom.

  As I turned to walk back up the concrete steps and into the house, I caught a glimpse of a silver fender sticking out of the pile. My car. At least Mom said it would be once she got it out of here and fixed it up. It was really Mom’s old car that she’d put in here when she’d bought the new one a couple of years ago. Maybe someday I could dig the car out and get it running, or even use hers. I could finally get my license and feel like I was free. It would sure beat having to ask Kaylie’s mom for a ride everywhere.

  I grabbed the boxes from the garage and dragged them back down the pathway to the front door. It only took ten minutes to go through one big stack, recycling most of it and throwing the rest in one of the garbage bags. I picked up the box to take this first load outside, but when I got to the hallway, the sides were blocked by the stacks of newspapers and magazines—the path was way too narrow for me to carry the box through the kitchen and out the back door. I could feel my muscles straining as I stood in the front hallway trying to decide what to do with the heavy, awkward box. The last thing I needed was to draw attention to myself by carrying the bags and boxes through the front door, but until I’d made the main path wider, it was going to be impossible to carry them out through the back.

  I checked my watch. Eleven thirty on a Tuesday morning. The only people who would really be around were old Mrs. Raj next door and maybe TJ from across the street, unless his mom put him in some sort of day camp during vacation. I decided going out the front was worth the risk—mainly because I had no other choice.

  As I set the box down behind the garage, I felt like I had begun to accomplish something. I was even sweating from the exertion, despite the cold weather, so I took off my jacket and hung it on the back of the front doorknob as I came back in.

  I was feeling even more accomplished as I hauled the next box out the front door. I heard the skateboard wheels scraping the concrete before I saw him.

  “Hey,” TJ said as he kicked the back of his skateboard so it landed in his hand. “Whatcha doin’?”

  I shifted the weight of the box to my hip and turned to him. “Just some cleaning.”

  “My mom always does that after Christmas so she can make room for the new stuff,” he said.

  “Well, there you go.” I turned to walk away.

  “Can I help?” he asked.

  I sighed and stopped walking. I really liked him, but the last thing I needed was a kid hanging around asking questions. “No, TJ. Not really. I’m doing fine on my own.”

  “Are you getting rid of anything good?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “How about I let you know when I’m finished.”

  “I can go through it with you,” he said. “Come on, I’m totally bored.”

  I looked up and down the empty street. “Aren’t there any other little kids around today?”

  TJ tipped his helmet back on his head with one hand. “I’m not a little kid,” he said. “I’m in third grade.”

  “Listen,” I said. “Anyone I babysit on a regular basis is a little kid. Go find someone else to bother. I’m really busy here.”

  “Fine.” TJ’s shoulders slumped as he turned to walk down my driveway. Great. Now his feelings were hurt. I really did not have time for this.

  “Hey, T,” I called after him. “How about I make a pile for you to go through later? If I find any cool stuff Phil left behind I’ll give you first pick.”

  He shrugged without turning around, but dropped his skateboard on the sidewalk and, with a running start, rolled around the corner and out of sight. I took that as a yes.

  Back inside, I felt good, like I was making progress. As I stuffed the boxes full of paper, I grabbed a bag labeled “Scrub City”—Mom’s favorite clothing store. Sure enough, it was filled with colorful nursing scrubs with the tags still on, and I wondered how long ago she’d bought these. I pulled out a shirt that was covered with Simpsons characters all dressed for Christmas—Homer had on a Santa hat and Lisa’s saxophone was covered in lights. Mom always found the most obnoxious scrubs to wear because she said it made her people feel better to look at something cheerful. She never called them her patients, always her “people.” I guess calling them patients would make it more obvious that a lot of them were never going home again. Maybe after, I could take these down to her work and let the other nurses have them. Sort of like Mom’s legacy.

  I’d gone down to the hospital with her for one of those “Take Your Daughter to Work” days a couple of years ago. I’d been there lots of times, usually parked at the nurses’ station with a supply of pens and pads of paper with the names of pharmaceutical companies written on the top, but we never stayed more than a couple of minutes—just long enough for her to pick up her paycheck or see to one of her people quickly. I’d spent half a day there once when the daycare lady didn’t show up, but I’d never seen her actually work before.

  I’d expected the same cranky, irritated person I saw at home every day, but once she stepped through the sliding doors, she was different. Her face softened, and there was a slight smile on her lips as we approached the floor where she worked.

  “Good morning, Mr. Evans,” she said to a tall, skinny bald man as we got off the elevator. He was wearing red plaid pajamas with a matching red plaid robe and gripped a tall pole that held an assortment of IV bags. Tubes snaked from under his robe and attached to the bags as he wheeled the contraption along beside him.

  “Good morning, Joanna,” he said, his gaunt face assembling into a slight smile. He turned to me. “Do we have a new nurse on the ward?” I’d picked the least objectionable pair of scrubs in her closet, but I was still mortified to be seen with roller-skating penguins all over my shirt. Mom said if I was going to miss an entire day of school, I had to look the part.

  “This is my daughter Lucy,” she said, putting her arm around me like it was the most natural thing in the world. “She’s come to see what we do here all day, so you boys better behave yourselves.” She winked at him as she said it. Arm around my shoulder? Winking? It was like Mom had been taken over by some kindly nurse alien.

  “Aw, come on, Jo,” he said, winking back. “That’s no fun now, is it?”

  “Just see what you can do for the next few hours, okay?” Mom patted his arm as he continued his slow shuffle down the hallway.

  Mom turned to me. “Let’s get you settled, shall we?” she said brightly, like we were going to spend the day at Disneyland instead of in a hospital cancer ward. We went to the nurses’ station and put our purses in the locked filing cabinet that held her stuff. She introduced me to the other nurses on the floor, reminding me which ones I’d met over the years. She kept saying, “My youngest, Lucy,” as if she was actually proud of that fact rather than thinking I was a liability.

  For the next few hours, I followed her around the floor, watching her check charts and stick needles into IV tubes. Mom chatted with the people in the beds like they were old friends—asking about their kids or their husbands, talking about the latest episode of some cop show they both watched, even while she had to pump some chemical into their bodies that was bound to make them feel even worse than they did already. She let me carry the bottles of medicine and once let me hold an IV bag, but most of the time I felt embarrassed for being upright and healthy while all these people were so sick.

  Late in the afternoon, we stopped by a half-closed door to a darkened room. Mom pushed it open, but turned to me. “I’m going to take this one alone, okay? Do you mind waiting here for just a minute? I’ll be right back.”

  “Yeah. Okay,” I said. She sounded so calm and reasonable I almost didn’t know how to react. It was like we’d spent the day reading a script of how a good mother-daughter team shou
ld communicate. I couldn’t help watching through the crack in the door as she talked softly to someone I couldn’t see behind a curtain. Instead of the harsh florescent lights and blaring TV in the rest of the rooms, this one was lit by a small bedside lamp and had soft classical music playing in the background. I could see Mom standing at the foot of the bed and stroking the tops of the person’s feet under the blankets.

  “Your mama is good at what she does,” her boss, Nadine, said, coming up behind me so softly I jumped.

  “Oh, I was just, uh… she asked me to wait out here,” I said, looking as guilty as I felt for peeking.

  “It’s fine, sugar,” she said. “Mrs. Collingwood is one of your mama’s special people. No family or even many friends around, so Joanna tends to spend a little extra time. Mrs. Collingwood’s been in and out of here so much over the years that we told her last time we’d issue her a FastPass so she could go right to the head of the line.” She looked at my blank face. “That was a joke.”

  I smiled weakly, but it seemed wrong to joke in a place that held this much pain. “I got it,” I said.

  Nadine reached out to pat my shoulder. “Been a hard day for you?”

  I shrugged. It had been weird to see Mom so efficient, so capable of taking care of other people when I knew deep down she was a failure at taking care of her kids. Maybe she used up all the good stuff before she got home. The person Nadine saw at work every day and the person who slept in her robe on our green recliner every night seemed like two different people.

  Nadine peeked through the crack in the door. “I’d tell you it gets easier, but it doesn’t, really.” She nodded toward Mom. “Joanna is one of the most caring and knowledgeable nurses I’ve ever worked with. Plenty of times she’s caught things even the doctors have missed.” She turned to me. “Think you’ll ever become a nurse? Or a doctor?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, but that was really just to be polite, because I did know. Nursing was one more way I wouldn’t be like Mom when I got older.