Chiral Mad 3

by Stephen King

  “No,” she said, and Dad looked at her like he was surprised she’d suddenly made a decision. Then he looked where she was looking. “No,” Mom repeated. “Too much space in this house. We don’t need that much space.”

  Dad left his door open and Brian watched him pass the hood of the car and join Mom on the passenger side.

  “We’ll find somewhere else,” he said. “Somewhere smaller.”

  “We don’t need that much space,” Mom said again and Brian heard sadness in her voice and it made him sad and he saw Dad put an arm around Mom’s shoulder and Brian realized the car was beeping, had been since Mom and Dad opened their doors. “It’s just a lot of room,” Mom said and Dad crossed in front of the hood again and opened Barry’s door and guided him out of the car and squeezed him, too, the car beeping, the doors open, Barry still stuck, still staring past Dad toward the seven stones, Brian watching his brother, watching his Dad squeeze his brother’s shoulder, bringing him closer, erasing the space between them.

  PUT ME TO DREAM

  STEPHANIE M. WYTOVICH

  At present,

  there is a single piece of furniture in my room:

  my memories,

  memories of things I have said, things I have done,

  and I ache to tell someone,

  to get the crass words and complicated prose out of my mouth,

  but like bile

  they burn, burn my tongue, my esophagus, my lungs,

  and this pain of silence is better than the physical agony of

  confession, admission,

  but these stories, these books, these novels of my muteness, they

  settle in my stomach, uncomfortable with bloated pages,

  with smeared ink,

  they fester inside me like an infected wound

  and I need to tell someone,

  someone who won’t judge me,

  who won’t point fingers and call me monster,

  call me victim, call me fiend; Yes, I need someone,

  someone who will listen,

  who won’t just tell me it will be okay,

  but a voice who will make it okay;

  but not today,

  not now,

  it’s far too fresh,

  far too much,

  and I think I’ll have mother bring up my bed first,

  let the clinks and clangs of the dripping pipe put me to sleep,

  put me to dream

  where the stories don’t scream

  where the bed swallows me alive,

  alive in this asylum,

  where I’m certain

  I will

  thrive.

  THAT PERILOUS STUFF

  SCOTT EDELMAN

  “ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT to get out here?” the cabdriver turned to me and asked as we pulled to a stop alongside my mother’s house. I could tell what he was thinking as he took in the front porch overflowing with dented bicycles, rusty tools, and machines parts, the unmown lawn with grass so tall it could swallow a small child, and the trash bags stacked against the garage to form towers that seemed certain to topple, and it wasn’t very different from what I’d thought when I’d turned my back on the place years before.

  So actually, no, I wasn’t all that sure I wanted to get out here, but I had no interest in explaining to a stranger why this sudden trip home to see my mother and brother left me feeling that way.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, not sure of that either. You can never go home again, they say. Well, unfortunately, they’re wrong. Which meant I had a challenge ahead. For Mom and Lou collected more than only stuff. They also collected uncertainty and resentment and fear, and other emotions as well that I’d done my best to abandon. So my main goal this visit—other than dealing with Mom’s latest difficulties, at which Lou had only hinted—was to make sure neither of my relatives offloaded any of those traits on me.

  “Here,” he said, passing a card back over his shoulder along with my change. “You might need this. It’s not always that easy to get a cab to come all the way out here.”

  A card with a taxi driver’s cell number was a reminder I wasn’t home—my chosen home, that is—any longer. I’d grown used to summoning a car with the swipe of my thumb. But now, I was at my first home—my birth home—where such things were still impossible. And looking at the house, obscured by Mom’s hoard—though from the disassembled machinery out on the porch, it was undeniably Lou’s hoard now as well—I knew there was going to be a whole lot more I’d find impossible here.

  The driver—Marco according to his card—pulled my suitcase out of the trunk—a small one, as I hoped not to have to stay long—and I was soon alone on the crowded porch of the house I’d had to run from, until my brother’s call had me running back.

  I leaned into the doorbell, but it didn’t work. Of course it didn’t work. Things had always fallen apart here, and Mom was always too busy bringing more stuff into the house to bother fixing whatever stuff she already had. I could have opened the door myself if I’d brought my key, but it had been so long since I’d crossed the country to visit that I no longer knew where it was.

  Does that make me a bad daughter? Sometimes I think so. Other times I think—if I’d been a better one I’d have ended up trapped like Lou. And unlike him, I don’t think I’d have survived.

  I took a deep breath, thought for a moment of immediately phoning Marco and telling him, you were right, and no, I didn’t really want to get out here, please take me back to the airport so I can catch the next flight away from this place, OK?

  But then I pushed all that aside and knocked.

  I heard Lou stumbling nearer in response to my rapping—I recognized that it wasn’t Mom because she no longer walked well enough to even get up to stumble—and wasn’t sure why he sounded off balance and was continually knocking into things. Until he opened the door and I could see what I’d feared was far worse than what I’d feared, and a spacious living room was now nothing more than a large storage locker with a narrow pathway running down the middle.

  Magazines and newspapers, which had obviously once been stacked into piles, had long ago slid into dusty mounds. Dozens of lamps, their necks broken, their lightbulbs dangling. Baskets filled with so much clothing it would have taken weeks to launder.

  So many possessions it was impossible even to perceive them all. So much chaos it looked as if half a dozen homes had exploded and then been scooped up in a hurry to fill this house. I’d suspected it could be worse … but this much worse?

  “What happened, Lou?” I said, too stunned to get out more words than those, asking about both my mother and the house at the same time. But Lou knew that. And didn’t like it.

  “No time to get into that now,” he said. “Mom’s really gotten worse.”

  Seeing the worried expression on his face, I wanted to hug him. But he and I had never had that kind of relationship, and I was too angry and distracted by the mess around us to have the ability to break through the barrier of that just then. Maybe later. I reached up to pat his shoulder and left it at that.

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “You told me as much on the phone. Where is she?”

  “Are you sure you’re ready?” he said. “You haven’t seen her in a long time, so you’re going to be shocked, I promise you. Better prepare yourself.”

  I didn’t think anything could have shocked me more than what I’d already seen. The house was claustrophobic enough before I’d left—Mom’s hoarding squeezed out the space my younger self had needed to breathe—but I wrestled my suitcase through the door—which did take some wrestling considering how narrow things had gotten—and steeled myself. Lou had to walk sideways down the hall—a hall once decorated with family photos and Dad’s darting trophies, but now more a tight path through a moving van—as I followed him to the back of the house.

  There, in what used to be the small dining area next to the kitchen, Mom was in a cot, propped up by pillows. So many pillows she almost seemed to vanish in them. A
wall of televisions, none functioning, some with cracked screens, others with snapped antennas, filled the room across from her. The sink in the connected kitchen was overflowing with record albums, the stovetop piled with dented birdcages which, thankfully, were empty. And I hated to think what might be in the oven.

  “You’ve got her staying down here?” I said, trying to speak quietly, but too angry to do so. “In the kitchen? And how could you let this happen to the kitchen anyway?”

  “She can no longer do the stairs, I told you that,” he said, only answering my first question. I doubted it would even be possible to get answers that made sense to my other questions from either of them.

  I knelt beside Mom, having to clear a space to do so—were those really empty potato chip bags, just left lying there?—and took her hand. She turned briefly toward me at my touch, not really seeing me, then looked back at the blank screens. I wondered what shows she thought she was watching, or if she even had enough of her old self left to believe she was watching anything.

  “Mom, it’s me,” I said. “It’s Jo. I came as soon as I could.”

  Lou muffled a snort, but just barely. I resisted turning at the sound. He didn’t understand what it was like.

  “How are you doing?” I whispered.

  She tilted her head slightly, first this way, then that, as if to indicate, take a good look at me, how do you think I’m doing? Or perhaps to indicate nothing at all, bobbing in concert to winds of memory she alone felt.

  “She’s been like this all week,” said Lou, hanging behind me less to give me a moment alone with her than because there wasn’t space for all three of us in the room at once. “She’s stopped talking. She’s stopped even knowing I was here.”

  “Then what’s she still doing at home?” I said, no longer bothering to whisper. Mom wouldn’t know what we were saying anyway. “Let’s get her to a hospital.”

  “Jo, you know there’s nothing physically wrong with her. At least nothing anyone can fix. It’s her brain. It’s just … it’s just what happens when a person gets old. I didn’t call you here because I believed you could fix this. I called so we could decide what to do next. Together. As a family. Besides, she has a living will. If she wants to die here, here is where she’ll die. This is where she’s comfortable.”

  “She’s not dying any time soon,” I said, hoping that saying the words would make it so. “And here? Die here? This isn’t a house any more. This is a waste dump. I know you inherited some of her … her sickness. But how could you let this happen?”

  “I didn’t see you trying to stop it.”

  “It wasn’t either of our jobs to stop it. But it wasn’t our job to make it worse either. It was our job to live. To escape it.”

  “Well, you managed to do that, didn’t you?” he said. “I hope you’re happy.”

  The bitterness in his voice hurt. But it didn’t cause as much pain as staying would have. I knew that. And I think he knew that, too. At least a little.

  “I wasn’t going to do it,” he said, looking over my shoulder at Mom. “I wasn’t going to be the kind of man who leaves.”

  “I’m sorry, Lou,” I said, apologizing not just for me, but for Dad, and how his leaving had changed everything. “I really am. But I had to, you know that. I … just couldn’t. I couldn’t. You’ve always been stronger than me. But still, you … you’ve lived here too long. It’s gotten inside of you. I don’t think you’re able to see the place as it really is anymore.”

  “I didn’t call you here for interior decorating advice,” he said. “I called you here to help figure out what to do with Mom. I thought that was the right thing to do. That’s how siblings are supposed to behave.”

  I got up off my knee, nearly slipping on—oh, great, were those candy wrappers?—and rolled my suitcase closer to Mom. And then I sat on it, because there was nowhere else to sit. I’d have liked to sit in a chair, but there wasn’t a cleared surface anywhere in the room. Or, I was guessing, based on the clutter there and in the living room, anywhere else in the house.

  I took Mom’s hand, squeezed it. She didn’t squeeze back.

  “Living will or no, we’ve got to get her out of this … this place. She collected, she hoarded, she wouldn’t let go of things, but she never intended to die in filth.”

  “There’s no filth here,” he said. “We’re not hoarders.”

  Now it was my turn to snort.

  “Do you see rotting food here?” he continued. “Dead animals? These are just the things that matter to her.”

  “The things that matter?” I said, angrily kicking at the wrappers around my feet. “How could all these things matter? And matter to whom? Her? Or you? It couldn’t possibly have gotten this bad if you hadn’t enabled her. You should have said no every once in a while. You should have put on the brakes instead of pressing on the gas.”

  Lou sighed, which he always did when he didn’t really want to talk. There had been many sighs in our relationship, more the worse Mom’s compulsion got.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have called you,” he said. “It’s just like old times. And old times were never very good.”

  “Well, they weren’t all bad either. And you did call, so let’s try to deal with the situation as it is.”

  Mom’s expression was blank, her reaction to the bickering of her children nonexistent. I’d normally have pulled Lou into another room to have a discussion like this, but as far as I could tell, it was almost as if we weren’t there at all. Once, any harsh words between us would have terrified her, but now, nothing. That wasn’t the Mom I knew. And I wanted the old Mom back, even with all her flaws. If I couldn’t do that, I at least had to do right by her.

  “Look, there aren’t many options,” I said. “We’ve either got to get her out of here, or get all this stuff out of here. It’s one or the other. That’s it. There are no other choices. Regardless of what you think Mom thinks she wants, this house has become a health hazard, and if anyone from the county were to see inside—”

  “No one’s going to see inside.”

  “You’re not thinking clearly, Lou. People don’t need x-ray vision to know something’s very wrong here. The way you’ve let the porch and front yard go, I’m surprised neighbors haven’t already complained.”

  Lou looked away, which told me … they already had.

  “Do you realize the cabdriver almost wouldn’t let me get out here? He thought the place was abandoned or belonged to drug dealers or something. Is all this stuff really necessary?”

  “Will you lay off about the stuff already, Jo? Dealing with the stuff isn’t going to fix anything. This is Alzheimer’s we’re dealing with. Nothing else but that matters.”

  “If nothing else matters, then let’s start clearing out some of this mess. If she stays—and OK, maybe you’re right, maybe she should stay, I’ll give you that for now—she’ll need nurses, and believe me, no one is going to be willing to work here. They’ll walk through the front door—if they even make it to the front door—and turn right back around and leave.”

  I dropped Mom’s hand, and reached for the top few magazines from a stack on top of the bureau that completely blocked off the mirror.

  “Not tonight,” Lou said quickly. “It’s late. Can’t we leave this for tomorrow? Please? This is going to be tough enough. Let’s leave it until after a night’s sleep, OK?”

  I had to admit … Lou was right. He might have let himself become trapped in a house of sludge, but he wasn’t stupid. And I truly was tired from the long flight. Besides, decades of debris weren’t going to be cleared out in one night. Looking at Mom, though, inert, focused on nothing but her inner self, if her inner self remained, I wasn’t sure how many more nights we had left.

  I let Lou lead me up the stairs to my old room, following closely in his footsteps so as not to dislodge any of the stuffed animals, paperweights, figurines, and other incongruous objects piled on the steps. I shuddered to think what my room would look like, and regretted n
ot checking into a nearby motel. But … it was my mother, and I felt I owed it to her to try to spend as many more nights under the same roof as I could. Lou had done it for a lifetime of days. I should at least be able to handle a few.

  He shouldered open the door and … yes, it was just that bad. It appeared as if all the junk mail that had arrived during my absence was piled in one corner. Shoes and purses exploded out of the open closet, its door no longer able to close, and beneath them I spotted bicycle pumps and empty picture frames. And why were there half a dozen microwaves at the foot of my bed, a bed barely visible under dozens of throw pillows and even more baskets of laundry?

  He dragged my suitcase over to the one bit of open floor space and started removing the piles from the bed and adding them to the other piles that ringed the room, filling in the space at the top until they touched the ceiling. I was sure it would all collapse on me as I slept. Or tried to sleep.

  “It’s good to see you, sis,” he said, once he’d cleared my old mattress.

  “It’s good to see you, too, Lou,” I said.

  And it was. I couldn’t deny that. But seeing all Mom’s stuff … that was never good. We had to get through it, though. We had to.

  Trying to sleep any longer was pointless. I’d given it a good shot, but this wasn’t a bedroom anymore. I felt as if I’d crawled into a long-abandoned storage unit. And closing my eyes didn’t help. Whether in darkness or in light, I could still feel the pressure of all those possessions. So I sat up and moved to the edge of the bed, having to first carefully choose the side with space left over for my feet.

  I looked up at the tower of boxes and trash bags that ringed the room, the tennis rackets and ukuleles, dressmaker dummies and slightly broken umbrellas, the detritus from a thousand yard sales, and wondered what would drive anyone—two anyones—to first gather and then keep it all. But I couldn’t think of an answer. Maybe there was no answer. I gave up trying to puzzle one out and flicked on a light.

  Where once there were windows visible along the outer wall of my room, now there was just a clumsily constructed wall of useless objects. A wall built of the forgotten. A wall covered with dust. How long had it been since anyone had gone through all these things and asked each item to defend its existence?