by Stephen King
It wasn’t going to be me. The stuff, as invasive as it was, didn’t really matter. Lou was right, though for the wrong reasons. It was Mom that mattered most of all. And if what was keeping her confined to the first floor was her health, that’s what had to be cleared up first, not every possession.
Since I couldn’t sleep, I headed downstairs. As I passed Lou’s room, I could hear him snoring. At least one of us was having no problem sleeping. Obviously, none of this bothered him. Since he’d inherited—or more likely absorbed—the same disease, I guess he found this way of life, these surroundings, normal. Just as well. Better he slept while I did what I had to do. Seeing me move any of their things would only make him anxious, I knew. Luckily, Mom was apparently too far gone for it to make her anxious.
She was awake, too, still watching the dead televisions. Wonder what she saw screening there in her head that was keeping her awake? No way of knowing.
“Can I get you anything, Mom?” I asked. “Do you need something? A glass of water? A snack?”
She didn’t answer, didn’t even look in my direction.
I obviously wasn’t going to get information out of Mom, and was too filled with nervous energy to do nothing, so looked around until I spotted the tall stack of magazines on the bureau, the ones Lou had stopped me from handling. Wouldn’t hurt to at least do some small bit of neatening up. If I was going to stay there for a few days, I had to do something to remain sane.
Mom didn’t seem to care as I sorted through the sometimes decades-old issues and stacked them in neat piles by the door to the backyard. After an hour of that, I’d managed to create the only clear surface in the room. In the house, perhaps. The mirror, revealed after who knows how long, was covered with dust, and I swiped at it with a palm so it could do what it was meant to do. Which reminded me of how many things there were in the house that no longer did what they were meant to do.
I looked in the glass and saw both myself and Mom reflected back. We looked so much alike, even with what the years had done to each of us, hers spent grasping and never letting go, mine spent running and always letting go.
But if I’m the one who’d been doing the running, why was she the one so far away?
I pulled out some chipped china knickknacks which had been hidden by the magazines in the space between the mirror and the bureau. Cats and dogs and turtles and elephants, covered by dust and cobwebs. To have been treated like that, could any of them have really mattered? They deserved better. They deserved to belong to someone who cared, someone who would put them to use. I gathered in my arms as many as I could, balancing them carefully, or so I thought, but I must have been more tired than I realized, because a penguin slipped, and as soon as I made a grab for it, the others followed. I managed to catch about half of them, but the others dropped to the floor, one of them shattering. A figurine of two dogs broke into many pieces, and their heads rolled. If not for the cups and saucers stacked by the foot of mother’s bed, they would have vanished beneath.
And then I heard Mom’s voice for the first time since I’d arrived. It was loud, not happy, and it made me feel twelve again.
“What are you doing, Jo?” she shouted. “You stop that!”
Shocked, I hurried to her side, let the rest of the statues tumble from my arms onto the mattress where they landed safely. I took her hands, looked into her eyes. She was back. If only for a moment, she was back.
“I’m here, Mom,” I said, amazed that she had roused enough to speak. I didn’t care that her words had been angry ones, as long as she was no longer locked inside her head. “I came back to help.”
“You call that helping?” she said, not looking at me, but at the shards of broken dogs scattered across the floor.
“I’m sorry, Mom, I didn’t mean to do that,” I said. “I was just trying to clear a little space. You know living like this isn’t healthy for you, don’t you? Let me try to make things better for you. Please let me do that for you.”
Mom shook her head, and pursed her lips.
“Your father gave me that,” she said. “Your father gave me that and you broke it.”
“I’m sorry, Mom, I wish I’d known, but when there’s so much, who can—”
And then suddenly, Lou was in the room with us, uncaring of the rubble he had to push aside to enter.
“What’s going on?” he asked, his voice even louder than mother’s had been.
Mom waggled a hand at the floor.
“I told you not to do this,” he said. “You told me you would wait until morning.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “It had to be done anyway. I didn’t think I needed your permission.”
“No,” said Mom, speaking with less strength she had just a moment before. “No.”
“No what, Mom?” I said, feeling her fingers begin to clasp mine less firmly.
“I know you care, Jo,” she said. “But … all this … all this must stay right here. And I’m staying right here, too. Staying. Staying. Stay …”
And then she was gone again, her gaze blank, her head turned back to the dead televisions. Whatever had animated her had passed, but still—
“Did you see that?” I said to Lou. “She’s not as far gone as we thought. Maybe there’s a chance we can have our mother back again.”
“Maybe. Or maybe you just startled and pissed her off enough to bring her back momentarily. If you started breaking my stuff, I’d wake up from a coma, too.”
“Joke if you’d like, but this was a good thing.”
“Nothing good ever comes from breaking something,” he said, pushing at fragments of dog with his bare toes. “This stuff matters, Jo. Her whole life is here. And mine, too. And yours as well, if you’d open your eyes and see it.”
“The only life that matters to me is the life that’s inside your skin. Her skin. Not any of this. This is just a prison. And one you two have built yourselves. I wish you’d open your eyes and see that.”
“If you really feel that way, then maybe it’s best if you spent the night somewhere else. Get a motel room. You know you want to anyway.”
“What, you don’t trust me now?”
“No, not really,” he said. “Not anymore.”
He bent and picked up the two dog heads, holding one in each hand.
“You don’t remember this, do you?”
“I’m afraid I don’t. There’s too much here to even consider remembering every object.”
“Dad gave this to her one anniversary. I don’t remember which one. But I remember that we were young. And I remember that Mom was smiling.”
“We would’ve been young for Dad to have still been around. Or for Mom to have been pleased about it enough to smile.”
“Whatever,” he said, trying to fit the chipped heads together along the edges where they’d broken. “But know that this is more than just a thing. This is a memory. This is important.”
“Perhaps. But can it all be so important? Doesn’t the sheer number of things make even the most important ones less important? Some things have to go. That’s why Dad left, because Mom couldn’t see that. That’s why I had to leave. That’s why you should have left, too, a long, long time ago.”
“I’ll help you with your bag,” Lou said coldly. He turned and headed down the hall and back upstairs. And after another longing look at Mom, lost in whatever thickening fog had engulfed her, her one brief moment of clarity gone, I followed him as best I could, picking my way through the litter of other people’s lives.
I didn’t get back to the house the following day as early as I would have liked. That’s because, as I fell asleep in the relaxingly uncluttered motel room, I realized I wouldn’t be able to do what I needed to do alone. And with Lou as tight in the grip of this thing as Mom, he couldn’t be the partner I’d need. I needed a different sort of ally. Someone disinterested, but passionate. Someone whose word might be believed a little more than mine. Which is why, when I entered the house the following afternoon, I had some
one from social services at my side.
Oh, it wasn’t official, because it can take months to get something like that going. But not everyone I’d gone to school with had skipped town the way I had, and I was able to reach out to a friend of a friend. So Greta was at my side that morning. She wouldn’t be able to force anything to happen, but I trusted that once she saw what I had seen, she’d back me up.
When we pulled into the driveway—or as far in as the washing machines and lawnmowers, not all of which had been there the previous day, would allow—her reaction was much like that of the concerned cabbie. Only she already knew, because of the history I’d shared—I belonged here.
I introduced Greta to Lou, not bothering to tell him that she wasn’t accompanying me in an official capacity. Mom was too far gone to pay attention, but maybe it would put some fear into him. He was too polite to throw her right out, as I could tell he wanted to do. Thankfully, he was usually able to hold it together around strangers. Greta moved through the narrow hallway, her face blank, not reacting to what must be hard not to react to—yes, she was good—and went to the dining room to meet my mother, with Lou and me trailing along.
“What is this?” he hissed.
“Something we need,” I said. “I told you, but you wouldn’t listen. This is beyond us.”
I moved up tightly beside Greta, because tightly was all there was room for.
“Hello, Mom,” I said. “This is Greta. She’s a friend of mine. She wants to meet you.”
There was no response, not even the bobbing of her head that she’d evidenced the day before.
“Like I said, she was briefly better last night,” I told Greta.
“That’s only because you broke something Mom cared about very much,” said Lou. “And you’re reading too much into it. She wasn’t that much better. It was a blip. Here and gone.”
Greta looked at Lou momentarily, nodded at me, and then turned back to Mom.
“I’d like to have some time alone with her if I may,” she said. “She could very well behave differently when you’re not around.”
We stepped out of the room, me gladly, Lou begrudgingly, and once we were by the front of the house, he let his anger out.
“You had no right to do this,” he said. “You walked out on her, just like Dad. You left me here to take care of it, the both of you. So I’m taking care of it. Now why don’t you butt out. Run like you did before. Forget I called you. We’re doing fine.”
“This is not taking care of it,” I said, waving my arm around the room, though even with being smaller than Lou, there wasn’t that much space for me to wave. “By what stretch of the imagination is this taking care of it?”
“By the stretch that she’s alive, she’s healthy, and what’s going on with her is beyond our control and not my fault.”
“But how about this!” I said. “Is this in your control!”
I grabbed at the nearest box, pulled back the corrugated lid, and found dozens of jelly glasses. Some I recognized from childhood, but most had been collected in the years since.
“Do you really need these?” I continued, in full rant mode. “You have enough of the stupid things to throw a wedding party, and I doubt you ever have guests here. This place is so embarrassing I’m probably the only one you’ve allowed in for years. Get rid of these, I beg you. Sell them, give them away, let them be of use to someone else, or even just toss them in the trash, but—”
I made the mistake then of trying to lift the box. It was far heavier than I’d thought, so instead it slipped from my hands. I made a grab for it, but only succeeded in ripping open a section of the cardboard, which let a few of the glasses tumble out. They hit the floor and exploded, and when the box followed, I could hear a loud jingling of glass as its entire contents shattered.
Lou shouted louder than I’d ever heard him before, but I didn’t care. It felt good to finally take action against all these oppressive possessions, even if I was doing it subconsciously, doing what Mom could never bring herself to do, doing what Lou, the good son, would never dare.
I bent so I could try to move the box somewhere out of what little path we had, but when I did so, the bottom collapsed, a shower of shards falling on my shoes. I cursed and threw the now empty box against the—not wall, but a wall of other boxes—and in that instant all my anger, all my pain, all my history with Mom’s things, those empty things, came out, and I began to cry at last. I flailed my arms about, knocked down other boxes which hit the floor with either thuds or crackles, hurled figurines of sad clowns, and glass globes that should have been decorating someone’s garden somewhere rather than clogging a hallway, and bowls of fake fruit, their wax sagging and discolored by age. I grabbed and flung anything my fingers could clutch.
“Stop it, Jo, you’re not accomplishing anything,” Lou shouted, while doing nothing to intervene. He’d never seen me let loose like this before and I think I scared him a little. I know I scared me.
I kept shouting and smashing things, he kept shouting and dodging the things I threw, but neither of us would stop our vicious dance until mother made us both jump by shouting impossibly louder than all the noises we were making put together.
Our mother, who according to Lou hadn’t left her bed in weeks, marched jerkily out of the hallway with only the aid of a cane. Greta, trailing behind her, looked stunned.
“My children shouldn’t be fighting,” Mom said, her voice clear and stong. There was none of the hesitation or searching for words that I’d heard during phone calls in recent years. “I didn’t raise the two of you to act this way. You’re embarrassing yourselves.”
“You’re walking,” said Leo.
“You’re talking,” I said. “Mom, you’re talking.”
Her few words the night before during that brief moment of clarity had been welcome, but this newfound coherence was astonishing.
“Of course, I’m talking,” Mom said. “Why wouldn’t I be talking? Why are you both looking at me like that?”
“I don’t understand,” said Greta. “I couldn’t get a word out of her. I couldn’t get her to react to anything. She was totally non-responsive, and now this. It makes no sense.”
“You just got her mad enough,” Leo said to me. “Just like last night. And just like last night, it’ll fade.”
“Alzheimer’s doesn’t work that way,” said Greta. “If that’s what she was suffering from, you wouldn’t see her spontaneously come back like this. This is something different. Something else. I don’t know what’s going on here, but whatever you think is wrong with your mother isn’t what you think is wrong with your mother.”
“Who said anything about Alzheimer’s?” Mom said. “It gets to be too much sometimes and I just get tired, that’s all.”
She walked up to me and poked at the rubble with the tip of her cane.
“Did you do this, Jo?” she said, with a tone I knew too well.
I suddenly felt like a kid again, flashed back to similar conversations in a house far less cluttered, but still far too cluttered for me, and couldn’t respond with anything more than a nod. A trace of tenderness appeared in her face in answer to that nod.
“You’ve got to stop this,” she said. “That’s no way for a grown woman to act, destroying other people’s things. What gives you the right?”
“I’m sorry, Momma.”
“And you, Louis, why were you shouting at Jo that way? She’s your little sister. You mustn’t treat her so mean.”
My brother dropped his head.
“I’m sorry, too, mother.”
After a round of hugs, which Greta stood aside from, watching Mom with continued confusion, I headed into the kitchen to get some trash bags. Considering the number of stuffed ones around the home, I knew I’d find a box of them somewhere. I started to sift through the debris and load it all into the bags as best I could without slicing my fingers, but as I finished filling each one, Mom would stop me from carrying it outside. She said she wanted me to set t
hem aside once I was done bagging everything, that she wanted to go through every item, every fragment, every shard herself to see whether anything could be saved. I already knew what Mom could never admit—there was nothing I’d damaged that was worth saving. I didn’t feel like arguing then, though, not with Leo glaring at me, and with Greta looking on in wonder. I no longer wanted witnesses for what Mom and I needed to say to each other.
“We’ll talk later once I have a chance to think about all this,” Greta said once I was done.
“There’s nothing to think about, young lady,” said Mom. “We don’t need your help here. We’re doing fine.”
“I’ll call you,” whispered Greta to me as she passed on her way out the front door. “Something must be done here. I don’t know what, but something.”
After the three of us cleared off the kitchen table—which means we had to fill in the space around Mom’s bed first—we had lunch. Not that we could prepare anything there ourselves, because the kitchen was long past being functional, the appliances not just overwhelmed but inoperative, so I ordered take-out. And we managed to have a conversation with Mom unlike any that we’d had in years. We set aside the tough stuff and talked about the things that didn’t matter, in one of those moments that seemed it was really the only thing that mattered.
As we shared about which late-night TV host we liked best and what our favorite recent movies were, something nagged at me, and I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. The timing of this talk and Mom’s resurgence all seemed far too … coincidental maybe? I wasn’t sure.
When we finally wore Mom out with our chatting, we rearranged the puzzle of the house once more so she could return to her bed. She seemed devoid of energy as I tucked her in, fading remarkably quickly for how much spark she’d shown.
As soon as she was settled, I went out to the porch with Lou to talk as we used to do when we were kids and wanted some privacy from our parents, not knowing that Mom and Dad probably heard every word anyway. I would have liked to sit in the porch swing, but we couldn’t reach it, of course, our way to it totally blocked. So we sat on the steps, one of the few clear spots, even though they were also being narrowed by … stuff. We sat in silence for a while, until the silence became too uncomfortable, and had to be broken.