The Opposite Of Tidy

by Carrie Mac

“No.” Charlie tapped something into her BlackBerry. “Not at the expense of great television.”

  Junie’s father paused. “Then how about at the expense of Marla’s broken heart? How about the expense of grief? Shut the cameras off. Now.”

  Charlie looked up, slipping her BlackBerry into her pocket so she could give Junie’s father her full attention. “The cameras stay on.”

  Kendra lifted a hand, silencing Charlie. “Five minutes. We’ll leave you alone for five minutes. And then we come back, and one of you,” she pointed at the door, then Junie, then Ron, “one of you will tell us the story here. I can tell it’s a sad one. And so we’ll leave you alone with it.”

  With a wave of her arm, the camera crews left, and so did Nigel, and Charlie. Then it was just Tabitha, Wade, Junie and her father.

  “You want us to stay or go?” Wade gave her hand a squeeze. “Whatever you want, Junie.”

  “Go,” her father barked. “Now. Please.”

  “I don’t know what’s happening.” Junie sounded so unsure of herself, and she was. This was strange territory, and she didn’t know where to place her feet. “Mom!” She banged one more time on the door. “Open up!”

  “Let’s go, Wade,” Tabitha said, letting Junie off the hook of having to make the decision herself.

  Tabitha and Wade joined the others outside, and Junie stared hard at the closed door while her father hugged his elbows and stared at the floor. After a long moment during which absolutely nothing happened, Junie finally said, “Dad, she means it when she says five minutes. Do something. Before they come back.”

  Ron knocked half-heartedly on the door. “It’s time to tell Junie, Marla.”

  “Tell me what?” Junie whispered.

  But she knew. Somewhere very deep down inside her sat the knowledge of exactly what this was about. She couldn’t put words to it, but she knew all the same. On a visceral level. And she wasn’t sure how that was possible.

  There was a rustling from inside the bathroom, and then the knob turned with a creak and Junie’s mother opened the door. Her face was blotchy and red from crying. She pulled Junie’s dad to her and planted her head on his chest and wept anew. Junie stared in disbelief at her parents. She would never have thought to live to see something like this happen. Junie’s dad held onto her mother, too, and after a moment of stoicism, fell to pieces himself, leaning his chin on her head and crying in great big sobs.

  “Mom?” Junie put her hands to her own cheeks, feeling the prickly heat of confusion and fear. “Dad?”

  Her mother said something but her words were muffled against her father’s chest. She pulled away, still clutching her ex-husband, and sniffed back another set of tears.

  “Thomas was your little brother,” she said. “He was perfect and new and smelled so delicious and fit in my arms as if he’d been there forever and . . . and—” She lost herself to the tears and sank her face back into Junie’s father’s shirt.

  “He died,” her father finished simply. “One night. In his crib. He was blue when your mother went to him in the morning.”

  Junie didn’t know what to say. She held her face, still hot, and now damp with silent tears. “Why don’t I know this?”

  “We thought it best to put it behind us.” Her father shook his head sadly. “For better or for worse, that’s what we did.”

  “When?”

  “You were two. Just two. We didn’t think you’d remember.” Her father reached out to put a hand on her shoulder, to touch the child who’d lived. “And you didn’t.”

  Anger was pushing the sadness and confusion aside, and Junie wasn’t sure that was such a good thing. She wanted to have nothing but sympathy for her parents, for surviving such a terrible loss, but she was angry with them too.

  “I can’t believe you lied to me! About my own life!”

  “No, no. No.” Her mother shook her head, protesting. “I wasn’t lying to you. I was lying to myself! I had to pretend that he’d never been here. I had to push the memories away. It was too painful to live them every single day! To see the nursery, and his tiny clothes. His receiving blankets, the pictures, the mementos, the diapers! The tiny newborn diapers. It was too hard. Too hard. Too hard. Too hard. Too hard. Too hard—”

  “It’s okay, Mom.” Junie was frightened to see her mother like this, unhinged. “Maybe it will be better now? Right? Now that the truth is out?”

  “No, no, no, no, no. No!” She shook her head. “It will never be better. You never recover from the death of a child. Never, never. Never.”

  What Junie wanted to say was that she still had one child left. And that she deserved a full mother, and not the fraction of one that she had. Even if the fracture made some sense now, she still resented it.

  “His name was Thomas?” Junie pushed past her parents and into the bathroom, where her mother had pulled out every item from the box and set it neatly along the counter and the floor, in tidy lines. Everything was blue, just as all of her infant things had been pink. Blankets, onesies, rattles, a tiny pair of cloth sneakers. Junie picked up the crib shoes and felt a wave of what might have been a memory. She’d been too young to truly remember, but somewhere inside of her was that two-year-old girl, trying to figure out why the baby had been there and then was suddenly not. Why her mother was crying all the time. Why the house had become such a sad, bleak place.

  The shoes sat in the palm of her hand, tiny and empty. She imagined that morning. Her mother finding Thomas in the crib, lifeless and blue. She could see it easily, and could only wonder if she’d been standing in the door, clutching her doll, watching, her thumb stuck in her mouth.

  “Where was I?”

  Her parents shared a look, and then it was her dad who explained, because her mother couldn’t speak through her tears.

  “It was a Saturday. You’d gotten up out of your bed and gone to see if Thomas was awake. I don’t know how long you were in there, but you came in and woke us. You took your mother’s hand and dragged her into the nursery, telling her Thomas was too sleepy. ‘Too sleepy, Mama,’ you said. ‘Baby Thomas too sleepy.’” Ron’s voice caught. “And then I heard your mother scream. She came running into the room with Thomas in her arms. He was blue, and cold. He’d died during the night.”

  “All alone. I wasn’t there!” Her mother wailed. She grabbed fistfuls of Ron’s shirt. “We weren’t there! He was all alone!”

  “The paramedics came. The police. The coroner.” Her father stared into a middle distance, as if watching it all over again. “They took him away in a tiny body bag. It looked like they’d come to collect the laundry.”

  “Where was I?”

  “Your grandmother came to take care of you,” her dad said.

  Junie expanded her anger now to include her beloved grandma. Why hadn’t she told her? As a way to explain her mother’s dysfunction? The look on her face must have announced her thoughts, because her mother was suddenly defending Junie’s grandma.

  “She would’ve told you. But I made her promise. On Thomas’s grave. Never to speak of him. He was only seven weeks old. I thought it would be easier if we just pretended that he’d never been here at all.”

  Their five minutes were up. Junie could hear the front door open, and Charlie barking into her phone. Kendra hushed her, and then the trio of them were back again, Charlie, Nigel and Kendra.

  “Ready to share your story with the world?” Charlie asked, sounding more as though she was ordering them to do so.

  “No,” Ron said. He gave Junie’s mother a long hug, and then pulled Junie to him before continuing. “Marla can decide for herself, but I won’t have anything to do with it. Junie can make her own decision.” Her dad stroked her cheek, a gesture both tender and possessive. “She can come with me, or stay here with her mother.”

  “I’ll stay.” Junie didn’t even need a moment to make up her mind. She would stay with her mother and help her through this, because, while it might have happened many years ago, it felt like a sudden
breakthrough at last. Junie felt as if the entire house and the family it had held within its walls had shifted into a new shape, giving her mother the space to reshape herself after so many years of being defined by such a tragic, heavy secret. Junie wanted to be there to see what would happen. As sad as it was to hear about her tiny baby brother who had died, she was hopeful, too, that by unearthing his story, her mother could finally move past her grief and take control of her life now.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Two months later, The Kendra Show flew Junie and her mother down to Los Angeles so they could be onstage with Kendra during the broadcast of the intervention.

  Since talking to Nigel and Kendra about Thomas’s death, Junie’s mother had begun to deal with her long-buried grief. Nigel had stayed two extra days to help her get on her feet after the revelation. Of course he’d pointed out the obvious on camera, that she’d been filling the void of the lost baby with things upon things upon things, but that no thing would ever replace a lost child. And Junie’s mother could only tearfully agree. They’d set her up with what they called “aftercare.” That meant that twice a week she got on a bus and went downtown to see her new psychologist, an internationally recognized expert in compulsive hoarding and post-traumatic stress. She’d be doing that for a good long while to come.

  By the time all the crews had left, the house had been restored to a certain tidiness but still suffered from the years of neglect. Junie’s mother had booked a paint crew to come in and repair the walls and paint them a creamy yellow, to bring in a bit of sunlight. She’d hired a carpetlayer to rip out the ruined flooring and replace it. She’d ordered a new living room furniture set, with a matching couch, ottoman and loveseat. All of these seemingly normal things pointed to a much larger, more important change: Junie’s mother had started to take care of herself. She rose each day from her new bed in her remade room and pulled open the tailored drapes to let in the day. Then she showered and did her hair, and came downstairs to put on a pot of coffee.

  Telling all this to Tabitha and Wade, it sounded so normal, but it was beyond thrilling to Junie. That her mother was functioning was a gift, and she had to admit that it was Kendra who had made it happen, and her mother, too, for contacting the show in the first place. It had seemed so far-fetched and impossible at first, but now Junie was just deeply grateful.

  As for Junie, she was going to flunk Math. There was no doubt. But Ollie had a plan. He was going to help her catch up over the summer, and he was hopeful that she’d be able to nail grade ten Math the second time round, do summer school for grade eleven the next year and go into grade twelve Math on track. Normally, this would have devastated Junie, but considering how well everything else was going, she was more than willing to accept this failing as her one big awful deal.

  Wade’s Virginia Woolf project was nearing completion, and was due just a week after Junie was going to Los Angeles for the Kendra taping. It was going to be on hold while she was gone, but she’d join the rest of them at Royce and Jeremy’s to finish it when she got back. They were all helping now, Tabitha, Ollie, Lulu, curmudgeonly Jeremy and Royce, too, energy permitting. Either Royce was feeling a bit better, or the movie was letting him forget about his heart problems, because he seemed to have a lot more energy lately.

  When it was time for their flight to L.A., Junie and her mother had multiple offers of a ride to the airport. Mrs. D. had been the first to offer. Then Junie’s dad, even though he still didn’t want anything to do with the show. Junie didn’t want to jinx things by being too hopeful, but it seemed to her that her father and mother were getting along a lot better since everything had come out in the open. But it was Wade who drove them in the end, because Junie wanted to have her very own Leaving Your Boyfriend at the Airport moment, even if her mother was there and Tabitha had come along for the ride, too.

  Wade kissed her rather chastely, one eye on Junie’s mother, and then gave Junie a bag of goodies for the plane: expensive chocolate, a deck of cards, earphones for the in-flight movie and a tiny four-leaf clover sealed in resin for her to put in her pocket as a talisman. Tabitha cried when she handed Junie a stack of trashy magazines for the plane and waved them off. Junie knew why. She would have cried too, if she hadn’t been trying so hard to be the strong one. It was amazing to Tabitha and Junie to see her mother looking so put together. She had makeup on, and looked quite a bit lighter already, which might have been due to the fact that she was going for a walk once a day before making supper. She was wearing purple capri pants and a matching sweater, and slingbacks with large purple plastic flowers on top. Junie couldn’t expect her mother to get any kind of fashion sense overnight, and she didn’t care. She was very proud of her mother, just the way she was.

  After they landed they were taken straight to the TV studio, which was enormous and industrial, like an airplane hangar. They were met at the edge of the lot by Charlie Falconetti and a driver in a golf cart and taken into the building and down wide concrete corridors, until the cart stopped in front of a room that had a star on the door, with their names on it in smart cursive lettering.

  “Whatever you need should be in there. Give me a shout if you think of anything else.” Charlie handed Junie a walkie-talkie. “Best way to get a hold of me. We go on the air in three hours. Hair and makeup and wardrobe will be by to collect you in about fifteen minutes.”

  By the time they were ushered onto the stage, Junie didn’t recognize herself, or her mother. After being dressed in clothes that they’d never wear, but which looked fantastic on them, they’d sat in the stylists’ chairs for the better part of an hour, their hair being worked on and their faces being carefully made up by women talking about their boyfriends and texting in between putting on dabs of this and spritzes of that.

  The whole experience was very surreal. Junie wasn’t sure that she liked it at all.

  The audience was abuzz, talking excitedly while they waited for Kendra to appear. Junie and her mother sat awkwardly in two orange leather chairs, centre stage, the lights up in the rafters so bright that it almost felt as if they were alone in the studio.

  “Quiet on the set!” a voice called from the darkness. The crowd fell silent. Kendra’s theme music, upbeat and youthful, exploded out of the speakers lining the edge of the room, and the audience leapt to their feet as Kendra swept into the room, walking confidently in her high heels, holding out her hands so that the crowd of mostly women could reach out and touch her as she made her way to the stage.

  Junie and her mother stood, as they’d been directed to earlier. Kendra parked herself between the two of them and took their hands.

  “Welcome, everybody! You’re all looking so smart today!” She turned and gave Junie’s mother’s hand a squeeze. “Especially you, Marla.” Back to the audience and the teleprompter, where her script was scrolling down in slow, big letters. “Marla here has come a long way to be with us today, both in real life and in her heart and mind and soul. Marla is a compulsive hoarder, and today on The Kendra Show we bring you her story, and her miraculous recovery. We’ll be back in a moment.”

  Crews rearranged the enormous cameras on tracks laid along the floor while the audience murmured and Kendra invited Junie and her mother to take a seat. They hadn’t seen Kendra since that last day when she’d sat alone with Junie’s mother in what had once been Thomas’s nursery. A room that had been used for storage for as long as Junie could remember.

  Seated, Kendra reached for Junie’s mother’s hand again and gave it another squeeze. “Won’t be any surprises, hon. Promise you that. Nice and easy, a few tears and some laughs and you can go back home and start living that life of yours to its fullest. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Junie’s mother said, struggling for enthusiasm.

  Now the director said, “Going live in five, four, three . . .” Then she held up two fingers, and one, and finally pointed to Kendra to indicate that they were live on air.

  Kendra turned on as if a switch had been flipped. Her teeth g
leamed white in the hot lights. Her eyelashes looked larger than life, like her smile.

  “When I first walked into Marla’s home, I couldn’t believe anyone could live in such squalor. The stench. The filth. The detritus of life. The decay of a life abandoned . . . to junk.”

  Junie nervously crossed and uncrossed her legs. Nice and easy? She doubted it. Her mother had taken something for her nerves before the show and was seeming to hold up okay in its lazy, warm glow. Junie glanced at her and wished she’d helped herself to a pill too. Behind them, shots of the house before, filled with the familiar mountains of crap, the rotting takeout boxes, the stacks of mildewed laundry, room after room filled to the ceiling with useless, unnecessary stuff. Junie’s skin broke out in goosebumps, and she had to grip the arms of the chair to resist leaping up and running out of there, screaming.

  Everyone she knew, and eleven million or more people she didn’t know, were watching right now. Wade and Tabitha, along with Ollie and Lulu, had driven out to Royce and Jeremy’s to watch it there in their home theatre, which had real theatre seats and a popcorn machine and a screen that took up one whole wall. Junie imagined Evelyn watching it alone, cursing Kendra for snubbing her but too curious to refuse to watch. The only person Junie was sure was not watching was her father. He’d be at work, adding and shifting columns of numbers, reaching for a perfect order that he could not attain in his personal life. He quickly clammed up whenever Junie brought up Thomas, and he hadn’t mentioned Kendra since her trucks had pulled out of the driveway. He was as solidly parked in denial as he’d ever been. He might not have been the one with the hoarding problem, but he was just as screwed up as her mother for trying to ignore the son he’d lost so suddenly and tragically.

  They cut to footage of Kendra mincing her way around the heaps of garbage to meet Junie’s mother in her long since torched easy chair.

  It went fast. It was true that living through the intervention itself had been far harder than actually being on The Kendra Show stage. This was all old news to Junie now. Her life had already moved on in the two months since Kendra had come to town. The cameras had left, along with the media and spectators. At school, the kids had moved on from her drama to the new drama of a girl who’d been arrested for smuggling drugs across the border for her boyfriend. Not that Junie was happy that the girl had been caught with five baggies of pot on her, but she was glad that the focus had shifted abruptly off of her. Of course there would be talk after the show, but honestly, Junie didn’t care. It was done. It was over. She’d lived through it, and, more importantly, so had her mother. And for the better.