The Expert's Guide to Driving a Man Wild

by Jessica Clare

  And she was dying. Had to be. That horrible ache returned to his stomach. He was going to lose Brenna as soon as he’d found out his feelings for her. Damn, fate was cruel. “Oh Brenna. Just tell me.” Tell me fast, so we can rip the Band-Aid off the wound and enjoy the rest of the time we have together.

  She looked so distraught that it broke his heart. But she tugged at his hand. “I have to show you something.”

  Shit, shit, shit.

  As she sat up in bed, he realized she was wearing her pajamas. His pajamas, actually—flannel plaid pants that were double-knotted at her slender waist and his favorite Tulane T-shirt. But it wasn’t like Brenna to sleep clothed. She liked to sleep naked and be curled around him. Which meant that she’d already gotten out of bed once, likely to prepare whatever it was that she wanted to show him.

  That sick feeling in the hollow of his stomach felt like a black hole.

  But she tugged at his hand insistently and, heart aching, he crawled out of their warm bed and followed her. He should have put on a pair of pants or boxers or something, but he needed to find out what was causing that look of anguish on her face first.

  They descended down the ladder in silence, and he noticed his personal laptop had been fired up and was sitting on a video page. She tugged at his hand again, leading him toward the computer. Mystified, he sat down when she gestured for him to and tried to pull her into his lap.

  But she resisted, her entire body tense. Instead, she leaned over him and clicked the mouse to start the video.

  An ad played on screen, and Brenna’s body vibrated with tension beside him. He scanned the Internet page, wondering what she was going to show him. Some sort of video describing fatal diseases? A home movie of some kind? But the video page had been put up years ago and had thousands of hits. The header read “S1 EP 14—the Atlees,” but he didn’t know what that meant.

  All he knew was that it was going to somehow destroy Brenna to show him, and in the process, it’d destroy him, too. He loved her. He loved her wild exuberance and hated her tears. He tried to pull her close again, but still she resisted.

  Theme music began to play, tinny through the laptop speakers, and he heard Brenna’s breath intake sharply. Drawing his attention back to the screen, he watched the credits of one of those hour-long special reporting news shows roll past. A solemn news anchor in a gray suit sat on a stool next to a screen that read “Special Investigation: 2004.”

  “Thank you for joining us tonight,” the man said in a deep voice, “as we continue our series on a growing problem in America. Is this a disease? Something inherently wrong with certain people’s minds that causes them to react differently than you or I? Or something else that forces these people to act the way they do?” He adjusted on his stool, gazing at the camera, and Grant thought his heart was going to burst from his chest in sheer anxiety.

  What the fuck was it, already? He couldn’t take much more of this. His mind was full of horrible images of Brenna suffering. Brenna stricken by disease.

  “This is an epidemic that is sweeping through many homes in the nation. As high as one in ten families can be affected. It destroys lives and everything it touches. We’re talking, of course, about . . . hoarding.”

  Huh?

  Hoarding?

  Brenna wasn’t dying? He wasn’t going to lose her like he lost Heather? Relief washed over him, so powerful that he couldn’t help himself.

  He laughed.

  Next to him, Brenna gave a horrified gasp and a choked sob. Before he could react, she reached out and slapped him in the face, then turned and ran for the front door.

  “No, Brenna, wait—” Grant said, getting to his feet. Damn it, he didn’t have any pants on. She was wearing his pants.

  “Fuck you, Grant. Just fuck you!” Brenna slammed the door to the cabin after her.

  Hell, he had to follow her. Explain that he wasn’t laughing at hoarding—though it was absurd to think she was upset about it—but at his own wild relief that she wasn’t dying of some mysterious disease. He searched the room for a blanket, but found nothing. Cursing, he headed for the ladder, intending to head up to his loft and grab a pair of pants.

  A high-pitched voice from the computer stopped him.

  “I don’t know when it started,” Brenna’s voice said. It was high and girlish and held a troubled note. “Our house has been like this for as long as I can remember. I grew up surrounded by bags and boxes full of stuff.”

  Grant turned back to the computer. There on the screen was a much younger Brenna. Her face was skinny and her hair was long and untamed, a lighter, almost golden brown compared to the much darker waves she wore today. She wore a dirty T-shirt and hugged her arms to her chest, as if acutely uncomfortable. There was a look of shame on her face that he didn’t recognize.

  The Brenna he knew wasn’t like this.

  “Brenna Atlee,” the reporter said, and Grant was startled to realize that he knew her under a different name, “has lived under the shadow of hoarding all her life. Her mother, Agatha Atlee, is a hoarder. Her mother before her? A hoarder.”

  Drawn back to the computer despite himself, Grant sat down in the chair. He knew he should have gone after Brenna, but the vulnerable, unhappy girl in the video had him riveted. He couldn’t pull himself away.

  The camera cut to the front door of a small ranch-style house in a run-down neighborhood. Brenna stood on the porch, her hand on a beat-up doorknob. There were large chips of paint missing from the red door, and a nearby window showed broken mini-blinds. She looked as if she wanted to run away. He’d seen that look on Brenna’s face this morning. Then, with a nod, Brenna opened the door to the house.

  Grant watched in horror as she pushed at the front door, shoving at it to get it to open enough to allow her in. She glanced back at the camera. “Watch your step when you come in,” she said, then began to step over piles of trash and boxes of junk to make her way into the house.

  “Every inch of the Atlee house is covered in garbage,” the narrator intoned, and the camera showed the reporter trying to follow Brenna into the house and having difficulty scaling the garbage. Teenage Brenna held aside a shopping bag of junk and assisted the reporter into a clear space in the house. “Every room of this eighteen-hundred-square-foot house is filled, top to bottom, with things. The room we’re standing in is the foyer. Brenna Atlee says her mother filled this room up last, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at it. Boxes and bags of clothing, dishes, holiday gifts, and even the neighbor’s garbage line the narrow walls of this cozy house.”

  Brenna pulled open a bag and began to dig through the contents of it, showing the cameraman. “She found this stuff at a thrift shop sale.” She pulled out a handful of tiny clothes and began to smooth them. “It doesn’t matter if she needs the stuff or not. She just buys it. These are baby clothes that she got for a few dollars. Boys’ and girls’ clothes. There are no babies here. I’m mom’s only kid, and the neighbors won’t take anything from us because they think we’re dirty.” She pulled out another piece of clothing, a tiny red sweater. “This is for a dog, I think. We don’t have a dog. Can’t have a dog. The city found a few dead animals in the house once and the neighbors called the cops on us. The fire department came in and cleaned out the garage once and found the carcasses of four dead cats. Mom was locked up for animal cruelty and my aunt had to bail her out. But once she was bailed out, she went through the garbage and took all her stuff back again.” Brenna’s small hands smoothed the sweater. “I always wanted a dog, though. I just figured it’s not safe for them here.”

  “Indeed,” the narrator said. “One would argue that the Atlee home isn’t safe for humans, either. Yet this is where thirteen-year-old Brenna and her mother live, eat, and sleep every day. But Mrs. Atlee doesn’t see a problem with her lifestyle.”

  The camera cut away from Brenna and moved to a woman who clearly had t
o be Brenna’s mother. She was a slender woman with the same dark waves that he recognized from Brenna, and a thin face with a slightly longer nose. She also had deep lines on her face, as if the world had been cruel to her and aged her hard. She sat in a recliner, wedged amidst junk that was piled high around her, and her arm rested on a dry-cleaning bag still full of clothing. A small table next to her was covered with old magazines, dishes, and what looked like a rotten Halloween jack-o’-lantern.

  The reporter handed her a box and squatted beside her in the mess, skirting the rotting pumpkin. “Can you tell me a bit about the objects in this box, Agatha, and what they mean to you?”

  “Of course,” the woman said in a reasonable tone. She began to dig through the box of stuff and pulled out the first thing. It was a baby food jar, black gunk stuck to one side. “This would be good for keeping screws and things in it. I just need to clean it out.” She put it aside and pulled out the next item—a coffee mug with a broken handle. “I just need to find the handle for this and it’s good as new.”

  “It’s broken,” the reporter protested. “Why not just throw it out?”

  “It’s perfectly fine,” Agatha told him, a harder edge creeping into her voice. “It just needs to be fixed.”

  The film began a narrative montage as Agatha went through the box and pulled out item after item. A shoe with no match. A broken fan. A stack of waterlogged Post-it notes. A jar candle that had been burned down to the wick. Useless crap, but Agatha Atlee had a use and an explanation for all of them.

  Brenna’s sad voice cut in again. “It’s like she can’t see how to throw things away. She doesn’t know how. She sees a use for everything and can’t stand the thought of something being thrown out when there’s still a need for it, somewhere.”

  “But the rest of the world views it as junk,” the reporter said. “It’s a viewpoint that has come between Agatha and her relationships many times in her life.”

  “I first started collecting,” Agatha was saying to the camera, “when I was nineteen. I ran away from home to be with my boyfriend, got pregnant, and then he left me. I lived on the streets for a while, and then a program helped me get a job and my first house.”

  “But by then,” the narrator chimed in, “the damage was already done. Used to living on the streets and having to scrounge for her next meal and the clothes on her back, Agatha found that she had a hard time acclimating to a normal life.”

  “I just kept seeing my coworkers throwing away perfectly good things,” she said, almost tearful with heartbreak. “And so when someone would throw something away, I’d sneak in to their garbage and steal it back.”

  “This stealing caused Agatha to lose that job. But by then, her baby, Brenna, was born, and Atlee qualified for assisted housing and food stamps. She bounced from job to job, and from relationship to relationship. No matter how strongly she felt about a man, the relationship inevitably ended once he got a look at her home life.”

  Grant’s stomach sank. That sounded achingly familiar.

  “I’ve never been able to give Brenna a real father figure,” her mother said sadly. “Most men say they can handle it, but when we move in together, it never works out.”

  “Atlee has been married and divorced six times.”

  “My last husband,” Brenna’s mother was saying, “didn’t understand about my stuff. He told me we just needed to organize and clean up. One day, I came home and found him throwing out a bunch of my stuff. It was like he’d stabbed my heart.” She gestured dramatically at her chest. “I didn’t know how he could do that to me. I went to the dump and had to take some of it back, but I couldn’t find all of it. I made him leave after that.”

  “Each time Mom breaks up with someone, her hoarding gets worse,” Brenna said, resentment and resignation in her voice and her dark, too-old eyes. “Once she discovered the dump, it got even worse. She used to just take home one or two things every day. Now she takes whole carloads of stuff.”

  “And family and friends are at their wits’ end,” the narrator intoned solemnly. “Agatha’s sister doesn’t know what to do about her family, but she is concerned for their safety.”

  The camera cut away to a woman with a deliberately pixelated face, clearly too embarrassed to reveal her identity. “I don’t know what to do,” the woman said, her voice masked. “Agatha doesn’t see that there’s a problem, and if you try to help her, she just gets worse. If I say something, she’ll shut me out of her life entirely and Brenna will be the one who will suffer. I don’t know how that kid can stand it, living in all that garbage. The other children make fun of her at school. They call her mom ‘the trash lady.’ They come and dump stuff on the lawn just to play mean pranks, and wait for Agatha to come and take it all inside, which of course she does.” The sister’s exasperation was evident. “And poor Brenna has never gotten to be a kid. Growing up, she could never play at that house. She could never have friends over to spend the night. She’s had to hide who her family is all her life. You know it has to affect her mentally. I just worry that she’s going to turn out like her mother.” She shook her head sadly. “When she was younger, I couldn’t go over because I’d constantly see that baby sticking garbage into her mouth. And Agatha didn’t think it was a problem. I couldn’t stand it . . .”

  The camera cut away and went into a long narrative about the psychological aspects of hoarding and how it affected those around them. They gave statistics on the number of hoarders in the United States, and Grant forced himself to listen with impatience. He just wanted to see the segment return to the young, vulnerable Brenna or her mother.

  At the very end of the piece, sad music began to play, and they cut back to Brenna again.

  “How do you feel about all of this?” the reporter asked Brenna. She sat in a small corner of her bed, the rest of it covered with junk, her room full. The floor was nowhere to be seen. “Do you see your mother’s things and feel like you need to collect as well?”

  Brenna gave a vehement shake of her head. “I hate it. I hate all of it.”

  “But your room is full.”

  “This isn’t my stuff.” She looked almost offended at the thought. “My room has always been clean. But when Mom ran out of space, she started putting stuff in my room. It doesn’t matter what I do—her stuff invades every inch of my space.”

  “And how does that make you feel?”

  “Like I need to run away. I just want to throw it all away. All of it. It’s not necessary, you know? It’s just stuff. And I hate stuff. I wish I could just get away from all of it. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

  The camera faded to black on Brenna’s words.

  Grant sat, stunned. Before he could turn off the video, the screen flashed over and began to play the same music. Another segment about a hoarding family played. Fascinated and horrified despite himself, Grant watched it, hoping for another glimpse of younger Brenna, but this was about an elderly couple who acquired things from thrift shops. The next segment was a middle-aged couple with two boys.

  He watched every segment. Then he went back to the beginning and watched the prior episodes. Mentally, he was trying to grasp what it must have been like for Brenna.

  Her shame and frustration at her mother, at her home life. The bitterness in her voice. It’s just stuff. I wish I could just get away from all of it. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.

  He’d never understood why Brenna was the way she was before. Why she was such a flake when it came to things like scheduling. Why she insisted on having a no-strings-attached relationship. Why she’d so quickly given up her cabin to Rome and planned on sleeping on the couch in the lodge, more or less without a space to call her own. Why, when he’d dug through her things, he’d found only the barest amount of clothing.

  Why she’d given away his presents.

  It’s just stuff. I wish I could just get away from all of it. That’s a
ll I’ve ever wanted.

  Everything made sense now. She’d shown him this video because she wanted him to understand how she was. The look in her eyes this morning had been full of terror and misery. As if she expected him to see the truth about her past and do the same thing that every other man had done—pack up and leave once the truth was uncovered.

  And he’d laughed in her face, relieved that it was just hoarding.

  God, he was an asshole.

  Grant darted away to get some clothes. He had to go after her.

  FOURTEEN

  Brenna slammed a fist down on the dashboard of her beat-up Sunfire. When that didn’t make the engine start again, she leaned forward, resting her forehead against the steering wheel and wishing that today would just disappear.

  She turned off the car, waited thirty seconds, and then turned the key in the ignition again. Nothing. Figured. With one fingernail, she tapped the gas gauge. The needle moved wildly. Well, that might be a problem. Or was it the battery? When was the last time she got a new battery? Probably the last time she got the oil changed. 2009? 2008? She couldn’t remember. Didn’t matter. The car was a piece of crap. She kept it exactly because it was a piece of crap—that meant it was easily abandoned.

  But for some reason, that didn’t sit well with her.

  Brenna took the keys out of the ignition one final time, then pocketed them. Her purse was still back at the office. Double-figured. She wiped her eyes, sniffled loudly, and then got out of the car. There was nothing to do but walk. Luckily she was close to town. From over the trees, she could see the roof of at least one building a block or two away. And the weather was decent.

  It was just the rest of the world that was crapping on her lately.

  Tears began to well in her eyes again, and Brenna swiped them away. She jingled her keys in her pocket, then tossed them on the ground. She didn’t really need those anymore, did she? Her car was dead.

  Dead like her freaking heart, now that Grant had stomped all over it.