Dirty Little Secrets

by C. J. Omololu

  “Don’t pick him up while I’m gone, okay? It’s only two weeks—he’ll be fine. Just feed him twice a day and make sure he has enough water in the bottle. I’ll clean the cage when I get back.” I wished I could take him with me to camp, but it would be hard to explain to the other junior counselors why I couldn’t leave him at home. All Mom had to do was shove some food in his cage, and with it sitting in the middle of the kitchen, there was no way she could forget. I just kept telling myself he’d be fine.

  “Don’t worry about your precious rodent,” she said. “I’ll feed him every day. He’ll be fat and happy when you get home, you’ll see.”

  It didn’t work out exactly that way.

  “Where’s Petey?” I said as I dropped my suitcase on the kitchen floor, a pile of junk mail filling the space on the counter where the cage had been.

  “Oh,” Mom said, looking down at the newspaper she was holding. “I was going to call you, but I didn’t want to ruin your trip. He got out the other day when I was feeding him. I looked everywhere, but I couldn’t find him.”

  “What do you mean he got out?” My eyes searched what I could see of the floor. A tiny hamster could be hiding anywhere in this house. “All you had to do was feed him. You said he’d be okay.”

  She put her arm around my shoulders and gave a quick squeeze. “I’m really sorry,” she said. She was looking everywhere except right at me. “I only left the door open for a second so I could cut some more apple, and when I looked back he was gone.”

  “He really ran away?”

  She nodded. “I’m sure he’s around here somewhere. Probably found a nice, soft corner to curl up in.”

  “But he was counting on me . . .” Petey was the first thing I’d ever been in charge of, and I’d let him down. He must have missed being held and stroked on the very top of his head. He must have thought I was never coming back, and he made his escape when he saw an opportunity. A sick, heavy feeling settled in my stomach and made the back of my eyelids prickle.

  I got down on all fours and looked under the table and along the wall. “Here, Petey Petey.” I made little kissy noises as I was calling him. “Here, Petey. I’m back. Here, Petey.” Mom got down on the floor too and together we searched everywhere we could, spending the next hour at hamster level trying to find him. But we never did.

  Sometimes I would see hamster droppings on the counter or the table, and I took it as his way of telling me he was still somewhere in the house, curled up safe in a little nest he’d made for himself, only coming out at night to look for food. I’d leave a pile of peanuts on the counter for him, and little by little it would vanish, so at least I knew he was eating something.

  The sharp smell from the cedar shavings in his cage brought back everything I’d felt that day when I’d come back to discover him gone. Mom must have put the cage back here in case we ever got another hamster, but we never did. It didn’t seem right to bring another living thing into this house when I couldn’t even manage to keep Petey safe. The water bottle was still secured to the side of the cage, but it had been dry a long time.

  I carried the whole thing over to the wall where the green bins were stacked. Even if Petey was long gone, the cage was still good. Maybe when all this was over, I’d get another hamster. Or clean it out and give it to TJ. He was about the right age for a pet.

  As I set the cage down on the bins, I spotted something sticking out from under the cedar chips. I shook the cage so the chips settled and I could see it better, sticking my face right up to the bars to get a good look. He wasn’t curled up in a ball, but lying out straight under a thin layer of cedar chips. The skin looked dry and papery but still had a few tufts of brown hair clinging to it.

  Petey.

  “Oh God,” I said. I looked closer to make sure, but there was really no doubt. Petey hadn’t escaped at all. He’d died right in this cage while I was gone, and instead of doing something normal like burying him, or even telling me the truth, Mom must have covered up the cage and left it in the dining room like it never happened. That was her solution to everything—cover it up like it never happened.

  My mind raced as I backed away from the cage containing the mummified remains of my only pet. “How could she?” I whispered. She probably forgot about him completely. Didn’t feed him or even give him water. Petey trusted me and I’d totally let him down.

  Without even thinking about it, I opened the top of the cage and gently wrapped him in the towel. He wasn’t much more than dried skin and bones by now, but the least I could do was give him a decent burial. Grabbing the shovel, I headed outside, not caring who saw me.

  On the side of the house, just under my window, was a sheltered spot next to a spindly hydrangea bush. The cold ground was hard as I stabbed at it with the shovel, but after breaking through the top layer I was able to dig a small hole, pulling out chunks of hard clay soil and piling them up in the walkway. When the hole was deep enough, I leaned the shovel against the wall and knelt down as I lowered the pink towel into it. Tucking the edges of the towel around Petey, I waited for thoughts to come—something about how I was sorry I’d left him alone, and how I’d do it differently if I had it to do again. I wished for something profound to give him a dignified send-off, but my mind just felt blank and empty. Slowly, I got up and dumped dirt back on top of him, scraping the shovel on the walkway as I scooped it up over and over again until the pink towel was gone.

  When I was done, I patted the dirt down with the back of the shovel and looked at the smooth ground where my first and only pet was buried. Unless you knew, you’d never guess he was here, but maybe it would make me feel a little bit better when the bush bloomed with huge pink flowers in the spring and reminded me that Petey was in a better place.

  chapter 8

  3:00 p.m.

  I, however, was still trapped in this crappy place. As clouds gathered outside, it grew quieter inside, and every move I made seemed to echo off the ceiling. Mom had the television going twenty-four hours a day if she was home—something to keep her company she said—so I grabbed the stereo from my room and set it up on top of a pile of papers in the middle of the kitchen. Filling the house with sound helped make it feel a little less lonely and made this crazy project seem a little less futile. Music to decontaminate by.

  After I suited up in my orange rubber gloves, I stood near the sink and tried to figure out where to start in what used to be a functional kitchen. That was always the problem when you were standing in an endless pile of garbage—where to start. Regular people might leave their dirty dishes in the sink for a few hours or even a day until someone got around to washing them and putting them in the dishwasher. Once the dishwasher broke down and the plumbing backed up, our dishes sat in the sink and on the counter for years. Actual years.

  The fronts of the cabinets were white once, but now looked as though they were covered in fine, brown dirt, like someone had stood in the middle of the kitchen and flung bags of potting soil all over everything. Except it wasn’t potting soil. It was mold that had crept along the counters and down over the cabinets until you couldn’t tell what color the cabinets were supposed to be. The mold had made its way up the tiles and the walls until the bottoms of the curtains hung heavy with black. It happened so gradually that we really didn’t notice. We just stayed out of that room as much as we could and tried not to look at anything too closely. After a while, it didn’t seem to matter anymore.

  Getting rid of this stuff was probably some kind of biohazard. I coughed just thinking about it. Mom’s breathing problems had gotten a lot worse lately—inhaling mold spores for years would do that to you. It might even kill you.

  It was creepy looking closely at everything like this. If you walked by it every day you didn’t notice how bad it really was. Now that I was paying attention, it was hard not to see it like Josh or Kaylie would—a disgusting mess that nobody sane would live in. Thinking about Josh just made me sadder. I don’t know who I was kidding last night.
r />   Until I got this fixed, I couldn’t let anybody near it. Or near me. It was amazing Kaylie still didn’t know—I’d been getting careless letting her pick me up and drop me off here. What if she’d seen how we really live? What if Josh smelled the house stink on my jacket when he put his arm around me? The heaviness started to take over as I let these thoughts race through my brain. I shook my head and tried to erase the image of him backing away from me in disgust. I couldn’t think any further than right now if I had any hope of making this work.

  There was no getting around cleaning the kitchen because that’s where most of the stink was coming from. Like every other horizontal surface in the house, the counters were piled high with everything you’d find in a normal kitchen—times twelve. If a few empty grocery bags might come in handy someday, Mom would save hundreds, because you never knew when the world might run out. Stacks of newspapers stood here and there waiting to be read and clipped. Empty food containers were everywhere—margarine and yogurt containers, water bottles, and cylinders that once held potato chips. Those were some of Mom’s favorite treasures. And it’s not like these just came from us. Mom “saved” empty containers from work and even random trash cans. She always said with some sort of strange, misplaced pride that she didn’t go digging in other people’s trash cans, but if something was sitting right there on top for all the world to see, well, then, she had an obligation to see it wasn’t wasted.

  I’d have to clear off some counter space to really get down to it, so I started with the stove. It was piled with miscellaneous junk as high as the range hood. A few years back the refrigerator broke, so Mom just piled groceries on the counter next to the stove, lining up the cans of food instead of putting them away anywhere. This would probably have been okay if she had only bought things in cans, but I was pretty sure she’d stashed things like lunch meat and fruit here too with the idea that as long as it was visible, we’d eat it quickly enough. Which was good in theory, I guess.

  In order to reach the stove, I had to make a new pathway through the piles of stuff that littered the kitchen floor. I couldn’t get the trash can in here, which meant my only option was to grab a trash bag and shove anything into it that I could find. Most of the stuff in here was so destroyed by mold, I didn’t bother wondering what was in the bags or boxes. It was better not to think about it, particularly if something was soggy or leaking or smelled so bad my gag reflex kicked in.

  I grabbed a can of green beans from the counter beside the stove. It had an expiration date that was two years earlier. And that was probably one of the newer cans in her collection. I started to load a bag with all the canned food, but realized that cans of food would make the bag really heavy really fast. I decided to leave the rest of them on the counter. Once everything else was cleaned up, a bunch of cans sitting on a counter wouldn’t look as weird. Maybe the paramedics would think she’d just gotten home from grocery shopping. If they didn’t look closely, they might not figure out that the shopping trip was from five years ago.

  With one hand, I held the trash bag against the stove, and with the other, I swept the containers, plastic bags, cups, and old food packages off the top. A few things missed the bag and bounced onto the floor, but I could deal with that later. I found not one, not two, but three big margarine containers full of those little plastic clips that come on bread packages. It only took one trash bag to clear most of the stove and uncover the burners. Real safe to have things piled on top of something that actually makes fire all these years, but it didn’t seem to have worried Mom. On a hunch, I turned the knob for the burner, thinking that like everything else in this house it wouldn’t work, but to my surprise it clicked and with a small whoosh burst into a bright blue flame.

  Maybe I could start cooking in here one day, if I could get the memory of the old kitchen smell out of my brain. Once Phil moved back, I’d make meals for the two of us—I’d have to start watching the Food Network to get some ideas. Maybe I could even have people over for dinner. I could learn to make complicated casseroles and fancy appetizers. Someday, after all this had been taken care of, maybe I could even have Josh over for dinner. It would be amazing having him in my house for dinner without worrying about Mom and the mess. I turned the burner off and threw a stack of about fifty empty cottage cheese containers in the bag. Good thing someday wasn’t all that soon.

  Working my way from the stove toward the sink, I cleared the counters pretty quickly. There were a few things that might have been worth keeping, but I had to just close my eyes and toss them in the garbage. Mom had three thermoses sitting next to the sink, and I could have saved them for the Salvation Army, but the thought of having some poor unsuspecting worker actually opening one of the jars and encountering some sort of festering, mummified stew was just too cruel. In the bag they went. Opened Diet Pepsi cans that were full of something that was probably liquid once but had through the wonders of science turned solid? In the bag. A shoebox full of bottle caps? In the bag. A plastic grocery bag full of some gelatinous brown goo that was probably produce at one point? Definitely in the bag.

  All the hard work made me forget about the cold wind that blew through the open windows. That and the rapid progress I was making toward the sink. Under a pile of plastic bags on the counter, I found a white dish drainer complete with dishes that had been clean once upon a time. I reached in and stroked the Underdog glass that had been the only cup I would drink from when I was little. Holding it in my hand was like discovering an old friend that I’d thought was gone forever. Underdog looked great, still bright red, white, and blue; his arm raised as he took off for parts unknown. Maybe that’s what I’d liked about him—he was always ready to go somewhere new.

  For the first time in more than an hour, I stopped working and carefully wiped the glass with the bottom of my shirt to remove any traces of mold. I took the rest of the dishes out of the drainer and tossed them into the garbage bag. Aside from the Underdog glass, there was nothing here I was ever going to use again. I grabbed a coffee cup that had “World’s Greatest Mom” printed on it in flowery pink letters. I could still see traces of lipstick around the edge and could picture it sitting on the side of the bathroom sink full of coffee as she got ready for work. Mornings were the best time for talking to her when I was a little kid. I’d sit on the fuzzy pink toilet lid and watch Mom as she did her hair with the curling iron and put her makeup on. She’d ask about my second-grade teacher, Ms. Davis, who always had lipstick on her teeth and I’d usually tell her about something rotten Phil had done. If I was lucky, she’d spray some of her perfume in the air and let me walk through it so I could smell like her for the rest of the day. If I missed her while I was at school, I’d just sniff my sleeve and the smell of her perfume would make me feel safe. I didn’t remember very much about being little, but I knew, once upon a time, Mom might have deserved the World’s Greatest Mom mug.

  As I held the mug over the garbage bag, I remembered with a creeping sense of dread how the dishes got into the drainer. I’d done them about four years ago, before “Garbage Girl” happened. Before I’d totally given up. It was probably the last time I’d done anything constructive in this room. In this whole house. I’d learned my lesson well.

  I had planned it as a surprise for Mom. She’d been working late all week, and I’d wanted to do something that would make her life a little easier, so she’d make mine easier too. And at that point in seventh grade, I needed an easier life more than just about anything else.

  Carefully pushing aside all of Mom’s stuff that had started to take over the space—after the Auntie Jean episode I knew better than to throw anything away or move it more than a few inches from where she had put it—I managed to make enough room to cook dinner. Okay, cooking dinner might be an exaggeration, but I made a meal in that kitchen for the three of us to eat. This was before the sink stopped working and developed a permanent brown crust, and before mold had started its incessant march across all surfaces. Back when you could still eat
something that had come into contact with the space and not watch for signs of botulism or trichinosis.

  After school that day, I’d gone down to the grocery store on the corner and picked up one of those already cooked chickens that came in the little plastic containers. If nothing else, I knew how much Mom loved those containers with the clear plastic dome on top. For her, something as simple as a chicken container held endless possibilities. After the chicken was gone, it could be a container to take food over to a sick friend, or with a slit cut in the top, become a place to put receipts. Most likely, it would become just another piece in her ever-growing collection of useless plastic containers. It was like she used up all her energy thinking about possibilities for reusing stuff, so she never got around to actually doing it. As long as something could be labeled useful, it was allowed to stay, and if you thought about it hard enough, you could figure out a use for just about anything.

  French bread and salad completed the meal. Phil hated salad or anything that was naturally green, but I’d tried to make it up to him by buying ice-cream sandwiches for dessert. Just as I was setting the bags on the counter, Phil came in from his room and started poking around in my bags.

  “Get out of there,” I said, slapping his hand away. “It’s for dinner.”

  “Whose dinner?”

  “Our dinner. Yours, mine, and Mom’s.”

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “No occasion.” I pulled out the bag of salad and set it on a clear space on the counter. “I just thought it would be good for us to eat dinner together.”

  Phil opened the cupboards and found a box of Cheez-Its that had hopefully been put in there not too long ago. After shoving a handful of crackers in his mouth, he said, “Bull.” Tiny crumbs of cracker flew out of his mouth in a dry, orange shower as he spoke.