“Why?” I asked, my voice sounding hoarse. My throat was tight, closing around the secrets that threatened to rise up and spill out at this invitation to let go and release, to trust someone enough to share. “Why do you want to know?”
“I want to know everything about you,” he said simply.
“But why now? Why tonight?”
“I think that if you share your awfully awful with me, then you’ll have nothing to fear. When you realize that I won’t freak out or disappear on you —”
“You will.” My voice was a rough whisper in the darkness of the car.
“When you see that I don’t,” said Jay, taking both my hands in his, “then, finally, you’ll be able to trust me fully and be completely open with me. There’ll be a connection between us — more than that, there’ll be a deep bond, and that will come through in the performance. The audience will see it.”
“So you just want this for the sake of the performance.”
“I never said that. I want us to be closer, and we can’t do that with secrets between us. I want to know you, and I want you to know you can trust me. Don’t you want that for us?”
I stared out the windshield. It was starting to snow. Light flakes, fragile as faith, drifted down through the darkness to dissolve on the hood of the car.
My resistance was weakening. All along I’d known I’d have to let Jay in on my secret sometime for us to have a shot at a real relationship. I just hadn’t been ready to tell him yet.
“But if sharing something important about yourself also happens to help your performance,” he said, “don’t you want that, too?”
I did. I wanted to turn in a great performance, for the sake of Doug and the whole cast and all the work they’d put in. For the sake of Jay, who had to act across from me in so many scenes. And for me. I wanted to be good for me.
Plus, there were other reasons why I was tempted to open up. I was so tired of keeping secrets, of hiding the truth, of keeping friends and foes and even family at arm’s length, of avoiding, covering up, and making excuses. Of deceiving.
It was exhausting, and terrified as I was of his reaction, I longed to share the load.
“Screw it,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
“You’ll tell me?” He sounded half-surprised.
“No.” I shook my head. “I’ll show you.”
I heard him blow out a long breath of air.
“Tomorrow, after school, you, Jay Young, may have the great privilege of bringing me home and escorting me all the way up to my room. And” — I tapped the side of my nose, like a gangster in an old movie — “I’ll spill the beans. All will be revealed.”
I was aiming for a light, joking tone, but on the last phrase, my voice was thick with dread.
In December, the light begins to thin and dim early. By four-thirty the next afternoon, the sun was close to setting, and I was cold, inside and out.
By this time the following day, I’d be backstage, putting on my makeup, getting into costume and character, ready — if Jay’s experiment worked — to give it my all. But now, as Jay’s car pulled up, I was sitting on the front step of our house, hugging my knees and wondering if I was about to make the worst mistake of my life.
I watched him walk slowly up the path between the overgrown shrubs and weeds of the front yard. Chloe was right — he was slightly bowlegged. A cowboy without a horse arriving for high noon at the Lane corral.
Jay smiled as he reached me, and held out his hand. If only he could pull me out of my life as simply as he tugged me to my feet.
“Ready?” he asked.
“No.”
“Changed your mind?”
“No.” Our breaths made white puffs in the chilly air. “Let’s do this. Walk this way.”
I led him around the side of the house.
“I thought you were going to take me inside.”
“I am. This,” I said, when we reached the bottom of the hanging rope ladder, “is my entrance.”
He cocked his head, clearly puzzled. “Why do you have a ladder to your room? And what the heck is that?”
I followed his gaze upward, to where the dark shadow of a human form was silhouetted against my bedroom window, and snorted. It did look a little creepy.
“Afraid?” I challenged.
“That depends. Is this the Bates Motel, and is that the stuffed body of your mother?”
“Only one way to find out.” I swung onto the lowest rung and began climbing up. “Follow me. If you dare.”
He waited until I’d reached the top, opened the window and climbed inside, before following, which was probably wise — I didn’t know if the ladder could carry the weight of two giants simultaneously.
“Ta-dah!” I sang when he stepped over the sill into my room.
He grinned at the dressmaker’s mannequin beside the window and patted it on the shoulder, before taking in the details of my space — the neatly made bed, the small television set in the corner, the desk with the sewing machine and sketchbook, my shelf of ordered books, the bare walls, and the absence of any knickknacks or mess.
“Well?” I asked.
“It’s very … neat and tidy.”
“My mom calls it sterile, but I find it soothing.”
He picked up my sketchbook and flipped through the designs. “Are these for your college application?”
“Yeah. I still need to do them full-size and in fabric.”
“They’re really good. I’m impressed.”
He stuck his head into my small en suite bathroom, but there was nothing much to see there either — no collection of foam bath or scent bottles on display, no muddle of cosmetics on the counter, no damp towels or underwear heaped the floor. Everything was hung up or packed away.
He walked over to the corner I used as my kitchenette, trailed a hand over the microwave and toaster, then opened the small fridge and peered inside.
“You’re a fan of Chef in a Jiffy, I see.” He inspected the neat rows on my shelf of foods — no more than two of every item, each with their labels facing forwards. “And also of instant noodles, Cup-a-Soup, and Cheerios.”
“I’m not one to boast, but I can make a damn fine bowl of cereal.”
“Can I ask why you have a mini-kitchen in your bedroom?”
“I need to eat.”
“And you can’t eat in your house’s kitchen because …”
This was it, the moment of truth. The scene called for some dramatic music as a backing soundtrack, but all I got was my heart thudding unpleasantly and a voice in the back of my head urging me to run, escape, shut this show-and-tell down right now.
Instead, I took a deep breath and said, “Come see for yourself.”
I unlocked and opened my door, stepped outside my zone of tranquility, and switched on the hallway light. Jay followed but immediately pulled up short, as if reeling from a blow.
In psych class, we’d learned about this phenomenon called habituation, which explained how you became used to things over time, stopped seeing them after a while, hardly noticed gradual, incremental changes. Even the insanely abnormal became utterly ordinary, if you lived with it long enough. And I had been living with this for a very long time.
Now I followed Jay’s shocked gaze, seeing it afresh, as though through his eyes. And it was horrible.
The untamed jungle of stuff started in the hallway. Towers of stacked storage boxes grew up one wall, reaching almost to the ceiling, while an undergrowth of newspapers and magazines drooped in untidy piles against the walls, here and there slipping into a groundcover of decaying paper.
Teeming inside a bookshelf with a glass-paneled front, like plants inside a tropical terrarium, were old photo albums, rulers from a geometry set, an assortment of kitchen gadgets still in their original packaging, several years’ worth of old planners, an old-timey soda syphon, and a chipped green vase. A purple piggy bank, stacks of paper plates and bulging manila folders, and a broken-stringed guitar sprouted from the to
p of the bookshelf.
“Home sweet home,” I said.
I snuck a quick look at Jay’s face. It was blank with shock, his eyes unreadable in the dim light, his mouth gaping.
“This way. Careful where you step.” I indicated the mere five inches of relative openness that snaked a path through the chaos of clutter.
“Huh?” Jay refocused his eyes on me. There was a crease between his eyes now, as though he was struggling to reconcile the me he knew with these surroundings.
I sighed. “Have you seen enough? Do you want to go back? Do you want to go home?”
“No. Show me everything,” he said. Then, in a firmer voice, added, “Lead on, Macduff.”
“Right,” I said. “Follow me, Macbeth.”
Jay sucked in an appalled breath, along with a lungful of dust, and coughed for a few moments before gasping, “Never say the name of the Scottish play! Don’t you know it’s bad luck?”
I gave him a wry smile. “I don’t think luck gets much worse than this.” I gestured to the surroundings.
“Don’t tempt fate, Peyton, I’m not kidding!”
“You’re superstitious?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder as I moved slowly down the hall, kicking aside a knotted tangle of bamboo tubes that had once been a wind-chime.
Jay followed behind, moving cautiously. “I’m an actor — of course I’m superstitious.”
He was taking it well. He hadn’t fainted, sworn, judged or bolted. He was a keeper all right. Then again, maybe it was too soon to call. He hadn’t seen the worst of it yet.
An old television set, with rounded screen and bulging rear, blocked our path. A tangle of computer cables and old phone chargers trailed over its top, like vines growing over a boulder.
“Here,” Jay said, lending me a steadying hand as I climbed over the obstacle.
I battled to find a clear spot to put down my foot. A huge laundry basket, filled with my old shoes, had tipped over, regurgitating slippers, tennis shoes and boots across the carpet. I picked up a small sandal to fling it out of the way and saw that it was a size seven. Had my feet ever been that small?
“Right.” I paused outside the next door along the hall. “This here is ground zero. Ready to go in?”
~ 37 ~
I pushed open the door, flicked on the light, and stepped inside. Jay followed and stood beside me in the tiny clearing just beyond the door as he took in the scene.
The walls were glimpses of a faded sky blue, just visible behind the forest of stuff. A mobile wilted from the light fixture — Winnie the Pooh, Eeyore, Roo, and Tigger trapped in a lattice of cobwebs. The cot was a thicket of stuffed toys, with Solly Monster perched on top.
Shelves teemed with tributes to babyhood — porcelain statuettes of chubby cherubs; a bronzed baby shoe; small books made of board and cloth; a wall calendar with fading photographs of babies curled up in mother-of-pearl shells and pea pods and the hearts of sunflowers; tiny crystal ornaments — rocking horses, teddy bears and train locomotives — their faceted surfaces now dulled by time and dust; hand-knitted booties; a jumble of bibs, and, imprinted in green paint on a piece of white board, an impossibly tiny pair of footprints.
“Look, Peyton, Ethan’s got such teeny, tiny feet!”
A giant teddy bear sat on a rocking chair. Draped across its arms was an old-fashioned christening gown, with yellowing lace collar and cuffs. That was the chair where Mom had sat when she fed Ethan. I’d longed to climb up into her lap and be rocked to sleep, but I was the big sister — the one sent to fetch bottles of formula and medicine.
“No, Peyton, you’re not a baby. You’re a big girl now. You’re Mommy’s little helper.”
Beside the chair was the changing dresser where Ethan had lain, cycling his thin legs in the air whenever we changed his diaper.
“Look at him go! He’ll be a champion cyclist one day.”
Now its surface was a shrine — a white votive candle, never lit, surrounded by a mass of framed photographs of Ethan as a baby. There was one of him in the incubator at the hospital, lying on a lamb’s wool blanket and connected to a matrix of tubes and machines, and another of him in my mother’s arms on discharge day. There were several of him at home — in his high chair being fed applesauce by Dad, an action shot of him kicking over a tower of blocks on the blue carpeted floor of this very room, and one of him propped beside me on the couch in the living room.
“You must be very gentle with him, princess.. He’s not strong like you are.”
We were surrounded by things my baby brother had never used, would never use — a red tricycle, a blackboard and chalks, tubs of playdough, wax crayons, Lego blocks, and dozens of books — all the things that had once been mine and which should have been handed down to him, but which had wound up in this mausoleum of a nursery instead.
I turned to check Jay’s reaction and was disconcerted to find him staring intently at me, rather than at this display of melancholy nostalgia and frozen grief. I could see the questions in his eyes.
“This was my baby brother’s room. His name was Ethan.”
I stepped over a mound of mothering magazines, snagged the incubator photograph, blew the dust off, and handed it to Jay.
“He had a congenital heart defect — tricuspid atresia with co-occurring ventricular septal defect. Basically, a hole in the heart.”
Jay stared down sadly at the picture.
“He’d already had one surgery and was due to have another when he caught pneumonia, and just never recovered.”
“How old was he?”
“When he died? Nine months.”
“How old were you?”
“Four.”
“Oh, Peyton. I am so sorry.”
Jay pulled me against him and hugged me tight. I wished he could hold me so tight that all my broken pieces would click back together.
I spoke against his shoulder. “It was a long time ago.”
So long ago that I treasured the few memories of Ethan that still remained. The baby toe on his left foot that crossed over the one beside it. The sweet smell that sweated out his scalp whenever Mom fed him pureed peaches. Even the bluish lips.
“I don’t know that you ever get over something like this,” Jay said.
I sighed and pulled back. “Well, my mother sure didn’t. She kept Ethan’s stuff. All of it — even the disposable diapers and the bottles of baby food. That’s how it began.”
She’d kept the last clothes he’d worn in a Ziplock bag and never washed them.
“I can still smell his scent on them.”
“She was smashed flat with grief and depression,” I said. “I guess when she couldn’t save him, she hung onto the next best thing — his stuff.”
“I lost my son. I won’t lose anything else.”
“Then she started buying more stuff — baby things, at first, but gradually just anything that caught her fancy. She became obsessed with her possessions, with shopping. At the time, I didn’t understand what was happening. I was just a little kid excited by all the new purchases, you know? Now I think she was trying to fill up the hole inside her.”
“Does she still buy so much?”
“Oh, hell yeah. She shops online like her life depends on it, even though we really can’t afford it, even though she doesn’t — can’t — use what she buys. It’s an addiction — it helps her zone out and go numb. When she’s staring at a screen, the blinkers are on and she doesn’t see the rest of it, doesn’t have to acknowledge what’s happened to her life.”
“Or to yours,” said Jay, returning Ethan’s photograph to its spot.
“Next, she quit throwing anything away. The clutter just spread through the house. Like a slow-flowing river.” Like a disease. “It reached a point where she just didn’t care anymore.”
“And your father?” Jay asked.
I squashed a deflated soccer ball beneath my foot. “They struggled on for a couple of years — trying to make it work. But there was just too much grief an
d guilt between them.”
“If only I’d …”
“You should never have …”
“But I didn’t know he …”
“What if you’d …”
“Dad spent less and less time at home — I guess initially to avoid my mother, to avoid dealing with Ethan’s death. But I suspect that he also started having an affair back then. One day he packed his bags and moved out. Pretty much said, ‘Have to go,’ and went.”
“So you lost him, too,” said Jay, staring deeply into my eyes. “You lost your baby brother, your mother to her depression and her belongings, and then your father left.”
I shrugged. I hadn’t thought of it that way before — as a triple blow of loss.
“As soon as the divorce came through, he married Lucy. And yesterday” — I kicked the ball aside — “we got the news that they’re having a baby. A son.”
“Holy shit, Peyton.”
“Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “Anyway, after Dad left, my mother just stopped going out. I mean, not overnight, but gradually less and less. I don’t think she’s set foot outside this house in five years.”
“God!”
“Yeah, she’s a hoarder and a shut-in, I know,” I said, feeling defensive.
“What must it have been like for you?”
“You need to be brave for your mother, princess. Come on, smile – there’s my girl!”
“Oh, you know,” I said breezily, squeezing the words through my tight throat.
“No, I don’t. Tell me.”
My eyes were stinging. I turned away from his penetrating gaze and left the room. Back in the jam-packed confusion of the hallway, I picked up my load of shame. Ethan’s room, awful as it was, was just about comprehensible. The rest of the house was simply a humiliating, filthy disgrace.
Jay sneezed several times, and I asked, “Still up for the grand tour of the whole mansion?”
“Yes. But I also still want to know what it was like for you.”
Jay was nothing if not persistent. Still, wasn’t that supposed to be the aim of this exercise — to open up to him? To trust?
The Law of Tall Girls Page 20