The Clear-Out

by Deborah Ellis

  “What do you mean, what kind?” Duncan asked. “I don’t know what kind. Books.”

  “Well, we do take them,” the volunteer said. “Are they good books?”

  “They’re books.”

  Duncan spoke the word as if it was a curse.

  “I mean, are they clean? We don’t need bookworms or bugs.”

  “There are no bugs in my house,” Duncan snarled. “If you don’t want the books, I’ll take them to the dump.”

  “Let’s take a look at them,” the volunteer said. “Do you have them with you?”

  “They’re in the car. It’s parked out front.” Duncan waited for the volunteer to get up and help him.

  For a moment, the volunteer didn’t move, but then he picked up the hint. “Let’s go get them,” he said, as if the job was something bright and shiny and fun to do. As he moved out from behind the counter, Duncan saw the wheelchair.

  “Sorry, I didn’t see—”

  “Load me up,” the volunteer said. “I can’t feel anything anyway. Might as well make myself useful. I’m Kevin.”

  Kevin held out his hand. Duncan shook it and shared his own name. “What happened to your legs?” he asked. He wouldn’t usually ask such a nosy question, but his wife had just died. That meant he could do what he liked.

  “Got beat up,” Kevin said.

  “What?”

  “Coming out of the hardware store. Can you believe it? I got lucky,” Kevin said. “Only paralyzed below the waist. My husband didn’t make it.”

  “Your husband.”

  Once Duncan would have been shocked or disgusted. But cancer changes everything. Now he just wanted to know one thing.

  “How do you manage?” he asked. “My wife just died.”

  The two men looked at each other.

  Kevin shook his head. “Let’s get those books.”

  They made several trips. The black garbage bags made quite a pile on the floor.

  “She was always reading. Drove me crazy.”

  “Dan was always volunteering,” Kevin said. “That drove me crazy. And look at me now.”

  Duncan didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to think. He didn’t want to feel. He didn’t want to do anything but put his dining room back together and get drunk.

  So that’s what he did. He went home and carried the parts of the dining room table up from the basement. How had his tiny little wife got them down the stairs in the first place? He screwed the legs back on. Next, he put the china and Tess’s little glass animals back in the china cabinet. Then he opened one of the bottles of gin he got from his golf buddies. He stayed drunk for a week.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Months went by.

  Life went on.

  That was the worst part about death, Duncan thought one morning as he was pulling on his socks. He had put on socks when Tess was alive, and he was still putting on socks now that she was dead.

  For a very short time, her death was important. People cried. They talked about her. They gave him things to try to cheer him up. But time passed. Life went on. It went on without Tess.

  And, every morning, Duncan put on a clean pair of socks. Just as if nothing had happened.

  He was managing okay. That’s what he told people when they asked: “I’m managing okay.”

  He had a freezer full of frozen dinners. He often bought a roasted chicken. He learned how to work the washing machine and dryer. He could run the vacuum cleaner, and he knew how to use the dust cloth. When he ran out of something, he wrote it on the chalkboard so he could remember to buy more.

  As always, he put his dirty coffee cup in the sink. But it was not washed and back in the cupboard the next time he reached for it. That was the hardest thing to get used to.

  When the pile of shoes by the door got messy, it stayed messy. No unseen hand straightened it up for him.

  Wherever he dropped stuff, that’s where it stayed. If it got picked up, he had to do it.

  At first, Duncan let the mess grow. Tess was supposed to clean the house, damn it. If she didn’t do her job, he sure wasn’t going to do it for her! He had his own things to do—mowing the lawn, hosing down the driveway. Things like that.

  His feelings changed the day their minister, Reverend Jones, dropped in. Duncan saw his mess through the other man’s eyes. Ashamed about what he had done to his wife’s clean house, he thought about hiring a cleaner. But he could not stand the thought of another stranger in his home. Way too many strangers had come in and out when his wife was sick. Visiting nurses, home-care workers, busybody neighbours.

  The worst were the members of his wife’s book club. They would sit with her and hold her hand and chatter quietly, as though they had some big secret. They stole time from him. He could barely stand to look at them at the funeral.

  So he had to learn to pick up after himself.

  “I hope you’re happy, Tess,” Duncan muttered to her as he dried and put away his dishes. “You finally got me to do housework.”

  Other things changed, too.

  He could no longer watch the Golf Channel. He tried after the funeral, but he couldn’t do it. It just wasn’t fun anymore. He realized that it was fun when Tess was alive because it proved he was running his own show. Tess didn’t like golf, but he was his own man. He could watch and play golf whenever he wanted to. Now that sort of thinking held no meaning.

  But there were other channels. Duncan watched a lot of reality TV and the channel that showed old movies. Between television and little errands around town, he could fill up a day. He did not look back, and he did not look into the future. This moment, the one he was in, was all he could manage.

  Three months after Tess died, strange things started happening.

  Duncan didn’t notice them at first.

  And when he did, he put them down to old age.

  He got into the habit of tidying the house every night after the eleven o’clock news. He would walk through the rooms, picking up any stray papers, putting away any stray dishes. He put the newspaper in the blue box and tidied the shoes on the mat by the kitchen door. Alone now, Duncan feared falling if he got up in the middle of the night. He liked to know the stairs and the floor were clear of anything he could trip over. And, he noticed, waking up to a tidy house was nicer than starting the day in a mess.

  One morning, as Duncan made his coffee, he noticed that the shoes were all messed up.

  “Must have forgotten to do that last night,” he said to the cat. He was sure he had lined up the shoes. He always did. But each day was so much like the last. He could have forgotten.

  He made sure he tidied the shoes that night.

  The next morning, they were messed up again.

  “Maybe I’m sleepwalking,” he said.

  When the same thing happened again the next night, he decided he was just going crazy.

  “If that’s as crazy as I get, I can live with it,” he said.

  One morning when he got up, all the dining room chairs had been upset.

  He blamed the cat.

  “Do it again and I’ll drop you at the Humane Society,” he said to Mr. Snuffles. Mr. Snuffles just yawned and turned his back. The chairs kept getting knocked over in the night.

  The cat acted strangely, too.

  Mr. Snuffles started to sit for hours on the carpet by Tess’s La-Z-Boy, purring. Just like he did when Tess used to sit in that chair and read. At night, he ran around the house, jumping and waving his paws in the air. Tess used to knit little mice and stuff them with catnip. She tied them to long strings, and she’d play mousie with him all over the house. Now the cat seemed to be playing with a mousie that only he could see.

  The cat’s game was funny to watch. But it was less funny when Mr. Snuffles bounded across Duncan’s bed in the middle of the night.

  Duncan found closet doors open that he knew he had closed. The TV would turn itself off in the middle of a show. The TV remote would be lost for days, then suddenly show up in the fridge next to the p
rune juice.

  One Sunday, Duncan hung back after church to be the last to shake the minister’s hand. He needed advice.

  “Grief takes many forms,” Reverend Jones said. “You have had a terrible loss. Give yourself time to get used to it. Get out into the community. Be with people. Many people hold you in high regard. Give them the gift of letting them support you.”

  Duncan knew that was a standard speech because not many people held him in high regard. Why would they? He had never done anything for them. He had never really done anything for anybody. He played in charity golf games, but he did it for the golf, not for the charity.

  He learned to live with the strange events. Every morning he re-tidied the shoes by the door and turned the dining room chairs right side up. At night, he closed his bedroom door so the cat couldn’t play with invisible mousies on top of him.

  He managed everything else in his life, the cooking, the cleaning, the loneliness. He could manage these strange events, too.

  And then one day Duncan walked into the kitchen and stopped managing.

  There were words on the chalkboard.

  Words he knew he had not put there.

  He stood in icy shock and read them.

  What happens?

  The words were written in his wife’s handwriting.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “So I’m not crazy.”

  “You are sad,” the Reverend Jones said. “Grief takes time. People get on with their days and take care of business, and they think their grief is all over. But it isn’t. It takes time.”

  Duncan looked down at his hands. He was sitting across from the minister in his office at the church.

  “Have you ever . . . lost someone?” he asked.

  “We have all had losses in our lives,” the minister replied. “I have talked with many in our church who have lost someone in their family. Grief is a powerful feeling. People often think they see their loved one in a shopping mall or on the street. Or they see the much loved face in the window of a moving bus. The person always seems just out of reach.”

  “Has anyone at our church seen his dead wife’s handwriting on the wall?”

  The minister smiled. “No. That’s a new one. But let’s look at what was written. ‘What happens?’ Is that the sort of message likely to come from the other side? You should look into this very carefully. I think you’ll find that you wrote those words yourself. Maybe you did it in your sleep. Maybe you’re wondering what happens next with your life.”

  “So what should I do?”

  “Pray. Rest. Go out for walks. Eat well. Take up something new. Give your mind something different to focus on. And give yourself time.”

  As he drove away from the church, Duncan thought maybe he needed another seven-day drunk.

  The skateboarders were at it again when he drove into his street. They blasted their loud, awful music as they skated around. Instead of yelling at them, Duncan just sat and watched them, zooming round and round in front of his driveway.

  “Maybe skateboarding is the new thing I should take up,” he said to himself.

  Then he leaned on the car horn until the skateboarders got the message. They took off, wind blowing their hair, not a care in the world.

  “Rotten kids,” Duncan muttered. He drove into his garage and went into his house.

  He rubbed out the words on the chalkboard and turned on the TV.

  When he went back into the kitchen to make himself a sandwich, the words were back.

  The same words.

  The same handwriting.

  What happens?

  “Enough with this nonsense!” Duncan shouted.

  He grabbed the chalkboard and tore it from the wall. He stomped out of the kitchen and through the back door. He dumped the chalkboard into the trash can and clamped the lid on the can. Then he took the can out to the curb.

  That night, he slept with his bedroom door open. The cat left him alone. The closet doors stayed shut. At dawn, he heard the garbage truck coming around his circle. His trash can banged against the truck, and the truck took away the chalkboard.

  Duncan slept in until eight. He stretched in his bed, fully rested, then got up and padded to the kitchen in his bare feet and pajamas. Why not have coffee before getting dressed? He wouldn’t make a habit of it, but why not shake his life up a bit? After all, he was retired. He had nowhere to go and no one to ask him why he was still in his pajamas. He filled the kettle, then turned to get the jar of instant coffee out of the cupboard.

  The chalkboard was back on the wall.

  In the same spot.

  With the same words.

  In the same handwriting.

  What happens?

  And that’s when Duncan got really scared.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Duncan was almost afraid to get close to the chalkboard, but he had to get it out of the house.

  With a pounding heart and a dry mouth, he took the chalkboard down from the wall—again. Scooping up his keys, he put the chalkboard in the passenger seat of his car. He got in behind the wheel and started driving.

  The Good Shepherd Thrift Store was not open yet. Duncan didn’t care. He sat in his car in his pajamas, his feet still bare, staring at the chalkboard.

  As soon as he spotted Kevin coming around the corner in his wheelchair, Duncan jumped out of the car. He had the chalkboard in his hand.

  “Get rid of this,” he ordered.

  Kevin looked him up and down.

  “What happened to you?” he asked.

  “I need you to get rid of this for me.”

  “It says, ‘What happens?’ ” Kevin said.

  “I know what it says. I need you to get rid of it.”

  Kevin took the shop keys out of his shirt pocket. “Let’s go inside. I think we could both use some coffee.” He locked the door behind them so they would not be bothered by customers.

  Kevin had the same brand of instant coffee in the back of the shop that Duncan had at home. The two men waited for the water to boil. Duncan sat down on a box. Kevin held out his hand for the chalkboard.

  “By ‘get rid of it,’ I take it that you don’t want me to just sell it in the shop.”

  “I need it gone.”

  Kevin handed Duncan a cup of coffee. “What’s going on?”

  Duncan leaned up against a stack of boxes. “When you lost your . . . husband . . . did you . . . did anything strange happen?”

  “Strange? What do you mean by strange?”

  “Do I have to spell it out?”

  “Yes! You have to spell it out. I can’t guess what’s in your head. You are standing here in your PJs and bare feet. I don’t think you are crazy, but I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me. Why do you need me to get rid of this chalkboard?”

  “Because it’s haunted!” Duncan yelled. “It’s haunted by my dead wife! She’s in the whole house, opening doors, playing with the cat, messing up the shoes. I can’t get rid of my whole house. But I can at least get rid of this chalkboard and this horrible message.”

  Kevin raised his hand and wiped the words off the board.

  “Oh, very good,” Duncan said. “I never would have thought of that. I’m cold,” he suddenly realized.

  “There are clean clothes on that rack over there,” Kevin said. “Help yourself.”

  Duncan wrapped himself in a grey robe and sat down on his box again.

  “My minister says it takes time, that all I’m experiencing is part of grief. I can accept that. That makes sense. But this does not make sense. I wipe out the message and it appears again. I throw away the board and it’s back again in the morning. Maybe I am just sleepwalking. I don’t have any friends I can ask. I’m nearly seventy years old, and I have no friends I can have a serious conversation with. You are the only one who can give me real answers. Did this happen to you when your husband died?”

  Kevin took a sip of coffee. Then he put the cup down and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.

>   “Not right away,” he said. “I was in the hospital for a while. Then I had to have help at home while I learned how to live in a wheelchair. But at last all the home-care workers and friends and family went back to their own lives. I was alone. That’s when the strange things started.”

  Kevin rubbed his hands together.

  “I thought I was over Dan’s death,” he said. “I was managing okay. Life was different, but I was doing all right. And then things started happening. I’d smell Dan’s aftershave. The knives, forks, and spoons would get messed up in the cutlery drawer. I like everything in its place. Dan could never see the point in that. When I’d go to bed, all the cutlery would be in its proper place. But in the morning, the knives, forks, and spoons would be all mixed together.”

  “You think he was there?”

  “He was there for sure. You know what it’s like when you come into your house and it’s empty? Or when you come in, and it’s quiet, but you can tell someone is there? Dan was there.”

  They drank their coffee in silence for a moment.

  “What does ‘What happens?’ mean?” Kevin asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Did you get any messages from Dan?”

  “The number 75,” Kevin said. “It kept appearing. Written in the dust on the telephone table. On the mirror when I got out of the shower. All kinds of places.”

  “What did it mean?”

  “Turns out, Dan had life insurance. Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth. He just hadn’t got around to telling me while he was alive.”

  “Seven hundred and fifty thousand. Wow. That’s life-changing money.”

  “And I’ve changed my life.”

  “How did you figure it out?” Duncan asked.

  “I took a leap of faith.”

  Duncan could get no more information out of him. They heard someone banging on the shop door.

  “Leave me your phone number, Duncan,” Kevin said. “I’ll set something up.”

  “What?”

  “Leap of faith, my friend. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  The parking lot was busy with shoppers and cars when Duncan left the thrift store. As he walked to his car, he kept his eyes straight ahead. If people were staring at him in his pajamas, he didn’t want to know.