“And you leave that bag here. Put that down right now.”
The way her mother had scolded her snapped her out of the fear. She wasn’t ten. She was an adult. An adult who functioned. And in one shrill, angry burst, she fired: “The next time I come back here, I’m throwing everything out!”
Silence. Elise knew she’d really done it now, and in a childlike reflex, she almost burst into tears and cried out, I didn’t mean it.
But she kept her mouth shut.
“You.” Her mother said, low and threatening. She hobbled toward Elise. “You will never be able to get rid of my things.”
But knowing her mother couldn’t catch up, Elise turned her back and dragged the heavy bag out behind her.
The teapot was still screaming when she reached her car.
~~**~~
Elise closed her eyes and tried to shut out the memory of that day. It had been their last exchange.
Hopeless and overwhelmed, she took a deep breath and decided the best thing to do was to go from room to room, scout things out, and turn on all the lights. Pull back the heavy drapes, open a few windows, and let in some air. Check out what was in every closet. Get a sense of what she was dealing with. Make a plan.
She brushed her hands on her jeans and went back to see what she’d stepped on in the hall. She stooped to study it.
It was a dried sea star. Sugar stars, they were called. She’d broken one of its arms. She remembered when she was little she’d been fascinated by them. When they were alive, she picked them up and their suction feet tickled her palm; when they were dried, they looked almost edible. She remembered wishing they were sugar-coated cookies. Now she was amused at the childish thoughts.
Gingerly, she picked up the pieces and set them on the hall table. She decided to start upstairs.
Upstairs, where she hadn’t been in . . . years, now that she thought about it.
She turned on lights as she went. All the rooms on the second floor branched from a narrow hall that ran the length of the house, and each room had sloped ceilings and a single window—though all the doors, including the ones to her mother’s bedroom and bathroom, were closed. In fact, it looked as though not even her mother had been up here in ages. The hall was littered with paper, cloth, and other detritus; lining the walls were more baskets and stacks of what looked to be driftwood.
She crept down the hall, stepping carefully, occasionally crunching something underfoot.
There was an unsettling rustling at the end of the hall, and a piece of newspaper moved. She thought she saw something skitter past her.
Great. Mice.
She made it to the end of the hall, to her old bedroom. She had left so much behind when she’d gone. Her bedroom was as good a place to start as any—whatever was in there was probably hers. She could toss it all and feel accomplished. She reached for the knob.
It didn’t budge.
She tried it again. Was it stuck?
No. Her mother had installed a locking knob on the door. It was locked.
“Mom!” She called out, even though she knew her mother wasn’t there. Fine. She turned to the room across from hers—it had been her father’s study.
There was a locking knob on that door, too.
She tried to calm herself. Fine, go to Mom’s room.
Her mother’s room. The bathroom. And even the linen closet. All locked.
Her breath caught in her throat and panic seized her. Wait a minute, Elise, she thought. There have to be keys to all these rooms. Probably in the kitchen somewhere.
The kitchen: that disorganized hole full of dirty dishes, broken cups and overstuffed drawers.
She made her way back downstairs and started her search. Drawer by drawer. Cupboard by cupboard. Grubby spoons, knives, forks. Napkins, potholders. Nails. Nails, tarpaper, hammers . . . and these looked new. She went into a few more drawers and cabinets. New tools were everywhere. Keys. What I need to find are keys. Bowls of screws, tacks. Piles of newspapers.
No keys.
In her desperation, she stopped rummaging and started rooting, stopped rooting and started removing. Soon she was pulling the drawers out, dumping their contents on the floor.
She could’ve sworn she heard a voice. Her mother: You will never be able to get rid of my things.
“Oh, yes I am!” she screamed. In response, something clunked upstairs. “Oh, yes I am! I don’t care if I have to break down these doors, I will get rid. Of your. Junk!”
She sank to her knees and burst into tears. She wasn’t strong enough to break down any of these doors, or even know how to go about doing it short of using an axe, and then it was going to cost her a fortune to replace everything.
Pete. She could call him. She could ask him how to get the doors open without damaging them.
She collected herself and reached into her pocket for her cell phone.
It wasn’t there. Had she left it in the car? No. She’d wanted it with her, in case . . . in case she fell over all the junk. In case she had to call someone because she was hurt. It had to be somewhere in the house.
She got to her feet and painstakingly retraced her steps, checking every inch of where she’d walked, kicking aside papers, wrappers, sticks. After a good forty minutes and she still hadn’t found it, she decided to check the car. Just check it, she thought. Maybe it fell out and it’s on the seat.
She opened the front door, dismayed when she saw that the skies had opened up. It was pouring, and the violent wind bent the trees and shrubs nearly horizontal.
Shit. She pulled up her hood and made a mad dash for the car, her booted feet landing in massive pools and runoff in the crumbling driveway.
And then she saw her cell phone. In a puddle, just outside her driver’s side door. It must’ve fallen from her pocket when she’d gotten out of the car. Knowing it was futile, she picked it up to see if it still worked.
Nope, dead.
She had no choice. She got in the car and started the ignition.
~~**~~
As she drove the two and a half miles back to the apartment house, she focused on calming down, formulating what she’d say to Pete, rehearsing how she’d say it. She parked the car and splashed her way up to his door. She noticed the cardboard pieces he’d put down in front of both of their stoops were little more than soggy, ineffective sponges.
She knocked on the glass of his outer door. Nothing.
She knocked again.
Footsteps, and then the inner wooden door pulled open and there he was, beer in hand, in his usual paint-spattered jeans and sweatshirt.
And before she could stop herself, she burst into tears. “All the doors are locked and I can’t find the keys and I don’t know how to get them open and my mother’s house is a mess!”
There was no response. She just stood there, crying and hating it, wiping her runny nose on her sleeve.
Finally, he just blinked, pushed the outer door open wider, and took a step back. “Jesus. Come in out of the rain. You’re going to catch pneumonia.”
She stepped inside, and he pulled out a chair at the kitchen table. “Sit.”
She did.
He brought her a box of tissues, went to the refrigerator, opened a beer, and set it in front of her. “You’ve changed your mind about me helping, I guess.”
She pulled a tissue from the black box and blew her nose, then said, “No, I just want . . . I don’t know what I want.” She shivered.
“What’s going on?”
She took a deep breath, blew her nose one more time, and then said, “Sorry.”
“That’s okay. It’s fine.” He set his hand on her arm.
She looked up at him, startled.
He withdrew his hand.
“No, that’s all right,” she said. “It’s actually kind of warm. I’m freezing.”
He went to a hook near the door and brought her one of his zip-front sweatshirts. “You can take off that and put this on. If you want.”
She hesitated.
It did look warm, and her sweater coat was soaked. She stood up and did as he’d suggested. She zipped the jacket, suddenly noticing it smelled . . . good, like nutmeg, she thought. She sat back down, blew her nose again, and sipped the beer.
He didn’t say anything; he just watched. Then: “So the doors are locked?”
“To all the rooms. And I have to get in there to clean them out. Do you have a special tool I could borrow or something?”
He was amused. “Not really. You’d have to pick the locks. I got a lock-pick kit in the truck, but it’s kinda something you don’t just do; it requires practice. But I’m pretty good at it. I could do it for you.”
“No!”
“Fine.” He took a step back, leaned against his kitchen counter, and folded his arms in front of his chest. “You know, I don’t get you.”
“I mean, I’m sorry. I . . . ” she took a deep breath. “The reason . . . the reason I didn’t want you to help is because . . . she has a lot of . . . had a lot of . . . stuff.”
There was a long silence again. Then he shrugged. “So what? Most older people have lots of stuff they’ve accumulated over the years.”
“You don’t understand. It’s a mess. She was a hoarder. Of weird shit.”
He frowned. “Weird shit?”
She nodded. And then, slowly, she told him the whole story, the words feeling sharp and foreign. She realized it was the first time she’d ever discussed it. But no expression on his face showed shock, or disapproval, or anything. When she was finished, the only sound in the room for a few moments was the soft murmur of the weather girl talking about gale warnings. Pete drained his beer.
He turned to the sink and rinsed out his can; he wiped his hands on a towel and leaned against the counter. “So what do you want to do? I mean, really? What would you like me to do?”
“I want all the doors unlocked. Or opened. Without them being damaged.” She sniffed. “And I want every item in every single room thrown out. Furniture, everything.”
“Okay. I think that’s a relatively easy problem to solve.” He tossed the towel in the dish rack. “You want to go now, or you want to wait until later or tomorrow?”
She thought about this. Again, her mother’s voice came back to her. She realized that she was a little scared of what might be behind the locked doors. And that if she waited, she might lose her nerve.
But she was glad, in a strange way, that Pete was going to be with her.
“Now,” she said.
~~**~~
The house’s dark green front door was banging in the wind. Pete shut off the truck engine, and both of them sat there, staring, the sound of the rain drumming on the roof.
She shifted to look at him. He was eyeing the house like he would an adversary, and she was suddenly aware that his doing this made him more than just her drinking buddy. She caught a faint whiff of nutmeg, and then her embarrassment took over again. “Look, maybe . . . you’re absolutely sure there’s no way you could just tell me how to use the kit.”
He was still staring at the door, but then he turned to look at her—and his expression was one she’d never seen on him before. It was almost as though he were annoyed. “Come on. Make up your mind.”
She nodded, and then simultaneously, they opened the doors, stepped out, and made their way to the house.
She could have sworn she heard him make a noise of disgust when he entered, but when she glanced at him, he wasn’t even surveying the scene; he was fiddling, instead, with some tools on his keychain. “Why don’t you show me the first door you want opened.”
“Um . . . it’s upstairs.” She cleared her throat. “It’s my old room.”
The stairs creaked beneath their feet. She wondered what he was thinking; she contented herself instead with trying to listen to every sound he made, whether or not he sighed or grunted. But she didn’t hear anything from him at all, save his boots behind hers. When they reached the top step, she heard that skittering from down the hall again, and the air felt closer than it had before—closer, and more rank. Like rotted lettuce and urine.
“I . . . I think there might be mice,” she said.
“Or something else. We might want to be careful when we’re going through all this stuff.”
They arrived at her door, and she took a step back to let him through. “This one.” She rubbed her arms, suddenly chilly. “This is it.”
He examined the door knob, and then worked with the tools on his keychain. “This lock’s pretty standard. Easy enough.”
She felt safer with him standing near her—an odd feeling she’d never had before—so she took a moment to look more closely at the condition of her surroundings. The coffee-colored paint was chipping, and in the corner above the window she saw what was clearly water damage, a black-and-green blotch haloed by yellow. All of this was going to be expensive to fix, and Mom hadn’t left much in the way of money. It occurred to her the easiest and fastest way out of this mess, once the place was cleaned up, was to fire-sale it. Dump it for as little expense as she could get away with—there were only a few small bills to pay off, and everything after that would be hers—and be done with it. It wasn’t easy to get nice old homes in Provincetown, and even this one, in the shape it was in, would make someone very happy.
“Voilà.” Pete pushed the door open and jammed the tool ring into the pocket of his jacket.
A smell like turpentine and asphalt drifted from the inside. She stepped across the threshold and gasped.
Everything of hers was gone. Her bed, her dresser, her lamps. Even the two framed pieces of art—both Cubist and possibly the only things she’d considered keeping—were gone. Instead, there was a single chair, piled high with junk, just to the right of the door, and the room was stacked, nearly floor to ceiling, with pieces of metal, cardboard, and wood. “This isn’t my stuff,” she said, more to herself than to him.
“You said this was your room.”
“Did she throw out my things?”
She felt his hand on her shoulder, and she suddenly felt so dizzy she leaned into it. Her mother had thrown out her things. Yes, it had been stuff she didn’t want, but it had been hers to throw away.
Her knees gave out.
Pete caught her.
She heard a crash behind her, and she realized he’d managed to clear off the chair with his free hand. It shifted and creaked when she settled into it, but it held.
He crouched, facing her. “This isn’t your stuff. You’re sure.”
“No.” She leaned forward and ran a hand through her hair. “I have no idea what all this is.” Her head throbbed, and her mouth filled with saliva; she thought she was going to throw up, but managed to quell it. She felt as though she’d been robbed. That same feeling she’d had when she’d come home to her apartment a few years ago: the door had been hacked open, and her TV, DVD player, and jewelry box were gone. She hadn’t been able to sleep for weeks—and it wasn’t because of the missing items, or out of the fear the person might come back, or even because she was running scenarios in her head of what might have happened had she been home. It was because someone had touched her things. Someone had been in her private space. Everything in her place had felt dirty.
She recalled the day she’d tossed her mother’s things in a bag right in front of the woman. Is that what her mother had felt?
Stop it, she thought. What you threw out then was junk, and it was for her own safety. You weren’t tossing out her photos or her bath products or her dishes or her furniture. You were throwing out junk. What Mom got rid of, in this room, that was your bed. Your dresser. Your lamps. She threw out perfectly good, usable stuff in favor of this . . . crap.
“We might still find your things,” Pete said, as if he’d been listening to what was in her head. “She could have just moved them someplace else.”
She nodded and took a deep breath.
He patted her leg, then went to one of the piles near her and pulled something out of it. “This looks like tar p
aper.” He held it up for her to see—it was a square and a triangle pushed together. Shaped like the side of a simple house. “And this—” he pulled something from a different pile. “This is aluminum.”
She was aware he was rummaging, and she was suddenly comfortable with him doing it.
“These materials had to be cut this way. If she cut it she’d have to have tools, like a jigsaw, or else she found it or bought it this way. But . . . there are thousands of pieces here.”
She looked around, and he was right. The same odd shape was cut out of several different materials, all of varying sizes. “Where did she get all this?”
“More importantly, what was she planning on doing with it?” He tossed the piece he’d been holding back on its pile, which toppled and landed on a coffee can. The can tipped over, spewing galvanized nails on the one clear patch of hardwood floor.
“I know what I’m going to do with it.”
He looked at her. “You okay? You look a little pale.”
“I’m fine.”
He seemed to accept this answer.
Elise stood up, feeling almost vengeful. “I’m going to get some boxes and start getting rid of it all.”
“You want me to open up the other rooms?” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I mean, I can open up the other rooms and go, if you’d rather.”
She realized he was offering her privacy. And at that moment, the thought of being alone in the house, of going through all of this—no, she corrected herself. The thought of being without him in the house—was terrifying. “No, I . . . would you help me throw all of this stuff out?”
He nodded. “If you want. I mean, if you’re sure everything’s going to the dumpsters and there’s no sorting, we can probably get this room all done in just a couple of hours.”
“I want that.”
He heaved a deep sigh. “Okay, then. I’m gonna step out for a cigarette and then we’ll get started.” He left the room and turned the corner.
She suddenly felt like she was being watched, watched by all the odd pieces of metal and tar paper and wood and whatever else. The pile he’d tossed the metal piece on shifted again.
She hurried out into the hall. “Wait—”
The Shadows Behind Page 17