Dirty Little Secrets (14 page)

I walked back to the dining room and started moving boxes again. As I was stuffing some newspapers in a garbage bag, I heard it again. A small voice calling my name.

“Stop it!” I yelled out loud this time. I was starting to panic when movement at the window caught my eye. Before I could react, the curtains parted, and TJ stuck his head through them.

“Hey!” he said. “Didn't you hear me calling you?”

“Man, TJ,” I said. My knees wobbled with relief, and I felt like I had to sit down. “You scared the crap out of me.”

“Did I?” he said, not looking ashamed. “I wasn't sneaking up on you or anything. I yelled and stuff.” He scrunched up his nose and looked around. “What stinks?”

I ignored that last statement and crossed the room until I was standing above him at the window. “What are you doing out there?” I peeked out the window and saw him standing on the stack of plastic bags. Only TJ wouldn't think to ask what a giant stack of plastic bags was doing along the side of the house.

He looked around the room. “Are you moving or something? Who's going to babysit me when Mom goes out?”

“Knock it off,” I said. “We're not moving. I told you, I'm just cleaning up some stuff.”

“Cool.” TJ looked behind him. “Can I come in?”

“No!” I answered just a little too quickly. “You can't come in. It's not a good idea. You said yourself it stinks in here.”

“I didn't mean it. Come on,” he said. “I can help. Plus, you said you'd see if you could find some of Phil's stuff for me to go through.”

I hesitated just long enough for him to see the crack in my resolve. TJ was one of those kids that spent his free time wandering the neighborhood waiting for someone to ask him to come over. Whatever the reason, he hated being home—a feeling I understood more than anyone else on the block. Plus, he was a pretty good kid.

“It's freezing out here,” he said. “Can't I just come in for a little bit?”

Even though I willed myself not to look back toward the hallway, I could feel my thoughts wandering in that direction. It was dark out now, and even though I could still hear the music from the kitchen, I had to admit it would be nice having another living body in the house. How much could a kid figure out, anyway?

“Shouldn't you be in bed or something?” I asked.

“It's not even six o'clock,” he said. “Mom lets me stay up until nine during vacations. She's having that weird guy from work over for dinner, so I had to get out of there.” TJ's mom had been divorced for a couple of years and seemed to go out with a new boyfriend every week. TJ didn't seem to like it, but she kept the babysitting jobs coming, so it wasn't a problem as far as I was concerned.

I looked around. It was crazy to let TJ in. Nobody had been in here in years, and I was just going to let him climb through the window? I thought about how quiet and a little creepy it was without him here but what a huge risk I'd be taking.

“If I do let you in, you have to promise me that you'll stay in this room.”

“I promise,” he said, not even asking why. I could hear his feet kicking and scraping at the wood siding on the house. He stopped and looked up at me. “A little help?”

I reached down and grabbed the belt loops on the back of his pants and swung him into the room. He reached over to close the window, but I stopped him. “No, leave it open.”

“It's freezing out there. Why do you want it open?”

“I, uh . . .” I tried to think of a good reason why I needed the window open in the middle of winter. “The garbage disposal backed up and I'm trying to get the smell out.”

“My mom just uses air freshener,” he said, taking a good look around the room. “Wow, you guys have a lot of stuff. This is totally cool.”

“Ya think?” I said. “Well, I'm trying to get rid of stuff we don't need. Which is pretty much all of it.”

“I'll take it.” TJ started poking his finger in some of the cardboard boxes that were stacked against the wall.

I grabbed his hand and looked him in the eye. “What I want you to do is help me grab all of the green plastic bins in this room and the living room over there and we're going to stack them up against the wall. Under no circumstances are you to go in any other room. You will be banned forever if you do.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because I said so.”

“Okay, but why?”

“I don't want you to get hurt,” I said, knowing it was a lame answer.

TJ shrugged and bundled his jacket tighter. “Can you turn the heat on?” he asked. “It's just as freezing in here as it is outside.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “we're trying to save energy, so I can't do that right now.”

“You're going to wake up dead then,” he said. “ 'Cause you're going to freeze to death.”

If he only knew.

He poked at one of the green plastic bins. “So what is all this stuff, anyway?”

“I don't really know,” I said. “It's mostly my mom's.”

He looked at the growing wall of green bins and piles of belongings in both the dining room and living room. “Well, she must be rich, because I've never seen anyone with so much stuff before.”

Rich. That was hilarious. “I don't know about rich,” I said. “She just never gets rid of anything.” I started moving boxes off some bins that were stacked along one window.

“Not anything?”

“Nope. Not anything.” I stacked the boxes on top of some others in the middle of the room and started dragging one of the bins toward our growing stack.

“How about books that you guys have already read?”

I pointed to the overflowing bookcase in the front hallway. If I read one book every day for two years, I'd never get through them all. “Nope.”

“How about a snotty-nose tissue that someone who has the worst cold in the world has blown their nose in until it was dripping with boogers?”

I stopped to think for a minute. “Well, she might throw that away,” I said. “But if someone was working on an art project that could incorporate a snotty, boogery nose tissue, then she would keep it in a bag somewhere until she could give it to them.”

“Ewww!” TJ said. Then he started laughing. “That is so gross. What about a whole sculpture made with snotty-nose rags, belly button lint, and earwax?” He started laughing so hard that he bent over double and had to sit down on one of the bins.

As I watched him laugh, I started smiling too. Somewhere in this mess I just might find a bag full of snotty tissue, belly button lint, and earwax. I wouldn't put it past her. It was weird telling all this to TJ. None of us ever talked about it outside of the house, but for some reason he felt safe. Even if he said anything to his mom, she wouldn't believe him. Nobody would believe that the stories he was telling about our garbage pit were true. No one would choose to live like this.

“Okay, okay,” I said. I clapped my hands. “Come help me drag this bin over to those. This one is heavy, so be careful.”

He grabbed the front handle and I grabbed the back, and together we picked the bin up just a few inches off the floor and crabwalked it over to the others. “What's in here?” TJ asked, and before I could stop him, he pulled the lid off. “Oh, cool!”

I peeked over the edge and was relieved to see it was just a pile of old books she must have had a greater plan for.

TJ picked one up and looked at the spine. “What are they? They all look the same.”

I grabbed one and recognized it right away because we had another set buried in a bookcase in the living room. “They're encyclopedias.”

He looked at me blankly.

“You know, books people used to use if they needed to find out about something. Kind of like Google, only in real life.” I showed him the side of the book I was holding. “See, this one has everything that starts with
V
. I used to read these when I was little, like they were regular books.”

He picked up another volume and flipped through it. “Can I keep them?” He shuffled through the books in the box and pulled out two. “I'll take
T
and
J
.” He stuck his hand back in and pulled out another one. “And
L
too.
L
for Lucy.”

“Okay, but that's it,” I said. “We'll ask your mom about the rest later.”

As I lifted a small mountain of shoeboxes and started to step on them so they would fit into the bag better, I spotted the heavy brass corners and battered black leather of the trunk that I hadn't seen for years. Grandma had died before I was born, and Mom kept Grandma's special stuff in this trunk. If Mom and I were alone at night, she would sometimes let me sit with her and look at the yellowing bonnets and tiny lace shoes Grandma had saved from when Mom was a baby. I'd always wanted to put the clothes on my dolls, but Mom said they were too old to play with. The trunk opened with a loud creak that got TJ's attention across the room.

“What is it?” He came and knelt down by the trunk.

“Some of my grandma's stuff,” I said. The bonnets and booties were still carefully folded on top.

“Are you going to keep it?”

I nodded. “I think I should.”

Stacked in the corner was a set of gold-rimmed plates with pink flowers on them. Mom always said we would use these plates sometime when the occasion was special enough. As far as I knew, there had never been an occasion special enough. I took one finger and ran it through the thick coat of dust that had formed on the small top plate. In three short moves I made two eyes and a frowning mouth. Poor, lonely plates. Once this stuff was cleaned up, maybe I'd keep the plates. Except that when I was in charge, we'd use them every day.

TJ stuck his head in the trunk. “It smells like old people in here,” he said. He reached in and pulled out something from the bottom. “Was your grandma in the Olympics or something?”

I squinted at what he had in his hand. “Not that I know of.”

“Well, here's a gold medal from somewhere.” He handed me a heavy medal that hung on a faded red, white, and blue ribbon.

I turned it over. On the back was engraved:
First Place,
Central Conservatory Piano Competition
. I shrugged. “I never met my grandma. She must have been a good piano player.”

TJ was digging in the trunk again, and I was afraid he was going to wreck something. I wanted to put the whole thing aside until I had time to go through it piece by piece. Mom never talked very much about growing up—her stories never started with “When I was a kid” like a lot of other parents.

“Let's leave this alone,” I said. “I'll go through it later.” I reached for the baby clothes to put them back in the top of the trunk.

“What's a ‘prodigy'?” TJ asked.

I looked over his shoulder at the yellowed newspaper he was reading. “It's a little kid who is really smart or really good at something.”

“Well, this little kid is really good at the piano,” he said, pointing to a photo of a small girl seated on a piano bench, her shiny patent leather shoes dangling above the floor. “Is that your grandma?”

“Let me see.” I took the paper and looked more closely. The caption under the photo read: “Local piano prodigy little Joanna Coles can barely reach the keys, but she performed like a professional at the Central Conservatory of Music Piano Competition, where she beat out all comers to win first prize.”

“Huh. It's my mom.” I looked at the date on the paper. “She would have been about nine years old.”

TJ hoisted a big black leather book onto his lap. The pages creaked and the plastic sleeves stuck together as he opened it. “Looks like she won a lot of stuff.”

We quietly flipped through the pages that showed Mom's progress from a cute little girl whose feet didn't touch the floor to a beautiful teenager seated elegantly in front of a white baby grand piano in a sleeveless ball gown. Her neck was long, and she gazed straight into the camera, as though daring anyone to doubt her talent.

The newspaper clippings showed win after win at local and even national piano competitions—photos of Mom accepting medals and trophies of all sizes. The book was only half full, and the clippings stopped abruptly in 1970. The rest of the shiny, black pages were blank. Mom would have been about seventeen.

TJ shut the book. “Did she quit?”

I felt like I had been looking at pictures of someone I'd never met. Why hadn't she ever shown me any of this before? Why did she stop playing? She never let me dig in the trunk, and now I knew why. I realized with a jolt that I'd never get these answers. “I don't know,” I finally said to TJ.

“You should ask her.” He stood up and looked around the room.

I put the book on top of the baby clothes and carefully shut the trunk. “Yeah, I should.” There were so many things I'd never know the answers to now. “Enough of this. You go finish up over by that wall, and I'll take care of these things.” I needed something to distract me. Something that would take my mind off the photos and the clippings and the trophies that had never made it into this part of Mom's life. I wondered what had happened to that girl who looked like she could win anything, to turn her into someone who wouldn't even answer the front door.

chapter 12

6:00 p.m.

“Oh yuck!”

“What?” I prayed there weren't any maggots, because I wasn't sure how I would explain those away. High school science experiment? Suburban 4-H?

“This box is all soggy and gross,” TJ said. He had the flaps open and was picking out mildewed bits of paper that disintegrated and fell heavily back into the box as he held them up.

“It's okay,” I said. “Just shove everything into this garbage bag.”

“Hey, Lucy, this looks good,” he said. “Can I keep it?”

I looked over to see him holding up a plastic bag containing Teddy B., the brown gingham teddy bear I'd made by hand in third grade. I walked over to take a better look at the box.