Dirty Little Secrets (18 page)

I squatted down and wrapped the end of the sheet a couple of times around her ankles so I'd have something to hold on to. Grabbing the sheet, I leaned back and pulled as hard as I could, grunting like a pro tennis player, until I lost my grip and tumbled backward on my butt, slamming into a stack of newspapers on the other wall and scrambling out of the way when they started to wobble.

There was no way she was that immovable. I gathered myself up and pulled again, but as I looked up toward her head, I could see that her shoulders were caught by the corner of one of the still-standing magazine piles. The pile shifted dangerously as I pulled one more time. Dropping her ankles, I picked my way over to the spot where she was stuck, held the top of the pile with my hand, and kicked at the bottom until the stack turned just enough to allow her shoulder to get by.

Taking my position down by her feet again, I pulled one more time, and she moved a few inches in my direction. After a few pulls, the sheet started to get dislodged from over her head, and I could see some of her white-rooted, wiry red hair sticking out of the top. I tried not to look as I pulled. It was much easier to concentrate on the grungy suede slippers. If I allowed myself to stop and think about what I was doing, I wouldn't be able to finish. I had to concentrate on the how and not think about the why, or it would seem too horrible and creepy.

When we reached the corner, I realized I couldn't pull her any farther. Because there were stacks of newspapers against all the walls, there was no easy way to get her around the turn and into the straight part of the hallway that led to the front door. If she would bend, it might work, but she'd been dead so long that there was very little give left in her body.

I should have stopped to try out a better strategy, but I felt that I just had to keep moving—I had to get this part over with as soon as possible. Cleaning the house didn't feel like such a big deal, but moving Mom meant that I had to make it look right. Cops notice when bodies are moved, and I was sure it was some sort of crime.

By picking my way around her body—and stepping on what I think was her left hand in the process—I made it to the other side up by her shoulders to try and ease her around the corner. If she had been alive she would have been really pissed at me right about now.

I could feel myself starting to get frustrated, but I breathed in slowly and tried to calm down. I was so close—only fifty more feet and it might be possible to actually be normal after all. Fifty lousy feet.

Looking at the one sharp corner that stood between me and success, the anger roiled in my stomach, and I so badly wanted to scream and kick the stacks that surrounded us. The turn was so sharp and the path was so narrow—there was no way to get her around the corner. Relocating her was such a good idea and it made too much sense to
not
work.

Like everything else in this whole stupid day, I had failed again. Just like Mom and Sara always said—I couldn't do anything right. Even dead, Mom seemed to be laughing at me, lying there refusing to make it easy once again.

It would serve everybody right if I walked out of the house at that moment—straight down the driveway—and left all this crap behind me. Just turned my back on all of it and kept on going. Not that I had anywhere
to
go, but as long as it wasn't here, it really didn't matter. I imagined how it would feel to walk down the street with nothing in my hands and not worry about this house. I bet it would feel amazing. Free. There was nothing stopping me from doing it. It's not like there was a lock on the door, or someone telling me I couldn't go. Anytime I wanted to, I could just head out the door and let someone else deal with all this mess.

Except I knew that I wouldn't. It was up to me to deal with this, just like it had been up to me to take care of us these last few years, making sure Mom ate a decent meal once in a while and had enough clean clothes for work. It was up to me to make sure the plumbing still worked and we weren't reduced to peeing in buckets again. Up to me to make sure that nobody ever found out how bad Mom was getting. It was still up to me.

My body felt disconnected from my brain as I tucked in the sheet once again. Mom's arms were flung sideways near her head, but I couldn't bring myself to grab her hands, so I lifted her under the arms and pulled her back down the hallway just a little bit, so her feet weren't all jammed up in the corner and she wasn't visible from the front door. I sat in the hallway a few inches from her head and tucked my knees up under my chin. I told myself that I was just taking a break—I wasn't giving up—but I wasn't sure I believed me.

I felt empty and used up. As I sat, gazing at the floor, I noticed her left hand was brushed up against my leg, almost like she was reaching out to touch me. It was such an unusual gesture for her to make that it startled me. I looked at her unpainted fingernails with the ridges that had gotten deeper the past few years and wondered when she'd touched me for the last time. We'd never been a very “touchy” family, but I couldn't remember holding her hand or even feeling her fingers brush against mine as we passed something to each other recently.

Looking at the hand that had made such an unbelievable mess of things, I realized it was also the hand that had carefully pasted pictures of what she wanted her life to be like into a notebook—the hand that had stroked the feet of a lonely, dying woman.

I reached out and curled my hand around her still, icy fingers. I held it there for a long time as I sat with my knees to my chest, wishing that just for a minute she could squeeze it back and tell me everything would be okay.

chapter 15

8:00 p.m.

It was pointless to keep going but impossible to stop. I wandered aimlessly around the house, trying to decide what to do next, finally sitting down on the arm of Mom's chair to psych myself up for the long night ahead.

Something was sticking up from the back corner of the cushion. The remote, maybe? I leaned over and pulled out a pair of scissors. Special scissors with black handles. Cautiously, I stuck my hand farther down into that corner and felt something hard and narrow. Another pair of scissors, but these had blue handles.

I finally pulled up three pairs of scissors scattered around the edges where the cushion met the chair. It was just like Mom. She was the one who lost the scissors down here, and when she couldn't find them, she went out and bought another pair. After she blamed me for losing them, that is. I took the cushion off to see what else had been right under her butt the whole time.

There were a few coins of different sizes and some old popcorn kernels sharing space with over a dozen envelopes that were piled toward the front of the seat. The coins and scissors I could understand, but how would sealed envelopes just happen to fall underneath the front of the cushion? And in a nice, neat stack?

I picked one up and looked at the return address. It was from a bank and it was pretty thick. Maybe she had a secret bank account she didn't want us to know about. Mom always said we didn't have enough money for things that I wanted, but I never believed her because she had Dad's child support plus what she made at the hospital. I had to pay for my own cell phone, and I'd missed the tenth-grade trip to Disneyland last year because we supposedly couldn't afford it. The main reason I didn't get my license wasn't because I had no car, but because Mom said the extra insurance would be too expensive. I always suspected that saying we couldn't afford it was an easy way for her to get out of something she didn't want me to do. It would be just like her to be literally sitting on a fortune.

Sliding one finger under the envelope flap, I allowed myself a spark of excitement. There might be enough in here to really make a difference. I could get the car fixed and get my license so I wouldn't have to rely on other people to get everywhere. Maybe I'd buy a new car instead—one that didn't remind me of Mom every time I sat in the driver's seat. One that would take me as far as I wanted to go.

I ripped the envelope all the way open and took out the papers that were inside. Ever since I started earning my own money, I'd been getting bank statements, so I knew one when I saw one. And this wasn't one. It was from a credit card company. There were pages and pages of charges, and on the first page in big black letters was one of the largest numbers I'd seen in real life. I looked up at the date in the corner of the page. This statement was from six months ago, but even then Mom owed $48,562 to this credit card. With all of the Christmas stuff she'd bought last month, I was sure the total was now a lot higher. I frantically pawed through the envelopes from all the other banks. The next bill I opened was newer and had another huge number in the corner. The next showed a balance of only $9,867. In the space of just a few seconds, $9,867 had started to feel like “only.”

The handle of her purse was sticking up beside the recliner. Mom always kept it in the same spot so it wouldn't get swallowed up in the tide of garbage. The panic was rising as I reached into it and pulled out her wallet. It was the same worn brown leather wallet she'd carried since I could remember, bulging at the sides, with scraps of paper receipts sticking out the top. Carefully, I opened the snap and looked inside. The slots were filled with credit cards—some were grocery cards or insurance cards, and one was a library card, but most of them were credit cards. As I pulled them out, I examined the expiration dates—it would be just like Mom to carry around a lifetime's worth of expired credit cards—but all of these were current.

There were two cards with airplanes on the front, one with a panda bear, a Macy's, a Target, and one from a store I'd never even heard of. When her wallet was empty, there were twelve credit cards sitting in front of me. All of a sudden, I felt like I couldn't breathe.

The mountains of stuff seemed to vibrate as I shifted my glance from one pile to the next. I thought about the ice-skating lessons I wasn't allowed to take because they were too expensive, and the week at the lake that turned into three days at a Motel 6 in Modesto because it was a lot cheaper. The scholarships and grants I was chasing because there wasn't enough money to go to a good university without a lot of help. And this is where it had all ended up. Not in trips to the beach, or a remodeled kitchen. It had ended in late-night home-shopping bargains on stuff we'd never use and gifts for people she would never give. That pile of plastic had fueled this pile of worthless garbage. Instead of seeing just piles of clothes and junk, I realized for the first time how much money must have been involved in amassing this much stuff. How much had she spent on things, only to have them sit in a pile for months and years? Whenever I bought a new book, Mom would remind me that there was a library in town, and libraries were free. Thank God I had Dad's money, because Mom's was only for stuff that was important to her. Apparently, that included useless countertop mixers, but did not include me.

My stomach was in knots as I thought of having to pay it all back. What if being dead meant that you weren't off the hook? It would take years—decades, probably—to pay back all the money she owed. There was no way I could afford to go to a good school now. If I was lucky, I might have time for junior college between jobs, if I had to help pay all that money back. Josh and Kaylie would go off to freshman year at UC Berkeley or Stanford and I'd be . . . where exactly? Where would I be?

I grabbed each stack of credit card bills and flung them across the room, as if getting rid of the evidence would make the problem go away. My jaw clenched as I reached for an armload of newspapers and threw them into the middle of the room, only to have them settle on the piles like a small dusting of snow on a glacier. A scream rose from the back of my throat as I lunged toward a stack of books and newspapers next to her chair and brought them crashing down with a vibration so strong the walls shook. I grabbed anything I could reach, enjoying the thud as whatever it was hit the wall and bounced back into the room. The sharp sound of the vase breaking against the brick fireplace was still ringing in my ears when I noticed a small trickle of blood from a tiny gash in the side of my hand. Staring at the smear of red that ran from the cut, I wiped it with my other hand until it started to sting. The pain had a weird calming effect and I doubled over, breathing heavily like I'd been sprinting.

I couldn't spend another second in that house. I had to get out if I was going to keep hold of my sanity and salvage anything. Stacks of books and newspapers fell to the floor as I raced down the pathways, focusing only on reaching the front door so I could breathe again.

The cold air hit me as I yanked the open door, and I drank it in as I moved toward the darkness. My breath was making little puffs of fog but I didn't feel cold. Here, I was free from the pathways and the stale decay of the house. Out here, there was no ceiling to trap the mess, only the stars that promised the vastness of space with nothing between me and them but cold, clean air.

I reached the corner and stood under the streetlight watching the traffic signals change from green to yellow to red and back again like they were part of a universal rhythm. I had no plan, only vague thoughts that passed through my head like vapor, only to disappear as quickly as they had formed.

Without realizing I was even moving, I found myself standing in front of Kaylie's house. I stared at the front door and tried to decide if knocking was what I really wanted to do. The minivan was in the driveway, and I could see a light on in her window upstairs.

“Lucy!” she squealed when she answered the door. “Why didn't you call? We totally would have come picked you up.”

“It's okay,” I said, amazed that my lips were moving in a coherent manner. “I needed the walk.”

“Is your mom better?”

“About the same,” I whispered. I felt like I was watching everything happen from very far away. It was safer than being inside my body and feeling empty.