Dirty Little Secrets (3 page)

She squeezed past the piles of newspapers and overflowing plastic bags in the hallway until she could see me. Her red hair showed an inch of gray at the roots, and wiry strands of it were hanging in front of her face. She put her hands on her hips, and I watched her ropy veins wiggle and move underneath her chapped, red skin. “What did you do with them?”

I shut my eyes and slowly opened them again. Here we go. “With what?” I asked, keeping my voice as even as possible. Any hint of sarcasm would send her over the edge, and I really, really wanted to go out tonight.

“You know what. My good scissors. The ones with the black handles.”

“I haven't seen your scissors, Mom,” I said, allowing just a hint of a sigh to creep into my voice as I tried to duck back into my room.

“Lucy Tompkins! You never put anything back where you found it. I need those scissors and I can't find them anywhere.” She leaned forward and tried to peer over my shoulder and into my room. I quickly stepped into the hallway and tried to block her view, although I knew she'd be in there looking through my stuff within seconds of my leaving.

Her eyes began to fill with tears. “I need them right now. There's an article on dog training I wanted to clip for your sister, and I always keep my good scissors on the table right next to the chair. Now they're missing and I know you took them.”

In a voice you'd usually use on a three-year-old I said, “Honestly, I didn't do anything with them.” For once, this was the truth. I hadn't touched her stupid scissors. “Kaylie's coming to pick me up in a couple of minutes, so I have to finish here.”

The tears were starting to spill over her eyelids and run unchecked down her cheeks. “After sixteen years, this is what I get? No help at all? You're just going to run off with your
friends
and leave me here alone? Can't you spare two minutes to help me look?”

I backed into my room and left her standing in the hallway looking old and defeated. God, I couldn't wait to get out of here and get my own place. I'd live all by myself and not answer to anybody. Less than two years—I just had to keep telling myself, less than two years and I could leave this all behind like Phil and Sara had.

I finished packing, but a lump of guilt settled into my chest. I listened to her shuffling around in the living room until I couldn't stand it anymore. In a few minutes, I'd be out of here, hanging out with Kaylie at the movies, but I knew she'd spend the next twelve hours sitting on the recliner watching TV by herself, which despite everything made me feel kind of bad.

Lifting my backpack onto my shoulders, I checked the time. Kaylie wouldn't be here for a few more minutes, and it would make Mom happy if I at least made an effort. It's not like I had a prayer of finding her stupid scissors in the avalanche of garbage, but I could fake it. At some point, I'd just started to go along with her and pretended everything was normal and this was the way everyone lived. It was easier that way.

I squeezed through the hallway and spotted Mom sorting through a stack of pictures in the living room. “Did you find them?” I asked hopefully.

She looked up from the pictures like she'd forgotten I was in the house. A frown settled on her face as she refocused her anger on me. “How could
I
find them when I have no idea what
you
did with them?”

I looked around the room, trying to concentrate on all the horizontal surfaces where a pair of scissors could be set down and never seen again, like some crazy picture from one of those
I Spy
books. I inched my way over to the recliner. “I think I might have put them back over here,” I said, as cheerfully as I could manage. I picked up a plastic bag from the drugstore and looked inside.

Mom leaned over and snatched the bag from my hands. “Don't touch that,” she said. “I need those things for work.”

It always came down to trying to find the right answer in a game where I didn't know any of the rules. If I didn't help look for the thing
I
supposedly lost, she'd be mad. If I touched any of
her
stuff, she'd be mad. It was just a question of what was going to make her less mad at any given moment. The exhaustion I always felt in these situations began creeping into my bones. “Okay,” I said in my most patient voice. “I'm going to retrace my steps back to the dining room.”

As I tried to turn in the narrow pathway, my backpack clipped the corner of a box that was stacked on top of some newspapers. It wobbled and started to fall, but I caught it in time and eased it back.

“Watch out!” Mom yelled. “I swear, you are such a klutz! Can't you even walk through a room without sending half the contents to the floor?”

No matter how many times she said stuff like that, it still settled heavily onto my chest. I dug my fingernails into the palms of my hands, hoping the pain would distract me from crying. “Sorry,” I mumbled.

Mom shook her head and sighed, as if the world's problems had been placed on her shoulders. “That's the best you can do? Always knocking everything over, losing my things. You never lift a finger—”

She was just warming up when Kaylie's signature two short beeps followed by one long beep sounded out front. It was like the cavalry had come to rescue me from hell.

“I have to go,” I said. I pulled my backpack tight against my shoulders and inched carefully along the path toward the front door. The relief I always felt when I stepped out of the house was like plunging into a cold pool on a hundred-degree day.

“I hope you have a
lovely
time,” Mom said, turning back to the pile of photos, the saga of the lost scissors temporarily forgotten. I said nothing, but shut the door just a little more forcefully than was necessary as I left, hopefully dislodging a pile or two to give her something to do for the night.

Now, as I stood in front of my bedroom door the next morning, I wondered if she'd ever found those stupid scissors. I pushed it open and stepped inside, leaving the rest of the house behind me. Compared to everywhere else in this place, my room was like paradise, with surfaces that weren't covered with bags of useless garbage, and with a bed you could actually sleep in.

The first time I'd really cleaned my room a couple of years ago, she'd totally freaked. I'd been babysitting at the Callans' when I got the idea to clean my room. I wanted my bedroom to look the same as the ones their kids had—carpet on the floor you could see and a desk you could reach without having to wade through drifts of crap. A room that could be dusted on occasion because there wasn't so much clutter, with a bed that didn't have to be cleared to be slept in. It's not like anyone else would see it, but still it would be nice. I'd started one morning when Mom was at work, and by the time she got home you could really see the difference. Despite my better judgment, I thought she might be happy about it, might be glad that for once I'd done some work around here. I couldn't have been more wrong.

The whole neighborhood could hear her ranting out by the garbage cans as she dug through them for the dirty stuffed animals, clothes that were too small, games with missing pieces, and everything else I had thrown out. I got the usual lecture about starving people in Africa who didn't have anything nice at all as she marched the garbage bags back into my room. Not that I could ever figure out what a starving African child would do with a one-eyed Care Bear. After she'd fallen asleep in the recliner, I'd taken the bags back out of my room and shoved them deep into the dining room where they quickly got absorbed into the mess and disappeared. From then on, I cleaned my room by relocating the junk to other parts of the house.

Soon after that first time, she made Phil take my door off the hinges and put it in the garage so she could keep an eye on me. At least that's what she said. Phil never said anything, but I could tell he felt bad about it. He was a senior in high school by then and did whatever it took to get by—just marking time until he could move out and be on his own like Sara had done years before.

You'd think a person would get used to being completely exposed, but I never did. I always slept facing the wall, but it still felt like someone was watching me. It took almost a year of careful negotiation to get the door put back on, minus the lock and doorknob so it didn't actually close all the way, but I wasn't about to complain. Apparently, nobody as sneaky and selfish as me deserved any privacy—you never knew what I might get up to in here if I had an actual door that locked. I might go crazy and vacuum the carpet or, worse, wash the windows. Anytime I cleaned something, she took it as a personal attack, like I was saying she wasn't good enough to do it herself. Which, in reality, she wasn't.

I reached into my jacket pocket for the ticket stub from the movies last night and smiled to myself. Smoothing over the corner that had gotten bent, I could almost feel the weight of Josh's arm around my shoulders. I put the stub carefully in my vintage Partridge Family lunchbox. A calm feeling came over me as I sifted through the tickets I kept there—movies, the baseball game with Dad when I went out to see him that one summer, Disney on Ice when I was seven, and the circus from before Mom decided it was cruelty toward animals and we stopped going.

My room was freezing, so I reached down and clicked on the ancient space heater. One hard smack to the side got it running again, the orange glow from the coil inside making me feel warmer even before the heat actually kicked in.

I wasn't sure when the furnace had broken completely, but it hadn't worked right since last year. I'd have to call Phil and have him come try to fix it again. He hated having to come home from college to deal with the house, but we didn't really have a choice. The last repairman didn't get past the front hallway before realizing the place was too full of crap to even get near the hot water heater. He threatened to report Mom to Child Protective Services if she didn't clean it up. He must not have, because CPS never showed up. Neither did another repairman. Mom said a lot of people in the old days had no hot water or indoor heat, and it didn't hurt them any.

Because she had an early dentist appointment, I hadn't had time to take a shower at Kaylie's this morning. I took inventory in my bathroom mirror to see how bad things were getting. Cutting my hair short had been a great idea, because it made showerless days not as noticeable. I could probably hit the gym for a shower later today so I'd look as good as possible for tonight—the mere thought of Josh sent an electric thrill through my entire body. Maybe I'd even manage to get a workout in this time, and justify Dad paying for the membership. Although from the looks of my hamper, a trip to the laundromat this afternoon was probably more important.

I was heating up some water in my microwave to wash my face when the doorbell rang. I froze like we always did, hoping whoever was out there wouldn't hear anyone moving around inside. The doorbell rang again a few seconds later, and I could hear distant knocking. Unless she knew who it was, Mom wouldn't get it, either, so we'd both just wait until they got tired and went away. Except whoever it was wasn't going away. After it rang insistently a third time, I quietly opened my door and tiptoed down the hall.

There was a spot in the dining room where you could look out the window without anyone seeing. Just as I reached it, I heard a car pull away from the front of the house and exhaled the breath I hadn't realized I was holding. Having someone at the front door always tied my stomach up in knots.

As I walked back to my room, I wondered why Mom didn't open her door even a crack. Usually she at least listened to see if she could figure out who it was. She must be sick or something if she didn't bother to come out at all. Her room was so full of stuff that she hardly ever slept in there anymore, but she occasionally shoved everything off the bed if she really needed to use it.

Feeling like I should at least make sure she was okay, I headed toward her room. The
National Geographic
s blocked a good six feet of the hallway, and I'd slowly started to pick my way over the mountain of fallen magazines when I saw it. One of Mom's slippers sticking out from under the pile.

“Mom?” I bent down and threw some of the magazines off until I had uncovered her leg. I shook it. “Mom?” It didn't jiggle like it normally would; it just felt solid and heavy. “Mom!”

Because the paths we'd carved through all the garbage over the years were only wide enough to accommodate one relatively skinny person, I had to kneel down by her foot and stretch out on my hands so I could reach her face. I frantically tossed magazines to the side until her head was completely uncovered. Her eyes were closed and her mouth had a purplish tinge around the edges. I followed her outstretched arm and saw her inhaler just out of reach on the ground. She must have been having an asthma attack when she fell, pulling a decade's worth of magazines with her as she went.

“Mom!” I reached up to shake her shoulder, but only felt the heaviness of her body as it refused to move. “Mom!” I yelled a little louder. “Come on!”
This was not happening. This was not
happening right now
. My heart was pounding so loud it sounded like the ocean in my ears.

I reached up and with a quick motion put my index finger out to feel her face. Her cheek was mottled and cold. Even though she was pale, my finger made a faint mark on her skin where I'd touched her. I scrambled backward, slipping on the magazines, and slammed into a pile of newspapers, sending them cascading down on us both. My breath was quick and short as I tossed them off me, throwing them as far as I could down the hallway until I could struggle to my feet.

Standing alone in the cold, dark hallway, I felt my teeth start to chatter, and I couldn't keep my hands from shaking. “This can't be real. This can't be real,” I repeated over and over as I crouched down, pulling the newspapers off her, revealing her face one more time.