The Snowball Effect (4 page)

Our basement was one of those nasty unfinished basements with a cold cement floor and bad lighting. The washer and dryer were back in the corner. There were a lot of pipes up by the ceiling. I imagined Mom swinging from a rope from one of the pipes.

Stop thinking about her,
I told myself.
Think about happy things. Think about Riley and bunnies and sunshine.

I pictured me and Riley walking through a field chasing bunnies. I went upstairs to my room and lay on my bed.

I stared up at the ceiling, at my graduation present
from Christine. It was a big collage on poster board. She'd made one for everyone in the Old Crew. In the middle, real big, was a picture of me and Riley sitting together after one of his soccer games, and a bunch of other pictures of us from high school, me and Riley and our friends. Then there were random happy words she'd cut out of magazines. “Fun.” “Friends.” “Awesome.” I hadn't gotten anyone a graduation present. I hadn't even thought about it.

I checked the time and then reached into my bag for my cell phone and called Kara. “Guess who just got to my house.”

“Who?”

“You'll never guess.”

“I know I won't. Tell me.”

“My sister.”

“Who?”

“Vallery. My older sister.”

“Oh, yeah. Wow.”

“Apparently Mom had a lawyer and the lawyer called Vallery and she has to be Collin's guardian or something.”

“Wow.”

“I know.” I looked out the front window at Vallery's Mustang. Where had she put all her stuff? Was she even planning on staying, or would she take Collin back to Texas? Would she even keep Collin now that she knew he had a grandmother who could raise him? Why did she
decide to come here at all, after she'd told the lawyer that she didn't even think she'd be able to make it to the funeral?

“I guess I'm staying home tonight,” I said. “And apparently there's going to be a funeral. I'll let you know when it is.”

For the first time, I imagined Mom's funeral. A ton of people had come to Carl's funeral, and he didn't even have that many friends, so I could only imagine how packed Mom's funeral would be.

“All right,” Kara said. “Let me know if there's anything I can do.”

I pictured the funeral home full of people, with each and every person making the Poor Lainey face.

“Hey, Kara…this is going to sound dumb, maybe, but can you not tell Christine and all of them? About the funeral.”

“Oh. Sure. I understand if you don't want a lot of people there.”

“Thanks. I'll talk to you later.”

I turned on the television. I waited for Vallery to come back, but after an hour she still hadn't. I looked out the window to check if her Mustang was still parked in front of the house. It was. I wondered what I'd do if Vallery went back to Texas just as suddenly as she'd shown up, if Collin went to live with his grandmother, if I was left here in this house all alone.

I called Riley's cell phone and left a message asking
him to please, please, please come over when he got off work.

 

When I asked Riley to spend the night a few days after Grandma Elaine died, he told me he didn't want to because he thought it would look bad. Riley was the kind of guy who wanted to wait until he was married to have sex. Except we didn't wait that long. After two years we knew that we would be together forever and we didn't see any reason to wait until we made it official.

When Riley acted weird about spending the night that first time, I reminded him that we were already sleeping together, and I made him feel guilty about leaving me alone when I was sad. And after he realized that my mom didn't care if he spent the night, and his parents didn't care either, he stopped being uptight about it. He came over whenever I asked him to, even if he had to wake up early for work the next day.

When Riley showed up in my room at ten with an overnight bag, Vallery still hadn't come back.

“Whose Mustang?” Riley asked. “Is he hiding in your closet?”

He winked at me and I rolled my eyes. “You just missed him. He climbed out the window.”

Riley took off his jeans and climbed in bed beside me.

“Maybe you can take a ride in it sometime, though.”

“Oh, you do know who it belongs to?”

“Yeah. It's my sister's.”

He sat up and stared at me. “Your
sister
?”

“Yes.”

He grinned, like he thought I was messing with him. “You don't have a sister.”

“I do. She lived in Colorado, but now she lives in Texas. Well, she did live in Texas. I guess maybe she's going to live here now. I don't even know. She's Collin's guardian. Maybe. I think.”

“Where's Collin? Is he home?”

“No. He's with Carl's mom.”

Riley shook his head. “I can't believe we've been dating for almost four years and you never told me you had a sister.”

“No, I told you about her. Remember the summer I ate nothing but Hot Pockets?”

“That was her? I thought that girl was your cousin or something.” Riley snuggled up to my back. “What's that soap opera you like to watch?” he asked me. “Lainey St. Somebody.”

“Hush,” I said.

“You should write to them. This would make a good story line.”

I'd almost fallen asleep when I heard Vallery come in the front door. A few minutes later she came to my door wearing a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt and flannel pajama pants. I looked at her in the glow of the television. “There you are,” she said. “Mabel? Really likes to talk. Oh my freaking God. I'm taking Mom's room. I know that's
kind of weird but oh well.” Then she turned and walked away.

“So that was your sister?” Riley asked.

“Yup. That was Vallery.”

“Nice to meet you!” he yelled after her.

I turned off the television. “Go to sleep,” I muttered. And then I was out.

I
n the morning when I woke up, I felt fine for a second, and then I remembered all over again. The person who had slept across the hall wasn't Mom. The footsteps puttering around the house weren't Mom's. Mom was gone. Vallery was here. I buried my face in Riley's back and fell asleep again until he got up to leave for work.

After Riley left, I stayed in my room. I didn't want to go out and talk to Vallery. I hadn't seen her in
ten years
. What did we have to talk about, besides our dead mother? I kept the door shut, and Vallery didn't bother me.

That afternoon when I heard her leave in the Mustang, I went down to the kitchen to make some lunch. But instead of going to the refrigerator, I opened a drawer and found Mom's phone book. I looked up Carl's mother's number.

I dialed the numbers too quickly and hit a wrong button. The robot voice came on and told me to try again. So I did. Collin's grandmother answered.

“Hello?”

“Hi. This is Lainey. Can I talk to my brother?”

She didn't answer me, but then I heard her yelling for Collin. I waited. Finally he picked up.

“Lainey?” he said.

“Hi, Collin!”

“Hi, Lainey.”

“Are you having fun at Grandma's?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are you ready to come home soon?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Our sister Vallery's going to bring you home. Grandma and Vallery and the lawyer just have to talk first.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know I miss you, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay. I'll—”

But he'd already hung up.

 

I had no interest in entering Mom's bedroom, but Vallery knocked on my door that night and insisted that I had to help her pick out something for Mom to wear for the funeral.

I looked at Vallery's things piled up in the corner.
She'd brought a red suitcase and three trash bags. It didn't look like a lot of stuff. I wondered what she'd brought and how long she planned to stay. I tried not to look around at anything else. I tried not to think about the fact that we were dealing with my dead mother's clothes. I tried to be cool like Vallery. But it was probably a lot easier to be cool when you hadn't seen the dead woman in ten years.

She hadn't seen Mom wear those clothes. She couldn't picture her in them, walking around the house, playing with Collin, leading one of her groups, making dinner, crying in the recliner after Carl died. Those clothes, to Vallery, were just clothes to be sorted through. It seemed perfectly normal to her that she was rummaging through Mom's things, shoving the rejected outfits into trash bags, picking out the last outfit she'd ever wear. Maybe Vallery would have been the sort of daughter who shared clothes with Mom. But I never went through Mom's closet, never borrowed anything. This felt like an invasion, and I didn't want any part of it.

I let Vallery dig through the closet while I sat on the floor with my back against the bed. I picked up a notebook sitting on the nightstand. I opened it and pretended to look occupied. As I stared at the notebook, I realized what it was. Mom's journal. This certainly constituted a bigger invasion than sorting through her clothes, but I couldn't put it down. Mom hadn't left a suicide note, but maybe she'd written something in here. I flipped to the last page. These could have been the last words Mom had ever written.

Notes for Mom's workshops. New metaphors for life. Jesus. She spouted off cheesy nonsense, but those women loved her. I flipped back a few pages, but it was all the same sort of stuff. Nothing about Carl or her depression. She must have stopped writing in there months ago.

“What about this?” Vallery said. I put the notebook back and looked at the green dress she held up.

“I guess that's fine.”

Vallery turned and looked at it again. “I think I might actually keep this one.”

“You're going to keep Mom's dress? You're actually going to wear that?”

“Yeah. So what? It'll fit me.”

“But she's dead.”

“Lainey, have you ever shopped at a Goodwill? Or bought anything secondhand?”

I ignored her and stared at the row of stuff hanging up in Mom's closet. She set the green dress to the side and pulled a black sweater off a hanger.

“Lainey, answer me.”

“Yes, I have.”

“Then I hate to break it to you, but you've probably worn some dead person's clothes. Death is the number-one reason why people make donations to Goodwill.”

“I'm sure that's a real statistic.”

“Well, I'm keeping the dress.”

“Okay. Whatever.”

Vallery flipped through the clothes. I picked at my fingernails.

“So what were you doing in Texas?” I asked.

“What do you mean, what was I doing? I was living there.”

“I know. I mean, did you have a job?”

“Of course I had a job. How do you think I paid my bills?”

I knew I sounded like an idiot, but I just wanted to know something about Vallery, anything about what her life had been like before Mom died. Why did she have to make that so difficult?

“Are you going back?” I asked. I didn't know what I'd do if she said yes. If Riley and I would get the house. If I'd ever see her or Collin again.

“How could I go back, when I have to take care of you guys?”

She wasn't going back. That was good. “You don't have to take care of me. I'll be eighteen soon.”

“Oh, right. You'll be able to magically support yourself when you turn eighteen.”

“Exactly. So why don't you want to go back?”

“Well, I didn't love it there or anything. I had a job I wasn't too crazy about. I had a few friends. Nothing that I'll really miss.”

“You won't miss your friends?”

She shrugged. “I moved a lot, so I have friends all over the place. Dallas is just another place. And I was born in Baltimore, so I guess this is home. Kind of.”

“What about all your stuff?”

She pointed behind her at the trash bags. “There it is.”

“You didn't have furniture or anything?”

She shrugged. “I let my roommate keep all that stuff.”

Vallery pulled a red dress off a hanger. She held it in front of her and looked at it. I looked, too. I remembered that dress. Mom had worn it to a Christmas party we'd all gone to the year before. She'd bought Carl and Collin matching dress shirts and nice new pants. I hadn't wanted to go, but she'd said I could bring Riley, so we went. Mom bought a new dress for me to wear. She picked it out. It was red, like hers.

“That one,” I said to Vallery.

“This one?” She tugged at the neckline. “It plunges. Don't you think it might look a little trampy?”

“No,” I said.

That night at the Christmas party had been one of the last times I remembered Mom being happy.

 

I knew from Carl's funeral that a funeral wasn't just the funeral. First they had to lay the dead body out at a funeral home for two days so people could come by and stare at it. And the immediate family had to be there for
hours
on both days, just standing around with the dead body and greeting everyone. And then they had the funeral service and you caravaned to the cemetery and stuck the body in the ground. And then sometimes you even had a party afterward. I really didn't understand why it had to be so drawn out. Who really wanted to be in a room with a dead body for hours at a time, for days? Why wasn't the stupid funeral service enough?

Unfortunately, Lainey Pike didn't make the rules, so Mabel and Vallery arranged for Mom to be laid out for two days at the Lee-Johnson Funeral Home, the same place where we'd had Carl's funeral. I hoped they were giving us some kind of discount for being loyal customers.

The viewing at the funeral home both days was packed. I didn't own much black, so I'd thought for a second about wearing the red dress Mom had bought me for the Christmas party, but then I realized that'd be ridiculous. No one else but Mom would be wearing red. I wore the same black dress that I'd bought for Carl's funeral.

I'd known that Mom had worked with a ton of women, but it was crazy to see them all gathered together like that. All those women who reminded me of the way Mom used to be.

Mom always said she knew exactly how her problems
started. She said her life was happy and great until I was four (which I didn't believe, because she'd already been divorced twice by then). When I was four, she was in a car accident while driving to work with her best friend. Well, that's how she told it. For all I knew it was some random woman she'd picked up at the 7-Eleven. Or maybe it never happened at all. But for the sake of argument, Mom and her best friend were on their way to work when a pickup jackknifed them. Mom had a concussion and the best friend died. That's when she lost half her mind. So she said.

She lost the other half when I was seven. She said we were walking to the store (because after the car accident she hated driving if she didn't have to) and I found a garbage bag at the side of the road. I walked up and kicked it. Mom, for whatever reason, decided to bend down and tear the bag open and investigate. She found a dead body inside. According to Mom. I didn't remember this particular incident at all. She said it was so traumatic that I blocked it from my memory. She said we both cried and cried and we flagged a car down and had them call the cops.

A few months after that, the fear-of-ovens thing kicked in. She'd just dumped her boyfriend and he'd moved out. I don't even remember his name—Daddy Whoever, right? Mom was in the kitchen at the restaurant where she worked and flames shot up out of the oven, and she freaked out. She didn't get burned. Not even close. The chef's eyebrows were singed, but that
was the extent of the damage.

A while after that, Mom and Carl met in this support group for crazy people. Not real crazy people like schizophrenics or anything, but dumb people like Mom who were afraid of things like ovens. Carl was afraid of public transportation.

The key to the support group was taking baby steps, and that the whole group be there when everyone conquered their fears. Mom went first. They had Mom turn the gas in the house back on, and that was the first step—Mom just living in the same house with a gas oven. I wasn't allowed to use it, and Mom wouldn't go in the kitchen, so I still lived on Hot Pockets. Then after a week or so of that, Mom and Carl and this other woman and the group leader worked up to just standing in the kitchen and talking. Carl actually acted like he was a little afraid, too, I guess to make Mom feel better about having such a stupid fear. After that, the group leader made dinner in our kitchen for everyone. Then the next week, Mom made dinner. She didn't fall into the oven, and everything was fine. She never relapsed. It was like she'd never had the stupid phobia.

Then they worked on Carl's public transportation nonsense. See, the reason Carl needed to get over his fear of public transportation was that he didn't have a car back then. And without public transportation he really didn't have much of a shot at getting a decent job. I swear to God those stupid fears they came up with were just to get
out of going to work every day.

The story of Carl's attempted rehabilitation is long and boring, but in the end, Carl did not conquer his fears the way Mom did. He dropped out of therapy. A few years later, Mom ran into him at work. Since she'd gotten over the oven thing, she'd found a job as a waitress at a buffet. Carl sat in her section one night and they talked a little bit; then he left her a huge tip and his phone number. She didn't have a boyfriend at the time, so things moved pretty quickly after that. I'm pretty sure he was over the public transportation thing by then anyway, but Mom wanted to help him with his anxiety, so he pretended that he'd had some miraculous recovery as a result of her guidance. Mom was so inspired by the experience that she decided to become a life coach and hold her own inspirational group sessions. She started inviting women over at all hours of the day when she wasn't working at the buffet, and she gave them these goofy inspirational talks and had them talk about their stupid problems and write down stuff in journals, and sometimes they did little interventions like Mom had done with the oven.

I could still hear her in my head, standing in the living room, pouring her heart out to those lonely, crazy women.

Picture Mom, a pretty forty-something-year-old woman named Lisa, standing in her living room in blue jeans, a nice shirt, and bare feet. Her hair and makeup are done up nice, like always. There are fifteen women
sitting around the living room and dining room. Our living room had a big sectional couch that stretched around two walls, and the dining room was full of chairs too. At first the women used to all fit on our old couch, but when Mom got more popular, we got rid of the dining room table and started eating at the table in the kitchen.

Most of the women are middle-aged. Most of them are overweight. All of them have low self-esteem. It's the first night of group—that's what Mom called it, just “group”—and they're all nervous.

“Can you control the things that happen to you?” pretty Lisa asks them. Some people nod or shake their heads, then look around at one another to see if that was the right answer. Lisa nods at them as she paces back and forth in the living room. “To a certain extent you can. If you don't want to get robbed, you don't walk alone in bad neighborhoods at night. Right?”

The women all nod. They know you shouldn't walk alone in bad neighborhoods at night.