Chapter 14
— Chapter 14 —
The basement smells the same: cinder block and mold and the old curly wood shavings on Step’s workbench. I remember coming down here when my parents were fighting. I’d sit on the metal stool that had been painted with at least a dozen different paint colors over the years, chips and scratches exposing all of them. I liked to trace my finger along the chisel gashes in the workbench and ruin a few zip ties by zipping them. My favorite thing to do was twist the sliding handle on Step’s vise until the wood blocks closed on a book or a hammer handle or my hand or my wrist. Just tight enough. Half a turn from harm. It pulled me into my body and made me feel real.
No one has cleaned up Step’s tools. There are rusty wrenches, screwdrivers, and hammers stacked in piles like pickup sticks—everything dusty. He could have last used them a year ago or ten. I look around for clues of what he might have been making, but it’s all garbage. Piles of cardboard. Empty milk crates. The dining chairs he got at a neighborhood yard sale when I was a teenager. He was going to learn how to do caning and repair the seats. People pay good money for chairs like that. Waste not, want not, Freya. The sled I broke ramming into a rock when I was five. It only needed one board replaced. He promised to fix it every winter, and I was always disappointed. Now I understand how hard it is to find a starting place, how heavy our hearts get, how exhausted we are. There are so many things I wish Step had done instead of carrying the weight of unfinished projects. I would have been happy with a cheap plastic sled from the grocery store and a snowy afternoon at the park with my father.
I open the cabinet above his workbench and find Claussen pickle jars filled with bent nails and corroded screws. On the top shelf, his transistor radio is still tuned to 93.9 WNYC. I turn the volume dial past the click and find familiar comfort in the whirring static and Terry Gross’s gentle questions.
The washer and dryer are at the back of the house, past the oil furnace I don’t know how to use and a water softener that requires an unquantified refill of a certain kind of salt to an unknown compartment at unspecified intervals. It’s one thing to think about repairing the siding and the cracked front stoop, but being in the belly of this building, with a view of its internal organs, sends me into a new kind of panic. I’ve spent my entire adult life in efficiency apartments. I’ve never even had a thermostat I could control.
I remember Step doing seasonal chores like tilling dirt and duct-taping foam covers over the hose faucets. I’m sure no one did that this winter. From what Hans told me the first time we spoke, those tasks were left undone for many winters. I assumed Hans wouldn’t know why, so I didn’t pursue it, but I wonder how my mother and Step were living before they died. Aubrey would know, but I don’t think it’s okay to ask a kid questions like that.
In the back room, there are dozens of cardboard file boxes stacked against the wall. The addition to the house was built on a slab of granite, and instead of trying to blast it out, the contractors cemented around the bedrock to build a ledge that takes up half the room. There are boxes on the ledge too, but there shouldn’t be. When it rains too much, the granite weeps.
There’s a black sweater draped on a drying rack and a jug of detergent on the shelf over the washing machine. I pull wrinkled wads of tip money from the pockets of my jeans as I throw them in the washer. I’m afraid to count. It can’t be much. I need to pay Aubrey back for her laundry soap and food and help. I have to keep myself fed and standing while I do whatever needs to be done to get rid of this house.
I don’t think I can make it up the stairs and back down again to switch the laundry to the dryer. While I wait, I sit at Step’s workbench and rummage through cabinets while Terry Gross talks about Shakespeare with a former child soldier from Sierra Leone. I find a crumpled receipt for a can of WD-40, three two-by-fours, a bag of potting soil, and another receipt for an Entenmann’s crumb cake and a bottle of Pepto.
In the cabinet under the bench there’s a wooden toolbox, handle worn shiny from use. On one side is an array of chisels with varying widths of flat blades, and on the other are gouges with blades that are V-shaped or rounded like a scoop. The handles are inlaid with abalone shell carved into a bird, a flower, a leaf, or a snail. I’ve seen these tools before—at Step’s parents’ house. They belonged to Momo’s father, Vili. When his fingers were too crooked and cranky to carve anymore, Vili retired from Steinway the microscopic crackle lights up my brain.
I get through the F-R-E-Y, and then the washer buzzes, breaking my spell. I look at what I’ve done, suddenly ashamed for defacing my father’s workbench. It feels like a level of disrespect I did not intend. I wish I could uncurl the wood and smooth it back into place. I don’t know how I’m supposed to handle this house and their belongings, when everything is sacred and awful in the same turn.
I switch the clothes to the dryer and climb the stairs, one at time, feeling the full weight of myself. I hurt so much that I can’t tell where it’s coming from. It’s more than my incision. More than the bruise on my ribs. It’s an ache running through every single cell.
On the couch in the den, I collect spit in my mouth to swallow a pain pill. It scratches my throat and feels like it’s stuck even though I know it isn’t. Wrapping Steena’s old comforter around me, I think about the nurse at the hospital telling me to walk, but all I want to do is sleep, so I imagine her telling me to rest instead.
“You just had surgery,” she says. “It’s a shock moving home. You need sleep, honey.”
I imagine her eyes turning soft. She’s not at the hospital anymore. She’s here. In a sporty little sweatsuit. In velour slippers. I’m not sure I remember her right. She’s morphing into Alice from The Brady Bunch .
“Kiddo, do you want a grilled cheese?” she asks.
My eyelids get heavy.
“Aw, look at you,” she says. “Sleep well, kiddo. You deserve to rest.”