Chapter Four
IN MY PARENTS’ HOUSE, nothing was ever thrown away.
Clothes piled up, formed drifts that grew into mountains Philip, Barron, and I would climb and leap from.
The heaps of garments filled the hallway and chased my parents out of their own bedroom, so that they eventually slept in the room that was once Dad’s office.
Empty bags and boxes filled in the gaps in the clutter, boxes that once held rings and sneakers and clothes.
A trumpet that my mother wanted to make into a lamp rested atop a stack of tattered magazines filled with articles Dad planned to read, near the heads and feet and arms of dolls Mom promised she would stitch together for a kid from Carney, all beside an endless heap of replacement buttons, some still in their individual glassine bags.
A coffeemaker rested on a tower of plates, propped up on one end to keep coffee from flooding the counters.
It’s strange to see it all, just the way it was when my parents lived here. I pick up a nickel off the countertop and flip it along my knuckles, just like Dad taught me.
“This place is a pigsty,” Grandad says, walking out of the dining room, clipping a suspender onto his pants.
After spending months living in the orderly dorms of Wallingford, where they give you a Saturday detention if your room doesn’t pass semi-regular inspections, I feel the old conflicting sense of familiarity and disgust. I breathe in the moldy, stale smell, with something sour in it that might be old sweat.
Philip drops my bag onto the cracked linoleum floor.
“What’s the chance of me borrowing the car?” I ask Grandad.
“Tomorrow,” he says. “If we get enough done. You make a doctor’s appointment?”
“Yeah,” I lie, “that’s why I need the car.” What I need is to have enough time alone that I can put my plan to get back into Wallingford into effect. That does involve a doctor, but not one who’s expecting me.
Philip takes off his sunglasses. “Your appointment is when?”
“Tomorrow,” I say impulsively, shifting my gaze to Philip and elaborating. “At two. With Dr. Churchill, sleep specialist. In Princeton. That okay with you?” The best lies have as much truth in them as possible, so I tell them exactly where I’m planning on going. Just not why.
“Maura sent over some stuff,” Philip says. “Lemme bring it in before I forget.” Neither of them suggests coming with me to the completely fabricated appointment, which fills me with profound and undeserved relief.
Someone could cut through the mess in our house and look at it like one might look at rings on a tree or layers of sediment.
They’d find the black-and-white hairs of a dog we had when I was six, the acid-washed jeans my mother once wore, the seven blood-soaked pillowcases from the time I skinned my knee.
All our family secrets rest in endless piles.
Sometimes the house just seemed filthy, but sometimes it seemed magical.
Mom could reach into some nook or bag or closet and pull out anything she needed.
She pulled out a diamond necklace to wear to a New Year’s party along with citrine rings with gems as big as thumbnails.
She pulled out the entire run of Narnia books when I was feverish and tired of all the books scattered beside my bed.
And she pulled out a set of hand-carved black and white chess pieces when I finished reading Lewis.
“There’s cats out there,” my grandfather says, looking out the window as he washes a coffee cup in the sink. “In the barn.”
Philip sets down a bag of groceries carefully. His expression is strange.
“Feral,” says Grandad, using a fork to pry an ancient piece of toast out of the old toaster, and tossing it into the trash bag he hooked over the basement doorknob.
I walk over to where he’s standing and peer out the window. I can see them, tiny liquid shapes. A tabby jumps atop a rusted can of paint, while a white cat sits in a patch of long weeds, just the end of its tail twitching. “You think they’ve been living here long?”
My grandfather shakes his head.
“I bet they were pets. They look like pets.”
Grandad grunts.
“Maybe I should bring them some food,” I say.
“Put it in a trap,” says Philip. “Better catch them before they breed out of control.”
After Philip leaves, I put out food anyway—a can of tuna they won’t come near while I’m standing there, but fight over when I stand at the bottom of the driveway.
I count five cats—the white one, two tabbies that I have a hard time telling apart, a fluffy black cat with a spot of white under its chin, and a runty butterscotch one.
Me and Grandad spend the rest of the morning grimly cleaning the kitchen, switching out our regular gloves for rubber.
We throw out a pile of rusty forks, a sieve, and some pans.
We pull up some linoleum and discover a nest of roaches that scatter so quickly that, despite stomping after them, most get away.
I call Sam after lunch, but Johan answers his cell.
Sam, apparently, is busy testing to see if the seniors control “the airspace above senior grass.” This experiment takes the form of holding one foot slightly above the restricted ground until someone tries to punch him in the head. I say I’ll call back.
“Who you phoning?” my grandfather asks, wiping his face with his T-shirt.
“No one.”
“Good thing,” he says, “since we got so much work to do.”
I straddle one of the kitchen chairs and rest my chin on the back frame. “You think there’s something wrong with me, or what?”
“Here’s what I think: I’m cleaning out this house. I’m not young, so you’re supposed to help. You don’t want to be some kind of useless pretty boy.”
I laugh. “I might be young, but I wasn’t born yesterday. That’s no answer.”
“If you’re so smart, you tell me what’s going on.
” He grins after he says it, like verbal wrangling is his idea of fun.
Being with him makes me think of being a kid, running around his yard in Carney, safe and free for the summer.
He didn’t need us to help him chat up a mark or shove some stolen item down our pants. He made us mow the lawn instead.
I decide I’ll try a different tactic to show him I’m paying attention. “What’s going on? I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but there’s definitely something wrong with Maura.”
He stops grinning. “What do you mean?”
“Did you see her? She looks terrible. And she thinks she’s hearing music. And I heard you say that Philip was working her.”
Grandad shakes his head and dumps his sweaty shirt on the table. “He’s not—”
“Oh, come on,” I say. “I saw her. Do you know what she said to me?”
He opens his mouth, but there’s a banging before he can speak, and we both turn. Audrey’s face is framed in the dirty glass of the back door. She frowns, as though sure she’s in the wrong place, but then she twists the knob and pushes the door hard enough to unstick it.
“How did you find me?” I ask, shock making me as cold-sounding as I ever hoped to be.
“All our addresses are printed in the student directory,” she says, shaking her head like I’m a total idiot.
“Right,” I say, because I am a total idiot. “Sorry. Come in. Thanks for—”
“Did they kick you out?” She puts one blue-gloved hand on her hip. She’s talking to me, but she’s staring at the piles of papers and ashtrays, mannequin hands and tea strainers that litter the countertops.
“For now,” I say, willing my voice not to crack.
I thought I was familiar with the sick feeling of missing someone, of missing Audrey, but right now I realize how much more I’ll miss her if I can’t see her every day in class or sitting on the grass in the quad.
All of a sudden I don’t care about the proper amount of ignoring. “Come into the living room.”
“I’m his grandfather.” Grandad holds out his left hand. The rubber glove hangs limply where his fingers are missing. I’m just glad she can’t see the stumps. Nothing but death-magic rotted flesh.
Audrey blanches, holding her gloved hand against her stomach as though she’s just realized what he is.
“Sorry,” I say. “Gramps, this is Audrey. Audrey, my grandfather.”
“A pretty girl like you can call me Desi,” he says, slicking back his hair and grinning like he’s a rascal daring to be reprimanded.
He’s still grinning as we walk past him into the living room.
I sit down on the ripped cushion of our couch.
I wonder what she thinks of the house and if she’s going to say anything about it or about my grandfather.
When I was a kid and brought friends over, I was defiantly proud of the chaos.
I liked that I knew how to jump over the piles and the shattered glass while they stumbled.
Now it just seems like an ocean of crazy that I have no way to explain.
She reaches into her shiny black pocketbook and takes out a handful of printouts.
“Here,” she says, dumping the papers on my lap and flopping down beside me. Her red hair’s slightly damp—as though she’s just come from the shower—and cold against my arm.
Lila’s hair was blond, soaked red with blood the last time I saw her.
I press my eyes shut hard, press my fingers over them until I see nothing but black. Until I push the images away. When I was Audrey’s boyfriend, I thought that by making her like me, by making her think I was like everyone else, I’d become like everyone else.
I think about winning her back, wondering if I could do it. Wondering how long before I screw up and she leaves me again. I’m just not a good enough con man to keep her.
“Some ‘sleep aid’ pills can cause sleepwalking,” Audrey says, pointing to the papers. “Unofficially. I brought some articles from the library. Some guy was even driving in his sleep. I was thinking you could just say—”
“That I was medicating myself for insomnia?” I ask, rolling over and pressing my face against her shoulder, breathing in the smell of her, filtered through sweater fabric.