Dirty Little Secrets (16 page)

I turned to look at the boxes and bags lined up on the only visible floor space. “Oh, I, uh, . . .”

Sara marched over to them and peeked inside. She raised her eyes to meet mine with her mouth hanging open in disbelief. “Are you throwing her stuff out?” she hissed, her voice barely louder than a whisper. She picked up a couple of the old photos and junk mail I'd tossed into the bag. “Is this for the trash?”

“Just a few things. I thought I'd—”

“Does Mom know?” She pulled the photos out of the bag. “You're messing with Mom's photos? Man, she's going to kill you.” Sara smoothed the edges of the photos that had gotten crumpled in the bag. She waved them at me. “None of this stuff belongs to you,” she said, her voice getting a little bit louder. “You're sitting here while Mom is sick and can't defend herself, calmly tossing out her important things?”

After all I'd been through today I didn't need one of her lectures. I grabbed the top photo from her and held it out to her face. I was so sick and tired of everything, I was starting to lose my fear. “These aren't important,” I said. “These are junk. You can't even tell what's in this photo—it's just a tangle of arms that are all out of focus.”

Sara looked closer. “No, that picture was taken on the Fourth of July a couple of years ago. See, right there, that's the red, white, and blue shirt I always wear to the parade.” She poked at it with a manicured finger. “You can't just get rid of Mom's stuff whenever you want.”

I tossed the picture at her and it fell to the floor. “Fine, then,” I said. “You take it. Otherwise it's going in the garbage with the rest of this useless crap.”

Sara glared at me and slowly bent down to pick it up. “Useless crap? What the hell do you know about useless crap? After all Mom's done for you.” She snatched the trash bag off the floor. “I'd better take this too so you don't throw away anything else important.”

I could feel the anger bubbling in my chest again. I was tired of pretending nothing was wrong—that every family lived surrounded by head-high piles of garbage. That we didn't really want to have any friends over, and it didn't bother us when Mom made it seem like everything was our fault. “Come on Sara, look around this dump! It's full of nothing but moldy crap. We can't even live here properly because it's such a mess. You haven't slept in your room in years, because Mom filled it with piles of junk the minute you moved out. Same with Phil's room. Even Dad left this dump and never came back. I'm the one who has to live in it, and I'm sick of it!” I could feel angry tears welling up in my eyes. I hadn't cried all day, and now a stupid argument with Sara was threatening to make me all weepy.

“Stop being so selfish,” she said. “It's not always about you, you know. It's not like I want to move back here or anything, so what do I care what she does with my room? And for your information, Dad didn't leave on his own—Mom kicked him out because he was constantly nagging her.” Sara loved dropping little information bombs at the worst possible times. The fact that she was almost ten years older than me gave her lots of ammunition. She never let me forget that she was here long before me and that she never wanted to play the role of big sister.

“What are you talking about?” I asked cautiously. I never knew whether she was telling me the truth or not, because she often felt it was her duty to screw with me. “You know as well as I do Dad abandoned us to go live with what's-her-name. That's why Mom got stressed out about everything.”

Sara waved that away with a flick of her wrist. “That's just what Mom says. I was almost your age when they got divorced, and it's not like I couldn't see or hear anything. Mom got tired of Dad not helping out. She said he made her life too difficult, so one day she just tossed him out on his ass. He didn't even meet Tiffany until way after that.”

I stood staring at Sara, waiting for her to say more, but she seemed to have no idea this information completely contradicted everything I'd ever thought. She started filling the plastic bag with anything she could find.

“I can't believe you're taking advantage of Mom being sick by going through her stuff. Good thing I came by today, or God knows what you might have done.” She looked up at me from where she was crouched on the ground gathering junk mail. “Mom told me she was worried about you. Always trying to keep her out of your room. What are you hiding in there? Hmm? Probably stealing stuff from Mom and squirreling it away. She always says that she can never find her valuables. You're probably taking them.”

“Mom can't find anything because she lives like a pig!” I was practically shouting now, the image of late-night phone conversations between them feeding my frustration. “Are you blind? Look around! Stop defending her and look around. It's not healthy.” I took a deep breath. “It's not normal.”

“Well, then, maybe you should help more,” she said. “She's getting older and can't do everything for you. Now that she's working longer hours, she can't babysit you all day. When I was little, we helped out all the time, and this place was spotless. I'm sure that if you picked up after yourself every once in a while, it would get better.”

“Now
you're
blaming me?” I didn't know why I was surprised—I'd heard it from Mom often enough. How I didn't help enough, and how if I were a better daughter, things would be okay. I shoved both arms at a teetering pile of clothes and bags until they toppled over onto the next pile.

“This is not my fault,” I said slowly. It was the first time I'd ever said those words out loud, and I liked the way they felt. Sara might want to be just like Mom, but I was going to do everything I could to be different from the two of them. If I had to go and live on a tiny boat with nothing but a toothbrush and a change of underwear, I'd do it—I'd gladly leave all this behind just to have a normal life.

Sara stood up and took a few steps toward the hallway. “I'm going to have to wake Mom up and tell her what you've been up to. No matter how sick she is, she's going to want to know that she's being betrayed by her own daughter. Real nice, Luce.”

As she began to work her way out of the room, I panicked, my resolve to stand up to them fading fast. Thank God it was too dark for her to see the growing pile of bags on the side of the house, but if she got down to the end of the hallway, she'd see Mom, for sure.

“No, don't!” I said. “Don't wake her up!” I flicked my hand and dumped a bunch of clothes on top of the other trash bags to cover them. Sara stopped walking and turned to me with her hand on her hip. There was just enough room in the pathway for her elbow to fit before it bumped the mounds of junk on either side. “I don't see that I have much choice,” she said. She shook the bag at me. “Not after this.”

I had to think fast. I should have known Sara would do this. “Look, I'm sorry,” I said. I stared at the floor and tried to look as humble as possible. For once I was glad that I'd taken drama as an elective last year. I might not be able to deal with an audience of hundreds, but an audience of one I could handle. “I'm not tossing out Mom's stuff; I just wanted to make a little more space for her. It's getting so crowded around her chair, pretty soon she's going to be sleeping outside.”

Sara looked over at Mom's chair and at the piles that were growing around it. “This is it?” she asked. She looked skeptical. “You didn't touch anything else?”

I could see her starting to change her mind. I had to keep talking. “No. Nothing. Only around the chair. I figured that when she was feeling better, it would be nice for her to be able to sleep without worrying that all of this was going to fall on her. You know . . . earthquakes and stuff.”

Sara hesitated, and I could see that half of her still wanted to go tell on me. Nothing made her happier than to be the good daughter in Mom's eyes. She looked down at the bag in her hand. “Well, I'm still going to take this with me so you don't throw it away.”

I followed her eyes as she looked around the rest of the room. Luckily, it was in such bad shape she couldn't tell if I'd done any work in here or not. I just had to keep her out of the dining room and the kitchen—not to mention the hallway. “Go ahead, if you want to,” I said. Without knowing it, she could help me get at least one bag out of here.

“Oh, I want to.” She turned to walk out the front door. As she passed me, she grabbed the bag of food I'd forgotten I was holding. “I'm taking this too. Get yourself something else to eat.” Typical. If there was a way to fix things for me and Phil and leave her out of it, I would.

I followed her out the front door and down the walk toward the driveway. She thought I was just saying good-bye, but I was really making sure she was actually going. Sara had gotten a new car a couple of months ago, and even I was shocked to see what she'd done to it in such a short time.

The backseat was full of those cardboard file boxes I was sure she'd swiped from work. You couldn't see the floor because of the pile of discarded clothes that reached as high as the seat. The front seat could still hold a passenger, as long as that person was willing to wait for her to clear the empty CD cases, tissue boxes, clothes, shoes, and fast-food bags that covered both the seat and the floor.

Sara didn't seem to notice me staring. “I'll be back tomorrow to see how Mom's doing,” she said as she climbed into the relatively clear driver's seat and grabbed at a water bottle that was rolling around by the brake pedal.

“Tomorrow?” I asked. I could feel the panic rising in my throat. I could never get it all done by tomorrow. Three days was bad enough. Tomorrow was impossible. “Aren't you working tomorrow?”

She glared at me. “I have a personal day coming, not that it's any of your business.”

“What time tomorrow?” I could tell I said it too fast, even as the words burst out of my mouth.

Sara turned the key in the ignition. “That's for me to know,” she said. “Stay away from her stuff.”

“Don't worry about it,” I said. I was sure I had enough worry growing in my stomach for both of us.

“Oh, but I do,” she said.

I watched her back out of the driveway and take off down the street. It seemed like I exhaled for the first time since I'd seen her car in the driveway.

As I turned back toward the house, I realized that even when the mess was all cleaned up, it wasn't over. Mom was gone. But Sara was still very much around—and she was getting to be exactly like her.

chapter 14

7:00 p.m.

I twisted the dead bolt into place and leaned against the secure door. Between TJ, Mrs. Raj, and now Sara, this place hadn't seen so much action in years.

The smell of Chinese food still lingered in the hallway, and I realized how hungry I was. It was almost seven thirty, and all I'd had was a blueberry scone and a couple of eggrolls. Tomorrow for Sara probably meant somewhere around eleven at the earliest, which meant I had about sixteen hours to put things right in this house. My stomach would have to wait.

The house was quiet even though I could hear the stereo still playing faintly in the kitchen. Mom's TV sat almost buried in papers and clothes near her chair, but of course the remote was nowhere to be found. It could be buried just about anywhere, so I stood still and tried to think like Mom. If I needed the remote, where would I put it so it wouldn't get lost?

I couldn't see it anywhere around the chair or on the boxes that were next to it. Maybe underneath? If I wanted to be sure that I'd know where something was, I'd probably shove it underneath the one thing I knew wouldn't move.

I sat in the green chair and pushed it into a reclining position with my hands on the armrests, and then reached between the footrest and the chair. Touching something hard, I took a deep breath and stuck my hand as far under the chair as it would go. By flicking whatever it was to the side, I worked a corner of it out until I could grab it with one hand and drag it into the open.

Before I even pulled it out all the way, I realized it wasn't the remote. It was just a thick spiral notebook with a black cover. I could see from the bulge in the front there was something in it, but there wasn't anything written on the front. Her diary, maybe? I'd never seen Mom writing in anything, let alone a fairly large spiral notebook, but I had to admit that in the past few years we hadn't really paid that much attention to each other.

The book was pretty heavy, and it must be important if she kept it separate from all the other piles of junk in this place. If it was her diary, it would be wrong to open it. More wrong than leaving her dead in the hallway for the better part of a day? I shrugged my shoulders as I opened the black cardboard cover. It was all relative.

It wasn't a diary—not really. Carefully pasted onto the pages of notebook paper were magazine pictures of different houses. There was a picture of a wide, green lawn with a house perched way off in the distance and a family having a picnic on a postage-stamp-sized blanket. There were dining rooms with long tables where people could linger after a meal and talk about politics or sports. A bedroom with a white canopy bed big enough for a mom and kids to curl up on a Sunday morning and read the newspaper. Every now and then on the page would be something written very carefully in her sprawling handwriting. She'd written “cabinets” next to the page with the rustic kitchen and “knobs” next to a picture of some latches.

I flipped quickly through the rest of the book. Every picture showed a house in pristine photographic condition, the people who lived there smiling at their good luck. There were no clogged sinks, no green bins, and no giant stacks of newspapers.

The notebook wasn't her diary—it was more intimate than that. They must have been pictures of the house
she
wanted to have someday. Except that someday never showed up. I ran my fingers over a picture of a wide porch with a swing that was perfect for sitting with an iced tea on a hot summer night. She must have been doing this for years—cutting out pictures of what might have been. This book of possibilities completely ignored the reality of what our lives had become. I knew how she felt because I felt the same way when I thought about my after. Hopeful—which was an emotion our house didn't see a lot of.