My mom lunged toward Gretchen and pulled her into a hug. As they wept in each other’s arms, my mother caressed my sister’s face with strokes that grew increasingly aggressive until before I knew it they became outright slaps—one hard smack followed by another even harder one, at which point Remy’s mom pushed her way between them, but not before my mom yanked out a fistful of Gretchen’s hair.
“This is your fault. It’s your fault.” She pointed a trembling finger at my sister, who huddled between Remy’s mom and Abby.
I screamed when I saw Gretchen’s hair, which fell to the floor in lazy wisps, and my eyes stung from a fresh gush of tears. I wondered if a person could dry out and die from too much crying. When I tried to stop, the tears continued to flow, silent but steady. Other times I sobbed until I couldn’t breathe. This lasted for days, even while I slept, and continued until there wasn’t a drop left for me to lose. By then I was a husk of myself, dehydrated and exhausted. We all were. I had never been so thirsty in my life.
Chapter Five
Summer 1996
My parents are divided on the question of whether I should get a summer job. Dad says no; Mom says yes. She doesn’t want me hanging around the house, doing nothing for three months. I don’t have a driver’s license, and even if I did, my mom needs her car to drive Hannah around most days. Mom wins, as usual, and I get the job of helping Susan Mitchell clean out her family’s basement. Formerly occupied by Susan’s now-deceased mother-in-law, the space is scheduled for some major renovations.
“Do you know what a ‘man cave’ is? My husband wants one.” She sniffs the air in the dim, damp basement. Even though the layout is identical to ours, I can barely tell because of all the stuff crowding the room. “Mold,” Susan announces, wrinkling her nose. “I’m sorry, Sam. It’s a potpourri of mold and mildew down here. We kept a dehumidifier running for Betsy. We never would have put her down here by herself, but she became very paranoid toward the end of her life. You remember her, Sam, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. We called her Grandma Bitty.”
Susan smiles. “I know. She was a wonderful woman. I couldn’t have asked for a better mother-in-law. But once she developed dementia, she became a whole different person. She was mean. Have you been around anybody with dementia?” Susan doesn’t wait for me to answer. “It was heartbreaking. Just heartbreaking. She was obsessed with the idea that someone was spying on her. She kept notebooks to document everything that happened. I’d leave her alone here to run to the grocery store, and by the time I got back she would have called the police to report an intruder. It didn’t matter how many times they searched the house; at first she thought they weren’t taking her seriously—which they weren’t, to be honest, not after the first twenty times—and then she started thinking we were all in cahoots to drive her crazy. It was very sad, and it never gets better with someone that age; it only gets worse.
“She’d get up in the middle of the night and barricade her bedroom door shut because she was afraid someone would sneak in—the intruder, I guess—and hurt her. Then she’d wake up in the morning and wouldn’t be able to open her door. I don’t know how someone her age had the strength to move all that stuff to begin with. We tried taking her door off its hinges, and it only made her furious. The names she called me … Eventually we had to move her down here for her own safety, but she couldn’t bear to be apart from all her … stuff. She was a pioneer when it came to hoarding. That’s what it’s called when someone keeps everything—did you know there’s a name for it? It’s an actual mental disease. I didn’t know that, not until I saw a Phil Donahue Show episode about it, and then I thought, Oh, my goodness, that’s Bitty to a T. For pretty much all her adult life, she had piles and piles of junk stashed in every corner of her house. You should have seen it. This is nothing compared to what it used to be like. Oh, it was absolutely insane. The first time Mike took me over to meet her—I was only seventeen—he was so embarrassed that he cried afterward.” She pauses. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you that. Don’t tell Mike you know about it, okay?” Susan plops a box of heavy-duty black garbage bags into my arms. “Anyway, you don’t need to worry about pitching anything valuable, because I’m pretty sure it’s all junk. Go ahead and throw everything away. Make it look like she was never even here.”
It has been a full two weeks since my family’s return, and I have yet to exchange a word with Remy. He’s constantly coming and going with one friend or another from the same group of four or five teenage boys. If not for the different cars they drive, I don’t think I would have realized they’re four separate individuals. Through my window, they look like out-of-focus, shaggy-haired extras from the background of a Nirvana video. There are, however, small distinctions among them: Blue Minivan’s hair is the longest, his heavy blond waves stopping just past his shoulders. His car has a JUST SAY NO bumper sticker on its back window. I can always hear Silver Pickup before I see him. He likes to blast his music—he’s always playing something from the last Beastie Boys album—with his windows down. He always leans on the horn to let Remy know he’s outside, instead of getting out and ringing the doorbell. Honda Civic and his brother (I think), who rides shotgun, are both easily forty pounds heavier than the rest of the group. Their bumper sticker is an anti-Nazi one, a swastika in a circle with a line drawn through it. It seems odd to have a sticker proclaiming something that most people would assume is a given in any decent human being. Why the need to announce it? You might as well have one that says I DISLIKE PAIN or KITTENS ARE CUTE.
Most nights after Remy has been out with friends all day, his girlfriend comes over and stays until after I’m asleep, although her car is always gone by the next morning. She drives a red Jeep, which was still parked on our street when I finally went to bed last night at around 1:30. It’s almost noon when Susan and I hear Remy walking around in the kitchen above us.
Susan flashes the ceiling a frown. “Nice of you to get out of bed today,” she murmurs. Her gaze is an apologetic wince. “I’m sorry for the way he’s been treating you, Sam. I don’t know what his problem is lately.” She pauses. “Heather is such a clingy girl. I wish he’d spend some time apart from her.”
I want to tell her that I don’t care about Remy’s life, or whether I ever talk to him again. It’s not like I’ve been pining away for him all these years. It’s true that we were close once, but ten years is a long time to be away from someone, especially when you’re our age.
“Heather?” I can’t help it. I do care. I care more than anything.
“Heather Bonterro. She’s a year behind you in school.”
“Oh.”
“Her father is an undertaker. Her whole family lives at the funeral home. Can you imagine?”
“Not really.”
Susan glances around the room. “Can I be honest with you, Sam?”
“Excuse me?”
She leans in a few inches and lowers her voice to an exaggerated hush. “I don’t like her one bit.”
I don’t say anything.
“Well? Don’t you want to know why?” She blurts it out before I have a chance to answer. “She’s one of those needy girls. Clingy, like I said. And she smokes, I happen to know—that child must think I’m a fool sometimes—and I found a note she wrote him in his pants pocket while I was doing laundry—but I wasn’t snooping, Sam, I respect Remy’s privacy, I want you to know that—and this note, oh, my lord, I’ve never heard such filthy things. She’s trouble. She’s dirty, and she’s trouble, and I don’t like her face.”
Susan finally stops speaking in order to breathe. She stares at me from behind her square, purple-framed glasses with the gleaming eyes of someone drunk on the relief of her confession.
At first, all I can think about is her claim—I’ve never heard such filthy things—and what a lie it is. I remember every word of the joke Remy’s dad told on New Year’s Eve, and the way Susan and my mom cackled with laughter. They seemed downright delighted by its filthiness.
“Oh, no. I hope I didn’t make you uncomfortable.” Any trace of relief in her expression is gone. “I shouldn’t have said all that to you.”
“No, it’s okay.”
“Maybe you could try to reconnect with him. Do you think he’d listen to you?”
“About Heather?”
“No, not just about Heather. Remy is different now. I know how boys get when they become teenagers, believe me, but he’s … It’s more than that. He doesn’t tell me anything.” Now Susan looks like she might start crying at any moment. “I just want to know he’s okay.”
I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing. All the while, the joke keeps running through my mind: This beautiful woman walks into her gynecologist’s office …
After a pause, Susan says, “Well, anyway, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to put a bunch of pressure on you. But sometimes I feel like I don’t know him anymore. I just want to hold on to him a little bit longer, Sam, before I have to let him grow up all the way.” She looks past me, at the playhouse near the edge of the yard. It still looks great; Ed must have kept up on the maintenance. Now that he’s paralyzed from a stroke, I wonder if anybody will bother with the task. “Remember all the time you two spent out there?”
How could I not remember? We spent entire days there, playing out whatever realities we could imagine, anything the space could accommodate. We did the standard childhood scenarios: school, house, hospital. After Turtle disappeared, we played detective and, eventually, courtroom, swapping the roles of lawyer, judge, and defendant without any understanding of how the scenes would have made our parents feel, not to mention any child psychologist who might happen to pass by.
Once Susan leaves me alone in the basement, it becomes clear Remy’s grandma has left a mess that is more staggering for its utter uselessness than anything else. Aside from a bed and a dresser, the room is packed with back issues of Muscle & Fitness magazine that are stacked in floor-to-ceiling columns against the far wall. There are hundreds of them, the most recent of which is from August 1974. Piles of cardboard boxes hold disorganized collections of items that fall just a hair outside the category of garbage: tangled masses of plastic bead necklaces, most of which appear to be hand-strung by either monkeys or children; maybe a thousand keys that could open an endless number of theoretical locks; dozens of fist-sized wooden armadillos whose gaping mouths function as bottle openers; six convection ovens, their boxes postmarked from the Home Shopping Network; piles and piles of old photographs that were exposed to so much moisture they have fused into bricks of lost memories; an unused candle shaped like the Virgin Mary, its wick protruding from her folded hands; nine packages of Polaroid film, but no camera. Everything stinks of mildew and rot. The only source of natural light comes from a small window near the ceiling above the bed.
It’s clear that my job here is just an excuse to keep me occupied, the same as when my mom used to pay me a dollar to organize our silverware drawer. The fact that I’m getting ten dollars an hour to sort through garbage annoys me more than it should. I could have gotten a real job somewhere in town, someplace where I’d have the chance to meet people and maybe even make some friends. At the very least, I could be working aboveground.
And it feels wrong to chuck all of Betsy’s possessions into the trash, even if that’s where they belong. How would she feel if she knew that her family wanted to get rid of every worthless item she treasured? It seems cruel of the Mitchells, even though I know they don’t mean it that way. I’m more selective than I need to be as I decide what to keep or toss, and I can tell Susan is disappointed by my lack of progress at the end of the day, even though she’s too polite to say anything. As she counts five ten-dollar bills into my hand, I see Remy watching us from the playhouse, gazing at me with steady eyes even when I stare right back.
Chapter Six
Summer 1985
Before she became a beauty, Gretchen was a fat girl. Our mother was horrified by my sister’s weight but tried not to show it. She did her best to reassure my sister that lots of kids are chubby, but her daily reminders that everything was going to be fine someday only reinforced the idea that Gretchen wasn’t fine to begin with. It didn’t help that Abby was so petite (“Lilliputian,” our mother called her), making Gretchen seem even bigger in comparison.
Even after Gretchen’s awkward days were long behind her, our mom still talked about how much it had pained her to watch the two girls play together. “I’d see Abby flitting around like a little whisper of a child, so sweet and dainty; and then, hulking along behind her, would be Biiiiig Gretchen.” She even did an impression of my sister, stomping across the floor with her arms held straight out like Frankenstein’s monster and her faced fixed in a dumb stare. Our mother seemed to assume that, just because Gretchen was no longer oafish, the comparisons weren’t hurtful, which was stupid of her. But she had no way of understanding how it felt to undergo the kind of drastic metamorphosis that her oldest daughter had experienced during puberty. Our mother did not know how to be anything but beautiful, and she believed that Gretchen must have shared her disdain for the younger, less attractive version of herself, as though the fatness was an unflattering outfit that she’d simply decided to strip off one morning.
My sister’s first few years at school were spent trying to blend in well enough that none of her classmates had reason to single her out for ridicule. The strategy was less than successful, because kids don’t need a reason to make fun of one another. Just as Abby put up with her fair share of teasing for being so tiny, Gretchen went through elementary school as one of the token fat kids. Some of the older boys on the school bus even made up a song about her, which they sang every morning as she walked to her seat as though it were as mandatory as the Pledge of Allegiance. It was only one line, repeated over and over for as long as it took for my sister to either bury her head between her knees or start crying: “Too many Twinkies … oink, oink!” (They were cruel, but not all that creative.)
During the summer between seventh and eighth grade, Gretchen’s body decided that enough was enough. Over those few months, she morphed into a young bombshell with such alarming speed that our dad insisted she see a gland specialist, even though we couldn’t afford it. It was as if she were molting, wriggling a little farther out of her old skin each day, not from effort so much as intuition: This is what I am meant to become. She didn’t have to put herself on a diet or exercise every day like other girls; she needed only to surrender herself to the genetic lottery whose check had finally cleared. Her unflattering lumps shifted themselves into sleek, symmetrical curves. Her hair grew fast, as thick and long as unspooling silk. Her legs stretched, her shoulders broadened, her spine corrected itself from a slouch to an arch. Twenty extra pounds seemed to dissolve as easily as snowflakes in hot water. When school began the next fall, people whom she hadn’t seen all summer didn’t recognize her. The Twinkie song was all but forgotten (until two years later, when poor Donny Levin started sixth grade).
It didn’t take long for Gretchen to understand that what had once been impossible for her—physical beauty—was now effortless. She was thirteen but looked seventeen. She rarely wore makeup, but it didn’t matter. Her knowledge of these facts brought power, and with great power comes great responsibility. Unfortunately, because she was still a thirteen-year-old girl, my sister had the emotional maturity of a thirteen-year-old girl. She believed she knew everything about life, when in fact she knew virtually nothing. In short, she was the complete opposite of responsible. And while our father understood that much, our mother wasn’t as quick to catch on. Because she’d been born beautiful, she’d had plenty of time to grow into an understanding of what such a role required from a person. Gretchen didn’t have the first clue.
But she had plenty of opportunities to practice over the next few years, and by the time Steven Handley strolled into our yard to build a retaining wall one hot June morning in 1985, sixteen-year-old Gretchen had been through a handful of boyfriends wh
o had barely managed to unclasp her bra without hyperventilating. They were nice enough—she stayed away from the ones who had teased her most mercilessly—but they were all disappointments in their own way: Ben the soccer player had acne all over his back (bacne); Michael the dentist’s kid seemed to have no idea what to do with his tongue besides shove it in her ear; Scott the drummer desperately wanted a mustache but did not possess the necessary ability to grow facial hair, so he constantly looked like he’d forgotten to wipe his mouth after drinking chocolate milk; Greg the future flight attendant had issues he hadn’t even begun to acknowledge; Adam mysteriously smelled like hush puppies all the time; and Hank always wore the same shirt as though he thought nobody would notice.
Put anybody under a microscope and their flaws will become unbearable. What Gretchen didn’t realize was that none of those boys made her happy because they were all so eager to make her happy. Nothing is more unattractive than desperation, and the boys at her high school reeked of it—especially around Gretchen. By age sixteen, Gretchen was bored with them. She set her sights on Steven, thinking he would be a challenge.
She was right. At first he didn’t pay much attention to her. It was part of his job description: Lenny gave all his employees explicit orders not to screw around with any of the clients’ underage daughters.
“What’s the matter with him?” Gretchen asked Abby Tickle, the two of them peeking into our yard from my sister’s bedroom window, studying every move of the landscaping crew with an intensity befitting Official Retaining Wall Construction Supervisors. “It’s like he doesn’t know I’m alive. Maybe his sex drive got damaged when he split his head open.”
Abby was still tiny, but she wasn’t a sweet little girl anymore. Lately she’d been cultivating a wild streak that sent occasional flickers of manic instability across her face. The words tasted good in her mouth as she spoke them, like a swig from the bottle of peach schnapps that Darla kept in the linen closet for emergencies. “There’s nothing the matter with him,” she said, her eyes shining with all the sordid possibilities. “It’s because he’s a man.”