“Did I wake you?”
“No.”
“Liar. How late were you up?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t sleep well.”
“Sorry. I just called to see how things were going. Have you seen the house?”
“I saw it yesterday.”
“How was it?”
“Interesting. There could be a book in this.”
“I thought there might be.”
“My mother was a hoarder.”
“She was a mess, or she was a genuine hoarder, like on the reality show?”
“The latter. Every room was filled with junk.”
“Was she a hoarder when you were little?”
“No. This is new to me.”
“I read that hoarding can be a coping mechanism, triggered by a traumatic event. People hold on to things because it buffers them from the world and gives them a feeling of control.”
“Trauma. Like my brother dying?”
“Yes, but you were with her after he died.”
“More than ten years.”
“So unless it was some crazy delayed response, something else must have happened.” She sighed. “You’re still sure that you don’t want me to come out?”
“No. I’ve got this.”
“All right. I’m around. I’m just cleaning the house this weekend.”
“I’ll send you some pictures of what real house cleaning looks like.”
“I want to see those pictures,” she said. “Good luck. Don’t get trapped under anything. Oh, you’re still at the Grand?”
“Yes.”
“Try the eggs Benedict. It’s out of this world.”
“You’ve stayed here before?”
“I stay there every time I go to Utah. I have two authors there.”
“Why haven’t you ever told me?”
“Because it would be like telling John McCain you’re planning a vacation to Vietnam.”
“That was cold. Have a good day cleaning.”
“You too. Talk to you tomorrow.”
I hung up the phone, dialed room service, and ordered the eggs Benedict and an apple pastry with a glass of fresh orange juice. I was getting out of the shower when there was a knock on the door. I shrugged on one of the hotel’s robes and opened the door. A woman stood next to a serving table covered in white linen.
“Good morning, Mr. Churcher,” she said. “May I come in?”
“Please,” I said, stepping back.
She pushed the table inside my room. “Where would you like to eat?”
“Over by the sofa,” I said.
“How’s your day so far?”
“Good,” I said. “I just woke up.”
She prepared the table for me, removing the cellophane from the top of the glass of orange juice and the metal lid from the eggs Benedict. I signed the check and she left the room.
Laurie was right. The dish was excellent. I finished eating, dressed, then headed out to face my mother’s mess.
CHAPTER
Seven
It was a bright and clear morning, and the massive Wasatch mountains rose like great, landlocked icebergs. I had forgotten just how big the mountains were. And how ubiquitous. With the Wasatch Range in the east and the Oquirrh Mountains in the west, mountains surrounded the city like a fortress wall.
Salt Lake City is a religious city, and since it was the Sabbath there wasn’t much traffic on the roads. I stopped at a Smith’s Food King for bottled water, dishwashing gloves, a bucket, mop, cleaning rags, and several boxes of Lysol disinfectant. Then I drove through a Starbucks for a Venti caffè mocha before heading to the house.
The home was warm as I walked in, which was an improvement over yesterday, but the mess actually looked worse than I remembered—if that were even possible. I carried my coffee and my cleaning supplies to the kitchen and went to work. Inside one of the cupboards were boxes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cereal and Quisp, two cereals that were nearly as old as I was. I don’t know what it is about old boxes of cereal, but frankly I felt nostalgic toward them. Maybe I had inherited some of my mother’s hoarder instincts, but I couldn’t throw them away. I finished wiping off the counter and was taking a sip of my coffee when I heard a voice.
“Hello.”
I almost spit out my coffee as I spun around. An elderly woman stood in the kitchen entrance. She had whitish-gray hair and was slight of frame, though she wasn’t stooped. Her eyes were clear and friendly.
“I’m sorry, I should have knocked, but honestly, after sixty years of just walking in, it didn’t cross my mind.” She looked around the kitchen with a slightly amused expression. “You’re cleaning. This would have made your mother crazy.” She turned back to me. “You’re Jacob, aren’t you?”
“Who are you?”
“You don’t know?” she said. “I’m Elyse Foster. I live two houses down. I was your mother’s friend.”
Something about her claiming friendship with my mother bothered me. My enemy’s friend is my enemy? What kind of a person would befriend my mother?
“I didn’t know my mother had any friends.”
“She didn’t have many. How old are you now, Jacob? Thirty-four? Thirty-five?”
“Thirty-four,” I said.
“Charles would have been thirty-eight.”
The mention of my brother’s name shocked me. “You knew my brother?”
“Honey, I knew both of you like you were my own.” Her brow fell. “You really don’t remember, do you?”
I shook my head. “No.”
She stepped toward me. “I always said you’d be a lady-killer someday. You were such a beautiful boy. Big eyes. Big curly mop of hair. I was right. You’re still beautiful.”
I felt awkward with the compliment. “Thank you.”
“You’re writing books now.”
I couldn’t tell if it was a question or a statement. “Yes.”
“I’m not surprised. You always had such an imagination.” She looked around the kitchen. “It’s always different after they leave, isn’t it?”
“After who leaves?”
“The home’s inhabitant. It’s like the spirit leaves the house as well as the body.” She looked at me with a sympathetic expression. “It must be difficult for you to be back after all these years.”
“Very.”
The moment fell into silence. After a minute I took a deep breath, then said, “Well, it’s nice to meet you. I’ll get back to work. I’ve got a lot to do.”
She didn’t move. “Don’t be so dismissive of me, Jacob. You’re not ‘meeting’ me. I’m a bigger part of your life than you know.”
Her directness surprised me. I wasn’t used to it. Once you become rich and famous, people don’t talk to you that way. At least, not if they want something from you.
“And I know you have questions.”
“How would you know that?”
“Because anyone in your situation would.” Her voice suddenly lowered. “I may be your only witness.”
I had no idea what to say to that so I didn’t say anything.
She broke the silence. “How long will you be in town?”
“I don’t know yet. A few days.”
“Are you staying here?”
“No. I’m staying downtown at the Grand America.”
“The Grand,” she said. “Used to just be the Little America down there and Hotel Utah. Now there’s a Grand America.” She smiled. “I’ll come back later. Give you a little time to digest things. Welcome home, Jacob. It’s good to see you again. I was hoping you’d come home.”
“This isn’t my home.”
“No,” she said, frowning. “I suspect not. Good-bye.” She turned and started to walk away, then stopped in the middle of the front room and turned back. “You know what they say about truth, Jacob.”
“What’s that?”
“It will set you free.” She turned and walked out of the house, gently closing the door behind her.
I went back to work, Elyse’s comment replaying in my mind. My only witness?
I took a break for lunch at around two, driving to a hamburger joint called Arctic Circle. I used to eat there when I was a boy. They had foot-long hot dogs and brown toppers—vanilla ice-cream cones dipped in chocolate. Arctic Circle is a Utah-based hamburger chain and the inventor of Utah “fry sauce,” a surprisingly tasty mixture of catsup and mayonnaise. When I was young there were two unique Utah hamburger chains, Arctic Circle and Dee’s Drive-ins, which no longer existed. When I moved to Spokane there had been an Arctic Circle, but I had never gone there. I don’t know why. Maybe because it reminded me of Utah.
After lunch I went back to work, finishing the kitchen at around seven. I had collected more than a dozen garbage sacks with junk and dragged them outside the back door with the others.
When I had finished mopping the floor and disinfecting the countertops and appliances, I sat down at the table and looked around the kitchen. There had been life here once. I remembered Charles asking for Mickey Mouse pancakes and my mother making them with chocolate chip eyes. It was nothing more than a snapshot of a memory, but it was significant. My mother was smiling.
CHAPTER
Eight
Monday
It was snowing the next morning. When I arrived back at the house, there was a large metal Dumpster in the driveway. Actually, it pretty much filled the driveway. I must have just missed the delivery because the truck’s tire tracks were still fresh in the new snow.
I walked around to the back of the house, carried back thirteen garbage sacks, and threw them into the Dumpster. Then I unlocked the door and went back into the house.
The next room I decided to clean was my bedroom. It wasn’t as bad as the kitchen. There were still the same four posters on the wall that I’d hung shortly before running away: a movie poster of The Matrix, one of Eminem, and two basketball posters, one of the Utah Jazz’s Karl Malone, the other the famous Michael Jordan flying dunk poster.
I was surprised to see the posters still up. I guess I’d assumed that my mother would have torn them down along with any other reminder of me. But the room was mostly the way I remembered it, though back then it wasn’t filled with boxes and strange junk like an old water cooler, a toy cotton candy machine, and about fifty empty plastic Coke bottles.
I had brought a Bluetooth speaker I could use to play music from my phone. Appropriately, I played my Red Hot Chili Peppers and Eminem, who had just hit it big about the time I left home.
Not only had my mother left my room exactly the way it was the last time I’d been there, but she had even made the bed and the drawers were filled with the clothes I had left on the front lawn the night I left home. It made no sense to me. Why would she have brought my things back into the house and put them away? Did she think I was coming back?
I was going through one of my drawers when the doorbell rang. I walked out and opened the front door. Brad Campbell stood on the porch. He was holding a tall Styrofoam cup that steamed in the winter air.
“Brad,” I said. “Come in.”
“Thank you,” he replied, his breath freezing in front of him. He stepped inside. “I thought I’d drop by to see if they brought the Dumpster.”
“It was here when I arrived. Your friends start early.”
“They start work around five in the morning. There’s less traffic to deal with.” He handed me the cup. “I brought you a peppermint hot chocolate.”
“Thank you.”
He looked toward the kitchen. “Looks like you’re making progress.”
“It’s coming along. Slowly. The kitchen took me all day yesterday.”
He nodded. “It looks like a kitchen now.” He put his hands in his pockets. “I’ll let you get back to your cleaning. If you need anything, just call.”
“I don’t know what I’d need, but thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” He slightly nodded, then turned and walked out. I carried the bags from the room to the Dumpster, then came back inside, washed my hands, and drove again to Arctic Circle. I had their famous ranch burger with a raspberry shake, then went back to the house.
The hall outside my room was piled high with boxes. Since it was a main thoroughfare, it wasn’t as cluttered as the other rooms, not that it really contained less junk, rather it was just slightly better organized.
I started going through the boxes. One of them contained all my schoolwork, from kindergarten to seventh grade. I was surprised that my mother had hung on to these things.
It took me about three hours to finish the hall. Almost all the boxes were filled with paper and documents of one kind or another. My mother had kept all her financial records and bills for the last fifteen years. The boxes were heavier than most of what I’d been carrying and, in spite of my daily appointment with an elliptical machine, I was a little winded after getting them all out to the Dumpster.
Next I started on the bathroom at the end of the hall. The bathroom was small and my mother had filled the tub with an eclectic pile of trash: unfinished knitting projects, two lampshades, and an old, rusted woman’s bicycle with two flat tires and no seat. I had no idea what a bicycle was doing inside the bathtub, let alone the house, but I’d given up trying to make sense of the mess.
I was carrying the bicycle out of the bathroom when there was a knock at the door. I looked over to see the door open. Elyse Foster stepped in. She had snow on her hair and she was holding a cardboard box that looked too heavy for her to have carried through the snow.
“I couldn’t imagine there would be anything to eat in the house, so I brought you some hot soup.”
“Let me get that,” I said, setting the bike down and taking the box from her. “Come in.”
She stepped farther inside the room. “I made you tomato soup. You always liked tomato soup. You liked to crumble saltines in it.”
“I still do,” I said. “It embarrasses my agent when we’re in a fancy New York restaurant. Old habits.” She followed me into the kitchen and I set the box down.
“I put some crackers in there. Also some buttered rolls and a piece of chocolate cake.”
“You didn’t have to go to all that trouble.”
“It was no trouble. Now sit down and eat. You haven’t left the house since noon, you must be hungry.”
I wondered how she knew I hadn’t left the house since then. I got two bowls down from the cupboard. “There’s enough here for two,” I said.
“I’ve already eaten,” she said. “I didn’t want to force my company on you.”
I came back to the table, unscrewed the lid from her thermos, and poured the soup into the bowl. “You’re not forcing anything. Have a seat.”
“Thank you.” She sat down across from me and began unwrapping the crackers. She set them in front of me. “It’s already looking much better in here. How is it going?”
“It’s a lot of work.”
“It ought to be. It took her more than fifteen years to compile it.” She looked around and her expression grew more somber. “These walls hold a lot of pain.”
“These walls hold a lot of pain,” I said, setting my hand over my chest.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
I looked at her. “You said something yesterday, about being my only witness.”
“Yes?”
“What did you mean by that?”
“I meant that I’m the only one who knew you before the change.”
“The change? You mean before I became famous?”
She shook her head. “No. Your mother’s change. She wasn’t always the way you remember her. After Charles died, she changed.”
“I was only four when he died.”
“I know. I doubt you remember much of your mother before that.”
I thought over what she’d said. “You said that you thought I would have questions.”
“I think anyone in your situation would.” Her face looked heavy with concern. “You don’t know how I’ve w
orried about you over the years. Your mother was so sick. I’m so happy to see that you’ve done well in life.”
I frowned. “I’m not doing as well as you think,” I said. “That’s why I write.”
She nodded slowly. “I know. I’ve read your books.”
I looked at her with surprise. “You have?”
“That’s how I’ve kept track of you. I recognize many of the places and people you’ve drawn from. You’ve even put me in a few of your books, whether you know it or not.”
I looked at her intensely. “How well did you know me?”
“You really don’t remember,” she said sadly.
“I’m sorry, I don’t.”
“Well, I shouldn’t be too surprised. The mind blocks out painful times. I used to have those little Brach’s chocolate stars. You would come over and ask for one of those almost every day.”
“I remember those. That was you?”
“For years I took you whenever your mother had a migraine. When my nephew stayed with me, I would take you for days at a time. Anything I could do to get you out of that house.”
Memories suddenly flooded in. There was a boy I would play with from time to time. He didn’t live in my neighborhood, his aunt did. Sometimes we would go on adventures in the backyard, playing explorers or pirates; other times we would go to his aunt’s house and play games. It was like we played alone, but together. But even he stopped coming around by the time I turned seven or eight.
“His name was Nick,” I said.
“Then you remember him.”
“You were his aunt.”
She nodded. “He came to stay with me every summer until you were seven. His father was military and was transferred to Germany. You stopped playing at my house after that. That’s probably why you don’t remember.”
“I always wondered why he stopped coming.”
“Your mother became more secluded after that. I didn’t see you as much.”
“You knew my father . . .”
“Yes. I knew Scott well.”
It was strange hearing him called by his name. “All I knew about my father is that he abandoned me.”