we live and stare at me in the halls like the smell of rotting garbage billowed out behind me when I walked. Maybe Josh and Kaylie wouldn’t care, and I’d get to have a best friend and a boyfriend at the same time. Maybe I was completely delusional.
I opened the dining room window and added several more bags to the growing pile. Mrs. Raj had her antennae up about the trash and would definitely come over to investigate. I wasn’t sure if it was good or bad that she was the least of my problems at this point.
As I piled stuff into the big trash bags, I started to think about right after. After everyone knew Mom was gone, there would probably be a funeral. All the old ladies at church loved her for holding the rummage sale every year and organizing their senior meals. They would want to come. And the people at work would be there, Nadine for sure. Maybe even some of the families of “her people.” But would they come once they’d found out the truth? Would the little old ladies and the friends from work be too horrified to show their faces at a memorial for Mom once she stopped being Joanna Tompkins and became that freaky garbage lady? I wondered if Dad would come, or if there were too many bad years between them for him to really care. I tried to picture the funeral with the casket and flowers, and me and Sara and Phil sitting in the front row all dressed up and looking sad.
The thing was, I didn’t feel sad like I was supposed to. As I shoveled bags of clothes, work memos, and food wrappers into heavy-duty garbage bags, I felt a lot of things, but sad wasn’t one of them. Angry, irritated, annoyed, lonely, and maybe even a little guilty. But not sad. Maybe after, I could be sad. But not now.
I might be able to survive senior year alone, but it would be so hard to watch Kaylie and Josh live their lives without me. I could just see myself in art class, sitting alone because nobody would want to come close enough to be my partner. Maybe I could graduate early, or do a home study until graduation. I could get a part-time job and live here with Phil until I could go away to college.
My phone was in my pocket, so I reached in to check the time. Seven fifteen. Depending on how late Sara stayed out tonight and how annoyed she actually was, I might have only twelve hours left. Sort of like Cinderella at the ball, only with garbage.
I made my way over to the front door and tried to imagine how the scenario would play out in the morning. I’d probably have to call 911 sometime before Sara actually showed up, and say that I found Mom lying in the hallway. Otherwise, it would look all wrong. Maybe the cops would put up that yellow tape, so Sara couldn’t go sniffing around in here until everyone was gone.
As accomplished as I felt looking to the left of the front hallway, I felt completely deflated looking to the right. I must have spent at least three or four hours in there, and it was almost impossible to tell. Sure, I could see that there was more room around the old, soggy green chair, but nobody besides Sara was ever going to see the difference.
Straight ahead, the hallway narrowed into a two-and-a-half-foot space you could just squeeze through if you turned sideways, put your arms stiffly to your sides, and sucked in your breath. If you’d had a super burrito at El Gordito anytime in the past twenty-four hours, you didn’t have a prayer of making it. I think that’s one reason why Mom stayed so skinny all these years—navigating the house required a BMI of less than twenty.
The hallway took a sharp left at the end, and Mom was lying about four feet from the corner. Why couldn’t she have died on her way out to get the paper? Or better yet, why not on the chair where she spent most of her time when she was home? Then it would be so much easier to get her out. But no. She had to die in the very back part of the very narrowest hallway, where it would be almost impossible for the paramedics to get her out on a gurney without lights flashing and hordes of neighbors straining to see what was going on behind the police barricades. Maybe they would just abandon the gurney idea altogether and just carry her body through to the front? Was there some sort of paramedic code that said that once a body was dead it had to be put in a body bag and strapped to a gurney, or did they have a little more leeway than that? Every dead body I’d ever seen on television had been sealed into black plastic and wheeled out on a bright yellow stretcher, but that didn’t mean it was the rule.
I’d begun pacing in the free space in the front hallway. The constant movement actually helped me feel better—calmed my stomach and gave the butterflies something to do besides slam at my insides. I didn’t know if it was all the coffee I’d had in the past twenty-four hours or just the fact that I could feel Sara getting closer by the minute, but I was starting to feel jumpy. If I could just figure out a way for the paramedics to get her out through the hallway, then maybe they’d be in and out fast enough for the house not to be such an issue. All they needed to do was check her over, make sure she was beyond CPR, get her out, and leave the condition of the house to me. If I could just make her more accessible, then her death would be normal. A woman dying under her own homemade avalanche made news. Somebody dying of lung problems or a heart attack happened every day.
I just had to make her more accessible. Accessible. The word bounced around in my head like a Ping-Pong ball. Accessible didn’t have to mean they could get to her where she was—it just meant that they could get to her, period. Oh my God, what an idiot! I’d been working on this completely backward this whole time. Instead of bringing them through the front door to Mom, I needed to bring Mom to the front door!
I scooted sideways through the maze of trash until I reached the part of the hallway that took a sharp left toward her room. I stood at her feet and took a deep breath, staring at the tiny pink roses on the sheet that covered her. Each one looked like a painting that someone had spent hours and days to get just right—the shades of light and dark pink giving each flower a greater depth and dimension. Someone had to have bought it new at some point—probably not Mom, but someone. I’d bet they never would have guessed where the sheet with the cheerful pink roses was going to end up.
Reaching down to touch her, I swallowed hard and closed my eyes. The only way to get this done was to not think of this as Mom anymore. This wasn’t the person who’d given birth to me and packed my lunches (well, for a few years, at least)—it was just a collection of bones and cells and duct-taped slippers that had to be temporarily relocated for the greater good. Greater good. I liked that. Made it sound almost biblical or something. I wasn’t doing this for me so much as I was doing it for the greater good of Mom, Phil, and even Sara, although she didn’t deserve it.
Blowing on my hands to warm them, I stood at Mom’s feet and tried to find the best way to maneuver her through the narrow hallway. I was a lot taller than she was, but it would probably be too hard to stand her up, even though that would be the simplest way.
I squatted down and wrapped the end of the sheet a couple of times around her ankles so I’d have something to hold on to. Grabbing the sheet, I leaned back and pulled as hard as I could, grunting like a pro tennis player, until I lost my grip and tumbled backward on my butt, slamming into a stack of newspapers on the other wall and scrambling out of the way when they started to wobble.
There was no way she was that immovable. I gathered myself up and pulled again, but as I looked up toward her head, I could see that her shoulders were caught by the corner of one of the still-standing magazine piles. The pile shifted dangerously as I pulled one more time. Dropping her ankles, I picked my way over to the spot where she was stuck, held the top of the pile with my hand, and kicked at the bottom until the stack turned just enough to allow her shoulder to get by.
Taking my position down by her feet again, I pulled one more time, and she moved a few inches in my
