direction. After a few pulls, the sheet started to get dislodged from over her head, and I could see some of her white-rooted, wiry red hair sticking out of the top. I tried not to look as I pulled. It was much easier to concentrate on the grungy suede slippers. If I allowed myself to stop and think about what I was doing, I wouldn’t be able to finish. I had to concentrate on the how and not think about the why, or it would seem too horrible and creepy.
When we reached the corner, I realized I couldn’t pull her any farther. Because there were stacks of newspapers against all the walls, there was no easy way to get her around the turn and into the straight part of the hallway that led to the front door. If she would bend, it might work, but she’d been dead so long that there was very little give left in her body.
I should have stopped to try out a better strategy, but I felt that I just had to keep moving—I had to get this part over with as soon as possible. Cleaning the house didn’t feel like such a big deal, but moving Mom meant that I had to make it look right. Cops notice when bodies are moved, and I was sure it was some sort of crime.
By picking my way around her body—and stepping on what I think was her left hand in the process—I made it to the other side up by her shoulders to try and ease her around the corner. If she had been alive she would have been really pissed at me right about now.
I could feel myself starting to get frustrated, but I breathed in slowly and tried to calm down. I was so close— only fifty more feet and it might be possible to actually be normal after all. Fifty lousy feet.
Looking at the one sharp corner that stood between me and success, the anger roiled in my stomach, and I so badly wanted to scream and kick the stacks that surrounded us. The turn was so sharp and the path was so narrow—there was no way to get her around the corner. Relocating her was such a good idea and it made too much sense to
Like everything else in this whole stupid day, I had failed again. Just like Mom and Sara always said—I couldn’t do anything right. Even dead, Mom seemed to be laughing at me, lying there refusing to make it easy once again.
It would serve everybody right if I walked out of the house at that moment—straight down the driveway—and left all this crap behind me. Just turned my back on all of it and kept on going. Not that I had anywhere
Except I knew that I wouldn’t. It was up to me to deal with this, just like it had been up to me to take care of us these last few years, making sure Mom ate a decent meal once in a while and had enough clean clothes for work. It was up to me to make sure the plumbing still worked and we weren’t reduced to peeing in buckets again. Up to me to make sure that nobody ever found out how bad Mom was getting. It was still up to me.
My body felt disconnected from my brain as I tucked in the sheet once again. Mom’s arms were flung sideways near her head, but I couldn’t bring myself to grab her hands, so I lifted her under the arms and pulled her back down the hallway just a little bit, so her feet weren’t all jammed up in the corner and she wasn’t visible from the front door. I sat in the hallway a few inches from her head and tucked my knees up under my chin. I told myself that I was just taking a break—I wasn’t giving up—but I wasn’t sure I believed me.
I felt empty and used up. As I sat, gazing at the floor, I noticed her left hand was brushed up against my leg, almost like she was reaching out to touch me. It was such an unusual gesture for her to make that it startled me. I looked at her unpainted fingernails with the ridges that had gotten deeper the past few years and wondered when she’d touched me for the last time. We’d never been a very “touchy” family, but I couldn’t remember holding her hand or even feeling her fingers brush against mine as we passed something to each other recently.
Looking at the hand that had made such an unbelievable mess of things, I realized it was also the hand that had carefully pasted pictures of what she wanted her life to be like into a notebook—the hand that had stroked the feet of a lonely, dying woman.
I reached out and curled my hand around her still, icy fingers. I held it there for a long time as I sat with my knees to my chest, wishing that just for a minute she could squeeze it back and tell me everything would be okay.
chapter 15
8:00 p.m.
It was pointless to keep going but impossible to stop. I wandered aimlessly around the house, trying to decide what to do next, finally sitting down on the arm of Mom’s chair to psych myself up for the long night ahead.
Something was sticking up from the back corner of the cushion. The remote, maybe? I leaned over and pulled out a pair of scissors. Special scissors with black handles. Cautiously, I stuck my hand farther down into that corner and felt something hard and narrow. Another pair of scissors, but these had blue handles.
I finally pulled up three pairs of scissors scattered around the edges where the cushion met the chair. It was just like Mom. She was the one who lost the scissors down here, and when she couldn’t find them, she went out and bought another pair. After she blamed me for losing them, that is. I took the cushion off to see what else had been right under her butt the whole time.
There were a few coins of different sizes and some old popcorn kernels sharing space with over a dozen envelopes that were piled toward the front of the seat. The coins and scissors I could understand, but how would sealed envelopes just happen to fall underneath the front of the cushion? And in a nice, neat stack?
I picked one up and looked at the return address. It was from a bank and it was pretty thick. Maybe she had a secret bank account she didn’t want us to know about. Mom always said we didn’t have enough money for things that I wanted, but I never believed her because she had Dad’s child support plus what she made at the hospital. I had to pay for my own cell phone, and I’d missed the tenth-grade trip to Disneyland last year because we supposedly couldn’t afford it. The main reason I didn’t get my license wasn’t because I had no car, but because Mom said the extra insurance would be too expensive. I always suspected that saying we couldn’t afford it was an easy way for her to get out of something she didn’t want me to do. It would be just like her to be literally sitting on a fortune.
Sliding one finger under the envelope flap, I allowed myself a spark of excitement. There might be enough in here to really make a difference. I could get the car fixed and get my license so I wouldn’t have to rely on other people to get everywhere. Maybe I’d buy a new car instead—one that didn’t remind me of Mom every time I sat in the driver’s seat. One that would take me as far as I wanted to go.
I ripped the envelope all the way open and took out the papers that were inside. Ever since I started earning my own money, I’d been getting bank statements, so I knew one when I saw one. And this wasn’t one. It was from a credit card company. There were pages and pages of charges, and on the first page in big black letters was one of the largest numbers I’d seen in real life. I looked up at the date in the corner of the page. This statement was from six months ago, but even then Mom owed $48,562 to this credit card. With all of the Christmas stuff she’d bought last month, I was sure the total was now a lot higher. I frantically pawed through the envelopes from all the other banks. The next bill I opened was newer and had another huge number in the corner. The next showed a balance of
