I clicked my phone open again. This was crazy. I hit the numbers and held it to my ear, my left hand shaking so violently I had to reach over with my right hand to try to steady it. It rang twice. Three times.
From where I was standing in the hallway, I couldn’t see Mom’s head anymore, only her legs and feet. It looked like she was still wearing her robe, and she had on those nasty slippers like she always did when she was home. Mom had worn the same brown suede slippers as long as I could remember—repairing rips with silver duct tape until that wore through as well and left dirty, sticky marks from the adhesive.
I closed my eyes and tried to think of nothing. Just for a few minutes, if I could get my mind clear, my thoughts could sort themselves out, and I would know what to do and how to feel. It was just the shock of it all that had me confused.
Past the kitchen, I squeezed myself into the living room and turned off the TV so I could think without it squawking around inside my head. We only had one trash can in the whole house so Mom could monitor what went in it. If something couldn’t be recycled, it could be reused. If it couldn’t be reused, it could be composted. If it couldn’t be recycled, reused, or composted, it could be put in a pile somewhere in this house where it would never again see the light of day.
I could put a few bags out in the trash bin, but then what? A few bags in the garbage wouldn’t begin to make a dent in the accumulation of almost an entire lifetime of “treasures.” Which was mostly what other people called trash.
I walked back into the kitchen and took a look around. I hadn’t looked in here for a long time—with good reason. The microwave and minifridge in my room were all I ever needed, so I avoided this part of the house at all costs. The counters were stacked with dirty dishes, petrified pizza boxes, and takeout containers full of food that had sat long enough to congeal into one black, furry mass. I knew the stove was to the left of the sink, but I couldn’t see it beyond the one clear spot right in the middle of the room. The cupboard under the sink was open, and the big pipe underneath drained into an old green bucket that sat on the floor half full of moldy water. Back when we still used the sink, I had rigged this so the waste emptied into the bucket, and we could take the bucket and dump it outside. The system was so primitive it almost made me smile—I could do a lot better now.
The sink itself was full of a uniform dark brown mass that could have been anything once. It looked like chocolate pudding, but I could guarantee it wasn’t.
As I glanced around at the remains of the kitchen, I could feel trickles of sweat running down my neck despite the frigid house. I couldn’t fix this. It had taken years to get it this bad; how was I supposed to fix it overnight?
I wrapped my jacket tighter around me and wished for more time. A few days—a week, maybe, and I could have this place looking okay enough to let people in. It’s not like I had to make it perfect, just good enough so it wasn’t a freak show.
A draft of cold air came from somewhere and brushed against my cheek. It was so cold inside, I could see my breath hang in front of me. It felt almost colder in here than it did outside, and, without the furnace working, this whole place was turning into one giant freezer. I’d have to keep moving or I’d freeze to death along with her.
Oh my God—my stomach did a flip-flop as the idea started to form. It was
A glimmer of hope started flickering inside me as I picked my way to the other side of the room as fast as I could, my thoughts racing one step ahead. This was totally crazy and totally wrong and totally the only hope I had at all.
The smell near the sink was so bad I had to hold my breath as I worked the windows halfway open. The moldy curtains waved listlessly in the breeze as the frigid air worked its way inside. The window in the laundry room was stuck pretty tight, but I did manage to open it a crack, and I hoped it was enough. With this many windows open in the back of the house, it would probably drop the temperature close to actual freezing. It almost never got cold enough to snow around here, but I’d heard on the radio that there was a frost warning this week, just in time for New Year’s Eve. The timing couldn’t be better.
The answer had been staring me in the face this whole time. The cold. As long as I could get it cold enough, Mom would . . . keep . . . until I had time to make things look better. I didn’t know that much about dead bodies, but I’d watched enough cop shows to know the cold would buy me a couple of days before things got too bad. And a couple of days might be all it took to make the difference between normal and newsworthy.
I could never keep track of the days during vacation, and it took a minute to figure out today was Tuesday. That meant I had until at least Thursday morning, maybe Friday, before Mom would have to be “discovered.” I could spend the next couple of days cleaning the place up, and then go to Kaylie’s to spend the night. When I came home in the morning, I could “find” Mom on the floor in a normal-looking house that contained a normal amount of stuff— lying dead in a normal position, not buried under a mountain of magazines in a house that looked like a landfill. If I closed all the windows before I left, it should warm up enough in here to make it look like she’d just died.
Two more years until I could have a normal life had seemed like an eternity, and suddenly it was like the universe was handing me a chance to have all of it ahead of schedule. There was only ten tons of garbage standing in the way.
I rushed back through the pathway, out of the kitchen, and down to my room at the end of the hall to grab my wallet. I’d need garbage bags—the big, black ones made for moments like this. As far as I knew, we didn’t even own any. I stood in my open doorway and felt my heartbeat slow and the knot in my stomach loosen. I kicked the door shut behind me, blocking out the smell and the mess, and took a deep breath.
The flutter of panic that had been whirling in my head was being replaced by something else. I felt a little guilty for the warmth of optimism that was spreading throughout my body at a time when I should have been devastated, but there it was. For once in my life, I was in charge. If I worked hard enough, I could keep Kaylie and Josh and the glimmer of a normal life that had started to form.
Was it selfish? Absolutely. It wasn’t like I could do anything to save Mom at this point, but I could do something
