he was still somewhere in the house, curled up safe in a little nest he’d made for himself, only coming out at night to look for food. I’d leave a pile of peanuts on the counter for him, and little by little it would vanish, so at least I knew he was eating something.
The sharp smell from the cedar shavings in his cage brought back everything I’d felt that day when I’d come back to discover him gone. Mom must have put the cage back here in case we ever got another hamster, but we never did. It didn’t seem right to bring another living thing into this house when I couldn’t even manage to keep Petey safe. The water bottle was still secured to the side of the cage, but it had been dry a long time.
I carried the whole thing over to the wall where the green bins were stacked. Even if Petey was long gone, the cage was still good. Maybe when all this was over, I’d get another hamster. Or clean it out and give it to TJ. He was about the right age for a pet.
As I set the cage down on the bins, I spotted something sticking out from under the cedar chips. I shook the cage so the chips settled and I could see it better, sticking my face right up to the bars to get a good look. He wasn’t curled up in a ball, but lying out straight under a thin layer of cedar chips. The skin looked dry and papery but still had a few tufts of brown hair clinging to it.
Petey.
“Oh God,” I said. I looked closer to make sure, but there was really no doubt. Petey hadn’t escaped at all. He’d died right in this cage while I was gone, and instead of doing something normal like burying him, or even telling me the truth, Mom must have covered up the cage and left it in the dining room like it never happened. That was her solution to everything—cover it up like it never happened.
My mind raced as I backed away from the cage containing the mummified remains of my only pet. “How could she?” I whispered. She probably forgot about him completely. Didn’t feed him or even give him water. Petey trusted me and I’d totally let him down.
Without even thinking about it, I opened the top of the cage and gently wrapped him in the towel. He wasn’t much more than dried skin and bones by now, but the least I could do was give him a decent burial. Grabbing the shovel, I headed outside, not caring who saw me.
On the side of the house, just under my window, was a sheltered spot next to a spindly hydrangea bush. The cold ground was hard as I stabbed at it with the shovel, but after breaking through the top layer I was able to dig a small hole, pulling out chunks of hard clay soil and piling them up in the walkway. When the hole was deep enough, I leaned the shovel against the wall and knelt down as I lowered the pink towel into it. Tucking the edges of the towel around Petey, I waited for thoughts to come—something about how I was sorry I’d left him alone, and how I’d do it differently if I had it to do again. I wished for something profound to give him a dignified send-off, but my mind just felt blank and empty. Slowly, I got up and dumped dirt back on top of him, scraping the shovel on the walkway as I scooped it up over and over again until the pink towel was gone.
When I was done, I patted the dirt down with the back of the shovel and looked at the smooth ground where my first and only pet was buried. Unless you knew, you’d never guess he was here, but maybe it would make me feel a little bit better when the bush bloomed with huge pink flowers in the spring and reminded me that Petey was in a better place.
chapter 8
3:00 p.m.
I, however, was still trapped in this crappy place. As clouds gathered outside, it grew quieter inside, and every move I made seemed to echo off the ceiling. Mom had the television going twenty-four hours a day if she was home—something to keep her company she said—so I grabbed the stereo from my room and set it up on top of a pile of papers in the middle of the kitchen. Filling the house with sound helped make it feel a little less lonely and made this crazy project seem a little less futile. Music to decontaminate by.
After I suited up in my orange rubber gloves, I stood near the sink and tried to figure out where to start in what used to be a functional kitchen. That was always the problem when you were standing in an endless pile of garbage—where to start. Regular people might leave their dirty dishes in the sink for a few hours or even a day until someone got around to washing them and putting them in the dishwasher. Once the dishwasher broke down and the plumbing backed up, our dishes sat in the sink and on the counter for years. Actual years.
The fronts of the cabinets were white once, but now looked as though they were covered in fine, brown dirt, like someone had stood in the middle of the kitchen and flung bags of potting soil all over everything. Except it wasn’t potting soil. It was mold that had crept along the counters and down over the cabinets until you couldn’t tell what color the cabinets were supposed to be. The mold had made its way up the tiles and the walls until the bottoms of the curtains hung heavy with black. It happened so gradually that we really didn’t notice. We just stayed out of that room as much as we could and tried not to look at anything too closely. After a while, it didn’t seem to matter anymore.
Getting rid of this stuff was probably some kind of biohazard. I coughed just thinking about it. Mom’s breathing problems had gotten a lot worse lately—inhaling mold spores for years would do that to you. It might even kill you.
It was creepy looking closely at everything like this. If you walked by it every day you didn’t notice how bad it really was. Now that I was paying attention, it was hard not to see it like Josh or Kaylie would—a disgusting mess that nobody sane would live in. Thinking about Josh just made me sadder. I don’t know who I was kidding last night.
Until I got this fixed, I couldn’t let anybody near it. Or near me. It was amazing Kaylie still didn’t know—I’d been getting careless letting her pick me up and drop me off here. What if she’d seen how we really live? What if Josh smelled the house stink on my jacket when he put his arm around me? The heaviness started to take over as I let these thoughts race through my brain. I shook my head and tried to erase the image of him backing away from me in disgust. I couldn’t think any further than right now if I had any hope of making this work.
There was no getting around cleaning the kitchen because that’s where most of the stink was coming from. Like every other horizontal surface in the house, the counters were piled high with everything you’d find in a normal kitchen—times twelve. If a few empty grocery bags might come in handy someday, Mom would save hundreds, because you never knew when the world might run out. Stacks of newspapers stood here and there waiting to be read and clipped. Empty food containers were everywhere—margarine and yogurt containers, water bottles, and cylinders that once held potato chips. Those were some of Mom’s favorite treasures. And it’s not like these just came from us. Mom “saved” empty containers from work and even random trash cans. She always said with some sort of strange, misplaced pride that she didn’t go digging in other people’s trash cans, but if something was sitting right there on top for all the world to see, well, then, she had an obligation to see it wasn’t wasted.
I’d have to clear off some counter space to really get down to it, so I started with the stove. It was piled with miscellaneous junk as high as the range hood. A few years back the refrigerator broke, so Mom just piled groceries on the counter next to the stove, lining up the cans of food instead of putting them away anywhere. This would probably have been okay if she had only bought things in cans, but I was pretty sure she’d stashed things like lunch meat and fruit here too with the idea that as long as it was visible, we’d eat it quickly enough. Which was good in theory, I guess.
In order to reach the stove, I had to make a new pathway through the piles of stuff that littered the kitchen floor. I couldn’t get the trash can in here, which meant my only option was to grab a trash bag and shove anything into it that I could find. Most of the stuff in here was so destroyed by mold, I didn’t bother wondering what was in the bags or boxes. It was better not to think about it, particularly if something was soggy or leaking or smelled so bad my gag reflex kicked in.
I grabbed a can of green beans from the counter beside the stove. It had an expiration date that was two years earlier. And that was probably one of the newer cans in her collection. I started to load a bag with all the canned food, but realized that cans of food would make the bag really heavy really fast. I decided to leave the rest of them on the counter. Once everything else was cleaned up, a bunch of cans sitting on a counter wouldn’t look as weird. Maybe the paramedics would think she’d just gotten home from grocery shopping. If they didn’t look closely, they might not figure out that the shopping trip was from five years ago.
With one hand, I held the trash bag against the stove, and with the other, I swept the containers, plastic
