She turned back toward the front of the house and thrust the bag into my hands. It smelled like pot stickers, and my stomach suddenly started growling. Apparently the eggrolls from earlier were getting lonely down there. “Just tell her I came by, will you?” Sara pulled her coat tighter around her neck. “She is okay, right?”
“Oh yeah,” I said, starting to relax. “There’s really nothing for you to do.” True, in more ways than one.
“It’s freezing in here. Is the furnace out again?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Phil needs to come over and deal with it.”
“Want me to send Mark over tomorrow? He’s pretty good with that sort of thing.”
Sara and her boyfriend-fiance-whatever, Mark, seemed to have worked out a pact to pretend our house was normal. He’d never spent any real time here, but he’d helped out a couple of times when things were broken, so he was more than aware of what he was dealing with. It made me wonder how she’d done it, because unless she was really good at hypnotism, he was a great actor. Or he was just stupid. “No,” I said. “The space heaters are working okay. I’ve got one in my room.”
“Be sure you keep it on so Mom doesn’t get too cold.”
I followed her to the front door, trying to ignore the irony of that last statement. “Yeah, I will. I’m sure she’ll be okay in a couple of days. Well, I’ll see you later.” I could feel relief flooding my body as she put her hand on the knob.
Sara’s eyes drifted around the big pile in the front hallway to the boxes I had sitting out on the floor by the recliner. “What’s all that about?”
I turned to look at the boxes and bags lined up on the only visible floor space. “Oh, I, uh,…”
Sara marched over to them and peeked inside. She raised her eyes to meet mine with her mouth hanging open in disbelief. “Are you throwing her stuff out?” she hissed, her voice barely louder than a whisper. She picked up a couple of the old photos and junk mail I’d tossed into the bag. “Is this for the trash?”
“Just a few things. I thought I’d—”
“Does Mom know?” She pulled the photos out of the bag. “You’re messing with Mom’s photos? Man, she’s going to kill you.” Sara smoothed the edges of the photos that had gotten crumpled in the bag. She waved them at me. “None of this stuff belongs to you,” she said, her voice getting a little bit louder. “You’re sitting here while Mom is sick and can’t defend herself, calmly tossing out her important things?”
After all I’d been through today I didn’t need one of her lectures. I grabbed the top photo from her and held it out to her face. I was so sick and tired of everything, I was starting to lose my fear. “These aren’t important,” I said. “These are junk. You can’t even tell what’s in this photo—it’s just a tangle of arms that are all out of focus.”
Sara looked closer. “No, that picture was taken on the Fourth of July a couple of years ago. See, right there, that’s the red, white, and blue shirt I always wear to the parade.” She poked at it with a manicured finger. “You can’t just get rid of Mom’s stuff whenever you want.”
I tossed the picture at her and it fell to the floor. “Fine, then,” I said. “You take it. Otherwise it’s going in the garbage with the rest of this useless crap.”
Sara glared at me and slowly bent down to pick it up. “Useless crap? What the hell do you know about useless crap? After all Mom’s done for you.” She snatched the trash bag off the floor. “I’d better take this too so you don’t throw away anything else important.”
I could feel the anger bubbling in my chest again. I was tired of pretending nothing was wrong—that every family lived surrounded by head-high piles of garbage. That we didn’t really want to have any friends over, and it didn’t bother us when Mom made it seem like everything was our fault. “Come on Sara, look around this dump! It’s full of nothing but moldy crap. We can’t even live here properly because it’s such a mess. You haven’t slept in your room in years, because Mom filled it with piles of junk the minute you moved out. Same with Phil’s room. Even Dad left this dump and never came back. I’m the one who has to live in it, and I’m sick of it!” I could feel angry tears welling up in my eyes. I hadn’t cried all day, and now a stupid argument with Sara was threatening to make me all weepy.
“Stop being so selfish,” she said. “It’s not always about you, you know. It’s not like I want to move back here or anything, so what do I care what she does with my room? And for your information, Dad didn’t leave on his own—Mom kicked him out because he was constantly nagging her.” Sara loved dropping little information bombs at the worst possible times. The fact that she was almost ten years older than me gave her lots of ammunition. She never let me forget that she was here long before me and that she never wanted to play the role of big sister.
“What are you talking about?” I asked cautiously. I never knew whether she was telling me the truth or not, because she often felt it was her duty to screw with me. “You know as well as I do Dad abandoned us to go live with what’s-her-name. That’s why Mom got stressed out about everything.”
Sara waved that away with a flick of her wrist. “That’s just what Mom says. I was almost your age when they got divorced, and it’s not like I couldn’t see or hear anything. Mom got tired of Dad not helping out. She said he made her life too difficult, so one day she just tossed him out on his ass. He didn’t even meet Tiffany until way after that.”
I stood staring at Sara, waiting for her to say more, but she seemed to have no idea this information completely contradicted everything I’d ever thought. She started filling the plastic bag with anything she could find.
“I can’t believe you’re taking advantage of Mom being sick by going through her stuff. Good thing I came by today, or God knows what you might have done.” She looked up at me from where she was crouched on the ground gathering junk mail. “Mom told me she was worried about you. Always trying to keep her out of your room. What are you hiding in there? Hmm? Probably stealing stuff from Mom and squirreling it away. She always says that she can never find her valuables. You’re probably taking them.”
“Mom can’t find anything because she lives like a pig!” I was practically shouting now, the image of late-night phone conversations between them feeding my frustration. “Are you blind? Look around! Stop defending her and look around. It’s not healthy.” I took a deep breath. “It’s not normal.”
“Well, then, maybe you should help more,” she said. “She’s getting older and can’t do everything for you. Now that she’s working longer hours, she can’t babysit you all day. When I was little, we helped out all the time, and this place was spotless. I’m sure that if you picked up after yourself every once in a while, it would get better.”
“Now
“This is not my fault,” I said slowly. It was the first time I’d ever said those words out loud, and I liked the way they felt. Sara might want to be just like Mom, but I was going to do everything I could to be different from the two of them. If I had to go and live on a tiny boat with nothing but a toothbrush and a change of underwear, I’d do it—I’d gladly leave all this behind just to have a normal life.
Sara stood up and took a few steps toward the hallway. “I’m going to have to wake Mom up and tell her what you’ve been up to. No matter how sick she is, she’s going to want to know that she’s being betrayed by her own daughter. Real nice, Luce.”
As she began to work her way out of the room, I panicked, my resolve to stand up to them fading fast. Thank God it was too dark for her to see the growing pile of bags on the side of the house, but if she got down to the end of the hallway, she’d see Mom, for sure.
“No, don’t!” I said. “Don’t wake her up!” I flicked my hand and dumped a bunch of clothes on top of the other trash bags to cover them. Sara stopped walking and turned to me with her hand on her hip. There was just enough room in the pathway for her elbow to fit before it bumped the mounds of junk on either side. “I don’t see that I have much choice,” she said. She shook the bag at me. “Not after this.”
I had to think fast. I should have known Sara would do this. “Look, I’m sorry,” I said. I stared at the floor and tried to look as humble as possible. For once I was glad that I’d taken drama as an elective last year. I might not be able to deal with an audience of hundreds, but an audience of one I could handle. “I’m not tossing out Mom’s stuff; I just wanted to make a little more space for her. It’s getting so crowded around her chair, pretty soon she’s going to be sleeping outside.”
Sara looked over at Mom’s chair and at the piles that were growing around it. “This is it?” she asked. She looked skeptical. “You didn’t touch anything else?”
I could see her starting to change her mind. I had to keep talking. “No. Nothing. Only around the chair. I figured that when she was feeling better, it would be nice for her to be able to sleep without worrying that all of
