“Me too,” Darla said. “The only way to know whether something’s gonna work out is to trust yourself, close your eyes, and just jump. Right?”
“Sure,” Josie said, “if you say so.”
They said their goodbyes and Josie hung up, elated and exhausted at the same time. Josie surveyed her place, this time looking at it through the eyes of a potential roommate. Well, it certainly had worked well all these years that she had been alone, and had even worked well for entertaining Alex. Having another person share the entire place was going to be interesting.
Her apartment didn’t really have a plan; it sort of reflected Josie in that sense. She had the first floor of a triple decker, right across the street from a giant park, but aside from her bedroom and her bathroom, the openness that had once been so appealing to her now became an issue. Darla would need privacy, and the only room that really made sense was this tiny—she wandered over to it…wow, ten by ten would be a stretch—room that didn’t even have a closet. Technically her apartment was allowed to be called a “one bedroom” because the little room lacked the basic functions of a bedroom. On the other hand, she wasn’t planning to charge Darla any rent for it, so free meant that her Ohio niece would have to get used to living in a room smaller than she was used to.
Darla wouldn’t complain, she knew that. The poor girl was used to living in a trailer in the middle of nowhere. Josie had grown up in a house. That had seemed to separate kids in their town—if you lived in a house you were somehow better than the kids who lived in the trailer park. Even though Josie didn’t believe that, and had never treated Darla or any of her friends who lived in the trailer park any differently, there was a sense of pervasive shame about growing up in any kind of home that was falling apart.
Both of them had lived in dwellings that seemed to reflect their mothers’ inner cores. For Aunt Cathy, the porch was perpetually falling apart, as if the entrance to her was so unnavigable that in order to reach her you had to get through the impossible and probably cut yourself and get hurt in the process. With Marlene’s house, it was the other way around. The house was never in great shape when her dad had been alive, but he’d cut the lawn, they’d gardened a bit, and even if the house had peeling paint on the outside, on the inside her mom had worked really hard to make it homey and loving.
The first year after the accident, though, absolutely nothing had been done. Literally. Josie had turned eleven just before the accident, and on her twelfth birthday she wanted to invite some friends over and so had surveyed the place. Finding newspapers from the week after her dad had died shoved in a corner had given her a profound sense of just how neglected everything was, as if time had stood still. And as time, in fact, marched on, nothing got done ever again. Marlene didn’t have the gutters cleaned, didn’t mow the lawn, didn’t buy food, didn’t even talk to Josie some days. She just lived in her own dysfunctional and sometimes florid world. Aunt Cathy had tried to explain to Josie that it wasn’t that Marlene didn’t love her, it was that the accident had changed her brain, made her selfish, made her focused on everything butlove. The words had seemed harsh but she had known that they were true.
When you live in a craphole, you grow up fearing that you’re just going to create a new craphole, and Josie had fought so hard not to do that. Living with Darla was going to be a challenge then—if Darla turned out to have succumbed to wanting to invent her own craphole. That wasn’t going to fly. Maybe giving her this smaller space would contain any hoarding nature, if need be.
She began pulling her boxes of old books out of the room. Why was she keeping textbooks from twelve years ago? It was easy now to get rid of them, something she couldn’t have imagined doing six months ago. Back then they had represented her intelligence, as if the book were a physical manifestation of what her brain could do. That seemed so silly. Cleaning out the room made her face years of crap that she had been lugging around with her, and as she spent the next couple of hours sorting and decluttering, she found herself violently throwing object after object into the Goodwill boxes. A broken chess set...gone, an old phone that she’d intended to give to a domestic violence shelter...in the box, clothes that she hadn’t worn in years and never would, but that represented some memory...gone.
Carrying the first box to her car that afternoon, the fresh air, the sun shining in a way that New England didn’t get very often, caught her off guard. A handful of clouds hung in the air like little cotton balls, evenly distributed across a vast sky. The sun shone down, not harsh, but gentle. It reminded her of the day that she and Alex had gone to the river. Her body began to hum as she lifted the box and dumped it into her trunk, not bothering to close it as she marched back into the house. Five boxes later, her mind was still retracing the memory of Alex’s hands on her ass, the power of his thighs lifting her up, how her back had scraped against that stone wall, the leaves pressing into her hair, the scent of him etched into her lungs, the hoarse cry that came from her throat as she came and came in his arms.
Frustration began to feel like anger, then threatened to turn to rage. She told herself sitting still, taking a break with a cup of coffee, would help her refocus on sorting out the concrete reminders of the burden of her past. And a finished space for Darla would allow her to welcome another person escaping some of that same past. Storming into the kitchen, she filled the holding tank with water, shoved a K-Cup filter into the machine, and hit “On” as if it were an indictment. Before the machine’s burbling death rattle was finished, she snatched the cup out from under the last few drips and gulped it down to fortify herself.
The room was nearly empty when she found it. An old box with a slightly chewed corner from some sort of creature that had nibbled at it back in the closet of her old house in Ohio. The box fell apart when she picked it up to move it and various items tumbled out. An old diary that she recognized from seventh grade, a corsage from some sort of awards banquet that she’d been to in high school, a trophy and…oh, God…her copy of A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle. That was her last gift from her father for her eleventh birthday. He’d gotten it for her and taken her all the way up to Cleveland to go to the art museum, showing her the Cleveland Public Library and marveling at all of the newfangled computer systems that Peters just didn’t have. It had geeked him out as a librarian, and she’d found herself asking him all sorts of questions that she’d never felt privy to even ask on the trip. He’d taken her out for a really weird sort of lunch, to a Greek place where she learned that what she had thought in her head was pronounced “gy-ro” was actually pronounced “yee-ro.” The man at the counter had chided her when she’d tried to pronounce it “gyro,” and her dad had just laughed, a good-natured chuckle that made her feel grown up somehow.