The Opposite Of Tidy (37 page)

After they landed they were taken straight to the TV studio, which was enormous and industrial, like an airplane hangar. They were met at the edge of the lot by Charlie Falconetti and a driver in a golf cart and taken into the building and down wide concrete corridors, until the cart stopped in front of a room that had a star on the door, with their names on it in smart cursive lettering.

“Whatever you need should be in there. Give me a shout if you think of anything else.” Charlie handed Junie a walkie-talkie. “Best way to get a hold of me. We go on the air in three hours. Hair and makeup and wardrobe will be by to collect you in about fifteen minutes.”

By the time they were ushered onto the stage, Junie didn’t recognize herself, or her mother. After being dressed in clothes that they’d never wear, but which looked fantastic on them, they’d sat in the stylists’ chairs for the better part of an hour, their hair being worked on and their faces being carefully made up by women talking about their boyfriends and texting in between putting on dabs of this and spritzes of that.

The whole experience was very surreal. Junie wasn’t sure that she liked it at all.

The audience was abuzz, talking excitedly while they waited for Kendra to appear. Junie and her mother sat awkwardly in two orange leather chairs, centre stage, the lights up in the rafters so bright that it almost felt as if they were alone in the studio.

“Quiet on the set!” a voice called from the darkness. The crowd fell silent. Kendra’s theme music, upbeat and youthful, exploded out of the speakers lining the edge of the room, and the audience leapt to their feet as Kendra swept into the room, walking confidently in her high heels, holding out her hands so that the crowd of mostly women could reach out and touch her as she made her way to the stage.

Junie and her mother stood, as they’d been directed to earlier. Kendra parked herself between the two of them and took their hands.

“Welcome, everybody! You’re all looking so smart today!” She turned and gave Junie’s mother’s hand a squeeze. “Especially you, Marla.” Back to the audience and the teleprompter, where her script was scrolling down in slow, big letters. “Marla here has come a long way to be with us today, both in real life and in her heart and mind and soul. Marla is a compulsive hoarder, and today on
The Kendra Show
we bring you her story, and her miraculous recovery. We’ll be back in a moment.”

Crews rearranged the enormous cameras on tracks laid along the floor while the audience murmured and Kendra invited Junie and her mother to take a seat. They hadn’t seen Kendra since that last day when she’d sat alone with Junie’s mother in what had once been Thomas’s nursery.
A room that had been used for storage for as long as Junie could remember.

Seated, Kendra reached for Junie’s mother’s hand again and gave it another squeeze. “Won’t be any surprises, hon. Promise you that. Nice and easy, a few tears and some laughs and you can go back home and start living that life of yours to its fullest. Okay?”

“Okay,” Junie’s mother said, struggling for enthusiasm.

Now the director said, “Going live in five, four, three . . .” Then she held up two fingers, and one, and finally pointed to Kendra to indicate that they were live on air.

Kendra turned on as if a switch had been flipped. Her teeth gleamed white in the hot lights. Her eyelashes looked larger than life, like her smile.

“When I first walked into Marla’s home, I couldn’t believe anyone could live in such squalor. The stench. The filth. The detritus of life. The decay of a life abandoned . . . to junk.”

Junie nervously crossed and uncrossed her legs. Nice and easy? She doubted it. Her mother had taken something for her nerves before the show and was seeming to hold up okay in its lazy, warm glow. Junie glanced at her and wished she’d helped herself to a pill too. Behind them, shots of the house before, filled with the familiar mountains of crap, the rotting takeout boxes, the stacks of mildewed laundry, room after room filled to the ceiling with useless, unnecessary stuff. Junie’s skin broke out in goosebumps, and she had to grip the arms of the chair to resist leaping up and running out of there, screaming.

Everyone she knew, and eleven million or more people she didn’t know, were watching right now. Wade and Tabitha, along with Ollie and Lulu, had driven out to Royce and Jeremy’s to watch it there in their home theatre, which had real theatre seats and a popcorn machine and a screen that took up one whole wall. Junie imagined Evelyn watching it alone, cursing Kendra for snubbing her but too curious to refuse to watch. The only person Junie was sure was not watching was her father. He’d be at work, adding and shifting columns of numbers, reaching for a perfect order that he could not attain in his personal life. He quickly clammed up whenever Junie brought up Thomas, and he hadn’t mentioned Kendra since her trucks had pulled out of the driveway. He was as solidly parked in denial as he’d ever been. He might not have been the one with the hoarding problem, but he was just as screwed up as her mother for trying to ignore the son he’d lost so suddenly and tragically.

They cut to footage of Kendra mincing her way around the heaps of garbage to meet Junie’s mother in her long since torched easy chair.

It went fast. It was true that living through the intervention itself had been far harder than actually being on
The Kendra Show
stage. This was all old news to Junie now. Her life had already moved on in the two months since Kendra had come to town. The cameras had left, along with the media and spectators. At school, the kids had moved on from her drama to the new drama of a girl who’d been arrested for smuggling drugs across the border for her boyfriend. Not that Junie was happy that the girl had been
caught with five baggies of pot on her, but she was glad that the focus had shifted abruptly off of her. Of course there would be talk after the show, but honestly, Junie didn’t care. It was done. It was over. She’d lived through it, and, more importantly, so had her mother. And for the better.

Was her mother healed, as Kendra was claiming? Junie didn’t think so. She knew that it would take more than a couple of months and a celebrity at your back to change the dysfunction that had accumulated over so many years. But Nigel had given her hope, assuring her that if her mother kept working with the psychologist she might very well go on to live a normal life.

Normal life.

What was that?

Kendra put a hand on Junie’s knee. “A penny for your thoughts?”

Junie glanced beyond the lights to the rows and rows of shadowed heads. It wasn’t normal to be sitting on the set of one of the world’s most famous talk shows. It wasn’t normal to have a mother who’d been locked in her grief for so long, finding comfort in packages from the Shopping Channel and other people’s garbage left in the alley for her to take home. It wasn’t normal to have a dead brother you didn’t know about. Had forgotten about. A little boy who had been born and loved and then buried in the ground, and buried a second time under all of the trash Junie’s mother had stuffed into the great big hole of sadness.

“Tell us about what it’s been like for you,” Kendra prompted her. “How has it been to grow up in a house like this?” She gestured behind them, to a photo on an
enormous screen. It showed the basement, with its teetering archives of garbage.

“Hard.” Junie couldn’t find the words. She felt suddenly very private about it all. She wanted to take her mother by the hand and lead her away from the stage, out through the fire exit and into the blazing California afternoon. She wanted to get a taxi to the airport and get on a plane back home. She wanted to go home. For the first time. To her house. Because it was finally a home. She should be there. With her mother. Not here.

“Tell us more.” Kendra was giving her a sympathetic smile, leaning forward, her elbow cocked on the chair’s arm, chin resting on her fist. Earnestly being her famous self. “Tell us what it was like for you.”

Junie looked for the camera that was trained on her. She realized that she didn’t actually have to open her soul to the world. There was no way that Kendra could take back her mother’s transformation now. She wasn’t obliged to describe the years of sadness and shame about the state of her home and the state of her mother. Junie blinked a couple of times and then said, “I always wanted my mother to be happy. And she is now. And that’s all I have to say.”

Her mother reached for Junie’s hand with one of hers and for the box of tissue with the other.

The rest of the taping seemed to go quickly. Kendra asked her a couple more questions, to which Junie answered again, “I just wanted my mom to be happy.” Kendra gave up on Junie then and focused solely on her mother, bringing Nigel into the conversation halfway through. The show took its shape, without Junie, and that was fine by her.

Afterwards, Kendra was cold to her, not saying goodbye. Not offering one of her trademark hugs or even one last smile. She gave Junie’s mother one last hug and shook her hand, too, snubbing Junie altogether.

“Thank you, Marla, and all the best.”

“No, no,” Junie’s mother said. “Thank you. I can’t even begin to tell you how much—”

“Okay, you take care now.” Kendra was looking past Junie’s mother at one of her producers, who was waving her over. “Safe trip home.”

“I am so very grateful,” her mother still gushed, oblivious. “So many people don’t get this second chance.”

“Okay, kids.” Charlie swept in between them, letting Kendra escape. “Let’s get the two of you on your way back to your charmed life!”

The Kendra Show
and Kendra herself were done with them. Moving on, or having already moved on, to the next bleeding-heart story, the next headline. The next people to exploit. Anger turned Junie’s insides molten, but she kept her mouth shut. Exploited or not, she and her mother were better off because of it.

“They’re busy, Mom.” Junie kept her voice low, restrained. “Let’s go.” She was afraid if she started to talk she’d turn on Kendra, hollering across the soundstage that she was an opportunistic leech, feeding off people’s misery in order to stuff her bank account. And while she believed that, she also believed that Kendra left a lot of good behind her, so she kept her trap shut and steered her mother toward the dressing room.

Wade met them at the airport that evening. He had two bouquets of flowers, a small one for Junie and an enormous one for her mother. On the way home, her mom sat in the front and talked about the show and the trip, about all the shiny, glossy people in L.A., the smog, the city that never fell quiet, not ever. Every once in a while, Wade would glance back and give Junie a little smile. Each one warmed her, like small sparks to her heart. She was glad to be home.

When they got back to the house, Wade came in too, following Junie into the kitchen, where her mother was rummaging around in the tea cupboard, newly organized with everything needed for making a pot of tea all in one place. The house still had a certain ruined smell, but Junie hoped that, in time, that would fade.

“Peppermint?”

Junie grinned. This moment was so ordinary. So normal. This was life, lived normally. As it should be.

“Actually, Marla,” Wade clasped his hands under his chin, “I was hoping that I could take Junie out for a little bit.”

“It’s a little late to be going out, don’t you think?”

“Well, actually, I was hoping to take her to Chilliwack for the night—”

“Absolutely not!”

“Mom—”

“Scout’s honour, nothing fishy about it.” Wade held up three fingers and placed his other hand over his heart. “Tabitha is coming too. And Ollie and Lulu. I’m running
out of time on my term project for English and I really need to finish the filming so I can get to the edits. The weather tomorrow is going to be perfect. We’ll have mist, or at least Jeremy says so. That’s what we’ve been waiting for to finish.”

Her mother knew about the Virginia Woolf project. Tabitha as Vanessa, Junie as Virginia, they’d all been out there for several entire Saturdays but had never spent the night.

“You’re wondering why overnight, Mrs. Rawley, and it’s a good question. The sunrise with the mist. It’s perfect for the scene in the river. I scoped it out. Spectacular. I thought it’d be easier to spend the night. We’ll be with adults. And Tabitha will chaperone. You know she’s up to the job.”

“That much is true.” Her mother poured the boiling water into one mug, instead of the teapot, which meant that she was going to let Junie go.

“I can go?”

“It’s so late.” Her mother lifted her eyes to the clock hanging over the dining table. It had hung for years in Junie’s grandma’s kitchen, and then had been lost in the basement chaos, only to be found and restored while
The Kendra Show
was there. Again, Junie felt her heart leap. So much normal, all of a sudden . . . she could hardly contain herself. “I suppose. But separate rooms—”

“Mom! Please.”

“
Please
nothing. I’ll call and make sure they know my wishes. Got it?” She glanced sternly at Junie, then at Wade.

“Yes, ma’am,” Wade said for the both of them. Junie was too embarrassed to say anything. This new, more
attentive, more involved mother would take some serious getting used to.