The Opposite Of Tidy (5 page)

Her mother looked at her, eyes damp. She knew how bad it was. She knew she needed to stop. She’d finally admitted that she was a hoarder—had actually used that very word herself—only about a year before. Right before everything had gone downhill between her and Junie’s dad. In fact, it was after she’d seen a segment on
Kendra
about it. That was the night she’d started looking for a professional organizer. What a mistake
that
had been.

Junie’s mom knew that if Social Services saw the state of things, they’d remove Junie and make her go live with her father and That Woman. She knew that the only reason Junie stayed with her was because she worried about her. Junie worried that her mother would stick her head in the oven and turn the gas on just to get away from the mess once and for all without actually having to deal with it.
She worried that one of the candles would tip over and the house would burn so hot and so fiercely that no one would be able to rescue her amongst all the junk. Sometimes Junie worried that one day her mother would pack a bag, walk out the front door and never come back, because to fix it was too hard, and to stay was even harder. But mostly, she worried that her mother was just going to get worse. That she’d hoard even more. And that one day Junie would come home from school and find her dead under a pile of rubbish that had fallen on her and crushed her to death. This happened for real. A man in New Jersey reported his wife missing only to find her three days later in their basement, where she’d perished under a pile of Christmas ornaments still in their original, unopened packages.

Junie left her mother with her guilt and went up to her bedroom. Her oasis of uncluttered calm. Her bed, a desk, a bureau, two shelves of books. That was it. Nothing else. Tabitha said her room looked like a monk’s quarters. And that suited Junie just fine. She changed into her pyjamas and went down the hall to the bathroom to brush her teeth. Things were slightly better on this floor, with only one side of the wall stacked with archive boxes from when her father had tried to “apply some order to the chaos.” Junie’s mother wouldn’t let them get rid of anything, but occasionally she let them sort it. The floor-to-ceiling stack of archive boxes had twenty years’ of papers in it. Not just the papers produced from a normal household, but every single paper that her mother had
ever
come in contact with: notes, parking receipts, old gum wrappers, bills, used envelopes . . . you name it.

When Junie headed back to her bedroom she heard the telltale sound of her mother dialling the phone. She knew the different beeps of the different numbers. This was one of the 1-800 numbers she often dialled to buy off the TV. A few days from then, several Closet Butlers would show up via courier. Junie glanced at her watch. Eleven minutes. Her mother had tried to resist. Junie knew this because if she hadn’t been trying, she would have dialled while Junie still stood there laying on the guilt. She’d made it eleven minutes before she’d caved and given in to her addiction.

Never mind if Wade liked her, or Tabitha, or neither of them. Junie was just glad that Wade Jaffre thought she lived at what was really Tabitha’s house. Never mind the scene in the driveway—imagine if he ever actually wanted to come in! The only person—other than her mom, dad or herself—who had ever been in this house on a regular basis was Tabitha. She was the only one who knew her big secret. And Tabitha’s mother. She’d come into the house once, and only once. She couldn’t find Tabitha, and it was past the time that she and Junie were supposed to be home. After looking around the neighbourhood for the girls, she’d knocked on the front door, and when there was a muffled answer from deep in the house, she’d opened the door and stepped inside. She’d only stood in the front hall for the time it took Junie’s mother to make her way to her, to tell her that the girls had called and were on their way home from the corner store, where she’d sent them on an errand. But from there Mrs. D. could see enough. Smell enough. After that, the girls almost only ever hung out at Tabitha’s house.

Mrs. D. had asked Junie if she felt safe. Junie said yes. Then Mrs. D. asked if she was bothered by the “state of things” at her house. Junie said no. She said that it was worse right then because they were finally clearing things out. Junie said that everything was just fine. Junie lied, over and over again, worried that Mrs. D. might turn her parents in.

Maybe it was better if Wade liked Tabitha. Junie couldn’t imagine having a boyfriend. Not when her house—and her life—was such a huge, unsalvageable mess.

THREE

Her mother had slept in her chair again. This was a secret that no one else knew. Not Junie’s father, not even Tabitha. That chair. How Junie hated that chair. Recently, her mother had gotten stuck in it when a pile of junk had been teetering for weeks slid onto her lap, topped with an ottoman and broken coffee table that Junie had said were a hazard but had refused to deal with on her own. Junie wondered if her mom could’ve helped herself out and hadn’t bothered. Either way, she’d sat there, underneath it all, until Junie had come home from school and helped dig her out. And was that a big enough deal to have inspired her to reach out for help? Apparently not. Junie had begged her mother to make things better, even as she dragged off the table and set aside bundles of old clothes, dirty empty food containers with ants and maggots in them, a box of musty old textbooks.

“You’ll die under all of this crap, Mom. Is that what you want? You want me to come home and find you dead? It could’ve been today! What if I wasn’t here? What if no one came for days and days? What if you starved to death here? Died from lack of water? It doesn’t take that long, Mom.”

“I’m not going to die anytime soon,” her mother said in very small voice.

Junie replied in an equally small voice, “But when will it end, Mom?”

“I don’t know,” her mother said. “I wrote to Kendra about it.”

“Who?”

“Kendra. On TV.
Kendra
, Kendra.”

Junie had said nothing. Her face flushed red. As if a world-famous talk show host would be able to help. Junie could only imagine the mailroom at the
Kendra
studios, full of desperate letters written by desperate people about their desperate situations. Her mother was now deluded as well.

Junie had thought that the burying scare might kick her mother into gear, but it hadn’t. Other than rearranging and steadying the detritus around her so that none of it was so tall that it would overwhelm her again, her mother had not only gone on hanging out in that horrible chair, but she’d taken to sleeping in it, too. Junie genuinely believed that one day she’d come home to find that her mother had purchased a commode and mini-fridge online and wouldn’t have any reason to leave the living room ever again.

Junie’s mother was still sleeping when Junie left for school. The chair was one of those armchairs that leaned
back, with a footrest that went up. She was in it fully reclined, and was sleeping hard with her mouth open and one of her legs dangling off the footrest. One arm was splayed out to her side, and she was still clutching the remote with the other. An old afghan covered her lap; her computer teetered precariously on her thighs. She hated that her mother slept in that gross old recliner.

She stood at the edge of the living room and shook her head. It was a disgusting sight: the room, with all its squalor, and her mother in the middle like she was queen of the garbage heap. It was all so embarrassing and awful. Even more so now that her mother couldn’t even be bothered to take herself up to bed at night. Junie had glanced in her mother’s room before she’d come down. Even if her mother had wanted to go to bed, there was no easy way she could. The bed was covered with the contents of a series of plastic bins that her mother had started to organize. She’d started that project eleven days ago, and hadn’t slept in her bed since. Not that it had been very sleepable before that. Up until her father had left, her mother had managed to keep a narrow moat around the bed, and the bed itself clear, even though the room was a mountain range of laundry, both clean and dirty. There’d been an avalanche on one side, the heap tilting and tilting until it had given. Now musty old clothes were piled around the bed and spilled onto it, mixing with the contents of the bins. The mattress itself was dingy and stained, because her mother had not bothered to put a sheet on it since her dad had left. When Junie had asked her why, her mother had explained that there was no
point, because she was alone, and slept in her clothes, so what did it matter?

It mattered. Greatly. Maybe Junie would tell Tabitha today. That her mother had been sleeping in her chair. Or maybe she wouldn’t. She felt as though she’d passed a threshold: the border between simple omission and a real secret.

Junie opened the door as quietly as possible. She didn’t want her mother to wake up and catch her leaving, because she wasn’t sure what she’d say to her. She could imagine all kinds of rude things about how fat she’d gotten and how lazy she was and what a slob she’d become. Junie hated that her mother made her have thoughts like that. But it was her mother’s fault. She was the one who was living this ruined life. Junie just wanted to get out of there, so that she wouldn’t say anything mean.

Outside, it was a glorious day. This made the inside of her house seem all that much worse. At the street, she glanced back. From the outside, you couldn’t tell what horror lay behind the closed doors and drawn curtains. That was because the outside had been her father’s domain. He still came once a week to mow the lawn. Junie didn’t know why, given that he’d otherwise abandoned them to live with That Woman. Guilt, probably. Nonetheless, the house looked good from the street. He’d painted it the year before, and had put in new windows, and the shrubbery along the front was neatly trimmed. He’d planted bulbs when they’d first moved in, when Junie was just a toddler, so the same tulips came up every year. They were in full bloom now, and always made Junie smile. The tulips were
her favourite part of the house. It was so sad that they only bloomed for a few weeks of the year.

Her favourite part of the street was the cherry trees. The street was lined with the majestic old ladies, their branches forming a fluffy pink canopy as she walked below. The ones on Junie’s street were a little behind that year, but the ones on Tabitha’s block were in full bloom. She walked down the middle of the quiet street, craning her neck so she could look at the explosion of pink, with bits of the bright blue sky behind.

“Hey!” Tabitha called from her stoop. “Watch out, Junie.”

A van turned the corner at the end of the block. A very familiar van.

“That’s Wade Jaffre’s van!” Junie ran up the sidewalk and clutched Tabitha’s sleeve. “Don’t tell, Tab. Please.”

“But where am I supposed to live?”

“I don’t know. But you can’t live here.”

Mrs. D. joined Junie and Tabitha on the step as Wade pulled to a stop in front of the house.

“I’m guessing you two don’t need a ride to school today?”

“I guess not.” Tabitha glanced sideways at Junie. Wade turned the engine off and opened the door.

“How is he old enough to drive?” Neither Junie nor Tabitha even had a learner’s licence yet, even though Tabitha had just turned sixteen.

“He’s in grade eleven,” Junie and Tabitha said at the same time. Junie punched her, and then all of a sudden felt incredibly immature.

“And you know him how?”

“Junie is in grade eleven World Studies and Biology with him,” Tabitha offered. “They were short AP teachers this year, so they put her up one year after she did those online courses in the summer, remember?”

“Oh, no!” Junie smacked her head and groaned. This called for a convincing, lightning-fast story. “Mrs. D., he thinks you’re my mom—”

“Sometimes I think I am too.”

“And he thinks I live here—”

“Sometimes I think you do too—”

“Please, just listen!” It came out more sharply than Junie intended, but Mrs. D. was paying attention now. Junie had never spoken to her like that. “I told him that I live here, because of the whole awful scene with my parents yesterday and how I couldn’t bear to be related to either of them. So now I’m related to you. Okay? I’m sorry, it was stupid, I wasn’t thinking, forgive me, but please, please, please just play along, okay? Please, please, please?”

Mrs. D. glanced at her real daughter. “And you’re okay with this?”

“Parts of it.” Tabitha caught Junie’s pleading look and gave in. “All right, all right.”

That, right there, was one of the biggest reasons why Junie loved Tabitha. She knew how to be the world’s most excellent best friend. Even willing to give up her own mother for the sake of the greater good! Or share her, at least.

“All right.” Mrs. D. straightened her blouse. “But for the record, I don’t like lying. And I don’t condone it, either. And neither should Tabitha.”

“I don’t!”

“Later,” Junie said through her teeth as Wade approached with a great big smile.

“Morning, ladies.”

“Good morning,” Mrs. D. said, while Junie and Tabitha gawped silently at him. “I’m the mother,” she added, with a pointed glance in Junie’s direction.