Page 76 of Don't Tell Me How to Die

After dinner Alex called to give me an update on the condition of the twelve bus passengers who were admitted to Heartstone General.

“Stable,” he said. “Every one of them.”

“I know. The kids and I saw you on TV,” I said. “Also, did you know that the governor sent out a tweet thanking you and the staff for your quick response and your dedication to public service?”

“Public service?” He laughed. “Typical political puffery. We’re a hospital. It’s what we do. Look, honey, I’ve gotta go. It’s been a media circus here all day, and as usual I’ll be the last clown out.”

“Do you have any clue when you’ll be home?”

“My best guess? About a quarter after never.”

“Spoken like the devoted public servant I know and love.”

“Love you back, Mags. Kiss the kids.”

He hung up.

The kids were nowhere to be kissed. They had dutifully cleared the table and disappeared into their netherworlds, not to reemerge again till morning.

I had the whole night and the whole house to myself. I was finally able to do what I had desperately needed to do all day. Have a long heart-to-heart talk with my mother.

I went to the garage, yanked the cord on the attic stairs, and my army of stalwart orange sentinels tumbled out, a few of them hitting me on the head and shoulders on their way down.

Ping-pong balls. Seven of them.

“Good evening, ladies,” I said as they clattered to the concrete floor below.

They were my early-warning system. If anyone had so much as tugged on that attic door since my last visit, the shock and awe of my little plastic warriors would have rained down upon them. And knowing my family, I guarantee they would have shrugged it off and not bothered to put them back. Bottom line: I might not be able to identify the intruder, but at least I’d know I’d been breached.

I lowered the stairs all the way and quickly began scooping up the troops. One, two, three, four, five, six... six... six...

I was one ball short. I flipped on my cell phone light and ran the beam across the floor. Oil stains, ancient paint spatter, thick clumps of dirt-caked leaves, gauzy spiderwebs rich with their latest prey. But ball number seven was nowhere to be found.

I dropped to my hands and knees, sweeping the light across the floor, slower this time, and wondered why I’d decided I needed seven balls to stand guard when one, or two, or at most three would have easily done the trick.

Because you’re the champion of overkill, the voice inside my head said.Because when you have something to hide, paranoia trumps logic. Because you don’t trust anybody, even your own?—

A splotch of orange peeked out from under the stark white freezer. I zeroed in on it with the light. A big black bold STIGA logo confirmed its identity.

“Gotcha,” I said, plucking the rogue ball out of its sanctuary and shoving it into the bag with the others.

I stood up and exhaled. I don’t even know why I bother worrying. My house has two attics. The one over the bedrooms on the second floor is where we store the stuff we have to get to during the year, like Christmas lights, Halloween decorations, luggage, and Alex’s fifty-quart lobster pot. It’s easy to access. Just open a door and walk up a flight of stairs.

The one over the garage is no-man’s-land, an inconvenient storehouse for all the junk we no longer need but can’t seem to part with. At least that’s what Alex thinks, which is why he hasn’t been there since we bought the house. As for the twins, after the dead-possum incident I don’t think they’d venture up that ladder if Apple opened a store up there and was giving out free iPhones.

I tucked the Ziploc bag full of ping-pong balls under my arm, climbed the stairs, turned on the light, and with my head down low, I navigated my way through a makeshift path till I encountered an oversized plastic rocking horse. His paint was peeling, and the four heavy-duty springs that attached to his tubular metal stand were tinged with rust.

I moved him out of the way and sat down on the floor. We all have secrets. Mine are up here preserved in a cardboard carton marked Aunt Rosie’s Good China.

It’s my burn box. It’s filled with all the things I want incinerated after I’m gone, and there’s only one person in the world I trust to do that without opening the box or looking at the contents—my sister Lizzie.

You may wonder why I haven’t destroyed the whole lot of it myself. I can’t. I won’t. They’re part of my history. Sweet or painful, they make up the fabric of my life. And there are times in my life when I have to reconnect with them.

Today was one of those times. I opened the burn box.

Yes, I had asked Lizzie to destroy it once I’m gone, but in truth there were no smoking guns in there. Just things I didn’t want shared with the world. Like love letters I’d received from Van after he joined the Marines, plus some I’d written but never sent after I found out he was married.

Every poem I had ever written was in a manila envelope markedGod Awful Teenage Girl Poetry. And, of course, there were diaries, seven of them in all, one for each of my teenage years.

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