Page 3 of Broken Things

Outside, the sky is a weird color. The clouds are a seasick green. We’re supposed to have a few bad days of storms—maybe even atornado—although nobody really believes that. We don’t get tornadoes in Vermont, at least not often, and half the time the news predicts one it’s just to boost ratings.

I heave the box into the Dumpster parked in our driveway. The Dumpster is the big, industrial kind used for home renovations and construction projects, and already, after only two days, it’s half-full.

Back inside, Abby is red-faced, coughing, cupping a hand to her mouth.

“What?” I say. “What is it?”

“I don’t know.” She chokes out the words, eyes watering. “I think it’s an old pizza or something.”

“Leave it,” I say quickly, trying to ignore the twin rotor blades that start going at the bottom of my stomach. “Seriously. The sky looks like it’s about to throw up.”

“Are you sure?” Abby obviously feels embarrassed thatI’membarrassed. Which just makes me feel worse, especially since Abby’s not the kind of person who is easily made uncomfortable. She is the kind of person who, instead of wearing big sweatshirts or sweatpants and trying to disappear, wears feathered skirts and multicolored tights and dyes her hair a variety of colors, then spends four hours staging a photo shoot with her pet Maltese, Cookie Monster. “We barely made a dent.”

This is not entirely true. I can see several bare spots in the carpet. The TV and TV console have been revealed in the living room. I wonder whether we still have cable. “So?” I force a smile.“More for us to do tomorrow. Maybe we’ll even find a buried treasure.”

“Or the lost city of Atlantis,” Abby says, peeling off her gloves and depositing them in one of the open trash bags. Before she leaves, she grips my shoulders. “You’re sure-sure-sure? I won’t find you tomorrow suffocated under a pile of dirty laundry and old newspapers?”

I force a smile. That awful shredding feeling is still there, churning up my insides. But Abby wants to get out. And I don’t blame her.

I’ve been wanting out for as long as I can remember.

“Go,” I say, sidestepping her. “Seriously. Before a tornado sucks you somewhere over the rainbow.”

She rolls her eyes and gives her stomach a slap. “I’d like to see a tornado try.”

“You’re beautiful,” I call after her as she heads for the door.

“I know,” she calls back.

After Abby’s gone, I stand there for a minute, inhaling slowly without breathing too deeply. We’ve opened all the windows—the ones we could get access to, anyway—but still the living room stinks like unwashed upholstery and mold and worse. The curtains, ragged and slick with stains, twist in the wind. It’s dark for four o’clock and getting darker every second. But I’m hesitant to turn on one of the overhead lights.

The Piles look bad in the dark, sure. But manageable. Formless and soft and strange. Like I could be in the middle of a weird alienlandscape, a place where whole mountain ranges are built of cardboard and copper and rivers of plastic flow softly between them. In the light, there’s no way to pretend.

My mom is crazy. She can’t get rid of anything. She cries if you try to get her to throw out a catalog, even one she doesn’t like. She holds on to matchbooks and sandwich bags, broken garden rakes and empty flowerpots.

Maybe things would have been different if Dad had stayed. She wasn’t totally normal back then, but she wasn’t totally screwy, either. But Dad didn’t stay, and Mom fell apart.

And it’s all my fault.

Abby was right: there is a pizza box, and the remains of something that must once have been a pizza (Ms. Pinner would have a field day explainingthatseries of chemical reactions) smushed beneath an old leather ottoman. I work for another few hours and fill another ten leaf bags, dragging them out to the Dumpster one by one. The sky gets wilder by increments, deepening from a queasy green to the color of a bruise.

I stand for a minute on the front porch, inhaling the smell of wet grass. As a little kid I used to stand just this way, watching the other kids wheel around on bikes or pummel a soccer ball across the grass, shrieking with laughter and noise. Go on and play with them, my dad would say, irritation pushing his voice into spikes.Just talk to them, for God’s sake. How hard is it to say hi?A couple of words won’t kill you.

I couldn’t talk. I knew how, of course, but in public my throat would simply stitch itself up all the way to my mouth, so trying to speak sometimes made me gag instead. I knew even then that my dad was wrong—words could kill you, in a thousand different ways. Words are snares to trip you and ropes to hang you on and whirling storms to confuse you and lead you the wrong way. In fifth grade I even started a list of all the ways words can turn nasty, betray and confuse you.

#1. Questions that aren’t true questions.For example,How are you?when the only right answer isfine.#2.Statements that are really questions. For example,I see you didn’t finish your homework.I got as far as#48.Words you can scream into the silence that will never be heard:

I’m innocent.

As a kid I found a different way to talk. At night I used to sneak outside and practice my ballet routines on the lawn, throw my arms to the sky and leap with bare feet across the grass, spinning and jumping, turning my body into one long shout.Listen, listen, listen.

The wind has picked up and whips an old catalog down the street. Maybe we will get a tornado, after all. Maybe a storm will come ripping through the maple trees and old cedar, tossing off branches and cars and even roofs like high school students do with their graduation caps, tear straight down Old Forge Road, and mow through our house, suck up the Piles and the bad memories, turn everything to splinters.

Back inside, I have no choice but to turn on a lamp in the front hall—one of the few standing lamps that hasn’t been buried under a mountain of stuff—and maneuver by its light, trying not to knock into anything in the living room. The wind has picked up. Newspapers whistle and plastic bags swirl, tumbleweed-style, across the living room.

The rain comes all at once: a hard, driving rain that batters the screens and bowls them inward, pounds like angry fists against the walls and roof. Thunder rips across the sky, so loud I jump, accidentally dislodging a laundry basket filled with magazines. Two whole Piles go over—an avalanche oftoasterumbrellascanvasrollspaperbackbooks—tumbling across the strip of carpet we recently cleared.

“Great,” I say to nobody.

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