There Was an Old Woman

Chapter Five


Her mother’s bungalow had looked run-down, sure, last time Evie was there, four months ago. But nothing like what she saw now. The cream-colored siding was tagged with bright blue graffiti, MKT75 in six-foot letters. Weeds in the front yard and driveway were knee-high. The only actual grass was sprouting from the roof gutter. The little garage, where Evie assumed her mother’s twelve-year-old silver Subaru was parked, listed away from the house.

The first wooden front step creaked as she stepped on it. The third felt dangerously punky with rot. The screens in the metal storm door were torn. Evie pulled the storm door open, found the right key on her key ring, unlocked the front door, and pushed inside.

A musty, sharp odor oozed out. Mold. Cigarettes. Sour milk? Eyes tearing, Evie dropped her backpack off the side of the steps and into the weeds. She took a gulp of air and held her breath, then covered her nose and mouth with the bottom of her fleece vest and ventured into the house.

The narrow entry hall was dark. She found the light switch and flipped it. Nothing. No wonder, she realized as she shaded her eyes from the outside light. No bulb.

Straight ahead she could make out the stairs up to the second-floor bedroom she and Ginger had shared. A narrow hallway led to a bathroom tucked under the stairs and beyond that, her parents’ bedroom.

Evie turned instead and entered the kitchen. She threaded her way around piles of newspapers and loaded paper bags and plastic garbage bags. The sink was overflowing with dishes, and the faucet was dripping. Evie reached over and turned it off. Pushed open the red-and-white gingham curtains that were gray and crusty with dust, and opened the windows. On the sill, a row of African violets were brown and withered.

She looked around in dismay. The little kitchen table where she and Ginger used to do their homework was adrift in papers and mail. The counters were stacked with boxes and cans. Cat food? Her mother didn’t even like cats, and yet there were dozens of empty cans of it.

A trio of small black moths fluttered in front of her. She clapped her hands and got one of them. At least a dozen more were resting on the ceiling, and when Evie opened the cabinet where her mother had always kept cereal and crackers, more flew out.

She poked a toe at one of the garbage bags on the floor. Glass clinked, and roaches skittered between the piles across the redbrick vinyl flooring.

Evie made her way through the rest of the house, trying not to feel overwhelmed. The living room was full of broken lawn furniture, orphaned lampshades, and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts. The brown vinyl-covered sectional sofa was buried under loads of rumpled clothing and bedding and newspapers. More books and magazines and newspapers were piled on the coffee table.

In the midst of the disarray was a large packing box with the SONY logo. That’s when Evie noticed a fancy new flat-screen TV hung on the wall where there’d always been a string sculpture of an owl mounted on mustard-colored burlap.

The only part of the living room that felt familiar was the fireplace and the mantel over it. Sitting there were framed photographs: Ginger and Ben at their wedding, Evie’s high school graduation picture, her dad. Evie picked that one up and wiped away a layer of dust. It was one of the few photographs that had survived the fire that nearly destroyed this house when she was six years old.

For an instant, Evie smelled smoke, even though she knew nothing was burning, and for a moment she saw herself standing across the street with Mom and Ginger, watching flames shoot from the roof of their house, knowing that Blackie and her litter of puppies were trapped in her parents’ bedroom closet.

She shook off the memory. Until yesterday, her mother had been living in this . . . squalor was the only word for it. She swallowed a lump in her throat. What on earth had happened? Her mother had never been a hoarder. Even at her worst, she’d cared about appearances. She’d always kept a neat house, and never went out without lipstick. Her grammar and table manners were impeccable. Something must have come unscrewed.

Returning to the kitchen, Evie opened the refrigerator, expecting the worst. But there turned out to be very little inside. On the top shelf sat a baking dish. She lifted the foil. Whatever was in it had shriveled and desiccated. She peered into a pink bakery box and poked at the remains of a mummified cake, its pink-and-white frosting hard to the touch. A half gallon of milk was dated four weeks ago. The veggie bin contained a plastic bag with a slimy head of lettuce in it and a bag of something that looked like prunes and smelled of rotten egg.

All of it had to go out. Now. Evie undid the twist on a half-full garbage bag already on the floor. A sharp medicinal smell rose from the open bag and she peered inside. Empty liquor bottles. She pulled one out. Vodka. Grey Goose. Her mother had moved up to an expensive brand.

Evie pushed a pile of papers off the kitchen chair and sat. As far as she knew, her mother’s only sources of income were what she got as the widow of a firefighter—a pension and Social Security. So how could she afford expensive vodka and a brand-new high-def TV?

But before Evie could follow that thought, she heard a scrabbling overhead. Instinctively she ducked. Then she looked up at the stained, cracked ceiling. Above her was the slope-ceilinged bedroom she and Ginger had shared. As she stared she heard more sounds, like something hard rolling across a wood floor. More scrabbling.

Vermin—Evie shuddered—had to have gotten in upstairs. What she wanted to do was run out of the house screaming. Instead, she waded through the kitchen, pushed aside the bags stacked in front of the broom closet, and opened the door. Its orderly interior seemed to belong to a different house. Standing on the floor beside a bucket filled with cleaning supplies were a broom and a carpet sweeper. On the shelf over them, clean rags were folded beside a pocketed canvas bag filled with garden tools. In that bag Evie found a pair of leather work gloves.

Armed with the broom and the gloves, Evie returned to the front hall. She looked up into the dark stairwell. If only she could pawn this problem off on someone else.

Slowly, she climbed the stairs. In the near pitch-black of the upstairs landing, she stopped and pressed her ear to the closed bedroom door. She could hear movement on the other side. Rustling. A squeak. A rolling marble sound, again followed by the scrabbling. Then a thump.

Evie stomped hard on the floor. Silence followed. She imagined raccoons or squirrels or, God forbid, skunks on the other side of the door, frozen and waiting for her next move.

She groped for the doorknob, twisted it, and with a bravado she wasn’t sure she had, threw open the door. It slammed against the inside wall. She caught a flurry of movement in the sunny, slope-ceilinged room. A whirl of gray disappeared through the back window facing the water. Then another.

Evie stood in the middle of the room, her heart pounding, and took in the damage. All in all, it was not nearly as bad as she’d feared. The seat of the skirted chair at the dressing table was torn open, some of its stuffing mounded like massive dustballs on the floor. There were acorns and sticks on the floor. But the beds she and Ginger slept in, tucked under the eaves, were unmussed, still covered with the familiar pink-and-white chenille bedspreads.

It took her a moment to realize that the window wasn’t open. It was broken. The bottom pane was completely gone. But there seemed to be no glass on the floor of the room. She looked out through the broken window. Shards of glass glittered just outside on the porch’s sloping roof. Didn’t that mean that the window had been broken from the inside?