“Are you coming home straight after work?” Sam’s voice crackled over the car speakers. I gritted my teeth. She sounded so innocent, as though she really couldn’t remember.
I told her twice before I left the house that morning that I had to stop at Kira's on the way home.
“No, babe, but I won’t be long.”
“Okay. Will you bring dinner?”
“Yeah. I already grabbed it.”
I had a stack of takeout boxes in the passenger seat of our new minivan. Two were for Kira, one for me, and one for Sam, all from different restaurants. Kira didn't like to eat the same thing twice in a row, Sam was very particular because she was pregnant, and I was craving sushi. My phone buzzed with a message from my bank, a warning about suspicious activity. My bank was so nosy, so what if I hit a few restaurants one after the other? None of their business. I shut the phone off. I always like to do that before going to Kira’s.
I tasted the stench of the house by the time I was halfway up the yard. There on the breeze was: ammonia, burnt hair, food, and some wet, mildewy current under it all. I took a final breath of the partially clean air outside the door. With takeout boxes balanced in one hand, Kira’s milkshake crowning them, I rubbed the lucky rabbit’s on the keychain she gave me, and unlocked the front door. I gave it a good shove to move whatever was blocking the way, but there was nothing there, and the door flew open. I tripped over the threshold and nearly fell to the filthy carpet, but sacrificed the takeout boxes in my place. The pale brown slop splattered out of the Styrofoam milkshake cup.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Kira asked from the couch on the other side of the living room, cigarette in hand. Two identical terriers came sprinting up to the mess. A tiny orange cat attempted to join them, and a dog arrived to snap at it. It leaped onto a table groaning under Kira’s literature collection. Vintage nudie magazines, Sunday newspaper comics, and a few hotel bibles wobbled, but didn’t collapse.
“I could actually open the door for once,” I said, side-eying the abnormally clear entryway.
“Figured I’d clean up a little for you.”
I kicked aside the milkshake and picked up the to-go boxes, scooping a bit of rice back into the one that had busted open. “Thanks. It looks pristine,” I said, glancing around the otherwise unchanged clutter.
“What did you bring me?” she asked, gesturing at the boxes.
“Mexican for tomorrow and a burger for today.”
Kira tamped out her cigarette atop a wet sponge she had sitting on the cracked, dusty glass table beside her. She stopped using ashtrays after nearly burning the house down a few months ago. The room still smelled burnt, more like a crematorium than a campfire.
I watched closely, trying to look glib as she awed me with the careful dance of crossing the room. She’d been an interpretive dancer in college, which I’d always found dull at best and excruciating at worst, but something about how she’d done it captured me. She had a long, willowy figure and moved with an easy, elegant grace, floating over the broken rocking horse, old instrument cases, and a plastic tub of what appeared to be keychains, vibrators, and Beanie Babies. She made it look effortless, like she was carried on a wind.
“Why can’t I have Mexican today?” she asked, taking the boxes from my hands and drifting toward the kitchen.
“Because it’s Monday,” I said, trying to see where she put her feet, like following someone else’s footprints in the snow. I miscalculated one of her long strides and crushed a porcelain doll's head. Its heavily made-up eyes survived in a single oblong piece that stared up at me disapprovingly. “Tomorrow is Taco Tuesday.”
“This is a burrito and rice,” she said. As she went along, she snatched up empty plastic containers from the piles. They were all white and faded, with a smear of remaining color to denote what they’d once been, sour cream, cottage cheese, yogurt, dip.
We made it to the kitchen together. The only other victim of my passing was a novelty glass bell from Prague, which I kicked into a Singer sewing machine. The handle cracked in half, but the bell part would still work.
Kira set the to-go box atop a pile of dirty dishes I had never seen move in the years since she’d first defiled them. She precariously balanced the plastic containers on the lip of the sink and began portioning out Mexican rice by the handful. She dismantled the burrito and rationed out the internals until only the tortilla and a smear of sour cream and guac remained. Gingerly, she toed a coiled garden hose aside and set the make-shift bowls in its place on the brown and gray, stained linoleum floor.
She whistled, and the twin terriers came running with the orange cat in hesitant tow.
“Sorry, guys. No kibble,” she said, shooting me a look. I refused to bring her pet food. I couldn’t stop her from feeding them her food, but I wouldn’t bring her anything just for them.
Kira leaned down and let one of the dogs lick her fingers as she took a bite of the empty tortilla. Two more cats slunk out from somewhere in the kitchen, materializing from the stacks of pots and pans and empty cardboard food boxes. I watched disdainfully as the animals ate, and I hoped Kira could feel my disapproval. The only indication that she noticed was a small, T-shaped wrinkle between her brows. I used to kiss that wrinkle. I don’t think she ever realized how it gave her away.
With the animals fed, she made her way to the back door, careful not to nudge any of them. A fourth cat skittishly approached the food.
“I need you to bury someone for me,” she said unashamedly as she picked up a crate of old computer parts blocking the door. I followed her, stepping in front of the approaching fourth cat and startling it back into the piles.
The ten-foot-tall, faded wooden fence that enclosed the backyard was so rotted you could get a splinter by looking at it. Each board was straight and fitted close together, so no one could see in or out. It felt like another room, and Kira treated it like one. Yard tools lay in a pile in one corner, cracked lawn furniture in another. She’d taped up some laminated posters on the wall: the periodic table, the solar system, and a diagram of a human skeleton. In front of one section was a rotting couch and the broken remnants of an old projector. We used to screw like monkeys on that couch, shaky footage of thrifted home movies flickering in front of us on a blotch of white paint. The paint was peeling, and yellowish flakes fluttered onto a pile of upturned dirt at the base of the fence. There was more upturned dirt in the yard than brown grass these days. Kira untangled a shovel from the pile of rakes near the cracked slab of concrete once known as a patio.
“You get started,” she said, placing the shovel in my hand, “I’ll go get her.”
Kira respected the dead. She didn’t always notice when one of her creatures died, but when she did, she wasn’t content to let it sit and rot. She wanted a proper burial.
Today, it was a kitten. It had the same orange stripes as the one scarfing down beans and rice in the kitchen. I dug a shallow hole for it. I tried to keep the holes in neat rows, for my own sake, so I didn’t accidentally unearth an old grave. At the end of this row was by far the largest patch of bare dirt, the final resting spot of a dog called Lenny.
Lenny, Kira had told me, knocked over a stack of barbells in the basement and crushed himself to death. I was fairly certain Lenny had been a coyote, drawn into the house by the utter chaos that marked it as more nature than civilization. His yellow eyes were open and seemed to watch me as I placed him in his grave and shoveled dirt over him. I sometimes worried he’d only been paralyzed and not killed, watching me helplessly as I covered his stuck-open eyes with soil. He was better off down there, probably.
I buried the kitten while Kira sat on the couch and loaded a bowl, legs spread to reveal a small tear in the crotch of her gray leggings. A bit of lime green lace peeked out.
“I fixed the upstairs shower,” she said, followed by the sound of her lighter sparking. I knew “fixed” meant she cleared it just enough to make it usable. I flattened the dirt and set the shovel on the ground. She offered me the bowl, and I took a puff, the smoke momentarily blocking the taste of putrid air that emanated from the house.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” She wore a cheeky smile, and her eyes were hooded, a bit of silver eyeshadow smudged on her lids. She spread her legs further apart and set a hand on her inner thigh. I handed the bowl back to her. I had told her I wouldn’t touch her until she could shower again, my little way of making sure she at least attempted to maintain her hygiene. She never looked spotless, couldn’t, on account of her perpetually filthy clothes. She’d left towels in the laundry machine until they dissolved into bundles of pure mildew. Even so, today her hair was clean.
“I gotta bring Sam her dinner,” I said coyly. She took a puff and returned the bowl to me, getting on her knees and scooching to where I stood. She pressed her face into the crotch of my pants, rubbing her nose against the zipper.
***
Twilight was scraping onto the horizon when I pulled up to my house. Sam’s anguish seeped into the garage as potent as the smell of Kira’s hoard. I sat for a few minutes with the car off, eating some pieces of my room-temp tuna roll.
Our dog Starks met me at the door, sniffing me in all the usual places. I nudged him away when he nosed the front of my pants.
“Hey baby,” I said, proudly holding up the takeout boxes. Sam was sitting on the spotless, gray sofa, her feet on the ottoman, her belly bulging grotesquely. I’d seen plenty of pregnant women on TV, but I didn’t expect how disturbing it would be to live with one. She still liked to have sex, but I usually refused. I hated how she waddled around, her back in a C shape, her little body swaying awkwardly from side to side.
“Hey,” she said, fiddling with the remote, refusing to look at me.
“I got your salad.” I set it on her lap along with the plastic-wrapped spork it came with.
“Uck. I hate it when they give you this trash. Can you get me a real fork, please?”
I obliged, putting the spork aside. I returned with the fork just in time to see her open the box and frown. The lettuce wilted from sitting in my car and turned green as chard from soaking up the dressing. She poked a spongy crouton.
Sam took a deep breath and crinkled her nose, looking up at me. Her eyes were wet and flat like a fish’s. She always gave me that look when she had something she’d been wanting to tell me. Her hair was slicked back fashionably and held in place by a satin-finished pink clip. She wore that clip with every outfit, even when it didn’t match. She only owned the one. I unclipped it and began to play with her hair; it was my only move, but it almost always worked. She stayed stiff this time.
“You know, cats have diseases that can be really dangerous for pregnant women,” she said. She choked down a bite of her soggy salad, chewing slowly.
“Oh yeah?” My attention drifted to the cooking show on the TV. Sam was constantly watching food shows, which caused her to be constantly hungry and, by extension, constantly cranky. I reached over her shoulder to take the remote and turn it off. I kissed her cheek on the way back up, just a peck.
“Yeah,” she said. I knew exactly what she was getting at. For all she liked to argue, she fell for it in earnest when I played dumb.
“Good thing we don’t have a cat.”
“I thought you would have been home earlier,” she said, opting for the more blunt approach. I sighed and dropped her hair.
“We’ve been over this Sam—”
“I know, but I—”
“Hey! Don’t interrupt me, come on. Kira is a sick woman, okay, and she’s my friend. She needs me.”
Her dignity didn’t allow her to suggest what she suspected.
Behind me, Starks’ paws clicked over the perfectly swept and polished wood floors. He smelled me again, no doubt getting whiffs of dead kittens, Kira’s mouth, or the stench of the house. He looked up at me disapprovingly. I hated that our spoiled brat of a dog could be disapproving of me. He didn’t realize how bad his life could be, that he could be the one crushed and buried alive. I gave him a nudge with my knee a little harder than necessary. He danced away and circled the sofa, putting his head on the cushion beside Sam. I glared at him over the back of her head as she fed him a piece of wet chicken.
“I just don’t see why you have to be the person to help her. That’s all.” The one thing I liked about Sam being pregnant was that she lost energy quickly; she could rarely see a fight to its conclusion these days.
I told Sam about Kira on our first date.
“Agoraphobic and a hoarder?” she’d repeat after me, “where does she get all the stuff?”
I shrugged.
Kira had lived in the house with her infirm uncle when we were in college. He’d paid her a grand a month to take care of him, and left her the house when he kicked it in the spring of our senior year.
After her uncle’s funeral, we went to the dollar-store and I bought her a bunch of leftover Valentine’s candy and gifts. She’d always been sentimental, but when I came over later that week, I found all the empty heart-shaped boxes stacked on her bedside table, the brown paper wrappers delicately laid atop them.
She stopped leaving the house. No more interpretive dance, no more drinks after class, no return from her bereavement leave. She didn’t graduate.
I kept bringing her stuff. I trolled thrift shops and yard sales. I helped my neighbors clean their basements and garages in exchange for a few pieces of crap here and there. I took my truck to the student housing and snatched things left on the roadside. mini fridges, microwaves, broken suitcases, old mattresses, and a plastic crate of used notebooks with a single woman’s sock with frogs on it thrown on top.
Kira lit up when I returned with that junk. So I kept doing it. She actually liked the useless fast-food toys, took pieces of broken furniture with the “free, please take” signs still attached, and filled her drawers and closets with children’s clothes that she could never wear.
I stood witness as the hoard grew, filling every bit of storage and then bursting out, covering every surface. First, the countertops, then the sideboards, her dresser, desk, and nightstand, the dining room table, and finally the floor. The piles got taller and thicker, layers of things atop the soiled remains of other things. All the things, my things, threatening to swallow her.
When we finished today, I gave her a box of foam fingers, a carton of plastic eggs, and two board games with missing pieces. A tingle of arousal shot through me, imagining her. She would treasure the stuff for the evening, pick up each egg and run her fingers along the smooth sides, press her forehead into the foam fingers, turn over all the game pieces in her hand, and memorize their strange shapes. Tonight, they were her greatest possessions, and by tomorrow, they would be part of the hoard like unnamed items in a search-and-find book.
“I’m all she’s got, Sam. Don’t be jealous.” I wished I were looking at her face to see the indignation at the mere suggestion. The idea that she could be jealous of my hoarding, agoraphobic, ex-girlfriend.
“Of course not,” she said. “I know you care a lot about her, and I’m worried. I hope she’s doing okay.”
The last time Kira left the house was for my wedding. She wore a metallic-bronze dress covered in black fabric rosettes, a headband that didn’t quite match, and five-inch heels. Every picture with flash reflected off that dress like she’d been dipped in molten metal—beautiful Kira, trashy and perfect. No matter how tacky her clothes were, there she was underneath them, a would-be runway model.
We sat her next to Sam’s half-sister Ellen, who hadn’t been part of the wedding party. Ellen was elegant in her smart, navy dress with her subtle eyeshadow and sweep of loose, brown curls. At the time, Kira’s hair was a frizzy, yellow permanent, with blotches of grown-out blue dye turned greenish on the ends. She wore Victory Red lipstick and a fake nose ring. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her, this aberration among our sensible friends and relatives.
Sam’s mother threw a fit near the end of the evening when she caught Kira slipping her wine glass and cake plate into her gray sack purse. I calmed her down and assured her she was the one being unreasonable.
Sam cried in bed that night.
“What’s wrong, baby?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she insisted, “just the stress of the big day leaving my body, you know? It was perfect. Everything was perfect.”
“Are you coming home straight after work?” Sam’s voice crackled over the car speakers. I gritted my teeth. She sounded so innocent, as though she really couldn’t remember.
I told her twice before I left the house that morning that I had to stop at Kira's on the way home.
“No, babe, but I won’t be long.”
“Okay. Will you bring dinner?”
“Yeah. I already grabbed it.”
I had a stack of takeout boxes in the passenger seat of our new minivan. Two were for Kira, one for me, and one for Sam, all from different restaurants. Kira didn't like to eat the same thing twice in a row, Sam was very particular on account of being pregnant, and I was craving sushi. My phone buzzed with a message from my bank, a warning about suspicious activity. My bank was so nosy, so what if I hit a few restaurants one after the other? None of their business. I shut the phone off. I always like to do that before going to Kira’s.
I tasted the stench of the house by the time I was halfway up the yard. There on the breeze was: ammonia, burnt hair, food, and some wet, mildewy current under it all. I took a final breath of the partially clean air outside the door. With takeout boxes balanced in one hand, Kira’s milkshake crowning them, I rubbed the lucky rabbit’s on the keychain she gave me, and unlocked the front door. I gave it a good shove to move whatever was blocking the way, but there was nothing there, and the door flew open. I tripped over the threshold and nearly fell to the filthy carpet, but sacrificed the takeout boxes in my place. The pale brown slop splattered out of the Styrofoam milkshake cup.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Kira asked from the couch on the other side of the living room, cigarette in hand. Two identical terriers came sprinting up to the mess. A tiny orange cat attempted to join them, and a dog arrived to snap at it. It leaped onto a table groaning under Kira’s literature collection. Vintage nudie magazines, Sunday newspaper comics, and a few hotel bibles wobbled, but didn’t collapse.
“I could actually open the door for once,” I said, side-eying the abnormally clear entryway.
“Figured I’d clean up a little for you.”
I kicked aside the milkshake and picked up the to-go boxes, scooping a bit of rice back into the one that had busted open. “Thanks. It looks pristine,” I said, glancing around the otherwise unchanged clutter.
“What did you bring me?” she asked, gesturing at the boxes.
“Mexican for tomorrow and a burger for today.”
Kira tamped out her cigarette atop a wet sponge she had sitting on the cracked, dusty glass table beside her. She stopped using ashtrays after nearly burning the house down a few months ago. The room still smelled burnt, more like a crematorium than a campfire.
I watched in careful, trying to look glib as she awed me with the careful dance of crossing the room. She’d been an interpretive dancer in college, which I’d always found dull at best and excruciating at worst, but something about the way she’d done it captured me. She had a long, willowy figure and moved with an easy, elegant grace, floating over the broken rocking horse, old instrument cases, and a plastic tub of what appeared to be keychains, vibrators, and Beanie Babies. She made it look effortless, like she was carried on a wind.
“Why can’t I have Mexican today?” she asked, taking the boxes from my hands and drifting toward the kitchen.
“Because it’s Monday,” I said, trying to see where she put her feet, like following someone else’s footprints in the snow. I miscalculated one of her long strides and crushed the head of a porcelain doll. Its heavily made-up eyes survived in a single oblong piece that stared up at me disapprovingly. “Tomorrow is Taco Tuesday.”
“This is a burrito and rice,” she said. As she went along she snatched up empty plastic containers from the piles. They were all white and faded, with a smear of remaining color to denote what they’d once been, sour cream, cottage cheese, yogurt, dip.
We made it to the kitchen together. The only other victim of my passing was a novelty glass bell from Prague, which I kicked into a Singer sewing machine. The handle cracked in half, but the bell part would still work.
Kira set the to-go box atop a pile of dirty dishes that I had never seen move in the years since she’d first defiled them. She balanced the plastic containers precariously on the lip of the sink and began portioning out Mexican rice by the handful. She dismantled the burrito and did the same until only the tortilla and a smear of sour cream and guac remained. Gingerly, she toed a coiled garden hose aside and set the make-shift bowls in its place on the brown and gray stained linoleum floor.
She whistled, and the twin terriers came running with the orange cat in hesitant tow.
“Sorry, guys. No kibble,” she said, shooting me a look. I refused to bring her pet food. I couldn’t stop her from feeding them her food, but I wouldn’t bring her anything just for them.
Kira leaned down and let one of the dogs lick her fingers as she took a bite of the empty tortilla. Two more cats slunk out from somewhere in the kitchen, materializing from the stacks of pots and pans and empty cardboard food boxes. I made a face of disgust at the animals and hoped Kira could feel my disapproval. The only indication that she noticed was a small, T-shaped wrinkle between her brows. I used to kiss that wrinkle. I don’t think she ever realized how it gave her away.
With the animals fed she made her way to the back door, careful not to nudge any of them. A fourth cat skittishly approached the food.
“I need you to bury someone for me,” she said unashamedly as she picked up a crate of old computer parts blocking the door. I followed her, stepping in front of the approaching fourth cat and startling it back into the piles.
The backyard was enclosed by a ten-foot-tall, faded wooden fence, the kind that seemed like it could give you splinters just by looking at it. Each board was straight and fitted close together, so no one could see in or out. It felt like another room, and Kira treated it like one. Yard tools lay in a pile in one corner, cracked lawn furniture in another. Some laminated posters were taped up on the wall: the periodic table, the solar system, and a diagram of a human skeleton. In front of one section was a rotting couch and the broken remnants of an old projector. We used to scew like monkeys on that couch, shaky footage of thrifted home movies flickering in front of us on a blotch of white paint. The paint was peeling, and yellowish flakes fluttered onto a pile of upturned dirt at the base of the fence. There was more upturned dirt in the yard than brown grass these days. Kira untangled a shovel from the pile of rakes near the cracked slab of concrete once known as a patio.
“You get started,” she said, placing the shovel in my hand, “I’ll go get her.”
Kira respected the dead. She didn’t always notice when one of her creatures died, but when she did, she wasn’t content to let it sit and rot. She wanted a proper burial.
Today, it was a kitten. It had the same orange stripes as the one scarfing down beans and rice in the kitchen. I dug a shallow hole for it. I tried to keep the holes in neat rows, for my own sake, so I didn’t accidentally unearth an old grave. At the end of this row was by far the largest patch of bare dirt, the final resting spot of a dog called Lenny.
Lenny, Kira had told me, knocked over a stack of barbells in the basement and crushed himself to death. I was fairly certain Lenny had been a coyote, drawn into the house by the utter chaos that marked it as more nature than civilization. His yellow eyes were open and seemed to watch me as I placed him in his grave and shoveled dirt over him. I sometimes worried he’d only been paralyzed and not killed, watching me helplessly as I covered his stuck-open eyes with soil. He was better off down there, probably.
I buried the kitten while Kira sat on the couch and loaded a bowl, legs spread to reveal a small tear in the crotch of her gray leggings. A bit of lime green lace peeked out.
“I fixed the upstairs shower,” she said, followed by the sound of her lighter sparking. I knew “fixed” meant she cleared it just enough to make it usable. I flattened the dirt and set the shovel on the ground. She offered me the bowl, and I took a puff, the smoke momentarily blocking the taste of putrid air that emanated from the house.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” She wore a cheeky smile, and her eyes were hooded, a bit of silver eyeshadow smudged on her lids. She spread her legs further apart and set a hand on her inner thigh. I handed the bowl back to her. I had told her I wouldn’t touch her until she could shower again, my little way of making sure she at least attempted to maintain her hygiene. She never looked clean, couldn’t, on account of her perpetually filthy clothes. She’d left a load of towels in the laundry machine until they dissolved into bundles of pure mildew. Even so, today her hair was clean.
“I gotta bring Sam her dinner,” I said coyly. She took a puff and returned the bowl to me, getting on her knees and scooching to where I stood. She pressed her face into the crotch of my pants, rubbing her nose against the zipper.
***
Twilight was scraping onto the horizon when I pulled up to my house. Sam’s anguish seeped into the garage as potent as the smell of Kira’s hoard. I sat for a few minutes with the car off, eating some pieces of my room-temp tuna roll.
Our dog Starks met me at the door, sniffing me in all the usual places. I nudged him away when he nosed the front of my pants.
“Hey baby,” I said, proudly holding up the takeout boxes. Sam was sitting on the spotless, gray sofa, her feet up on the ottoman, her belly bulging grotesquely. I’d seen plenty of pregnant women on TV, but I didn’t expect how disturbing it would be to live with one. She still liked to have sex, but I usually refused. I hated the way she waddled around, her back in a C shape, her little body swaying awkwardly from side to side.
“Hey,” she said, fiddling with the remote, refusing to look at me.
“I got your salad.” I set it on her lap along with the plastic-wrapped spork it came with.
“Uck. I hate it when they give you this trash. Can you get me a real fork, please?”
I obliged, putting the spork aside. I returned with the fork just in time to see her open the box and frown. The lettuce wilted from sitting in my car and turned green as chard from soaking up the dressing. She poked a spongy crouton.
Sam took a deep breath and crinkled her nose, looking up at me. Her eyes were wet and flat like a fish’s. She always gave me that look when she had something she’d been wanting to tell me. Her hair was slicked back fashionably and held in place by a satin-finished pink clip. She wore that clip with every outfit, even when it didn’t match. She only owned the one. I unclipped it and began to play with her hair; it was my only move, but it almost always worked. She stayed stiff this time.
“You know, cats have diseases that can be really dangerous for pregnant women,” she said. She choked down a bite of her soggy salad, chewing slowly.
“Oh yeah?” My attention drifted up to the cooking show on the TV. Sam was constantly watching food shows, which caused her to be constantly hungry and by extension, constantly cranky. I reached over her shoulder to take the remote and turn it off. I kissed her cheek on the way back up, just a peck.
“Yeah,” she said. I knew exactly what she was getting at. For all she liked to argue, she fell for it in earnest when I played dumb.
“Good thing we don’t have a cat.”
“I thought you would have been home earlier,” she said, opting for the more blunt approach. I sighed and dropped her hair.
“We’ve been over this Sam—”
“I know, but I—”
“Hey! Don’t interrupt me, come on. Kira is a sick woman, okay, and she’s my friend. She needs me.”
Her dignity didn’t allow her to even suggest what she expected.
Behind me, Starks’ paws clicked over the perfectly swept and polished wood floors. He smelled me again, no doubt getting whiffs of dead kittens, Kira’s mouth, or the stench of the house. He looked up at me disapprovingly. I hated that our spoiled brat of a dog could be disapproving of me. He didn’t realize how bad his life could be, that he could be the one crushed and buried alive. I gave him a nudge with my knee that was a little harder than necessary. He danced away and circled the sofa, putting his head on the cushion next to Sam. I glared at him over the back of her head as she fed him a piece of wet chicken.
“I just don’t see why you have to be the person to help her. That’s all.” The one thing I liked about Sam being pregnant was that she lost energy quickly, she could rarely saw a fight to its conclusion these days.
I told Sam about Kira on our first date.
“Agoraphobic and a hoarder?” she’d repeat after me, “where does she get all the stuff?”
I shrugged. Kira had lived in the house with her infirm uncle when we were in college. He’d paid her a grand a month to take care of him, and left her the house when he kicked it in the spring of our senior year.
After her uncle’s funeral, we went to the dollarstore and I bought her a bunch of leftover Valentine’s candy and gifts. She’d always been sentimental, but when I came over later that week, I found all the empty heart-shaped boxes stacked on her bedside table, the brown paper wrappers delicately laid atop them.
Slowly after she stopped leaving the house. No more interpretive dance, no more drinks after class, no return from her bereavement leave. She didn’t graduate.
I kept bringing her stuff. I trolled thrift shops and garage sales. Helped my neighbors clean their basements and garages in exchange for a few pieces of crap here and there. I took my truck to the student housing and snatched up mini fridges, microwaves, broken suitcases, old mattresses, and a plastic crate of used notebooks with a single woman’s sock with frogs on it thrown ontop.
Kira’s eyes lit up when I returned with that junk. So I kept doing it. She actually liked the useless fast-food toys, took pieces of broken furniture with the “free, please take” signs still attached, and filled her drawers and closets with children’s clothes that she could never wear.
I stood witness as the hoard grew and grew, first filling every bit of storage and then bursting out, covering every surface. The countertops first, then the sideboards, her dresser, desk, and nightstand, the dining room table, and finally the floor. The piles got taller, thicker, layers of things atop the soiled remains of other things. All the things, my things, threatening to swallow her.
When we finished today, I gave her a box of foam fingers, a carton of plastic eggs, and two board games with missing pieces. A tingle of arousal shot through me, imagining her. She would treasure the stuff for the evening, pick up each egg and run her fingers along the smooth sides, press her forehead into the foam fingers, turn over all the game pieces in her hand, and memorize their strange shapes. Tonight, they were her greatest possessions, and by tomorrow, they would be part of the hoard like unnamed items in a search-and-find book.
“I’m all she’s got, Sam. Don’t be jealous.” I wished I were looking at her face so I could see the indignation at the mere suggestion. The idea that she could be jealous of my hoarding, agoraphobic, ex-girlfriend.
“Of course not,” she said. “I know you care a lot about her, and I’m worried. I just hope she’s doing okay.”
The last time Kira left the house was for my wedding. She wore a metallic-bronze dress covered in black fabric rosettes, a headband that didn’t quite match, and five-inch heels. Every picture with flash reflected off that dress like she’d been dipped in molten metal. Beautiful Kira, trashy and perfect. No matter how tacky her clothes were, there she was underneath them, a would-be runway model.
We sat her next to Sam’s half-sister Ellen, who hadn’t been part of the wedding party. Ellen looked so elegant in her smart, navy-blue dress with her subtle eyeshadow and sweep of loose, brown curls. At the time, Kira’s hair was a frizzy, yellow permanent, with blotches of grown-out blue dye turned greenish on the ends. She wore Victory Red lipstick and a fake nose ring. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her, this aberration among our sensible friends and relatives.
Sam’s mother threw a fit near the end of the evening when she caught Kira slipping her wine glass and cake plate into her gray sack purse. I calmed her down and assured her she was the one being unreasonable.
Sam cried in bed that night.
“What’s wrong, baby?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she insisted, “just the stress of the big day leaving my body, you know. It was perfect. Everything was perfect.”