The Other by Marilyn Peake Read online

  Clutching the edge of my parents’ quilt, I lay down on the bed and sobbed. I’d experienced too much loss that day.

  Chapter 6

  My new job at Archer-Knight involved two weeks of training and two weeks of following a Senior Social Worker into the field before I could visit homes on my own.

  I was assigned to Andy Wheeler. He emailed me the name of the first client we’d be visiting together and told me to read up on the file.

  It amazed me that records were still kept on paper, placed in manila file folders, and housed on metal shelves. I wanted to tear the whole system down and computerize it. Instead, I walked down a series of hallways from my office to the front desk and requested the folder on Max Davenport.

  The secretary, a young woman with blonde hair swept up into a ponytail and a faerie tattoo on her upper arm, pulled the file from the series of metal shelves behind her. When she turned around, I noticed that the hair under her ponytail had been dyed into rainbow-colored stripes. Returning, she slapped a notepad down on the counter, plopped a pen down on top of it and said, “Just sign the file out here. Every time you take or return a file, you mark it down here. By the way, my name’s Aubrey. You’re the new girl, right?”

  Yup. That was me.

  She extended her hand and we shook. Then she smiled and said, “Good luck with Mr. Davenport.”

  Andy drove us out to Max’s place in his cramped Volkswagen Beetle. It was blue with rust spots, the floor covered in papers and discarded wrappers. I was thinking he should really clean that up if he hoped to convince clients that hoarding wasn’t in their best interest.

  When we pulled into Max’s driveway, a somewhat emaciated dog with matted fur lumbered over to greet us.

  Andy rubbed his hand back and forth over his own shaved head as though for good luck. He said, “Don’t mind him. He’s friendly enough. I’m going to give you some advice you might find useful when you’re out on your own. These clients don’t know how to take care of themselves, never mind the animals they keep. If you think the animals could use food, bring some with you. That way, they’ll consider you a friend, rather than an intruder.”

  I said, “The clients?”

  Andy laughed. “No. The animals. Just feed them. Sometimes you have to do it when the clients aren’t looking. I have one client, Frieda Knapp…I’ll try to arrange for you to go out to visit her with me…she’s convinced people are trying to poison her and her animals. It’s a sad case, actually. She’ll only eat food from one particular store and, even then, she questions who their suppliers are and throws out a whole lot of their stuff. She’s gotten very thin, as have her cats.”

  Unlocking the car door, Andy hopped out. Reaching into the back, he grabbed a bunch of dog biscuits out of a bag.

  Throwing them up into the air, he yelled in an encouraging voice, “C’mon, Lucky, catch it!”

  Lucky looked exhausted. He waited until the biscuits hit the ground, then hobbled over to one and started crunching away.

  Grabbing his notebooks out of the car, Andy said, “And that, Jade, is how you make friends with the animals.”

  Stepping out of the car, I took a moment to study Mr. Davenport’s property. It had a great deal of potential. Although the house was in serious need of a fresh coat of paint and some of the roof tiles were missing, it was a large turquoise-and-lavender Victorian-style house with gingerbread trim. At either end of the house stood a turret and there were a couple of stained glass windows.

  Old willow trees with long sweeping branches grew in the front yard. The grass was overgrown, the lawn filled with weeds and patches of dirt here and there. It looked like there had been a garden running the length of the house at one time. Now, the rose bushes had weeds climbing their branches and choking the life out of them.

  When we reached the porch, I saw more signs of neglect. A few boards had rotted straight through. As he rang the doorbell, Andy warned me to watch my step.

  At that moment, a car drove up the driveway and parked behind Andy’s. A fashionable woman wearing tight jeans, a black-and-white checkered shirt rolled up to the elbows and flat yellow shoes hopped out. She yelled to us, “Hello, there! Are you here to see my father?”

  Andy said, “If your father’s Max Davenport, yes, we are.”

  As the woman walked toward us, her long black ponytail bounced from side to side. With her red lipstick, matching nail polish and perfectly applied makeup, she looked like a model.

  Getting up from his comfortable spot in the shade next to a willow tree, Lucky trundled over to greet her. As soon as she saw him coming, the woman dropped to her knees and yelled, “Lucky!” When he finally reached her, she hugged him and ruffled his hair. He in turn wagged his tail and barked.

  Turning her attention back to us, the woman said, “I’m Maggie Davenport, Max’s youngest daughter.”

  Andy stepped down from the porch, walked over to Maggie and extended his hand. He said, “Nice to meet you! Thanks for answering our request to meet with family members. You have an older brother and sister, is that right?”

  Standing up, Maggie replied, “Yes. Mike and Molly. All our names start with M.” Absentmindedly petting the dog, she added, “My mom’s name is Mary. I think both my parents having names starting with that initial is how the whole thing started…”

  Andy asked, “Can you tell us exactly what happened to your mom? Your dad hasn’t been very clear on that.”

  I had seen something about that in Mr. Davenport’s file, a paragraph or two saying that his wife was missing, along with her photograph and a brief description. Where she was born, her age: sixty-three years old, her education: high school. She was a thin, taut woman with brown eyes and gray hair. That’s all I remembered. Basically nondescript. I’m not sure I’d recognize her if she walked right past me, even after seeing her picture.

  Sadness came over Maggie’s face. She said, “We don’t know. Dad said she left. I worry about her every single day. She’s not well. She has diabetes and we’re pretty sure she’s suffering from an early stage of dementia. The police looked for her for months. Our family organized a search as well. We never found her. We thought we had some great leads, but they went nowhere.”

  A question flew out of my mouth before I even knew I had planned to ask it. “How long has she been gone?”

  Maggie said, “Over a year now. Last week was the anniversary of the day she went missing.”

  I wondered what that was like, when they first discovered she was gone. I had a bazillion questions, but I didn’t know if it was my place to ask them. Maybe Andy already knew from talking to Max. I figured I’d ask him when we got back in the car.

  Andy asked, “Will your brother or sister be joining us today?”

  Maggie scrunched her face up, as though thinking hard about the question. She said, “No. I’m hoping they’ll come out and meet you another time. They’ve been through this kind of thing before. It never goes anywhere. My dad won’t part with his stuff. I’m hoping you’ll be different. Archer-Knight has a lot of great reviews.”

  Ah, yes. Evaluating a mental health center by popular vote on the Internet.

  Andy said, “Our center has a lot of success. Is there anything else you’d like us to know before we meet with your dad today?”

  Maggie said, “No, I don’t think so. My dad can be…difficult. It’s worse now that my mom’s gone.”

  Pulling a cell phone out of her back jeans pocket and punching in some numbers, she said, “My dad doesn’t like to answer the door, so I call him when I get here.” A few seconds later, she spoke into the phone. “Hey, dad, I’m here with the Social Workers…Oh, come on, Dad…Archer-Knight is one of the best. Please, dad…I drove all the way out here…I had to get a babysitter…”

  The front door opened a sliver. A short, thin man with gray hair sticking up in all directions peered out from a darkened space.

  Maggie placed one hand on the door and the other on her da
d’s shoulder. Bending over to kiss him on the cheek, she said, “It’s good to see you, dad!”

  Obviously happy to see his daughter, he let her push the door all the way open. She turned and waved for us to follow.

  Andy went first. I came in after him and quietly shut the door.

  I couldn’t see anything of the house interior. Our view was completely blocked by stacks of boxes three-quarters of the way up to the ceiling. We stepped into a narrow space facing a wall of boxes.

  I screamed as something flew past me and whacked me on the head. Wings! The fluttering sound, and the sensation of being smacked in the head by a flying animal. The first thought that popped into my head was: Bats! I wanted to run from the home, but I had come prepared for anything. I figured there were bound to be mice and rats in some of these houses, considering how much junk and old food were typically stockpiled. I just hadn’t thought about the possibility of bats. I remembered the missing roof tiles. I hoped we wouldn’t need to go up into the attic, but I knew that was wishful thinking. An attic was the perfect spot for both bats and hoarding. Maybe we were all hoarders deep down. Even people with sparsely decorated homes tended to stuff all kinds of memories up in that special place below the roof.

  I thought about the attic in my own family’s house. My mom had filled it with lots of memories, mostly of me growing up: Girl Scout uniforms, projects I’d made, baby clothes, early reader books. A thought struck me hard. Had she left records of my adoption up there?

  Max shouted, “Squirtle!” pulling me out of my reverie.

  I asked, “Squirtle?”

  Making her way down a narrow aisle between piles of cardboard boxes, Maggie explained, “It’s a Pokémon.”

  Following her, I said, “Oh, I know that. It looks like a little blue turtle. But what was your dad referring to?”

  As she ran her hands along the cardboard walls surrounding us, Maggie said, “It’s our parrot. Squirtle. I named him. Parrots live a long time. Squirtle’s twenty years old now. I named him when I was twelve. I thought it was perfect back then—just because he’s blue and I loved everything Pokémon.”

  I laughed. “Me, too. I had binders full of cards.”

  Maggie stopped and turned around. She smiled. “I did, too.” Rapping on a box with her knuckles, she added, “My collection’s somewhere in here.” Opening her arms wide and reaching upward, she said, “Somewhere in all the piles in this enormous house. If you come across them when I’m not here, please let me know, OK?”

  I said, “Sure.”

  From somewhere on the other side of the cardboard fort, Maggie’s dad shouted, “Squirtle! Good boy! Now, you have to go back in your cage. You’re scaring our guests.”

  Running my hands over sides of boxes, following Maggie’s way of maneuvering the narrow aisle, my hand brushed against something soft and gooey. I stopped and looked. Gah! Bird poop!

  Looking at my hand, I tried to decide what to say. Finally, I asked, “Is there a place where I can wash my hands?”

  Maggie turned around. “Why?”

  I held up my hand and showed her the poop.

  Maggie said, “Yeah, that happens. Follow me.”

  Andy and Max’s voices rose up loudly from somewhere beyond the cardboard wall. Andy was saying, “I thought you had decided to get rid of these papers. They’re very old. See how they’re yellowing.”

  Max started crying. “I don’t care how yellow they are! They’re part of history—my history, my family’s history. Look here…” The sound of paper rustling, pages being flipped. “See this weather report? It snowed that day. It got real deep. I took my kids sledding while Mary made dinner. I can’t throw away that memory.”

  Andy asked, “Mr. Davenport, did you take any photos that day?”

  Max answered, “No. Not that day. Mary took most of our family photographs. She was real good that way…” He started crying again.

  Andy didn’t give up. He said, “OK, how about this one?”

  Again, the sound of newspaper pages being turned; then shook, probably to make the pages lie flat. Max said, “OK, now see here, peaches were on sale. Molly loved peaches. I’m sure Mary musta bought some for her during that sale.”

  Andy tried a logical approach. “But, see, you don’t know for sure. This newspaper is kind of creating a false memory for you. Why don’t we get rid of this one?”

  Max started to cry again. “No, not that one. It has peaches in it! It’s a connection for me with little Molly. You can’t take that away from me.”

  Andy said, “Speaking of Molly, where is she today? She couldn’t make it?”

  In between sobs, Max said, “No. She doesn’t come around much anymore. She’s pretty ungrateful. Broke her mom’s heart, she did.”

  We reached the end of the path Maggie had taken through the boxes. She seemed to know exactly where it led. We came out directly into the area where Andy and Max were talking. They were standing in a small oval area in what appeared to be the living room, completely encircled by enormous stacks of newspapers. It reminded me of photos I’d seen of soldiers hunkered down in the trenches in World War I, surrounded by piles of sandbags.

  Maggie said, “Hey, Dad, Jade needs to wash her hands. She ran into some of Squirtle’s poop. We’re gonna use the powder room next to the kitchen, OK?”

  In a shaky voice, her father replied, “OK. But don’t stay in there too long. You know I don’t like people in the kitchen area. It disturbs the way I have things arranged in there.”

  Maggie said, “Sure. I know that, Dad.”

  As we entered the kitchen, pain shot through my abdomen, on the lower right side. It was so severe, it felt like I’d been stabbed with a knife. Without thinking, I doubled over, grabbed my side, and moaned from the sudden agony of it.

  Max and Andy stopped talking.

  With worry in her voice, Maggie asked, “Are you all right?”

  I stayed crouched over for what felt like an eternity. Finally, the pain disappeared, evaporated into thin air. I straightened up, feeling embarrassed. First day in the field and I’d managed to behave unprofessionally. I couldn’t read Andy’s face to determine if he was shocked. He was looking at me without much of an expression.

  I answered, “Yeah, I’m fine. I just had a sudden sharp pain. Not sure what it was.”

  Maggie said, “I think you wiped Squirtle’s poop on your shirt.”

  Oh, damn. There was poop there all right! I felt super-annoyed, but worked hard to hide it. Man, Squirtle was the perfect name for that bird. A squirt here, a squirt there. Ugh.

  The kitchen stank so badly, I held my breath while we crossed through it. The smell of rotting food permeated the air.

  The bathroom was worse. I almost threw up. I fought really hard not to hurl. The toilet looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in years. Thin swirls of brown sludge lined the bowl. Orange mold ran along the inside rim. The seat was up, so I got a horrifyingly good look.

  The sink was so disgusting, I almost didn’t see the point in washing my hands. Black mold circled the drain.

  Maggie turned the faucets on for me. She said, “They stick sometimes.” Fumbling around on a shelf behind a striped curtain, she produced a bar of antibacterial soap and handed it to me.

  Placing my hands under the warm water calmed me. I lathered with soap and rinsed. I asked Maggie, “Do you have any paper towels or anything, so I can clean my shirt?”

  She rummaged around in the cabinet and came out with something even better than paper towels: Clorox Wipes! She said, “I bought these last week. I always keep some here.”

  After I cleaned the bird poop off my shirt, I looked around for a place to throw the wipes. I ended up adding them to a pile of garbage spilling out of a plastic can. They added disinfect smell to the putrid one monopolizing the air. Washing the Clorox off my hands, I wiped them on the back of my shirt to dry them.

  As we stepped into the kitchen, I suggested we join Magg
ie’s father and Andy.

  Max looked small and broken. I wondered who he’d been as a young man. He’d married. He and his wife had raised three children. His file said he’d been a painter, painting homes for income and artwork to fulfill his passion. I knew what it felt like to lose someone close to you. Losing my mom had broken me, but not completely. I was still young. I had my whole life ahead of me. Max did not.

  As we approached the men, Andy put down the newspaper he’d been trying to convince Max to throw away.

  I tried a different approach. I asked Max about his painting. I tried to imagine his home with a fresh coat of paint. It must have been a gorgeous house at one time. The living room was turquoise with a white ceiling, although the ceiling had taken on a gray tinge. The kitchen was yellow with the same color ceiling.

  Max said, “I haven’t been able to paint lately.”

  Andy, relentlessly pursuing his goal, said, “There’s no room to paint in here. Where are your paint brushes, anyway? Could you even find them?”

  Max replied, “Mary was my muse. It’s not the same now.”

  I asked, “Did you ever paint her? Ever do family portraits?”

  Max said, “Yes.” The look in his eyes was one of sheer torment.

  Maggie said, “Dad, would it be all right with you if I showed them your paintings?”

  Max said, “Sure, sure…” Then, anger rising up inside him, he shouted, “But don’t give any of them away, you hear me, Maggie? Those are never to be given away, even after I’m dead and gone! OK?”

  Placing her hand on her father’s shoulder, Maggie said, “Don’t worry, Dad. Those paintings mean a lot to me, too. Our family will always hold onto them.”

  Turning to me and Andy, Maggie said, “C’mon. The paintings are out in the barn.”

  Andy told me, “You go. I’ll stay here with Mr. Davenport.”

  Making our way through the maze of boxes to a back door, we exited into a huge backyard with a barn at the top of a grassy incline. I felt short of breath and had a throbbing pain in the lower right side of my abdomen as we hiked up to it.