The first step of organizing is to survey the situation in its entirety to determine what, precisely, you’re dealing with; only then can you formulate a plan and begin to actually deal with it. And so I walked among the piles, taking it all in. What an odd variety, I thought to myself. There were a few larger boxes, though they didn’t have handles. In fact, now that I was really looking, most of the boxes were various sizes, but few larger than a shoebox. Maybe Bashir had given them to her—he often handed out liquor boxes to people who were moving. But no; unlike those boxes, with their splashy labels and strange sizes, these were almost entirely basic brown cardboard, the kind most companies used for shipping. And as I looked closer, that’s exactly what these were; every single one of them had an address sticker affixed to the front and had been mailed to one Sally Francis.
I picked up a box to examine it. I hesitated for a moment—my mother had always been big on privacy—then reassured myself that she’d already given me permission to help her. I began to pull the tape off the top, which is when I realized that unless my mother was a whiz at packing tape, which I highly doubted, the box had never even been opened. Beneath the cardboard flaps was a sea of pale pink tissue paper. I fished around for a second before retrieving a tall bottle with pink letters. “Liquid Face-lift,” read the label. Odd. My mother had a professed aversion to aging, yes, but why had she not bothered to take out this product and use it?
A quick shake told me the box contained more stuff, so I reached into it again and pulled out a wrinkle-blasting peel, and beneath that, a box full of silicone pads that were supposed to prevent crow’s-feet from forming, though the woman on the front of the package looked like she was recovering in a burn unit. A receipt confirmed that my mother had been the one to make the purchase . . . which had been $175? For three items?
I pulled another box off the top of a stack. This one had been opened, at least, but it contained a handheld tool that purported to slice and dice even the toughest foods. Except, my mother barely cooked. Why had she purchased this? Was it a gift that she’d forgotten to give? Topper did like to cook; maybe it had been for him.
But as I glanced around, it was like I was staring at one of those 3-D posters and my vision had just now adjusted. Now the shape of this situation was crystal clear: every last box in the apartment was an item that had been shipped to her. And a good number of them, maybe even half, had never even been opened, let alone used.
I tore through them, tossing them aside instead of arranging them as I normally would’ve. Every package made my heart sink deeper in my chest. There were hundreds of dollars’ worth of items; thousands, if I were doing honest math. Many of the household products were from a single supplier, a multilevel marketing company that the Washington Post had recently featured in a scathing exposé. I’d heard Ravi and Josh talking about it, as one of their B-school classmates was high up the food chain at the company, and the story had been something of a scandal in their circle. But the majority of the items were random. Gaudy earrings that I couldn’t imagine my mother wearing, purchased from a home shopping network. Some incredibly small newborn onesies, which I assumed she’d bought around the time the twins were born—until I saw that they’d been ordered just a few weeks earlier. A product that purported to make dingy old grout look brand-new again. Thin, velvet-covered hangers that were supposed to save space and prevent creases in clothing. This last product I could get behind. But how could my mother have purchased it without bothering to open it?
There were still a dozen or so boxes left when I gave up. I couldn’t do it—I just could not do it. Because every single package was further proof that something was wrong with my mother. Really, something was wrong with me. Hadley had clearly told me our mother was not well. Even before I’d discovered the thousands of dollars of purchases she neither wanted nor needed, she’d been dropping bread crumbs for me for months—a missed word here, a lost thought there, forgetting something, like my last birthday, that she wouldn’t have even a few years earlier. And all the while, I had been insisting that it was nothing but loneliness and everyday aging.
I sat in the middle of the living room, too overwhelmed to stand or even cry. As I looked around, I knew in my heart that all this stuff wasn’t just more work for me and Hadley and Piper.
It was the beginning of the end.
THIRTEEN
LAINE
When I went back downstairs, my mother was still on the armchair, but she was awake. I must’ve still looked upset, because she immediately asked me if everything was okay.
You tell me, Mom, I thought, though I was a little relieved, too, that she’d picked up on my emotional state. If I’d been younger, I would’ve taken this as a sign she cared. Now I was viewing it as evidence of her lucidity—and the more of that I could find, the better. “Fine,” I lied. “I was a little surprised by the boxes upstairs, though. Did you buy all those things?”
“Oh, Laine,” she said, waving a hand dismissively. “First Hadley, now you? Can’t I spend my own money the way I want to?”
“Of course you can,” I said quickly. “I was just curious.”
“It’s just a few things.”
If by a few she meant several dozen, sure.
“Okay,” I said. It didn’t feel okay, but I wasn’t going to sit and argue with her. I needed to talk to my sisters, to see if maybe—just maybe—I was overreacting or overthinking this. Speaking of which, I had four minutes to get out the door if I was going to be on time. “I’ve got to go meet Piper and Hadley soon,” I told my mother. “Are you sure you’ll be okay here by yourself?”
She smiled brightly. “Haven’t I been by myself for years now?”
“Yes,” I said, unable to ignore the guilt that her comment triggered in me. “You have.” She’d also spent some of that time turning the upstairs apartment into a warehouse for expensive tchotchkes. But she wasn’t a toddler, I reminded myself; I couldn’t tote her everywhere with me. Besides, I needed to talk to my sisters without her around.
“You’re a good one, Laine Francis,” she said as I bent to kiss her cheek. “Don’t you forget that.”
“I won’t,” I said softly.
But I wasn’t the one who needed to be reminded not to forget.
My sisters and I had agreed to meet at a restaurant off of Central Park—and by we, I mean Hadley had told us that’s where we’d be gathering. The host informed us that there was a wait, so we gave her a cell phone number to call us when our table was ready, then grabbed coffee and donuts from a street vendor and headed into the park.
“Laine, what’s wrong?” said Hadley as we made our way down the winding trail. Usually we had to push through a throng of tourists, especially near the park’s entrance. But except for the occasional jogger whizzing past us, we were practically alone today.
I took a sip of my coffee, which was bitter and burnt. Then I sighed and said, “You were right.”
“About which part?” retorted Hadley with a grin.
Over Hadley’s head, Piper rolled her eyes at me, but I couldn’t even smile.
“Mom,” I said. We’d just passed under a low bridge, and there was a wooden bench up ahead on the path. “Why don’t we sit?”
Piper, who was dressed in the drab athletic clothes that she often wore in an attempt to blend in, took one end of the bench; Hadley, who was wearing a boho-style caftan that I knew for a fact cost as much as one of the many magazine checks I was waiting on, took the other. I plopped down between them.
“So you’ve seen it for yourself now,” said Hadley.
“Yeah,” I said miserably. “It’s bad.”
“What happened?” asked Piper.
“Where do I even start?” As awful as I felt about not listening to Hadley, I felt worse about what I was about to tell her and Piper. I took a deep breath. “So, Mom’s been buying a bunch of stuff from God only knows where, and she’s not even opening most of it. She’s just hauling it all upstairs. I found her up there last night looking totally confused.”
“Wait, what about Roger and Rohit?” said Piper.
“Apparently they moved out months ago and she never thought to mention it. And that’s not even the bad part. You guys . . .” My voice caught. Back at the apartment, I’d tried to tell myself it was okay. But now, here with my sisters, there was no sugarcoating the bitter truth. “She was totally out of it. It was horrible.”