Then I went into explicit detail about what my troubled young people encountered and endured. I told them in the quietest voice possible about the drug-addicted family members, the daily abuse meted out by once-trusted relatives, teachers, and coaches, the rapes and tortures. My adoptive parents shuddered.
I stared in disbelief at the beanbag chair. Dirty beanbag chair, shabby polyurethane-filled piece of shit! Their entire lives, they each had trouble hearing difficult and upsetting things; it astonished me that they were even able to accept the fact that their adoptive son committed suicide. I continued to stare at the disgusting beanbag chair. Over a decade ago, when the family cat died, they refused to remove the dead body. Everyone loved the cat, because it acted like the dog. They left the dead cat in the foyer, where anyone who entered the house encountered it. After two weeks of the dead cat on the floor, I became so disgusted with the sight and smell, I had no choice but to call pest-control services, the same service that scraped the dead animal out of my adoptive brother’s closet. After they removed the rotten cat-body, everyone, including my adoptive brother, became very angry with me, and refused to talk to me for two months.
Do you remember Chad Lambo, Helen? Does the name ring a bell? He’s been supporting us like we’re part of his own family. He says he went to school with you, that you might know him.
What Chad? I said. I don’t remember a Chad.
You don’t remember Chad Lambo?
I don’t know a Chad, I said, and I don’t care to.
My adoptive father gulped down his tea, got up from the couch and went to the cabinet above the stereo and took out a bottle of gin, which he proceeded to pour into his empty teacup.
So it’s just the three of us, I said, echoing my adoptive father.
They each frowned. I thought they were displeased, but it could have been about anything; there was nothing good in the situation. My adoptive father looked particularly angry. I thought he was going to ask me to leave the house again.
Helen, he said, I think it’s time to go to sleep.
Had it really been five years since we had seen each other? Or was my adoptive father becoming senile?
I’ll put fresh sheets on your bed, said my adoptive mother, and she stood up.
Tears the temperature of near-boiling water sprang out of my eyes for no reason, no reason at all. It was humiliating to cry in front of them as an adult. Ashamed, I ran up the stairs.
7
The first night back in my childhood bedroom, after a five-year-long absence, I sat on the carpeted floor and arranged my clothes and items into neat piles, I distracted myself from the miserable circumstances that brought me back to the fortress. To put my clothes and things into order was better than meditation, I thought, and much more productive. Arrange your room and you can arrange the world, I said to no one. Once I was finished organizing my things on the floor, I made my way into the closet, a walk-in filled with objects in chaos: a poster of silver dolphins swimming peacefully in a neon-green radioactive ocean, several books about crime including the O.J. Simpson trial, JonBenét Ramsey, Jeffrey Dahmer, one acid Western paperback, a photo of ten nude men on a ten-seated bicycle, aviator sunglasses, a fisherman’s hat with the initials BC, a high school yearbook, two Fiona Apple CDs, a poster of Fiona Apple in her underwear crawling out of a couch, a worn Dover edition of The Odyssey, with many lines enthusiastically highlighted in the first few chapters. I set it down and paged through the yearbook until I realized it wasn’t my yearbook, because I couldn’t find a picture of myself; it was my adoptive brother’s, 2003, a couple years after I graduated. I examined the well-meaning end-of-school-year messages from a few friends, I counted five signatures, inscribed with black markers and pens on the inner cover. I remembered one of the friends, Zachary Moon. He wrote: HAVE A GOOD SUMMER YOU FAGGOT. Smiley face. There were crude little drawings of bongs and breasts and vaginas and cars. YOURE MOMS CUNT. YOURE SISTERS TWAT. As I paged through the senior portraits, I became enchanted by all of the mocking and bitter faces. Everyone was broken and ruinous.
I crawled into bed, exhausted from my arranging, and immediately I felt the flower-patterned comforter from my childhood smother my adult female body. It made the skin under my breasts sweat, and the sweat soaked through my nightshirt, a gigantic men’s XXL Hanes V-neck I found wadded into a soiled ball on an empty seat in the F train on St. Patrick’s Day. I took off my shirt and threw it onto one of the piles on the floor. My breasts were the size of small, shrunken apples. The horse-pulling-the-cart image came into my mind as I wiped the sweat onto the comforter, and instead of the smell of apples, the smell of cucumbers wafted into the air, causing me to gag. I expected to find peace in my childhood bedroom, but not even opening the windows to let the room air out for hour after hour would release the stench of death and cucumbers permeating the room, and the house, a house of death.
8
Once upon a time the house was infested with silverfish. They came out of the cupboards and closets in great numbers, they came out of every single crevice of the house, from the cracks in the ceilings to underneath the doors. Some men in hazardous-material outfits drizzled pesticide over the entire house, a pesticide which left a chemical residue that we were forced to inhale for weeks upon weeks because my adoptive father was too cheap to put us up in a hotel while the poison tapered off. Sometimes I thought we might have become brain-damaged from the fumes, each of us sustaining catastrophic brain injuries, it would have explained so much.
9