"Postmortem Menagerie" by Julia Dath
There hasn't even been enough time for the dust to settle in my late mother’s bedroom when Tyler and I clear it out. It’s a living tomb of who she was: chestnut furniture purchased thirty-odd years ago from somebody’s front yard, and boxes with some missing lids stacked in peculiar disarray that create a maze of memories, both significant and utterly useless to me. But the tomb isn't even allowed three days of rest before it’s unearthed again, the upheaval of her private space a necessity in abandoning a house that was sold while her bedsheets still smelled of that all-too-familiar thick perfume she spritzed each morning.
Tyler was born with our mother’s infuriating desire to let the sun waste away whilst lingering in conversation, and because the clock is ticking down to clear this entire house out, I decide it is best for us to divide and conquer. The bedroom is the epicenter of my mother’s peculiarity, infested with every idiosyncrasy of her personality, and with inevitability, Tyler will want to ponder the memories of fonder moments we shared with her. I designate him to sort any usable kitchen appliances into plastic bins and throw the rest into the trash. As I am the only one out of the pair of us with the sensibility to make any meaning of the mess on a schedule, I tackle the bedroom alone.
I sort the shirts in her closet into piles of give-to-local-Goodwill and give-to-storage-containers-Aunt-Margaret-purchased when I come across a peculiar wooden oddity. A wooden chest that is no larger than a standard bread box hides in the darkest corner of the cluttered closet, and I heave out and place it onto her bed to examine.
It’s not shocking for a woman who collected Life magazines from the dentist office and once spent twenty dollars on seashells coated in resin at a yard sale to have a locked wooden chest in the back reaches of her closet, but it is strange that mother never made me ogle over it after she purchased it. It appears to be made of oak wood, with a rounded top not quite unlike something that would hold a pirate’s treasure. Right on the seam of the lid and base a rusted brass keyhole keeps it locked. I feel around the sides and base of the chest for a key, then check the place in the closet where the box had been kept. Nothing.
Perhaps she lost the key years ago, or tucked it into a space only she could find. The key could be in any one of these boxes or drawers, I suppose. Each one of the twenty-plus open-lid boxes to the left of her bed spills over with everything from newspaper clippings from thirteen years ago to the old parts of a radio that she unscrewed and kept to tinker around with, but never did. Her belongings are just like her: scattered, eccentric, looking for a place to belong and never quite finding it.
Lingering between all of the trash in these boxes are the things I’m determined to keep: birth certificates and wedding photos and perhaps some of her old journals she insists she kept in college. All of that is free real estate for me to discover, tucked and hidden away, but not under lock and key. All I have to do is dig, and I will find it.
I try to push the key and chest from my mind, to redirect focus back to sorting the shirts. Returning to my spot on the floor, I pick up a navy blue v-neck short-sleeved shirt with a hole on the left shoulder seam. Goodwill pile, then.
I wonder what she kept in the chest.
Next, there’s a cable knit sweater made of green and red dyed yarn. She wore it to the Christmas Eve brunch when Tyler vomited on the egg and mushroom casserole. That’s the day we discovered he was allergic to cremini mushrooms. Storage closet, then.
Maybe she left something important for me to find in there.
A t-shirt from a marathon she only ran about a quarter of three years ago: Goodwill.
The key might be right underneath my nose.
A shirt with permanent bleach stains: Goodwill.
I bet the key is in this room.
A tie-dye tank top.
She wants me to find it.
Gingham blouse.
I need to find it.
The blouse falls back into the unsorted pile and I return to the chest, where it sits taunting me from the bed. Again, my hands smother the outside of the box, searching for a key that might be taped somewhere. No, it’s not there.
In her nightstand, perhaps. I rip all three levels of drawers open to find a plastic bag filled with pennies, some crystals she purchased for spiritual healing, and a coupon for a free haircut that expired last March. My fingers dig to the back corners of each drawer but find nothing like a key.
Turning back to the chest, I decide that there is no way I’m leaving this room without finding that key. More likely than not, my cluttered mess of a mother dropped it somewhere obscure without the intention of ever finding it again. She was always doing that—taking things that mattered and letting them slip through her fingers while all of the obscurities got to stay.
In the ten years since I moved out for college, she never knew the location of my baby photos or the scrapbook she made of Tyler’s high school play performances. But she could always find the cap of the long-lasting chapstick she ordered off of a QVC commercial or the paint color cards she stole in bulk from stores to make little collages on her wall.
She held this buzzing reverent light of creativity and sentimentality in her hands, but could never keep a firm grasp of it.
“Need some help up here?” Tyler leans against the doorframe, his untamed brown hair tucked loosely behind his ears. Walking into a silent house this morning made my stomach knot, but it could not hold a candle to seeing my baby brother show up to our childhood home in a suit and tie, something he proclaimed at the age of sixteen that he would never wear. He had an interview this morning, he told me. The rest of the world didn't stop spinning to allow us to linger in our grief.
I’m still spinning, too. Work and dating and rent did not pause for even a single second after Aunt Margaret called to deliver the news. That night I took a red-eye across the country and called the office to tell them I had a stomach bug and would work from home for the week while still walking across the tarmac.
Some time in the past few hours Tyler changed to a pair of ill-fitting jeans and a weathered gray t-shirt. He steps into the room and looks over my shoulder into the drawers I just searched.
“Go back downstairs. Finish the kitchen.” “Kitchen’s all packed.”
“Start the garage then.”
“It’s all sorted.” I run down the list of places he could occupy himself, but the house is small. The three of us fit snugly within it’s four walls while Tyler and I grew up. Its square footage never matched the vastness of its presence in my life. It was the place I adored, then the place I resented, and most recently it was the place I pretended no longer existed.
“Jess,” Tyler says my name tenderly, trying to coax the coil winding tightly in my chest to relax itself. It only pulls tighter. “Let me help in here. There’s so much in this room that—”
“I can handle it,” I snap, slamming the three drawers shut and returning to my shirt pile.
Tyler crouches down next to me and picks up a shirt.
“This was her car wash shirt,” he laughs lightly, taking a green shirt with a fraying collar and screen printed shamrock on the front from the pile and examining it closely. “Back when my school musical had fundraisers, she’d show up in this shirt. Said it brought the luck of the Irish or something so we’d make more money.”
I roll my eyes.
“We’re not even Irish.”
“Yeah, but remember when mom got on that stint about luck. She tried luck charms from every culture and—”
I take the shirt from him and place it in the storage container pile. Tyler stands to his full height and crosses to the bed, noticing the chest for the first time. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him feel the edges for the key, just as I had done.
“You were looking for the key, weren't you?” He smirks. I don’t reply, but my brother knows me too well. I can never resist a puzzle.
Tyler slides down to sit next to me on the floor again. “Did you check the closet?”
“Of course I did.” We’re side by side, and I can’t help but be reminded of sitting just like this on the floor years ago in this very room, watching as our mother talked to Aunt Margaret on the telephone or painted her toenails sunflower yellow.
Tyler and I always observed in those situations. We didn't have a TV, and the library was a drive away, so sometimes mom was the entertainment.
“Do you think—” Tyler begins, his eyes darting across the room to the undisturbed mountain of boxes. I swallow the huge lump growing in my throat and get to my feet, crossing to the boxes I had not dared touch yet.
My brother is still behind me, watching with curious eyes as I rip open the first lid to discover it full of old newspapers. The cardboard walls are collapsing in on themselves, and I take a look at the date on the first paper to discover it is utterly insignificant.
“Recycle this.” It’s not a question and Tyler gets up to haul the box outside while I peek into the one beneath it, which is missing the lid. On top of a soft bed made of old sweatshirts sits the purple lava lamp I kept in my room in middle school. I take it out and place it on top of the bedside dresser. The thing probably won’t even work anymore if I plug it in.
Box after box, object after object, and no key. I can’t help but tear everything apart, for fear I might've missed it hiding in the folds of a blanket or pages of an old magazine. You leave me all this shit, but no key?
She knew what would happen when she died. People’s stuff doesn't apparate into thin air.
And my mother knew her days dwindled, but she didn't make any sort of effort to diminish the clutter in the room.
People always thought that with this mess that she was scattered. They were right, of course, but after years of sitting in the passenger’s seat on drives to the grocery store and leaning on the kitchen counter while pasta boiled on the stove, I learned one distinct fact about my mother: she understood.
People, places, life… they weren't foggy for her. Every night at dinner she’d ask Tyler a boatload of questions about his day, from what shoes he decided to wear to the snacks he bought at lunch. But with me, she’d wait. She knew I’d say what I pleased, and that questions like that didn't do me any good.
I knew my mother understood the world better than it understood her, and it infuriated me to not be let in on the secret. As a kid I doted after her, collecting my own menagerie of oddities and trying to see how collecting things made her understand people. But years of trying meant years of looking at the most important person in my life and knowing there was something she withheld from me. By the time I reached sixteen my own collection had gone away, traded for a minimalism that prioritized only the most sentimental of objects.
The puzzle of her obscurity was something I never truly finished solving.
My hands dive into the final box. There’s a bunch of marbles in a jar in here and a little painting of a full moon that she probably bought at a flea market. No key.
No. That can’t be right. There has to be a key in these boxes. She wouldn't just lock something and think I’d never open it—
I lift out the jar and painting, placing them on the bed before turning the box over and giving it a firm shake. Maybe there’s a false bottom panel on one of these and underneath she’s kept the key. One by one I dump out the searched boxes and shake out dust and air.
You can’t hide this chest from me. The coil in my chest wraps tighter, tighter. I grab box after box and then they’re all empty but I’m not done. I begin to rip open every drawer, cabinet, and jewelry box. I’m not looking meticulously anymore, the search is more of a fury of motion than anything else. It feels like an injustice to leave any corner of the room hidden from my eyes.
You can’t leave this unsolvable puzzle, you can’t hold onto everything but the things that matter. You can’t leave me—
I blink, eyes feeling hot and watery. You can’t leave me, but you did.
My body sinks onto the bed and I fall back, head hitting the mattress softly and my eyes closing. I can feel the presence of the chest just a few inches away from my head, but I don’t open my eyes to look at it again.
She’s gone, really gone. The room is her tomb and I’m digging for remnants of a woman that I had left behind the moment I left for school and never looked back to check on. She manifested these peculiar objects because I never stopped her, because I never helped her. And now she’s gone, running away from me and leaving the burden of guilt to sit heavy in my chest.
“Jess?”
I look up to see Tyler’s head leaning over mine, and he blinks, confused. “Are you—”
His eyes brush over my puffy red face and he decides to omit asking me the miserable question that we both know the answer to. “Look, Jess, it’s okay if you can’t find the key. Mom lost stuff all of the time, and—”
“I know.” I sit up, sniffling, and Tyler is puzzled.
“You know?” he asks cautiously. “What do you mean, you know?”
I fold my legs and pull them close to my chest. Tyler does the same, and now the wooden box is sitting unopened between us. “I just mean…. I remember when we were little. She’d buy these weird things all the time and never use them. There’s probably nothing in there anyway.”
Tyler’s face softens, and my brother reaches his hand to me. I slide mine into his, and the flesh of his palm is warm and sweaty against mine. We rest our joined hands on the top of the chest. “She loved you, you know. God, Jess, she loved you so much.” He pauses, staring right into my eyes in earnest. “And she knew how much you loved her.”
I shake my head. No, she couldn't have known. How long had it been since either of us called? Since I drove home just to check on her? “I just wish we had told each other, you know?” I whisper. “I just wish we had said it.”
Everything stops spinning. And I don’t just cry, I sob, the force of it wracking my body and causing me to gasp for air. Tyler leans forward, squishing the chest onto my lap as he pulls me into a hug. My neck buries into my baby brother’s shoulder and his arms wrap around my back. “She knew, Jess. Wherever you were, whatever you were doing, she knew. And it’s time for you to know it, too.”
I don’t respond, just let the power of the tears wash over my senses. They drip in erratic trails down the planes of my face, dribbling off the edge of my chin, and landing right on the top of the chest squished between our grieving bodies.
Julia Dath is a Sophomore Writing Major at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York who is drawn to exploring family connections in her work. Her fiction has previously appeared in Buzzsaw Magazine and is anticipated to be published in Stillwater Magazine this spring.