What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [11]
“Who would be in there?” Sharla asked, in the tired voice she reserved for telling me I was a moron. However, I noticed her hand stayed still on the doorknob.
“A hobo,” I said, and nearly saw him then, toothless and leering, sitting in a corner of Mrs. O’Donnell’s poor, empty bedroom. His handkerchief was off its stick and lay open before him; he was unpacked, claiming the space as his own. He had BO. And in the slatted light that came through Mrs. O’Donnell’s left-behind venetian blinds, you could see a knife clenched in his hairy fist. I imagined the Swiss army variety like our father’s, only not as nice. Rusty. In the habit of opening windpipes rather than bottles of grape soda.
“There are no hobos in Clear Falls,” Sharla said.
“How do you know?”
“What is the matter with you? Don’t you want to do this?”
“Yes!” Maybe not.
“There is no one in there. It is an empty house that we get to explore for as long as we want.” She squinted at me. “What’s under your arm?”
“Marshmallows.”
At first, she looked as though she might yell at me again; but then she held out her hand. I gave her one; then, as she did not take her hand back, two more. She shoved them in her mouth, then opened the door. And there it was, the exact smell of Mrs. O’Donnell. A warm smell, like ironing, mixed with something like old orange peels. “Shhh!” Sharla said, closing the door behind me. She stood perfectly still, her head cocked, listening.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Shhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”
I had gotten to her. She was making sure there wasn’t a hobo. My pride made me smile; I ate another marshmallow. We were a team, equal in importance, never mind the age difference.
Sharla turned to glare at me; apparently I was making noise eating.
“No one’s here,” I said loudly, in my marshmallow-thickened voice. “Tut-tut, chicken-butt.”
And then I led the way, I did, across the empty living room and into the center of the tiny dining room.
“This was the dining room,” I said solemnly.
“I know that.”
“You weren’t ever in here.”
“I was, too.”
“When?”
“Once when you were sick; I borrowed some soup from her. Mom sent me. She gave me a can of tomato soup.”
“I ate it?” I thought of Mrs. O’Donnell’s bumpy knuckles reaching in her cupboard for soup to give to me, shivered a little in regretful repulsion. It occurred to me that she would never make soup again. I wondered what she had done with the food left in her house on moving day. Maybe she’d given it to Leroy. Or set it out in her metal trash can, which now waited at the curb looking a bit splendid—such was the power of the moonlight.
“Let’s go look in her bedroom,” Sharla said.
I was going to say that nothing was there, but it wasn’t true. There was something there; there was something everywhere. There was a spirit in the house, a sad sense of someone newly gone. Each room had its own small, untold lament. The dining room missed its lace tablecloth and the turkey dinners Mrs. O’Donnell had served when her husband was alive. The kitchen tap dripped, looking for macaroni to rinse. The air in the bedroom would be rich with the leftovers from Mrs. O’Donnell’s dreams and her middle-of-the-night wakenings, those times when she sat on the edge of the bed with her hands on her knees, her thin hair wild about her glasses-less face, the ticking of her bedside clock suddenly loud. I was sure she’d sat like that. I was sure everyone did that, once they got old.
We climbed the stairs, walked down the hall past the bathroom, and Sharla pushed open the door to the empty square that had been Mrs. O’Donnell’s bedroom. I was right; the air here was charged. I felt the hairs on my arms lift; an invisible finger zipped up my spine. I looked at Sharla, wanting to ask if she felt all this, too, but her face was closed, impassive. She wasn’t colliding with memories of a life lived and now gone; she was simply looking around. The closet door was