Little Secrets Page 7

  Temperatures were cold, but not yet freezing. The past few weeks had seen rain, a lot of it. The squirrel into which she’d just sunk her fingers was both mushy and saturated, its belly bloated. It stunk. Its eyes were gone, she could see that much, and its little mouth gaped with teeth that were too long. Ginny backpedaled with her hands out in front of her, her shriek locked in her throat.

  In the kitchen, Sean sat at the table with a towering Dagwood sandwich in front of him. She pushed past him to the sink, where she ran the hot water aggressively and scrubbed at her hands. More soap. More scrubbing. Oh God, so gross. So gross.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I was bagging up leaves, and guess what I found. A dead squirrel. A rotten dead squirrel. And guess what I found it with, Sean? My hands!” She shuddered, repulsed, but laughed too at the absurdity of it. “It must’ve gotten into the bait and gone outside to die, just like the exterminator said.”

  Sean crossed to the sink to grab her hands. “What? Jesus Christ, Ginny, what the hell were you thinking? Are you okay?”

  “I didn’t puke, so yes, I guess so.” She shuddered again, but the disgust was fading as the hot water and soap washed her clean. She tried to tug her hands from Sean’s grip, but he held her tight.

  “Get something,” he said.

  “Something like what?”

  “Hand sanitizer. Alcohol. Something! No, I’ll get it.” Incredibly, he grabbed a bottle of whiskey from the lower cabinet and spun the lid.

  Ginny stared. “What are you going to do with that? Light my hands on fire?”

  Sean looked at the bottle, sighed, put the cap back on. “Maybe I should drink it.”

  “Sean…” Ginny turned off the water and dried her hands on a towel. In the yard, knuckle deep in rotting squirrel, she’d screamed. Here in the bright kitchen with her hands clean, she didn’t want him to keep fretting. “It’s not that big a deal. Really. It was gross and startling, but that’s all.”

  “You shouldn’t have been out there at all. Raking leaves? In the dark?”

  “I didn’t start when it was dark,” she pointed out. “And the leaves needed raking. It’s not a big deal.”

  Except that it sort of was.

  “I thought I heard you go upstairs,” Sean muttered. “I didn’t know you were still out there, I’d have come out and helped you.”

  Ginny pulled a bottle of hand lotion from the cupboard and rubbed it carefully into her skin. “What do you mean, you didn’t know I was out there? You saw me go out the back door.”

  “I thought maybe you came in the front.”

  “You thought I came in the front door,” Ginny said. “How on earth could you think I came in the front door? You saw me from the window upstairs.”

  “I didn’t see you.” Sean went back to the table and scraped his chair back to sit again in front of the sandwich.

  Ginny’s fingers curled so tight into her palm her fingernails dented the skin. Not quite painful—not yet. But the potential was there. “I saw you. In the window upstairs. I waved. You waved.”

  “I was in here making myself something to eat since you weren’t cooking dinner.”

  Oh. No. He. Didn’t.

  “Yeah well, I was outside raking the leaves since you weren’t doing that.” She eyed the table. “I notice you didn’t make me a sandwich.”

  “How was I supposed to know you wanted one? You were upstairs. I figured you were pissed off at me, so you went upstairs to…you know. Be pissed.”

  Incredulity kept her speechless for a minute as her mouth worked without finding words. And, ah yes, there was the bright sting of pain in her palms. Ginny focused, eased her grip. “Sean. Seriously? You are kidding, right?”

  He looked at her, eyes narrowed. She couldn’t tell if he was challenging her or genuinely oblivious. “No.”

  “I saw you,” Ginny said. “Upstairs. In the window.”

  “I wasn’t up there.” He bit into the sandwich, spoke around a mouthful of sloppy lettuce and mayo. “You want some of mine?”

  She didn’t want any of his. She’d starve before she ate any piece of that dripping mess. Plunging her hands into a dead and bloated squirrel hadn’t made her vomit, but that sandwich might.

  In times past, she’d have raged at him until he turned his back and gave her the silent treatment, but this was supposed to be a fresh start. Right? All of this, everything new and fresh and different than it had been before. Every fucking piece of it.

  Sean cut off a piece of the sandwich and held it aloft, ignoring the slide of tomato seeds and mayonnaise over his hand. “Here. It’s good. Eat some.”

  Ginny sat at the table across from him. “Yes, okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

  Chapter Nine

  This would be the baby’s room.

  Ginny had never wanted to know the gender of her child in advance. So few surprises in life were truly wonderful, and she’d always imagined the moment of birth to be the perfect time to discover if she was the mother of a daughter or a son. Because of her previous problems, this time around she’d been subjected to every possible test and what felt like an insane number of ultrasounds. You could get them in 3-D now, a scarily vivid image of your unborn child’s face presented to you on a piece of photo paper or on disc to upload to the Internet and show off to all your friends. It was hard to make sure the techs didn’t slip up and give away the baby’s sex, even though most of them were genuinely eager to help keep the secret. Ginny thought Sean knew, though. She’d heard him murmuring to the tech once when she was getting dressed. Something about “if you could make a guess.”

  She thought it was a boy.

  That didn’t mean she was decorating this room in any shade of blue, though. Both her sister Peg and sister-in-law, Jeannie, had done up their nurseries in pastels, with babycentric designs, and then complained when the kids got older and the rooms needed to be redecorated. Ginny had decided to go with a fun jungle theme, using vinyl stickers against brightly painted walls. The stickers could be pulled off later and replaced. The bedding could be changed as a child of either gender graduated from a crib to a bed, and the colors she’d chosen would work for even an older child. Two walls lime green, two a rich chocolate brown. This room also had a dormer. She envisioned benches with cushions, a cozy place to read and play. Maybe some curtains to make a cave or castle, depending on the kid’s personality.

  For now, it needed a thorough cleaning and all of the fixtures and trim taped off. Sean had forbidden her from doing any painting, but he hadn’t been able to argue too strenuously against her taping things. At least so long as she promised not to get up on a ladder.

  This pregnancy had been hard on her physically, but mentally Ginny had taught herself to feel better than she ever had. Less worried, for one thing. The more she’d learned about the possibilities of mental and physical defects, the less frightening having a child with special needs seemed.

  For Sean, on the other hand, the more he knew, the more uneasy he became. The facts and statistics she devoured unsettled him. Sean didn’t think he could balance a checkbook or clean a strange stain off a shirt or organize a surprise weekend away, and in the fourteen years they’d been married, Ginny’d never been able to convince him otherwise. There was no way she could convince him he could be a good father to a baby with problems. All she could do was not take chances. Reassure him. Let him fuss over her. Ginny had learned not to tell him what she discovered from her online research.

  She’d learned not to tell him lots of things.

  With her music playing, this time from a carefully chosen playlist that contained nothing to sneak-attack her emotions, Ginny gathered her bucket of supplies, all organic or nonchemical based because Sean had insisted he didn’t want her breathing in toxic fumes. They’d had a cleaning service come through the house before they moved in, but she hadn’t be
en particularly impressed with the job they’d done. It was bad enough that more of the former owner’s belongings had been left behind than they’d wanted, but knowing the dust balls and finger smudges were someone else’s grime…gross.

  Sean’s mom, Barb, had offered to come over and help, but that would’ve been more of a nightmare than trying to get water stains out of a tub without using bleach. Besides, Ginny had been looking forward to cleaning. Maybe it was all that time spent with Gran, who’d not only had a “hired woman” for most of her life but also spent more hours on her knees scrubbing the floors than she ever had in church.

  Ginny’s mom had been a terrible housekeeper, in direct response to her upbringing. Just like she’d never host a party, Christmas or otherwise, Ginny’s mother also had never done more than the bare minimum when it came to keeping them from living in squalor. Beds unmade, dishes in the sink, dust everywhere—that was Ginny’s house growing up. It wasn’t exactly like living in the pigsty Gran called it, but it wasn’t quite as tidy as most of her friends’ houses either, with moms who stayed home and presumably spent their days making use of old toothbrushes to keep their grout from going gray.

  “I have better things to do with my time,” Ginny’s mom always said, and as a working woman herself, Ginny had often found that to be true. The kind of clean Gran had demanded took a lot of time and/or money to maintain, and though Ginny always made sure to make the bed in the morning and put dirty dishes in the dishwasher, she also sometimes left her laundry in the basket for days on end before folding it and putting it away.

  Now, of course, she wasn’t working and had nothing but time, and the combined clutter of a just-moved-into house with her being home all the time to actually see the mess…well, she understood now what her gran had meant when her fingers itched to “get to fixing things.”

  This room wasn’t in terrible shape. Mostly it bore the touches of time and disuse. Cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling—she got those down easily enough with a broom. Something that looked like shavings in a couple of the corners, possibly from the insects Danny was supposed to have taken care of. She swept the room quickly, then drew a bucket of hot water from the bathroom and mopped the wood floor. They hadn’t yet shopped for furniture, though she’d gone through a couple catalogs and picked out what she wanted. They’d need a carpet in here too, or maybe a couple fun throw rugs.

  She looked around the room, envisioning it painted and furnished. There in the corner, a rocking chair. Her sister swore by a glider, but Ginny had seen a bent-cane rocker at one of the Amish markets a few summers ago. When she pictured herself with a baby in her arms, it was always in that chair. The crib could go here, she thought, away from the windows and the drafty cubbyhole door. The dresser, there. A bookcase in that corner, because her child would certainly be a reader. And in the closet…

  “Ugh.” She stopped, nose wrinkling when she opened up the double wooden doors. The dust in there was palpable, along with the acrid tang of mouse droppings. Old mouse shit was still shit, she thought with a grimace, and grabbed the broom.

  In the closet, when it was clean, she planned to install a set of wire shelves and hangers to store toys and clothes. Like most of the others in the house, including hers, the one in this room was deep but narrow. Not really a walk-in. Almost like an afterthought. This one had nothing but a single bar running from front to back and a shallow wooden shelf above it. Lots of functional space made useless by that old-fashioned setup. She’d make it better.

  For now, Ginny concentrated on sweeping out the dust bunnies and mouse poop and dead beetle shells. It was a good thing Barb wasn’t here to help her out. Sean’s mom would’ve screamed and tossed up her hands at even the hint of a little poop, no matter how ancient. Ginny laughed a little guiltily at the image. Barb meant well; it wasn’t her fault Ginny found her mother-in-law as useless as the shelf in this closet.

  Her broom bumped that shelf as she worked, rattling the wood on the pegs holding it up. As it turned out, the shelf wasn’t one long piece of wood, but three or four foot-long sections. She figured that out when she bumped it again and only part of it lifted, sending down a drift of more dust and pellets.

  Gross.

  She’d promised Sean she wouldn’t exert herself or climb on ladders or lift heavy paint cans, but there was no way she could leave the filth. From downstairs, she brought the pantry step stool and set it up. That was only two steps; surely he wouldn’t get on her case about that. Armed with a roll of paper towels and squirt bottle of vinegar and water, Ginny stepped onto the bottom step. Then the next. The ceilings in this house, including the closet, were a luxurious nine feet, but that meant that even with the stool, she wasn’t quite tall enough to see all the way to the back of the shelf, or all the way to the end.

  “A little at a time, baby, just a little at a time.” Gran’s words again, used for all manner of tasks that had seemed too daunting. One jar at a time while canning the endless supply of tomatoes from her garden, one pan of cookies at a time when she got to baking for the Christmas party, one stitch at a time when she was working on her embroidery. Ginny supposed the same held true for cleaning dirty closets. One wipe at a time.

  The first paper towel she swiped across the top came away black with dirt and speckled with dead ants. Her swipe also brought along a couple ant traps. That explained the shavings in the corners. She dropped the paper towel. Spritzed more cleanser. Wiped again. This time was better.

  Ginny used six paper towels to clean that section of the shelf, another four for the next. Then she had to get down and move the stool over a few inches. As she did, above her, the wood creaked. She straightened, looking, but saw nothing. Heard nothing. She looked around the closet and saw nothing there, either.

  Ginny took a step back, looking upward again. Set into the ceiling was an attic access panel similar to the one in the hallway, though in here there was no room for a pull-down ladder. Ginny held her breath, listening, but the sound didn’t repeat.

  “Right,” she said aloud, slapping her dirty hands against each other and wishing she’d thought to grab some rubber gloves. “Come out, Gary Busey, wherever you are.”

  The joke didn’t seem so funny when she herself had just moved into an old house with a sort of creepy crawl-space attic. And she was alone. And she’d heard a weird noise.

  Ginny wasn’t in the habit of talking to herself, at least not out loud, but more words slipped from her lips as though speaking them instead of just thinking them gave them the power to be true. “It was nothing. Just like the nothing you saw in the hallway. Just like the nothing you saw in a window. Shadows, that’s it. And old houses creaking. That’s it, Virginia Eloise.”

  That’s what her gran had called her, ever so formally. Nicknames, she said, were for people who didn’t have beautiful names. She’d never referred to Ginny’s mom by her name, always calling her honey or darling or sweetheart, affectionate terms that had curled Ginny’s mom’s lip because she said they weren’t meant fondly but as a way of pointing out how unbeautiful her name was. Gertrude, named after Gran’s mother-in-law. Ginny’s mom went by Trudy and had been careful not to name her own daughters after any relatives.

  Saying it aloud that way settled something inside Ginny. Almost like Gran had said it herself, which was impossible, both because Gran wasn’t here, and also because Gran had been incapable of saying much of anything that made sense for the past few years. She didn’t talk much at all, in fact. She mostly sat and stared out the windows of the nursing home, even when Ginny came and brought her special treats that she wasn’t supposed to have on her diet.

  For the second time since moving into this house, emotion blindsided her. Ginny put a hand on her heart, mindless of the dirt on her white shirt, although it left a smudge she’d have to fuss with later and which would never quite come entirely clean. She closed her eyes, her other hand on the back of the stool for balance as she b
ent over with the force of her sorrow. Gran was old and had always been a little wacky, but to see her losing her mind…to watch her actually lose all sense of not just the people around her and where she was, but of herself…

  Ginny’d been ignoring it for a long time. Her monthly visits were filled with forced cheer and lots of bright, one-sided conversation, and she pretended the headaches that always came home with her were from the stink of the cleaning chemicals in the home, not from the stress of smiling so hard her face hurt. She hadn’t allowed herself to think fully on Gran’s condition, or how it made her feel, and now it all swung up and hit her in the face like a stepped-on rake.

  Bam. Slam. Right between the eyes, the pain sudden and fierce enough to make her gasp as she fought against tears and lost. Heat slipped down her cheeks and clogged her throat. She pressed her eyes closed tighter and shook her head, muttering aloud.

  No, she wouldn’t do this. She wouldn’t let this happen again, this slip-slide into melancholy for which there was no cure. Hormones, circumstances, her own choices, the vagaries of fate—whatever it was, she wasn’t going to let herself give in to this burst of anxiety again. She just. Would. Not.

  Blinking rapidly, Ginny used a clean paper towel to scrub at her face. She drew in a few sharp breaths until the dust made her sneeze. She blew her nose, cleared her throat, got herself under control. She had a closet to clean and lots of other things this house needed. No time to break down over what she couldn’t change.

  Bolstered, determined, she got back up on the stool and gave the shelf a swift sweep with a handful of paper towels. Something skidded along the wood with her hand, but she was moving too fast, had been too hasty. More than dust and a few dead ants or some dried turds tipped over the edge of the shelf this time.