This Belongs to You
by Aimee LaBrie
She was my 57th client. I remember that because the house number was 75 Leipzig Street, and I thought that it was significant that the numbers were reversed. Back then, I was always searching for signs, making meaning out of birth dates and billboard signs, license plates and fortune cookies.
I worked for twenty years as a professional organizer. I'd seen hoard before, that was my job. You must imagine that my own house was as neat as a pin. And it was until Margaret Pieman. After her, I let things stay where they fell, began to like the towers and the path I wove through to make it to the microwave or the recliner where I slept after my bedroom was overtaken by cast-off clothes, stuffed animals, jars of jam, black umbrellas that had been turned inside out by the wind. I liked the accumulation of things. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Margaret Pieman lived in a three-bedroom ranch in Fort Worth, Texas. When I first got out of the car, the sun reflected off the windows and I thought, Oh, wow, this is beautiful, because the whole house was lit up like it had a halo around it. The windows were blocked off with blankets, so it was impossible to see inside.
She met me at the front door, beside a faded sleigh with Santa at the head of it, his mouth open in as if he had just finished a string of "hohohos." Nine plastic reindeer lay on their sides, looking like that had been fallen into a sudden sleep.
Margaret shook my hand firmly, a tough grasp with hands in gardening gloves. She said, "You are not going to believe this."
I thought, Yes, I will. I'd been to the house of a gentleman the month before who had kept every single store receipt since he was fifteen years old. He wore an adult diaper because he could no longer make his way to the toilet. The hallway was blocked by boxes of fly-fishing magazines. A jar of discarded dentures earned space on a bookshelf stuffed with Russian newspapers. That is one example.
At the time, I thought it was a tragedy.
We went inside the house. I had my mask with me, in case there was a smell. Bug spray in case there were roaches. Cell phone on speed dial in case one of us tripped over boxes and tipped headfirst into a collection of broken shells. But I was not prepared for what happened when she opened the door. First, the smell. I was accustomed to human feces, animal waste, food rotted past the maggot stage and well into fly development. That is what I braced myself for, the odor of decay and neglect. Instead, what I got was cinnamon and yeast, like baking bread. It reminded me immediately of my grandparent's bakery in Jersey City.
What in the world, as my grandmother would have said.
Margaret gripped my hand, saying, "I won't let you fall."
I moved forward in the pitch black. I heard the roar of a roller coaster so loud, I ducked, thinking that a track ran above us, then the jingle-jangle of fun house music, mixed with the murmur of people talking, as if we'd stepped into a crowd. It reminded me of a family vacation to Atlantic City from 25 years ago. We kept moving forward in the dark. It was like being plunged into the bottom of a cave. But I could feel this very particular bite of wind on my face--a brisk wind, cold, the slicing type only found on New England cliffs, where I had been when I was fifteen or so. That was the summer I fell in love for the first time with Haskell Jenkins. Best kisser in my life. I hadn't thought of him in forever.
Margaret said, "This is the hardest part. Step over that rope there and now you can see."
Like a switch had been flipped, light flooded into a room that may have been a place to eat or a place to visit with guest. It had become something else entirely. "Oh," I said. "Oh, my God."
At first, it looked like a typical hoarder's property. A sea of seeming garbage, random objects, piles of clothes, worn, cardboard boxes with caved in sides. But when I got over the initial and familiar shock of the hoard, I noticed that everything in the room looked familiar. The broken clock looked like one that belonged to my great grandmother. The china dolls whose heads I could just see peeking from a cabinet across the room--they didn't belong to anyone I knew, but I remembered them from the doll museum we visited when I was twelve. A stuffed seagull in a cage from the boardwalk in 1987. The square desk of my fifth grade English teacher, Mr. Calise. The red dog collar from our Collie, Bolt, who got hit by a car.
"It's all here," Margaret said. "Everything you can remember. I saved it for you."
That whole day and into the night, I wandered through her house, marveling at the collection of things from times and places I had forgotten.
Now, my house is like hers. I go to yard sales. I save bits of paper I find blowing across the street. I collect chess sets with broken knights, stacks of playing cards whose aces are missing, photo albums of strangers, knives locked up tight in wooden boxes. I have a system. I was a professional organizer, after all, so things are kept in categories. Mostly, I'm just guessing what they mean, why they might matter to someone else.
I am waiting for that person to arrive and find the things she lost.
Aimee LaBrie's short stories have appeared in StoryQuarterly, The Minnesota Review, Cagibri, Zoetrope, North American Review, Mortar Magazine, Gulf Stream Literary Review, Cleaver Magazine, and others. Her work has been nominated three times for Pushcart Prizes. Her first short story collection, Wonderful Girl, won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for fiction and was published by the University of North Texas Press. Aimee teaches creative writing at Rutgers University. She can be reached on Twitter @butcallmebetsy and by email at aimeelabrie@gmail.com.