“Ouch!”
I was rudely wrenched out of a nap by a slap across the head from my sister, and in the middle of a fabulous dream, no less, about rescuing my entire family from a horde of intestine-chomping zombies using the crossbow and combat knife that Papa Kwirk had given me. I was their hero. They owed me their lives.
“We’re here,” Cass said. She looked at my shoulder. “Is that drool?”
Sisters are trained to point out your faults. I wiped my mouth and looked out the window. We were off the interstate now, bouncing along a shabby dirt road.
Welcome to Greenburg.
The road led up to a gravel drive, which led to my great-aunt’s house. A colonial-style two-story with a huge wraparound porch and a balcony. Not big enough to warrant the world’s largest mailbox in her yard, but still bigger than our house back in Indiana—and we stuffed five of us in there, plus a snake. Aunt Gertie lived all by herself, and she was basically the size of a broom handle. Not the whole broom, even. Just the handle.
Most people when they grow older want to downsize, but not Aunt Gertie. Since moving from New York she’d come to appreciate wide-open spaces, she said, which was why the house sat on four acres, far enough from neighbors that you would have to hop in your car to borrow an egg from next door. Five bedrooms. Three bathrooms. A kitchen that you could run laps in. “This is what thirty-plus years of big-city lawyering gets you,” Aunt Gertie remarked of her little mansion on the prairie, her mixed accent half humble Midwest farmer’s daughter, half Jersey Shore spitfire.
Dad pulled up to the house, and all three of us in the back scrambled to get out of the car and away from each other as quickly as possible. It was starting to stink back there. Probably my fault—I forgot to put the deodorant on before putting it in my backpack—but I blamed Cass anyways. Aunt Gertie called to us from her porch. “You’re late,” she said.
“Sorry, Gertie,” my mother said. “We took a slight detour.”
My great-aunt strode across the lawn to greet us, hugging each of us in turn—a rib smasher that you wouldn’t expect from a woman so skinny. Probably something she learned from Papa Kwirk. She’d gotten her hair cut since Christmas. It looked very no-nonsense. She put a hand on my head after she hugged me. “I think you’ve gotten shorter since I saw you last.” It had been four months, and in that time I’m pretty sure I’d grown at least an inch, but Aunt Gertie liked to give everyone a hard time.
“And I think you’ve gained weight,” I said. “Did you eat a whole french fry or something?” My aunt was notorious for her dieting, which only partly explained why she weighed less than her twelve-year-old grandnephew. She also exercised religiously. Really, we didn’t have a whole lot in common.
“Funny guy,” she said, and pinched my cheek. Her eyes shot back to Cass, who, with the help of my father, was pulling Delilah’s terrarium from the back seat. “Are you freakin’ kidding me, Cassiopeia Kwirk? You brought that thing? I already have the godforsaken ferret and now you bring the snake? What is this? Wild Kingdom?”
“Beelzebub’s here?” Lyra exclaimed. She was the only one of us who actually liked Papa Kwirk’s slinky little weasel. She thought it was cute. I mentally gave myself bonus points for packing extra socks.
“Yeah. He’s in the house somewhere, probably crappin’ all over the carpet. Jeez, that thing is huge.” Aunt Gertie tapped on Delilah’s glass as Lyra dashed into the house to find the ferret. “What do you feed it? Live chickens?”
“Mice,” Cass said. “Small ones.”
“Whatever. It stays in the garage. And I don’t want to hold it, so you don’t even need to ask.”
“Thanks, Aunt Gertie.”
Dad got a second extra-long hug from Aunt Gertie, who whispered something in his ear. His eyes narrowed and he frowned, but he nodded and followed her across the lawn. “Come on in and make yourselves at home,” she said to the rest of us, waving us through the door.
It was still familiar from the last time. The porch. The big trees. The frog lawn ornaments playing flutes and banjos by the bushes. The couple of times we’d come to Greenburg, we’d stayed with Aunt Gertie. Never with Papa Kwirk. I wasn’t sure why. I assumed it was because she had the right number of pull-out couches and empty beds. And because Dad insisted.
“I made a whole list of places we could order from for dinner. As usual, just ignore the clutter,” Aunt Gertie trilled.
Clutter was Aunt Gertie’s name for the enormous piles of stuff that sat on every table and shelf in every nook, corner, cranny, and crevice of her house. Despite its enormity, there was surprisingly little space to set your stuff down.
Aunt Gertie was a collector. That’s what she called herself. Dad called her a pack rat. Mom preferred the word “hoarder.” She never said it out loud, of course, but my mother hated staying at Aunt Gertie’s, you could tell. It probably took everything she had not to start throwing things away, or at least shoving them into closets so you’d have more room to walk.
I kind of liked it, though. You sort of felt like an archeologist uncovering some pharaoh’s dusty tomb when you walked through Aunt Gertie’s front door. After all, there was bound to be something priceless stashed away among all this useless junk.
“I see you’ve been busy,” Mom said, stepping past a stack of boxes in the entryway with sloppy Sharpie scribbles on the sides. Bedroom. Family room. Attic. Several boxes were labeled Pictures. One was labeled Ferret Crap. I assumed it wasn’t really Beelzebub’s poop stored in a box, though with Aunt Gertie you could never be sure.
“Oh, that’s all Jimmy’s stuff,” Aunt Gertie said casually. “At least, the little things. The big stuff is already in storage, except the motorcycle, of course—that’s in the garage. This is mostly just personal items. Sentimental junk. We can look through it all later, if you’d like. Come relax and tell me about the trip.”
Aunt Gertie and my parents immediately found spots in the living room—the least messy room in the house—and started talking about completely mundane stuff. Road construction along the interstate, the weather, the new color of paint on Aunt Gertie’s walls (mint green and hideous). It was almost as if they wanted to talk about anything other than my grandfather, the whole reason we were all here. For her part, Aunt Gertie looked like she always did. No dark rings under her eyes. No nose rubbed raw and red from too much tissue wiping. She did not look like a woman who had recently lost her brother and best friend. She was wearing a lot of makeup for someone dressed in yoga pants, but that was Aunt Gertie for you.
It didn’t take the Kwirk kids long to split off and go our separate ways. Cass was still out in the garage getting Delilah settled, and I could hear Lyra banging her way through the rooms upstairs, opening and closing doors, looking for the ferret—“Be-ellll-ze-bub. Where arrre you?” After I’d answered the required battery of questions from my aunt (School? Good. Soccer? Good. Friends? Fine. Girlfriend? Nonexistent, but thanks for asking), I interrupted a riveting conversation on the construction of the new roundabout in town to ask Aunt Gertie if she’d gotten any new toothbrushes since the last time we were here.
I hadn’t forgotten about the toothbrushes.
“You bet your sweet bippy,” Aunt Gertie said, and pointed to the stairs. “Up in the vault. In fact, there’s one up there I got just for your dad. See if you can find it. And take your time. Your parents and I have some catching up to do.”
That’s when it dawned on me. They weren’t talking around Papa Kwirk. They were talking around me—the only kid left in the room. I nodded and headed for the stairs, wondering what a bippy was and why I would bet it.
“Watch your step,” my mother warned, no doubt worried that I would trip over some pile of Aunt Gertie’s junk and get swallowed by the clutter, never to be seen again.
I started up the stairs, pausing for just a second to look at a picture on the wall of Aunt Gertie and Papa Kwirk, all dressed up. Maybe it was for the retirement party that we didn’t make it to.
It was the first time I’d ever seen my grandfather in a suit.
Tomorrow, I assumed, would be the last.
The carpet in my great-aunt Gertie’s house changes with almost every step. Sky blue in one room, pine green in another. Gold to maroon to a sort of brownish gray that looked like dirty snow. Every doorway was like a portal to another colorful dimension, though in some rooms it was hard to tell because you could barely see the floor at all. Not that I had a right to criticize.
I’m not sure what qualifies one as being a hoarder, but Aunt Gertie sure did have a lot of stuff. There were dolls sitting on shelves and books stacked in corners. Every room had at least one table with a lamp on it, even though all the rooms had overhead lights and none of the lamps had bulbs. There were towers of boxes scattered throughout, like the ones downstairs in the entryway, except these weren’t even labeled. The house wasn’t dirty, not even that dusty (though not spotless like my mother’s office)—making me think that Aunt Gertie actually moved all this junk around to clean behind and underneath it, which made it even more of a wonder that she kept it. The last time we visited, Cass and I, in a fit of boredom, invented a game of trying to catalog all the strange stuff Aunt Gertie had accumulated. We wrote it down on a sheet of paper. Things like:
Dad said it probably came from living for so long in a one-bedroom flat in Manhattan. That once she got a house with all this space, she insisted on filling it with something, and having no husband and no kids and apparently way too much money, she filled it with whatever she could find.
Most of this stuff she kept upstairs in the Vault, one of three spare bedrooms and the only one that didn’t have a spare bed in it. Probably because there was nowhere to put one.
That’s the room I found myself in, looking for the large cedar chest, much like what I imagine pirates used to bury treasure on desert islands. I spotted it in the corner by a pile of shoes, knelt down beside it, and flipped the latch. It opened with a satisfying creak.
There it was. Aunt Gertie’s most prized collection.
Her toothbrushes.
It was no secret that my great-aunt had a thing for proper dental hygiene. Her house was a wreck, but her teeth were perfect. Even at the age of sixty-seven, she still had her original set. But the treasures in this chest weren’t ever used for brushing teeth. They were more like a monument to the awesomeness that is toothbrushing in general. A tribute to the glory of oral health.
There were at least a hundred of them. Imagine any kind of toothbrush, any shape, any material, and Great-Aunt Gertie had one. She had toothbrushes made of ivory and silver and wood. She had toothbrushes with foot-long handles and giant bristles. She had toothbrushes shaped like famous monuments (the Leaning Tower of Pisa was a personal favorite; it had a suction cup angled at the bottom so that it actually tilted when you stuck it to the sink) and celebrities (a Marilyn Monroe–patterned one was Aunt Gertie’s pride and joy). Double-sided toothbrushes for getting your uppers and lowers at the same time. Toothbrushes with screwdrivers in the handle. Toothbrushes that sang to you, that shot toothpaste out, that folded in half. Toothbrushes shaped like naked people—male and female; no doubt those would be a big hit around the lunch table at school. She even had one that concealed a tiny knife in the handle so that you could stab somebody and have fresh breath.
I scanned the top of the chest, looking for new additions. A lot of them looked unfamiliar. I didn’t recognize the Superman one. Or the battery-operated Justin Bieber (I resisted the urge to press the button, knowing I would regret it). I picked up a plastic frog that looked out of place and gasped when its head fell off, revealing a toothbrush protruding from its stubby neck. What kind of little kid would want to brush his teeth with a decapitated frog?
On second thought, I knew Manny would get a kick out of it.
I found at least a dozen new brushes but didn’t see anything that screamed “Dad” until I noticed something on the floor. I guess it hadn’t made it into the chest yet. Or maybe she’d left it out so that she could remember to give it to him when we came. The moment I saw it, I knew it was the one.
A ThunderCats light-up talking toothbrush, complete with Lion-O stand. Dad was going to love it. ThunderCats had been one of his favorite shows growing up. I pulled the handle free and pressed the big white button on the side.
“Thunder . . . Thunder . . . Thunder . . . ThunderCats. Hooo!” the toothbrush said.
“What the heck is that?”
I spun around, still holding the lion-man-shaped toothbrush, to find Lyra standing in the doorway, her dirty socks in her hands. I expected Beelzebub to be pressed up against her, writhing and nipping and struggling to get free, but apparently she hadn’t found him yet. Ferrets are good hiders, and lord knows there are plenty of places in Aunt Gertie’s house to hide. Lyra had taken off her socks as a precaution. Or maybe as a lure.
“Is it for Dad?” She’d heard our father recount his weekday afternoons and endless Saturday mornings sitting cross-legged in front of the TV too. She could also name all the Smurfs and the Fraggles. I nodded and skootched so that she could sit beside me and admire Aunt Gertie’s bizarre collection. “They aren’t used, are they?” she asked, wrinkling her nose.
I forgot that Lyra was only five the last time we visited Aunt Gertie’s. She hadn’t gone on the cataloging quest with Cass and me. She’d never seen the treasure chest before. “Some of them,” I said.
“Ew. That’s disgusting. Why does Aunt Gertie collect used toothbrushes?”
“You collect words,” I said.
“That’s not the same at all. Words are indispensable. You can’t do anything without them.”
“You could brush your teeth,” I said. “Provided you had a toothbrush.”
“Dubious,” Lyra replied. “Without words, human civilization wouldn’t exist and we wouldn’t have even invented toothbrushes.”
Now she sounded like one of Aunt Gertie’s National Geographics. “I bet you’re wrong. I bet cavemen had toothbrushes. Probably made of bone and woolly mammoth hair or something.” I was pretty sure Fred Flintstone had a toothbrush. Of course, he also had a car and a dinosaur crane.
“That’s revolting,” Lyra said. She picked up a toothbrush that appeared to be made out of Lego, obviously meant for little kids. Her forehead furrowed. “Why does Aunt Gertie have such a big house and no family?”
“She has family,” I said. “She has us.” And she had her brother. At least until recently. The two of them had been really close, I knew. I guess Papa Kwirk didn’t feel the same way about sisters as I did. Or maybe he did when he was younger and managed to grow out of it. Was such a thing possible?
“You know what I mean. How come she doesn’t have any progeny of her own?”
I stared at my little sister. “Progeny? Really? You can’t just say ‘kids’? You’re ten.”
“Almost eleven,” Lyra corrected. “And progeny sounds better. Anyone can have kids. When I grow up, I’m going to have progeny.”
I tried to imagine what a world full of Lyra’s progeny would look like. A gaggle of pigtailed Boggle champions ready to take over the world. I shuddered. It’s not that I wished she wasn’t so smart; I just wished she did a better job of keeping it to herself. “Maybe she thought they’d be too much work,” I said.
“Kids aren’t too much work.”
“I’m not any work,” I told her. “You, on the other hand, are a chore.”
Maybe that’s why Dad never had any brothers or sisters either, I thought. Why Papa Kwirk never had any more kids. It must have been hard enough raising one on your own. Once Grandma Shelley died, it had just been the two of them. Dad never said much about those years either, when it was just he and Papa Kwirk.
Lyra twirled the Lego toothbrush around and around. “I sort of miss Grandpa already. Is that weird? Can you miss someone after only one day? When you wouldn’t have seen them anyway?”
“I don’t think it’s weird at all,” I said. I knew what she meant. There was something strange about being here, in Aunt Gertie’s house. Something that brought Papa Kwirk’s absence so much closer. This was his town. The place he lived and worked and fished and played cards. The place where our own dad was born and raised. The moment Papa Kwirk came back from the war, he married my grandmother and they settled down here in Greenburg and never left. He never left. Not like Dad, who hightailed it out of here the moment he graduated from high school, only coming back when he had to.
Like now.
I could almost feel Papa Kwirk’s absence in the close air of the overstuffed room. If it felt strange to us being here, I thought, imagine how Dad must be feeling right now.
“Here,” I said, handing Lyra the ThunderCats toothbrush stand. “Let’s go show this to Dad. And then maybe I’ll help you look for Beelzebub.” I’d learned long ago to always add a maybe anytime I suggested I’d do something for either of my sisters.
It was always a good idea to have an out.