The Wrong Family(50)
She turned off the TV and stared resolutely at the blank screen. It had become more difficult for her to get up from the crawl space in the last few weeks, the pain in her joints flaring beyond the help of the aspirin from the Crouches’ medicine cabinet. She wished there was still a stash of oxy in there, but that was gone now, thanks to Sam.
Most days she chose instead to lay curled in the nest she’d made with the foam mattress she’d snuck from the camping supplies. She’d taken blankets and a sleeping bag, too, from the linen closet upstairs, and once Winnie donated a garbage bag of old throws, as she called them, which Juno ferried down the hole before Nigel could cart it away. No one ever noticed her thefts, though Juno supposed they weren’t really thefts, since everything was technically still in the house, and it was stuff they were getting rid of anyway. Winnie and Nigel were too busy with their own shenanigans to notice hers.
She’d amassed a small wardrobe of discarded sweatshirts and sweatpants from the giveaway bags, things she washed weekly in the Crouches’ laundry room. When the weather got very cold, and the ground in the crawl space turned icy, Juno would crawl up at night and sleep in her old digs underneath the snowsuits and Halloween costumes in Hems Corner. That was a treat. On those days, she stayed upstairs for most of the day, collecting supplies and standing near a window for a few minutes to soak up some of the sun (if it showed itself). She washed her clothes and blankets, took a bath, ate a warm meal, and watched the news. By that time Juno was nearly asleep on her feet. When she lowered herself back to her crawl space after a day at the Crouches, she was tiiiired. Or maybe it’s your kidneys that are tired, she told herself. But as dandy as her growing nest and wardrobe were becoming, nothing compared to the bliss of sleeping in the apartment during this glorious week without the Crouches.
She could hear the faint rumble of the dryer from where she sat, trying to read but too distracted.
She took the clothes out, warm and smelling of the dryer sheets, and folded each one into the grocery bag she was borrowing from Winnie. She knew the vacation was temporary, and soon she’d head back to the crawl space. But if Juno were honest, she was able to spend multiple days in the crawl space in moderate comfort: changing out her clothes, sleeping without worrying about people messing with her or cops chasing her off. Cops young enough to be her son, boys who had little to no respect for people her age, never mind homeless people her age. No, she preferred it down here under the Crouch house, suffering in peace. She had a fleet of apple juice and water jugs now: three for waste, two for water, one for trash. She kept those in what she considered her toilet area—the farthest corner of the crawl space. Juno considered her crawl over to be exercise, which she got very little of these days. She figured it wouldn’t matter for long; her kidneys burned like coals in her body, hot and sweating under the pressure of too many work hours and poor work conditions.
“Sorry, ladies...” She used one hand to reach back to massage a kidney and the other to slam the dryer closed. Juno’s things were packed and ready to go. She carried the bundle to the closet and lowered everything into the crawl space, the smells of dirt and ammonia sweeping around her in a gust of dead air. She was used to it, though Juno had no doubt she was now sharing her lungs with mold spores.
Standing up, she looked down with satisfaction at the things she’d managed to get done this morning: laundry, a shower, TV time, and she’d even got a little exercise in. The last thing she needed to do was eat.
The walk to the fridge was a long one; Juno never knew if there would be food to take. Glory hallelujah, someone had gone to the market, and if Juno could bet money on it, she’d say that the someone was Nigel. Leftovers were vegetarian meat loaf and real mashed potatoes. By the time they got back the food would go straight to the trash anyway. Juno ate it cold, straight from the tub. Then she washed and dried the Tupperware, putting it into the drawer with its fellows.
Outside it was raining; the grass was a spunky neon. The blue-gray clouds drooped like bellies over Seattle. Despite the clouds, there were spears of light breaking through, hitting the lawn and sidewalks and street beyond with the type of light you’d see in a Thomas Kinkade painting. Two memories surfaced uncomfortably in her mind. She looked away despite the beauty of the scene in front of her; in fact, because of the beauty of it. Juno the therapist had loved grass, a rarity in New Mexico. It had become a fascination in Washington to Juno the newly homeless. There was always grass, deep-watered, green and soft. When she slept in the park, she’d kept Kregger’s Swiss Army knife by her side, though the thought of trying to stab someone with the tiny blade held in her swollen, arthritic hands was laughable. It made her feel better to have it there, nevertheless. She hadn’t known where else to go, and there were always people chasing you away. The park had been the only welcoming place for Juno, so she stayed through summer and into fall. But Washington changed come fall, the never-ending drizzle coating the ground she slept on and leaving the grass wet. She remembered the damp seeping through her clothes night after night as she tried to get warm. She was never dry for those months and she’d become deathly ill, her fever spiking so high she’d been delirious. Some good Samaritan—a jogger who’d seen her in the same spot the day before—had called the ambulance. After that, she’d had the blue tent for a while.
Juno knew about Skinner and his rats, had studied his methods in school, so her aversion to wet grass was just a fact. It was how humans worked, picking up pieces of their experiences and choosing to fall either to the pain or triumph. If anything, Juno was just sad it had to be that way, that she associated terrible things with something she once loved. She suddenly felt hot all over as she had that day, before she slipped into that fevered sleep. The last thing she’d seen before her eyes had sealed shut was a blade of grass, so lush and bright she’d focused on it with all her might, her teeth clacking together. There were a hundred drops of the finest rain clinging to that one blade of grass. It was sharp around the edges, like the blades of her old carving knife. Juno had looked closer and seen that there were tiny writhing hairs, reaching their little arms toward her grotesquely. You’re not really seeing what you’re seeing, she’d thought. You’re sick, not stupid. And then she’d blinked a few times, her vision clearing. She’d had to remind herself to see things from the right perspective. It was just too much thought about grass, and when Juno woke up in the hospital, she found she hated it, simple as that. There was no grass in the crawl space, though, just dirt, dirt, dirt.