Burglars

When mom died, she left us the house on Knob Street. It was the last place she lived and the last place any of us had lived with her. I moved out last, but I’m not the youngest. I think my sisters hate me for that, like they feel as though I haven’t spent long enough living in the real world to have earned all of mom’s stuff, and her house, and the shriveling garden in the backyard, which was where she had died.

I was standing over the dried-up flower bed, looking at the imprint of my mother’s body in the depressed mulch. When she fell, she had snapped some of the withering leaves off of her dying petunias, bent the stalk shooting out of a still-green hosta, its little purple flowers flattened in the dirt. No one had bothered making the garden look as if an old woman hadn’t died in it. The shape of her was surrounded by a few deep footprints from the EMTs that had attempted and failed to resuscitate her. Her heart, fluttering incorrectly for the last time, skipping too many beats and then pattering out the remaining, useless electrical activity that didn’t count towards being alive.

Her garden had looked shitty long before she had collapsed into it. Once her heart had stopped working properly, she seemed to have lost her talent. 

My sister came out of the house, onto the back porch, already lighting a cigarette. Jessica was the second-oldest, a real estate agent now, and married to a bank teller. Together they vertically integrated the ongoing housing crisis, and along the way produced two horrible children. I think she knew that, and I think she knew that it had to have been her fault, because there was no one else who really taught them how to be people. Her husband didn’t talk much. He liked to drink beer and sit quietly most of the time. I admired him for that. 

“You been in the attic?” she asked me. She handed me a cigarette.

“Not today,” I said. I lit the cigarette, trying to remember the last time I’d been up there. If, on any of my rare visits over the past couple of years, I had had a reason to pull down the ladder and climb up into the cobwebs. “Is it bad?”

“She still has our bikes. And a whole lot of other shit.”

“Maybe you can give them to the kids.”

“They’re all rusty now.”

“They were rusty back then, too. I think she got them at a yard sale. One day she came home with just…bikes. In the back of the car, remember? No price tags or a bow or anything. Went out for milk and eggs or whatever, and came back with old bikes.”

“Like I said. I’m not giving them to my kids.”

Jessica liked to pretend she had more money than she did. She was a decent real estate agent, but she had signed on at the tail end of the era when people could really buy houses that were big enough and had pools. Now she mostly shows raised ranches. Her husband has worked at the Credit Union for ten years, so he’s gotten steady raises. But he still works at a bank. I don’t know how they live like they do, having someone else come over and clean their kitchen and their bathrooms, going on vacation a few times a year. 

I think Jessica was sad. I think we all were, because that’s how you feel when your mom dies. The only one who had cried, that I’d seen, was Carole, the oldest and therefore the one with the most mom-hours. She was still inside, going through the overflowing drawers of mom’s roll top desk, sorting it all into two piles: junk and maybe important. We all knew that Carole probably wasn’t the best judge of what might be important, but no one else really wanted that job, and mom was dead, so there wasn’t anything important anymore except for her will.

We’d all read it over and over to make sure we got it right, as if we didn’t want it to say what it said. That the house on Knob Street was ours, all of ours, which meant we would have to all agree on what to do with it. I wondered what kind of lawyer she’d had that wrote it up for her. Maybe one that hated their kids and thus assumed that our mother would like to torture us from beyond the grave.

Or maybe she was just old and in a hurry, knowing that her heartbeats were so irregular and rapid that she was swiftly running out of them. She had panicked, looked at the largest thing she owned, and decided that was what she would leave us.

We smoked in silence, Jessica resting her elbows on the porch railing, looking down at the shape of our mother.

The funeral had already passed. It was hard, but not because she was dead. It was hard because her life insurance policy still listed dad as the beneficiary, but there was no dad anymore. Until the lawyers could figure that out, we were left paying for her arrangements out of pocket. It had been hard because we had spent all that money for a twenty-minute service and a coffin that didn’t shine like the model from the showroom, spent all that money for Carole to get up behind the podium and blubber through a eulogy I was certain she’d pulled from a template on the internet. All that money for a square headstone on which we weren’t sure what to etch except for her name and some dates. We were not a family of beloveds or devoteds

Carole emerged from the house with a stack of mail.

“Important or junk?” Jessica asked. Carole descended the steps of the back porch, lifted the lid of the recycling bin, and dumped all of the envelopes into it.

“Word of advice,” Carole said, waving a hand in front of her face. She needed us to know that she hated that we smoked. “If you get a jury duty summons, ignore it. Apparently you don’t even get in trouble. She had six of them in her desk, and not once did she say anything about going to no damn jury selection.”

“Mom would be a shitty juror,” I said. 

“Would have been,” Jessica said.

“She’s got too many opinions.”

“She had them.”

“‘Preconceived notions’ is maybe a better phrase,” Carole said, and that was that.


I went to the attic to look at the bikes and see if there was anything else, something that might wring from me a reason to cry, the impulse to cry, the familiarity of crying. I couldn’t really remember what it felt like. 

It was an attic like all attics before it: dark as if on purpose, as if in opposition to its closeness to the sky. Every corner festooned with dust and webbing, abandoned spider-houses still clinging to the unfinished wood. Underneath the single window stood the bikes, leaning into one another in a row from smallest to largest. Amber’s bike was little and blue and still had the training wheels on it. She never got very far in the process. Mine, with its creaking handlebar gear-shifter and the cartoonish flames I’d attempted to paint on it, over the rust spots I’d been desperate to disguise. 

The thing about the bikes is that we weren’t really very poor. Our mother could have bought them new, but that would have meant passing up the opportunity presented to her by the yard sale she happened to drive by. It would have felt like a waste, to have seen the bikes, counted them and noted how the number matched how many children she had, and then to not pay ten dollars to bring that serendipity home with her, in the back of the station wagon. It probably would have haunted her for the rest of her life, knowing that someone else might have them. Or worse, that the four bikes might all have gone to separate homes. 

My mother was of the belief, stated or not, that objects were capable of missing us. That, when we threw them away, they were forced to question their worth and wonder what they’d done to not be needed anymore. I remember her crying over Amber’s car seat, which had been my car seat. She was done having children, and her last one was big enough not to need it. 

The ladder creaked behind me. Amber was here.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said.

“Carole’s crying again,” Amber said, climbing the final rung. I told her the story about the car seat and she shook her head. “It wasn’t about the car seat. It was because none of us would be little again.”

“Are you taking psych classes or something? You were too little to remember.”

“I’m not saying I remember, I’m saying it makes more sense than what you said.”

“But it wasn’t the only time,” I said. “Once we had this clock that broke and she had me take it out to the garbage because she didn’t want to hurt its feelings. She said: I hope it knows it was a good clock.”

“Was it?”

“It did what a clock is supposed to do, until it didn’t.”

“Maybe they know what death is, like we do. Objects, I mean. You’re born a clock or something and you know you’ll break eventually, so when you do you don’t want some lady making it about herself.”

“Mom’s dead. We’re making it about us.”

“She won’t know.”

“But the clock would?”

“I’m saying maybe the clock experiences death. It dies. And it would have liked to do so peacefully but mom was crying about it which was probably annoying.”

We unstacked some wooden chairs mom had piled amongst the vaguely labeled boxes. Amber produced from the chaos an old box of Trivial Pursuit, and we played and got everything wrong and no one won.


By the end of the day, the four of us had managed to amass one stack of possibly-important mail and a few stories we all remembered differently. I wanted to suggest setting the rest of her belongings on fire, but Carole was already crying again, holding an unopened bank statement in her hands, sitting on the plush carpet in our mother’s living room. We exchanged the skewed details of our youth, our mother between us becoming a shadow, a shapeshifter. She became whatever the story called for, became the embodiment of whatever insignificant trauma the moment had caused us. Our mother was neglectful of scrapes and bruises. Our mother once walked into the room naked because she forgot it was summer and none of us were in school. It was winter, Jessica said, a snow day actually. But I remembered her being covered in a sheen of sweat. Amber remembered that our mother had cried, and she suggested that it was owed to the realization that her body had become something she never wanted anyone to see. 

“Don’t overthink it,” Carole said. “She was just sensitive. Like a child. When something she didn’t expect would happen, she was so delicate.”

Our mother taught us how to shimmy the packed dirt and roots of a flower out of its plastic casing, and how to place it in the ground in the center of the little hole she’d dug with her trowel. It was marigolds, it was petunias, it was impatiens. 

“Wait, no,” I said. “It was something else. Something shaped like a marigold but not a marigold. Pointier.” I could see the pale pinks and oranges. “She didn’t cry when dad died. Remember?”

“Yes she did,” Carole said.

“No, she didn’t, he’s right,” Jessica said. She lit a cigarette. Carole scowled at her for doing it indoors, but Jessica went on, because the house was hers just as much as it was Carole’s and mine and Amber’s. “She took us out for ice cream after the funeral. She said: you’re half an orphan.”

“Did she really say that?” Amber asked. Jessica nodded, looking down the barrel of her cigarette. Amber looked at me for a different answer, and I shook my head. Our mother said many things, but none of them were that cruel, and certainly not that clever.

She wasn’t a mean woman. Anything she did to make us feel unwanted was largely accidental– the product of having been unprepared (four times, somehow) to bring a child into the world. It was as if she was surprised that, every time she had one, she faced the same challenges that the last one had presented. Baffled by the idea that she had to teach us all how to ride our rusty bikes, that all of us should be born incontinent and thus necessitate her getting her hands dirty. I felt bad for Amber, being the last. She bore the brunt of our mother’s lack of maternal motivation. Mom had already put in her time. Most of Amber’s diapers were changed by Carole, who used to sing a little song when she did it. By that point our mother claimed to have lost the dexterity to clean a baby’s ass properly, what with the onset of arthritis. They never bothered to teach me how to do it, because I was too young and a boy. They predicted for me a life of never needing to learn how to change a diaper or sing to a baby, and they had been right. 

I held out my hand to Jessica and she gave me a cigarette. Amber held out her hand and I gently smacked it away. Carole, in a show of non-smoker solidarity, put her arm around Amber, who tilted awkwardly into the bower of her arm.

Carole used to let us use her perfume when we came home smelling like smoke. I was unsure when her moral awakening had come, when exactly she decided that her behavior was inherently better than everyone else’s. She hadn’t lived a spotless life. Sure, she’d never smoked, but she was twice divorced (from the same woman) and had a habit of chewing her nails.

“Bill’s got the kids?” Carole asked. Jessica nodded once, slowly. 

“They went to the Natural History Museum.”

“So did we, kind of,” I said. Everyone laughed, even Carole, a little. “There’s slightly less taxidermy here.”

“God, can you imagine if that was one of her hobbies?” Jessica asked. “She would have died tripping over a petrified squirrel carcass.” She flourished her hand about the room, indicating the persistent mess, our mother’s inability to clean up after herself in a way that stuck.

We were quiet for a long time. I got up and went to the kitchen, opening every cabinet in the hopes that she had left something behind for us to drink. The glasses were already packed up, so we decided to pass around the cheap bottle of red wine until it was gone. We let Amber have a turn on every second rotation.

I wished mom had been a drunk. I wanted there to be some definable reason that I didn’t feel anything. If she had been a drunk, if she had been a mean drunk or had stepped out on our father or had made us eat soap when we used swear words I could at least have explained why none of us had cried except for Carole. My friends asked: are you okay? And I was. I wasn’t glad she was dead, but I wasn’t sad either. I felt incapable of missing her. I had missed characters from canceled television shows more. I’d missed objects more, like she did. Maybe it was some hereditary developmental disorder, that we should never become attached to the things one is supposed to love. Just car seats, just fictions.

I thought about how I should remember this day, so that I could miss it. The poetry of it: all of us sitting in a circle, our lips purpling. Talking about our mother, the circle working like a backwards seance as we tried to push her spirit farther back into the nothing. One day Carole would die, and we would do the same thing, closing her gap in the circle and talking about how she was the only one who cried at mom’s funeral. 

The bottle was empty and I let Amber have a cigarette. Carole went into the kitchen and rubbed the tip of her forefinger into all the little, impenetrable stains on mom’s countertops. Jessica laid on the floor, holding her phone above her head and texting her husband. Amber smoked clumsily. It was dark out.

I waited twenty minutes for my head to clear before getting into my car, alone. In my back seat were boxes of things that were going to be given the chance to fit into my home. Things I remembered from childhood and things my mother had bought in her later years, all kitschy and absurd, destined to end up as an ironic conversation piece in my small apartment. The house was empty now, except for the bikes in the attic. 

Amber pulled her car up next to mine in the driveway. She rolled down her window and I rolled down mine.

“What do we do with it now?” she asked.

“I think Jessica’s going to try to sell it,” I said. 

Amber nodded, noticeably solemn as if she had hoped I would say that we were all going to move into the house on Knob Street, together again as one happy family, somehow, despite our history to the contrary. 

“Do you want to keep it? Seriously?” I asked.

“I just feel like we should. Mom would think the house will miss us. Like we’re abandoning it.”

“Amber,” I said. “We don’t have to care what mom would think anymore.”

Amber and I had talked in the past, at length, about our lack of a belief in the afterlife. Mine was heavily fermented, having aged over the years into something of which I was absolutely certain. I had spent a longer time than Amber thinking it over, weighing the different viewpoints until my maturity allowed me to be sure. For Amber, I imagined it was some youthful act of nihilism. Maybe she would change her mind. Maybe she was changing her mind right then, as we sat in the driveway with our cars running and our feet pressed on the brakes, ready but not willing to leave. 

“Before Jessica sells it,” Amber said, “she should paint my old room green. It was always sky-blue and it made me feel like I was in heaven but still alive. And she should paint your room a light maroon. And Carole’s room should be pale gray, and Jessica’s should have wallpaper.”

“Okay.”

“And she should rip up the carpet on the stairs.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think they’ll be happy? The next family that lives there?”

“Who knows.”

“I just think it could be a good house, if the right people move in.”

Amber shifted in her seat, pressing down harder on the brake and shifting the car into drive.

“Get home safe,” I said.

Everyone left, driving back to all of their different homes. I stayed in the car for a while with the engine running. It was late, and I wanted to go home, but I found myself unable to leave as if paralyzed by a guilt I couldn’t actually feel. Like I should be sad to leave this place, sad to drive off and spend the next few weeks corresponding with my sisters about what we were going to do with the house on Knob Street. 

I turned off my car and walked back down the driveway, around to the back of the house. The motion-sensing porch light turned on, and I felt like a burglar. But there was nothing left to take, if we had even wanted any of it in the first place. I walked through the beam of light, over to the garden where she had died. I gently kicked my way through the drooping hostas and the growing weeds and stood over the shape of my mother, the outline of her body cast in a stark shadow by the porch light. I got down on my knees first, pressing my hands into the dirt, and then I turned to lay down where she had died. To see what she had seen at the end, if she had time enough to look.

After a while, once I was no longer a threat, the light turned off and I could see the stars. My mother had died in the daylight. I would never know what the sky looked like for her, exactly. I thought that maybe if I could put myself in her shoes I might be able to cry. I thought about how, if she’d laid here for a little while, she must have thought about her children. I wondered if we really do think about important things while we die, or if maybe she had something on the stove or had errands to run later in the day, things that she would no longer be able to take care of. The heart attack just an inconvenience, like traffic or poor weather. Oh darn, she thought. Now I’ll miss the supermarket

I guess we never do the things we are supposed to do. 

 

Color photo of the author, Aaron.

Aaron J. Muller is an author from Hudson Valley, NY, where he lives with his husband and two cats. He holds a B.A. in English from SUNY New Paltz, where he was awarded the 2019 Tomaselli Award for Creative Nonfiction. In mid-January 2023, he will earn an M.F.A. in fiction from Bennington College. Muller’s work has appeared in journals such as Inverted Syntax, Taco Bell Quarterly, & Cold Signal.

Image description: A candid photo of Aaron outside on a sunny day, leaning on a wooden railing. He is looking off to the right, his face in profile. 


This short story first appeared here, at Prose Online.

Aaron J. Muller

Aaron J. Muller is a Pushcart prize-nominated author from the Hudson Valley, NY, where he lives with his husband and their two cats. He holds a BA in English from SUNY New Paltz, where he was awarded the 2019 Tomaselli Award for Creative Nonfiction. As of mid-January 2023, he will have an MFA in Fiction from Bennington College. Muller’s work has appeared in print and online journals such as Inverted Syntax, Taco Bell Quarterly, and Cold Signal.

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