The Clear-Out (3 page)

One morning, as Duncan made his coffee, he noticed that the shoes were all messed up.

“Must have forgotten to do that last night,” he said to the cat. He was sure he had lined up the shoes. He always did. But each day was so much like the last. He could have forgotten.

He made sure he tidied the shoes that night.

The next morning, they were messed up again.

“Maybe I’m sleepwalking,” he said.

When the same thing happened again the next night, he decided he was just going crazy.

“If that’s as crazy as I get, I can live with it,” he said.

One morning when he got up, all the dining room chairs had been upset.

He blamed the cat.

“Do it again and I’ll drop you at the Humane Society,” he said to Mr. Snuffles. Mr. Snuffles just yawned and turned his back. The chairs kept getting knocked over in the night.

The cat acted strangely, too.

Mr. Snuffles started to sit for hours on the carpet by Tess’s La-Z-Boy, purring. Just like he did when Tess used to sit in that chair and read. At night, he ran around the house, jumping and waving his paws in the air. Tess used to knit little mice and stuff them with catnip. She tied them to long strings, and she’d play mousie with him all over the house. Now the cat seemed to be playing with a mousie that only he could see.

The cat’s game was funny to watch. But it was less funny when Mr. Snuffles bounded across Duncan’s bed in the middle of the night.

Duncan found closet doors open that he knew he had closed. The TV would turn itself off in the middle of a show. The TV remote would be lost for days, then suddenly show up in the fridge next to the prune juice.

One Sunday, Duncan hung back after church to be the last to shake the minister’s hand. He needed advice.

“Grief takes many forms,” Reverend Jones said. “You have had a terrible loss. Give yourself time to get used to it. Get out into the community. Be with people. Many people hold you in high regard. Give them the gift of letting them support you.”

Duncan knew that was a standard speech because not many people held him in high regard. Why would they? He had never done anything for them. He had never really done anything for anybody. He played in charity golf games, but he did it for the golf, not for the charity.

He learned to live with the strange events. Every morning he re-tidied the shoes by the door and turned the dining room chairs right side up. At night, he closed his bedroom door so the cat couldn’t play with invisible mousies on top of him.

He managed everything else in his life, the cooking, the cleaning, the loneliness. He could manage these strange events, too.

And then one day Duncan walked into the kitchen and stopped managing.

There were words on the chalkboard.

Words he knew he had not put there.

He stood in icy shock and read them.

What happens?

The words were written in his wife’s handwriting.

“So I’m not crazy.”

“You are sad,” the Reverend Jones said. “Grief takes time. People get on with their days and take care of business, and they think their grief is all over. But it isn’t. It takes time.”

Duncan looked down at his hands. He was sitting across from the minister in his office at the church.

“Have you ever . . . lost someone?” he asked.

“We have all had losses in our lives,” the minister replied. “I have talked with many in our church who have lost someone in their family. Grief is a powerful feeling. People often think they see their loved one in a shopping mall or on the street. Or they see the much loved face in the window of a moving bus. The person always seems just out of reach.”

“Has anyone at our church seen his dead wife’s handwriting on the wall?”

The minister smiled. “No. That’s a new one. But let’s look at what was written. ‘What happens?’ Is that the sort of message likely to come from the other side? You should look into this very carefully. I think you’ll find that you wrote those words yourself. Maybe you did it in your sleep. Maybe you’re wondering what happens next with your life.”

“So what should I do?”

“Pray. Rest. Go out for walks. Eat well. Take up something new. Give your mind something different to focus on. And give yourself time.”

As he drove away from the church, Duncan thought maybe he needed another seven-day drunk.

The skateboarders were at it again when he drove into his street. They blasted their loud, awful music as they skated around. Instead of yelling at them, Duncan just sat and watched them, zooming round and round in front of his driveway.

“Maybe skateboarding is the new thing I should take up,” he said to himself.

Then he leaned on the car horn until the skateboarders got the message. They took off, wind blowing their hair, not a care in the world.

“Rotten kids,” Duncan muttered. He drove into his garage and went into his house.

He rubbed out the words on the chalkboard and turned on the TV.

When he went back into the kitchen to make himself a sandwich, the words were back.

The same words.

The same handwriting.

What happens?

“Enough with this nonsense!” Duncan shouted.

He grabbed the chalkboard and tore it from the wall. He stomped out of the kitchen and through the back door. He dumped the chalkboard into the trash can and clamped the lid on the can. Then he took the can out to the curb.

That night, he slept with his bedroom door open. The cat left him alone. The closet doors stayed shut. At dawn, he heard the garbage truck coming around his circle. His trash can banged against the truck, and the truck took away the chalkboard.

Duncan slept in until eight. He stretched in his bed, fully rested, then got up and padded to the
kitchen in his bare feet and pajamas. Why not have coffee
before
getting dressed? He wouldn’t make a habit of it, but why not shake his life up a bit? After all, he was retired. He had nowhere to go and no one to ask him why he was still in his pajamas. He filled the kettle, then turned to get the jar of instant coffee out of the cupboard.

The chalkboard was back on the wall.

In the same spot.

With the same words.

In the same handwriting.

What happens?

And that’s when Duncan got really scared.

Duncan was almost afraid to get close to the chalkboard, but he had to get it out of the house.

With a pounding heart and a dry mouth, he took the chalkboard down from the wall—again. Scooping up his keys, he put the chalkboard in the passenger seat of his car. He got in behind the wheel and started driving.

The Good Shepherd Thrift Store was not open yet. Duncan didn’t care. He sat in his car in his pajamas, his feet still bare, staring at the chalkboard.

As soon as he spotted Kevin coming around the corner in his wheelchair, Duncan jumped out of the car. He had the chalkboard in his hand.

“Get rid of this,” he ordered.

Kevin looked him up and down.

“What happened to you?” he asked.

“I need you to get rid of this for me.”

“It says, ‘What happens?’ ” Kevin said.

“I know what it says. I need you to get rid of it.”

Kevin took the shop keys out of his shirt pocket. “Let’s go inside. I think we could both use some coffee.” He locked the door behind them so they would not be bothered by customers.

Kevin had the same brand of instant coffee in the back of the shop that Duncan had at home. The two men waited for the water to boil. Duncan sat down on a box. Kevin held out his hand for the chalkboard.

“By ‘get rid of it,’ I take it that you don’t want me to just sell it in the shop.”

“I need it gone.”

Kevin handed Duncan a cup of coffee. “What’s going on?”

Duncan leaned up against a stack of boxes. “When you lost your . . . husband . . . did you . . . did anything strange happen?”

“Strange? What do you mean by strange?”

“Do I have to spell it out?”

“Yes! You have to spell it out. I can’t guess what’s in your head. You are standing here in your PJs and bare feet. I don’t think you are crazy, but I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me. Why do you need me to get rid of this chalkboard?”

“Because it’s haunted!” Duncan yelled. “It’s haunted by my dead wife! She’s in the whole house, opening doors, playing with the cat, messing up the shoes. I can’t get rid of my whole house. But I can at least get rid of this chalkboard and this horrible message.”

Kevin raised his hand and wiped the words off the board.

“Oh, very good,” Duncan said. “I never would have thought of that. I’m cold,” he suddenly realized.

“There are clean clothes on that rack over there,” Kevin said. “Help yourself.”

Duncan wrapped himself in a grey robe and sat down on his box again.

“My minister says it takes time, that all I’m experiencing is part of grief. I can accept that. That makes sense. But this does not make sense. I wipe out the message and it appears again. I throw away the board and it’s back again in the morning. Maybe I
am
just sleepwalking. I don’t have any friends I can ask. I’m nearly seventy years old, and I have no friends I can have a serious conversation with. You
are the only one who can give me real answers. Did this happen to you when your husband died?”

Kevin took a sip of coffee. Then he put the cup down and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.

“Not right away,” he said. “I was in the hospital for a while. Then I had to have help at home while I learned how to live in a wheelchair. But at last all the home-care workers and friends and family went back to their own lives. I was alone. That’s when the strange things started.”

Kevin rubbed his hands together.

“I thought I was over Dan’s death,” he said. “I was managing okay. Life was different, but I was doing all right. And then things started happening. I’d smell Dan’s aftershave. The knives, forks, and spoons would get messed up in the cutlery drawer. I like everything in its place. Dan could never see the point in that. When I’d go to bed, all the cutlery would be in its proper place. But in the morning, the knives, forks, and spoons would be all mixed together.”

“You think he was there?”

“He was there for sure. You know what it’s like when you come into your house and it’s empty? Or
when you come in, and it’s quiet, but you can tell someone is there? Dan was there.”

They drank their coffee in silence for a moment.

“What does ‘What happens?’ mean?” Kevin asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Did you get any messages from Dan?”

“The number 75,” Kevin said. “It kept appearing. Written in the dust on the telephone table. On the mirror when I got out of the shower. All kinds of places.”

“What did it mean?”

“Turns out, Dan had life insurance. Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth. He just hadn’t got around to telling me while he was alive.”

“Seven hundred and fifty thousand. Wow. That’s life-changing money.”

“And I’ve changed my life.”

“How did you figure it out?” Duncan asked.

“I took a leap of faith.”

Duncan could get no more information out of him. They heard someone banging on the shop door.

“Leave me your phone number, Duncan,” Kevin said. “I’ll set something up.”

“What?”

“Leap of faith, my friend. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

The parking lot was busy with shoppers and cars when Duncan left the thrift store. As he walked to his car, he kept his eyes straight ahead. If people were staring at him in his pajamas, he didn’t want to know.

Two days after Duncan gave Kevin the chalkboard, Kevin asked Duncan to come to the thrift shop. There, in the shop’s storage room, stood the leader of the skateboard boys.

The kid wiped his nose on his shirt sleeve. He tossed his long hair off his face, and it flopped right back down into his eyes again.

“You have got to be kidding,” Duncan said.

“That was my reaction, too,” Kevin said. “Wait until you hear him.”

“I’ve heard him,” Duncan said. “I’ve heard his loud music and his rude tone. Teenagers today don’t care about anybody but themselves. I’m getting out of here.”

“She’s trying to ask you something, bro,” the skateboarder said. “And she’s getting a little annoyed with you.”

“Don’t you speak of her!” Duncan spun on the boy, pointing his finger right under the boy’s nose. “She was worth more than you and your lazy friends put together will ever be worth.”

“Then maybe you should have treated her better when she was alive, bro.”

“I’m not your bro. And I’m leaving.”

“Peace out, then,” the kid said.

Duncan stomped out of the thrift store. His car tires squealed as he sped out of the parking lot.

“I don’t have to put up with this,” he muttered. “I can sell the house. Why not? It’s mine. I’ll sell it, take the money, and go someplace warm and play golf all year. I’m single now. Time to start acting single!”

He’d go visit a real estate agent that very morning.

The kid on the skateboard zoomed by him, darting in and out of traffic. He looked as if he was flying.

“I hope you get run over!” Duncan yelled. “I hope you get smashed up! Why should
you
get to live, when better people than you have to die?”

Duncan didn’t know why he had waited so long to leave town. Really, the time had come.

Was his passport up to date? He’d need to make a list of things to do. How should he sell his furniture? Maybe the real estate agent would know someone who could come in and deal with it all.

Duncan thought for a moment about asking his son for help, but he decided against it. Bobby would have strong feelings about selling the family home. And Duncan didn’t want to know about them.

He didn’t want to know, and he didn’t want to care. All he wanted was to play golf. Play golf, lie on some beach, and drink himself silly for the rest of his life.

“It’s
my
life,” he muttered. “I can finally do with it what
I
want to do.”