Page 32 of The Intruder

BEFORE

ELLA

I’m on my way to my room when I notice the smell.

I just got home from school, and my mother will be home within the hour.

She won’t leave me alone for the whole evening here, but she doesn’t think I can do that much damage in less than an hour.

I have managed, on occasion, to fill up a garbage bag worth of stuff and dump it down the block where she can’t get it back.

But even that is a stretch—I have to work quickly.

I used to try to sneak garbage out in my backpack and throw it away at school, but some kid saw me doing it and told everyone, and now I won’t risk it.

I wasn’t planning to take out any garbage tonight though. I have homework to do. Everything takes twice as long when I’m trying to focus while working on my lumpy bed.

But it’s even harder to focus now because of the smell.

I have been noticing it a little bit the last few weeks.

I mean, I’m going to be honest—my whole house smells bad.

The cigarette smell is the predominant one downstairs, but anywhere you go in my house, there’s an unpleasant odor.

It’s musty and a little sour. That’s why I’m so paranoid about people at school thinking that I smell, although Anton now swears he made it up and that he thinks I smell good.

Anyway, even though I noticed it the last few weeks, it’s worse today. Like, much worse. It’s really bad in the hallway as I’m walking to the bathroom, but I can even smell it in my room. It’s at the point where I’m breathing through my mouth to stop from gagging.

Finally, I give up studying to investigate.

The smell is strongest in the hallway and seems weaker when I go into the bathroom, so I know it’s not coming from my room or the bathroom. And although there are a lot of papers stacked in the hallway, I don’t see anything that looks like it could smell. That only leaves one other place:

My mother’s bedroom.

I am completely forbidden from going into her bedroom, but there’s no lock on the door, and the smell is driving me nuts. I will leave the door open, and if I hear my mother entering the house, I will hightail it.

As slowly as I can, like I think somebody is hiding inside, I crack open the door to my mother’s bedroom.

Of all the rooms in this house, my mother’s bedroom is the worst one.

Her bed is just a double mattress on the floor, and half of it is covered in papers and cardboard.

She is literally sharing her bed with junk.

She also has an open card table covered in papers and, like, half a dozen laundry hampers scattered around the room, filled with a combination of clothes and more junk.

If it wasn’t so disgusting, it would be horribly sad.

Also, the bad smell is definitely coming from this room. No doubt.

Well, at least the fact that her bed is just a mattress on the floor means it can’t be coming from underneath the bed.

I creep inside the room, keeping my fingers and toes crossed that my mother won’t come home.

I don’t know how she has been sleeping in this room.

The smell is so bad, I have to breathe through my mouth.

And even so, I still feel like I can smell it.

It’s this awful, decayed smell. I really do think there’s a chance there could be a dead body in here.

Oh my God. What if my father has been dead all along and his body is rotting somewhere in this room?

No, that’s not too likely. I would have noticed it before now.

I look through the laundry basket, and I don’t see anything that’s a likely culprit.

I suspect the smell is coming from the closet, but I have been told not to go in there, under penalty of death.

But right now, I actually feel like the smell might kill me.

So I have to enter the closet. It’s self-defense.

I try not to breathe as I pull open the closet door.

Like the rest of the house, my mother’s closet is packed to the brim with clothing.

It’s hung up on hangers, stuffed in so tightly that I don’t even know how she can see what’s in there or pick stuff out to wear.

Mostly she wears her uniform anyway. The bottom of the closet contains more clothes and a bunch of shoes. And one other thing.

I remember back in October, my mom was bragging about how the supermarket had this great deal on pumpkins.

So she brought home two of them, talking about how we were going to carve them together.

Well, I didn’t really have any interest in that because I’m not five, and she lost interest because she doesn’t seem to like me very much.

I never really thought about the pumpkins or where they went.

Until now.

It’s been at least five months since my mom brought them home. Five months of two pumpkins rotting at the bottom of her closet. What is wrong with her? How do you allow pumpkins to rot in your closet for months? How is it possible she didn’t notice it or care? Because the smell is so bad that…

I clamp a hand over my mouth. I can’t take it anymore. I run as fast as I can to the bathroom, and then I throw up in the toilet. That was one of the worst things I’ve ever smelled in my whole life.

And now I have to clean it up. Because if I don’t, my mother definitely won’t, and it will only get worse.

Also, I have to do it quickly. She won’t want me messing around in her closet.

I mean, she will recognize the pumpkin needs to be cleaned up, but she will feel a need to do it some specific way, and she won’t have time for it right now, so she’ll put it off, and the smell will never go away.

I’ve got to get rid of these pumpkins right now before she can turn it into a whole thing.

She might not realize they’re gone, but if she sees me getting rid of them, she’ll definitely freak out.

I push away another wave of nausea as I walk downstairs to get some garbage bags.

I also find a box of rubber gloves under the kitchen sink, and for once, I’m glad my mom has literally everything you could possibly need.

Well, I would really like a mask to cover my face, but I don’t see anything like that.

I grab two garbage bags and a pair of gloves, and then I race back upstairs to my mother’s bedroom.

I shovel the rotting pumpkins into the first garbage bag. It’s basically all liquid at this point, or at least there’s nothing solid. I am trying my best to suppress my gag reflex, but it’s really hard. The smell is so overwhelmingly awful, and I can’t get it out of my nose. I can almost taste it.

Once I’ve scooped the orange and black goo into the garbage, swearing the whole time, I contemplate what to do with the rest of the closet.

Some of my mother’s clothing is definitely ruined, but I’m scared to throw it out.

The worst damage though is to a bunch of papers that were under the pumpkins.

Most of them are wet and sticky with pumpkin juice, the ink blurred or illegible.

I check my watch. My mother isn’t supposed to be home for at least half an hour.

I’m throwing these papers out. There’s no possible use she could have for them, because they are all destroyed.

I shove as many pages as I possibly can into the garbage bag.

If my mother were here, she would want to check every single sheet, and it would take hours or even days, but they are all wrecked.

There’s no point in even looking. Finally, after I have gotten rid of most of the papers, I come across a manila envelope.

The outside of the envelope is slightly soggy, but I can still make out the word written on it in black ink:

ELLA

It’s an envelope with my name on it. I’ve never seen this before, and it’s the first thing I’ve come across in this closet that looks like it might be worth saving. Of course, I can’t know that unless I check what’s inside.

I look at my watch again. Fifteen minutes.

I ease open the clasp on the envelope, knowing I will have to put it back exactly as I found it. There are a few papers inside, which seem to be relatively untouched by the pumpkin juices. I don’t know what the documents are, but I recognize the one right on top.

It’s my birth certificate. With my father’s name on it.