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mean. Have you been around anybody with dementia?” Susan doesn’t wait for me to answer. “It was heartbreaking. Just heartbreaking. She was obsessed with the idea that someone was spying on her. She kept notebooks to document everything that happened. I’d leave her alone here to run to the grocery store, and by the time I got back she would have called the police to report an intruder. It didn’t matter how many times they searched the house; at first she thought they weren’t taking her seriously—which they weren’t, to be honest, not after the first twenty times—and then she started thinking we were all in cahoots to drive her crazy. It was very sad, and it never gets better with someone that age; it only gets worse.
    â€œShe’d get up in the middle of the night and barricade her bedroom door shut because she was afraid someone would sneak in—the intruder, I guess—and hurt her. Then she’d wake up in the morning and wouldn’t be able to open her door. I don’t know how someone her age had the strength to move all that stuff to begin with. We tried taking her door off its hinges, and it only made her furious. The names she called me … Eventually we had to move her down here for her own safety, but she couldn’t bear to be apart from all her …
stuff
. She was a pioneer when it came to hoarding. That’s what it’s called when someone keeps everything—did youknow there’s a name for it? It’s an actual mental disease. I didn’t know that, not until I saw a
Phil Donahue Show
episode about it, and then I thought,
Oh, my goodness, that’s Bitty to a T
. For pretty much all her adult life, she had piles and piles of junk stashed in every corner of her house. You should have seen it. This is
nothing
compared to what it used to be like. Oh, it was absolutely insane. The first time Mike took me over to meet her—I was only seventeen—he was so embarrassed that he cried afterward.” She pauses. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you that. Don’t tell Mike you know about it, okay?” Susan plops a box of heavy-duty black garbage bags into my arms. “Anyway, you don’t need to worry about pitching anything valuable, because I’m pretty sure it’s all junk. Go ahead and throw everything away. Make it look like she was never even here.”
    It has been a full two weeks since my family’s return, and I have yet to exchange a word with Remy. He’s constantly coming and going with one friend or another from the same group of four or five teenage boys. If not for the different cars they drive, I don’t think I would have realized they’re four separate individuals. Through my window, they look like out-of-focus, shaggy-haired extras from the background of a Nirvana video. There are, however, small distinctions among them: Blue Minivan’s hair is the longest, his heavy blond waves stopping just past his shoulders. His car has a JUST SAY NO bumper sticker on its back window. I can always hear Silver Pickup before I see him. He likes to blast his music—he’s always playing something from the last Beastie Boysalbum—with his windows down. He always leans on the horn to let Remy know he’s outside, instead of getting out and ringing the doorbell. Honda Civic and his brother (I think), who rides shotgun, are both easily forty pounds heavier than the rest of the group. Their bumper sticker is an anti-Nazi one, a swastika in a circle with a line drawn through it. It seems odd to have a sticker proclaiming something that most people would assume is a given in any decent human being. Why the need to announce it? You might as well have one that says I DISLIKE PAIN or KITTENS ARE CUTE.
    Most nights after Remy has been out with friends all day, his girlfriend comes over and stays until after I’m asleep, although her car is always gone by the next morning. She drives