American Salvage

THE TRESPASSER

 The mother jiggles her key in the ancient lock, nudges open the heavy oak door with her shoulder, and then freezes on the threshold . The father steps around her, enters the kitchen of the family cottage—last summer he and his daughter painted these walls sunshine yellow—and drops one of his two bags of groceries onto the linoleum.The thirteen-year-old daughter’s mouth glitters with braces. She squeezes her gym bag to her chest and says, “Holy crap.” The stove is burned black, the ceiling tiles above it are scorched, and the adjacent side of the refrigerator is sooted. Bedsheets hang over the windows, one of which has been shattered, the broken glass removed.A faint ammonia smell lingers,and the kitchen garbage can is full of empty Sudafed packages and coffee filters and crumpled tinfoil. A curly-haired blonde departs unseen through the back door, descends the stairs, and heads for the river. A few days ago, she was one of four intruders in the cottage cooking methamphetamine, but when the three men left last Sunday to go home and get a night’s rest before work, the girl hid away in a closet in the daughter ’s room. The men had not realized that the skinny girl with the ravaged face was only sixteen, and they did not know that she had snagged enough meth during cooking to keep herself going,shooting up, for more than a week. The family discovers that objects in every room of the cottage have been moved. On the kitchen counter, a configuration of condiment bottles—horseradish sauce balanced atop mustard, The Trespasser stacked atop mayonnaise, with two squeeze bottles of ketchup alongside—is encircled by pastel birthday candles arranged wick to end. Drawers are empty, their contents arranged as shrines on tables and dresser tops and in corners. In the bathroom, medicines and ointments and bottles of pills have been lined up on the sink. Tubes of lip balm cluster around an old glass bottle of Pepto-Bismol upon a green-and-white guest towel draped over the toilet tank. In the center of the master bed sits an ancient nest of twigs containing pale blue robins’ eggs (collected and blown by a greatgrandmother ), which forms a nativity scene with a pair of wooden dolls. A dozen old-fashioned clothespins are laid out side-by-side across the foot of the bed like children at a reunion lining up for the group photo. Figurines and portraits long invisible to the family on the hallway bookshelf in their old juxtapositions have suddenly reappeared : the rocks painted to look like trolls mingle with the miniature bronze pigs, goats, and dinosaurs. These creatures now gaze upon a framed photo of the daughter with her gymnastics trophy. (The daughter switched from gymnastics to swimming two years ago when she shot up four inches in height, right after this portrait was taken.) All the objects and framed pictures have been polished with soft cloths, which the trespasser then deposited in the hallway hamper. Piled on top of the hamper are a dozen pretty boxes of facial tissue in gray, blue, and yellow, each box opened, with a few tissues extracted. The trespasser pretended to be visiting her own family’s cottage, pretended that the bones in the faces in the photographs were her inherited bones and that she inhabited this place as naturally as the furniture and relics. Although she was alone during the week, the trespasser rearranged the living room so the old leather and wicker chairs are now turned toward each other, forming a conversation nook instead of facing the TV. She vacuumed the living room and american salvage  then changed the bag and vacuumed again, sucking up all the cobwebs and even the ash from the fireplace. At first there seem to be a few objects missing from the daughter ’s room, but the daughter discovers them in her closet, where the trespasser slept five nights in a nest created from all the pillows in the house. She curled there with two stuffed ponies and a unicorn, the pink flannel pajamas that say Daddy’s Girl, and the secret purple spiral notebook that is identical to the one the daughter keeps in the city. The trespasser read and reread the notebook in which the daughter has detailed frustration about a poor swim performance and about boys...