With a name like Edna, I thought she’d be fat. I was disappointed when she wasn’t. Her cheeks were sunken-in and she had these pointy racehorse limbs. She reminded me of my mother, her face pinched up like a bird’s, under the covers in the afternoons flanked by her armies of things. But while my mother surrounded herself with candles from Bath and Body Works and cow-themed kitchen ornaments, Edna hoarded anything she could.

I came to her bedroom in the mornings with her tea and cream on a tray. I had ploughed a path from the kitchen to her bedroom with a snow-shovel, one that forked and weaved like a vein through the fleshy mounds of trash. Her bedroom was the worst in the house, teeming with stacks of month-old pizza boxes and Tupperware lids and empty juice cartons. And God, the smell. It reeked of bile and rot and wretchedness. I had to breathe through my mouth, hopping over ever-growing towers of chip bags and old-lady panties and relinquished 7-Up bottles.

She didn’t seem to like my company whenever I was around, but I stayed because I was supposed to. She was always silent when I brought in the tray, sitting straight like a sphinx against her headboard, watching over her colonies of German cockroaches as they skittered across the bedspread. I’d given up on the smiling, since she never smiled back. Sometimes she grunted in a sort of endearing attempt to acknowledge that I was there. Usually she didn’t. I called her son Alan one night after I was sure she’d gone to sleep, chewing a hangnail on my thumb until it bled.

“She’s still not talking to me.”

“Is she taking her meds?”

“Yeah. Well, like, I think. I leave them on the tray in the morning and they’re gone when I come back for it.”

“And how’s the place look?”

I paused. “Better.”

“Bullshit.”

 

The first time she really spoke to me was when I brushed her hair. We sat on the bed together, her neck bent like a coat-hanger while she watched Wheel of Fortune on the television set. I kept my pant legs tucked into my socks so nothing could crawl inside. She made this throaty noise that sounded more like a turkey’s panicked garble than any word in the English language. I thought maybe I’d pulled too hard on a tangle, but she didn’t flinch, so I kept going. She was quiet for a while, and then she spoke again.

“Stop cleaning up. Please. I don’t like it how you do it. I would do it if I wanted it.”

Her voice was alarmingly clear. She might have been a singer before giving it all up to stockpile used plastic cutlery and half-melted Snickers bars.

“They’re – it’s getting worse. Really, Edna. It’s so bad. There’s, like, hundreds of them.”

“I know.”

“Like, when I turn on the light in the bathroom sometimes, it’s horrible.”

She craned her neck to look back at me with her yellow chicken eyes. “I know.”

Of course she knew. She rarely left her bedroom, watching the roaches parade around in fleets like she was an army general. They liked warm and they liked dark. Edna’s bedroom was both, constantly. And they certainly had no shortage of food, living there. She never bothered with throwing out her leftovers or washing up her dishes, and she wouldn’t let me wash them for her. She would spiral into little furies whenever I came in with the rubber-gloves and garbage bags. In the afternoons while she napped, I sat in the hallway with my back to the wall, watching them crawl in and out of the crack underneath her bedroom door.

I tried killing them at first. They freaked me out, so I could hardly do it with a Kleenex. The particularly robust ones would sometimes pop when you squeezed them, like pomegranate seeds. Once the temperatures dropped outside, they were multiplying endlessly. They had built homes inside the piles, little metropolises, colonies of them traipsing spastically through the filth. I went from room to room with the vacuum cleaner, dumping out the filter and flushing them down the toilet. I only stopped because I could hear her crying.

 

On a Tuesday morning, I stand in her kitchen with my winter boots on. I have all the windows open, waiting for the kettle to boil, trying not to look down. It’s always worse if you know they’re there. I bring her the tea and the cream on the tray. Today, she is waiting for me in her bed, wrapped in her duvet, birdlike as ever. Today, she speaks to me.

“Did Alan call? Last night? I heard you talking. Was it Alan?”

“No. Why?”

“Because you were talking. I heard you. I thought it might have been Alan. Did he want to talk to me?”

“No, that wasn’t Alan, it was my mother. Sorry, did I wake you up?” I sit at the end of her bed, gnawing on my thumb, stupid. I watch as a fat one dances along the hem of her nightgown, another lazily poking its antennae out of her sleeve.

“Your mother.”

My mother. She and Edna wore that same pinched expression, had the same sinewy blue hands. But my mother could never live like this. She is a woman of dignity and importance, who bakes her own shortbread cookies and never brings the ones in the tin to Christmas dinner. Hazy summer afternoons in our living room, she would whack mayflies so hard with the fly-swatter that they stained the walls like grape jelly. If she saw a mouse in the backyard, she would demand my father call the Orkin man as a “precautionary measure”.

“Yes. Her name is Linda.”

“Linda. Do you visit? Do you go and see her?”

“When I can, yeah. I do.”

Edna nods. She looks at me as if something I said has poked at something dormant inside, plucked some old feeling like an out-of-tune guitar string. And I understand.