Brenna pulled open a bag and began to dig through the contents of it, showing the cameraman. “She found this stuff at a thrift shop sale.” She pulled out a handful of tiny clothes and began to smooth them. “It doesn’t matter if she needs the stuff or not. She just buys it. These are baby clothes that she got for a few dollars. Boys’ and girls’ clothes. There are no babies here. I’m mom’s only kid, and the neighbors won’t take anything from us because they think we’re dirty.” She pulled out another piece of clothing, a tiny red sweater. “This is for a dog, I think. We don’t have a dog. Can’t have a dog. The city found a few dead animals in the house once and the neighbors called the cops on us. The fire department came in and cleaned out the garage once and found the carcasses of four dead cats. Mom was locked up for animal cruelty and my aunt had to bail her out. But once she was bailed out, she went through the garbage and took all her stuff back again.” Brenna’s small hands smoothed the sweater. “I always wanted a dog, though. I just figured it’s not safe for them here.”
“Indeed,” the narrator said. “One would argue that the Atlee home isn’t safe for humans, either. Yet this is where thirteen-year-old Brenna and her mother live, eat, and sleep every day. But Mrs. Atlee doesn’t see a problem with her lifestyle.”
The camera cut away from Brenna and moved to a woman who clearly had to be Brenna’s mother. She was a slender woman with the same dark waves that he recognized from Brenna, and a thin face with a slightly longer nose. She also had deep lines on her face, as if the world had been cruel to her and aged her hard. She sat in a recliner, wedged amidst junk that was piled high around her, and her arm rested on a dry-cleaning bag still full of clothing. A small table next to her was covered with old magazines, dishes, and what looked like a rotten Halloween jack-o’-lantern.
The reporter handed her a box and squatted beside her in the mess, skirting the rotting pumpkin. “Can you tell me a bit about the objects in this box, Agatha, and what they mean to you?”
“Of course,” the woman said in a reasonable tone. She began to dig through the box of stuff and pulled out the first thing. It was a baby food jar, black gunk stuck to one side. “This would be good for keeping screws and things in it. I just need to clean it out.” She put it aside and pulled out the next item—a coffee mug with a broken handle. “I just need to find the handle for this and it’s good as new.”
“It’s broken,” the reporter protested. “Why not just throw it out?”
“It’s perfectly fine,” Agatha told him, a harder edge creeping into her voice. “It just needs to be fixed.”
The film began a narrative montage as Agatha went through the box and pulled out item after item. A shoe with no match. A broken fan. A stack of waterlogged Post-it notes. A jar candle that had been burned down to the wick. Useless crap, but Agatha Atlee had a use and an explanation for all of them.
Brenna’s sad voice cut in again. “It’s like she can’t see how to throw things away. She doesn’t know how. She sees a use for everything and can’t stand the thought of something being thrown out when there’s still a need for it, somewhere.”
“But the rest of the world views it as junk,” the reporter said. “It’s a viewpoint that has come between Agatha and her relationships many times in her life.”
“I first started collecting,” Agatha was saying to the camera, “when I was nineteen. I ran away from home to be with my boyfriend, got pregnant, and then he left me. I lived on the streets for a while, and then a program helped me get a job and my first house.”
“But by then,” the narrator chimed in, “the damage was already done. Used to living on the streets and having to scrounge for her next meal and the clothes on her back, Agatha found that she had a hard time acclimating to a normal life.”
“I just kept seeing my coworkers throwing away perfectly good things,” she said, almost tearful with heartbreak. “And so when someone would throw something away, I’d sneak in to their garbage and steal it back.”
“This stealing caused Agatha to lose that job. But by then, her baby, Brenna, was born, and Atlee qualified for assisted housing and food stamps. She bounced from job to job, and from relationship to relationship. No matter how strongly she felt about a man, the relationship inevitably ended once he got a look at her home life.”
Grant’s stomach sank. That sounded achingly familiar.
“I’ve never been able to give Brenna a real father figure,” her mother said sadly. “Most men say they can handle it, but when we move in together, it never works out.”
“Atlee has been married and divorced six times.”
“My last husband,” Brenna’s mother was saying, “didn’t understand about my stuff. He told me we just needed to organize and clean up. One day, I came home and found him throwing out a bunch of my stuff. It was like he’d stabbed my heart.” She gestured dramatically at her chest. “I didn’t know how he could do that to me. I went to the dump and had to take some of it back, but I couldn’t find all of it. I made him leave after that.”
“Each time Mom breaks up with someone, her hoarding gets worse,” Brenna said, resentment and resignation in her voice and her dark, too-old eyes. “Once she discovered the dump, it got even worse. She used to just take home one or two things every day. Now she takes whole carloads of stuff.”
“And family and friends are at their wits’ end,” the narrator intoned solemnly. “Agatha’s sister doesn’t know what to do about her family, but she is concerned for their safety.”
The camera cut away to a woman with a deliberately pixelated face, clearly too embarrassed to reveal her identity. “I don’t know what to do,” the woman said, her voice masked. “Agatha doesn’t see that there’s a problem, and if you try to help her, she just gets worse. If I say something, she’ll shut me out of her life entirely and Brenna will be the one who will suffer. I don’t know how that kid can stand it, living in all that garbage. The other children make fun of her at school. They call her mom ‘the trash lady.’ They come and dump stuff on the lawn just to play mean pranks, and wait for Agatha to come and take it all inside, which of course she does.” The sister’s exasperation was evident. “And poor Brenna has never gotten to be a kid. Growing up, she could never play at that house. She could never have friends over to spend the night. She’s had to hide who her family is all her life. You know it has to affect her mentally. I just worry that she’s going to turn out like her mother.” She shook her head sadly. “When she was younger, I couldn’t go over because I’d constantly see that baby sticking garbage into her mouth. And Agatha didn’t think it was a problem. I couldn’t stand it . . .”