Chapter Three
A whoosh of dusty air escapes when I open the door, like I’ve broken the seal of an ancient tomb.
My hand finds the light switch out of habit.
Bright LED lights illuminate the foyer’s splintered and warped wood floors.
The lights are new, but judging from what’s around me, they’re the only new things.
The two rooms sitting off the foyer are filled with sparse cloth-covered furniture.
On my left is the formal dining room, connected to the kitchen by swinging doors, and on the right, a parlor where Mabry spent most of her time drawing in her sketchbook.
The rooms are nothing like the blond hardwood floors and tall windows of my high-rise.
They are dollhouse rooms, separate and boxed in and much smaller than I remember.
The floorboards creak as I walk farther in, and along with that sound, I hear our voices ricochet off the walls as we hauled our gear in that last summer here.
“Hey, y’all, we’re here!” Mama yelled, a cigarette balanced between her lips.
Mabry clung to my side. She was always shy when we first arrived.
The Aunts shuffled down the hall in unison.
They reminded me of fairy-tale creatures .
. . Grimms’-fairy-tale creatures. Made of sharp bones and loose skin and topped off with salt-and-pepper frizzy hair and thick eyeglasses.
In sync, right down to their missing molars.
Their matching muumuus hung on them like bright tents, baggy and wrinkled like their skin but with lots more color.
“Lookee here, Pearl,” Petunia said, wrapping her arms around me. “We got us some scalawags come to visit.”
Petunia grabbed Mabry, and we all hugged in an awkward circle full of pats and coos and smelling like mothballs and Rose Milk body lotion.
“I need a wine cooler after that drive. Where y’all keep the hooch?” Mama ran a hand through her hair and exhaled a perfect ring of smoke.
“Sweet sugar, you know good and well we don’t keep hooch in this house. And we don’t smoke in it neither.” Pearl pursed her lips. “Maybe one of these summers your memory will kick in.”
Mama rolled her eyes.
“What are we gonna do for fun this summer?” I asked Pearl, or maybe it was Petunia. They looked more alike than usual.
“Ever milk a goat?” they said in unison.
I laugh at the memory, but the laugh fades as my eyes fall on the straight staircase in front of me.
The last time I saw it, I was hauling bags down, not up.
Oblivious in some ways, complicit in others.
Not understanding it’d be almost twenty years before I stepped foot in this house again.
I missed this place so much that first summer we didn’t return.
I’d packed my bags and Mabry’s, and we raced home after our last day of school to load them in the station wagon.
That’s when Mama told us we wouldn’t be going back, ever.
Mabry cried for days. The Aunts called and wrote letters, and Mama told them we’d try next summer.
Mama and I fought, and I told her I’d take Mabry without her, and Mama slapped me so hard my teeth rattled.
“We’ll never step foot in that town again,” she said. “If you try to go, I’ll take Mabry and disappear.”
That was all the threat I needed. Mama knew my weakness.
I shift the paper sacks from the Sack and Save as my duffel strap digs into my arm. I glance down the hall toward the kitchen, then back to the staircase.
My phone trills in my purse. I shift the sacks, fumble for it, look at who the caller is. I’ve sent her to voicemail too many times already. If I don’t answer, she may call the National Guard next. Besides, now would be a good time to hear a friendly voice.
“Hi.”
“Willa! Finally. I’ve been worried sick,” Amy Owens says over speakerphone.
Friends for longer than I can remember, Amy and I bonded because of our mothers.
Hers an alcoholic, mine bipolar. Two incoming high school freshmen living with dysfunctional mothers have a way of finding each other.
Gravitational attraction. Amy had just moved to Greenhill, Louisiana, and was looking for a friend.
I’d lived in Greenhill my whole life, and I was still looking for a friend.
She didn’t care that I charted my mother’s moods on a calendar with red and black markers, and I didn’t care that sometimes she ran away from their apartment and slept under my bed.
Now, our after-work, happy hour childhood-one-up matches keep our other friends laughing.
They sip their special old-fashioneds and swear we are lying.
Amy and I laugh with them. Only not as loud.
“Sorry. I’ve been avoiding my phone.” For obvious reasons, I want to add.
“I got the text you sent early this morning. What the hell are you doing in south Louisiana?”
I glance at the stairs again. “Quick errand,” I say.
“Well, convenient timing on this errand,” she says.
I make my way down the narrow hall toward the kitchen. “I made it convenient timing.”
Like the rest of the house, the kitchen is smaller than I remember, but unlike what I’ve seen so far, it’s been updated.
Stained wood floors, faux-distressed cabinets the color of a robin’s egg, a white farm sink under a window.
A small square table with four mismatched chairs sits in the middle of the room like an afterthought.
The appliances all look new and unused. I wonder if my great-aunts were still here when they died or if they were in a nursing home.
They must have been in their nineties. I hope they were here.
As soon as those words enter my head, my heart clenches.
An image comes to mind of my mother at Texas Rose, tangled hair and an oversize robe, falling asleep sitting up.
I set the groceries next to the sink.
“Wanna talk about the interview on Fort Worth Live?” Amy says.
“Nope,” I answer before she finishes her question.
I snag the bottle of wine from one of the bags and find a glass in the cabinet.
“Well,” Amy says, “wanna talk about our podcast and when we’re getting back to work?”
That one is trickier to answer. I have a podcast thanks to Amy. She’s the one who told me years ago to switch from radio. My radio program was losing steam, and so was I. She helped me reinvent it into a show averaging over five thousand listeners per episode and growing.
I unscrew the top, pour a small glass, and sip. I don’t even care it’s warm.
“Soon,” I say.
“Talk about it soon? Or we’re getting back to work soon?”
“Both.”
“I guess the good news is your social media followers have quadrupled,” Amy says with a short laugh.
“Yay, me.” I drain what’s left of my wine and set my glass down. That’s when I see the note propped up by the coffee maker.
“Willa,” Amy starts.
“Hang on.”
I pick up the note. Make yourself at home. Your mother’s things are in the attic. Be by soon to check in. It’s signed in small neat cursive by my aunts’ lawyer, Charles LaSalle II.
“This isn’t the end of the world,” Amy says in my ear. She starts talking about a few show ideas and ways to navigate this minor incident, but I’m not listening anymore. I’m back at the front staircase.
I pick up my duffel and head up. When I reach the top, I pause, my heart pounding faster than it should be for my slow ascent.
Like downstairs, the second floor is compartmentalized.
One bedroom at the top of the stairs. One across the small landing.
And two down a short hallway to the front of the house, overlooking the driveway.
The door to the bedroom Mama claimed every summer is cracked open.
A chill passes over me.
“Are you listening to me?” Amy says.
“Yeah,” I lie.
She continues talking as I ease toward the bedroom and peek inside.
The antique four-poster bed is stripped as bare as a skeleton.
No tangled sheets. No empty vodka bottles.
No smoke curling around its carved posts.
I swallow the lump in my throat and close the door. That’s not the room I’m here for.
Goose bumps cover my arms despite the warmth of the house.
I drop my duffel and flip the light switch by the stairs.
A single lamp illuminates in the corner, but the ambient light does little good.
Shadows still linger in the back corner, near the other set of stairs.
The ones that are cramped and narrow and lead to an attic.
“But we’re not going to worry about that,” Amy says and keeps talking.
I place my foot on the first step, and it creaks so loudly I pause, like I’ll wake someone up.
But there’s no one here to disturb. It’s just me, alone, in this house.
I chew the side of my thumbnail, then continue up.
The higher I climb, the lower the ceiling becomes thanks to the slanted roof.
Hunched and struggling to maintain my balance, I pause at the top of the stairs.
The air feels cooler up here. The Aunts must have added air-conditioning at some point.
When Mabry and I played here as kids, it wasn’t.
The summer heat culminated up here like molten lava.
Once we played hide-and-seek, and Mabry hid in the attic for so long Aunt Pearl made her drink pickle juice when she finally came down, sweaty and shaking.
I’d been terrified and lectured Mabry until she cried.
Then I apologized and let her crawl into bed with me that night so I could tickle her back until she fell asleep.
“I mean, how do you want to handle it?” Amy asks.
I close my hand around the knob and turn it.
Nothing happens. I twist it again. Still nothing.
I pull and push and rattle the door. It’s locked.
I smack my hand against the wood, shut my eyes, count to three because it’s as far as I get before I start looking around the small landing for a key. Only dust hides in the corners.
“Willa?”
Of course it’s fucking locked. I rub the back of my neck. “Sorry, Amy, what did you say?”