Chapter 4
— Chapter 4 —
By the third New Hampshire exit, the sun has cleared the horizon, and my tired old Corolla gets the shakes, vibrating my innards. I worry neither of us will make it, but twenty minutes later, the wobble stops as suddenly as it started, leaving me to wonder if it was the road, not my car. Either way, it shook things that shouldn’t be shaken.
No matter how I time my pain pills, or double the dose, I can only drive an hour at a time before the heat radiating from my gut feels like it could fog the windows. That nurse was right about walking. As much as it is misery to haul myself from the driver’s seat, movement takes the steam out of the pain. So I drive down the coast in short shifts, stopping to pace the far end of parking lots or the side of the road. My head is clouded with Percocet, and the sky is the kind of relentless gray that makes my eyes hurt. Dirty snow. Bare trees. Each place I stop looks like the last, and in the continual dreariness it’s hard to remember I’m gaining ground.
A few exits past Worcester, Mass., my tank is down to fumes, and I end up at the same gas station where I stopped on the day I drove to Maine ten years ago. The mom-and-pop operation is a Sunoco now, but I remember which pump I used and the flush of fear that made my fingers numb as I checked my pager while I filled my tank. I dropped quarters in the pay phone at the corner of the lot to listen to my voicemail, and when I heard Steena’s voice say “Freya,” I hoped, despite her tone, that she’d come through with a sudden burst of sisterly kindness. I wanted to hear her say she believed me, that I mattered too much for her to let me go. All she said was “You know if our mother kills herself, it’s your fault, right?”
It should have been a seven-hour drive to Somers, New York. It takes me twelve. Even then, I think about blowing the exit, driving off into oblivion, or at least White Plains, but I’m hungry and tired and I need to walk again. So I turn off the interstate and drive over the reservoir, past the train station, up the gentle side of the hill, feeling the lump in my throat grow bigger.
I can see the house from the top of the hill, the little valley it lives in, sandwiched between granite slopes, surrounded by trees. A Cape Cod–style summer cottage with extra parts built after the fact, so from some angles it’s quaint, and from others it looks like a building that has lost the point of itself.
Now, the gutters are overgrown. Not one or two seedlings—an entire tree line sprouting from the moss-covered roof, like a forest at the edge of a mountain. Broken branches litter the yard. Step’s Chevy station wagon is parked in the driveway, rusting.
The chain link gate is open, crinkled at the place where I backed into it with my car. Step had the fence installed after he got Lyme disease. He thought keeping the deer out would keep the deer ticks away too, like they don’t also travel on mice and groundhogs and raccoons. But because of the way the property is nestled into the landscape, in several places the fence top is only a short leap from the hill. So what Step actually built was a deer trap. They’d jump in but couldn’t get out, and he had to spend a consuming amount of time herding those tick-laden deer through the gate.
There’s a bump at the end of the driveway, and the exact impact is written in my body like a song I can’t forget. I brace for it as I turn off the road, expecting my head to wobble in the exact way it does. The dread follows automatically.
I park next to Step’s car. His green sweatshirt is still on the back seat, the sight of it shocking. Worse than just his car. He always had several of the same kind in various stages of disintegration. This one has sweat-bleached armpits, threadbare elbows, cuffs fraying. His body wore it to bits. Numbness flushes all the way through my fingertips. I survey the driveway cracks, the wall of white spruce trees blocking the view of the road, and start to feel like I’m watching a movie about someone going home.
The two-tiered flagstone staircase is crumbling. Under the bay window a grubby section of aluminum siding has fallen into the bed of pachysandra below, exposing moldy pink insulation to the elements. Furry vines creep from the woods to the walls and look like they’re trying to climb in a window.
It was a charming house once. It isn’t anymore. The woman in the movie would feel sad about this. I can’t feel anything.
I don’t know how Hans Gruenberger, Esq., tracked me down, but that’s how I found out my parents died. He called the bar on a Sunday. I happened to pick up the phone.
“So sorry for your loss,” he said, with such rote precision that it made me wonder if he told people about their dead relatives as often as I suggested the fisherman’s platter to diners at The Clam.
They were in my mother’s car. Blinding late day sun. A wet road. Tractor trailer. That driver died too.
Hans was calling to tell me I’d inherited their house.
A few weeks later, he sent the papers to the bar. Called every day at work until even Buck was nagging me to “sign the damn whatevers so I don’t have to talk to that nerd-burger again.”
“Can you sell it?” I asked Hans the next time he called.
“Maybe in a better market you’d find a buyer as-is. But now? With everyone talking about the bubble bursting? Not likely.” He outlined the complex equation of the decline of the house, inspections and repairs, the cost of junk haulers to deal with the contents. “If you don’t have money upfront to hire someone to take care of those things, you’ll have to do the work yourself.”
Steena got everything else, he explained. The easy money: life insurance, savings, IRAs. I got the albatross, because the house was in Step’s name, and he was my real father.
“What happens if I don’t want to sign the papers?” I asked, feeling the urge to slam down the phone and run. Disappear even further up the coast. All the way to Canada.
“You can disclaim your inheritance,” Hans said. “With the legal turnabouts and provisions in their estate, it will be treated as if you predeceased your parents, and the house will go to your sister.”
So, I signed the damn whatevers, because, as a matter of principle, I couldn’t let Steena be the last of us standing. I sent the envelope back through certified mail. Didn’t visit the property. Didn’t answer any follow-up calls from Hans. I did the deed, pretended I hadn’t. Could have forgotten about it completely were it not for late nights when I’d wake up in a sweaty panic over what I hadn’t taken care of, the unknown depth of consequence.
My house key is still in my glove compartment, tethered to the booster club key chain I’ve had since middle school—an outline of a happy elephant stamped into red rubber, dingy from pencil dust and pocket lint. I’ve never been able to throw out keys. I can’t remember if someone told me it was inauspicious, like giving knives as a gift without taping a penny to the box. Bad luck, or bad karma, or something like that. It’s possible that the locks have been changed, but not probable. Calling a locksmith or buying new doorknobs is not the sort of thing my parents would’ve gotten around to. The house isn’t a wreck just because I ignored it for six months. They had a long-standing habit of letting things go.
I make my way up the stairs, testing my weight on each piece of flagstone before I commit. Ten steps, then a landing, seven more steps to the front door. I’m winded by the time I turn the key. The door sticks, but opens when I throw my shoulder into it, and I stumble inside, gasping from the pain of that push. Loose tiles in the entryway shift under my feet. I can’t decide if I’m hearing the grit of broken mortar or it’s something I imagine from the feeling.
I used to believe I could tell who was home and what mood they were in by the way the air felt when I walked through the front door. Now, the house is stale and damp, familiar in the base notes of old carpet and dust, dead houseplants, and stacks of the Sunday Times , but there’s no energy in the air, good, bad, or otherwise.
For a split second, I long for the light, breezy feeling of my mother on one of the rare days when I came home to find her in a good moment, on a bright afternoon, when she smelled like Anais Anais and was happy to see me. She’d bound down the stairs, suddenly light on her feet, and hug me into her pillowy chest. There was music in her voice when she said, “Hi, my baby girl ,” which was her term of endearment only for me, never my sister, at least not since I came along. But I’ve been missing that ephemeral version of my mother for so much longer than ten years. In my memories of that feeling, I always had to reach high to hug her while she bent to meet my arms. Sometimes she’d sit on the second step and hold me in her lap. When I look at the carpet now, matted down the center of the staircase like a dry creek bed, I remember the thunder of my mother’s cracked heels, heavy on each step, and realize that we don’t have words for mourning people when their souls leave us long before their body is gone.
In the version of this house that lives loudest in my mind, my mother is yelling about how ungrateful I am. Steena is upstairs slamming the door to her bedroom. And Step is lying on the couch in the den, reading another dusty clothbound book about the Civil War, pretending he can’t hear us. All three of them have haunted my brain, no matter where I go, and I worry this house will always contain them.
Everything is smaller than I remember. Compared to my apartment at the Vista View, the living room is palatial, but I still feel out of scale, like the wrong-sized doll for this house. The grandfather clock is gone, but I can see its footprint in the carpet. Same dried flowers in a vase on the same stone mantel, same velveteen club chairs and faded brocade curtains. I run my hand over the tiny dents in the dark, glossy finish of the pine coffee table. The give of that wood under my brand-new front teeth is one of my first memories.
The floor creaks in all the familiar places. In the kitchen the same tiles are chipped and cracked, left without repair. But it looks like someone, at some point, gave everything a good scrub. The windowsills are free of dust. The counters are crumbless and completely bare.
I open the fridge. The light goes on inside. It’s cold. Empty except for a bulb of fennel and two cans of Pepsi. One of the cans has a pink plastic lid covering the opening. Someone could have left the soda months ago. But the fennel fronds aren’t even limp. The refrigerator shouldn’t be on. I haven’t paid the NYSEG bill.
“Hello?” I call. “Hey!” And brace myself. Nothing. My breath is shallow and loud, like I’m making my own Foley track for a horror movie.
I pull the lid off the soda can and pour some in the sink. It fizzes. It’s that recent. I hear scratching from the sunroom on the other side of the kitchen—like someone gently raking leaves, but definitely inside.
“Hello?” I can’t breathe. I drop the can and walk as quickly as I am able, back through the living room and out of the house. It’s hard to lock the door because my hand won’t steady. It’s stupid to lock the door anyway. Clearly, the lock isn’t keeping anyone out.
There’s half an hour or so until it gets dark, but the sun is behind the trees, and it’s already dim in this little valley. I get in my car and back down the driveway. I don’t know where to go, but I can’t stay here tonight.