Chapter Six
Evelyn stared out past the elevator doors and blinked in disbelief at the image that greeted her.
The studio was gone. The hallways and offices had disappeared completely.
Instead, she was staring at the small rancher with vinyl siding where she had spent the first eight years of her life in Rutherford, New Jersey.
“It can’t be,” Evelyn whispered.
One glanced over her shoulder. “Neat, huh?”
“It looks exactly like I remember it.”
“Well, duh.” One seemed unfazed. “I told you . . . we’re traveling through space and time here. This is your house. From Hanukkah, circa 1999. Remember?”
Evelyn’s feet teetered toward the door. From the outside, the home she had grown up in was picturesque. White vinyl siding dotted by green shutters. A raised concrete porch painted white. But even from the street, she could hear her parents screaming.
It’s always the same with you!
Oh, here we go again! Always harping! Always nagging!
I wouldn’t have to nag all the time if you would just try to be a husband and father!
It was the last Hanukkah Evelyn would ever live in that house. Her parents would separate that same December, then officially divorce a few months later. The house went up for sale, and Evelyn and her mother moved to a small, but less expensive, apartment that kept her in the same school district.
Evelyn hesitated at the threshold. It was the strangest thing, really. She was thirty-four years old, a full-fledged adult and independent woman, yet revisiting the past made her feel all sorts of nauseous. Then again, that could have also been the migraine.
One glanced over her shoulder. “You coming?”
Evelyn stepped off the elevator and followed the little girl into her old house.
It was just how she remembered it. The brown carpet in the living room.
The floral wallpaper in the kitchen—left over from when the house had first been built—that dated the entire structure.
The weirdest part of all was that it smelled like how she remembered.
Like walking into a stranger’s house and noticing the musky scent of mildew building up in the walls—damage from decades of rainstorms—alongside whatever was cooked last night for dinner.
In the kitchen, her parents were fighting.
You never help! You never make dinner, or clean up after—
Because I’m working!
Oh, right! Drinks at the bar with your buddies until two o’clock in the morning!
Evelyn couldn’t remember a time in her life when her parents displayed any sort of affection for one another.
Her mom was always certain that her father was out cheating.
Her father, in return, accused her mother of being controlling, possessive and jealous.
In fairness to them both, they never put Evelyn in the middle.
Rather, they just seemed to ignore her completely.
Her eyes wandered toward the living room where, situated in front of a television set, was an eight-year-old version of herself. Brown hair braided into two messy pigtails, she wore blue jeans and a rainbow-colored striped turtleneck while eating mindlessly from a bag of chips.
You’re nuts, you know that? You make up stories in your head.
Then go to therapy with me! Try to save this marriage!
I’m not the crazy one, Sheila!
It was always her first love. Television.
Stories. Also potato chips, as she had never met a salted potato she didn’t like.
But point being, whatever was happening in the real world didn’t matter.
Fictional worlds were so much better. So much safer, too.
Perhaps she would have written her own fictional tale one day, but she fell in love with producing television.
Bending down to her younger self, she felt a pang of hurt spread across her chest. She wanted to give herself a hug, tell that little girl she would be okay, that all the sad events of her life—yes, even the heartbreaks—would shape her into the woman she eventually would become.
One mused over the scene.
“Were your parents always this loud?” One asked, concerned.
“Believe it or not,” Evelyn said, jesting only slightly, “this was their indoor voice.”
“Yikes.”
Evelyn rose from her spot. “Look, I get it.”
“You do?”
“Yes,” Evelyn explained. “This is my first official heartbreak. The divorce of my parents.”
She supposed it was also where she first learned to withdraw from the world when something hurt her, but she didn’t feel like hashing that all out with a delusion.
“Did your parents ever go to counseling?” One asked.
Evelyn scoffed. “Never.”
Her father was old-world in that regard.
The child of a Holocaust survivor, he was distrusting of both outside influence and doctors.
He fully believed that therapy was only for “crazy people.” Since her dad was certain that her mother was the one with all the psychological problems, there was no need for him to talk it out with a trusted professional.
Perhaps that old-world mentality seeped into Evelyn, because she’d also avoided going to marriage counseling with David.
Her eyes wandered back to her parents, still screaming at the top of their lungs in the kitchen.
She and David never fought like that. They never lost their tempers, lobbing cruelties at each other, waking up the whole neighborhood in the process.
But looking back, comparing her own failed marriage to her parents’, she wondered if she conflated silence with a healthy relationship.
The truth was her parents were far better people after they divorced.
Married, they were toxic, straight lethal poison for one another.
Separated, they thrived. Her father remarried and maintained a successful relationship with his second wife for over a decade, before passing away unexpectedly from a heart attack when Evelyn was in her early twenties.
Her mother never remarried, but that was by choice.
After the disastrous relationship with Evelyn’s father, her mom saw marriage as a deal that was far more favorable to the man.
She had a string of long-term partners whom she shared her life with—traveling, going to gardening clubs and lectures together.
She was now living her best life in one of those oversized retirement communities down in Florida.
Her parents weren’t bad people, they just brought out the worst in each other.
“Divorce can be a blessing, too,” Evelyn said, finally.
“True,” One said. “But that doesn’t make it easier, does it?”
No, there was nothing easy about divorce. She had learned that fact twice in her life. She didn’t need a ghost to remind her. She was haunted without the help.
Just then, her mother sent a drinking glass flying. It landed in one loud crash against the kitchen wall. Evelyn watched her younger self rise from her spot, grab a jacket and race outside.
“Shall we?” One asked, beckoning Evelyn to follow.
Outside, Evelyn found her younger self sitting on the sidewalk in front of their house, playing with rocks.
When kicking stones was no longer entertaining—was it ever entertaining?
—she simply folded her chin into the palm of one hand and stared out into the empty street.
Evelyn swallowed, watching the scene play out.
Her parents’ screaming still echoed across the whole damn neighborhood.
It made her heart ache, seeing herself, and seeing how lonely and left behind she had once been.
But she had forgotten this part. Sitting on the sidewalk alone, waiting for some sign of safety so she could return home.
The way it felt, like she was holding on to a thousand secrets—every single one of them attempting to tear her apart from the inside.
No wonder she wanted to disappear. No wonder her little heart had been broken. All she wanted was for someone to make her feel safe, and loved, and wanted. To make reality a better place than her fictional stories and worlds.
“Oh, look,” One said, pointing to the house next door. “Someone’s coming.”
Evelyn glanced to the house next to hers and found David, his mother and his sister arriving back home.
They exited a minivan. His mom, in front.
Danielle trailing after her. And then an eight-year-old David, struggling with a backpack up the driveway.
Evelyn’s heart lurched into her throat. Her anger at him dissipated, if only for a moment.
“Oh my God,” Evelyn said, laughing. “He was so little.”
He was more strawberry blond in those days, but he still had that spattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose.
There were so many nights in their marriage together, when David had fallen asleep first, that she would just lie there in the bed beside him, memorizing each dot and divot, like an astronomer charting the heavens.
But unlike the confident man and physician David had become—the one who now seemed to be carrying boulders beneath his shoulders—childhood David was incredibly awkward inside his own form, with arms and legs that seemed more like gummy appendages than those of the confident man he would eventually become.
Still, even Evelyn had to admit he was cute.
“He had a certain boyish charm,” Evelyn said.
“And you two were friends back then?”
“We were neighbors,” she said begrudgingly.
There was nothing romantic between them back then. They were way too young for romance. David was just another kid on the block, someone to ride bikes with and offer challenges to down by the lake during the long days of summer. The deeper friendship, along with the romance, would come later.
Instead of heading inside, David noticed Evelyn sitting on the sidewalk. He came over and sat down beside her on the stoop, slinging his backpack to the ground beneath his knees.
“Hey,” David said.
“Hey.”
“Whatchya doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Yeah,” David said. “Me, too.”
Her parents’ bickering grew louder.
Why would I want to come home just to be screamed at?
I wouldn’t scream at you if you would come home before midnight!
Evelyn watched her younger self blush red.
It was over two decades later, but she knew what that little girl was feeling.
Rewatching the scene, the same emotions sat inside her.
The shame. The embarrassment. The belief that sharing the secret of their family dysfunction would somehow betray the love she felt for both parents.
She couldn’t talk about it. She wouldn’t talk about it. Because talking about these things would make them real.
“Tonight’s the first night of Hanukkah,” David said.
“I know.”
“What do you think you’re getting for presents?”
Her younger self shifted, uncomfortably, in her seat. “I’m probably just gonna watch a movie.”
A silence settled between them, long enough for two cars to drive by. Evelyn could see the eight-year-old version of herself trying not to cry. And then David reached into his backpack and pulled out a block of wood, decorated with nine sets of bolts and washers.
“Here,” David said. “I made this for you. It’s a menorah.”
“I know what a menorah is,” Evelyn said, taking it from him, analyzing it by turning it over.
It was a handmade menorah, with the name DAVID painted across the front in big block lettering, then decorated with tiny Jewish stars and stickers of characters from various animated action movies. “Why does it have your name on it?”
“Oh,” David said, pressing his lips to one side. A beat later, he had his answer. “I did that so you would know who gave it to you.”
Evelyn softened, watching the scene unfold in front of her. For a single second, she forgot how much she hated grown-up David.
She had fragments of this memory, but she had forgotten the details. Like the way her parents’ voices carried into the neighborhood. Or how David had that face full of freckles even as a child.
But mainly, she had forgotten the menorah David had pulled out of his backpack—the one he had so obviously made for himself in Jewish day school—which he then sacrificed to Evelyn simply to make her feel better.
Her heart ached at the recall.
She twisted around, determined to ask One the purpose of this memory. David was the person who had left her, after all. But, her heartbreak was gone. Evelyn found herself blinking her eyes open and, much to her dismay, lying on the cot in David’s medical bay.