4. Lucy
I passed by Gus’cottage which was two down from mine and had every urge to pull over and bang on his door. To talk to him, to hug him. Almost like I was programmed to do so. Instead, I drove down the road that led to the very last cottage.
The unevenness of the pathway was not going to give the Mini Cooper an easy time this summer. The scratching from small pebbles and dirt beneath was loud enough that I’d believe it was shooting up through the floorboard.
All of the cottages were close enough in distance that only a couple of rows of hedges and narrow side yards separated us from our neighbors. But from the main road, we each had a long driveway that convinced us that we were pushed back into our own secret world.
Oh, to be back at the Hillside Cottages.
Each cottage was practically the same, and the landscaping was predictable. Vibrant green grass in the front and back yards, and flower bushes line the walkways and border the house. I loved the sense of knowing what to expect from the Hillside Cottages.
They sat back on the other side of the woods and were adjacent to the creek that wraps around and leads into Hummingbird Lake. White-washed shiplap runs throughout every main room accentuated with low-hanging natural wood beams and floorboards.
And I got to call the fourth one on the left my home, or the Collins Cottage as my grandmother Tiffany and I liked to refer to it as. At least I did. I haven’t considered any of this to be home for a while now.
In a few short months, I guess it won’t be.
I didn’t create any expectations when planning my return home. But knowing an instant feeling of calmness had not crossed my mind. It was almost as if being back in Rider was enough and everything else in my life would work itself out.
The same way it used to.
There was a time when my mother lived here with us. It was when I was young and she was focusing on the early days of becoming a lawyer. But once her bank account reflected her new success, we moved out.
I had gone with her initially, but you wouldn’t have guessed it. She dropped me off here enough on the weekends that the cottage was more of a home to me than anywhere else. Soon enough, it became weeks at a time because it was easier. Whatever that meant.
My mother found herself in the city more times than she was in Rider for her cases. Sometimes she decided to stay down there because it was more convenient. Being away from her home and her daughter was more convenient. Where her career was concerned, nothing else mattered to her.
I got tired of never knowing where I was going to stay, or for how long, so at the ripe age of nine years old, I told her that I was moving into the cottages full-time. Tiffany was beyond excited to have me while my mom didn’t even bat an eye or look up from her laptop to acknowledge her child—I had a backpack filled to the brim slung over my shoulder that housed the only clothes I bothered to keep at my mom’s for the spare time I was there.
Even when she was back checking on her condo every so often in later years, she never bothered to visit. She hated the slow life that Rider provided and tried to leave just as fast as she would arrive.
I was more than content with calling the cottages home for as long as I lived. But when Tiffany passed away, only a week after my high school graduation, I promised myself I would go off to college like she wanted for me. And I promised myself that I’d never come back. I couldn’t. My send-off into the real world, my closure, was knowing that she was with my grandpa Tuck again and I was going to make her proud. That’s all that mattered to me.
By the skin of my teeth, I made the deadline of accepting the offer for the fall semester within hours. I packed everything that I could into my two suitcases, bought a one-way ticket, and never looked back.
Until now.
I stood at the front door like I had many times before, but the air between me and the house’s foundation suddenly felt eerie. The ghost of a life that was no more was waiting in line, waiting to enter uncertainty alongside me. The shutters and the door frame were painted the same white dove color they’d always been. Except now they were chipping away at the joints. I picked away at an already empty spot beside the doorbell. I lodged the key into the lock, the one I kept on my key ring after all these years and opened up the door.
A gust of cold wind brushed along my skin. Straightaway, goosebumps formed on my forearms. The tapping of the suitcase wheels on the flooring competed with the thoughts inside my head.
Visions of being curled up in the corner breakfast nook on Sunday mornings with my grandmother flooded my brain. The smell of bear claws and coffee cake seeped through the crown molding and she and I were arguing over me drinking coffee at such a young age. All of it danced around me on replay. Hypnotized by memories of another life, I barely noticed that my eyes were swelling up until I felt the warmth of a tear trickle down my cheek.
I pulled at the back door. The dampened door jam gave me resistance, I had to yank it towards me a couple of times before it finally budged. The patio boards creaked beneath my feet when I walked along it. But if you were careful, you could walk along the third board as if it were a balance beam and no one would hear a thing.
After she had gone to bed, I’d sometimes sneak out here and sit along the creek. Not to meet someone in secret, or leave for the night, but I’d sit at the end of the porch and listen to the water and the crickets. It was white noise while I delved into another book.
I extended my arms out on either side of me and balanced along the third floorboard. One foot in front of the other, I walked slowly down to her chair. It was in an angled position, and the tip of the armrest ever so slightly kissed the edge of the chair that used to belong to Tuck.
He and Gus went to high school together and were on the same wrestling team. Despite an initial rivalry about who was the better wrestler, they became quick friends. Not until after they had an amateur wrestling match after practice one day to “settle it once and for all” as I’ve heard many times over. No one won, and it ended up with them laughing and going to get burgers afterward. That moment sparked a timeless friendship.
When Tuck passed, Gus promised him that he would look after Tiffany. I could recite the stories about how they were practically the three musketeers back in the day.
I had never met him, he passed away before I was even born, but the stories that I was told made it feel like he spent many nights out here with us in that very chair. Sometimes she would sit out here and talk with him about her day. Eventually, I started to, too. If the walls behind their appointed seats could talk, I’d know enough stories and secrets to last a lifetime.
I ran my fingers along both of their armrests before settling into Tuck’s seat to experience the feeling of sitting beside Tiffany once more. I shut my eyes, letting the midday sun kiss my face for the entirety of this moment. Her laugh, her humming of familiar songs—I heard it all.
Fully expecting a neglected landscape, I was thrown off by the maintained yard when I slowly opened my eyes back up. Either we had faux grass all these years, or…
I stood to examine the rest of the backyard.
The hedges were trimmed, and the tree branches were cut back. Her rose bushes were thriving better than they ever were. But one thing in particular stood out—the hydrangeas. They were fuller than ever, a soft shade of sky blue.
We had planted them within my first year living here, sans my mother. Tiffany could sense the sadness that came with not hearing from her much and wanted to distract me. It gave me something to focus on rather than waiting by the phone or checking every car that came into our driveway.
It might have been our project, but I took the reins. I watered them and trimmed them. I maintained the whole bush and it had become my favorite part of the weekends.
The hydrangeas smelled like Memorial Day. They smelled like the start of summer.
When they were finally in full bloom, we would pluck a few and place them on the entry table, in the nook, and out here on the patio. It was rare to find a surface in the house that didn’t have a handmade bouquet complimenting it.
It’s how we knew summer had arrived.
I ran inside and upstairs to check the rest of the house. It was untouched. Her gingham quilt was taut against the mattress and the bear that my grandfather won for her at the state fair sat in the center of the throw pillows. I left her blouses in the closet next to her coats which were neatly packaged away and hung up in garment bags. All else was loosely organized or exactly the way that I left it, that she left it.
Next door was my room.
I sucked in a deep breath, one that tasted both recognizable and murky.
“Here goes nothing,” I spoke under my breath.
Framed pictures, awards, and certificates that were once hung above my desk, now sat stacked on top of my dresser. The outlines of where they used to be were still faint on the walls. The tassel from my high school graduation cap hung on the edge of my vanity mirror. The thin fringe was so tiny, a small decorative and insignificant piece, yet I felt it suffocate me from four feet away.
The homework, the tests, the extracurricular activities… I kept myself busy for those four years. And the standards and expectations of what I should be doing during my teen years never caught up to me. I never felt left out by not going to parties, and losing my virginity was so far off my radar.
My high school years were simple, they were predictable. I was gone for most of the day, came home to do homework, and then spent the rest of the night preparing to do it all over again. I never moaned and groaned like many other kids my age did over school—I enjoyed it.
But that was another lifetime. I thought I had it all figured out at eighteen. I don’t remember feeling exhausted or stressed, and I never felt the pressure that soon appeared in my college years.
I knew it came with the territory, but I believed that my “pre-requisite” known as being an “obsessive scholar” since middle school would have prepared me enough. I realized it was a completely different ball game. And I was persistent to never falter.
I picked myself up from an inevitable spiral where I thought of all of my academic habits and decisions, and walked over to the door frame. Zipping by it when I entered the room, I completely missed the etches that remained in the paneling. You could still see the original paint color under the pen marks, but on the rest was the violet shade I had since I was ten.
Tiffany had avoided the markings, afraid to paint over all of the years of my growth. Four years old, five years old, six… Until the age of thirteen, she had measured my height every fall before the school year started. At that point, I had inherited the “short-stack” title from Gus for good once the numbers were stagnant.
I looked back at the room as a whole. My entire childhood lived in the confines of these four walls, under this roof. And while a good portion of the house was packed up, I still had a long way to go. Packing up our rooms might just be something I’m not prepared for.
Here goes nothing.