SULLIVAN
Chapter Seven
My mother is at work, my sister is at her summer day program, and I’m alone in the house for the first time since I got home Friday night. It’s also the first time I feel like I can breathe since I left Missouri.
My mom more or less checked out on my life a while back.
I don’t blame her, though. I wasn’t a very nice guy from the time I turned twelve onward, but I also think she was waiting for a reason to wash her hands of me.
She’s not a bad person. She just has a crap life and crap luck.
She hates her job as a grocery store manager and is always barely scraping by.
My sister will probably never be able to live on her own, and my dad’s no help.
He’ll always love chasing a high more than anything or anyone else.
He’s been gone since before Emma was born.
I was seven. It was the same year I found the violin. Life-changing in every way imaginable.
While he doesn’t live far away, he doesn’t come around my mom or Emma anymore, not since I told him not to. I can’t guarantee he’ll stay away, but it’s been a solid two years now, and he’s managed to keep his word.
The weekend at home was okay. My mom and my sister were glad to see me, and we put together a puzzle, watched my sister’s favorite Pixar movies, and had a few decent meals together.
I’ve been as pleasant as I can be, but yesterday afternoon, I felt the mask slipping.
I tried taking a nap, but when that didn’t work, I got irritable enough that my mom asked me to excuse myself from the dinner table.
I want to be alone, but my room isn’t cutting it.
I can’t play instruments here because even with the muffling devices, the house is small enough to where it still bugs both of them.
While my playing obviously doesn’t suck, my practice can get repetitive.
I thought being alone in the house would be the thing I needed to start settling down after the week I spent at Adrian’s, but the house is messy, it smells like burnt coffee, and it makes me think of all the reasons I wanted to get away in the first place.
I’m not sure there’s any place in the world where I’ll ever feel like I belong, but I know for sure it isn’t here.
Around noon, I take the car Adrian bought me down to the most secluded spot by the lake I’ve ever found that’s big enough to fit a car. Before I had the Audi, I would ride my bike down here, but now I can bring my violin and my cello along with a fully stocked backpack.
Before I drag all that shit out of the car, I need to make sure I can actually get onto the property.
I’ve been dreaming about this place so often, I’ve missed it.
The last time I was here, the fence and the No Trespassing sign deterred me, but I’ve lost something else besides thirty five pounds over the last nine months: my ability to give a shit.
The “fence” isn’t much. It’s made out of chicken wire, and it’s short, easy to step on and move past. It’s enough to denote the property line along with a series of signs bought from the local hardware store.
When I get to the denser woods that surround the house, my heart rate picks up.
The forest is so overgrown and lush with summer, much of the sunlight is blocked out.
I take in every inch and inhale the green scent of soil.
I love this. I love that the spot still feels untouched.
I love that no one wants to buy the property, clear the land, and build a massive lake house.
Still, it’s no longer technically abandoned property.
Someone owns it, and while it looks like no one’s been here since the last time I was, I try to be stealthy as I make my way to the clearing where the house was. God, I hope it’s still there.
Light and so much green guides me through the woods, and I finally come out on the other side.
The two-story house is still here, sitting on an elevation above the lake.
While it absolutely looks like it should be condemned, someone’s taken the time to board up the holes in the siding, roof, and windows.
However, they’ve done nothing to prevent the forest’s sprawl.
The house is covered with invasive vines, and there’s a slight tilt to it I never noticed before. I assume that’s foundation rot.
To me, though, this is even better. The house looks less like an abandoned shack and more like a ruin.
Despite the few panels of fresh wood, the place is moodier than ever, the overgrowth doing its best to cover up all the outside surfaces, even the newer parts.
I test out the back porch steps and climb them, only to find one of those keypad locks on the shitty, rotten door.
This is where I have to decide how determined I am to get inside.
While I think about it, I walk the perimeter, trying to find any signs that anyone else has been here recently.
There’s a lightly trodden path from the overgrown driveway, but the grass there is fresh and straight, if a little shorter than the surrounding greenery.
The front door has the same style of realtor lock on it, but this door is in better shape.
My best bet would be to pry off a panel nailed over one of the nearby windows.
I knock, just to be safe before I really start trying to break in.
When no weathered old man opens the door, and it doesn’t swing open from the power of whatever ghosts could live in there, I go around back again to check for more possible entry points.
I look through one of the intact windows on the back porch and balk at what I see inside.
It’s staged.
Like—someone is actually trying to sell this place. I guess I could be wrong about the foundation, but it seems slightly insane to me that anyone would want to buy this house and fix it up as is. Anyone but me anyway, and that would only be if I had any desire to own a home here, which I do not.
When I say staged, I don’t mean anyone tried to make it fancy. The couch I see is plaid, befitting of a shitty lake house, but it looks to be in decent shape. There’s an antique coffee table and a matching plaid armchair. Beyond that, there’s a large wooden dining table with four chairs.
I mean—nice try, I guess?
Seeing the furniture does make me want to go inside more than I already did, so there’s that.
Near the edge of the porch, there’s a window that’s only half boarded up. The lower half remains accessible. I tug lightly at the sash with two fingertips, and it slides open a crack. “Ha.”
Twenty minutes later, I’ve lugged my cello and violin through the woods, along with my backpack.
After I crawl through the porch window, I find the set of French doors along the wraparound porch.
They’re locked from the inside, so once I have those open, it’s easy enough to get everything into the house.
While they make the place look slightly more welcoming, the few pieces of furniture in the living room disrupts the acoustics.
I find an empty bedroom on the first floor to set up.
I also bring in one of the wooden chairs from the dining table and a cushion from the couch.
Shaking off thoughts of Adrian as I get my cello out of its case, I tune into the sounds of my surroundings.
Since the house is half boarded up, it has a soft resonance.
I’ve spent one college year studying music.
Since the first year education is very basic, mostly putting words and theory behind things I already know, I’ve tried to learn everything I can about how to translate a full score onto paper.
I experimented with every instrument I could get my hands on from French horns and saxophones to the xylophone.
When I tried the oboe, however, I was hooked.
I bought one, and it’s become a new obsession.
I put my new instrument together in the lake-facing bedroom with its one intact window and one boarded one. I wet a reed as I spread some blank music sheets across the floor from my spot on the couch cushion.
Once my instruments are ready to play, I look around the room and try to find some peace in the soft eerie glow as ripples from the lake occasionally bounce light across the ceiling.
The house has lost some of its charm on the inside.
It used to smell like earth when it was so exposed to the elements.
Today, there’s a new scent I can’t distinguish.
It’s herbal, maybe. Like it was fresh at some point but has gone stale.
The house maintains a little of the same haunted charm it had two years ago, but the knowledge that people other than me have been in and out of it, messing with it, spoils some of the allure.
I still feel connected to it in a way I can’t name.
It inspires me with the beat up wood floors and the reflections from the lake.
The thick layer of dust everywhere reassures me that no one’s been here in a while, but there’s the slightest sense of intrusion.
Not quite a violation, but a twinge of unease that offsets the peace I used to feel whenever I came here.
Weirdly, I don’t hate it. I am, after all, alone, and no one would even know where to look for me.
Being lost in the woods is another dream I have more and more lately, and while it might should like a nightmare to anyone else, it’s one of my dreams that makes me feel safest. This house comes up in those dreams a lot, too.
Still, knowing I could get caught keeps a low buzz of adrenaline humming in my blood. Ideas race wildly through my head, and I’m thinking opera, or a dark, tragic ballet. I’m also imagining a thriller on a film screen scored with carefully placed silences and swells.
If I ever manage to be as prolific as my own imagination, I’ll go down in history, provided I’m as good at this as I’ve been led to believe.