Short Story
Going Home
I steady myself as I walk up the crumbling stairs, caked with a year’s worth of dirt and grime. Breathe in. Breathe out. You can do this. Like me, the porch has been slowly pulling itself away from the house for years. I, however, have come back; the porch looks as though it has no intention of ever doing so. I run my hand along the loose wrought iron railing. I used to tie my bike here; it used to be an anchor. I guess it wasn’t strong enough to hold me here. It wasn’t strong enough to hold any of us here. Not even Ma.
My face starts to feel hot. My eyes are stinging as I blink furiously, willing them to draw back their tears. I’m on fire, burning from the inside out. There’s a keening noise in my ear and it takes me a moment to realize that the sound is coming from me. I’m standing on my parents’ rickety front porch, losing my grip. I shouldn’t have come here.
Breathe in. Breathe out. I draw myself up and allow anger to replace my weak bout with nostalgia. The slow simmer of resentment and indignation help to steal my resolve. I have to do this. I touch the front doorknob and pause. Do I walk in? Do I knock? I’m struck with the realization that this is no longer my home. I have become a stranger here. I sigh. I knock quietly.
“Hold on a minute,” a man’s voice calls from within the house. Loud and strong, with just a whisper of New England left on the vowels. “I’m coming.”
I suck in my breath. The blood is rushing through my ears so loudly that I wonder if he will be able to hear it. The door opens. He stands just shy of six feet tall. His once-black hair hair, dulled to silver, stands out disobediently in every direction, as though he’s been running his hands through it all day. His red-rimmed eyes register shock before quickly settling to an impassive gaze.
“Jess.” He says my name as though verifying who I am; that it is truly me standing here before him. I want to run. I shift my weight from one foot to the other and try to stop from wringing my hands. He blinks rapidly several times. His mouth hardens. “What do you need?”
My head moves slowly from side to side. I open my mouth to speak but no words come out. He waits patiently, looking increasingly more uncomfortable.
Finally I stammer “I-I-I… I wanted to see Ma. I thought… I mean, I heard…” I trail off because I don’t know how to phrase the words in such a way that doesn’t make me sound like the asshole that I am. My mother is dying and I came here to watch her go.
“Yeah, well… You’re too late,” my father tosses at me.
I blink and wait for the punch in the gut that I’m told that I’m supposed to feel. My brow deepens before he continues, “no, no. She isn’t gone yet. Not totally anyway,” and his shoulders slump a little as he heaves out a heavy sigh. Quietly he adds “but her mind is gone. She won’t know who you are.”
He looks off to the side, his mouth opening and closing as though he wants to say something else. He looks back at me sadly; almost tenderly. “Come in,” he says simply.
Stepping through the front door is like stepping back in time. In the living room, the once gleaming red oak floors have faded to a parched gray. Dusty, sun-bleached curtains frame the sagging windows at the front of the house, their little red rosebud print all but evaporated.
My eyes drift to the fireplace mantle, otherwise known as “The Shrine.” Photos of Jake cover every square inch of the red brick sill. Baby Jake. Toddler Jake. Kindergarten graduate Jake. Little League MVP Jake. High school prom Jake. Then the photos abruptly stop. One on end of the memorial ledge is a framed print of Jake’s obituary, and on the other, a mahogany urn containing his ashes. Jake-in-the-Box.
The old man sees the direction of my gaze and clears his throat. “She’s in the third bedroom.”
The third bedroom. My bedroom. It’s at the far end of the hall, past the master and the mausoleum. Of course they wouldn’t have disturbed the dead with more death. That would just be rude.
I turn away so that he doesn’t see the sour look on my face. I don’t want to be thrown out before I have the chance to do what I came here to do. I look toward the hall, motion with my head and raise my brow.
“Yeah. Go ahead,” he shrugs. “Like I said, she won’t even know who you are,” and he turns away from me and walks towards the fireplace, standing with his back to me, contemplating the photographs. I’m guessing he’s wishing those were my pictures up there and Jake was the one tracking dirt across the old wood floor.
As I start down the hallway, my eyes fixate on the open doorway of the second bedroom: The Forbidden Place. Ma caught me playing Barbie’s in there once. I had loved the soft feel of the blue chenille rug under my feet. It was a vast sea that stretched from the gateway of the Land of Hall and flowed under the South Post of Bed, a dark and cavernous abyss inhabited by the horrible Catkitten. If Captain Ken steered the Dream Boat too close to the void, the inky black tentacle would lash out, snaring it with its barbs. When Ma found me in there with my toys she started screaming and crying. I was never to go in there! Never ever! Out! Out now! Seven year old me didn’t understand why she wasn’t allowed to play in Jake’s room. He wasn’t using it anymore.
When some parents lose a child, it destroys their marriage. The loss of Jake seemed to bring mine even closer together; they joined forces to keep his memory alive. He had a place setting at the table at every meal. On Christmas, there were presents for him under the tree. We had a birthday party for him every year on his birthday.
Once, when I was 13, I asked Pop why we bothered lighting candles, since it’s not like Jake could blow them out. He sent me to my room and I wasn’t allowed to have any cake that day. Jake’s cake. Dead Jake. He wasn’t having any cake either, so at least there was that.
I approach the opening of The Forbidden Place and stop. I take survey: Four-poster mahogany bed covered by a patchwork quilt in reds and blues; antique mission-style dresser, cluttered with school papers, baseball cards, and a stack of Pogs; a Red Sox pennant from the 1986 season; framed poster of Roger Clemens; shelves filled with various trophies and awards; the blue chenille rug. It is all still there, frozen in time and place; a sad tableau of an interrupted life.
I want to go in there and rip the quilt from the bed, swipe my hand across the dusty dresser and send all of the junk to the floor; the floor that I wasn’t even good enough to play on. It’s a tricky thing, trying to measure up to a ghost.
My nails dig into my palms as I turn from the doorway and make my way further down the hall to my old bedroom.
Standing in the doorway, I peer inside; the first thing I notice is that all traces of me have been scrubbed from the room. The pale pink walls have been repainted an institutional gray. My pale yellow, Princess Anne curtains gone; in their place hang burgundy Roman shades that cast long shadows into the room. My furniture has been hauled away, replaced by a rolling hospital bed; a bed that holds what is left of my mother; beside it, a single upholstered wingback chair that I don’t recognize. A blanket has been carelessly flung on the bare wood floor. I think my father has been sleeping here.
I steel myself as I walk up to the side of the bed and stand over my mother’s frail body.
Standing around five-foot-five, my mother was average build, like me. Neither too fat nor too thin; neither too tall nor too short. Her shoulder length brown hair, a few shades darker than mine, hung straight to her shoulders. Her patrician nose, perfectly positioned for looking down at me, donned a smattering of freckles that would darken disobediently each summer, sending her into a frantic regimen of lemon juice and concealer, giving me an indication of how she must have certainly viewed my own freckled face. Her hands were strong and calloused from both working the front gardens that surrounded our tidy little house and from wringing them obsessively over the heartache of losing her only son: The Golden Child.
That woman is gone, replaced by this waif on a rented hospital bed.
Her head has been shaved, though not recently, as about an inch of downy blonde hair has sprouted across her pallid crown, bisected by an angry red gash that stretched from her left temple to just behind her ear. The scars from the since-removed staples are reminiscent of the stitches from one of Jake’s baseballs.
She has lost a significant amount of weight, her cheeks sunken, her mouth drawn, contorting her face into a caricature of a tortured apparition. The woman who spent the majority of my childhood venerating a ghost was turning into one before my eyes.
Slowly, I sink down into the chair. This is what I came here for. I will myself to feel something for this woman who lay dying before me. Sadness. A sense of loss. Pity. I sigh. I don’t feel any of those things. What I feel is closure. After so many years of chasing a memory that I barely possessed, I finally felt set free.
When people ask me what I am doing for my mother for Mother’s Day, I can respond with “oh, my mother has passed…” and attempt to look appropriately grieved when they inescapably gasp and respond with “oh my, I am so sorry!” Gone will be the days of enduring looks of horror when I tell people that I don’t speak to my mother, that we haven’t had a relationship for over a decade, as though I have committed some unholy atrocity. No longer will they feel compelled to tell me that I will surely regret it one day and urge me to “just make an effort.” Sometimes, there is no effort left to be made. You can’t change people.
My mother’s eyes flutter open and she slowly fixes her pale blue, glassy eyes upon me. I hold my breath. She says nothing. I see no recognition evident in her expression. I feel emboldened to speak.
“Hi Susan.”
She blinks twice and licks her lips. “Hello deah,” she responds in a clear voice, laced with a Maine drawl, deceptively robust against the backdrop of her gaunt visage.
I falter. Does she recognize me?
“Sorry, I can’t get up right now,” she quips, and chuckles at her joke; a raw, guttural noise that shakes her delicate frame. My chest pounds in union with the drum beat in my ears, keeping perfect time in a macabre rhythm of life and death.
“Are you a friend of Jake’s? He should be home soon…”
I feel dizzy and lightheaded. Her mind may be gone, but her soul remembers. I rise from the chair, pull my shoulders back, and look down at my mother. “Yes,” I reply. “I’m a friend of Jake’s. He asked me to tell you he will see you soon,” and, without another word, I turn and walk away.
My face starts to feel hot. My eyes are stinging as I blink furiously, willing them to draw back their tears. I’m on fire, burning from the inside out. There’s a keening noise in my ear and it takes me a moment to realize that the sound is coming from me. I’m standing on my parents’ rickety front porch, losing my grip. I shouldn’t have come here.
Breathe in. Breathe out. I draw myself up and allow anger to replace my weak bout with nostalgia. The slow simmer of resentment and indignation help to steal my resolve. I have to do this. I touch the front doorknob and pause. Do I walk in? Do I knock? I’m struck with the realization that this is no longer my home. I have become a stranger here. I sigh. I knock quietly.
“Hold on a minute,” a man’s voice calls from within the house. Loud and strong, with just a whisper of New England left on the vowels. “I’m coming.”
I suck in my breath. The blood is rushing through my ears so loudly that I wonder if he will be able to hear it. The door opens. He stands just shy of six feet tall. His once-black hair hair, dulled to silver, stands out disobediently in every direction, as though he’s been running his hands through it all day. His red-rimmed eyes register shock before quickly settling to an impassive gaze.
“Jess.” He says my name as though verifying who I am; that it is truly me standing here before him. I want to run. I shift my weight from one foot to the other and try to stop from wringing my hands. He blinks rapidly several times. His mouth hardens. “What do you need?”
My head moves slowly from side to side. I open my mouth to speak but no words come out. He waits patiently, looking increasingly more uncomfortable.
Finally I stammer “I-I-I… I wanted to see Ma. I thought… I mean, I heard…” I trail off because I don’t know how to phrase the words in such a way that doesn’t make me sound like the asshole that I am. My mother is dying and I came here to watch her go.
“Yeah, well… You’re too late,” my father tosses at me.
I blink and wait for the punch in the gut that I’m told that I’m supposed to feel. My brow deepens before he continues, “no, no. She isn’t gone yet. Not totally anyway,” and his shoulders slump a little as he heaves out a heavy sigh. Quietly he adds “but her mind is gone. She won’t know who you are.”
He looks off to the side, his mouth opening and closing as though he wants to say something else. He looks back at me sadly; almost tenderly. “Come in,” he says simply.
Stepping through the front door is like stepping back in time. In the living room, the once gleaming red oak floors have faded to a parched gray. Dusty, sun-bleached curtains frame the sagging windows at the front of the house, their little red rosebud print all but evaporated.
My eyes drift to the fireplace mantle, otherwise known as “The Shrine.” Photos of Jake cover every square inch of the red brick sill. Baby Jake. Toddler Jake. Kindergarten graduate Jake. Little League MVP Jake. High school prom Jake. Then the photos abruptly stop. One on end of the memorial ledge is a framed print of Jake’s obituary, and on the other, a mahogany urn containing his ashes. Jake-in-the-Box.
The old man sees the direction of my gaze and clears his throat. “She’s in the third bedroom.”
The third bedroom. My bedroom. It’s at the far end of the hall, past the master and the mausoleum. Of course they wouldn’t have disturbed the dead with more death. That would just be rude.
I turn away so that he doesn’t see the sour look on my face. I don’t want to be thrown out before I have the chance to do what I came here to do. I look toward the hall, motion with my head and raise my brow.
“Yeah. Go ahead,” he shrugs. “Like I said, she won’t even know who you are,” and he turns away from me and walks towards the fireplace, standing with his back to me, contemplating the photographs. I’m guessing he’s wishing those were my pictures up there and Jake was the one tracking dirt across the old wood floor.
As I start down the hallway, my eyes fixate on the open doorway of the second bedroom: The Forbidden Place. Ma caught me playing Barbie’s in there once. I had loved the soft feel of the blue chenille rug under my feet. It was a vast sea that stretched from the gateway of the Land of Hall and flowed under the South Post of Bed, a dark and cavernous abyss inhabited by the horrible Catkitten. If Captain Ken steered the Dream Boat too close to the void, the inky black tentacle would lash out, snaring it with its barbs. When Ma found me in there with my toys she started screaming and crying. I was never to go in there! Never ever! Out! Out now! Seven year old me didn’t understand why she wasn’t allowed to play in Jake’s room. He wasn’t using it anymore.
When some parents lose a child, it destroys their marriage. The loss of Jake seemed to bring mine even closer together; they joined forces to keep his memory alive. He had a place setting at the table at every meal. On Christmas, there were presents for him under the tree. We had a birthday party for him every year on his birthday.
Once, when I was 13, I asked Pop why we bothered lighting candles, since it’s not like Jake could blow them out. He sent me to my room and I wasn’t allowed to have any cake that day. Jake’s cake. Dead Jake. He wasn’t having any cake either, so at least there was that.
I approach the opening of The Forbidden Place and stop. I take survey: Four-poster mahogany bed covered by a patchwork quilt in reds and blues; antique mission-style dresser, cluttered with school papers, baseball cards, and a stack of Pogs; a Red Sox pennant from the 1986 season; framed poster of Roger Clemens; shelves filled with various trophies and awards; the blue chenille rug. It is all still there, frozen in time and place; a sad tableau of an interrupted life.
I want to go in there and rip the quilt from the bed, swipe my hand across the dusty dresser and send all of the junk to the floor; the floor that I wasn’t even good enough to play on. It’s a tricky thing, trying to measure up to a ghost.
My nails dig into my palms as I turn from the doorway and make my way further down the hall to my old bedroom.
Standing in the doorway, I peer inside; the first thing I notice is that all traces of me have been scrubbed from the room. The pale pink walls have been repainted an institutional gray. My pale yellow, Princess Anne curtains gone; in their place hang burgundy Roman shades that cast long shadows into the room. My furniture has been hauled away, replaced by a rolling hospital bed; a bed that holds what is left of my mother; beside it, a single upholstered wingback chair that I don’t recognize. A blanket has been carelessly flung on the bare wood floor. I think my father has been sleeping here.
I steel myself as I walk up to the side of the bed and stand over my mother’s frail body.
Standing around five-foot-five, my mother was average build, like me. Neither too fat nor too thin; neither too tall nor too short. Her shoulder length brown hair, a few shades darker than mine, hung straight to her shoulders. Her patrician nose, perfectly positioned for looking down at me, donned a smattering of freckles that would darken disobediently each summer, sending her into a frantic regimen of lemon juice and concealer, giving me an indication of how she must have certainly viewed my own freckled face. Her hands were strong and calloused from both working the front gardens that surrounded our tidy little house and from wringing them obsessively over the heartache of losing her only son: The Golden Child.
That woman is gone, replaced by this waif on a rented hospital bed.
Her head has been shaved, though not recently, as about an inch of downy blonde hair has sprouted across her pallid crown, bisected by an angry red gash that stretched from her left temple to just behind her ear. The scars from the since-removed staples are reminiscent of the stitches from one of Jake’s baseballs.
She has lost a significant amount of weight, her cheeks sunken, her mouth drawn, contorting her face into a caricature of a tortured apparition. The woman who spent the majority of my childhood venerating a ghost was turning into one before my eyes.
Slowly, I sink down into the chair. This is what I came here for. I will myself to feel something for this woman who lay dying before me. Sadness. A sense of loss. Pity. I sigh. I don’t feel any of those things. What I feel is closure. After so many years of chasing a memory that I barely possessed, I finally felt set free.
When people ask me what I am doing for my mother for Mother’s Day, I can respond with “oh, my mother has passed…” and attempt to look appropriately grieved when they inescapably gasp and respond with “oh my, I am so sorry!” Gone will be the days of enduring looks of horror when I tell people that I don’t speak to my mother, that we haven’t had a relationship for over a decade, as though I have committed some unholy atrocity. No longer will they feel compelled to tell me that I will surely regret it one day and urge me to “just make an effort.” Sometimes, there is no effort left to be made. You can’t change people.
My mother’s eyes flutter open and she slowly fixes her pale blue, glassy eyes upon me. I hold my breath. She says nothing. I see no recognition evident in her expression. I feel emboldened to speak.
“Hi Susan.”
She blinks twice and licks her lips. “Hello deah,” she responds in a clear voice, laced with a Maine drawl, deceptively robust against the backdrop of her gaunt visage.
I falter. Does she recognize me?
“Sorry, I can’t get up right now,” she quips, and chuckles at her joke; a raw, guttural noise that shakes her delicate frame. My chest pounds in union with the drum beat in my ears, keeping perfect time in a macabre rhythm of life and death.
“Are you a friend of Jake’s? He should be home soon…”
I feel dizzy and lightheaded. Her mind may be gone, but her soul remembers. I rise from the chair, pull my shoulders back, and look down at my mother. “Yes,” I reply. “I’m a friend of Jake’s. He asked me to tell you he will see you soon,” and, without another word, I turn and walk away.