This Is Home

by Lisa Duffy

  Today, we’re supposed to scrape off the old paint in the entryway of the house and apply a fresh coat. Desiree is only here because she’s not paying rent, and Lucy suggested this would be a good way to chip in.

  But so far, all we’ve done is listen to Lucy tell us that the staircase is facing the front door—a feng shui disaster that’s affecting our well-being.

  Awful chi energy, she kept repeating under her breath until Desiree told her that the staircase had been that way forever and that if Lucy said chi one more time, Desiree was going to smash the glass in the front door with Lucy’s head.

  So we moved on to paint, and now we’re stuck again.

  There are three brushstrokes lined up in a row on the wall, and Lucy’s not sure about any of them.

  She keeps glancing over at me and back at the wall, as if I might be able to help her decide, but it’s so hot that all I can think about is the bead of sweat rolling down my neck.

  Desiree stomps in from outside, smelling of cigarettes, and stands next to Lucy. She says smoking calms her down, but I can feel her anger pulsing through the room, and as usual, Lucy ignores her. She either doesn’t care or she’s so used to Desiree’s temper she doesn’t notice it anymore.

  “What about that one?” Lucy asks, pointing to the color on the left.

  “They all look fine to me,” Desiree snaps. “It’s brown. In a hallway. Who gives a shit?”

  “It’s not brown. It’s ecru. There’s a difference.” Lucy answers serenely, lost in the colors on the wall, as though Desiree isn’t about to annihilate her.

  “Which one makes you feel peaceful?” Lucy asks us both.

  “Don’t ask us,” Desiree says. “You’re the feng shit expert.”

  “Feng shui,” I correct, and Desiree glares at me.

  My stomach growls, and Lucy breaks out of her paint trance.

  “I thought you made breakfast,” she says to Desiree.

  “I did. And she ate. Tell her you ate.”

  “I ate,” I say.

  I don’t mention that breakfast was egg whites sprinkled with some sort of brown seed mixed in that I tried to slip to Rooster Cogburn under the table and even he wouldn’t eat it.

  “I’m sixteen,” I tell them. “I can make my own breakfast anyway.”

  “Preaching to the choir,” Desiree mutters, and this makes Lucy put her arm around my shoulders.

  “Of course, you can,” she says in a soothing voice. “We know that you can. It’s just nice to eat with someone.” She says this the way only Lucy can say such things—so sweet and nice that you have no choice but to feel bad about being the jerk who gets mad about someone making you breakfast.

  “Her stomach is growling because it’s lunchtime. You managed to waste an entire morning on a staircase that can’t be moved and paint that all looks the same.”

  Lucy ignores Desiree, and suddenly the front door opens, and a woman steps through the doorway. It takes me a minute to register that it’s the serial killer who’s just moved in.

  She freezes, looks from me to Lucy to Desiree, apparently as surprised to see us as we are to see her.

  The front door is wide open and the light behind her is blinding. I blink, and my eyes focus on the oversize black sweatshirt she’s wearing, so large she’s swimming in it, the hem almost touching her knees, only a sliver of shorts peeking out, and then just her thin, white legs.

  I take a step away from her, bumping into Desiree and stepping on her foot by accident.

  Desiree scowls and elbows me, her bony arm digging into my side, but before anyone says anything, there is chaos in the hallway.

  Two small boys are chasing each other. Arms and legs and the smell of vomit surround us. One swings a plastic golf club and it whizzes by Desiree’s head, so close a puff of her hair flies up.

  The serial killer’s eyes go wide, and she rushes to her front door, puts the key in, and pushes it open.

  “Boys!” she yells. “Go inside!”

  The boys tumble through the doorway and out of sight, disappearing around the corner, taking the noise with them.

  Lucy, Desiree, and I haven’t moved, and if the serial killer wasn’t still standing in front of me, I might think I dreamed the whole thing. I glance at Desiree, who looks back at me, then down at her foot, her big toe bright red in her flip-flop.

  “Quinn,” Lucy greets. “Are you getting settled?”

  “I’m so sorry,” the serial killer named Quinn gushes. “He didn’t get you with the club, did he?” she asks Desiree.

  “She’s fine,” Lucy insists, and Desiree gives Lucy a look that makes me take a step away from her. “My gosh, you’re making me sweat,” Lucy adds, eyeing the sweatshirt.

  “I got sick, and some of it got on my T-shirt. This is the only thing I had in my car,” Quinn says. “I wouldn’t normally bring them here, but we were at the park—”

  “Oh, well go change,” Lucy interrupts, taking her by the arm and guiding her into her own apartment. “Come,” she says over her shoulder to me and Desiree. “We can watch the boys while she washes up.”

  And then they’re gone, around a corner into another room.

  “Go,” Desiree says. “I hate kids.”

  “You hate everyone,” I tell her, and she shrugs, like I have a point. “I don’t want to go in there either. Why are we getting in the middle of this?”

  Desiree snorts. “Because Lucy can’t help herself. Ever since your father showed up with that girl, Lucy’s been snooping around. Wouldn’t surprise me if she went through the trash barrels outside. Nosy as all fuck.”

  “Bent brought her here?”

  Desiree squints at me. “You didn’t notice him moving her in? Carrying boxes? Hello?”

  “I thought he was just being nice. Like helping the new tenant type of thing.”

  Desiree nods, as though she can see why I might think that. We have a ninety-seven-pound dog upstairs that proves Bent can’t say no to anyone.

  “How does he know her?” I ask Desiree.

  But she’s already stomping upstairs, leaving me alone in the empty hallway, surrounded by the bad chi from the staircase and the smell of vomit and the paint on the wall that looks to me like dirty brown stains.

  The last thing I want to do is go inside, but I hear Lucy’s voice, and I know it’s only a matter of time before she comes looking for me and finds me standing here in the hallway, doing nothing.

  I walk through the doorway, and the first thing I see, the only thing I see, is moving boxes. Stacked against the wall and still taped shut, as though she hasn’t been living here almost a week.

  The living room has the same built-in hutch as ours, and when I pass it, I see a picture frame on the shelf. There are voices coming from the back of the house, at least a room away, and I grab the frame, bring it close to my face.

  It’s a picture of two guys dressed in army uniforms, somewhere in the desert.

  One guy is leaning against a tank with his helmet in his hand. He’s young, maybe in his twenties, tanned and blond, with a face that Desiree would say is movie star material.

  Only his profile appears because he’s looking at the other guy, who’s lying on his back, legs crossed, a cigar in his mouth, winking at the camera, as though he’s on a beach in the tropics instead of a war zone. I squint and bring the picture closer, and that’s when I recognize him.

  The other guy—the one the movie star material is staring at—is Bent.

  It’s a minute before I realize I’m holding my breath. The memories of when Bent was gone turning my stomach inside out.

  Five years ago, Bent went overseas with his Guard unit. It was supposed to be for a year, but he got hurt and came home early.

  I’d slashed each day he was gone with a blue marker on the calendar in my room. Blue because Bent does a spot-on impression of Elvis Presley singing “Blue Christmas”—like if you close your eyes, Elvis is right in front of you—and it’s impossible to see the color blue and not think of t
hat, and when I do, it’s also impossible to be sad. And I needed every reason to not be sad when Bent left.

  When he came home early, I didn’t flinch one bit at the scar on his head—if I could have thanked it, I would have. It brought him back to me. Maybe a little different—thinner and a little bit deaf depending on where you were standing when you talked to him. But otherwise, the same old Bent.

  But he hadn’t been home long before my mother took off.

  I don’t think his bags were all the way unpacked when my mother told him she was leaving. A girls’ trip was how she put it.

  She was the one who had been on duty while my father was overseas. She needed a break, she kept repeating. And from my bedroom, I remember wanting to ask—a break from what?

  She flew south, to sunnier skies and warm weather, and told us she’d be gone a couple of days—a week at the most.

  A week became two, then three. Then a month passed.

  My mother and I talked on the phone once or twice a week, and she’d give me an excuse, explain why she needed to stay longer—her friend needed help moving to a new apartment or there was the threat of a tropical storm and she didn’t want to fly in that kind of weather, a breeziness to her voice that should have been reassuring.

  Except we lived in a two-bedroom house with thin walls. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t hear my father shout into the phone one night—I’m not talking about me . . . don’t do this to her.

  I didn’t tell my father I was happy she was gone. That the air in the house was easier to breathe after she left. No more of her mood swings. No more coming home to one of her “bad days” when she’d lock herself in her bedroom all night or sit at the table with a blank look on her face, staring at the wall.

  Maybe her vacation would help. Maybe a break was all she really needed.

  The weeks passed and Bent and I settled into life together. Just us. He wasn’t back to work yet, still recovering, getting stronger day by day.

  Then I started getting headaches—migraines that had me lying in the dark, afraid to move. Bent would sit next to my bed, ask me what he could do. I’d ask him to talk—his voice helped block out the throbbing. He’d tell me about the guys in his unit. Or what it’s like to fly in a helicopter. Sometimes he’d go back in time, tell me what it was like when he first joined the Guard, before I was born. How back then nobody ever dreamed they’d be on the front lines of a war so far away from home.

  My mother came home finally, months later, and I know Bent hoped it was because she missed us.

  But she’d found a lump in her armpit down in Florida. So, it was really the cancer that brought her back. Except that she never really came back. Not in her heart at least, where it mattered. Her body was with us, but she just walked around like a ghost. Like she was already gone.

  After she died, people would say things to me like I’m sorry you lost your mother or Cancer doesn’t seem to care who it takes.

  And in my mind, I’d think, dying isn’t the only way someone disappears.

   4

  Quinn

  Quinn hadn’t expected guests.

  When she’d opened the door, the twins ran in and stopped in her bedroom. Quinn found them jumping on her mattress, and by the time she had them off the bed and settled down, Lucy and the girl were in the doorway, staring at the mess—Quinn’s suitcase in the corner, spilling over, her underwear inside out in her pajamas from when she’d pulled them off early this morning, late for work and desperate to get dressed as fast as possible.

  There is a stained mattress on the floor, a worn sheet in a ball at the foot of the bed. Cardboard moving boxes line the walls, some marked: shoes, books, toiletries. The one at Quinn’s foot reveals a bra stuffed into a small wicker wastebasket, a frying pan, spice containers piled haphazardly on top of one another.

  The sign of someone who packed hastily. Without care.

  Lucy is politely pretending she doesn’t notice, rounding up the boys, telling them she has a treat for them upstairs.

  But the girl stands awkwardly in the doorway, shyly glancing around. Quinn feels her cheeks color, unprepared to explain why she’s been in this house almost a full week and the only things she’s unpacked are her toiletry bag in the bathroom, a single towel, and the picture frame in the other room that she dug out only to show Bent.

  The bed frame piled in the corner is hidden behind boxes, and Quinn wonders if they think she sleeps like this normally. The stained mattress thrown on the floor as though she’s some sort of squatter. A vagrant.

  “I wasn’t feeling well, so I didn’t unpack yet. . . .” Quinn trails off.

  The girl looks at her and gives a slow shrug, and Quinn wishes she didn’t feel the need to explain—Lucy and the girl are in Quinn’s apartment, uninvited after all.

  But still, Quinn wants to tell them—this is not who I am. This is not me.

  “It’s better to take your time unpacking anyway,” Lucy chirps, as though reading Quinn’s mind.

  Lucy gives her an encouraging smile. Quinn can’t tell if she’s just being nice or genuine.

  “Don’t rush getting cleaned up. I’m kidnapping these two ducklings for a treat. We’ll be on the third floor. Just come up when you’re ready. Let’s go, Libs! Choo, choo! Follow the train, ducks! We’re moving,” Lucy sings as she leads the boys to the back stairway in the hall.

  The girl follows sullenly behind, and she glances back at Quinn before she shuts the door, and the expression on the girl’s face is unmistakable—if looks could kill, Quinn would be dead on the floor.

  The door clicks shut when Quinn feels a lump form in her throat, and suddenly the room spins, and she barely makes it to the bathroom before she vomits again, the ginger ale she drank earlier to settle her stomach splashing into the toilet bowl.

  She sits on the edge of the tub, reaches over to the sink, and turns on the water. Her single towel hangs on the shower rod above, and she pulls it down, holds a corner of it under the faucet, and presses the wet towel to her face.

  She washes off quickly, feeling a panic rise inside of her that she’s left the twins with complete strangers.

  Madeline will be upset if she finds out—she doesn’t like any changes to the twins’ routine—and Quinn hopes the boys won’t mention it to her. But it’s likely they will—their days rarely include something outside of the schedule Madeline has dictated.

  Preschool in the morning, followed by fifteen minutes of playground time. Lunch and a nap from one thirty to two thirty. The afternoon is tumble-time at the gym or reading at the library, depending on the day, then bath time, dinner, and Madeline is home at six o’clock (never a minute before) to spend an hour with her sons before their bedtime.

  Madeline had the twins exactly one week before she turned forty, pregnant by an anonymous donor, and now the twins are almost five, and Quinn can’t remember a single weekday that Madeline has not gone to work. She doesn’t take sick days—and Quinn has witnessed days when Madeline should have been in bed—and she doesn’t deviate from the schedule. Ever.

  Their life seems to exist as a complicated sentence, the twins parentheses in Madeline’s meticulously arranged life of speaking engagements, conferences, and whatever else went into being Boston’s premier research scientist. The one and only Dr. Madeline Lawson.

  But today Quinn is lucky. It’s Wednesday—Madeline’s late night, and the overnight nanny will relieve Quinn after dinner.

  And by tomorrow night, when they see Madeline for the first time in two days, this quick stop at Quinn’s new apartment, with any luck, will be forgotten, and Quinn won’t have to explain why she altered the twins’ routine.

  Still, Quinn rushes, and she is dressed and on the landing of the third floor less than ten minutes later.

  The door is open, but Quinn sticks her head in, calls out a hello.

  “Back here!” she hears Lucy say.

  Quinn walks in and glances around. The floor plan is the same as Quinn’s, yet the two apartmen
ts look nothing alike. Here, there is light and openness. Soothing colors on the walls, and furniture placed just so, giving the impression that the room is much larger than it is.

  There is a couch across from where she is standing. Sunlight from the window washes over the plaid cushions—the same pattern as the hand-me-down couch in her and John’s apartment when they were newly married. They’d had it in their living room only one week before the fabric on the cushions split wide open, bits of stuffing falling on the floor every time they sat on it. John had finally hauled it downstairs to the sidewalk and put a Free sign on it.

  For a moment, she is back on that couch with John. Stretched out with her feet in his lap on the first night in their duplex.

  They’d ordered pizza, and John had pushed boxes together as a makeshift coffee table. She was lighting a candle when John came up behind her, put his arms around her waist, whispered first things first, and kissed the side of her neck.

  They’d made love on the couch, the pizza box unopened in front of them. By the time they were ready to eat, the pizza was cold, and John had given Quinn a sheepish look, told her that now that she was eating for two, maybe dinner should have come first. She’d laughed and corrected him.

  Three, she’d said. I’m eating for three.

  She still remembers the look on his face. How his eyes had filled, and he’d brought her close, kissed her temple and let his lips linger, breathing her in. As if she were the most intoxicating thing on this earth.

  Quinn would do anything to stay inside of that memory, peel it open as though it were a Polaroid picture that she might step into. To go back in time, before she lost the babies. Before John deployed. Before he came home a different man. She has an unbearable desire to lie down, curl up on the couch, close her eyes, and stay in that memory.

  But she hears the boys in the other room, and she is reminded that she is in charge today. The paid caretaker.

  And she’s no longer the most intoxicating thing on this earth to anyone—she’s not even sure she’s a wife anymore.

  Can you be a wife when your husband has vanished?