I let my mind wander, thinking about our few family trips to the rapids. The days always started so full of hope, ending with Dad passed out in the backseat. One or more of the kids would hold a cold beer on whatever fresh bruise he handed out that day. I rubbed my arm, remembering the rock he had shoved me into, the gash, and the monster purple, swollen skin that soon followed. If I trailed my finger along my upper arm long enough, I could imagine I felt a scar.
I crept along through three red lights until it was my turn at the front of the line. My stomach cramped as I realized which intersection the light had been installed at. I forced myself to look to the right and see if the old garage was there.
Maybe half a block away, a worn down building glared tiredly at the traffic from its perch against the base of a green hill. Dieter and Sons in stenciled faded black rested over the open bay door.
Strange to think there had been a time Jordan Dieter was one of us, blending into the Zebenfaiger brood, like he was made up of our blood. Even more so when his father decided there was something wrong with him.
His father’s favorite phrase had been, “No son of mine!” Like he was a soap opera villain.
A man who rivaled Dad in contempt for his own children, I remembered Mr. Dieter with his angry scowl and a raised fist. There had been a quieter time under those memories, but after Jordan’s mom and little sister died, easy days were gone for them.
A horn blared, and I jumped, turning my focus back on the road and the green light. I pushed down on the gas, ignoring the cars peeling around me as I inched back up to forty-five.
I pushed away thoughts of Jordan as I turned off the highway and maneuvered down the familiar roads to Dad’s house. Winding and turning through the woods, up and down through the hills was a meditative exercise. The houses became fewer and further between until the only evidence of their existence visible from the road were mailboxes and driveways disappearing into dense forest. Fairy tales dreams, just like when I’d been a kid, chased the car. What lay behind each tree?
Twenty miles outside of the useful part of town, isolation was felt by everyone who lived on the mountain. In fact, when we were kids we felt like the mountain belonged to us. Tall, imposing and seen from almost anywhere in the whole town, Mount Poena was entirely privately owned. The mountain was broken into ten chunks of land belonging to families going back over a hundred years. It was always the greenest mountain; no logging or thinning had taken place on Poena, except where the few homes had been built.
Lucky enough to be the oldest of his six sisters, Dad got the land when his childless uncle died, just in time to marry Mama and move her out here. Mama gave birth to Todd the day after they signed the deed on the land, starting their own tribe.
The split in the road that led to our driveway loomed ahead. Goosebumps rose on my arms and I drove around the bend. The anxiety in my stomach made me feel right at home.
The road faded from paved to gravel and narrowed as I approached the house. Brush had grown over the edges of the driveway, scratching down the sides of the car. A thin branch dragged over the windshield and then through the open window, slapping me across the lip.
“Sonofabitch.” I tasted blood at the corner of my mouth. Back a few hours and already getting slapped around. The same reason I left home. Oregon did not miss me at all.
The cruel bitch.
I pulled up in between the house and Dad’s workshop at the roundabout in the driveway, took a deep breath and looked at the house. It was two stories if you counted the attic the boys used as a large bedroom. The outside used to be a deep pine green, and some of the slats still held their color between faded green. The shingles on the roof were torn and faded, and probably all needed to be replaced.
Resting on an old concrete foundation, the house sat up off the ground a few feet, looking unsteady in its old age. The second step was missing from the set of five steps leading up to the screened-in back porch. At second glance, the screen was also missing from the porch.
At least it looked like all the windows were still intact on that side except for one in the attic, covered up by particleboard.
Historical, with parts of the house over a hundred years old, had been breathtaking and ethereal once upon a time. Aunt Dee said it was like we brought a sickness to the house when we moved in, draining the energy and life from the wooden slats and screens.
I looked away, already defeated. It was worse than I thought it would be, and I didn’t understand how everyone expected me to sell it. Who would buy a house that looked like...
If I was running from an ax murderer in the forest and happened upon this house to hide in, I’d keep going.
My eyes ran over Aunt Dee’s vegetable garden down by the path into the woods. It looked like a few plants still thrived in the raised bed, and might be worth a look later that day.
Behind the garden was the forest, a living and dark thing, even in the afternoon sunlight. It’s hard to believe I used to roam it at all hours of the night with Jordan, Angela and our brothers. We weren’t afraid of bears, cougars or anything else that could hide in the shadow of a boulder or large tree. The darkness seeped out of the woods and onto the path towards the house. Despite the heat I shivered; feeling as though an ice-cold finger had just trailed across my shoulders.
“Time to go inside,” I said, turning back to the house and slamming the car door shut.
A movement in an attic window stopped me in my tracks. The curtain lifted. A figure appeared, leaning forward, the light catching her face just for a moment. I backed into the side view mirror, hurting my hip.
I have weird, tiny and broken memories of her, almost non-existent. Then the stories my subconscious made up in my sleep about her life. I didn’t know her though. Not really. But I saw pieces of her in the mirror every day and have leafed through her pictures enough times to know that face anywhere.
“Mama?”
CHAPTER FOUR
“Hello?” I timidly called out, pulling the squeaky screen door open and sticking my head into the kitchen. I wanted to call out for Mama, but the thought of saying her name out loud made the surrounding air thin. I gripped the metal handle in my palm and took a deep breath. “I saw you in the window and—”
A woman with comical pink lipstick appeared in the doorway to the living room, too young to be Mama. Maybe ten years older than me, with my same dirty blond hair and brown eyes. But she had curves and a full figure, my bones pointed out at angular intervals. Her tan peasant skirt flowed as she moved into the kitchen and she extended her arms.
Before I could back out the door, she enveloped me in a hug, dragging me the rest of the way into the house. She squealed and shimmied.
“You’re so damn skinny,” she said, pushing me back at arm’s length. An overpowering smell of cream and berries surrounded her. “And what happened to your lip? It’s bleeding.”
I fixed her with an awkward smile before I touched my lip and remembered the branch. “Uh.”
“Let me fetch us a rag,” she said, pulling drawers open, slamming them shut when a quick rustle didn’t turn up what she wanted. “Nothing ever organized, is it? Or, it’ll be there until I need it, then probably show up in my...” I picked up on her Southern accent, as she trailed off and reached into her skirt pockets. She pulled out a washcloth. “Well, wouldn’t ya know it? Family curse be damned! Maybe things’ll start looking up now that little Meg is here.”
She brought the cloth over to the sink and soaked it, talking about how famished I must be. And how was my trip? And did I think I was okay to stay in the woods all alone? She reached to wipe my face, and I grabbed the washcloth from her hand, giving it a once over before dabbing at the corner of my lip. She said, “Oh, look at me fussing. You’re probably wondering who the heck I am.”
“It had crossed my mind.” I backed into the screen door.
“Cecelia.” An expecting smile sat on her face. “We’re cousins on your Mama’s side.”
“I didn
’t know Mama had any relatives.” Her resemblance to Mama was eerie, like being inside a living dream smack in the middle of the kitchen. The whole day already held a dreamlike fog around me, the room frozen in time from the day I moved out. Her appearance only increased my unease. A living time capsule. The one thing that seemed new was the year on the Tractor Supply calendar; even that was a few years behind.
Cecelia nodded like a bobble head. “Aren’t too many left, but you’re one of us.”
“Oh.”
She laughed and put her arms out in front of her, marching in a circle and chanting in a robotic voice, “one of us, one of us.”
All right. She was crazy and uncomfortable to watch. I busied myself looking around the room to see where the changes hid, and what was familiar.
I ran a finger along the built-in shelf beside the table; Aunt Dee’s collection of vintage food tins still adorned the wall. The lime green refrigerator with a big dent in the door whirred in the corner. The missing burner had not been replaced on the yellow stove. A plastic doll head melted to metal when I was eight; Aunt Dee tore the burner out of the stove and tossed it right over the porch into a bush. It became part of the scenery by the following summer, flowers and weeds growing and tangling through the spiral.
The only things out of the ordinary were the stacks of newspapers on the counter corners, and this woman who looked like someone had taken Mama’s photograph and injected life, or a whole lot of chicken grease, into her. She laughed at her marching joke and dropped her arms.
“You live here? In Cedar Valley?” I asked.
She nodded, losing some of the vacancy behind her eyes. “Moved up two springs back from Georgia. Came to meet your mama and give her some things mine wanted her to have. We sold the trailer after their Dad, Pappy, died.”
“Two springs ago?” I asked, absently picking up a tin and turning it around in my hands. She nodded. “Pappy?”
She nodded again. “Brought some trinkets I thought she would like this way, ‘cause Mama and I didn’t have the space for everything. I was so sad to hear she left ya’ll, but I fell in love with the town soon as I set foot in it.”
“I didn’t know.” My eyebrows scrunched close together. “No one ever told us her dad was still alive.”
Pappy? A grandfather? Then again, Mama wasn’t around to mention them. I remembered asking Aunt Dee once about where they had come from, the people they left behind. She said everyone they loved in West Virginia were gone. I set the tin down. “You came all the way here to see my mom? She ran off twenty years ago.”
“I didn’t know it then.” She opened the refrigerator and made a face before slamming the door. “We gotta get you to the market.”
“You didn’t call ahead first?” I asked, leaning against the counter. “We might’ve moved or something.”
“Your daddy didn’t have a phone no more, and all our letters kept coming back. But Mama said something was wrong with the return to sender writing, she was sure of it. Well,” she looked around and lowered her voice, and I wondered if someone else was in the house, “Mama never did like your daddy. Kept saying she didn’t trust him to give her the letters.”
“Why didn’t she ever try and visit? Mama moved out here like thirty years ago. Longer. All that time, she never came to see her sister?”
Cecelia looked sad, but only for a second. “Mama’s too proud. And they had bitterness between each other when your mama left. Anyway, I simply love to travel, and I said I should come out to see how she was. Just between you and me, I was gonna see if I couldn’t get Geraldine — I mean, your mama — to come back and visit us back home for a minute. Then maybe just keep her there. Wasn’t ‘til I got here that I found out about... Well, about what she done to you youngins. Skipping town and leaving you alone without a mama. Really wasn’t too much a surprise. Mama told me how she could be.” She shook her head. What did that mean? “But your Dad was nice as could be. He introduced me to folks down at the church.” The church? “Now I got a job, a cute trailer, and a real nice fella who works for the logging company.”
“I thought all the logging companies closed.”
“We got some, just more pesky regulations,” she said with an irritated wave of her hand. She stopped fidgeting and gasped, covering her mouth. “I forgot to tell you — listen to me; just going on and on.” She walked over and sandwiched my hand in hers. “Meg, dear, I’m so sorry for your loss.”
It took me a minute to figure it out; she was talking about Dad. Dad was dead, and people were going to be oh so sorry for my loss.
I attempted to edge past her to the living room, but she kept talking away, and not moving out of the doorway.
How lucky I was to have a Dad like him, taking care of me after Mama left. How much she loved the old house and wanted to get it aired out for my arrival tomorrow. One of her hair clients at the nursing home was the grandmother of the real estate agent. And don’t that whole family love to gossip? Hmm. Only it was funny because I came today. She must have looked at the calendar wrong. And wasn’t it funny how much we looked alike? Did I have a game plan for cleaning out the house? What about plans for the hutch in the living room? And what about Aunt Dee’s ceramic angels? She always loved them. If I didn’t want them, she would gladly pay me for them.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with anything yet,” I said when she paused to breathe. I didn’t know what state the rest of the house was in, let alone what I would do with all the stuff. And I sure didn’t remember any angels. They might be worth something, no way I was going to hand them off to this stranger the day I met her.
“Well, you keep me in mind on those angels. I’d love for you to say I could have them.”
I took a deep breath as my stomach growled and my throat made a gurgling sound. A day had passed since anything but orange soda and cigarettes went into my body, and I lost most of my calories on the bus floor. Walking over to the refrigerator, I remembered her reaction when she looked inside, changed my mind and opened the pantry instead, satisfied to find a few boxes of dried goods. But more importantly, the floor was covered with stacks and stacks of canned fruits and vegetables from the garden. The labels were new
“Your Dad taught me how to can last fall.”
“Rodney.” I opened a box of chicken flavored crackers and sat down. “I haven’t thought of him as Dad in a very long time.” The lie slid off of my tongue with ease. I had enough practice; it sounded like the truth to everyone. I tried for many years to call him Rodney, but it never stuck.
Cecelia could keep a one-sided conversation going like a hyper Avon saleswoman, blabbing on about this person or the next, mostly friends of hers who remembered me from school. Other people mistaking us for the same person. At first, I contributed to our chat as she called it — but chats require at least two people — with appropriate facial expressions and little disagreeable noises here and there. It wasn’t long before I realized she didn’t need a response from me to be satisfied, and I let my mind drift away from the conversation.
I was leafing through a stack of papers on the table and looking for the phone book when she said his name, snapping me back.
“I’m sorry, Jordan?” My vision went cloudy at the edges for a second, and I took a deep breath and memories flooded in with the gulp of air. A ruined friendship. I needed Cecelia to talk again. Yammer on like she had been doing. Cover the memories of chants, crying and screaming for help. My heart felt more full of sadness than it had in years. “I don’t remember—”
“Dieter. Runs the auto shop on Sycamore Highway with his brother,” she said, and my dropped jaw betrayed me.
“Runs the garage?”
Jordan and I were going to move to France when we finished high school. He wanted to be an artist, and I was going to be a singer. That had been the plan since kindergarten, no matter he couldn’t draw a recognizable stick figure, and I never could sing in more than the one key. Off.
“They’re such nice boys,”
she said, as though they were children. When I left Oregon, Jordan’s brother would have been the age I am now. “First time I met Jordan, his eyes were traveling all over me. Thought he was secure with himself for sure, not my usual type, but I might give him a try.” She winked, and I bit my tongue. “Turned out, he thought I was you for a second. A ‘learned how to eat since you been gone’ version of you.”
A hairy brown spider crawled fast from under the stove. I stepped back, squelching my instinct to hop on a chair. Cecelia stomped on it before it got far, like she had been waiting on him to run out. She smiled and grabbed a roll of paper towels from the counter. “Then when I heard how close you two were growing up, I was sure ya’ll had something going on.”
“No,” I said, watching her pick the flattened spider off the floor with a single paper towel and drop it in the trash. Jordan. There was a confusing time in sixth grade when I fell in love with him. But after a year of continual heartbreak, and then finally, acceptance, I never entertained those feelings again.
“No, guess not.” She looked at me like she held a secret under her tongue. “Anyways, I seen him out on a date one night, and that’s how I figured out we weren’t his type.”
“Good, I’m glad he’s dating.” We might have a good mash of hippie and acceptance culture here. But just like every town, for each coexist bumper sticker spotted, on the next street would be at least a half dozen ignorant Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve bumper stickers. Even in this town, bigots abound. I might not have been home in ten years, but with Facebook I didn’t miss a lot.
Going Home (Cedar Valley Hauntings Book 1) Page 3
