by Edie Claire
She couldn’t even see the house.
She stole a glance at Adam. He looked as horrified as she felt.
"I was expecting as much," she lied, keeping her voice steady. "My uncle kept telling me not to worry about upkeep, that he was taking care of it. But I always suspected he wasn’t spending a dime on the place."
Adam was quiet for a few seconds, apparently having to concentrate to discern drive from non-drive. "Your uncle sounds like a real piece of work."
"Indeed," she agreed. So he thought the man was certifiable. What did it matter, so long as he didn’t think she was?
"How far back is the house?" he asked, straining to see over the horizon of seed pods that capped the towering weeds.
"It shouldn’t be much farther now," she assured, not having a clue. Nothing in this mess seemed familiar. She could be anywhere.
She wished she was.
"There," he announced finally, looking ahead. "I think I see it."
"Just keep following the drive," she instructed, still not seeing anything. "It will fork right in front of the garage; you can park there. The house itself will be off to the left."
When a small wooden building rose up before them, she hardly recognized it. Clapboard walls once painted white had peeled to a dirty gray. The whole lower right quadrant of the garage door was gone. The window in the storage loft held only shards of glass.
Adam parked the car and gazed out the driver’s side window without speaking.
Sarah cleared her throat. The reaction she had feared had begun. Her heart was in overdrive. Her hands were sweating. A heavy weight descended onto her shoulders; her stomach burned.
You’re going to take this in stride, she commanded. You’re going to keep Adam talking, and you’re going to pretend it’s no big deal.
"What a mess!" she exclaimed, opening her door and hopping out. "Don’t get me wrong, this was never a show place, but it’s amazing what a few years of neglect will do, isn’t it? Maybe you’d better not look when we get to the house—it could be a real disaster."
Adam stepped out of the car. Her chatter hadn’t elicited a smile. His face looked grave.
Her eyes drifted over his shoulder.
She could see the second story of the house behind him. Every inch of paint was peeling. Half the window panes were broken. The other half were gone.
You can do this.
"Amazing," she repeated tonelessly. "The attorney I hired to deal with the eminent domain told me the place had been vandalized—he didn’t say to what extent."
Adam made no comment.
She put one foot in front of the other. She marched up what had been the front walk, pushing weeds out of her face as she moved. She could hear him following her. She reminded herself of her plan.
"Where did you live when you were little?" she asked. "What kind of house? Were you born in Pittsburgh?"
It took him a few seconds to answer, but when he did the very sound of his voice, with its alien northern timbre, reassured her. He was real. He was of the present. So was she.
"I was born in Slippery Rock, but I went to school in Plum, not far from your library. We had a typical Pittsburgh house; two stories and a basement, steep yard. My brother and I would have killed for a big flat area like this—it would have been great for football."
She almost grinned. The man was made of tact. "I suppose it would work better if it was mowed first."
"For football, yes. But I wouldn’t be so quick to cut these weeds if I were ten. They’d make for one wicked game of capture the flag."
The playful tone in his voice soothed her further, and she imagined that her pulse was slowing. She wasn’t alone, and she wasn’t seventeen years old. Everything would be fine.
She reached the front steps. She climbed them. An empty chip bag crunched under her foot. She took a deep breath and looked around.
Trash was everywhere. The floor of the wrap-around porch was littered with cans and bottles of every description, rumpled grocery sacks, fast-food take-out containers, and cigarette butts. Chunks of porch rail had broken off and were lying in the weeds. The adjoining windows were covered with plywood. The plywood was covered with graffiti.
She remembered having the windows boarded up. She had received a few angry letters from the county—something about a hazard or a nuisance—and she had hired somebody to seal the place tight. But she had no idea, now, how long ago that was.
She directed her eyes straight ahead. It didn’t matter what was on the porch. There was nothing here she wanted. All she had to do was look for the storage chest in her parents’ room. Then she could look for her father’s paintings in the attic. She didn’t have to go into her room. She wouldn’t go into Dee’s. She could walk through the living room and pretend it was nothing more than a hallway. And then she would turn around and leave.
As simple as that.
She fitted her keys in the locks. She pushed open the door.
It stuck at first, then swung forward on stiff hinges, releasing a cloud of dust from its swollen frame. Don’t look. Just go to the master bedroom.
Keeping her eyes on the floor, she stepped forward.
The room was lit only by the sunlight pouring in from the open door. But that amount of light proved plenty.
The floor was covered with every kind of refuse imaginable. Beer bottles. Pop cans. Candy wrappers. Pieces of cloth. Pieces of wood. Pieces of things she couldn’t identify. She couldn’t help herself. She raised her eyes.
The living room, and what she could see of the dining room and kitchen, was unrecognizable. The furniture she remembered was gone. The recliners. The couch. Every stick of the entertainment center. The floor rug. The paintings on the walls. The dining room set. Only the heaviest, most oversized pieces remained—the china cabinet, the buffet. The only ones, she thought with repulsion, that couldn’t be lifted through a smashed-out window.
She returned her eyes to the floor. Nausea overtook her.
"Sarah?" Adam said gently, his voice coming from somewhere behind her. "Are you all right?"
She swallowed hard.
"No, I’m not all right," she answered honestly, forcing out each syllable in the strongest tone she could muster. Her shock was giving over to anger, and she welcomed the feeling. Anger she could use. "I’m furious. But it’s too late to do anything about it now. I’m just going to check on two things, and then we’ll leave."
She stomped away from him, kicking debris from her path as she headed up the stairs. She kept her eyes down. She had to. If she hadn’t, she would have tripped over a half-full two-liter of root beer. A discarded pair of track shorts. A broken radio. What looked like the cover of one of her parents’ old record albums.
Nausea surged anew. She blurred her focus and walked faster.
She wanted to tell herself that the family chest would still be there—the steamer trunk that had come through Ellis Island with her father’s relatives so long ago. But she wasn’t foolish enough to be hopeful. It was a valuable antique. And even if it had survived, even if the vermin who had handed everything else out her windows had considered it too heavy to bother with, it would almost certainly have nothing inside it.
Unless, of course, she or her aunt had locked it. Had they? she couldn’t remember.
She reached the landing and moved quickly to the right. She tried not to look in her room, but her peripheral vision wouldn’t obey. In a flash she could see that her furniture, too, was gone. Everything was gone.
She closed her eyes tight outside Dee’s room, walking forward blindly, delivering a vicious kick to anything that touched her feet. She reached the master bedroom doorframe. She swung around inside it, her breath held. She opened her eyes.
A bulky wooden bed frame stood in the center of the room, devoid of mattress and box springs. The heavy wooden vanity had been pulled away from the wall, its drawers standing open and empty. Trash was everywhere. Dirty clothing was everywhere. She didn’t look to see if it had been her
parents’. She didn’t want to know.
The chest was gone.
She lurched forward to open the door to the closet. It held more of the same. Wadded, dirty clothing on the floor. One forlorn, misshapen hanger suspended above.
It’s gone. All of it.
No quilts. No baby clothes. No keepsakes. Nothing.
Her head felt hot. All her blood seemed to have pooled there, flushing her cheeks and leaving her limbs cold. She was walking in a nightmare. A nightmare of her own making.
She whirled around to leave and collided with Adam. He was standing in the doorway behind her so quietly she had forgotten him. She bounced off him as if he had shocked her, then pushed past him through the door. Forget the plan. His presence couldn’t stop her from feeling. Nothing could.
She walked to the end of the hall and looked up. The drop-down attic stairs weren’t hidden, but there was a chance they might be missed.
The handle was beyond her reach, and she looked around for something to stand on. But before she could search far, Adam appeared at her side. He reached up, pulled on the handle, and slid the wooden steps down into place.
"Thank you," she mumbled, not sure if her unsteady voice could be heard. She tested the steps with a bounce, declared them stable, and ascended.
Sweat trickled down the side of her neck. It was hot. The whole house was sweltering, but the air under the roof was like an oven. She moved off the ladder and surveyed the attic on her knees.
Her mother’s neat stacks of boxes had disappeared. What remained was a sea of torn cardboard, strewn clothing and books, loose papers, and broken Christmas decorations. Every box had been gutted. A smaller proportion of these belongings seemed to have been desirable enough to steal, but the broken-out windows at both ends of the attic treated her to a cruel image of the family’s artificial Christmas tree sliding over shards of glass and plunging onto the lawn below.
That was all the windows treated her to. No air whatsoever was moving through them. The heat was stifling, and moisture, heavy as dew, tainted everything in sight with the acrid scent of mold.
Dad’s paintings, she reminded herself. They might still be here. They were amateurish. Who would want them?
It was hard to see in the semidarkness, and she had no idea what living creatures might be sharing the space. But she didn’t care. She crawled off on hands and knees, searching.
She was only vaguely aware of Adam appearing at the stairwell. "What are you looking for?" he asked. "Can I help?"
Sarah answered, but her voice seemed to be coming from someone else. "Paintings. I’m looking for my father’s paintings."
She picked through the debris with determination. Sweat rolled down her back as she bent; drips fell from her face onto her hands. She sifted through the reams of jumbled paper. College notebooks, textbooks. Old letters. A dot matrix printer. A bird cage. Clothing that looked familiar—perhaps hers. Moth stains. Mildew. One torn Hawaiian lei.
"Sarah?"
The tone in Adam’s voice stopped her cold. She turned to see him sitting a few yards away, holding something toward her. It was a canvas board.
She scuttled toward him and grabbed it, then moved into the light.
Sunset at Taos. Orange, reds, and yellows. Pueblos stacked to the sky.
"It’s his!" she stammered, her lower lip trembling. "I remember it."
He picked through the pile some more, then turned back to her. "Okay, I’ve got three others, two on canvas and this one. Were there any more?"
She took the portraits from his hands. They all were damaged to varying degrees. Torn on the edges, even moldy where bare canvas remained. But her heart leapt with joy at the sight. "This was his dog, Lucky Day," she explained, holding up a stiff rendition of an English Setter in a broken plastic frame. "It was my favorite. The others were all landscapes. He loved New Mexico."
"Is this all?"
She nodded. Drops of sweat flew.
"Then let’s get out of here before we both pass out," he said shortly, taking the other three paintings from her lap. He held them away from his body as he moved towards the stairs, and as she followed she could see why. His shirt was drenched.
When she mounted the stairs he held up his hand for the dog picture she still cradled in her arms, and she gave it to him. Her legs were wobbly, and she had to put both hands on the steps to steady herself. When she reached the bottom, he slid the stairs back into place.
She looked at him. His flushed skin was shining, and drops of sweat clung to every dark ringlet of his hair. "Here’s my suggestion," he offered. "Let’s lock up, go back into town, and get some food and something to drink. Then you can decide where you want to go from here. How does that sound?"
She nodded, reminding herself that he wasn’t used to the humidity. Not that even a lifelong Southerner could have tolerated that attic much longer—it wasn’t only humid, it had to be well over a hundred degrees.
He headed down the hall before her, still carrying the paintings. She focused on them and only on them, ignoring as best she could the nightmare to her left and right. Five years. All the damage she had witnessed had been done in that much time. The bulk of the looting must have occurred before she had the windows sealed. But was there still an opening somewhere—an opening big enough for a person to squeeze through? Was her house still party central for every degenerate in the county?
She followed Adam back down the stairs and into the living room. He made a beeline for the door, and she attempted to follow him. But keeping her eyes on the paintings had a price. Her foot caught on something, and she stumbled.
Adam whirled around. "Are you okay?"
Her left hand had landed on a crushed paper bag. Her right was touching someone’s underclothing. She jerked both hands back, pulling her foot from the broken drawer in which it had lodged. If she had stood with her eyes closed, she might not have seen what lay on the floor by the fireplace. But she didn’t want to fall again. And as she pulled herself to her feet, her open eyes took in every detail.
A twin mattress, crumpled and stained, lay flat on the floor. On one side lay scattered mounds of empty beer cans, cigarette butts, and discarded condoms. On the other side, propped at an angle, sat what had originally been attached to the wall above the mantel. A long, rectangular mirror.
"Let’s go, Sarah."
She couldn’t move. The dreaded thoughts shuffled front and center. She was here. Here where everything had happened. The one place, physically and mentally, where she had sworn she wouldn’t allow herself to be. The couch was gone. The rug was gone. Nothing in the room looked the same. But it was the same, because there was a mattress. Right there where the couch had been. The same thing had been happening in the same spot, over and over, all this time.
"Sarah—"
"DON’T TOUCH ME!" she jumped away from the hand. Shudders rocked her body. She could see him as if it were yesterday. His vile skin exposed and sweaty. His abhorrent tattoo. His sadistic glee.
"Sarah?"
He was out there, somewhere. Still. Nothing had changed.
"Sarah, look at me. Please."
She wasn’t better. She wasn’t in control. What happened that night couldn’t be erased, because she hadn’t forgotten it. She couldn’t forget. Every miserable image was engraved on every miserable cell in her miserable brain.
Images swarmed before her eyes like cockroaches. Dee, sitting on her bed, laughing, raving about the guy she was so hot for. Him standing at the door, whiskey bottle in hand, bare to the waist, displaying his muscles like a gift. His hideous, smirking smile. The sweat on his suntanned back. The bobbing of his oily black curls—
You can’t tell, Sarah! You can’t!
Dee’s voice pounded in Sarah’s head. Her temples throbbed. Her feet itched. The walls of the house seemed to undulate around her.
Why had she come here again? Why?
Her eyes searched for the open front door, and she lurched toward it like a madwoman. She knew that A
dam was in the room, and she knew that he wouldn’t hurt her. But it didn’t matter, because she couldn’t stand the sight of him, either. It was too much. Too close. She had to get away. She had to get away from everything.
She plowed forward over glass, metal, and trash—leaping as necessary, hustling toward the door at full speed. She reached it and ran through, and then she kept going. She jumped off the porch and into the weeds, parting the brush with outstretched arms. She heard Adam calling, but she ignored him. She was looking for a safe place, and she wasn’t stopping until she found it. There had to be a safe place.
Somewhere.
There had to be.
Chapter 14
Adam stood on the porch, looking out. He would say his blood was boiling, but in heat like this, that statement would be true even if he weren’t furious.
Damn that mattress.
The horror of finding one’s family home in shambles was bad enough. He could see how deeply the carnage was affecting Sarah, but up until just now she had held herself together. Her reaction, in fact, had been more controlled than his own would have been. Everything her parents had owned had been either abused, defiled, or stolen. Whether she blamed her uncle or herself, an eventual outburst of anger was understandable, even expected. But the outburst he had just witnessed hadn’t come from anger.
"Sarah!" he called. "Stop!"
The only sound that returned was the rustling of weeds.
He dropped the paintings onto the porch and took a quick, deep breath. The heat in the house had made his every muscle go limp. But the look on her face just now had been worse. It had made him feel sick.
Something terrible had happened to her here. She had been remembering it as he watched, and it was clear that the sight of the mattress had been the catalyst.
He jogged down the steps and began to follow the trail of trampled weeds she had left in her wake. The task wasn’t difficult.
"Sarah!" he called as he moved. "Let’s go, all right? I’ll take you back to town."
