Homesick

by Nino Cipri

Nita: Your mom is not the one gagging up mud and feathers, Madd— [Coughs.] I can’t even— [Coughs.]

  Maddie: Shhh, baby, it’s fine. All right. We can go in the morning.

  Nita: [Hoarse.] Now. Right now.

  [...]

  Nita: Please.

  [...]

  Maddie: Okay, okay. Get your stuff together. I’ll tell my mom we’re—

  Nita: Please, don’t. Just...write her a note, okay. I don’t even care about my stuff, I am so fucking scared right now—

  Maddie: All right, we can go. We’ll find somewhere to stay outside of town.

  Nita: Thank you, oh my God, babe, thank you so much. I’m so sorry I even—

  Maddie: It’s okay, just...just pack what you can. I’ll go write my mom a note.

  Nita: Okay. Okay. Yeah. I can do that.

  [Footsteps.]

  [A lamp clicks on.]

  [...]

  Evie: [whispering] Is it time?

  Maddie: I...

  Evie: It’s sooner than I thought it would be. But it’s not too late. That’s the important thing. We don’t want a repeat of what happened to Emily. It’s better this way.

  Maddie: Is it?

  Evie: Don’t fight it. She might still be able to get away.

  [Footsteps. Rustling fabric. An embrace.]

  Evie: I love you, sweetheart. Be brave. I’ll miss you, but I know you’ll always be close, now.

  [Be brave.]

  [The lamp clicks off. Footsteps.]

  Nita: Did you write the note?

  Maddie: [Clears throat.] Yeah.

  Nita: Are you...are you okay? Sorry, I’m so fucking freaked out I didn’t even think—

  Maddie: It’s all right. I’ll be fine in a minute. [Takes a breath. Sniffs.] Are you packed?

  Nita: I can’t find my recorder. Have you seen it?

  Maddie: Maybe it’s in the car.

  Nita: Why would it...you know what, I don’t even care. Let’s just get the fuck out of here.

  Maddie: All right. Before we go, can I just...

  [It’s a goodbye kiss, but Nita doesn’t know that.]

  Nita: Ready?

  Maddie: Yeah.

  [Footsteps. A door opens and closes. The sound of night: wind slapping against wet leaves, rain hitting gravel. The car doors open and shut, and the engine turns on. So does the radio: nothing but loud, angry static.]

  Nita: Fuck!

  [The radio shuts off. The car shifts into gear, and then gravel crunches under the tires as they start to drive.]

  [4:21 minutes of ambient noise.]

  Maddie: I’m actually grateful, you know. That I came back. That you got me to come back.

  Nita: You were right. I shouldn’t have kept asking you. It was—

  Maddie: I needed to do it. I’d put it off for so long.

  Nita: Put what off?

  Maddie: I’d almost forgotten. You woke something up. Your questions.

  Nita: Mad— [Coughs.] What are you talking about?

  Maddie: It was almost too late.

  [...]

  Nita: Look, I’m already freaked the hell out, so if you could do me a favor and not be all fucking cryptic—

  Maddie: Remember what I said when we were on our way here? You’re safe. You’re safe because you’re a stranger. You’re right to want to get out of here as soon as you can. This place...it does something to you. Doesn’t matter how far you go, it’s always pulling you back. That’s what happened to my dad, and it was—Emily knew there was no point in trying to get away, but I insisted, and she—

  Nita: Ma— [Chokes.]

  Maddie: Don’t. It’s okay. Don’t try to fight it.

  Nita: Fight what? Jesus, what...

  [The engine has grown louder.]

  Nita: Can you slow down?

  Maddie: It won’t change what happens next.

  Nita: Oh my God. Please, whatever you’re thinking of doing, please don’t.

  Maddie: I am so lucky I met you. I’m just—I always thought I’d be alone, and that nobody would know my name. I’m so grateful that you’re here.

  [You’re here.]

  Maddie: Try not to think about me, okay? Just leave me behind. Don’t even say my n—

  [The crash through the guardrails takes them both by surprise. They scream the entire way down. A scream with shattered glass and scraping metal; a scream that wrenches itself open from the inside. A scream infused with something inhuman, old as mountains, wild as a bird suddenly breaking from a cage, electric in the air. A scream with blood on its teeth.]

  [End of recorded material.]

  ***

  Entry 21.

  [Beginning of recorded material.]

  [1:32 minutes of ambient noise: traffic, voices, dogs barking.]

  Nita: Timestamp. It’s, uh, 3:28 in the afternoon. January 10th, 2014.

  [...]

  Nita: I’m moving out tomorrow. Um. I can’t really do stairs that well, at least until the leg brace comes off, so I’ll be staying at my mom’s. I’m just here to grab some clothes and things. And to leave this recorder on.

  [...]

  Nita: I guess what I’m saying is, if you have anything else you want to say, I’ll be listening. I’ll leave the recorder on in the empty room. Let it run until the battery dies, I guess.

  [...]

  [Footsteps, uneven and limping. A door creaks as it closes.]

  [...]

  [...]

  [...]

  [...]

  [

  .

  .

  .

  ]

  [Are you sure you want to hear what we have to say?]

  SHE HIDES SOMETIMES

  The linen closet disappeared first. Or maybe it was just the first thing that Anjana noticed the morning her parents moved into the nursing home.

  The closet was downstairs, in the short hallway between the kitchen and the guest bedroom. It was narrow, hardly wider than Anjana’s shoulders, with two high shelves inside. It had always seemed like such a superfluous closet, so far away from the bedrooms upstairs. Too far from the kitchen to be a pantry. Too far from the front door to store jackets and shoes.

  Anjana was trying to find a bedspread that Auntie Priya had sent them from Dhaka, the white one with the blue and green embroidered flowers. She thought it might cheer up her parents’ suite in the nursing home. She could bring it to them that weekend, before she went back to Pittsburgh and school. The bedspread had been her mother’s favorite before she’d fallen ill.

  Her father was a surgeon, and her mother had been a teacher, and they had been a family that loved clear answers and facts, truths that were clipped and groomed into manageable, sensible creatures. Her mother’s sickness was not like that: it was feral and strange. It had no name and no diagnosis, just a list of symptoms that added up to a woman Anjana no longer knew. Pale-skinned, a blank stare, her hands curling restlessly against her thighs. Her face had sunken, and her hair was kept in a loose, fraying braid—Dad’s handiwork. For a former surgeon, he could be remarkably imprecise with his hands. He hadn’t bothered to pluck her eyebrows either, or the small dark hairs on her chin and upper lip. Her mother would have hated being seen like that.

  Just that morning, after they’d packed up the car, Dad had sent her into the house to fetch her mother. She’d found her in the master bedroom, one hand resting on the armoire—it was too big to take with them, and none of their friends or relatives wanted it. Her head was cocked, as if she were listening for something.

  “Mom,” Anjana said gently. “It’s time to go.”

  Her mother had rested her palm against the armoire’s carved wooden door, and said, “She hides sometimes.”

  Anjana had often hidden in there when she was a small child. She’d burrowed all the way into the back, nestled amongst her mother’s saris and her father’s suits. She’d leave the door just slightly ajar and breathe as quietly as she could. Come and find me! she’d call to her mother or sister, when she was in the mood t
o play. Other times, she just sat in there, silently hidden away. Safe.

  Anjana had cursed her father for making her do this alone, for staying in the car. “She’s not there now, Mom. Come on. We’re leaving.”

  When her mother didn’t move, Anjana wrapped her hand around her arm, tried to tug her away. Her mother shook her off and shouted, “Where is she?”

  Anjana had taken a step back, voice shaking. “We—we’ll go find her. Please, come with me.”

  Her mother had glared at her. Then she’d turned on her heel, walked out of the room, down the stairs, and out the door without stopping to put on shoes or her coat.

  Anjana touched the peach-colored wall where the closet had been. She thought of the handprint her mother had left on the armoire upstairs. She’d dusted, cleaned the windows, scrubbed the floors, and stripped the bed, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to wipe away that small mark, the last place in the house that had felt her mother’s touch. She’d come down here instead, to look for the bedspread from Auntie Priya.

  Anjana briefly thought of calling her father, asking if he’d gotten rid of the closet during a remodel, then she decided against it. Dad had enough to worry about already.

  ***

  The entrance to the attic disappeared next. Anjana wasn’t even looking for it, but on a trip to the bathroom, she happened to look up. The square wooden panel had been replaced by smooth ceiling. She blinked. Went to the bathroom. Urinated. Washed her hands. Came back out and looked again. The ceiling was still smooth. She went back to cleaning the windows in the living room and told herself that she was very tired and under a lot of stress. She’d finish cleaning the living room and then go to sleep. The attic would be there in the morning.

  It was not there in the morning. And the small bay window in the kitchen, where she and Chitra had often done homework while their mother prepared dinner, was gone as well. The little nook with the cushioned bench had been walled over and fitted with a square window, small and cramped like the window to a jail cell. There was no way her father would have remodeled the kitchen to get rid of it. But she called him anyway, to make sure.

  “How’s Mom?” she asked, the customary opening of all their conversations for the past few months. They talked about her, around her, over her. Anjana couldn’t remember the last time she’d talked to her mother. If she’d known it was the last time, she would have made an effort to remember.

  A shuffle of breath, or perhaps Dad was shifting the phone in his hand. “She’s okay,” he said.

  What was that supposed to mean? Anjana decided that it hardly mattered. “And how are you, Dad?”

  “I’m adjusting.”

  He sounded sorry for himself, and it made Anjana grit her teeth. He wasn’t after her guilt or her sympathy. He had made his choice to go with his wife into a nursing home, to spend whatever time they had left together. If he had regrets, he hadn’t voiced them. He just sounded miserable, and there was nothing Anjana could do.

  “That’s good,” she said, and could think of nothing else to add.

  “How’s the house?” he asked, still glum. “How are you getting along with it?”

  She nearly laughed, hysteria edging up on her. “It’s okay,” she said. “I meant to ask. Did you remodel before Mom got sick?”

  “Remodel?” he asked. “No. Why?”

  Anjana had learned how to lie to her father long ago, and it was effortless now. “Just wondering,” she said. “I thought the light fixtures seemed different.”

  She cleaned the kitchen that day, avoiding the wall where the little nook had been. She managed to lose herself in packing up her parents’ cookware and plates so she could take them back to Pitts-burgh with her. When she opened the door to the garage to pack the boxes in her car, she discovered that it had shrunk from a double to a single. She could hardly open the doors to her Prius. She moved her car out into the driveway.

  ***

  When she called Chitra, it was nearly midnight. Not that it mattered: Chitra was in Sacramento, three hours behind, and Anjana needed to tell someone that the basement door had disappeared.

  “I think Bobby’s having an affair,” Chitra said by way of greeting.

  Chitra’s husband had probably had several affairs, but Anjana knew better than to say this. Her role was to listen as Chitra laid out all the evidence of Bobby’s possible infidelity, to make sympathetic noises in the right places, and to call Bobby things like shitweasel and douchecanoe, since it would make Chitra laugh. They’d honed the routine years and several boyfriends ago. But Anjana couldn’t do it.

  “I can’t find the basement,” she said. She was sitting on the floor in the living room, willing herself not to look over her shoulder. Every time she did, it seemed like the walls had inched closer to her.

  “What can’t you find in the basement?” Chitra asked.

  “No, the whole basement. I can’t find it anymore.”

  There was a crackly silence. The sound of all the miles between them, between their childhood home and Chitra’s grown-up life.

  “I’m sorry, what?” Chitra said.

  The basement is gone. The kitchen nook is gone. The attic and the linen closet and who knows what else. The house is disappearing in small slices. Anjana said none of that.

  What she said was, “Never mind, it’s not important. What did Bobby do this time?”

  Anjana remembered how their mother would sometimes listen to Chitra’s phone calls on the extension in her own bedroom, before they all had cell phones. Mom would hold a hand over her nose and mouth so that Chitra couldn’t hear her breathing. Anjana, who was seven years younger than Chitra, would watch from the same spot that she was sitting in now, pretending to read Animorphs books and spying on her mother, who was spying on her older sister. Was Mom listening to me talk to Katie? Chitra would demand later, and Anjana would flush and shrug and say, I don’t know, I was reading.

  Anjana could have made a noise, could have told. But she’d let herself be invisible instead. Complicit.

  “Maybe I should come home,” Chitra said. “Bobby can sit and stew on his own for a few days, and I can help you get the house together to be sold.”

  “No!” Anjana cried, though she wasn’t sure why. “No, that’s okay. I mean—”

  “No, you’re right. I was always useless at stuff like that. I’d probably just get in your way.”

  Anjana had to bite her lip. Some kind of feeling was bubbling up, tight and hot and slippery, trying to pull itself out of her throat.

  ***

  Anjana decided she would continue sleeping in her bed. She brushed her teeth and washed her face believing that she’d be able to do it. She walked into her room and sat down on her old bed, looking around with relief. Her room, at least, was the same, still burdened with remnants of her childhood. The walls were the same pale blue that Dad painted on her thirteenth birthday. The bookshelf still had an entire shelf devoted to Animorphs and Yu-Gi-Oh!

  Anjana wrapped her arms around her knees, shut her eyes, and tried to listen to the house the way she used to, when her sister was already grown and her parents existed on the other side of a great impassable wall: in their late forties when she was born, from another generation, from another country.

  The house didn’t sound different. It sounded the same as when she was a child, a little girl who had liked to hide sometimes. She’d burrowed into a quiet, tight-fitting spot, held her breath, and tried to imagine what the world would be like if she disappeared.

  When Anjana opened her eyes, she went cold with fear. The bookshelves were gone. The closet door hung ajar, empty. The walls had crept closer to her. It took several moments before she could force her limbs to move, to gather up her pillow and duvet and walk—calmly, slowly, as if she were trying to escape the notice of a predator—outside to her car, still parked in the driveway. She slept fitfully in the backseat, her breath fogging the windows.

  ***

  “Put Mom on the phone,” Anjana
said, the next morning when she called her father.

  Dad sighed. “It’s not a good day.”

  Anjana had been awake since dawn. She’d walked through the house, taking in the changes. The back patio was now a small, cement stairway to the garden. The dining room had shrunk, and the tables and chairs crowded against each other. Chitra’s old bedroom, the one her parents had converted into an office, had disappeared entirely.

  “I want to talk to her.”

  “Anjana, I’m not even sure she’ll hear you.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with her ears, Dad!” she shouted into the phone. “I know her fucking mind is gone, but she can still hear me when I talk to her!”

  Reproachful silence; a specialty of her father’s. Whereas her mother could shake the walls, each word an earthquake, her father retreated into a silence that vibrated in the air.

  Anjana belonged as much to one as to the other. Various boyfriends had told her as much. So she waited for her father to say something, but when he did, it was a shock.

  “I talk to her every day,” he said. He sounded old, as old as death, as old as sadness itself. “And...”

  Anjana bit her knuckles waiting for him to finish, but the silence seemed to collapse on itself. Hysteria crept up on her. “Dad?” she said, suddenly convinced that he, too, had disappeared.

  “I’ll see if she’s sleeping,” he said eventually. “I’ll call you back.”

  Anjana walked through the house again. The dining room was now hardly bigger than a walk-in closet. The big mahogany table and matching chairs were gone. It made Anjana feel dizzy, nauseous. Where were the rooms going? Why didn’t they make a sound as they disappeared?

  The stairs had narrowed, and Anjana’s shoulders brushed the sides. She tripped at the top, expecting more steps. How many had there been? Was the ceiling hanging lower than it used to?

  The master bedroom had shrunk, and her parents’ stripped bed pressed against the wooden armoire. The attached bathroom had vanished. The room even smelled different. It was missing the top notes of her parents’ presence: her mother’s amber perfume, her father’s cedar aftershave, laundry soap and hospital antiseptic, the tea they both drank. The room smelled as if nobody had breathed in there for years.

  The phone in Anjana’s hand buzzed, and she nearly dropped it.