Mumma's House

by Ike Hamill

  “Briefly. She had a moment of rebellion and there was some talk of fixing up the whole loft into living space. That was back when there were more people living in Mumma’s house. Space was in short supply. Privacy was nearly nonexistent.”

  “Who built this room?”

  “Lots of people had a hand in it,” Auggie said. He bent over, still keeping back from the dark space under the bed and pointed his flashlight into the shadows.

  Kate glanced around. It was pretty clean for a place unoccupied for what must have been decades. There were no signs of mice up here. There wasn’t even really much dust to speak of. It was a sealed time capsule of a nineties teenager. Kate looked up as she checked her math and then corrected herself in her head. June hadn’t been a nineties teenager. She would have turned thirteen at the turn of the century.

  “Hey, Gus, reach under here,” Auggie said, pointing under the bed.

  “Don’t make him do it, Auggie,” Kate said. She put her hand on her husband’s shoulder as she knelt down next to him. Gus was barely paying attention. He was looking down at a bottle of nail polish, studying it.

  “Huh?” Gus asked.

  “I’ll do it,” Kate said. “What are we after?”

  “It’s all the way back there,” Auggie said. “See that dark green shoebox near the wall? That’s what we need.”

  “Do you ever plan to tell me why we need this thing?” She flattened her face against the area rug. It ended about at the edge of the bed and there was light colored wood floor underneath. A few dust bunnies scattered from her breath as she said, “I mean, we’re up here in your sister’s old room on—point the light—Christmas Eve.”

  Her fingers scraped the edge of the box. She caught the lid with her finger.

  “Oh!” Kate said as she jerked back.

  “What?” Auggie asked.

  “Something was moving in that box. I think you do have mice in here.”

  “Shouldn’t be,” Auggie said. “Vernon flashed the whole thing with surplus metal. He was somewhat of a nut job. He claimed that lightning would zap June in her sleep if he didn’t shield the entire room.”

  Kate didn’t bother to tell Auggie how crazy the notion was. There was no point to imposing logic on Auggie’s childhood memories. They seemed to be a grab bag of mysticism and half truths.

  She caught the edge of the lid with her fingernail and dragged the box until the corner was out from under the bed. Her work was done. She stood back up while she patted dust from her shirt.

  “You can deal with the rodents. I’ve had enough for today.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Tell you later,” Kate said, glancing at Gus. She didn’t know how squeamish he was. Some kids would have nightmares if they knew that mice were nesting in major appliances in their house.

  Gus was slowly pulling open the top drawer of the dresser. Kate walked towards him. She was partly curious and partly trying to be a surrogate mother for Gus in this situation. He was still young to be going through the drawers of a teenager, especially when that teen was a younger version of his own mother. She wasn’t here, but she still deserved the privacy that she had moved out to the barn to find.

  There was nothing in the drawer.

  Gus’s hand moved onto the next drawer.

  “Let’s not go through those, okay?”

  “How come?” Gus asked.

  “We haven’t asked your mom if it’s okay.”

  “Why would she leave all this stuff but take the things from the drawer?” Gus asked.

  Kate could only shrug. She had been wondering the same thing. The posters probably didn’t mean anything to June, but there would be no reason to walk away from photos. Some of them were of smiling friends standing in front of goalposts. Another had June and what was probably her aunt hugging in front of a lake. Those must be cherished memories and clearly June had thought enough of them to hang them in the first place.

  “They’re here!” Auggie said. He was holding the lid to the box.

  “Rodents?”

  “Slippers.”

  “Huh,” Kate said. She bent over and picked up a t-shirt. She folded it against her chest and put it at the foot of the bed. Gus was already looking over Auggie’s shoulder. Kate joined them.

  When Auggie said, “slippers,” she had imagined ballet slippers. These were nothing more than worn house slippers. They were the kind with pilled up fleece on the inside, leather on top, and rubber soles.

  “We’re here for those?” Kate asked.

  “They belonged to Cousin Trudy,” Auggie said. “We promised her that we would put them back in her nook when we could.”

  “Then what are they doing up here?” Kate asked.

  “We couldn’t find her nook.”

  # # # #

  The ladder seemed much shorter on the way back. The cold in the shed wasn’t as paralyzing either.

  Kate was confused.

  “She walked all the way out here and climbed up that ladder every time she went back to her room to go to bed?”

  “No,” Auggie said. “There’s another way but the upstairs door to the shed was bricked over. It’s a long story.” He glanced at Gus when he said this. She got the impression that the story wasn’t so much long as it was inappropriate for his ears. “That whole floor of the shed was heated and nice. It was just like June was living in a far corner of the house, not out in the barn. The only hardship was that she didn’t have any windows. Sometimes she would make it all the way down to breakfast before she realized that she should have worn jeans instead of shorts. She didn’t have any sense of the weather up there.”

  Kate’s eyes kept returning to the slippers. She wanted to ask about the real story behind them. Auggie probably wouldn’t tell her anything until Gus was returned safely to the front room.

  “We got ’em,” Auggie called as they pushed through the door from the hall.

  “Good, now get rid of them,” June said. She was sitting between the girls on the futon. The three of them were reading from the same book. Kate smiled at Millie and moved to take a seat next to her. They looked so cozy, all sitting together under the same blanket. Kate wanted to be a part of that little nest.

  “Wait,” Auggie said, putting his hand on her elbow before she could escape. “I need you to show me.”

  “Now? Can’t it wait.”

  He shook his head, offering no explanation.

  Kate sighed.

  Gus slipped into the spot that Kate had picked out for herself. The kids were all safe with June. Auggie gently pulled her towards the stairs.

  “Be right back,” Kate said. “Pick out another book to read when I come back, okay?”

  Isla nodded. Her eyelids were already starting to droop. Isla never had trouble getting to sleep on Christmas Eve. Millie would be up until midnight, regardless of whether or not she believed in fat men and chimneys.

  Together, she and her husband climbed the stairs. He held the box with the slippers like it was full of liquid and he didn’t want it to spill. As soon as they reached the upstairs hall, Kate moved into the lead and gave an order over her shoulder.

  “Start explaining why we’re doing this and I’ll take you to your nook.”

  She glanced back to see Auggie nod.

  # # # #

  “Trudy was older than me, but she really seemed closest in age to June. Nobody in the entire family was allowed to call my sister June Bug. Somehow, Trudy got away with it. There was some confusion as to Trudy’s lineage. If you ask Allison, Trudy was Mom’s first born from an affair. Other people said that Trudy was from Dad’s first marriage.”

  “So she was your half-sister?”

  “Maybe,” Auggie said, “but maybe not. I was little, but before Trudy came to live with us, I remember my mother saying something about Cousin Trudy being her Aunt Sophia’s daughter. In retrospect, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because Sophia was actually my mother’s great aunt, and she was born in the twenties. S
o, she would have been at least sixty when Trudy was born.”

  “There could be more than one Trudy,” Kate said.

  “Exactly. Regardless of who her parents were, Trudy was like a sister to us. Sometimes she was the older sister, protecting us and comforting us after Mom died, and sometimes she seemed like she was our age or even younger. Emotionally, she was somewhat… Maybe slow is the word?”

  “On the spectrum?”

  “Sure—maybe that’s it. Trudy was also somewhat mysterious. I would almost call it magical, but I know you hate that kind of thing.”

  “I don’t hate it. I simply don’t accept things that don’t follow the rules of our universe as we know them.”

  “Sure. Okay. Well, anyway, Trudy had a nook. She had a secret place that she would go to when she was feeling antisocial. It was magical because you could only find the place when you were in her good graces or if she took you there herself. June could always go there, but most of the time I could only go if I was invited.”

  “You’re saying that the room I was in can only be accessed if…. Wait, what are you saying?”

  “You were just about to say it,” he said. “It was a room at the bottom of stairs that should have looked out over the southern yard. But I’m telling you that if you go outside and try to find that window, it just won’t be there.”

  Kate rolled her eyes. She stepped down into the wing hallway and waited for Auggie to turn on the light before she continued down and around the corner. She glanced back and noted that he was studying the walls, like he was trying to remember every detail. It was almost cute to see him so timid about his surroundings. She was seeing the child version of the man she had married. It was almost cute but a little disturbing. She counted on Auggie. He had to get ahold of himself soon or she might not be able to see him as an adult once more.

  She hesitated. For a moment, the door hadn’t been there. It was just a trick of the light. The molding of the other door cast a shadow and it obscured the lines of the door that she was looking for. It was closed now.

  “I’m pretty sure this is it,” she said. “I thought I remembered leaving it open, but I wasn’t really paying that much attention. Or it might have blown closed or something.”

  Auggie didn’t say a word. When she glanced back, he was staring at the knob, waiting for her to try to turn it.

  She did, knowing full well that it would open. Of course it did. The only problem was that it opened towards her. Kate laughed at herself.

  “Wrong door,” she said to Auggie. “I know because I had to reach around it to get to the light switch.”

  Auggie didn’t say anything. He only pointed at what the door had swung open to reveal. In the shadows, there were a few stairs that led down to a landing.

  “Sure, but this isn’t the right door. These must be another set of stairs. Like I said, the door swung inwards and then I had to reach around it to get to the switch that someone had mounted behind the door.”

  Auggie didn’t answer. He reached around her and flipped the switch. Again, he pointed. It took a second before she saw what he must have been pointing at. There were footsteps in the dust. One set led down to the landing and another came back up. Kate leaned down to see the pattern that the shoes had made. She leaned on the doorframe to lift a foot and see the matching pattern on the bottoms of her own shoes.

  “Huh. Well…”

  She let the word trail off and then decided that there was an easier way to prove her point. They didn’t need to argue. She would lead the way and prove that these were different stairs. Auggie followed.

  By the time she turned the corner, she had started to lose confidence. The lower flight looked exactly as she remembered. The door pushed open and confusion took over. It was the blue and green carpet, the couch, and the television. Everything looked precisely the same.

  “Trudy’s nook,” he said. “You found it.”

  Auggie practically pushed her aside in his rush to get into the room. He hunched under the sloping ceiling as he ran his hand across the top of the television. Auggie’s laugh was light and natural, and Kate realized that she had never heard her husband so delighted as he was in this moment. All those other times—with the kids, watching movies, or on his thirtieth when they threw him a surprise party—he had been happy, but never this delighted. This was a color that she had never seen on Auggie before.

  The box dropped to the floor when he fell to his knees and slapped his hands to his cheeks. There didn’t seem to be anything in particular that he was looking at.

  “What?” she asked.

  Auggie pointed with a trembling finger.

  “This is where I used to nap. I forgot all about it. I wonder if I could still squeeze in there.”

  Auggie crawled towards the space between the side of the couch and the wall. Before he got there, he turned around on his hands and knees so he could back into the tight space. He did fit. It didn’t appear to be remotely comfortable. Auggie had to squeeze himself down until his chin was near his knees. When he spoke, his breath came in quick bursts. His chest wasn’t accustomed to being compressed like that.

  “When I was a kid, I was small enough that this was my own little space within Trudy’s space. I could look through this window and see the kids playing out in the side yard. It wasn’t drafty like the other windows in the house. If I pressed my hand against it, I could feel the cold or the heat outside, depending on the time of year. None of that leaked through the edges of the sash though. This nook always remained the exact right temperature for either taking a nap or zoning out and watching the tube.”

  Kate kept an eye on Auggie as she picked up the box and sat on the edge of the couch. He was trying to wiggle his way back into the spot, like he could shrink himself down if he tried hard enough. Kate looked up at the TV. It was still snowing on the screen. The black and white static undulated with whatever electronic noise filtered through the universe. It was mesmerizing in a way.

  “Even Jules loved Trudy, the cynical bastard,” Auggie said. He began to extract himself from the little hole. “When we were all together, June would sit on the couch with Trudy, I would be in my little space, and Jules would sit on the floor with his back against the edge of the couch. Sometimes we wouldn’t even have the TV on, or we would tune it to static, just like this. On snowy days, with low clouds, we could get a couple of the Bangor stations to come in. They had better sitcoms in the afternoon and older, wiser-looking news anchors on in the evening. Sometimes, Aunt Allison would go out into the yard, calling us in for dinner and we would all be up here, safe and sound. We could even knock on the window and she would never know where we were.”

  Auggie sat next to her on the couch and took one of her hands.

  “So you don’t…” Kate began. She had intended to challenge Auggie’s memory. She was going to question whether he still believed that the window would be invisible from down in the yard. She stopped herself. To prove her point, she would have to go outside in the cold and look for Auggie’s face or the warm blue glow of the TV static. Then, the best possible outcome would be to potentially deflate one of his most cherished childhood memories.

  Auggie was still looking at her, waiting for her to finish her question.

  “So you haven’t been back here since…” Kate prompted.

  “Oh,” Auggie said. “Yeah. When Trudy got sick, she told us that we should still come to her nook if we could, but we shouldn’t be sad if we didn’t find the place again. She said that Mumma’s house is like a flower. It grows and opens and closes with the passing weeks and changing seasons. It’s not always the same. She made us promise something, too. If we ever did come back, we would bring her slippers and leave them in her spot so she would have them if she needed them. Before they took away her body, June insisted on taking the slippers. She was never able to bring them back here to Trudy’s nook though. That’s why she kept them under her bed.”

  Kate nodded. It didn’t matter what family drama ha
d ensued. There could have been a dozen reasons why the kids hadn’t been able to bring the slippers to this room. Maybe June had held onto them for purely sentimental reasons. Auggie was telling the truth as he remembered it. That was good enough.

  “So now you’ve brought them back,” Kate said. She looked down at the old things in the green box. “What made Trudy sick?”

  “She was poisoned,” Auggie said with a sigh. He looked down at their entwined fingers. “Cousin Dean poisoned her. He died in prison.”

  “Jesus, Auggie, you never told me that.”

  “It’s a weird thing to tell,” Auggie said. He flashed her a quick, unconvincing smile. “What is that, a sixth date thing? Do I tell that to my wife on our tenth anniversary? By the way, when I was a kid, my second cousin, once removed, killed the girl who might have been my half-sister or maybe my cousin and I was the one who found her body.”

  “Yikes. I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “It was a long, long time ago. Her death was terrible, I’m not going to lie, but the way she died wasn’t all that much of a shock. Trudy always said that she was going to be poisoned. I’m not blaming the victim or anything, but we all knew where Cousin Dean got the idea, and it was from Trudy herself.”

  “Wow.”

  They sat in silence for several minutes. Auggie’s eyes were fixed on the static. Kate didn’t like the way the visual noise drew her in. She looked at the window, down at the carpet, and then over to the door. She gave Auggie time to meditate. The girls were asleep. Kate had time to sit with Auggie until he found some truce with his memories.

  He squeezed her hand before he started to rise. When his other hand reached for the box, Kate handed it. Auggie set it on the floor. With reverence, he lifted each slipper and placed them in front of the couch. They were ready for Trudy’s memory to step into. When he had aligned them perfectly, Auggie took the box and led Kate towards the door.

  “I wish June were here to say something.”