by Ronald Malfi
“Why don’t you leave?”
“Where would I go?”
She crouched to his side and peered inside the boxes. Gabriel smiled when he came across a large purple folder held together by rubber bands.
“Here it is.”
“You save everything.”
“Memories. Who wants to throw them away and forget about them?”
“Sometimes we don’t have a choice,” she said.
Pulling the rubber bands off and peeling back the folder’s worn cover, Gabriel presented her with a series of rough sketches and drawings done in crayon and by a child’s immature hand.
“Damn,” he said, “will you look at these? I haven’t seen these…”
“We drew them?”
“You were a stubborn student, but I eventually got you to sit down and draw. Only took some bribery. And a couple of locks and chains.”
“Which ones are mine?”
He laughed. “The bad ones.”
“Ha. Thanks, Picasso. Let me see.”
There were about twenty leaves of paper, all scrawled with swirls of Blue Sky and Brick Red and Grass Green—puerile renditions of dogs and ducks and boats on ponds and people on bicycles and trees and houses with candy roofs. It was obvious which ones belonged to Gabriel—some of the drawings showed evidence of artistic promise—while Kelly’s were merely crude imitations of the world as seen through the eyes of a small child.
“Amazing,” she said.
“I keep everything,” he said. “That’s my thing.”
“Gabe?”
“Hmmm?”
“I don’t want to insult you…”
“Uh, here it is.”
“Seriously.”
“What?”
“This town is horrible. Spires is like a bad dream. What are you doing wasting your time here? And I don’t just mean with your artwork; I’m talking about your life. This place is dead and empty and there’s really nothing here for you.”
His smile faltered and she feared she’d insulted him. She started to apologize but Gabriel only shook his head.
“I’m not insulted,” he said, “and in a lot of ways you’re right. In fact, when I had that showing in the city, I honestly considered moving there. I mean, all that inspiration every day, right? I even made some phone calls about apartments. But in the end, I wound up changing my mind.”
“You were afraid?”
“No. If I was afraid I would have forced myself to go. No, this was something different, a little more complex.”
“What?”
“I guess I didn’t want to have to run away from anything. And that’s what I realized I’d be doing. The city is beautiful and inspiring…but it’s there, it’ll always be there, and I can always go there for inspiration. That wasn’t why I wanted to go, despite what I tried to convince myself. I really wanted to leave because I wanted to run from this place, from Spires. And for some reason, that didn’t sit well with me. I mean, it just seemed like such a cowardly reason to go. I didn’t want it to be for that reason. I wanted to pursue what was right, not just run away from what was wrong. I don’t know, maybe that sounds crazy, but I don’t feel like I’m really wasting my time in Spires. I feel…well, I feel like I’m really prepping myself, preparing myself. This way, when I finally leave, I’m able to look back without regret.”
“No,” she said, “that makes perfect sense.”
“I thought you’d understand.”
“Yes.” She smiled at him. He smiled back and kissed her. It happened too quickly—over and done with before she even had time to register what had happened. It was Gabe, Gabriel, Gabriel Farmer, the young boy with the tousled hair and conspicuous laugh who’d fallen from a tree and skinned his knees on the day they met. Kissing. And in the follow-up moments, as Gabriel pulled away, she felt something hot and uncomfortable turn over inside her chest which she recognized to be the initial stirrings of guilt. Again she thought of Josh, despite her intentions to pitch him from her mind and live in the moment.
“It’s too bad we never had the opportunity to…” Gabriel faltered, smiled, blushed. “I don’t know. To be ourselves. To really get to know each other and grow up together. I think that would have been good. Things might have turned out different.”
“You were a good friend.”
“I wish I could have helped you. I didn’t know what to do when you went away.”
Smiling, she rubbed his arm. “I didn’t know what to do, either,” she said.
It was late when she finally arrived back at the compound. Slipping in quietly through one of the many side doors, she made her way down the hallway and into the kitchen where she set the purple folder on the table and poured herself a glass of milk. The house was silent. Peering out the window over the sink, she saw past the film of frost on the pane to the blackness of the forest beyond.
There was a noise behind her. But when she turned around she saw that she was alone.
“Hello?”
This house brings out the fear in people. So big and empty, jumping at shadows. This house and this town.
She finished her milk and tucked the purple folder under her arm. Careful not to make a sound, she crept down the main hallway toward the winding staircase, her mind preoccupied with Gabriel and his words—It’s too bad we never had the opportunity to…
To what? she wondered now. To what, exactly?
The basement door at the end of the hallway caught her attention for some reason and she paused just before mounting the winding staircase. It was closed and bolted. She was abruptly overcome by a strong urge to go to it, to unlock and open it, to go down into the basement.
Kelly turned and went to the basement door, turned the bolt, and cracked the door open. It creaked and she winced, the sound amplified in the nighttime silence of the house. Leaning into the doorway, she put her hand against the stairwell wall to feel around for a light switch. Finding none, she forced the door open wider to allow light from the hallway to flood the descending staircase. She peered in. After the first three steps, the rest of the staircase was devoured by darkness.
Why in the world do you want to go down there? a small voice spoke up in the back of her head. What’s gotten into you?
But she had already started descending the stairs. Her body blocked out the light of the hallway behind her, making it nearly impossible to see. Each footstep caused the risers to creak and groan. With her hands she traced the walls as she crept further down, intent on uncovering a light switch. Still nothing. And the stairs seemed never-ending.
What am I doing?
Finally she reached the bottom and felt something cold brush by her face. Startled, she jumped back…then sighed as she realized it was the chain to a light fixture in the ceiling above her head. Blindly, she groped for it, found it again, yanked it on. Shadows scattered. The light was strong enough to illuminate only her immediate area—a section of basement encumbered with countless brown boxes, each stacked one on top of the other, straight to the ceiling. Spools of masking tape lay scattered along the floor and in rings at her feet. Old, moth-eaten clothes lay stacked in forgotten piles.
Ahead of her, the basement landing communicated with a large room. Creeping forward, her hands splayed out before her face, she found a second light fixture and turned it on as well.
The basement opened up before her.
It was a mausoleum of forgotten artifacts, stiflingly congested with domestic refuse, making navigation difficult. Mildewed sofas; pitted brass lamps; scores of leather-bound books; a hand-carved coat rack adorned with a twist of tangled Christmas lights; busted wicker chairs; an old sewing machine housed in a mammoth maple cabinet: these things loomed liked the skeletons from some lost era, mummified in dust and frozen in time. Generations of family possessions. The heads of innumerable mammals, horribly tremendous and lifelike, stared at her with black, glassy eyes from against one wall: remnants of her father’s forgotten obsession. The entire cellar exuded a stale, necrotic stink; it seemed to
coat everything, to radiate from every shadowy corner, every piece of junk that littered the floor. She could already start to smell it on her own skin.
Kelly skirted around a water-stained bombe chest and bundles of soggy newspapers tied with twine. Against the wall behind the stacks of newspapers, and quite out of place among the rest of the junk, was an open box brimming with toys. A plastic doll with curly sprigs of blonde hair poked out of the top. A stuffed zebra with button eyes also hung halfway out of the toy box. She tucked the purple folder Gabriel had given her under her arm and bent to her knees, peered inside the box. Sifting around, she uncovered unused coloring books still shrink-wrapped, a slinky, and a collection of ceramic horses, mostly broken. A doll’s shoe; a busted water gun; a toy wheelbarrow sans wheel…
I came down here looking for this box, she thought, not quite understanding why, nor truly believing the thought. All this stuff in here…
Toward the back of the box was a sketch pad, its cover torn off, its pages yellow and stained. She reached for it, tugged it free of the box. On the first page was a crude drawing of a tiny, square house with shuttered windows and large plumes of flowers on either side of the front door. Flipping through the pad, Kelly saw that it was filled with similar sketches, all presumably drawn by her sister Becky at some point. For the most part, the majority of the drawings were exactly what one would assume from a young child. But the drawings on the last dozen or so pages toward the end of the pad were different. Looking at them, Kelly felt herself slowly being consumed by some sick, spreading fear. One sketch depicted a young girl on her hands and knees, blood on the palms of her hands, crawling through the forest. In her wake, the girl left bloody hand-prints in the grass. Another drawing portrayed the same house from the front page of the book, drawn now with much more haste—all sharp angles and heavy impressions. In certain spots, Becky had pressed the pencil-point through the paper, puncturing the page. And on closer inspection, Kelly saw that the shutters were now open and that there was a face in one of the windows. The face itself was too abstract to make out any details—in fact, it hardly even resembled a face at all—but something about it caused Kelly to tense, the muscles in her body becoming taut and myalgic.
Her mind reeled: I came down here and picked up this sketch pad…but why? How did I even know it was here? And what does it mean? Damn it, what am I suddenly so afraid of?
But hadn’t she been afraid for some time now? There was nothing sudden about it…
Even back in the city, that same small voice whispered.
She turned the page. Staring up at her was the drawing of a dog with one of its front paws raised in injury. A jagged lightning bolt cut had been drawn across the dog’s raised leg. And from its back rose the protrusions of a dozen knives.
We almost killed that fucking dog, she thought, and the thought was alien to her, foreign in meaning…made no sense. Dog? Yet it was there nonetheless: We almost killed that fucking dog!
Something was happening here—she could feel it pushing against her, driving, fighting for control of her. It was the same sense of impending doom she had felt back in Manhattan, only more prominent now, as if she’d managed to accidentally bump the source. Images flashed across her brain—images from her own childhood—yet they remained nonsensical and still somewhat elusive. Part of her was trying desperately to remember while another part of her was insisting she keep all doors locked, all accesses denied, all memories forgotten.
I was committed to an institution when I was fifteen, but for the life of me I cannot remember why. How come this hasn’t haunted me, driven me crazy after all this time? How come, until just recently, I’ve never bothered to understand what happened to me when I was a child? And why is it all coming down now?
That driving force, that power pushing her, guiding her—it was here. In this house. Strong.
In that instant, and for whatever reason, her mind formed a picture of old Nellie Worthridge. For a split second, Kelly could see the old woman as clear as day inside her head, lying there in a musty room on a tiny bed, the single window’s shade drawn tight against the midafternoon sun.
She sensed movement behind her and she spun around. Shocked by the silhouette of someone standing directly behind her, she dropped the sketch pad and uttered a startled cry.
The figure took a step into the light.
“Kelly.”
It was her father. Dressed in a bathrobe and slippers, his graying hair twisted into corkscrews, he looked like he’d just been involuntarily pulled from a deep sleep.
“Jesus,” she breathed, “you scared me.”
“I heard noise down here,” he said. “We’ve had rats. Big ones. I thought it might be rats.”
Still shaken, she managed to stand and brush the dust off the knees of her jeans. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I was making so much noise.”
“It’s a big house. Lots of room for sound to travel, get loud.” Then, perhaps as an afterthought: “I wasn’t asleep.” There was obvious discomfort in his eyes, in his voice: resonant and nearly palpable. “I was up worrying about your sister.”
She didn’t know if she believed his words. The image of her parents standing beside Becky’s bed, their faces expressionless, their eyes noncommittal, surfaced in her head. All their years of parental absence throughout her own youth rushed back to her in one electric wave. Their coldness, their dispassion, their inability to parent. And in the end, was it fair to hate someone for such an inability?
“We’re all worried,” she said, maintaining composure.
“All these years…” He spoke now with an inference of reflection, his eyes distant and sloppy in their sockets. “Your mother and I worried about you, too, Kelly. You think we haven’t, but that’s not true.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Do you hate me?” His words surprised her. Partly due to the impulsiveness with which he spoke them, but also because it had never occurred to Kelly that her father might actually commit time to the consideration of such things.
And she didn’t know how to answer him.
“You don’t see everything,” he said. “I know…your mother and I know…that you’re a smart girl and a special girl—you always were—but you don’t see everything. And we never knew what to do with you.” His eyes left her and traced briefly around the darkness of the cellar. At one point they came to rest on the decapitated animal heads against the wall. He almost smiled, again lost in retrospection. “On occasion, the smoke clears…and we almost understand what’s going on around us, and who we are, and what we’re supposed to do. And before it all clouds over again, we try to do the right thing.” His eyes fell on her again, frighteningly sober. “I’m trying.”
“Daddy…”
One of his large hands moved…and for a moment Kelly thought he would reach out and touch her, perhaps on the arm or shoulder or even caress the side of her face. Comfort her, the way fathers do. But he didn’t. And despite the enormity of his frame, he suddenly appeared as a child to Kelly, lost and frightened and powerless to communicate beyond fragments and innuendoes. And the appearance of such unexpected innocence managed to vanquish what anger she’d previously felt toward him.
“I wasn’t there for you,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry things turned out the way they did. I never claimed to be a wonderful father.”
She could only watch him speak. It was like watching a mirage through a fan of heat-waves across the landscape of some dream desert.
“This house,” he continued, “has been more than a house. In reality, it’s just walls closing the inside off from the outside. And the outside from the inside too, I suppose. It’s just…sometimes it’s difficult to see past those walls. But I try. You don’t see everything, Kelly, and you may not know it, but I try. Even now.”
Distantly aware that her eyes were welling with tears, Kelly shook her head. Though she feared her voice might crack, she spoke anyway. “You don’t owe me anything. I do
n’t need an explanation. I’m here for Becky.”
“You’re a good girl, Kelly. You’ve grown into a good woman, too. I just wanted to tell you that.” His eyes shifted upward and appeared to transfix on the beams in the ceiling. “Sometimes I hate this house.” Again it seemed as though he might touch her, but instead he just offered her a weary old man smile. Kelly thought his eyes looked more intelligent than she ever could remember. She thought, My father is an old man. Who would have ever thought he’d become an old man?
“I’m going to bed,” he said. “You be careful down here.”
“Right,” she said. “The rats.”
He nodded and turned, his giant looming shadow covering the entire wall behind him.
“Yes,” he said. “Big ones.”
Hours later, she awoke—or thought she awoke—in the middle of the night to find her mother standing above her bed, looking down at her without expression. Just standing there, staring at her in the darkness, the side of her body illuminated by the strip of moonlight that filtered in through the bedroom window, silent and unmoving. Was this real or was this a slice of dream that had followed her into consciousness as she turned over in bed? Dream or reality, Kelly saw the woman standing there, and if it was a dream, she recognized the peculiarity of the situation even in the depths of slumber. Her eyes closed, she thought she even felt this dream-mother touch a hand to her forehead, smooth back her hair. And in her mind, she watched as the dream-mother departed from the room, passing over the carpet like an apparition, pausing briefly in the doorway before disappearing into the darkness of the hallway.
In her sleep she dreamt of the wooded hillside that surrounded the house. And in this dream colors were much brighter and sharper, the leaves and grass impossibly green and absent of snow. Birds sang and flowers blossomed with the suddenness of tiny celestial explosions at her feet. It was storybook.
Kellllllly…
Becky called to her from somewhere deep in the woods; the girl’s voice carried out over the wooded hillside and treetops in an echo that shook the valley. And at the sound of her voice, the lush forestry blackened and withered, as if ravaged by disease.