Dead Ends

by JT Ellison

  Actually it seemed that everything in her life wanted more from her than she could ever give, but that was an entirely other issue. No one was forcing her to drive to Linton, South Carolina, unless you counted the fact that Rufus, her best friend, was prodding her to do so. Though this was the problem with the situation at hand—Rufus was imaginary. She didn’t hear him talk out loud, nothing that crazy; his voice was more like a memory. Usually he comforted her, but ever since she’d seen that limestone house on the Internet, he wouldn’t go away.

  The highway changed from its simple, unfurling black ribbon to thin country roads lined with moss-draped trees and boiled peanut stands. Alice’s hands were sweating, slick on the steering wheel even as the air conditioner pumped cold air. A warm Coca-Cola sat in the cup holder, and open bags of Fritos and gummy bears slumped in the passenger seat just within reach.

  She was angry at Rufus, and at herself because she didn’t want to waste her day driving four hours only to gaze at a house that had been lurking in the crevices of her mind for all her remembered life. A house she could see in her mind’s eye as right as anything in her life. As clear as the blue eyes of her husband, as clear as the oak tree in their backyard with the tire swing hanging from it, as clear as the newly-etched lines on her face and the half-spiderweb creases at the sides of her eyes.

  A week ago she’d seen the house as she was scrolling through her Realtor company’s website. Auction! it stated. The photo on her screen shimmered and moved as if it were alive, almost reaching out for her. It was an old house, from 1910, the brochure said, built as a plantation home for the Worthington family when they grew indigo and rice in the rich Lowcountry of South Carolina. It had changed hands many times, been reincarnated as hunting grounds and then a bed-and-breakfast. Now it was being sold at auction “as is,” a great opportunity on ten acres.

  Alice hadn’t been in the real estate business for long, just a little over a year, but everyone knew that “as is” was never a good thing. Something was always hidden in that phrase, a glitch the buyer wouldn’t find until they’d signed on the dotted line.

  Alice had stared at that image on her screen for so very long that when the children ran in the door from school, tossing backpacks and asking for snacks and an hour on their video games, she realized that hours had passed. It was the house of her dreams, not the kind of dreams of what one might want in the future, but the real kind of dreams, where she awoke at 2:00 a.m. with her heart pounding against her ribs like a bird trying to escape. She clicked on the picture, opened it to see the slide show of rooms and hallways, of ancient bathrooms, and it was her house. It was the house of her memories. Not exactly, there were some things that were off. But still, she knew the minute she opened the photo that she had to go see it; she must walk its hallways.

  For days she walked through life untethered and half aware, so obsessed with the stone house with the iron gates and double-gabled roof. She’d called the listing agent to ask more questions, find out who owned it and why it was being sold. The owner had died alone and the money would go to a family estate, that’s all she was told.

  It was impossible that Alice had ever seen this house before. Mother had told Alice that they moved to Atlanta from Louisiana when Alice was four years old. Every time Alice asked her mother about their childhood house, and the days when they’d lived there, her mother would shake her head with the gray perm curls wiry and tangled, wave her French-manicured hand through the air, and make a noise that sounded very much like pooh-pooh. “It doesn’t matter now, Alice, dear. It’s in the past and you don’t want to look at the past, trust me on this.”

  Alice didn’t trust her mother on anything, so why she would trust her about this was beyond reason. There was nothing Alice had ever been able to do to get her mother to discuss Alice’s childhood home. Not once. Not even after her mother’s fifth vodka tonic, which didn’t have any tonic in it and was the exact right count for when Mother’s lips were loosed.

  Mother wanted Alice to forget that her years from ages one to four happened. There weren’t photos. There weren’t videos. There weren’t memories that made much sense. But Alice damn well knew that memories would not be denied—problem was that Alice was never sure which were imaginings and which were true memories. How could she know without someone to ask?

  “Was it as big as I remember?” Alice would ask casually as she basted the Thanksgiving turkey.

  “I don’t know how big you think it was, dear.”

  “Did the yard really have a graveyard in the back, or did I make that up?”

  “Oh, my Alice, you are so very good at making things up.”

  That answer wasn’t a yes or a no. Actually, not much her mother ever said about those years was a yes or a no. That answer was also a dig at Rufus—Alice’s childhood imaginary best friend. For God’s sake, Mother had even told Alice’s husband, the lanky sensitive soul Leon, about Rufus. Leon had, of course, thought it adorable that Alice once had an imaginary friend. He’d said it made Alice even more wonderful than he’d believed.

  “But you see,” Alice’s mother had said, slurring her words around a cigarette with an ash an inch long about to drop onto Alice’s new sea-grass carpet. “You see, Alice wasn’t just friends with him when we lived in that backwater swamp—Alice took Rufus with her to Atlanta.”

  “How long did Rufus live with you?” Leon had kissed Alice when he asked this question. It was his way of making sure she knew that he was on her side.

  “A long time,” Alice said, not wanting to tell her husband that sometimes she still saw Rufus. Well, she didn’t see him as a ghost, nothing that wackadoodle. She saw him as he once was—as real and solid and wide-eyed as he’d been. She could bring him to mind even now as she drove to the house in Linton.

  Yes, back to the house, she thought. Enough of her mother.

  Of course, there was no way this was her childhood house. And why she was annoyed was beyond her scope of understanding, because no one was forcing her to go to South Carolina. No one but Rufus, that is. He wanted to see if this was the one! He wasn’t asking her to go, and he wasn’t asking her to not go—he just stood there with his wide brown eyes and stared at her, insisting that it must be, at the minimum, checked upon.

  So there she was in her Volvo, wearing her hair in a bun with a tortoiseshell clip, and smoking cigarettes, one after the other like she was a smoker, which she wasn’t, or hadn’t been since 1998. She was listening to radio stations go in and out along Highway 17 as she crossed marshes green and blue with unorganized creeks and estuaries winding among each other. She’d lied to Leon, telling him that she had a conference in Savannah. He’d believed her, and why wouldn’t he? She’d never lied to him about anything, except how much a new pair of boots might have cost, or that she had a headache as he moved closer in the bed wanting some of what she wasn’t in the mood to give. But on the whole, she counted herself as an honest and devoted wife and mother, at least better than her mother. Not that this was a good yardstick to measure with, but it was all she had.

  When they’d lived in that house, it had been just the three of them—Mother, Rufus, and Alice. There’d been laughter and running through empty rooms (in her memories, most of the rooms were always empty). If there was ever a Father, Alice didn’t know or remember. Another off-limits subject with her mother that was always met with, “I met him. I was seduced. I never saw him again. Sweetie, that’s all you need to know because it is all I know. But thank God he was so handsome, because Lordy, look at you, so beautiful you could stop the moon in its path.”

  Alice drove, thinking of these things, and the closer she came to the plantation house for sale at auction, the more foolish she began to feel. But now she was almost there, and she might as well go look at it.

  For the last thirty minutes of her trip, Alice tried to empty her mind of the thoughts that pushed at her. There were many techniques for this, and she’d been taught all of them in the never-ending quest to rid herself
of Rufus. Like an alcoholic who hides their vodka bottles in strange places around the house, or the insides of their boots—she knew this one because she’d tried on her mother’s cowboy boots one time and almost broke her toe shoving her foot in the bright red leather—Alice hid Rufus in the invisible realms of her mind.

  She talked to him less and less, but talk to him she did.

  And she succumbed now, just like her mother swigging straight from the bottle when she thought no one was looking.

  “Do you believe it, Rufus? I lied to my family and I’m driving four hours to look at a house that reminds me of the one you and I used to live in. Remember those days?”

  He never answered, but the silence never stopped her from continuing to talk.

  “Remember when we’d run through those hallways as fast and as far as we could? How we’d play hide-and-seek? How Mother would sing us songs while she cooked in the big kitchen? You were always laughing. You never got mad or upset, even when Mother cried or the thunderstorms shook the house. There was the oak tree outside, the one with the gnarled branches and the hole in its side big enough for us to hide in, but only one at a time.”

  Alice realized, dammit, that she’d been babbling to Rufus for a while now and she shut her mouth and turned up the radio, a country music song about a pickup truck and a case of beer. She was almost there; no turning back. If she parked, stared at the house and turned around, found a motel to sleep for the night, and then returned home the next morning, no one would know better.

  At the last turn onto Beachhead Road, Alice slammed on her brakes. There were cars parked end to end down the length of the road. Signs on sticks poking out of the grass shoulder every few feet stated in large red letters: Auction. An arrow pointed up the street, which was shrouded by oak trees and hanging Spanish moss clinging to the afternoon sunlight.

  Maybe she would just drive by. Yes, that was a good plan.

  Alice swooped the car around the parked ones and drove slowly until the house came into view.

  Her heart stopped; she knew it did because when it started back up again, it banged against her chest and startled her with the pain of a hammer into her breastbone. She slammed her hand over her breast. Was that what a heart attack felt like? No. Nothing else hurt at all.

  Slowly she found a parking space and walked toward the house, step by step, slowly as if sneaking up on it. She was dizzy.

  It looked just like the photo—a limestone house inside a wild menagerie of waist-high weeds and oak trees crowding each other to the point of being tangled. The seven-foot-tall iron gate swung open, the scrollwork’s gold paint peeling. The walkway to the wooden double front door was made of broken stones, wiry yellow grass and dandelions forcing their way through the cracks. Alice stood so still that other buyers bumped into her, but she didn’t notice; she just stared.

  Her mother was a liar. Why this came as such a surprise was hard to say. This was the house.

  “This is it, isn’t it, Rufus?” she asked out loud, and a man in a blue suit and yellow tie walking by stopped to make sure Alice wasn’t talking to him.

  Alice knew her way around and she found herself winding around nameless, faceless people, feeling as if her body floated more than walked across the wide-plank hardwood floors, through the hallways to the back room where Mother had once slept.

  The smell of sex was pungent and sour, and as a child Alice knew the aroma meant trouble without understanding what it was, and always mixed with the smell of the liquor in the glass decanter at the bedside. The bedroom, it was in this bedroom.

  Alice held Rufus’s hand, warm and dry, as they burst through the bedroom door to spy on them—her mother and the dark man. Mother was underneath the bulk of the man, and she was hollering all hell to get off, to stop. It was Rufus who had lurched for them, who had pulled at the man’s hairy arm, who had hit the man over the head with the bedside lamp.

  But the man, large enough that a lamp was as silly as a rubber ball tossed at his head, merely laughed. Rufus began to cough; Rufus always coughed. His little body bent over, and the man picked Rufus up, not in a kindly way, and Alice charged after them. The man carried Rufus down the hallway and plopped him onto a rumpled single bed and walked away. Alice crawled into bed with Rufus, his body as hot as the sidewalk in the middle of the summer when they used a magnifying glass to fry the ants.

  “Mommy!” Alice called her name over and over and over, but she never came. She was with the man with the hairy arms and the slick hair, flopping around underneath him and ignoring Alice and Rufus.

  Alice continued to call until her voice went dry and nothing came out. They believed that eventually she would come because that’s what mommies did. Alice cried and she held Rufus and placed wet washcloths on his forehead because that was all she knew to do. They fell asleep together and when Alice awoke, in the dawn of a thunderstorm morning, Rufus was as limp and pale as her china doll. She started to scream.

  Maybe she’d never stopped.

  The real estate agent Alice had seen on the advertisement ran into the bedroom in a gray suit and a white silk shirt, her hair with so much hair spray it looked like it had been painted on. She whirled Alice around by her shoulders. “My God, stop! What is it?”

  Alice opened her eyes, the aromas of sex and whiskey fading. Her hands rose to her neck, and she slapped her hand over her mouth that was still screaming. There was no bed or sex or dark man, no Mother or Rufus or fever. The room was empty and dusty, a skeleton of what her memory revealed. The bones of the room disintegrated like cancer had eaten them away. The wood-trimmed walls were pockmarked with wormholes, chunks of it missing. The chandelier hung sideways, a spider clinging to it from the remnants of a web. The windows, three of them, were broken with various-size holes: one the size of a bullet, the others a baseball, maybe.

  “What is wrong with you?” the real estate agent asked again. “Do I need to call 9-1-1?”

  Alice turned around to face the woman with the bleach-blond hair and black eyeliner so thick and dark, it looked like a tattoo. “I’m fine.”

  “I don’t think so.” The woman spoke in a quiet voice as if trying to calm a toddler. “Let me help you out. You’re scaring the other prospective buyers.”

  Her mother was right. That boyfriend from college was right. She was crazy. Literally.

  Alice would not be deterred, though. Even as her mind told her that she wasn’t crazy, she understood that she was acting as though she were. And that’s when she ran.

  The graveyard behind the house was overgrown to the point of hiding the gravestones, although there were only a few of them. Maybe twenty, or was it less? Alice wasn’t sure because she was lying flat on the ground, the wet earth soaking through her favorite Real Estate Agent navy-blue fitted dress. Her hair was spread around, undone from the low bun. Twilight spread across the earth, soaking into the grasses and weeds, casting long shadows of the gravestones as thin rectangles, one on which Alice rested.

  Her head was cranked to the left, and her hand rested at the base edge of a stone. She took in small sips of breath. How had she landed here? Hadn’t she just been standing in an empty bedroom screaming? What was happening to her? Where the hell was she? Far off she heard sirens and the overlapping voices of a crowd.

  The cold earth slapped her in the face and she came to herself, as if she’d left for a long, long while. She sat up with a bolt and understood something awful—those sirens were for her. She ran her fingers along the gravestone’s lettering—Rufus Worthington. Then the dates for a child aged eight years old. She spoke to him again, as she always had. “You are real.”

  There were other gravestones with the same last name, but Alice didn’t take the time to read them because she understood that if she didn’t leave, those sirens would descend and men would take her and they would inject her with meds to calm her down and there would be a hospital.

  She stood barefoot. She’d lost her shoes and her nude-colored stockings had been ripped so
her toes poked out like tiny sausages. That didn’t matter. Not much mattered except escaping the sirens coming for her. She slunk into the woods, toward the marsh, into the tall spartina grasses of the estuary.

  First the ground was soft, and she sank ankle-deep and then to her knees and then her waist. Soon there was the water—she was chest-deep as the memories, so long locked inside, chased her into the depths. She swam for as long as she could, but soon she knew she wouldn’t be able to stay afloat, and that was okay, too, because now she understood everything there was to know.

  She wasn’t crazy. Rufus was her brother. The man was her father. The woman her mother. The house her childhood home. She’d slept next to her brother while he died, and her mother slept with a monster of a man in the next room, never answering their calls.

  It was the last memory that swam with her, slowly swam with her until she couldn’t swim anymore.

  The limestone house didn’t sell that day, what with the ruckus from the woman who had started screaming in the back left bedroom. They’d found her late that night, poor thing, naked and stranded on a sandbar in the middle of the marsh. Her husband had come to retrieve her from the local hospital. It was whispered that she must have believed the ghost stories told in jest to buyers who roamed the hallways, attempting to decide whether to buy or renovate or destroy and start again.

  There was once a family who lived here, it was told, and the little boy died, the mother ran away to leave the father there alone with his ghost son, who still roamed the grounds. The pitiful woman had believed it and come undone. The woman’s husband couldn’t explain why she was four hours away from home wandering through a house that she had no intention of buying. It was all a great mystery, and the story added to the lure of the house, which sold a week later in a new auction that drew even more buyers, upping the price.