On Home

I have always known that I would have to go back to the house I grew up in. How can someone leave behind a literal lifetime's worth of memories? Nevertheless, that should not have been the day. September 6, 2014. The first week of school had just ended, and my sisters and I needed our belongings that we had left behind at our father’s. My mum, sisters, and I piled into a car that barely fit more than the four of us, and started off. I thought I was going to enter the house, grab things I needed, things forgotten, and leave.

She had a scrunched up look about her face as she dialed numbers into her phone that I didn’t recognize. The road shifted sharply, and we swerved when the other side of the phone call picked up.

"No, it's not an emergency. Can you help me?"

My own nerves ticked in as the car came to a quick stop, and I flipped the mirror in front of me down-- a habit--partially to calm my dizziness from heat and stress, partially to check my sisters. Janessa's knuckles were not a bone white, as people put it, but a pale yellow. She was scared. Hannah was overtly annoyed. She cares about so little now, and her disappointment geared towards my mum as she called the police to ask an officer to escort us to our house was apparent. What used to be our house.

"He wants my daughters to go in one at a time." My mother explained breathlessly. "And he won't let me in either!"

Being the first time I had heard of my father's conditions for our "visit," acid rose and leaked into my eyes and mind as we returned to the road, minutes away from our destination. Too many questions popped into my head.

Reading my thoughts, my mum muttered, "There's no way I'm not going in with you all." Hannah threw her hands at the ceiling and shouted about our rights. Bitterly, Janessa glared into a murky reflection on the window of the car.

Rolling up to the house, I was shocked. Our neighbor told us that our father never took care of the yard, but I could have never prepared myself for what I could not imagine and yet now see before me.

My mother's beautiful garden was ruined. The yellow, unruly grass covered stones, pathways, pots. Everything, even the weeds, was choked out by the grass. Her perfectly positioned plants wilted, now dead like our memories of the place. The car he took away from us sat unused behind the broken down van, and the car left to me by my grandfather was trashed by his neglect and parked haphazardly in the road. It was a sight that leaves one feeling disturbed and cold in passing much less in approach, even in the late-summer heat.

Knocking on the door, that broken down, several times repainted thing, mixed emotions filled me. I was to re-enter a house that was never my home, just a load of memories. When my sisters and I had gathered at the front door, disgust filled me as the exaggerated groan of the recliner collapsed down stairs and through the door.

"Who's going in first?"

"We all will." Hannah's sharp tongue cut the air.

The yelling started, frustration, exasperation, and sheer exhaustion, grew on us all. The brute of a man stood in the doorway. Had his gut not dipped over his belt, it'd have been a cruel body to match a stern furrow in the brow. His white shirt stuck to his torso like a page curling after being glued down, and his ragged khaki shorts stopped at the knees to show off his prized possession-- the ridiculous booted ankle-- twice broken and healed wrong.

The sun beat down on my mum, sisters, and I relentlessly while he stood in the shaded doorway arguing about agreements, visitation rights, perjury, all with a tone of brattiness. Just when Janessa looked like she was about to cry, he agreed to let us in with a witness to ensure the security of his possessions. As if one could steal from her own house. I stalked down the street, over the property line to our neighbor's house, ordered by the rotund man blocking the entrance that none of us wanted to enter. A flash of black and white passed by, a police car, and I wanted nothing more than to yell out to him, run out into the road to stop the driver.

On return, a new witness, another neighbor, had appeared for my father.

When he moved away from the doorway, I could see the stairs were filthy, and my first inclination was to flinch at my mum's bark to clean them as I had heard so regularly before we had left, but it was no longer just the stairs. A toxic familiarity that used to only reside in his bedroom was now wafting, almost palpable, through every room.

The three of us ran to my childhood room, the room Hannah, Janessa, my mother, and I shared as soon as he let us pass, only to be stopped again by boxes upon boxes creating a mountain that felt too big to fit into the small room. Hannah cried for the first time that day. Janessa cracked into a silence still audible.

Alone, I start towards my own room in the basement. Every negative emotion fills me just as it once did whenever I was alone in my room. The dark clings to me as I pass his room, the source of tangible air allowing a rotten presence emanate into the halls, the rooms, pouring into the entire house. No longer my clean linen closet, our untouched bathroom, Nanay's sunny room, our laughter filled kitchen. Dishes stack up by the sink and the moldy smell pulls at the bile in my stomach making me want to retch. The stairs fare no better. A dirt brown carpet leads me down to my bedroom. The filth in the air catches sunlight, sparkling the room. The dank basement kicks my nerves into overdrive as the need to hold my breath fills my head when I wade into the shade. My room lies dead ahead now, and the short two door hallway expands another fifteen feet into the black. The door handle chills my hands and chest. I don't want to see this.

I stand before a valley made entirely of boxes. There's no room to breathe in there, and I haven't even walked in yet. Dead flowers in the windowsill set the mood, and I am swept away with nostalgia. Three months hit me hard. My blankets. On the last day in that house, I hadn't made my bed. Climbing over the boxes, I fall into my bed, blankets enveloping me and the room collapses in on itself. A focused sun beam cuts through the broken blinds in my window, warming the spot where I lie. The pin holes where my drawings used to hang glared at me, and disfigured faces in the patterned ceiling welcomed my return. I could hear the yelling upstairs, and I was transported in time as I revisited every fight of my childhood shadowed with the self pity I abhor so much.

Walking back up the stairs, bags now packed, I saw that my father's unwanted friend through the years was here.

"So you're in highschool. You know what you want study, right? You have to know, because you're going to leave soon. Go working." I pride myself on not generally being annoyed by people, but this was not the time. "You can't leave your father now though. He's going through hell. You have to love him. Hug him. I know what that's like, going through hell. My wife is crazy! You know, she left me. Sent by the angels she says..."

A steady course of curses were pouring into my head as I tuned him out. "Shut up, Bruce."

Car packed, we all stood outside, now drenched in sweat. Bruce had lost his temper with my sisters while I was in my room, and was now incoherently blabbering about abandoning my father. Something he had said must have struck my mother because suddenly, a cacophony resounded. My father chimed in. The screams created a bubble effect, making me feel as if the neighborhood was empty. Everything just drained, everything vanished, and I was done.

I had lost my temper, and with it, I lost my memory of my own shouts.

More yelling happened, but now the threats were directed at me. Hannah looked slightly smug despite swollen eyes, and Janessa hid behind her. Finally quieting down, my father hobbled down the stairs and gave me a hug with the pathetic words I still despise.

"I'm sorry."

With that, we silently piled back into the car, bodies pressed up between the windows and our possessions, and drove off.