Chapter Twenty
I stopped skating a while ago. I was getting blown every way except forward once I hit Main Street, so I walked out here on the road’s shoulder. There are no cars out, no one to see me. Everything around me becomes more transparent. I’m by the ice cream shop Traci took me after I saw Dr. Paul. The shop is shuttered up against the wind. They’ve rolled in the awning and the parking lot’s empty. I sit down at one of the sticky picnic tables just to think about where I should go next, staring at the trees creaking and stretching almost to breaking. Then, one of them, a tall, half dead elm, does.
It makes this sound, as close to a scream as I’ve heard any plant make, and the part of the tree that split off razes through the other nearby trees’ branches, taking some of them down with it. The wind that replaces the tree’s fall fills all the land around us with a sigh.
It’s a relief I don’t share. My skin still prickles, electric with rage at Traci. Every time, she’s chosen Jeff over me. And maybe this time she’ll choose him again. Every time, she’s chosen to follow her dreams without thinking about how her dreams aren’t mine. Moving to this place that doesn’t want me. This place I’m trapped in with no way of escape.
I stare at the shredded trunk of the elm. It’s so strange that when humans die, they bleed and decompose so quickly. But that tree continued to stand in the shell of its living form until some force of nature took it down. Is that what I am to the ghosts of Sabrina, Aggie, and Ellis? Some force of nature? Some gust of wind that’s supposed to return their spirits to ashes or dust or whatever immaterial substance they’re composed of? Out of the house, these questions come like gusts of wind too. Not enough to bowl me over—just something I’m moved by. I’m still upset with Traci, Jeff, and myself. But I have some distance. I want to let the wind blow me off course from Aggie’s house, toward Nan’s old farm.
I wish I could talk to Dad about all this. We used to talk sometimes when I was on the way home from school. I’d just call him because I was bored, or he’d do the same. Walking from the bus stop to our house was only far enough to get the highlights in. It occurs to me now that these conversations were naive. I saw him as a friend, not a parent. I saw him as infallible. I trusted him. I want that innocence back. I want to go back to thinking everything’s gonna be ok. I want everything to be ok. And now I don’t have anyone except Cole.
That’s not totally true, though, is it?
My eyes worry the gap where the elm used to be like the exposed gum after a lost tooth. I run my eyes over and over the gap until I stop seeing it and begin to concentrate on the background. A hill. An unfarmed plain of land. The little cottage with its weathered gray shingles. The roof sags into a smile. The Walker house on the abandoned farmland where Nan grew up.
I don’t look both ways as I step onto the street. Luckily, there are no cars. I have tunnel vision. Any fear of ticks or poison ivy falls away as I battle through the weeds up the hill toward Nan’s childhood home. Even if I can’t get in again, spending time there has to be important. I’m walking where my great grandparents and Nan walked so many years ago. Even if that connection isn’t justice for my great grandfather, at least I can connect to his memory. Did he imagine his great grandchild would walk the same paths as him someday?
I’ve found my way back to the ragged structure of Nan’s childhood home all alone. This place called to me. Even when I was riding, fueled by rage and without destination, I managed to find the path back here. This time Nan’s house will let me in. I can feel it.
The doorknob is bubbled with rust. It takes an extra twist to jimmy the whole thing clockwise. I don’t expect it to open, so when the knob clunks and the front door opens into a dark hallway, I’m shocked. The air inside is thick with nature. It smells alive. It probably helps that people party here frequently. This space is still used, contrary to the lonely abandonment of Aggie’s house.
I’m careful to avoid any spiderwebs or piles of leaves that might contain squirrels as I step through the rooms. Empty bottles of hard liquor and cans of Oland Export huddle in corners and half-formed tags are spray-painted onto walls. I hear a rustle and chatter in the walls, as if the rodents are whispering my arrival to their kin. A welcoming? A return? I hope not an invasion. My presence here is temporary.
Although the banister is rotting, the stairs look fairly stable. I imagine Nan would have slept upstairs. There likely won’t be many hints about her family’s life here, but I just want to have a better picture, a clearer imaginary history of this place.
There are only two rooms upstairs in this small house: my great grandparent’s bedroom and Nan and her siblings’ bedroom. They’re on opposite sides of the hall. I imagine the patter of children’s feet crossing the hall into their parents’ room in the night, finding warmth in their parents’ bed. I imagine what I know I would have done. What I did when I was a kid. My favorite nights were the ones where I slept between my parents. I never had any dreams.
I choose to enter the room on the right first. The window faces southwest. The glass is cloudy and melting with gravity’s slow force. On sunny days, it must heat up in here, must fill with a religious glow. Was this the kids’ room? I turn from the window back to the door, and that’s when I notice the graffiti scrawled in blood-red against the peeling wallpaper: murderer.
So, this is my great grandparents’ room.
I peel it all off until the wall is blank, then I visit the room across the hall.
The wallpaper in this room is softer. This is definitely where the kids slept. A pattern of lily pads and frogs repeats except where the walls are water damaged or the paper’s peeled off. I imagine my Nan, tiny, with her hair coming out from its braids, playing jacks with her brothers and sister in a corner. Her laugh, which always bursts out of her chest so warm, higher-pitched and goofier. I sit down cross-legged on the floor and gaze out the window at the clouds roiling above. I watch for symbols to draw themselves with their ridges until my eyelids get heavy.
My phone’s buzzing wakes me. If it’s Traci, I’m not answering. I don’t want to think about what the fallout of my statement about Jeff will be. If she believes me, she’ll be devastated. And if she doesn’t believe me . . . What if I’ve destabilized their relationship just enough that she and Jeff live in a limbo of distrust forever? I’ll have to be witness to it all, knowing that I’m right with his smug face leering at me while Traci’s back is turned. Even worse, what if I’ve destabilized our relationship to the point that Traci can’t trust me anymore?
I don’t even want to look at my phone. But it keeps buzzing, so I pull it out of my pocket to quiet it. Then I see it’s Nan on the other end of the line, as if I’d finally summoned her by connecting with her old home.
“Nan!”
“Oh, good, I got the right number. How come I haven’t heard from you since you moved? You don’t think of your Nan?”
“I called you, Nan. Left a message.”
“Got your message. But why didn’t you call again? Are you being safe? I told you don’t get on any strange motorcycles.”
I laugh. I know she’s serious though, so I keep it quiet and say, “I won’t, Nan.”
“Those country boys are some else. You watch out.”
“I will.” What would she think of Cole? There’s silence on the line. “I’m thinking of coming into the city soon. Can you do my hair like when I was a kid?”
“As long as you don’t squeal like you used to. Couldn’t pay you to keep still.”
“I promise I won’t.” I hear the click of her lighter on the end of the line and a long sigh as she takes a drag of her cigarette. I used to hate getting my hair done whenever we’d go to see Nan but now the memory gives me comfort, like in the dream I had of her yesterday. The smell of cigarettes would get so deep into my hair and skin and clothes. It smelled like death to me. But now I’m nostalgic for it. I wish I could sit on one of her old pillows on the floor while she tugged at my head. “You know where I am?”
“No.”
“Guess.”
“I don’t like guessing games.” I roll my eyes.
“I’m at your old house.”
“That old place! Ha!” She laughs full-bellied into the receiver and static gathers like the dimples at the corners of her mouth. “You be careful. Hope you’re not going inside.” Too late.
“What was it like when you moved to the city?”
“Hm. Well, at first I hated it. But then I started to like some things. Church and after school going to the corner store for penny candies. Seeing other Black folks around. Met your grandfather. Made my babies.” She leaves out the hard parts. The addiction, abuse, poverty that interspersed those joys . . . all the fear . . . But I believe in the joy of the moments she does mention because I can tell she does too.
“Did you like living out here on a farm?”
“Oh yes. It was my whole world. I didn’t know anything different. Go by the stream and splash around, play in the woods with my siblings. And ride the horses my dad raised out there. You know my Tamarack, the picture I have up in my living room.”
“Mhm.” I peek out the window at the slope, imagine Nan and Tamarack riding across the fields. “Dad told me some stuff about our family’s history in this town. About how you left because of your dad getting accused of murder. Do you know what happened?” I want her side of the story. Maybe she knows something Dad didn’t.
“I don’t like to talk about it too much. Nothing good can come of talking about it.” I hear the click of her lighter and a soft inhale as she pulls the smoke into her lungs. “But if you really want to know, they said they found a body on the property where my father worked. Took him in for questioning. Broke his leg. He didn’t do it, of course. Our farm was everything for us, he’d never risk it.”
“I’ve been looking for proof—to clear his name once and for all—”
“No point,” Nan interrupts. My heart drops.
“Why not?”
“Nothing left from that time. Even then, it was his word against that Ellis Bainbridge. No one ever believed my father to be untruthful, but his word was worth a lot less. Going against Ellis might mean losing your job at the mill.”
“You’re sure there’s nothing to prove your father was innocent?” I ask, but I know the answer before I’m even finished the question. If Aggie’s whole house is like a museum, a mausoleum even, this house is barely bones left over. No one was here to preserve it.
“Why d’you need proof anyhow? Isn’t knowing enough?”
“Well, how’re we supposed to have justice if I can’t prove it? People will still believe he did it!”
“Let me tell you something, baby—our farm fed us and half the town. But with the way people treated us after that woman was murdered, we couldn’t stay. They forgot or ignored that our family built most of the houses in that town, including the one where he was a handyman. Some ancestors were enslaved, others freemen . . . and before that the land was stolen . . .”
Sabrina’s words echo in my head: Who built this house? Whose money? Whose blood? Nan is repeating a story that’s familiar to me. To hear confirmation from her, a living, breathing family member who has cared for me my whole life, makes me sure of my next steps. If I do this, I’m not doing it for Sabrina. I’m doing it for Nan. I’m doing it for me, and for Dad, and for Mum.
“My Great Aunt Aggie’s house was part of that. That’s where he worked.”
“That’s right.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Your father told me not to tell you all those years ago because you’d never be able to sleep in the house again. None of my business, but I thought you all shouldn’t be sleeping in that place anyway. Crawling with ghosts.” Has she seen them too? Doesn’t matter if she believes. One day I can tell her the whole story. For now, I just need facts.
“Do you think Aggie killed her husband?”
“Oh, I know it. And good riddance. How could she live with that man after all he did? That man knew how to give people the runaround. He was scamming up and down Main from the day he was old enough to carry a wallet. And our family suffered the consequences. We were the last Black people driven out of that town by the white folks who made us build it. We made that town, and they took everything from us. You understand why I never gone back there.”
“I don’t want to live here.”
“But you do.”
“I hate Jeff.”
“Don’t say hate. It’s not what you feel. You don’t know hate. You’ve got to make do until the situation is over.”
“I know, but I don’t want to.”
“You have to respect your mother’s choices. There’s a lot I regret as a mother, but seeing you, seeing how good you’ve grown up . . . Traci did a good job with you. And your father, even though he still got stuck in the trappings we tend to get stuck in . . . I’m still proud of everyone. And I know you’re going to take good care of yourself and those around you because it’s what I taught your father, and it’s what your mother and father taught you. Look, we all get into the wrong things at different moments in our life, but it’s your choice to move forward wishing others well. Justice comes fast sometimes, but most times it’s slow and it’s not a straight line. You’re going to be just fine. You hear me?”
“I hear you. I miss you, Nan.”
“I miss you too, sweetie.”
There’s as much silence as there could be with the wind rattling the windows of this place and the TV in the background of Nan’s life feeding through. But I know this is what peace is. This moment. It’s the moment before we say goodbye.
“Now, I have to go get ready for my evening. I’ll hear from you soon, Asha.”
“You will.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
I’m left alone again. But I feel less lonely now. All this time, I’ve been thinking about how other people should be living their lives. Alive or dead or undead. But to move on, it’s not a clear path. I’ve hurt myself as much as others by not understanding what I need to be able to live in this place. If I’m going to live here, no matter for how short a time, I don’t want to be haunted by past violence. I don’t want to forget, but I don’t want to drag my feet into the future. I have to speed things up; I have to move toward the future I want running. And I have to do right by everyone I love.