Chapter Five
Traci sighs as she watches the taillights of Jeff’s Tesla disappear beyond the moat. She’s leaning against the layer of dust on the kitchen windowsill with the wistfulness of a nineteenth century widow. I’m warming my phone in my hand as I search for the right words to text Nia back—after Cole came by for the party last night, I completely forgot about our conversation. Maybe I wanted to forget about it. Her last message to me read:
What’s new?
It should be easy enough to answer. I let my eyes wander over the cupboards hanging on by their ornate brass hinges and the scuffs scarred onto the floor by routine in front of the stove. Nothing is new out here. I know that’s not what Nia meant. What could I tell her about, though? The party? Maybe with distance last night will become more embarrassing. I’m not ready to joke about it yet. Cole? What if this new friendship makes her feel replaced?
Veins twang in my temples. I lean my head against the peeling eggshell to soothe the headache that is last night’s souvenir. Endless content scrolls across my screen as I hop through every app on my phone, all of it useless information, just something to look at other than Traci. Then, I refresh my feed and see Nia’s bright face. She posted a selfie with her family against the busy background of Pearson airport with text that reads “peace out canada xoxo.”
Shit. I do the math. She was supposed to leave on the ninth. The ninth was Friday. Yesterday, while I was out with Cole, she was getting ready to leave the country. She was probably texting me from the car to the airport. My heart sinks into a slimy pool of guilt. By now, Nia’s probably close to landing in Sierra Leone or else in some middle-European country on a layover, where she doesn’t have a phone plan. I’ve been so caught up in my own world, I forgot to care for the best friend I’ve already got. I hope she’s stepping out into the sun now, with her parents and Jamal behind her, ready to walk into the arms of her mother’s extended family, who they haven’t seen for years.
Knowing Nia, she’ll forgive me for going silent. Also knowing Nia, she won’t tell me she was sad I didn’t show up for her. How could I have let her slip my mind? Nia and I promised each other we’d stay committed to our friendship no matter what, and I couldn’t even remember to wish her safe travels a week after leaving the city. I toss my phone onto the table. The clatter turns Traci’s head.
“I hope Jeff doesn’t take too long at the hardware store,” she says. “He really shouldn’t be on that ankle for long. You know how he gets stuck looking at power tools.”
I snort. “Not that he even knows how to use them.”
Traci lets out a long sigh and I lean back on the feet of my chair, waiting for her to lecture me. “Don’t start with that again, Asha.”
“I’m not starting anything!” I say, but my tone’s already off and Traci has hypersensitive ears for when I’m giving her tone.
“That was a dig at Jeff. Sit properly on your chair.”
“I swear it wasn’t.” I let the two legs fall back to the floor. They crush stray crumbs from breakfast. “I’m just saying, he likes looking at those tools because he has masculinity issues, not because he knows how to use them.”
“How is that not a dig?” Traci’s tone is becoming more severe too. If I want to keep the peace, I’d better back off.
I take a deep breath, and just like when I let the presence in the ceiling hold me last night, I surrender. “All I’m saying is—he’ll be fine.” It’s cold, but my annoyance is not because of Jeff, really, despite his threat last night. I’m cranky more because I’m kicking myself about forgetting my best friend. Plus, I’m hungover. So I follow up: “Besides, this means we get some time alone.” It’s a positive spin, which is what moving here is supposed to be all about.
Traci’s shoulders relax from where they’ve crept up by her neck. I can tell she’s pleased at the suggestion of one-on-one time with her kid. She lets my comment about Jeff go. I’m finally taking an interest in our relationship! It makes her happy. And admittedly, I’m looking forward to time just the two of us together too. Jeff can take as long as he wants at the store.
“I still can’t believe his foot’s okay,” Traci mutters, half to herself. I showed her the hole Jeff made this morning while he was taking a shower. In daylight, the jagged gape of the hole makes even more of a dramatic contrast with the rest of the deck. He almost took the entire third step down with him. “The state of that step and you would’ve thought he’d have broken a bone at least. But he’s healthy, his body’s reliable.”
The word reliable sticks in my brain, and I remember that phone call I overheard, his voice low, strained, sinuous with sexual intentions . . . and I think of Traci, the only woman he’s (allegedly) been with since the end of his relationship with his ex-wife.
Reliable. Is he as reliable as he’s made himself out to be since then? With all his good deeds and showing up a day early for extra time with his wife? Or is all this do-good behavior a cover-up? All his newfound alone time in the city—he must get lonely without Traci around. Hell, I’m lonely with Traci around.
What does Traci mean to him? She loves him, keeps him fed, watered, held. And he does the same for her. I just hope Jeff isn’t using her to feed his savior complex, to make him feel like a good man while he gives the ok for another old-growth forest to be chopped down.
He loves her for who she is, right? After all, Jeff drove all the way out here just to see us. He’s going to do a bunch of work on the exterior of the house, which means I won’t have to climb up the rickety ladders we found in the garden shed to replace shingles—which I don’t even know how to do anyway. All this work is on his weekend, too. He won’t get a real break until the house is fixed up. Meanwhile, me and Traci can take our time and don’t have to drive back to the city late at night. It’s really generous of him.
Then again, his secret sits festering in my stomach. I don’t know how to feel about Jeff, is the truth. And I don’t want to mess things up with Traci. She thinks I’m doing well here. She trusted me to go out last night. And look how that turned out. Embarrassment simmers beneath my skin when I remember crouching in the bushes with Cole.
“Well, we’d better get started on cleaning.” Traci’s already tying her hair back in a ponytail and stretching her arms like she’s about to run a race. Maybe I should stretch too; from the list she’s pasted up, the length of the refrigerator door, it looks like cleaning will be at least a week-long marathon. Traci wants to take it room by room, so today we’re starting with the mustiest, dustiest room of them all; the living room.
I pull all the new cleaning supplies from where they’ve been languishing on the counter for the past few days. We had more pressing issues to attend to, like washing the sheets so that the small, itchy red bumps that have continued to rise on my wrist and Traci’s sneezing fits might dissipate. She thought it might be mites in the pillows, but her allergies have continued to take us both by surprise as she scream-sneezes at the least opportune moments: over the pasta we ate last night, while she was brushing her teeth, in the dead of night . . . and the bumps on my wrist are still there. They’ve started leaking a clear fluid. Traci says we should go to a clinic on Main if it gets any worse. I try not to scratch, but as well as I do at avoiding digging my nails into the rash during the day, I end up scratching it in my sleep. This morning I woke up with a scrape of blood on my fresh white sheets. After that, I clipped all my nails so short my fingertips stung when I washed the breakfast dishes. If that doesn’t solve the problem, I don’t know what will.
“Stop itching at that rash and come help me carry these supplies to the living room.” Traci swats my hand away from my wrist.
I examine a bottle of extra strength disinfectant she found in the back of the cramped town hardware store. From the faded and minimalist packaging, it looks like it’s been sitting on the shelf at least ten years. A skull and crossbones leers ominously from the back label. “Should we wear masks? Looks deadly.”
Traci snaps her new purple rubber gloves on. “God, I hope it’s as lethal as they say. For pests at least. The current ecosystem in this house is not conducive to human life at all.” She slaps a fresh rag over her shoulder. She realizes she hasn’t answered my question and adds on, “I think there are some masks in my suitcase if we need them.”
Moments like these, when we’re doing mundane things, are when I feel closest to the mother-child relationship I idealized as a kid. That relationship, once a warm, living, breathing thing, folded itself down into a paper-doll version of what we had. Cleaning, cooking, sitting together reading . . . those are the times when I am most comfortable in a room with her. When our differences in opinion and misunderstandings hibernate for a while, our focus is off of each other’s flaws and we can just be. The accumulation of arguments and disagreements about which parent I want to live with, who’s the better parent, where I’m going, what I’m doing, if I’m doing enough, if she’s a good mother, if I’m a good kid, if I care about school enough, whether she cares about me, and the biggest irritant of all in our relationship, Jeff, all dissolve. I feel safe.
I want that safety back so bad I would cut this house up and put it back together a thousand times if it meant I could feel it again. To not have to worry anymore. I used to feel something like what I felt last night when that apparition held me: true peace, even against logic.
The woman in the ceiling is just another thing I have to keep to myself. Like when I finally told her, with all my bags packed, that I’d made the decision to stay with Dad, and she shouted at me that all he’d do was hurt me like he hurt her. Living with the idea of a protective apparition brings me a sense of reassurance. Whether this is real or in my head, Traci would only sense danger if I told her about it.
Then again, Traci wasn’t exactly wrong about Dad. But she wasn’t exactly right either.
Aggie’s house has a living room and a den, which was confusing to me growing up. The living room was “for company” but whenever family was visiting, we only hung out in the den. I’d ask Traci why we weren’t considered company. She’d answer that family isn’t company, that this was our home too. That confused me more.
In my eyes, this house was, when Aggie was alive, unequivocally hers. There was nothing about it that felt like home. Everything inside these walls was old and strange, from another time and world than I lived in. That sentiment was drilled home even more by Aggie herself. She treated my mum like a daughter most of the time, and Mum treated her like a parent most of the time too. But there were times I picked up on a frustration between them. It surfaced mostly when Aggie insisted we keep the doors closed to rooms that weren’t being used, or didn’t move any of the books or photos or paintings around, or that Mum should stop trying to buy her new cooking gear or throw out any of seemingly useless artifacts that wouldn’t have any value at an antique market, let alone a flea market. The excuse for having things her old-fashioned way was always the same, the house likes it that way.
Those frustrations with the house made them both into stubborn children playing an endless game of tug of war that often ended in injured feelings. I could understand now where they were both coming from: Mum trying desperately to pull Aggie into a future where she was cared for, and Aggie trying desperately to preserve this house to the point that it felt like a museum for the dead and we were just ghosts passing through on a vacation from haunting. Why couldn’t Aggie let Mum change a few things in the interest of caring for her? Did something happen in her past to make her so set in her ways?
All I have are speculations based on tidbits of Aggie’s life that Mum dropped over the years. The truth is, I never really got to know her. She wasn’t too curious about anything that happened after 1975. Our interactions all happened with my parents’ legs between us, or between the stiff hugs that marked the beginnings and ends of our stays. We never got deeper than a surface conversation about her garden, and that one time she showed me the birds. That time was nice. But it was only one time. All in all, I sensed I had to tread carefully in her space, make sure I didn’t cross a line that would draw her judgement; I think she liked her house better when it was empty.
Mum swings the tall oak door to the living room open. Inside, the living room reflects the same grandeur that’s present at first glance of the house’s exterior. The curtains are still drawn, as Aggie liked them, blocking out the sun except for a thin strip at the center where the drapes connect. They’re so coated in dust I think they’re gray, before realizing they are more of a minty green that makes the rest of the stiff furniture appear sickly and frail.
Great Aunt Aggie was secluded in her last years and didn’t have visitors who weren’t being paid to be here. Nurses or Kelly Levesque-Gerges or someone to cook. I suppose those people probably spent as little time here as possible. Other than those few townies who ventured onto her property to earn their living, it seems she only had the portrait of her and her late husband Ellis on the mantelpiece to keep her company. Must have been a lonely life.
With a strong grip on the curtains, Mum wrenches them apart. Midway she lets out a shriek and drops them. I gasp as thousands of baby spiders scramble to find their nests at the corners of the window. Coughing up the dust clouds swirling in our lungs, we check ourselves over with panicked hands to see if any spiders have found their way onto our clothes. When we’re both satisfied we’re not covered in creepy crawlies, we move an antique chair with roses engraved on its joints. I climb up on it and try to get a good grip on the curtains. I feel something tickling my hand and pull it back quickly in case it’s some type of bug or mite. When I glance at my palm, I see I was mistaken. It’s actually a tangled clump of white hairs that could only have accumulated after falling from Aggie’s head. I shake it onto the floor, feeling equally disgusted and impressed that the clump of hair managed to get up there on the curtain. Once the hair clump is settled on the floor, I give my hands a thorough wipe on my pants. They leave dusty white prints behind. “Can we wash these curtains?”
Mum must be thinking the same thing. She’s staring them down like an enemy to defeat. “If that ball of thread you just dropped is any indication, they may not survive the washing machine. We could just get new ones . . .” she considers. I don’t mention the ball of thread was actually human hair. “Maybe we should just get new ones? God knows how long these moth-eaten rags have blocked out the sun. What do you think?”
I shrug. It’s nice to be asked my opinion, even if I don’t have an answer. Despite the inheritance from Aggie, I know Traci’s been worried about money since she lost her job. “Let’s wash ’em and see.” I unhook the curtains from the long brass rod that supports them.
With the curtains off, sunlight streams into the room. The dilapidated grandeur of the Victorian style living room is even clearer now. I can imagine men gathering for scotch and cigars and discussing long-past wars. The sunlight catches on the dust motes swirling in the air currents. Light suddenly becomes tangible. I watch as the dust reconstitutes itself in places, becoming more solid. Does dust miss being part of something larger when it’s set loose on the air?
The swirls fall against some current in the air that remains solid, forming a pattern, what looks like a hand, reaching . . . reaching toward Traci’s shoulder as if to gently—
“Asha! Careful!”
The antique chair wobbles beneath me. I regain my footing on the navy cushion. When I look back toward Traci, the dust hand is gone. I must be imagining things. Like the woman who emerged from my ceiling last night.
My heart jolts as my eyes find the apparition’s face again. Why hadn’t I noticed it before? That portrait of Aggie and Ellis on the peeling mantelpiece. I look closer at the younger version of Aggie in the arms of her husband, with her dimples fresh in her plump cheeks and long, blond hair falling from its bun. I’m so used to imagining Aggie as her old self that I didn’t connect the dots when I saw her face in the ceiling. It took something about the blurriness of it coming through the corner of my eye for me to recognize her younger self as the woman in the ceiling. I must’ve caught a glimpse of this photo some other day and fallen into a half dream. I was still buzzed and rattled from the party.
I move to begin cleaning up the spider nests. A teacher once told me dust is eighty percent dead skin. Does that make dust motes the closest thing to ghosts? If so, this house is as haunted as the Levesque-Gergeses seem to think it is. I’ll have to tell Cole. I wonder if she’d think it was funny that I thought I saw a ghost. Or concerning. Can’t believe I’m considering this ghost stuff Cole got me on.
“Why are you smiling?”
“I don’t know.”
“A boy?”
“No! Mum—” it slips out. Both of us are surprised to hear me say the word. I haven’t called her “Mum” for years. My ears redden. Hers do just the same. “We’ve only been here for, like, a week.”
“Aunt Aggie used to ask me that all the time and I’d be so embarrassed. Of course, there usually was a boy. But I know that’s not your thing. At least not yet. You’re so much better behaved than I was at your age. I know I get on your back about some stuff, but overall, you’re much easier to deal with than I was.”
I think back to how Cole’s uncle called Traci “fun” when I said I was her daughter, how it seems like some men in this town think Traci sleeps around and judge her for it. It makes me mad to think about them talking about her like an object. But it makes me even angrier that Traci would ask me about boys just because I was smiling.
I rub my rag vigorously in the spider-infested corner of the window. The harder I rub, the more I direct my anger away from Traci. A tiny brown spider crawls over the back of my hand. I let it go free, watch it climb into a safe crack on the other side of the windowpane. I open my rag to see its siblings ground to pulp in my hands. I almost feel bad leaving it as a lone survivor. I don’t know if spiders have a concept of family. If they do, maybe the survivor will find some other spider family to support it.
“Aggie would say I should be careful with the boys around here,” Traci continues. “She didn’t like most of them. She really didn’t like most folks around here.”
“Why not?” I can think of a few reasons based on my encounters with Joe. But he’s a man, not a boy, and he’s RCMP, which doesn’t add to his likeability as far as I’m concerned. I’m not sure police would’ve been an issue for Aggie, though.
Traci turns from me and kneels to rub the baseboard with her disinfectant-dampened cloth. Beneath the gray grime is a slightly lighter color of yellow, which I think is supposed to be white. “She was more radical than most of the women around here.”
“Radical?” I have to laugh. Looking around this old house and knowing Aggie as a nice, but eccentric and rigid old woman, it’s hard to imagine her ever being “radical.” She kept all her riches locked away in these walls. I can’t remember her ever making any comments about women’s rights when I was visiting.
It’s as if Traci reads my mind. “Well, she was a feminist from the time she was quite young. She ran the local chapter of Women United in this room up until Ellis’s death.”
I imagine a group of well-dressed, white, upper-class women gathering here in the ’60s, driving over in bright cars, smoking cigarettes and laughing at jokes they could only make when men weren’t around. The town was doing well back then. For those women, it was probably a good time to think about the future, even their futures in this town. By the time Traci was living here, everyone’s idea of success had flipped. If you wanted to be anybody, you had to leave. That’s how she ended up in the city. Nan too, in a way. Traci spent her whole childhood in small New Brunswick towns. Her whole life after Aggie’s, she’d lived in cities. Until now.
“Why’d she stop after he died?” Wouldn’t that be the time she needed those women the most?
Mum takes a deep breath. She doesn’t often talk about Aggie’s husband. I always assumed that since he died long before she moved in with Aggie, she just didn’t know much about him. “I think it had something to do with the circumstances of his death?”
“Suicide, right?” I knew that much. She nods.
“Ellis died by suicide, but because of Aggie’s feminist leanings, a few people—mostly husbands of the women in the Women United group who didn’t approve of feminism back then—started a rumor that Aggie was . . . responsible for his death.” I can tell the thought is affecting Mum. Her anger simmers close to the surface. She often tries to push things down and pretend everything’s okay, but I’ve learned her tells. Her shoulders and eyebrows tense up like they did earlier in the kitchen. I think that’s why it’s so frustrating for her to argue with me. I’m like that too: barely giving a warning sign before my anger boils over.
“You mean, like, she murdered him?”
“You know, I don’t know if it matters, Asha. Did some people think she murdered him? Yes. But most people just put the blame on her. For not caring for him, for not being a good wife.”
“So that’s why people think this house is haunted?” I say it half-jokingly, to lighten the mood, tamp down some of that anger before it bubbles over. If even a few people thought she murdered Ellis, then that explains the rumor.
Traci half-snorts, half-laughs. “Who told you that? Kelly?”
“Cole. She said Kelly thinks this house is haunted.”
“See, rumors always come back around in this town. And usually when they do, they’ve still got a grain of truth in them. I’m not saying there was foul play in Ellis’s death, but the ghost rumor might have some weight to it.”
I’m shocked. “You think this house is haunted, too?”
Traci shrugs, turns with a slight smile to look at me. “Maybe not haunted with ghosts. Haunted by bad memories, sure.”
“Have you ever seen any ghosts?”
“Never. But sometimes there is an energy I can sense.” Traci wipes her hair out of her eyes and sits back on her feet. She stares up at the mantelpiece inquisitively.
“What kind of energy?”
“Protective, maybe?” She squints, unsure. I think of the presence—maybe Aggie?—that helped me drift to sleep last night. How Jeff’s leg was uninjured after what should have been a serious accident. Then I remember the house blurring out of focus when we first arrived; the way the key I took from the rafters was unnaturally warm. And that flash of firelight in the mirror, the unnatural cool that preceded Jeff’s leg dropping through the step. Was that the energy Traci was talking about? And if there’s a protective presence in this house, then what are we being protected from?
Traci continues, interrupting my thoughts. “Maybe it’s just growing up here with Aggie, knowing how she was. Protective of the house and all its artifacts, protective of the space as a whole. I kept telling her to fix the moat out front, but she blew me off. I think she liked that it deterred people from coming to visit. This house was like her shell. At first, when I came here after my mother died, everything looked hard and sterile. But as I got to know Aggie better, I saw how she cared for the place. There was a softness to her. She could be such a sweet old lady, but Aggie had a difficult life.”
I look around at the crystal doorknobs, the vintage light fixtures, cherry wood chests, a once-scarlet crushed velvet chaise lounge, and I think about the farm where my dad’s mother grew up, how I couldn’t recognize it from the other broke down farms beside it and beside that and beside that. Aggie had it hard in this bougie house? I know privilege isn’t a measure of happiness, but it’s almost funny thinking about her having a hard time here, with everything paid for by generations of colonizers who came and pillaged this land before her. Aggie living in this house having a hard time with all this land, with all these people coming in to care for her, with running water, with everything, everything she could want. And Nan, Dad’s mother: working with horses into her late teens until her parents decided they needed to get away from this town. All of them left together to move someplace closer to their idea of freedom.
It’s like Traci reads my mind: “Asha, I know what this house looks like. What Aggie’s life looked like. There is wealth in these walls, nobody could deny that, but Aggie, personally, had a very hard life. She lost her husband. They were very close. I don’t know if she loved him, but they were very close until he died.”
“Why do you think she didn’t love him?”
“The way she’d talk about him, mostly. She’d tell stories about the hijinks they used to get up to when she was young, that they were really partners in crime. She’d tell me stories about how they’d break into the town swimming pool on summer nights, make prank phone calls . . . all sorts of fun.” Fun. Maybe for them. If they got caught by the police, all their parents would’ve got was a stern phone call. Meanwhile, my great grandfather was wrongfully arrested and got his leg broken by the same cops who let their hijinks slide. “But Aggie never said she loved Ellis. I think she felt a lot of anger toward him for leaving her here alone in this house. I’d hear her yelling his name sometimes in the night, worse than the way she’d yell at me if she found me smoking in the backyard. Even when I asked her if she loved him, when I was marrying your father, she wouldn’t answer straight.”
“Did you—?”
“Love your father?” She stops scrubbing, sits, and turns to me. She’s all the way at the far side of the baseboard now. Traci looks me in the eye, so I know she’s telling the truth. “I loved your father very much. And I think a part of me will always love him, even if he didn’t pull his weight when we were together. It was like I was raising two kids.”
She’s said this before. I asked her again hoping she’d say something different, something more callous, or tell me something awful he did—anything to confirm he’s the bad man the courts think he is. Anything to confirm he isn’t the man I know: kind, generous, loving, and present.
I wish I could be mad at him for leaving me. But I know it wasn’t his choice. His imprisonment has felt like a replay of their agonizingly slow split.
“I believe you,” I say.
“I know.” I want to ask her about how Dad compares to Jeff. If she really loves Jeff as much as she loved my dad. But I’m scared of what she might say: that Jeff is the love of her life, her soulmate, that she wants to spend the rest of her days with him. I can’t bring myself to broach the topic.
Traci goes back to scrubbing. “Asha, I’m not making things up about Aunt Aggie. I saw how hard she worked to regain her reputation after people started those rumors. She was still working at it when I came to live here. People were not kind to her. They were scared of her, and the men were not interested in becoming her next victim, never mind she never had a first. The women weren’t much better. They’d invite her to their fundraisers and parties, hoping to get enough drinks in her that she’d tell the truth—or the truth they wanted to hear. But she never did. I think she was glad to have me here. She was deeply lonely, and I gave her some entertainment at least.”
“Do you think she ever loved anyone?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if she loved who she was supposed to love.”
What does that mean? Mum sighs now, folds her cloth over and refills it with disinfectant.
I can’t believe we’ve gotten through a conversation without fighting. I don’t want to ruin things by asking Traci if she means what I think she did. She’s implied it before, after a few glasses of wine with girlfriends when they start talking about their fucked-up childhoods: Aggie was queer. Whether or not it’s true, I don’t know. But I get uncomfortable with the way Traci talks about it, like it’s a family secret, like it’s still something shameful even if it’s not. So what if she was?
“You know, Asha, it’s ok if you don’t like boys.”
“What? Why would you say that?” I drop the rag and turn back to face Traci. All I did was smile and she’s invading my privacy. Heat rises in my chest.
“I just want you to know—”
“Just because you think Aggie was queer doesn’t mean I am. Just ’cause I don’t want to talk about boys with you doesn’t mean I don’t like them. Maybe I’m bi. Maybe I’m ace. Maybe I’m not even a girl. Whatever, it doesn’t matter. I still wouldn’t want to talk to you about it.” I realize my voice is rising, my fist is clenched. The words hanging in the air sink in somewhere deep in my stomach. I wanted our time together to be as free of conflict as possible. But she had to bring up sexuality because she always wants to know everything about me. We’ve had this conversation so many times before. My sexuality is something Traci keeps picking at like a scab. I’m not ready to have a conversation with myself about what I want, let alone her. She wants to know everything about me. It’s suffocating.
I wish I had Cole’s confidence and certainty to know who I am and to be that person with my family. Traci keeps hinting that she’d be accepting if I wasn’t straight. I’m not worried about acceptance. I just don’t know.
I can tell I hit a nerve. I was harsh, but I said what I meant. I don’t want to apologize, but seeing her face turned away from me and reddening with embarrassment, I want to make up for it somehow, too. It feels like someone is pushing against my chest, crushing all the air out of me. This is the way hurt has grown between us unchecked for the past few years: Traci tries to get close to me and I push her away. I can see that. But I don’t know how to stop this cycle when she pressures to me to answer questions that I haven’t even fully thought through myself.
Before I can gather the right words for an apology, Traci says, “Oh, damn. I think this might be black mold. It’s one thing after another here. The mites, the mice, the spiders . . . now mold?” Traci pulls back from the corner where she’s now seated, looking worried about the dark patches creeping up from below the baseboard.
The words roll around in my stomach and I feel like puking again. “I think I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Ok, sweetie. I love you.” She says it without looking back, so reflexive it might’ve been one of her big sneezes. For a second, everything is just the same as when I was a little kid, like I never got frustrated with her. But those words didn’t make my eyes sting so much then. Those words made me feel safe, not like I had anything to lose.
“I love you too.”
As I leave, a breeze bends a tree outside so the sunlight streams in brighter. The light reflects off the frame on the mantelpiece, obscuring Ellis’s face. Aggie remains visible. Separate from him, her smile is even brighter, her dimples deeper, her eyes knowledgeable, obscuring any chance of truly knowing of her.
Upstairs, in the bathroom, I pop a pimple and press the goop out until there’s blood. Then I dab at it with a piece of toilet paper and wash my hands. The water rushes out, too hot. It almost burns my hands.
I don’t know how long I’ve been in here.
It’s hot on the top floor. Hotter than outside. It’s suffocating with all this dust. I pull open the bathroom window first, dislodging leaves and dirt from last fall (and possibly many other falls before). Next, I open the windows in my room. A breeze wafts out into the hall, where I open a window that’s higher than I think Traci would be able to reach.
I pause outside Traci and Jeff’s room by the head of the stairs because I’m used to their door being shut. This is a new thing since Jeff started hanging around more. I used to spend a lot of time in Traci’s room before he was in her life. When I was younger, I often had night terrors or trouble falling asleep, so I’d crawl into Traci’s bed. It was the only way I could sleep soundly until I was embarrassingly old. Even after I started being able to sleep on my own more, I’d still sleep better in Traci’s bed. But Jeff doesn’t like me hanging out where he and Traci bang, I guess.
But today, the door is slightly ajar. Just enough that I think it would be believable to say I’d opened the window because the door was left open and it was so hot in there. Any curiosity I feel at entering a space I haven’t felt comfortable in since his arrival in our lives is secondary. Besides, I’m doing them a favor. If they want to sleep in a hot sticky mess tonight, that’s up to them. But I know Traci likes sleeping with a cool breeze touching her skin. Back home, in the summer, she used to position the air conditioner so it blasted her face while she slept. Her skin felt like ice whenever she touched my shoulder to wake me up for school.
The door creaks a bit when I open it, but I hear Traci running the tap and singing to herself in the kitchen. I step inside. Having the door shut has only concentrated the heat. Sweat pearls on my upper lip. In contrast to my room with clothes and books tossed around the floor, Traci and Jeff’s room is unnatural in its neatness. Jeff’s beige canvas weekend bag is folded neatly in one corner, his polos and golf pants hung in the closet, I suppose so he feels at home for the few days he’s here.
It still smells like Great Aunt Aggie in here. Her rosewater and mothballs. It smells like Traci too, that warm spiced scent, almost like apple cider, and even a bit like Jeff’s sweat. But as I walk toward the window, tiptoeing on the creaky hardwood, noticing the lavender sheets Traci brought from home, her jewelry tree with all her heavy necklaces, the rosewater and mothball scent becomes overpowering. It’s one of those smells that gets behind your eyes and takes up all your brain space. I think this is what people mean when they say “heady.” I don’t know if I’ll be able to wash it out of my brain when I leave. I dig my nose into my elbow and hurry to the window, pull it open, and let the wind rush over me.
Across the room, the door slams.
I jump, then let out a giddy laugh. It was just the change in air pressure with all the open windows up here. I look around for something to prop the door open and decide on Jeff’s canvas bag because . . . well . . . because it’s the only option available. I swear it’s not out of spite. I try to reach for it without letting go of the door, which wants to shut again.
“Asha?” Traci calls from downstairs, “Is everything ok up there?”
“Yes! Coming!” I shout back, peeking my head into the hall so she doesn’t think I’m in her room. I hope the muffled acoustics of this house will cover for me.
I twist the crystal doorknob, but it’s unnaturally cold and slick as ice. It slips from my hand. The door slams again with the force of someone pulling from the other side, someone a lot stronger than me. I can’t reach Jeff’s bag. I turn the doorknob in its socket. It’s useless; it won’t catch. A lot of the doors in this house are like this. They’re loose or something and won’t catch in their rusted mechanisms. The fear I felt when the door slammed earlier crashes back into me like a wave. What if it’s not just a broken knob? I try not to think of the apparition, Aggie. She was so strict about keeping the doors shut.
As I pull harder on the door, my eyes are drawn to a dark spot in behind the doorframe. At first, I think it’s a fly, or more black mold, but then I realize it’s something else: the corner of something, maybe dark paper. I abandon my struggle and look more closely. Even with fear lapping at my ankles, I’m too curious to ignore whatever’s revealed a corner of itself to me. It must be a picture or card. It’s bent, creased, old for sure. And it looks like the only reason it’s begun to fall out is because the paint on that side of the door has cracked. When the door slammed, a bunch of paint flakes fell to the ground to reveal it.
God, I wish I hadn’t cut my fingernails so short this morning. I dig the pads of my fingers into the tiny crack as deep as I can and carefully pull at the corner. A photo begins to emerge, covered in paint chips and dust, but there.
When I get the whole thing in my hands, it’s as supple as leather. The paper that backs the photo is thick. The photo itself is black and white. At first, I wonder if it’s a photo of Ellis that Aggie hid away, but that doesn’t make sense, because the man, in his wide pants, vest, and tie has his hair pulled back in a bun. Eyeing the bun, I second guess myself. Maybe he is not a he. Maybe Traci was right about Aunt Aggie being queer. Why else would this person be hidden behind a doorframe and a layer of paint?
The person in the photo looks directly into the camera, with a wide smile that shows crooked teeth. They’re freckly, probably a redhead. And the way their eyes crease is familiar. It reminds me of Cole, the first day I saw her, squinting in the sun. In more than that, too. The way the person in the photo is leaning against the wall reminds me of Cole too, as I watched her at the party talking to Skunk, far away and totally involved in conversation, but looking back at me every once in a while, like we had some secret. Like we would be talking about whatever happened that night afterwards, alone, sharing our observations and maybe even—
“Asha?” Traci’s close, maybe at the bottom of the stairs. I pocket the photo to show Cole and turn the knob. The door opens immediately this time, and I step out.
“What were you doing in my room?”
“Just opening the windows. It’s hot up here.”
“Oh. Thank you. That’s thoughtful.” She sounds surprised but I’ll take it over accusations of trespassing.
I meet her at the bottom of the stairs. For the rest of the day, whenever we’re not cleaning, my hand finds its way into my pocket to pass my fingers over the rough edges of the photo. Maybe Aggie wanted me to find this. As I remember her protective presence holding me last night, the peace I sank into, how good it was, how I’d do anything to feel safe that way again, the terror I felt when I was stuck in Traci’s room retreats then surges back like a rogue wave. Aggie’s protection was so powerful. Why would she need such a strong ability to protect unless there was something else in this house? Something that’s more of a threat. Something bent on harming her—or us all.