23: Gone
2007
Living with ghosts for so many years, we’d all come to learn that any type of change in our home could cause a rise in activity. Whether it was a remodel, the birth of a child, or even something as minor as getting new furniture, the ghosts let us know that they noticed the transformation.
Our home was about to undergo one of the biggest changes yet. Our son, our baby, was moving away to attend college. As mothers tend to do, I had a mommy meltdown. Once Troy officially moved out, I cried and cried for days. Any mention of his name would bring me to tears. Of course, if his name wasn’t mentioned, that also made me cry. After days of this, I decided the best thing for me to do was work. That’s how I handle stress. I work. The harder the work, the better off I am.
Unfortunately, Wes had nothing for me to do on the job, so I was left to my own devices. With the yard mowed and the gardens weeded, the biggest, hardest, most difficult task I could think of was cleaning Troy’s room. But when I went into his room I knew this wasn’t a good idea at all. No doubt the room needed to be cleaned, but I couldn’t do it—not yet. I left his room and vowed to get to it soon, but not that day. Closing his door behind me, I tackled cleaning out the cabinets, wallpapering the kitchen, and rearranging the living room.
I knew Wes and Keshia would be coming home any minute, so I tried to put on a happy face and pretend I wasn’t going to die soon. Despite my best efforts, they knew all wasn’t well on the home front.
Both of them crept around the house as if they were walking on eggshells. This only served to irritate me. “I’m okay!” I yelled. “Would you two quit looking at me like you think I’m going to crumble to the floor?” They slunk off in opposite directions. Fine, I thought. Where’s my family when I need them? Gone! Everybody’s gone. Troy’s gone. You guys won’t talk to me! I’m all alone! This of course brought on a new round of tears, sending me to the bathroom for more Kleenex. Walking down the hall, I noticed Troy’s bedroom door was open. I slammed it shut. “Who keeps opening this door?” I yelled out. “I want it left closed!”
The next day wasn’t much better, nor was the day after. My sisters, having already gone through this, tried to console me. It didn’t work. Obviously, I loved my children more than my sisters loved theirs. They were still alive after their children had left home and I knew I wouldn’t be able to survive much longer.
Knowing there was nothing left to scrub, polish, vacuum, or paint, I decided the time had come to take on the room—Troy’s room. I walked down the hall with trash bags in tow and stopped in front of his open door. The same door I’d closed at least five times a day since he’d left.
I began picking up things in his discarded piles and shoving them into the bags. There were old clothes, torn football cards, and long-forgotten homework assignments. Little by little, the floor started to become visible. When I picked up his ripped football practice shirt, I couldn’t believe he’d put it into the pile to be thrown away. True, I must’ve told him a hundred times to throw it away, but seeing it tossed aside was like closing the book on an era of our lives. There’d be no more Friday night high school football games. There’d be no more … many things.
The familiar lump formed in my throat. Holding the threadbare shirt to my chest, I walked to his bed. I sat down and sobbed into his shirt. As I cried, I felt someone pat my back. Lifting my head from the now-wet shirt, I felt it again. There was no one there. Exhausted, I curled up on his sheetless bed and went to sleep as someone I couldn’t see continued to pat my back.
After getting that day behind me, I started to see that perhaps my sisters were right. I might pull through. It was somehow possible to live with a heart that was broken into a million little pieces. Troy was less than two hours away and he’d promised to come home often. When he couldn’t make it home for the weekend, I could always go and see him.
Surviving on these visits, I began looking forward to his Christmas break. When he called and asked me if I’d go shopping for his new girlfriend with him, I jumped at the chance. We scheduled our shopping excursion for his first day home.
Sticking with tradition, Keshia went shopping with Wes to insure my Christmas gifts wouldn’t consist of power tools. She and Wes got in one vehicle while Troy and I got in another and we all headed out in separate directions. I had my son back and all to myself for awhile. We shopped, went out to dinner, and tried to catch up on each other’s lives.
When Troy and I returned home, we saw that Wes and Keshia were still gone. I stood on the porch rummaging through my purse to find my house key while Troy impatiently jiggled the doorknob. As he backed away to let me insert the key, the door unlocked and opened wide. Startled, Troy turned and looked at me. I told him it appeared I wasn’t the only one missing him.
He smiled and told me he hadn’t seen anything and I hadn’t either.
After putting our packages away, I watched Troy lock the front door as he went outside. When he began jiggling the doorknob, I knew what he was doing. He was his father’s son. I watched him through the glass of the door. He jiggled the knob, he pushed on the door, and he jiggled some more. He looked up and saw that I was watching him; he smiled and told me to let him in. When I opened the door, he walked in, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “It’s the wind.”
My son was home!
Before we knew it, Troy’s first year of college was over. My sisters were right. Somehow, I had survived.
Growing tired of dorm life, Troy called and wanted us to come help him move into a house he’d found. When we walked into his new place, it reminded me of the first time I had walked into my house so many years before. This house was not empty. There was someone here. As I walked around, I felt as though the presence was a male entity. It wasn’t anything to be afraid of, so knowing how Troy felt about these things, I kept the impressions to myself. After helping Troy get settled in, Wes and I headed home. As we got into the car, Wes said he didn’t think Troy was alone.
Wes told me when he was walking down the hall, he could feel someone following him. We discussed how we thought this was going to be an interesting move for Troy. Knowing how he felt about ghosts, we were curious to see how it was going to unfold. We both thought if Troy did ever notice anything, we’d never hear a word about it.
We were wrong. Troy was good about calling home and, during these calls, he’d talk about how he could hear someone walking around late at night. It was hard to keep my suspicions to myself, but I tried. At first, I told him it could be the house settling and that he just needed to get used to being somewhere different.
The longer Troy lived there, the longer his list of complaints became. He still talked about hearing someone walk around, but now he also talked about how, after locking his doors, he kept finding one of them unlocked.
When I finally shared my thoughts about his house, they were received with an, “Aw, Mom! It’s just a creepy old house.” Not expecting anything different, I told him I knew how he felt, so I would drop it.
Trying to stay true to my word, every time he called with a new story, I tried to come up with a reasonable explanation. He started complaining that when he got up in the mornings, he found his pots and pans stacked in the middle of the kitchen floor. I suggested maybe he had a squirrel or something in his cabinet and it pushed the pans out.
He told me he didn’t think that could be the reason because they weren’t scattered around, they were always stacked in the middle of the floor. Troy wanted to tell me about these incidents, but he’d always end with, “It’s just a creepy old house.” Then he’d want to change the subject.
One time, Keshia spent the night with Troy. When she came home, she told me Troy’s house was so active, she didn’t know how he could sleep at night. She went on to say she could hear someone walking, and pans rattling all night long. She said the rattling got so loud that she got up to see what was going on. She couldn’t see anything unusual when she walked into the kitchen, but she could detect which cabinet the noise was coming from. When she opened the cabinet door, the noise stopped. She saw the cabinet only contained plastic—nothing that would have warranted the noise she heard.
A few days later, I was talking to Troy on the phone and he told me he needed to find another house because it was impossible to sleep there. He said in addition to hearing someone walk around and pots and pans rattling, now his washing machine was turning itself on in the middle of the night.
As I tried to stammer out possible reasons for this to happen, Troy said, “Cut the crap, Mom. We both know this place is haunted!”
I laughed. “Okay but I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.”
“Well … I don’t … most of the time.”