THE SMELL IS WORSE UPSTAIRS. It’s equal parts mildew and long-ago cooking odors, but not foods that leave the sort of aromatic life in the air that tells you the house was once occupied by people. It’s old food of the left and forgotten kind, tucked into discrete places I know I’ll likely find during April’s remodeling.
And there’s something else. A sour odor overlaying it all. Acrid, like a campfire hastily snuffed out, but not before it could do a little damage.
And when I examine the frame of the hallway at the top of the stairs leading to a long row of doors, I see more evidence to support that smell. Charred pieces of wood spot the frame, crumbling under my finger when I touch the burnt places. I flip the switch and blink against the light that flickers to life.
What did April say? Some plumbing and electrical issues, but still livable? I don’t recall her mentioning anything about fire damage. I don’t know much about home ownership—okay, I know nothing—but shouldn’t that be something that’s at least casually thrown into the conversation before you buy a house? Oh, by the way, there was a fire here, so that might have whittled some of the structural components down to toothpicks. Still want the house?
Charred remains of yellow-and-green-flowered wallpaper cling to the walls of the hallway, the plaster behind it a progression of dark rust to yellow. I raise Linda to my eye and make the wall my first picture. As though I’ve flipped a switch, her flash sparks and I hear rain begin to tap the roof. The wind exhales, and the branches on the trees grumble against the disturbance.
The hallway exposes six doors, three on each side, before coming to an abrupt end. I start with the first door to my right.
The window to this room is open, raindrops dotting the outside of the yellowed fabric hanging limply from the rod above. I cross the room and pull closed the ancient window that will no doubt need to be replaced. Even closed, the draft that creeps in around the sides puffs the curtain around my head, tenting me in a mildew cloak.
This room is pretty sparse, with an ornately carved bed frame resting without its mattress in one corner and a mismatched dresser hunched beside it, the bottom drawer jutting like an underbite. A pop of turquoise color peeks out from the corner of the opened drawer, all the way to the back. I recognize it immediately after walking a little closer. Reaching in, I pull out a plastic My Little Pony, complete with pink mane and matching tail, a smattering of lollipops adorning its left flank. I used to babysit a girl who had one. I remember telling her that they weren’t new, that they were just resurrected from somewhere in the 1980s. I remember seeing that same pony sit in the backyard sun for days on end after that, like it was being punished for my revelation. I’d dashed this girl’s fantasy about her pretty teal pony, and now it would bake in the unforgiving Arizona sun because of me.
I pluck the pony from the drawer and tuck one leg into my back pocket. I have no idea why it’s here, but I’ll be damned if I banish one more plastic pony to the subexistence of neglect.
Before I leave the room, I raise my lens and zero in on the spotted curtains of the window and the bed empty of its mattress. I notice a trail of dust and a dried smear of mud on the wall by the window, most likely the product of rain getting in from the open window. Except that it should be speckled like the curtain instead of smeared.
The room across the hall is practically a carbon copy of the previous one. Instead of a wooden frame, this room contains a bed made of ornate but rusted wrought iron. Still no mattress. There’s not even a dresser in this room, just a folding meal tray with faded pea green marbling that looks like something you’d find at a yard sale after someone’s grandma dies. This window is open too, and harder to shut against the now pouring rain.
The room beside that one is also missing a window covering, but at least this one has a mattress. And while the rain is making a sizable puddle beneath the window, the wind hasn’t quite blown any moisture to the bed. I think this might be where I sleep tonight, and I place the pony on the bed.
The room across the hall and the one beside it are duplicates of each other: twin rooms of rosebud wallpaper, all pinks and purples and oozing femininity. But old femininity. Like doilies that have been sitting underneath potted plants on side tables for too long, the dirt forming a brown ring. Charred ends of wallpaper strips stop and start, with gaping holes exposing custard-yellow glue that failed to do its job long ago. These rooms are the first since the hallway in which I’ve seen a recurrence of the fire damage.
I walk to the corner of the room at the back of the hall—the second of the pink rooms—and examine the heap of moldy bed linens piled and abandoned, their once pink hue looking peachy now.
I pinch a corner of the sheets and lift, leaping back when a brown spider the size of my palm skitters out of its hiding place and through a massive hole in the back of the closet.
“So that’s what I get to think about before I go to bed tonight,” I say. “Where that thing’s crawling while we’re sleeping.”
I take a picture of the bed sheets and a picture of the closet hole. When I lower the lens, a smudge on the window catches my attention.
Crossing the room, I see that it’s less of a smudge and more of a print. An upside down hand print. I hold my own up to it and cover it easily, my fingers reaching over an inch beyond the print on the window, though it makes my wrist ache to get it angled just right.
Upon taking my hand away, I notice I’ve left my own print, which should have obscured the first. Instead, they’re overlaid.
Then I finally see the problem. Disbelieving, I raise the window and let in some of the rain, reaching for the smaller print and rubbing it with my thumb. My suspicion is confirmed when it smears easily. The print is on the outside.
I close the window fast, the chill from outside snaking its way up my arm.
I picture myself as the owner of this little hand, bending my wrist to make an upside down print from where I’m standing. Given that the torque of my wrist is still struggling to right itself, I can’t figure how it could happen.
The final room is perhaps the biggest train wreck of them all, the place where previous renovation attempts came to die. It’s as though every ounce of furniture missing from the other rooms has migrated here. Five dusty, yellowed mattresses form a kind of fort across the room, lining a sheltered pathway from the window to the closet door, which stands firmly shut thanks to one fallen blue-striped mattress with satin piping. I have to climb over three dressers, all emptied of their drawers, a lamp with no shade, and heaps of papers and blankets and damp bedsheets to reach the window, which is, thankfully, easy to shut against the downpour outside.
Robbed of its sound, the room feels somehow embarrassed now, like that sudden hush that falls at a party, and only one person is still talking loudly about what she found in her dad’s sock drawer. A few of the papers piled around the mattress fort still titter under the remaining draft, but the rest of the room waits for me to make a move.
I snap a picture of the barricaded closet door and push away the thought that I’ll find an even bigger spider than the one setting up camp in the room across the hall.
While the hallway and the twin pink rooms exhibited some evidence of fire damage, this room displays none of that aside from the strong acrid odor. It’s worse here than in the rest of the rooms by far. I search for the source—sure something in this room is charred to a crisp—but I can’t see even a square foot of flooring in the midst of all the rubble.
It might be the clutter that kept me from noticing the wall to my right until now. The only wall that isn’t painted a sort of overcast gray color in this room. Instead, it’s covered over sloppily with the same floral wallpaper from the hallway, though it runs out halfway down the wall about a third of the way across. The remainder is covered in the pink wallpaper from the twin rooms. The tops and bottoms run up short or too long over the molding against the floor. It looks like it was hung in a matter of minutes.
I move a few scattered drawers belonging to the empty dressers and clear a path to the wall before pulling the loose end where the yellow and green meets the pink. Loose wallpaper is kind of like a hangnail. You can’t not pull it.
I tear until a triangle the size of my hand has curled away, exposing blue paint beneath the floral design. I pull the paper into my fist and yank as hard as I can, relishing the destruction I’m responsible for—an old, familiar feeling. A feeling that precedes April and my dad’s disinterest and my mom’s abandonment. A feeling that precedes that night in the desert. And now I remember what it’s like to feel in control of something, and I have to choke back a sob it feels so good.
After setting Linda in one of the abandoned drawers, I push stacks of damp papers and end tables and heavy quilts from the wall, clearing a space for the chaos I’m suddenly desperate to unleash.
I dig at a new corner of the wallpaper, but I can’t get a hold of the end. I scratch until my fingers start to burn, but the paper won’t budge. I frantically search the room for something to aid me and spot a stick lying by the window. It must have blown in from one of the branches outside.
I chisel at the corner of the wallpaper until it comes up, and I tear a new sheet from the wall, this one almost a foot long. More blue wall exposes itself. I tear again. Another two feet fall to the floor in tendrils of discarded design. I dig and tear at the paper until I’m kicking through shreds like a hamster in its cage and sweating from the effort. But it’s better than what I was feeling before.
I look at the wall I’ve marred. Swipes of newly exposed plaster peek through the shreds like shy creatures. And upon closer examination, it appears as though that’s not too far from the truth.
Faint against the blue are fine strokes of lighter colors. Thin lines, drawn with a frenzied hand depicting a forest. I spot the tops of evergreen trees and paths painted into a mural of some kind, with tiny flowers and squirrels and birds dotting the scene.
I scrape another corner of the paper from the wall and tear carefully so as not to leave any of it behind. The wallpaper separates from the plaster with a sigh and lifts away to reveal a head of hair so red, it’s purple. I pull a little more, and there, staring at me from six inches away is a set of bright green eyes painted into a young face of permanent contemplation.
“What are you doing?”
I spin to find April in the doorway, her worry searching for a place to land in the frenzy of the room and her unstable stepdaughter.
“Home improvements,” I say, gulping for the air I hadn’t realized I was missing.
After her search of my face, she finally notices the wall I’ve begun to strip.
“Some kind of mural?” she asks, as if I might have the answer.
“The wallpaper’s hideous. Basically everything’s hideous. Oh, and the house has fire damage,” I share, leaving no bit of bad news out. I wasn’t quite done unloading my immense emotional baggage in here, and frankly, her interruption bothers me a lot.
April takes a breath that puffs her small chest and lets it out in three, two, one. She looks down at the floor and back up at me.
“I won’t do this, Penny. This sniping every other minute. I swear to God it’s like being married to my ex all over again. I’ve been trying. For three months, every day, I’ve been trying. And I know I shouldn’t say this, and I’m probably going to regret it, but I’m not really in the mood to filter myself right now. I’m the only one who’s really been trying. So you can keep doing what you’re doing and make the next two months miserable for us both. Or you can consider—just consider—the possibility that I wanted you here with me.”
April walks away, leaving the air heavier than before. That quiet fills the room again, only this time not even the papers are chattering about how embarrassing that must have been. For her. For me.
I take one last look at the green eyes in the wall, convinced they witnessed and judged that entire interaction. And even though I found this mural with its pastoral trails and earnest face with shocking red hair and whatever else the wallpaper hides, it feels strangely against me. Like it wasn’t ready to be found and hurled out of hiding into the wreckage of this room and my life.
“Sorry, kid,” I tell the wall. “Looks like we’re all in it together now.”
As I leave the room, I hear the paper flutter in my wake.