I DON’T THINK my grandparents knew what to do with me. It had been twenty-five years since they had coexisted with anyone other than themselves, much less a teenage girl who had just lost her entire family. They were in mourning themselves, dealing with the loss of a daughter, a son-in-law, and two grandchildren. The fact that their flesh and blood was the one who brought the carnage was a weight too heavy for them to bear.
The large farmhouse, one that was packed with happy memories from my childhood: capturing fireflies in mason jars in the large backyard, Christmas Eves spent wrapped in afghans on the worn wood floor of their formal living room, a giant tree glittering from the corner, hot chocolate in cracked mugs, fried chicken on Sunday afternoons, and Easters spent hunting for eggs through the tall grasses in their backyard. That farmhouse died around us, a house of mourning and death, no one wanting to speak or move, worried that we might step on the crack that would cause us all to come crashing down.
They put me in the downstairs bedroom, the one right off the foyer. There were no rules, no curfews, no stern looks or discussion of my activities. They moved through the house, two silent ghosts, they in their world and I in mine. I could have thrown an orgy in my room, screaming and fucking the paint off the walls, and I don’t think they would have stirred, moved from their cemented resting spots. I almost wanted to kill them just to put them out of their misery.
But I wasn’t ready to kill then. I was scared to hell and back by my urges. They whispered to me in the night, catching me in unguarded moments, when I had exhausted myself with tears and loneliness and frustration. They struck me while driving, when my mind would wander from the road, taking its own direction until it ended in a bloody fantasy that had me gasping with fear and need. Fear of what I envisioned, need pulling at me to make it happen. I’m glad I didn’t kill them. Despite the black hole their life turned into—I don’t think I could have lived with myself if I had taken their lives. Contributed further to the tragedy that is our family.
I stumbled through the graduation ceremony, my eyes dead and cheeks wet. Everything I knew, everything I had, everything I was, had disappeared. The next week, the check from Dad’s insurance policy came. The first check I ever wrote was to the funeral home, my hand shaky, my signature unpracticed. That evening, I packed up my things.
An estate company auctioned off the house and all of the contents in it. I was told, by a perky redhead in a blue suit, that the home sold for less than market value, the new paint doing little to overcome the blood that was shed in our kitchen. She wanted to know when I would be by, to pack up my room and get my belongings and the personal items in the house. I told her my time frame in two simple words. Fuck off.
I got an e-mail two weeks later, with the address of a storage facility, a unit number, and an invoice. I paid for six months, assuming that I would sort out my emotions by then, be able to hold an item of Summer’s, look into a picture frame, or smell the scent of my mother’s lilac perfume. Two months ago, after six or seven milestone checks, I sent them a rent prepayment for the next five years. The last four have done nothing to heal the pain.