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“May?” Aunt Betty attempts to grasp my attention as I day dream.
I drop my fork in surprise and it clatters to my plate.
“Are you alright?” she asks me, her brows furrowing. “You’ve been spacey all afternoon.” I have yet to tell her about my visit with Kade or our agreement.
“I’m sorry. This place is just getting to me I guess,” I mutter and stab at a boiled carrot with decade old salt and pepper sprinkled on it.
Her furrowed brow increases. “Your mother used to say that.”
“And then she went crazy,” I finish her unspoken thought.
Aunt Betty nibbles on her garlic toast. “I think it’s best we finish up here and leave. Your past here is too much. It would get to anyone.”
“Do you think that this place is the cause of all the stuff that happens here or do think that it’s the events that have happened here that lead to further events, like some sort of domino effect?”
My aunt takes a deep breath and finishes chewing and swallowing her mouthful of food slowly before answering. “I’ve never liked this place. I’ve only been here a handful of times. The first was when Daniel was born, the second when you were born, the third when he disappeared, and the fourth when your mother tried to kill you. From the very first time I came here, I thought something was off. I can’t explain it really. It’s just a feeling. A chill, something cold creeping up my spine every time we drive past town and into the country side nearing this area. Maybe it’s silly, but I can almost feel the crossing of a border somewhere between Sunnybrooke and here. A few miles out of town and I just get this feeling. I told my sister that—your grandma—once and she thought I was nuts. Well, until your mother told her all the weird stuff that had happened out here and that continued to happen. Your mother continued relaying the events of this place to her over the years and then she would relay it to me. I never understood why your parents never left, especially after your dad passed away and your brother went missing. Your mom had no reason to stay here really. Maybe she felt closer to them here. I’m not sure I’ll ever understand, but the day that I got the call about what happened between you and your mother... I swore I’d take you away from here and make sure you never came back. Yet here we are now. To answer your question, I’m not sure I believe in whatever it could be that would make this place so...deadly, but then I’m not sure I believe in such a coincidence either. Too much has happened around here to be coincidence. I wish I could think of a rational explanation for it all, but I can’t, no one can.”
She raises a good point. If there is something weird and unbelievable going on here, then what is it? What could it possibly be?
“Kade stopped in while you were napping. He’s an investor and he agreed to buy the place as it is. We just have to take what we want and go. He will deal with the rest. He will be here in the morning to sign papers and switch over utilities and stuff before we go.”
My aunt looks surprised but nods as if she’s more than ready to get the hell out of here. “Good. It’s not healthy for you to be here any longer than needed. What papers does he need to sign right now? Did he even come in to see the place?”
I shrug. “I don’t really know what is entailed in selling a house honestly. He seemed really intent on buying it as is. Maybe he’s planning to knock the place down.”
She seems a little skeptical. I am too. My aunt chuckles and nods. “We’ll have to call a real estate agent tonight then, because I’ve never sold a house either. My friend Cheryl sells houses. I’ll give her a call.”
After my aunt goes to bed rather early in the evening, I walk about the house, taking it all in for the last time. I think about taking pictures but decide against it. The memory of this place is enough. I grab a box and take a few photos from around the house and put them in it to take home with me. I also take a few knickknacks from my old bedroom to bring along with me, some old photo albums I found in the attic, and a quilt that my grandma made my dad when he was a kid. After my packing, I retreat to my old room and lay down in bed on top of the covers. I stare at the roof deep in thought.
I can’t wait to return home to my apartment and friends. I pull out my cellphone to check my messages, forgetting that out here in the middle of nowhere, there isn’t any cell service. I can’t help but wonder how Jane is doing back home in our apartment all alone, though I’m sure she’s not really all that lonely. I’m sure she’s had her boyfriend Darrel over the entire time I’ve been gone. He practically lives with us.
I close my eyes briefly, relaxing. It’s too early for me to be able to sleep and there’s too much on my mind to sleep anyhow. My thoughts keep going back to Harriet. Part of me feels beyond guilty for not reporting seeing her to the police, but another part of me is paranoid about what Kade said earlier.
A rush of air causes my hair to tickle my face and I open my eyes quickly, thinking that my aunt has woken up and just opened my door. My door is closed. I snap my head to the window. It, too, is closed. A prickling sensation hovers over my skin and my heart skips a beat. I watch as the long grey curtains in front of the window ruffle as if wind has swayed them. After a moment they go still. I leap up from bed, not sure what I’m about to do exactly. The soft breeze continues to move through the room only causing me to continuously become more shaken. I approach the window and check for a draft. Then the now familiar, annoying, loud thump causes my hair to stand on end. What is going on?
Out of nowhere a man dressed in farmers garb with long, wavy blonde hair and crystal blue eyes is standing in front of me, looking at me curiously.
Before I know it, my knees are becoming weak and I’m kneeling on the floor feeling light headed, a scream of confusion, frustration, and fright ready to escape my lungs, but before it can, everything goes black.
I wake up lying on my back in bed, the room dimly lit by the small bed side lamp that I’ve kept on while staying here. The previous events rush back to me at once and I gasp, racing out of bed to flick the lights on. Knowing that I’d clearly dreamt it all up or else I’d have been on the floor right now, I slowly calm down. I take deep breaths to relax myself and pull my phone from my hoodie pocket to check the time. It’s shortly after two in the morning. Not wanting to go back to sleep after all that, I lie back down in bed and decide to read a book on my phone to calm down.
By four, I’m doing everything I can to keep my eyes open. I take to pacing the house, somehow ending up in my mother’s room for only the second time since I’ve been back here. My eyes land back on the graffiti in red on her wall and anger replaces some of my fright and confusion. I find my mother’s old jewelry box and rifle through it casually. I find a necklace she used to wear often and memories flood back to me. Fond memories. Since that day she attacked me, I’ve always wondered what happened to her. Was she always mentally ill, I was just too young to see it? She was never a bad mother before then. She was an excellent widowed mother, especially after everything. My aunt seems to think that what happened with my dad and brother tipped her over the edge, but why did it take so many years for her to snap after those events? To me, it just doesn’t make sense.
Hours before my mother attacked me, we’d been baking cookies for my school bake sale, eating the dough, and laughing. I drop the necklace back into the case and close the lid.
I was fifteen. In all actuality, I wasn’t all that young. Surely, I’d have noticed if her mental health was declining, no?
I move to her closet and discover her now slightly out dated wardrobe and a pile of shoes. I look through the old clothes remembering more and more of her. I find myself feeling a bit guilty for not visiting her when she was taken into the psych ward, but it’s too late now.
I kneel down to her shoes and can’t help myself from slipping on one of her favorite sparkly, white heels. After years, I’ve come to the conclusion that the woman who shot me was not the woman who raised me. My mother never would’ve done that. She loved me.
I remove the heel and toss it gently into the closet before closing the door. I move to her desk in the corner and lift a picture of her and my grandmother from the cork board, smiling at it before placing it in my pocket. I see the drawer that had been locked when the police searched the house for any clues as to why my mother decided to try and kill me. They’d forced it open and now the wood was chipped and broken. I slide it open, finding it empty. The calendar on the top of the desk dated back over seven years ago shows her shifts at the hospital and my first day of high school marked clearly. My eyes curiously move to the day of the incident. It’s blank besides the simple note ‘cookies for bake sale’. Nothing leads me to think she planned to kill me. If she was to kill me, why waste time making cookies? I flip to the next month where she has my fall dance marked down, the one she was supposed to chaperon. I hadn’t been too happy about that fact at the time, the memory causes me to giggle quietly.
I cough from the dust I sent whirling when I flipped the calendar page, the rush of air causing more dust to fly and then a coughing fit from me. I find myself laughing uncontrollably for no apparent reason.
I quiet myself before I wake up Aunt Betty and sit down in the edge of my mom’s bed for a moment, taking in the room for the very last time. I take in everything from the design of the blinds, to the way the laminate floor is chipped in the one corner from my dad dropping the heavy safe once in a drunken stopper after a Christmas party in town, where he’d won the raffle and decided that he needed to move the safe to a more secured location for the night until he could take the money in to the bank. He’d only won two hundred dollars, so now it seemed silly that he’d have moved that thing across the room to the closet, or at least tried. After dropping it and wrecking the floor, my mom had scolded him and told him to go to bed. She wasn’t really that mad though, because I remember hearing them both giggling from my room. Looking back now I realize that they were flirting, and my dad was probably being the humorous guy he always was. I miss his goofy smile.
Thinking about the safe for the first time in many years makes me wonder what, if anything, would be in there now. Would I find more family pictures or something of the sort that I could take back home with me? Recalling that my dad had ended up actually moving the safe to a more secure location the following day, I go into the spare bedroom next to my mom and dad’s room and attempt to recall where exactly he’d taken apart the floor. I push down on some of the floor boards for a clue but come back empty. It could be anywhere in the whole quarter of this room I’d seen him sitting in that day with a pile of tools.
Then I see something that catches my eye. A small X shaped scratch in the corner of one of the floor boards and I know I’ve found the right spot. I try to pry the board up with my nails, but I fail and have to go grab a flat screw driver from the closet down the hall. I jab it into the crack and then position it at the right angle to pry it up. It snaps up fairly easily and I move to the ones surrounding it. When I’m done, a whole two feet by two feet is visible and the old dusty safe I remember appears. Feeling a bit like a treasure hunter, I smile in triumph before reaching down and pulling it up out of the hole. The thing is heavy, and it takes all I have to pull it up, I barely get it out of the hole.
Try to lift the lid, I discover that it’s locked of course. How in the hell will I ever find the passcode to this thing? I try the house phone number, family birthdates, everything I can think of. Then I try the obvious ones. One, two, three, four; Two, four, six, eight; and so forth. I am beyond surprised when the green light flashes following the input of four ones. I lift the lid to find a heck of a lot of paper. I assume birth certificates, passports, deeds to the house, all those types of important things, but when I lift up the first envelope and flip it over to see it labeled ‘May. Read at 18.’, I wonder if it’s the will we never found or something along those lines. I can’t help but open it. After all, I’m over eighteen.
A pull out a letter. “May, by now I will be long gone, and hopefully your mother will have remembered to give you this if all is well with her. I understand that if you’re reading this and you’re now an adult, that many years have passed, and many tragic things have probably happened since I’ve passed away. You might wonder why I know this. Well, as I’m sure you’ve come to understand, this place is not normal. Bad things happen here. You might wonder why we never moved away. If we moved away, the bad things would only follow us. We have both everything to do with the tragic events and nothing to do with them. You’ll understand eventually, but until then I hope you live as happily a life as is possible under the circumstances. Know that I am alright where I am now. I am okay. You will be too, no matter what happens. We’re strong. Our family is strong. When the time comes, know that you’re not going insane, you’re not crazy. Don’t be scared. Be strong. I know that right now you’re probably reading this and wondering if I was a bit crazy, but this will all make sense to you one day whether it’s tomorrow or five or ten years from now. Stay strong, dad.”
I close the letter, confused and set it to the side. Was my dad like my mother? Did my dad really pass away from a heart attack at 28 years old like I was told? Who has a heart attack that young? How have I never thought about this before? How did he know he was going to die? With shaking hands, I reach for the next thing in the safe. The next thing is a blue print of the house, and then just the regular safe stuff. Pictures, important documents. I take a few pictures of the stuff and take my long-lost birth certificate, but leave everything else inside. I could just leave the heavy safe where it is, but for some reason, I feel the need to put it back where it was.
I wipe a tear from my chin. Thinking about my dad always leaves me in tears. He was a good man. I miss him so much.
I decide to head down to the kitchen and make myself some seven-year-old tea.