This House is Ours. (Patreon)

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I don't want to believe in ghosts. I used to. I used to want to, I mean. I wanted to hold onto my father even after the cancer took him. I wanted there to be rituals or magic to keep him alive. To catch his voice in a bottle. But there wasn't. And the more I thought about it, the more it scared me, to imagine him sitting somewhere in the dark, by himself. What if he was still dying in the afterlife. Alone and dying? I don't want to believe in ghosts. Let the dead stay dead.

My little brother Simon and I are standing in the driveway, wearing clothes that are now our funeral clothes. Today we are going to bury our mother. She killed herself. Our father died, and she started to die too. It was like she was under deep water. She stayed in her room all day. She ate alone.

Sometimes, sitting on the steps, hidden from view, Simon and I could hear our uncles, our grandmother, visitors we didn't even know, all saying the same words. You have to pull it together. You have to come back to us. You have to eat. You have to bathe. You have to be a person again. For your children. They need you. Your children. They lost their father. All they have left is you. But if she answered, we could never make it out. We lost our father. She lost more.

It didn't seem fair, that they wouldn't let her grieve. If we had hidden away, would they chastise us? If we stopped eating, would we be letting her down? Why were they using us as a weapon against her?

So we would sit outside her closed bedroom door, in the afternoon, and talk to her.

"You don't have to eat," Simon would say. "We are okay. We are okay and you don't have to eat for us to be okay."

There wasn't much to say, in the way of news. Malagash is in the middle of nowhere, and we had stopped caring about the outside world. All that mattered to me was my mother and Simon. Even our grandmother was part of the scenery. We mentioned her with the same distant curiosity as we mentioned seeing the fox again.

"He jumped this time!" Simon told her. "I didn't think foxes could jump!" He would sit with his back against her door, and I would sit facing him. It felt less lonely that way. We were both there, and if we were there, maybe she was too. Sometimes it felt like she was not in the house at all. But we never saw her coming or going.

"You don't have to come out of your room," I said outside her door. "You don't have to have a bath for us to be okay."

"You don't have to be a person," Simon said quietly. There was a long pause. "You don't have to come back to us."

Later, Simon woke up to use the bathroom and he saw her in the middle of the night, disappearing down the stairs to the main floor. He came and shook me awake. He pulled me with him, past her wide open door, where her bed was neatly made, and down the stairs. Through the empty dining room, out into the kitchen. But there was no one there.

The front door was closed, but unlocked. When we opened it, there was nothing. Just the front driveway, looping around the island of grass and the giant tree with its tire swing. We stepped out into the cool night salt off the ocean, and stood there listening. Nothing. She wasn't down the long gravel. She wasn't on the old wooden chair. It was Simon who finally found her. He pulled on my elbow gently and pointed.

She was out in the middle of the field, in the long grass, just standing there, staring into the woods. She was naked in the moonlight. I don't know if she heard us, if the screen door had creaked as we came outside. Either way, she didn't turn. She didn't look. Not at us, anyway. She only stared into the woods. Like she was waiting for something in the dark.

So we sat down, and we waited too. She didn't move. She didn't make a sound. And the more time passed the sleepier we got. My little brother with his head on my lap. My own eyes starting to close. They would droop, and I would fight them. Open them as wide as I could. I looked out in the field to make sure she was still there. The tire swing was moving slowly. Creaking. Quiet, and then a slow creak.

"Are you still awake?" I said to Simon.

"I think so." He paused. "Are you?"

Out in the field, my mother started to sing. If any of it was real, I mean. If any of it was real, she started to sing. She sang slowly and quietly, letting the words take their time. My eyes closed themselves again, and I curled up around my little brother, hugging him like a pillow, listening to her far off voice.

Are you lonesome tonight? Do you miss me I say?

Are you sorry we drifted apart?

Does your memories cling to that bright summer day

When I kissed you and called you sweetheart?

And then a slow creak.

Like the rose on the vine I am clinging to you

As I did when we drifted apart

I am wishing you back to that little shack

Where I kissed you and called you sweetheart

And then a slow creak.

If there was more to that song, I never heard it. Half asleep it was a chorus of voices. They were all so familiar. Singing all around us. In the field, and in the driveway. In my arms, and up on the barn roof. And then a slow creak. Everywhere.

Simon woke me up from my dreams, I don't know when. It was still dark. And the field was empty. It was dead quiet again. There was no song in the air. The tire swing was still. Simon's eyes were bright.

He helped me to my feet. When we went inside, we left the front door unlocked, just in case she was still out there. We didn't need to. Upstairs, her door was closed shut again. She was home. She must have come right past us. Did she watch us sleep? Had she been awake herself? I wanted to crawl into my own bed. Wrap my arms around my pillow in the top bunk and sleep. Instead, I sat down with my back against the door, and Simon sat facing me.

"We didn't see the fox today," I said to the door.

"We didn't look for him though," Simon added. "We went down to the water and tried to dig up razor shells." He paused a long time. It was silent on the other side of the door. It was always silent. But she heard us. We believed that. We did. She heard our stories. We were still part of her life, even if she was hurting. "We didn't catch any though."

"They're fast," I said.

"They're fast." He was yawning. And my eyes were closing again.

"They are fast," our mother said, quietly. "I remember."

And then I was asleep again.

It was only a week ago. If feels like last night. Like we fell asleep telling her about how fast the shellfish were. And we woke up so we could get dressed in time for her funeral. And here we are. Standing in the driveway, waiting to go to her funeral. Waiting for our uncles. The field out there is empty. There is no singing coming from the barn or the sky.

"We should walk," Simon says beside me, his voice low enough that our grandmother can't hear him. "They can drive and we can walk. We can. We can walk." It is the most he's said all day. He is even quieter now than he used to be. When he was smaller and frightened of everything. When he was just, "the waif" in my mind. He's still small, but he's not so delicate now. He's my only friend. "We should walk," he says, looking over at our grandmother.

"They won't let us," I say, but I know that's stupid. They don't get to "let" us do anything anymore. Our grandmother and our uncles. They might not agree to it, they might argue against it, they might even drive slowly beside us the whole way. But they can't stop us. They can't tell us to come out of our rooms more. To pull it together. To come back to the world.

Imagine. My big bear of an uncle trying to force me into the back seat of the car, like wrangling a wild cat. That will not happen. I will scream and thrash. I can feel it. There's violence in me today. It is our mother's funeral, and they aren't even real. Nobody is real anymore. The only person in the world today is Simon.

There's violence in both of us. I can see it in every small movement my brother makes. Deliberate. Careful. Like ferocity waits just behind his eyes. His face is calm but I can hear the snarl of his teeth. I can feel it behind my eyes, too. We are going to bury our mother.

We're orphans now, I guess. Our father is dead. Our mother is dead. Our heads are filled with violence and I don't know what. A song? I can't escape the feeling that the sky and the lightning will raise us, now. The clay red dirt of Malagash itself will be our mother. The crashing Atlantic Ocean will be our father. We are wild and free.

"We should walk," I agree. "She liked to walk." I'm wearing one of my mother's black work shirts, and my black jeans. Simon is in his grandmother-starched white button up shirt. Funeral clothes. Beside us, the tire swing is creaking in wind that's too gentle to notice.

There is no wind at all. It is cold out, but very still. The long blonde grass of the empty field is still. The weather vane on the roof of our peeling old house is still. But something is moving that tire swing slowly. It creaks and aches and creaks and aches. A long pause, and then creak. A long pause and then ache. Are you lonesome?

Maybe this is why the driveway feels like it is slowly spinning. Simon squeezes my hand, looking up at me. Eleven years old, his eyes holding back that violence the same as mine. But there's no pity or sadness in him. The spinning slows even more in his cold hand. Today we are burying our mother. I squeeze back.

"Okay," I say to him, my voice as quiet as his. Words for him alone. "We'll walk."

Now I can feel the wind. Now the long grass in the field is moving gently. Now the weather vane on the house drags itself in a different direction. There's a flash of orange between the trees and the grass. The fox. A rare glimpse we usually announce to everyone. I nudge Simon gently and point with my eyes. He doesn't say anything. We watch the fox together, until he disappears into the long grass again. They are so small.

"Come sit with me," our grandmother says out the window of the car. She's dressed in black, the same dress she wore to our father's funeral, and the back seat shadows hide the already hidden parts of her face. Storm warning today. Maybe there will be thunder and lightning. Maybe that's why I thought of it before. Maybe that's why the air tastes like this. Wet.

Our grandmother has been crying all morning. We sat on the stairs in our funeral clothes and listened until we couldn't anymore. So we came outside. She followed. Now she's sitting in the car watching us.

"Your uncles will be out soon," she says.

"We're going to walk," I tell her.

"What?"

"Me and Simon. We're going to walk," I say.

"Don't be silly. It's going to rain." I look up at the cloud cover and think about rain for a moment. Of course it's going to rain. Why did she say that? It doesn't matter if it rains or not. "Your clothes will be soaked," she says. Rain is just part of being alive.

"We'll be fine." Will they bar us from our mother's funeral for wet clothes? Our mother died in the water, and they're all attending her funeral alive and dry? Rude. We should walk out into the ocean. We should attend the funeral soaked with salt, trailing sand from our caked dress shoes.

"Simon, come sit with your grandmother." Simon doesn't say anything. He just shakes his head. "I wish you would," she says.

I can hear my uncles now, talking in the doorway. Simon and I turn and start walking up the drive. We can hear their voices louder now. Maybe asking our grandmother. Maybe calling our names. Come back to us. But we are walking. We reach the end of the driveway, where the mailbox has its flag down, and we turn right. This is the long red road that cuts through Malagash. The church is on this road. Not far, but always farther than I remember. It doesn't matter. They won't start the funeral without us.

"They're coming," Simon says without looking back, and I can hear the car on the gravel driveway now. I tense for an argument, but they don't stop. They give a little toot of the horn, and a small, serious nod as they pass. It is unexpectedly ridiculous. You can make a wave solemn, or a nod, but nothing can stifle the absurdity of a car horn. Toot. See you at the funeral. Toot toot. I don't feel like anything is real.

The road is a gentle red, like the leaves turning in the trees. We walk on the side facing oncoming traffic. There is a tractor sitting in a field. There is a white and red dirt bike leaning up against a shed. A pen of Llamas goes quiet as the Atlantic Ocean itself comes right up to the road to walk beside us.

"She had to do it," I say quietly, and Simon nods.

"I know."

"She was hurting all the time. She missed him like crazy."

For a long time he doesn't say anything, and then Simon looks at me.

"Do you think she was afraid?" he says.

"No." We keep walking, and another car passes us. It still hasn't begun to rain, but it will. They promised us a storm and we're gonna get one. They can't lie to us today. Not today. We can see the church now, with cars parked in lines along both sides of the road out front, spilling out from the small gravel parking.

When I try to picture my mother out on the pier, folding her clothes, fastening chains, preparing to kill herself, I don't feel anything. I can't imagine how she felt. I can't see her face. Was she afraid? "Maybe," I say.

"No. I don't think she was afraid. I think it made her happy." Simon stops again, and just stares at all the cars outside the church. There are too many. Who were all these people? How do they all fit in such a small church? "I think she was happy again," he says. "I want her to be happy again."

"Or at least not sad," I say. Another car passes us, and Simon takes my hand.

"Or at least not sad," he says.

People think something is broken or not broken. One or zero, like binary. People love binaries. They love to know exactly where they stand. They love a logical world.

I think that way too. I can’t help it. Either this tree branch is broken or it is not broken.

But when our father died of cancer it only halfway snapped the branch inside our mother. Not entirely broken, but not whole. Simon and I were the still-living wood inside that branch, holding the rope around her neck, keeping her half alive. Everyone told her that. Everyone reminded her that she was strangling. That she had to strangle, for her children. She was in pain for so long.

Our mother solved problems for a living. But computer programming and real life aren’t the same thing. The variables in a computer are all logical, and that perfect math does the work. But emotions don’t fit. How do you measure them? Pain is worth this. Taking care of my children is worth that. Compute. Compare.

It's impossible. There’s no way to calculate a solution from feelings. So, our mother must have made a choice.

She chose herself. And I am sad and lonely and I am afraid and I am angry.

And I am very very proud of her.

There are strangers smoking outside the church. They say words when we pass them, sorry and other words, and sorry again, and jesus and angels and none of it matters. It doesn't. They don't even have faces. I'm half worried they are going to bow to us as we walk past. Simon and I pull the church door open, and go in. I can hear the strangers catch the door behind us. We're here now. The waiting is over.

Our grandmother leads us up front, past pew after pew of strangers. We sit down, and it begins. They've been waiting. They're ready to go. The priest gives us a small sad smile and looks down at the words. His voice booms. It fills the room with the words. He's standing beside a formal looking photograph of my mother from when she was young. From before we knew her. From before she was our mother.

The priest is loud and confident, but Simon and I can only hear the other voice.

"Selfish. Cowardly." A woman's voice, behind us.

"Next time, count to ten before you resort to violence," my mother said once. I was twelve, and bleeding from my ear. We were still living in the city then. My head rang and rang, so that I could barely hear her voice under the sound of a hammer against steel. I wanted violence now. I wanted a knife. An axe. I wanted the world cracked in two.

"What good does ten seconds do? What am I supposed to do for ten seconds?"

My mother leaned close.

"Plan," she whispered. And she kissed me on the head.

It was a real whisper, meant just for me. Quiet and firm. I never told that story to Simon, but beside me he is counting under his breath. He is very very still. His shoulders are angry. And just when he starts to relax, our aunt's stage whisper reaches us again. In church. At my mother's funeral.

"Never thought of anyone but herself," Two pews behind us, she is stage whispering.  Which is not a whisper at all. Her words are meant to reach. Her opinions are very important. They're meant for everyone.

"Coward's way out," she says. About her own sister. About my mother. The thunder and storm outside are starting. The whole church flashes in the lightning and spark of hammers on steel. At my mother's funeral. Hammers on steel. Just a streak of rage inside me, I don't want to count to ten.

Beside me, Simon is counting under his breath again. I never told him that story. He wasn't there.

"Are you counting to ten?" I whisper, a real whisper, meant just for him. He nods without even looking at me. "Ten seconds won't save her, Simon." I'm so angry.

"Ten seconds won't save her," Simon agrees. But he counts anyway. Only then does he stand. Ten seconds. There are three people to our right and four to our left. Simon goes left, slipping past before our grandmother can stop him. Our aunt is sitting two pews back, on the aisle. The priest is reading loud.

"Selfish is what it is," our aunt continues. Two pews back. Four sets of knees to the left. I can hear my mother's word. Plan. My mother's smile. When had she told Simon those words? When had he ever needed to count to ten? There's so much I missed, back when I thought I was the only one. But there he is in front of me, such small fists wound tight. I follow.

"So soon after their father died? To leave them with nobody? Selfish. Cowardly. The easy way out." It is obvious that Simon's plan does not account for consequences. And why should it? There are no consequences at a funeral.

He is so fast. So small and so fast. The lighting and thunder crash around the whole church again and again inside us. I don't know what is going to happen. I can see her stupid, half familiar face now. My mother's sister. Crash. I don't know what is going to happen.

Our Aunt looks over, turning to see what her husband is staring at, and Simon is almost there, his arms wide like he is coming in for a hug. She looks confused, but what can she do? She opens her arms, still sitting in her pew. She exposes herself. Simon folds into her, his face against hers. She wraps him in a reluctant hug but I can see his plan now. His teeth. He grabs her as tight as he can, and he bites her face. He bites her face again and again and again, making an ungodly sound as she begins to holler. She tries again and again to shove him off of her but she can't.

Then her husband grabs Simon by his hair, pulling him off and shoving him to the floor, turning to tend to her. I don't hesitate. I jump up and onto his back. Pulling his hair. Yanking to the side. I want at his neck. My teeth want in. I bite and I bite but all I can get is his jacket. He throws me off, down hard onto the floor beside my brother. My head is ringing.

"Jesus Christ," he says. Our aunt is still trying to stop her cheek bleeding. Simon is beside me. His teeth and lips and chin. There is so much satisfying blood. I pull him to his feet, and hide him behind me. I can taste the salt air again. We stand there and watch our aunt bleed.

"I counted to ten," he tells her from behind me. Our aunt is gaping.

"I didn't," I say. I want to spit on her. "Coward. Selfish," I say. Her husband shoots me a nasty look and I step toward him, teeth bared. He stumbles back a bit. He can't help it. Good. Fear us.

My aunt has no idea what to do. Her smug certainty has vanished. Her words are gone now. Counted to ten and torn right out of her stupid face with strips of flesh. Did nobody tell her that orphans are animals? Did nobody explain that there are no consequences at a funeral? She is just looking at us. Gaping. Bleeding. She has no more nasty important opinions.

Everyone else's words are gone too, just for a moment. There is no funeral. There are no reprimands or exclamations. Simon and I are standing alone in an empty church while somewhere, not so far away, a tire swing begins to creak and ache.

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