This House is Ours - chapter 2 (Patreon)

2- 

It is our aunt who has to leave the funeral. Clutching her bloody face while I take my brother downstairs to the bathroom. It is a strange wide room with a small sink set against the wall. I wonder what was here before. What do churches keep in their basements? I lead Simon to the sink and wet a paper towel. My own head is aching, where it hit the floor, but there's no blood. My brother stands calm and patient while I wash blood from his cheeks. His chin. His lips. 

"Open," I say, and he opens his mouth. A faint film of blood. There is a shelf beside the mirror, with a set of old playing card glass tumblers. I fill one with water, "rinse." He rinses and spits. The watered down blood swirls and is gone. Then he looks at me, waiting. 

"Open again." Without the blood, I can see the smallest bit of skin caught between his teeth. I reach my fingers in, but can't get at it. I cut my nails this morning. For the funeral. So I can't pick it free. "Sorry," I say. I reach again. "Sorry." He doesn't mind. He is calm, just watching me. In the end I have to use paper towel like floss to scrape it free. Down the sink she goes. I check him over again. No blood on his face. "Good." I say. "Now shirt."

The front of his shirt is sprinkled with blood. Not a lot, but blood. He unbuttons and slips free. I don't know anything about getting blood out of clothes. So I take his shirt and fold it up beside the sink. His t-shirt underneath is black and clean. He looks down at it uncomfortably.

"It's okay." I say. "We aren't here for anybody else. We're here for her. She died naked. I don't think she's gonna care if we're in our t-shirts." I start to unbutton my own shirt. Underneath I have a t-shirt, too. Green. I'll stand out more than my brother. It doesn't matter. Nobody will say anything. I fold my dress shirt, too. Carefully next to his. "Ready?" I say, and he nods.

"Good," I tell him. "But if there's any more trouble, I get to bite the next one."

Back upstairs, everyone is standing. They seem relieved to see us. They start to sit down, first a small group, then more of them. The funeral puts itself back together, piece by piece. Like a puzzle, with two pieces missing where my aunt had been. One more time, our grandmother leads us to the front and sits us beside her in the pew. The priest starts to speak again. Less quickly, this time. Less certain. He keeps looking nervously at us.

Out in the graveyard, the sky is hammering down. Only half the mourners make their way through the mud to the grave, and most of them stay for just a minute. The wind throws rain sideways. Mud is on their nice fancy shoes. Eventually it is just us standing there. 

Just us and a gravestone. Two gravestones. His and hers. Just us and an ornate wooden coffin, with rain railing on it from above, from the side. A carpet of fake green grass that I don't understand, and a machine of pipes in a rectangle, and ropes to lower our mother's body down to lay a few feet from our father.

Behind me I hear tires on wet gravel, and my grandmother looks up. 

"She did not," my grandmother says. I turn to see a police car pulling to the side of the road, where all the other cars had once been. "She fucking did NOT." My grandmother says. The car door opens, and a man in uniform steps out slowly, his hat in his hand. Already aware he's at a funeral. He can see the coffin. The gravestones. He can see how small Simon is. How small I am. He just stands there, waiting.

My grandmother goes.

"Did you want to say something, Simon? Do you want to say goodbye?" My uncle asks, but Simon doesn't say a word. "Simon?" He doesn't answer. He doesn't shake his head. He doesn't owe anyone an answer anymore. He's looking at the gravestones. My other uncle keeps trying to hand him an umbrella, until finally Simon takes it and drops it on the ground. We are soaking wet, all the way through. We just keep standing and standing. Why are we doing this? Our mother isn't here. She didn't want to be here. 

Finally my uncle clears his throat, and he is about to say something.

"We're going to walk home," I cut him off. I look down at the coffin, then take Simon's hand in mine, and we go.

"Wait," my uncle says.

"Let them go," his husband's voice is soft.

"Excuse me," the policeman calls to us, as we head out the driveway and begin to walk. "Excuse me," he says. Neither Simon nor I look at him. He is not our problem. In a few minutes he'll be gone too. There are no consequences at a funeral. 

"Their mother is dead." My grandmother tells him. "You don't talk to them. You talk to me."

The thunder is gone, and the lightning. The hammer on steel. The feeling of chaos and violence. It's all gone. I'm not sure what's left. The rain is hard and loud in its own way, but it is also peaceful. It makes the road a darker red. It changes the color of my t-shirt. The skin on my arms. Simon's hair.

When we reach the spot where the ocean comes right up to the road, I take Simon's hand and lead him down to the water. The sand is wet and cakes to our shoes.

"I just want to see," I tell him. And I start to wade out into the water. When I'm up to my knees I can hear him behind me, splashing a bit to catch up. The water is higher on my brother, but we're both soaked through anyway. The salt is clean and cold. I don't know what I thought I would feel, standing here. Close to her somehow? But no. This isn't where she died. This isn't how she died.

Simon is looking down at something, and then he reaches out his hand, and grabs a jellyfish by the soft safe dome. He pulls it trailing up out of the water, still dripping, even in the rain, and then wraps the stinging lashes around the bare skin of his left arm. His eyes go wide but he doesn't make a sound.

"What!" I snatch the jellyfish off his skin, which is flashed red now, with long snaking bright lines. I want to throw it as far into the sea as I can, but I don't. Simon is still looking at me. So I lay the creature across my own skin. Wrap my left arm with it the way he did. It is a pain that almost sings. It is so sharp and so immediate. I think I get lost in it, because the next thing I know, Simon is pulling the thing off my arm and throwing it back into the sea. 

My arm looks just like his. We match. Red vines. Red snakes and tendrils. Sea creatures. Red chains. Maybe we'll scar the same. Maybe we'll be brother and sister forever, and never leave one another alone like this. He'll never have to sit at my funeral. I'll never have to sit at his. He takes my arm and puts it under the salt water. It doesn't help, but I love him for it.

Before we leave I dunk myself in the water entirely. I run my hands through my hair and then dunk myself again. When I come up, Simon is dunking himself too. He comes up for air and shakes his hands in his hair. Then he goes under again. There is a brief flash of lightning, but if feels far away. I wait for thunder that doesn't come. 

The bright pain wrapped around my arm throbbing like a sound.

When we get home, the car is in the driveway, but nobody is in the kitchen. The house is quiet. I get two glasses down, and pour us each some water from the fridge. It is cold but unfiltered. Well water, with its strange taste, and a bit of sea salt from my lips. Simon holds his arm out for me to see. The bright stinging lines look so alive, like they might move. I hold mine out, too.

There are towels in the bathroom, and we take them upstairs. At the top of the stairs, our mother's door is shut. 

I grab the handle and push the door open. A neatly made bed. An empty desk. The closed door gives the wrong idea. It creates the wrong impression, like she might still be hiding.

Still no sign of our uncles or grandmother. We take the towels to our room and close the door. Everything looks the same. Our bunkbeds. The window and closet. Nothing has changed. We peel our wet, salt clothes off, and sit naked on the strange old carpet to dry ourselves off. We towel our hair. 

It takes me longer than my brother, who is already digging in the dresser for new underwear. He climbs into his bottom bunk, and I stand up to pull the curtains closed. It isn't even dark out yet. I pick up all our wet clothes and set them against the wall. Salt. Then I dig through my own drawer. I climb the wooden ladder to the top bunk. To my soft sheet and pillow. I can hear Simon breathing. Maybe crying. 

"You did good today," I say in the dark. 

There is a long pause, and then a small knock on the wall. 

"Simon?" He knocks again, quietly.

It is then that I realize my brother hasn't said a word since the chaos. He has looked, and gestured, and wrapped a jellyfish around his arm, all ways of communicating, but he has not said one word. Not since the violence and the blood. 

He knocks on the wall again, a bit louder this time, and I understand. 

"I love you too, Simon." I knock on the wall as I say it. I don't even have to say it, I realize.  Then I close my eyes and finally let myself start to drift. I let the tears come, quiet and flowing. And I let my body sink deeper and deeper into the bed. Simon can hear me crying I think, because he knocks again. 

I knock back and I keep crying. 

My mother took two cinder blocks from the garden in the shadows behind the house, where we picked rhubarb, and sometimes raspberries, and she carried them down the middle of the road toward the wharf in her bare feet. We know, because in the morning her shoes were still there by the locked front door. Her shoes were still there, her bedroom door was still closed and empty, everything was normal.

There was no moon the night she left. She carried the cinder blocks down the gravel driveway in her bare feet, down the faded red road, past empty night time fields, and stopped to turn down past the rusted sign, past the stacks of lobster traps in the brittle living sand grass. She went halfway out the pier, set each block down and she began to undress. We know, because they found her clothes neatly folded on the wooden ledge above the water. 

She left behind two notes back at the house, (For Sunday. For Simon.) knocked onto the floor somehow by the time we found them. She left her laptop computers, stacked neatly. She left the car in the driveway. I can't list everything she left. 

It must have been hard standing out there on that ledge. There must have been cold wind coming in off the water while she took her clothes off. Her ring. There must have been voices in her head. Voices like her sister's.

"How could she."

"Selfish."

"Cowardly."

"How could she."

How? She folded her clothes neatly. She padlocked herself around the waist out in that cold night air, and she looked down at the water. The Atlantic Ocean is green dark off that pier at night. And maybe it wasn't hard at all. Maybe once you've made a decision like that, a weight lifts. A leaf falls. Soft white snow blankets everything. How could she? She pushed the chained cinder blocks off the side of the pier, and she followed. Her pain went away.

In the morning, the sun is too bright. I don't want to get up, but they are downstairs yelling about breakfast. I can hear Simon getting dressed. So I climb down from the top bunk and start pulling clothes out of the dresser.

"Morning," I say. Simon looks at me and touches my hand good morning back. 

We get dressed, and go to stand outside our mother's door. Someone has closed it again. I turn the handle and push it open angrily. I'm looking at the other side of the room, searching for something to tie the door open, and it feels like there is a shadow in the bed, lying on its side, turned to face the wall. But of course there isn't. I close my eyes in frustration. There is nothing to tie the door open. 

I touch Simon on the shoulder and motion for him to follow me. Downstairs, into the kitchen, where everyone is sitting around the kitchen table, eating. Where the air smells like bacon and toast. Where there are two plates set out for us.

"Good morning," my grandmother says. "Juice or milk?"

But I head past them, to the door. My mother's shoes are gone now. Simon is reaching down for his shoes, but I shake my head. He stands back up. He leaves them there. Outside the gravel driveway cuts at our bare feet, sharper than I expected. At first I step gingerly, but it doesn't really help. It still hurts. Still cuts. So I walk. Fast and hard. Angry.

The trunk of the car is unlocked, and inside it takes me a minute to find the bungee cord. Hooks on each end. There's a plastic bag here, too, from the police station. I know it is a pile of clothes, neatly folded. Is the ring in there, too, in a smaller plastic bag? Or has someone taken it inside for safe keeping?

Simon is looking at a cut on the bottom of his food. Then he looks at me. I show him my own foot. The blood. Then I close the trunk, and hug him. I didn't expect to see her clothes. I try my best not to let him see the panicked look in my eyes, I just want to get back inside the house. But Simon grabs me by the elbow, and points at the trunk. 

So I open it again. This time with him right beside me. I take the plastic bag from the police station, and I put it in the middle, between us. Simon is the one who opens it. Who pulls out the pile of our mother's clothes. They are not stacked neatly at all, the way my mother would have stacked them. The way our uncles described when they thought we couldn't hear. Some policeman has gone through them, and then shoved them into a bag carelessly.

I take her pants and I hold them up, folding them across once, and then down three times. Simon takes her shirt. He folds it neat and clean. It looks perfect to me, but not to Simon. He shakes it out and makes sure every button is buttoned. Then he folds it again. Every corner matching.

In the house, I can see both of our uncles standing in the window watching us. 

Simon takes the pants from me, and unfolds them. He fastens the button, does up the zipper, and folds them again. He moves slowly and carefully. He sets the pants down in the bottom of the trunk, and then places the shirt on top of it. He reaches into the bag and pulls out our mother's underpants, and he folds them too, just once, and sets them on top of the shirt. Then he scoops his hand underneath and lifts them all into the plastic bag. He seals it again.

I touch the back of his head. When he turns to look at me, he looks relieved. I feel relieved, too. The panic is gone. We close the trunk and I hardly feel the gravel, walking back to the house. We pass through the kitchen without stopping, and there are words, blood and feet and floor, but we have one more task before breakfast. I have a bungee cord in my hand. We track blood through the dining room, and up the carpeted stairs, leaving our bloody footprints like ghosts. 

In my mother's room I affix the bungee cord to the back doorknob of her door, and then to the closet behind it. I have to wrap it around the closet doorknob a few times to make sure that the cord is taut. That the door stays open. No more shadows.

Over breakfast, our grandmother just seems sad.

"Simon, you don't have to talk if you don't want to," she says, "but you're making me very frightened." 

"Sunday, is your brother okay?" my uncle asks. I nod yes, and Simon knocks love quietly on the side of my chair. I knock back.

We eat our breakfast in silence, they watch us the whole time. Nobody says anything else. Our silence is contagious. There's nothing to say. Then we go back up to our room, and close the door.

We wait for nightfall. For the sound of our grandmother climbing the stairs, and the faraway sound of her bedroom door. Then our uncles, making more noise, coming up the stairs together. Standing outside our room for a long time before opening it to find the lights out, and us tucked into bed.

"Goodnight," they whisper. And then they cross the hall to their own room, and we hear their door click closed. And then we wait some more. We wait, and we wait, and finally I slowly pull back my covers and climb down the ladder. Simon is beside me.

We know exactly how to open the bedroom door in perfect silence. We know where every creaking floorboard is in the hallway, and how to avoid them. Downstairs, we don't even glance at our shoes. She was barefoot. We open the screen door, push down and forward with the exact pressure so that it doesn't creak. We're both in the same clothes we wore all day. The night is perfect and cold.

The driveway feels so much longer in our bare feet, cutting and biting at us. But Simon doesn't wince or make any faces. I stop to wait for him, and take his hand. I let him set the pace. He doesn't walk slowly or gingerly, either. 

It's obvious where we're going, but I wonder whose idea it was, his or mine. I wonder if it is an idea at all, or something calling us. From the dark. From the water.

The pavement is such a relief after the gravel. I can feel my feet throbbing and both of us are leaving dark splotches of blood. But we're moving faster now. The pavement is warmer than the air.

We hear the car coming long before we see the lights. There is no hurry. Simon and I find a tree on the side of the road and we stand beside it in the darkness. Brother and sister, patient and invisible. The car approaches.

Simon grabs my hand, and I pull him slowly into a side hug. The lights get brighter and closer. I put my hand where his heart is. And then the car is gone. Nobody sees anything on this road at night. His heartbeat is slow. Calm. We are safe and we are together. 

Simon still hasn't spoken. I still haven't spoken. We are figuring out our own way.

Above us, the sky is empty and full at the same time. Stars so small that they make the road seem darker. We leave the safety of the tree behind, and Simon keeps my hand in his, but we are safe and we are together. Back at the house everyone is asleep and quiet. The screen door didn't creak as we left.

We walk in the middle of the road, like our mother did on her walks. Before our father died.

The warehouse beside the pier doesn’t have any markings. It doesn’t have any windows. Lobster traps are everywhere, set back from the water, stacked on dry land. Leaned against walls. Simon looks through the grass until he finds the first cinder block. He picks it up and starts to carry it down the pier. I watch him stop to rest, set it down, lift it again. His face so serious. When he reaches the spot where they found our mother's clothes, he stops and looks back, waiting for me. 

I briefly wonder why these blocks aren't in plastic bags too. 

I lift the other cinder block from the grass, and I walk out to stand beside him. Together we push the concrete blocks and watch them tumble them into that green dark water. The night takes the sound and they're gone. There's a moment where we can still see a shape beneath the surface, like a face looking up, but there's nothing there. 

Simon watches the water longer than I do. 

I sit and wait for him.

The walk home is long. My feet are starting to feel torn. When we reach the driveway, I stop and look at the gravel. Simon doesn't hesitate at all. He walks ten feet and then turns and waits. When I catch up to him he takes my hand and lets me set the pace.

We open the screen door in exactly the right way, and close it carefully behind us. It does not creak. Inside, we leave bloody footprints across the kitchen in the darkness. In the quiet of the house. What will they think when they wake up and find bloody footprints coming in, but none going out. Are the ghosts still here? 

We are.