This House is Ours - 2 (Patreon)

-Sunday-

Malagash hasn't changed. Months and months have passed. Malagash is the same. It is Simon and I who are changed. Malagash is still one long winding red road. We are something else. We're the rustle in the brush at the side of the road. We're the figures standing stock still out in the field at night. We're the shape beneath the waves, we're the glow of phosphorescence trailing your fingers. This place is ours now.

I remember there was something shocking about red asphalt, about seeing a red road for the first time. Like if you stepped outside and the noon sky was a solid, cloudless purple. But time and darkness can carve out a place for anything to live inside us. To be comfortable. A road can't be strange to you once you've walked it barefoot in the middle of the night.

Simon and I stayed in our bunk beds, across the hall from where our uncles sleep. They were still talking, quietly. It was so dark that the light from under their door crawled across the hall and under our door too. They were still here. Our father died eight months ago, and they were only supposed to stay for two weeks.

But our mother wouldn't leave her room. She told them, calmly, that she was going to kill herself. She doesn't know when. But she knows. And so our uncle Frank couldn't leave. And so Jonah couldn't leave. I'm glad they're here. I love them so much, and without them? Simon and I would just be ghosts in this big house.

Frank's wide, soft eyes always seem about to spill into tears around us. Like we're sad little orphans. His husband Jonah is quiet but always warm. My mother is locked in her room. And Simon and I have gone mute.

Well, Simon went mute. I followed. He's all I have. Of course I followed.

But Frank and Jonah, what are they supposed to do? How can they leave? We're family. At night we can hear them talking in bed. They're "needed here," they say. And at first… at first I thought that meant "trapped." I thought they felt trapped here. But that isn't the way their hearts work at all. They are good.

My grandmother is glad to have them. Frank's deep laugh in the kitchen. Jonah's soft and reasonable dry humour. She loves them too. She loves the company. The family. Someone to take care of her while she takes care of us. The three of them stay up at night, playing cribbage while Simon and I sit on the stairs and listen. Half to their voices, and stories, half to the silence behind our mother's door.

And then every night we climb into our beds and we wait. Eventually Jonah and Frank go to bed. The light goes out. Their voices get quieter, as they talk one another to sleep in the dark. Sometimes laughing. Sometimes just an indistinct murmur that drifts in and out and finally stops. We wait longer than that. We wait until we're sure.

Tonight Simon climbed out of bed first. He began to dress as I climbed down the ladder. He doesn't speak, and neither do I. He hasn't spoken in a month. Not to me, not to anyone. Our uncles are worried. But they don't know what to do. There is talk about seeing a doctor. Talk about a psychologist. My grandmother takes him to church. Everyone is at a loss. But I knew what to do. I didn't know why, but I knew what.

Wherever my brother was going, I was going to go with him. I stopped talking, too.

In our dark bedroom, Simon waited patiently as I found a sweater. Folded in the bottom of the trunk we share for our clothing. Ready. But he touched my elbow cautiously. And I heard the sound of the bathroom door downstairs. Our grandmother's hand on the bannister, and we waited until we heard that small click of her far away bedroom door. The master bedroom. Then we moved quiet through the house. I fell over putting my sneakers on in the dark. We were gone. Out into the night.

Malagash hasn't changed. It's us that did. We've become part of something here. I have no idea what. Once you've cut your bare feet on the road, that road is your road. That dirt bike leaning up against the caved-in stumbling elephant house? That is your dirt bike. Those are your sad empty windows. The eyes behind them are not afraid of you. You are not afraid of them.

The ice cold Atlantic ocean is our ocean now. We own it and it owns us. We can see it from anywhere. It blends into the air we breathe, like Malagash is a beach that the tide drowns once a day. Every night we walk beside it, holding hands in silence.  Past the pier, and the lobster traps. Past the church and the fields and the dirtbike.

This all belongs to Simon. This all belongs to me.

-

-Letter-

Dear Simon,

Dear Sunday,

People are going to tell you that I was selfish. Weak. Tired. Depressed. A bad mother. You are going to overhear their voices in the next room. Their "Whispers." Down the stairs. Through the window. Not one of them will know what it was like to fall asleep next to your father. To talk in the dark until we fell asleep. To keep talking even then. For years. To wake up with him again and again and again. And then to wake up without him.

I don't mean waking up alone. Waking up alone is not the same as waking up without your father. Waking up alone can be solved. It's not a very complicated puzzle. It isn't rocket science. Find someone new to wake up with. Solved. Learn to wake up alone. Solved.

But waking up without your father? That, it turns out, is a sick pain that will never go away. That, it turns out, actually is impossible. So, yes, people are going to tell you I was selfish. Weak. Tired. Depressed. A bad mother. The things people say when they do not understand.

"Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem."

Idiotic.

Your father's death is not temporary. Unless I REALLY misunderstood the doctor.

Your father was a part of me, in a way nobody has ever been. The cancer killed him, but it left his dead body. For the rest of my life I will feel this dead thing hanging around my neck. Crushing my chest at night. I will fall asleep trying to talk to it, but it will not talk back. Pain isn't even the right word.

Pain is when you stub your toe. Or slice your face with a knife. Pain is having your fingernails carefully pulled out, one at a time. It isn't the right word. I'm suffering, I guess. I'm hurting. But that isn't why I am going to kill myself. I'm going to kill myself because I can't carry your father's corpse around anymore, hoping that he will wake up. That's what hurts. Nonsensical hope. The hope that he'll be there beside me once the lights are out. The hope that he'll be there when I open my eyes.

Hope. They're going to say I was selfish. Weak. Tired. Depressed. A bad mother. But they won't tell you the truth. That I'm free. That my hope is finally gone.

-

-Frank and Jonah-

"There was blood on the floor in the bathroom."

"What?" Frank sat up in bed. Jonah closed the door quietly behind himself.

"Not a lot. But blood."

"Well, she didn't…"

"No. No," Jonah's voice was reassuring. "I heard her door close earlier. And there are so many reasons there might be blood on the floor. Just a few drops."

"But?"

"Sometimes I do wish we were home again. I know we are needed here. But we are living in a haunted house."

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