Blinking away phantoms, I pulled over in front of our old house. I lived less than two miles away, but seldom returned here. Bridge Street was out of the way, a place people only went to if that was their destination, and it was rarely mine.
The house, a small single-story set back from the road had sat in the middle of a dirt lot when I’d lived there, but the dirt had been replaced by a lawn years ago, and instead of cracked and weathered shingles, the house now sported relatively new vinyl siding. Still, beyond the aesthetics, it basically looked the same. My old bedroom window was now dressed with lacey curtains, and I wondered who lived there these days. We had never owned the house, and after my mother’s death the landlord sold the property to another family. Since that time ownership had changed hands again, but I knew nothing of the current tenants. In fact, as far as I knew none of the families who had resided on Bridge Street at the time of my childhood were still there. Even smaller-town America had become transient it seemed, the days of families occupying homes for generations relegated to a nostalgic quaintness of yesteryear.
Hesitant to leave the false sense of security the car provided, I turned off the engine and looked to my left, further down the street toward the squat two-story house Bernard and his mother had lived in. Of all the houses on the street, it was the only one unoccupied, and since Bernard’s mother had died less than a year before, the only one still closely tied to the past. A modest two-story badly in need of a paint job, the windows were dark, the front yard unkempt and the driveway empty. Taken over by the bank, it had apparently sat unsold, empty and sealed shut since, and was well on its way to becoming the neighborhood eyesore. If it remained vacant much longer, the kids in the area would undoubtedly dub it the local haunted house—if they hadn’t already—never realizing just how near the truth they might be.
In her later years, Bernard’s mother had lost much of her beauty to the ravages of cancer. In and out of the hospital for months, eventually the doctors had admitted there was nothing else they could do for her, and she was sent home to die. Less than a month later, in the upstairs bedroom just to the right of the staircase, that’s precisely what she did. Bernard later told me he had been in the room when she died, that he’d held her hand and watched her take her final breath. I knew all too well what it was like to see that happen. My mother had died in my arms, gray skin stretched across a face I barely recognized, eyes sunken but open, awaiting things only dying eyes could comprehend. To watch your physical creator, the human being from whom you came, the literal flesh and blood vessel responsible for your conception and birth, wither and die, was something beyond explanation. Like soldiers who have survived the horrors of combat, you’d either experienced it or you hadn’t. You either understood what it was like, what it meant to be infected to your core by such things, or you didn’t.
She went quietly, he’d said desperately, as if determined to convince me. I don’t think she could even feel the pain anymore, she—she went quietly. His voice murmured to me from the past, sounding the same as it had through the phone line that morning. I’d told him how sorry I was, and that I understood what he was going through.
I know, he’d said. That’s why I told you first.
The squeak of the car door echoed along the pavement as I stepped from the Pontiac. I made my way slowly along the sidewalk, waiting to cross until I was in front of Bernard’s old house. Memories ricocheted about—mostly blurs—but large chunks of the past remained elusive. Particularly those portions of the past tied directly to this street, this neighborhood, and this house. I had always assumed those uneventful periods in life simply faded and all but vanished over time because they held nothing of particular importance, but now I felt differently. As I approached the waist-high fence surrounding the backyard, it seemed a better bet that those things just beyond the grasp of memory had been forgotten deliberately, and not because they were unimportant, but because they held within them things too unpleasant to confront. Even now.
I felt the aged wood against my hand, pushed open the gate and stepped through into the side yard. The lawn was dead, a victim of winter, the parched brown grass accompanied by occasional patches of bare dirt scattered about like a sprinkling of landmines. As I moved deeper onto the property an unseen bird shrieked more warning than welcome from its perch somewhere within the half circle of lofty trees just beyond the fence in the backyard.
Several windows on the side and rear of the house had been broken or cracked by thrown stones, and someone had written Eat Me in spray paint along the back door. On the cement patio off the rear entrance sat the same lawn furniture that had been there the last time I had visited, days after his mother had died and only a month or two before the bank had seized the house. The white plastic table and chairs had faded and cracked in places, and one of the chair legs had been broken clean off and tossed aside. Next to a weather and time ravaged chaise lounge, several large garbage bags had been left in a neat row along the back of the house. Each bag had been filled to capacity, and I tried to imagine what they contained. The day Bernard lost the house he’d been served with a warrant and had been unable to retrieve many of his personal items still trapped within. I pictured workers gathering items—his items, his mother’s items—and stuffing them into those garbage bags.
Two entire lifetimes seemingly reduced to a neglected shell of a building, some broken furniture and a row of trash bags, as if nothing else remained of either of them.
I looked up at the back of the house and the darkness on the other side of the smudged windowpanes on the second floor. The sensation of someone watching me from just beyond the swathe of shadows rattled my already frayed nerves. “Bernard,” I whispered. “Are you here?”
The trees, stirred by a momentary breeze, answered for him.
Small windows along the foundation of the house reminded me of the cellar in New Bedford where he had hanged himself. But this was his home, a place of history, so what had Bernard conjured here, in this house where he’d once claimed the Devil sometimes spoke to him? What demons had he summoned and brought to life here? And why? Why had he done it in the first place? Why had he listened when evil beckoned—even if it had come from within him—why had he chosen to embrace it?
I moved to the edge of the patio and crouched down; eyes fixed on the old chaise lounge, its canvas backing tattered and soiled. What had I seen and experienced here, incidents my mind had relegated to hazy spirits that haunted me from the shadows even now? How had they blinded me, stolen my vision and left a void where their memory should have existed instead? Or had I given it away, buried the knowledge so deeply myself that it no longer seemed real?