Full Circle

[sasha]

Until that piercing moment of revelation, Alan had forgotten all about the dream he'd had when he was ten. At least he'd convinced himself at the time that it had been a dream; but then he'd taken pains to forget it, to bury it deep, to lock it securely behind doors in his mind, and over the intervening years had barricaded those doors behind the furniture of an ordinary life ordinarily lived.

Now he remembered the night it had happened, the memory crashing through those barriers like maddened floodwaters clawing their way through a rift in a dam, sweeping aside carefully erected denials and cover stories on their murderous charge downstream to wreak vengeance for their long confinement. In an unwelcome rush it all came back: the midnight vision, and how he’d run sobbing with fright from his bedroom and burst into his sister’s. She was a worldly fourteen at the time, and he sought solace in her mature calm, her wisdom and experience, her instinctual nurturing. She’d let him crawl in beside her and bury his face in her shoulder, where his terrified sobs had gradually slowed to a staccato snuffling. Rocking him and stroking his hair, she whispered reassuringly that it had only been a nightmare.

“But it was so real,” he’d insisted. “It was Dad, standing there“ – and he’d pointed towards the doorway – “but it wasn’t. I mean it sorta looked just like him… but he was different. He was old. And he was staring at me, not smiling – just staring… with big scared eyes…” and at the recollection he’d started crying all over again.

“Shh, shh, Lannie, it’s okay,” she'd murmured, holding him a little tighter. “I miss him too, so much it hurts. We all do.” Then she’d brightened, and pulled away so she could look into his eyes. “But you know what?”

“What,” he’d sniffed.

“We’ll all get to see him again when we go to Heaven!”

“But I don’t want to go to Heaven!” he'd wailed. “I’ll have to die, like Daddy did!”

“Heaven’s supposed to be a wonderful place, Lannie. You get to fly, sleep on clouds, and maybe even meet God.”

“I don’t want to meet God, ‘Lecia. I just want Daddy to be not dead.”

She’d been silent for a moment before she replied, and when she did there were tears welling up in her own eyes. “Me too, Lannie.” She’d paused to wipe her eyes with the sleeve of her nightie. “Know what else? He isn’t really dead, not dead dead. He’s just living somewhere else, now. And someday…” - she’d smiled past her tears and flicked his cowlick with her finger – “someday we’ll all be together again. Just the way we were.”

“Yeah?”

She’d sniffed and managed a chuckle. “Yup.”

He’d sighed, closed his eyes, and immersed himself in her comfort. He let her take charge, let her shoulder the load of the demon that had possessed their family, and in the security of her all-knowing arms, felt some of the dread and grief ebb away. “You won’t die, will you ‘Lecia?”

“Oh, Lannie,” she’d sighed. “Someday I will. But not for a long, long time.”

“Promise?”

“I promise, Lannie.” She’d kissed him on the forehead. “Now,” she said more briskly. “Let’s get you back into your own bed.”

“Tuck me in?”

“Of course, silly!” He’d slid out of her bed and she followed, their bare feet making little sticking sounds on the polished hardwood floor. Hand in hand, they’d returned to his room. She’d sat with him for a few more minutes after he’d crawled under the covers, and when he began to drift into the gentle paralysis of drowsiness, she’d kissed him one more time and tiptoed out of the room.

Within minutes he’d fallen back into peaceful slumber, so quickly that he’d never heard her own sobs from the room across the hall.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

And now here he stood, four and a half decades later, leaning in shocked disbelief against the door jam of that very bedroom. The paint was peeling now, and the hardwood floors had long since been covered with cheap carpeting that now reeked of mildew and mouse urine. The floral paper curled from the walls in ugly irregular shreds, like whittled shavings from a feather stick, and the cold, November breeze that blew in through the missing windowpanes bore the scent of snow. Thirty minutes ago he’d wondered if it had been a mistake coming back; but he’d had nearly the entire day to kill before his flight home, and how often did one get to see the house one grew up in?

Its condition had shocked him. The exterior walls that had sheltered him, Alicia, their mother, and - after his father’s passing, their aunt Eileen - were unpainted and weatherbeaten. Clapboards hanging at drunken angles exposed the cladding beneath, where dry rot had leisurely begun to consume the structure. The front door was padlocked shut, but he’d easily gotten in through a great rift in the screen porch and the living room window that looked out onto it.

Bits of plaster from the ceiling littered the kitchen floor, and the bare walls echoed their crunch under the soles of his shoes. “Oh my God,” he’d whispered. “Not like this. I didn’t need to see this.” He paused at the stainless steel sink, dry and full of dust, still bearing the dent he’d made trying to clean the cylinder head of the dirt bike he rebuilt when he was fifteen. He ran his fingers over the familiar contours of the scar, wiping away the grit from the crumbling house in the process. “Damn. Goddamn.”

He looked around. The new owners had made some changes – they’d knocked out the downstairs bath and merged the space with that of the family den to create what was probably a formal dining room. He was actually glad for that – at least his memories of time spent in this part of the house could remain unsullied by the reality of what he saw now. He hadn’t lingered here, but had passed through, to the main entry, and stood at the base of the stairway leading to the second level.

It was here, while gazing at the near-forgotten and now achingly familiar lines of the window lights over the front door, that he heard the sound.

It had come from upstairs, and happened so quickly that by the time it had broken through his reverie it was over. He had to replay it in his mind with imperfect memory, but it sounded like fabric rustling against fabric. Curtains blowing in the wind? Or maybe just the sound of the wind itself, playing a ghostly melody through the gaps in the house like a dirge softly played on a flute?

He ascended the stairs, remembering how the fourth one from the top would betray with a groan his coming home after curfew unless he thought to skip it. As he’d learned to do at seventeen, he kept to the inner wall and skipped that particular tread. At the top he stopped and listened.

Torn wallpaper arced and bobbed as the house breathed, making a faint, regular scratching. Probably what I heard, he thought. Then another sound from a room, his old room, snapped him to high alert, and was almost drowned out by the pounding of this heart.

It sounded like the faint creak bedsprings make when the sleeper comes awake and sits.

Get a grip, Alan, he thought. It’s two in the afternoon, it’s 35 degrees in here, and it looks like no one’s been here for years. Nevertheless it took him several seconds to summon the nerve to proceed to the doorway, and he made a conscious effort to do so as silently as he could.

A whisper – like a child murmuring in his sleep.

The hairs on Alan’s arms and neck erected themselves.

He approached the doorway. The door itself had long since been removed, suggesting that the new owners had converted it to some kind of communal space – a sewing room perhaps, or an upstairs den. But he knew well the pattern of light the now-broken window painted on the floor, and remembered how warm it had been to sit there on a cozy winter day playing with his Lincoln Logs and Tonka toys while Dad had practiced his guitar downstairs in the living room. He stood in the doorway, nostalgia and dread swirling into an enticingly poisonous brew in his soul, and he regarded this space that had once been his very own.

Something moved in the darkened corner.

A shadow – a vague outline, dark gray against black

The silhouette of a child of about ten.

The silhouette stepped back, and for a moment, for just the barest of an instant, was rendered with clarity by a sunburst glinting off a piece of broken glass on the floor.

“Jesus,” Alan gasped.

It was a small boy with a familiar face staring back at him, into him, searing into his soul with eyes widened with fright, a fright that reflected his own. And even as he stared, the silhouette faded, but not before tilting its head back and opening its mouth in an agonized scream of terror.

Alan knew too well who that young boy was.

Something brushed against the back of his neck and he jumped with an involuntary cry of his own, but it was just a strip of rotted wallpaper dangling from the wall. He leaned against the door frame in shock, and in that moment, in that pose, he remembered the dream.

He also remembered how his grandmother had always told him how much he had looked like his father when he was ten, and how it was a long-standing joke for her to pretend to get confused and call him by his father’s name, Walt.

He remembered the disbelief and denial with which he’d greeted his father’s diagnosis. He remembered the antiseptic stench of the cancer ward; amulets of stainless steel and polypropylene arranged like totems throughout the hospital room in a futile attempt to keep the wolves and bears of mortality at bay; and how the day his father had taken his last breath was so unlike the movies, where death was portrayed with high drama. His Dad hadn’t clutched his chest and died cursing like Lear, but had simply stopped breathing and gradually deflated as his essence went wherever such essence goes.

It all came back to him in a terrifying epiphany.

A tear leaked from one of his eyes. He didn’t try to wipe it away, but let it run its natural course down his cheek.

“Oh, Lannie,” he choked aloud. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Champ.” He looked into the corner he’d seen – or thought he’d seen – the apparition, but it was empty, just a darkened corner in an empty room in an abandoned house. “I did the best I could, but I never managed all those things you daydreamed about. Never became an explorer, an astronaut, or a secret agent. Never climbed Everest. Never played guitar like Dad. Hell, I couldn't even keep my marriage together.” He brightened: “But I helped raise two boys of my own - that's a pretty grand mountain in its own right!” Then he paused and became pensive again. “Never got a Nobel Prize - but I co-authored a technical paper or two, and got my name on a couple of patents. Maybe I don't have a research center named after me, but I laid a brick or two in the edifice.” He sighed. “I've done okay. Not great, but okay."

The room didn’t answer – after all, it was just an empty room. The rustling of the loose wallpaper suddenly seemed sadly mundane, and its immediacy reminded him he was due at the airport before too long. Alan reluctantly turned and walked slowly down the hall to the stairway. The chill of winter pressed in on him as he headed down the stairs for his flight home, but he felt an unexpected peace all the same. At the bottom he paused and looked back up to the upstairs landing.

“So long, Lannie,” he called aloud. “Everything’s going to be alright, Pal.” And he turned and left, knowing that it would be and had been.




(Written 2/23/2008, based on a dream I had 6/13/2005)

[mnaz]

Well done. You have a talent for painting "haunted places" vividly, drawing the reader in. I love the bits of memories as you move deeper into the ruins of the house, like the squeaky stair and dent in the sink, which reinforce the "full circle" experience.

You've written the whole piece in past-tense, with a recent past remembering a more distant past-- moving from "he had sighed," etc., to "he remembered," etc. Which makes sense. (I would check for grammatical consistency on this.) I suppose another way to write this story would be to move from past tense to present tense.

Anyway, thanks for the look in.

[sasha]

and thanks for the comments & observations. I had to give some thought to how to tell the story - in simple past tense all the way through with a "suddenly, 40 years later" to bridge from deep past to near-present - or the grammatical ploy here, of "past past tense". I didn't think of present tense - don't use it often. It seems like a good way to build & maintain suspense, but I don't think it would have served the melancholy tone I was reaching for.

Found & fixed a few of those inconsistencies you warned me about - thanks for the heads-up. Also a few "its/it's" and other common pitfalls...