There stood a house once. A building of wood and bricks and nails, topped with tar and tiles and with a lovely chimney and a fireplace that was never used. The way leading to the front door was lined with flowers and shrubs, tended to by the mother of the house who dutifully cared for them as they were the most important thing to her in the entire world.
The father kept to the back patio, smoking like a bad engine and drinking himself to sleep every night. He thought of his son more than anything – Phil, who never visited. He wondered what he should have done differently, what he should have said or shouldn’t have said. Maybe if he hadn’t yelled as much or hadn’t lost his temper so often, maybe Phil would have stopped by for a Labor Day cookout or to watch one of the big games now and again. Maybe they would have stayed in touch after Phil left the house and made his own way in the Army.
The son never called, never stayed in touch. He never told them about his deployments, his engagement, his marriage, nothing. “Fine” was the last thing he said to his father after a threat to be cut off for good if he left. He had said nothing to his mother. There was nothing to say, he thought. Nothing in his mind that would change things. It is what it is and it isn’t going to be anything else. Things unsaid become wounds unhealed, of course. And when the house burned to the ground and the father went with it, suddenly Phil felt he had no choice but to pull the scab. Now or never, he thought. Now or never, just to say you tried.
Phil drives the lonely drive back south, back to the house. The car is small and cramped, a tight prison of plastic and cracked leather or disintegrating rubber. It would be choking, were his wife Kelly not with him. They drive in silence, the radio off, no gps route, nothing but the sound of tire noise and gusts of wind. The roads are barren, a route few take and fewer would want to take. Kelly occasionally puts a hand out to Phil’s free arm every time his breathing picks up. Sometimes that is all one needs to find their center. Kelly wonders what to say, what words to bring comfort to the man she loves. Every second of forward travel brings that house Phil’s never once spoken of from story into reality. He had asked her to go with him, to that place he grew up in, to that wasp’s nest. She was puzzled he’d even ask, as if he would need to ask her to go, like he was enlisting her into some arduous journey, some crazy suicide mission with little chance of success and less of survival.
But he means the world to her, and she to him. And when you love someone truly, there is no question need asked and no answer given, it’s just done.
Phil stands in the ashes of the house, and he dwells on the past the way a man does when he has no answers, and wonders what he could have done differently. Why even come here? What was the point?
Perhaps he thought he would return one day, but he never did. It was possible he had always intended to but never found the time. Or he believed he just needed the right words ready, something to break new ground and rebuild something new, but he could never find them.
So there he is, and he has nothing to say.
He steps amid the burnt remains of the building. A house he knew as a child and tried to forget as an adult. He would never say it was a home, no matter to the years spent there. It was never more than a building with stuff in it, wasn’t it? A prison cell. A coffin. He had put it away in a corner of his mind and forgot about it, separated from it further each day that passed, slowly fading under a growing layer of mental dust somewhere in the attic of his memory. The smell hits the worst, more than one would expect. All the collected trappings of a life charred and cooked together in a potpourri of melted plastic and metal and insulation and vinyl and clothes. It hangs in the air.
He stands in his old bedroom, what they had turned to an office and one of the few rooms left ‘intact’, in the sense the walls still stood, though they were crisped and tattered, some of the studs exposed like roasted bone. The carpet at the base of the door warped where the heat melted the fibers and curled them up the way hair does when it burns. The son closes his eyes, feeling a sting of haze, and he thinks of his childhood, memories he does not want to have. Birthdays canceled because of a poor test grade. A favorite toy snapped in two for crying. A slap in the face for wanting to paint and not play football. Be a man, stop fucking crying. Men play sports, and I am not raising a fairy.
The son balls his fist and comes to the closet door. He hits it flat and straight, knocking it off the warped hinges and to the ground. There, his eye catches in the corner of the closet, pushed away to the edge of the floor and almost out of sight, a box.
There it sits, intact and unspoiled, with the words ‘Phils Stuff’ written in black marker and sloppy handwriting. They kept a bunch of stuff, a cardboard time capsule sitting there waiting for pickup. Phil debates for a moment, but ultimately it draws him in as it might a moth. As he falls to one knee, Phil exhales and touches the box, reaching out an arm to pull it towards him. He is taken by surprise at the weight of it, hoisting it up with a slight grunt as he comes back to his feet and steps back through the doorway and into the rubble, nearly losing his balance. The smell hits him once again, the acrid cloud of molten fixtures that gets on you and isn’t easy to wash off.
His footsteps crack and crinkle over desiccated bits of flooring, broken up like dry mud in the desert.
The mother sits in the dining room on a wire frame that provided the skeleton for what was probably once a comfortable chair, she looks down at the ground, refusing to look up as she hears the crunching footsteps of her son coming from the far hallway.
“I found a box in your office.”
She does not look up at him. “Good. I had hoped you’d get it out of here,” she replies, nodding her head just so.
“I … guess I’ll take it with me. Maybe go through it tonight at the hotel before the funeral.”
“Sure.”
Phil looks to his mother, opening his mouth as if to speak, but no words come out. Instead, he chokes back a lump down to his stomach and exhales quietly. The mother moves only to rest her chin on her right palm, staring out to the back patio, where the fire had started.
It is only as Phil turns to leave that she is shaken from her catatonia.
“Have you eaten yet?” She asks through her fingers.
“No, we only just got checked into the hotel. Kelly is waiting in the car.”
“Oh.” The mother says. “Did you two want to go somewhere?”
Phil’s eyes wander to the kitchen, where he sees a variety of canned foods on the floor, most of them either melted down to goo or burst open and sooty. He sees a can of peaches, the label had survived the flames, yet the lid popped off and the insides were scorched black like cold lava.
“I guess.” He says to her.
“Okay.” She mutters. “Let’s go now, then.”
Phil sits adjacent to Kelly, and across from his mom. They occupy a booth in the corner of the only pizza joint in town, a hole in the wall place that is dimly lit and smells of old upholstery and garlic. The windows red and green stained glass, the table is crooked and wobbles back and forth on an uneven leg. Mother does not take her coat off, though Phil and Kelly do.
The three look at their menus. Phil knows his wife is not a fan of pizza. But he knows his mother likes this place. She used to say it was cozy and homey and the breadsticks were excellent. Phil always thought they were doughy and tough.
“They have Caesar salad,” Phil says, pointing it out to his wife.
“The service here has gone downhill,” The mother mumbles to herself, looking up to the kitchen doorway, hoping a server will see her icy gaze and come take their order. “It used to be so much better.”
Phil looks again to Kelly, who sits with her arms across her chest, her legs tucked close. He rubs her shoulder, and she rests her head against his. The mother looks back to see their embrace. She moves her lips to one side of her face, before turning back to look at the server across the dining room.
“What is with this place?” She says in a sharp and cutting way.
“Someone will come by eventually. It’s okay.”
The mother does not look to her son when she replies. “Yeah, well if they wait as long as you did, we won’t ever eat, will we?”
Phil purses his lips, nodding back and forth. Let this one go. It won’t do any good. Let this one go. Phil sighs. He says nothing.
“Are we invisible?” She says as she watches a waitress meet with another table and take their order.
“Oh, she takes their order. Of course.” She shrugs her arms and lets one slam back onto the table, causing it to shake and rattle on its uneven leg. “I bet she’d come by if the building burned down.” She lets out a chuckle that turned to a sharp inhale of air and a scowl.
Phil closes his eyes and breathes long and hard. Kelly rubs his shoulder, hoping it will be enough. Phil thinks the same as he swallows hard. She is doing more than enough. Sometimes the best thing a person can do is just be there. Be there and do nothing while I search the memory banks of English to find the right words in the right order.
“Maybe just relax,” he says, though he feels he shouldn’t have.
She turns back to face the pair, leering at the wife for a moment before moving her eyes back to her son. “Don’t tell me to relax child.” Kelly lifts her eyebrows instinctively, only realizing she had when the mother cuts into her by saying, “And don’t you give me that look young lady.”
Phil’s eyes dilate. Let it go, man. But to attack a person’s spouse, to drag them into your own shit. That’s not so easily let go, is it?
He locks his eyes onto his mother’s, the first time they’ve met tonight. “She didn’t give you a look.”
“Yes, she did. She doesn’t like me. I’m sure that was your doing,” the mother smiles.
“She’s right here. Please don’t talk about her like she isn’t.”
“If your father were here, he’d smack both of you silly.”
In his mind, Phil feels and hears a slap against his face. It stays with you no matter how much you pack it away, an open palm that transcends its own time to meet you in the present, a gift you don’t want but must accept.
“No, just me,” Phil says. He gives his mother a sarcastic smile and feels a knot in his gut as she stares back at him, her eyes fixed and cutting.
“Maybe you needed it.”
Maybe you needed it. Maybe you really did. Maybe you were a bad son and deserved it. Maybe you were the reason he smoked and drank and put his hand through the drywall. Maybe you’re a disappointment and a piece of shit and it was your fault. If you were a decent son, he’d probably not have hit you so much and blamed his own failings on you. Maybe it was your own fault.
But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he was just a bad father and she didn’t want to be a mother.
“Maybe I just needed someone who cared enough to save me from him.”
Silence casts over the table, filled only by the muffled conversations of other patrons come to dine on pizza and breadsticks. Phil breathes deep and prepares himself for the hell that is about to set upon him. He readies for the things left on the table, neglected and abandoned all these years to fester and sour with time, ready to burst open like a can of old peaches. But that wrath never comes. Instead, his mother bites the inside of her lip and looks out the red and green windows and says nothing.
“I … I’m sorry mom. I …”
“Stop.” She chews the inside of her cheek. “Let’s just drop it.”
Phil rubs his eyes hard, seeing a menagerie of colors and shapes, an empty place he wishes he could run to. He looks down at the worn wood of the table and counts the eternity of each passing second. A second can feel like a year when you are boxed in with nowhere to go.
Mother reaches into her coat pocket, producing an envelope with the word ‘Son’ written on it in black marker and sloppy handwriting. “This is for you.”
Phil doesn’t look the envelope; it slides into his vision without his consent. The handwriting definitively dad’s. Sloppy, uneven, the black ink shoved into the envelope as though the marker was held with a balled fist. He only reaches for it a moment later, after his mother has let go of it.
“He wrote it a year ago or so, never mailed it. It was in his nightstand.”
He wrote you a letter, the bastard. Some diatribe of apologies and platitudes and regrets, things he would have done differently if he knew then. Or maybe one last attempt for him to take a final swing. Until it is opened and the contents examined, it can be either and therefore it is both.
Phil closes his eyes and shoves the lump back down his throat as he inspects the restaurant. There’s a claw machine full of stuffed animals, 50 cent candy dispensers by the door, a pickup window for people who would rather eat at home and not at a place that smells of old upholstery and garlic. He sees a sign of a cartoon pizza slice grinning, holding a pizza itself, saying, “It’s happiness in a box!”
Phil folds the envelope up and stuffs it in his pocket. “I’ll read it later tonight I guess.”
The three eventually order and eat their food, together yet alone, in the dim light of a local hole in the wall with red and green stained windows. The breadsticks were doughy and tough.
Mother pays the bill with her credit card, signing the receipt in the ornate fashion she preferred.
“The funeral is tomorrow, wear something presentable,” she says as the three leave.
“I know.” He says to her.
Phil hoists the box onto the hotel bed, grunting with some effort. It is heavy and there are muted metallic clanks as its contents shuffle and shift. He stands in front of it, as if expecting it to attack him, something to jump out and swallow him whole. But it’s just a box.
His wife rubs his back. “I’m gonna take a shower,” she says to her husband.
“Okay.”
Phil doesn’t turn on the lights, leaving only the narrow slit of light coming from the edge of the hotel room curtains. He sits beside the box, rubbing his eyes and exhaling as he looks back to it. He wonders what is inside. Why it was kept. Why did they even bother.
He stares at the cardboard, imagining all the ways it could have been destroyed by the flames but wasn’t. Maybe if it was left in the attic where the flames consumed everything or left out in the living room where the roof had caved in and crushed everything beneath it. Maybe if there was no damn box in the first place.
What if you had visited? What if you hadn’t even come back? Why did you even bother? What was the point of any of this? What did this accomplish? You become your parents or you become their opposite, you know. What if you turn out like he did? What if it’s too late?
He feels another lump come up, and though he tries to swallow it back down and push it back inside, he can’t. Phil forces his eyes closed and does everything he can to think of anything else but these things, yet they find him all the same. He sobs into his hands, seeing the same images repeat over in his head like a skipping record. Every time the old man took his belt off or punched a hole in the wall or broke a precious toy. Mother out in the garden and doing nothing, tending to her garden in blissful ignorance or apathetic deference to the screaming and crying inside. Shouting. Destruction of children’s property. “Go Away!” “I’m not raising a pussy!” “I hate you!” “I will beat the man into you if it kills me!”
Phil pants and can’t catch his breath, exhaling faster each time. He hears the water in the shower shut off and tries to stop before the door opens.
But he doesn’t, because he can’t. Because when the mental storage room is opened, like Pandora’s it doesn’t just go back. The best you can do is let it run and hope it runs far away.
His wife exits the shower and takes her husband into her chest, hugging him tight as he puts his arms around her. The pair remain there, in the dark hotel room with only a narrow slit of light. She knows little of his childhood, knowing only he would never speak of it to her, leaving every blank unfilled and conversation truncated. But she knows the feeling he must have, and if he is hurt, she is hurt also. And so, they hold each other there in the dark and cry together.
They say nothing, until Phil is able to clear away the things he doesn’t want and thinks only of his wife. He thinks of their quickie wedding at the courthouse where she wore her favorite purple dress. He thinks of their first road trip to Seattle and the first time they loved each other. He thinks of her encouraging him to leave the Army and become an animator like he always wanted. He thinks of her face and her faint blue eyes and her warmth. He catches his breathing, relaxes his arms, and his wife rubs his back two times before letting him go and kissing him.
“I’m sorry, Kelly.”
“It’s okay.” She whispers back, as she walks over to the other side of the bed and climbs in. “If you want, we can just go home tomorrow morning.”
“Yeah.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Phil stands up and grabs the box in his arms. He carries it across the room and drops it down on a small desk. He pauses a moment with his hand atop the flap there, just waiting to pull the thing free. But he decides otherwise and leaves the box closed. He reaches into his pocket, producing a creased and folded envelope with the word ‘Son’ written on it in sloppy handwriting. He lifts one of the flaps of the box just so, just enough to slide the envelope into the box and out of view.
Phil breathes deep, inhaling as much as his lungs can hold and slowly pushing the air back out as he closes his eyes. He does not swallow any feeling back down to his gut, instead he holds it until it dissipates and dissolves away and he thinks of home and the drive back.
He moves to the window to snuff out the crack of light, and as the curtains sway back and forth with his action, he spies a dumpster at the end of the parking lot, its lid open, showing black plastic bags and papers and cardboard and all the other unwanted refuse people toss away without care or worry. All those things no one wants or needs.
He looks again to the box sitting there, the cardboard flaps folded around each other to keep it shut. And he thinks for one moment. Just one moment given, nothing asked, before he looks out once more to the dumpster at the end of the lot and reaches over to the desk and grabs the box.
Sometimes, there is purgation in opening things up, lifting the flaps and going through each item or issue or trauma one by one to categorize and catalogue them and hope therein lies the catharsis. Other times, maybe it’s easier to just throw it away.