I felt my long hair sticking to the back of my neck, my sundress clinging to my skin, the sweat on my bare legs, and I hadn’t even been here five minutes. My knees buckled as I stepped onto the splintered wooden porch. “Where’s the breeze?” I asked.
“It’s been like this all month,” he said. “I brought over some fans. There’s nothing structural other than the AC. Needs paint, lightbulbs, a good cleaning, and we need to decide what to do with everything inside, obviously. It would save a lot of money if we can sell it ourselves,” he added with a pointed look in my direction. This was where I came in. In addition to my dealing with Dad’s paperwork, Daniel wanted me to sell the house. He had a job, a baby on the way, a whole life here.
I had two months off. An apartment I was subletting for the extra cash. A ring on my hand and a fiancé who worked sixty-hour weeks. And now a name—Corinne Prescott—bouncing around in my skull like a ghost.
He pulled the screen door open, and the familiar creak cut straight to my gut. It always did. Welcome back, Nic.
* * *
DANIEL HELPED UNLOAD MY car, carrying my luggage to the second-floor hall, stacking my personal items on the kitchen table. He swiped his arm across the counter, and particles of dust hung in the air, suspended in a beam of sunlight cutting through the window. He coughed, his arm across his face. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t get to the inside yet. But I got the supplies.” He gestured toward a cardboard box on the counter.
“That’s why I’m here,” I said.
I figured if I planned to live here for the duration, I should start in my room, so I had a place to sleep. I passed my suitcase at the top of the stairs and carried the box of cleaning supplies, balanced on my hip, toward my old room. The floorboards squeaked in the hall, a step before my door, like always. The light from the windows cut through the curtains, and everything in the room looked half there in the muted glow. I flipped the switch, but nothing happened, so I left the box in the middle of the floor and pulled back the curtains, watching as Daniel headed back from the detached garage with a box fan under his arm.
The yellow comforter covered with pale daisies was still rumpled at the bottom of my bed, as if I had never left. The indentations in the sheets—a hip, a knee, the side of a face—as if someone had just woken. I heard Daniel at the front door and I pulled the comforter up quickly, smoothing out the bumps and ridges.
I opened both windows—the one with the lock that worked and the one with the lock that broke sometime in middle school, which we never got fixed. The screen was gone, which was no great loss; it had been torn and warped from years of abuse. From me pushing out the bottom, crawling onto the sloped roof, dropping into the mulch that hurt only if you misjudged the distance, night after night. The type of thing that made perfect sense when I was seventeen but now seemed ridiculous. I couldn’t climb back in, so I’d sneak in the back door and creep up the stairs, avoiding the creak in the hallway. I probably could’ve sneaked out the same way, saved myself the jump, saved my screen the damage.
As I turned back around, the room now bathed in light, I noticed all the little things that Daniel had already done: A few of the pictures were off the walls, the yellow paint discolored where they’d hung; the old shoe boxes that had been up high in the closet, stacked neatly against the wall in the back corner; and the woven throw rug that had been my mother’s when she was a child, out in the middle of the floor, pulled from under the legs of my bed.
I heard the creak in the floorboard, Daniel in my doorway, box fan under his arm. “Thanks,” I said.
He shrugged. “No problem.” He angled it in the corner and flipped the switch. Heaven. “Thanks for coming, Nic.”
“Thanks for starting my room,” I said, shifting on my feet. I didn’t get how other siblings had such an easy relationship. How they could ease back into childhood in a heartbeat, dropping all formalities. Daniel and I were about to spend the day tiptoeing around our empty house and thanking each other to death.
“Huh?” he said as he turned the power up on the fan, so the low hum became a steady white noise, muffling the sounds from the outside.
“My room.” I gestured toward the walls. “Thanks for taking the pictures down.”
“I didn’t,” he said, pausing in front of the fan and closing his eyes for a second. “Must’ve been Dad.”
Maybe. I couldn’t remember. I was here a year ago, the night after we’d moved him out, but the details . . . the details were lost. Were the shoe boxes down? Were the pictures off the wall? I felt like I would’ve remembered that. That whole night was a blur.
Daniel didn’t know I had come back here instead of driving straight home, like I told him I had to—I have work, I have to go. I came back here, wandering from room to room, dry-eyed and shaken, like a kid lost in the middle of the county fair, searching the crowd for a familiar face. Curling up on the sheets in the empty house until I heard the engine out front and the doorbell I didn’t answer. The creak of the screen, the key in the door, his boots on the steps. Until Tyler was leaning against my bedroom wall. I almost missed you, he’d said. You okay?
“When was the last time you were here?” I asked Daniel.
He scratched his head, stepping closer to the fan. “I don’t know. I drive by, pop my head in from time to time, or if I need to get something for Dad. What is it?”
“Nothing,” I said. But it wasn’t nothing. Now I was imagining the shadow of someone else in the room. Rifling through my boxes. Moving my rug. Looking. Searching. It was the feeling that my things were not where they should be. It was the uneven imprints of dust, revealed in the sunlight. Or maybe it was just my perspective. I grew, and the house got smaller. At my place, I slept in a queen-size bed that took up about half my apartment, and Everett had a king. This full-size bed looked like it was meant for a child.
I wondered, if I curled up on the mattress, whether I would feel the indentation from someone else. Maybe just the ghost of me. I yanked the sheets off the bed and brushed past Daniel. The crease between his eyes deepened as he watched me.
By the time I got back upstairs after putting in the load of wash, the room felt a little more like mine. Like Daniel and me, the room and I took some time to grow accustomed to each other again. I took off the ring and placed it in the chipped ceramic bowl on my nightstand before tackling the bathroom and the dresser drawers. After, I sat on the floor in front of the fan and leaned back on my elbows.
Hour two and I was already procrastinating. I had to go see Dad. I had to bring the paperwork and listen to him talk in circles. I had to ask him what he meant in that letter and hope that he remembered. I had to pretend it didn’t sting when he forgot my name.
Didn’t matter how many times it had happened before. It gutted me every time.
* * *
I GATHERED UP THE guardianship paperwork to bring to Dad’s doctor—to start the process. So that, in life’s biggest irony, we would become guardians to our father and his assets. As I prepared to leave, I heard faint, muffled noises from outside—closing of doors, revving of a motor. I figured Daniel must’ve called someone about the yard. But then the screen door creaked, cutting through the noise of the fan.
“Nic?” I knew that voice like twelve years of history filed down into a single memory, a single syllable.
I leaned toward my window. Saw Tyler’s truck idling on the side of the road. Some girl in the passenger seat. Daniel’s sun-scorched back facing me as he leaned against the open window of the truck, talking to her.
Shit.
I spun around just in time to see Tyler standing in front of my open bedroom door.
“Figured it’d be rude not to come in and say hi.”
I smiled without meaning to, because it was Tyler. A knee-jerk reaction.