“Crap.” I snap them all shut. “Where did you put her?” I head to the hall and pull out the hide-a-ladder embedded in the ceiling. The attic is where my father kept all of those pesky things we once took pride in possessing out of sight, Christmas decorations—something my father dubbed seasonal crap, old bankers boxes filled with memories, trophies, ancient artwork ready to crumble at a glance, and volumes and volumes of the scrapbooks my mother worked on like some Lifetime marathon. She loved to document our existence while most of us still existed.
The light flickers on, blinking in and out as if it were still considering its options, exposing the gossamer ensconced rotted out wood beams, the floor covered in a patchwork of plywood. I take in a nice hearty breath of that old familiar scent, sweet aged pine coated in dust—house breath Rachel used to call it. I have learned over the years that every home has a scent, and ours smelled like kindling sweet and ripe for the burn.
My eyes track over to the left and I stop mid-breath. Where once stood a towering mountain of all our memories, every over brimming box filled with Price family pride and joy, now lies a wasteland. Nothing but cobwebs and an empty space that feels large enough to park a semi in.
“What the hell.” I sink down and take a seat on the squeaky floorboards, a plume of dust rising around me. He did it. He hauled every last speck of who we were, of who my mother was, and tossed it to the curb like some old relic that belonged in the junkyard. I leap down, shut the ladder with a thundering crash, and open closets and drawers, looking in every nook and cranny, scouring the garage like a thief looking to steal, but there isn’t one sign of anything. Every last drop of my mother, my brothers and sister has been effectively erased.
I stagger back inside, back to the hall of horrors, as my brother and I used to call it, and scan the pictures one by one. I find myself, almost relieved that I wasn’t entirely erased, but Wilson, Aston, Rachel—my God, what did they even look like? My mind is refusing to give them up at the moment. But the most startling omission of all is that of my mother. Why in the hell would my father want to wipe out the memory of her? I realize that grief is a bitch. I intimately know that, but this kind of a purposeful cleansing feels outright evil. Soulless. And just like that, my heart sinks. My mother doesn’t live here anymore, not in any sense of the word. What I wouldn’t give to hear her voice one more time, have one last conversation.
A brisk knock to the front door causes my spine to buck. We’ve never had trick-or-treaters here, not when I was young at least. The house is too far off from the street. I head on over, fully expecting to find a concerned neighbor. I bet they miss my father plodding around his cozy little compound, complaining about the weather, bitching about the lawlessness disease that’s gripped our nation. Barking the wages of sin is death at the top of his lungs at every God-awful hour. Instead, I swing the door open to find a well coifed, painted lipped, tits out and proud Monica Phillips.
“Crap,” I mutter, not even trying to hide it. She’s made no secret of the fact she’s still after me. But I wouldn’t entertain it—not even months ago, if she were in L.A. and wearing a string bikini on a day that my dick decided it couldn’t get any harder without begging for relief. Not even on that day would Monica Phillips had been a prospect. And on that note, I wish to God she had been my neighbor back in L.A. because I never would have cheated. Allison and I never would have moved—she would have hated having Monica as our neighbor, but that nightmare could nowhere near compare to the one my infidelity embroiled me in. Embroiled Reagan in.
“Is that any way to greet an old friend?” She gives a hard wink. “You going to invite me in or what?”
I open the door just enough for her to slither inside with her high-heeled boots, her too tight dress, shiny around the waist from the fabric stretching thin.
“My, my, let’s do the time warp, my friend.” She does an awkward hitchhiking motion with her hand. “Some things never change.”
“We’ve changed.” I follow her over to the sofa and motion for her to take a seat as I fall into my old man’s favorite chair. “Dad’s chair.” I slap the armrest. “We used to monkey around on it as kids, but as soon as we heard that old Caddy pull up, we bolted for the four corners of the house.”
Her smile pulls tight, bright red and dangerous. Monica always did have a demonic flare about her. “You kids were afraid of your daddy.” Her inked in brows hike high into her forehead. “I don’t see why not. Everyone else feared him, too.”
My mind does its best to push back the curtain of the past and try to decipher if this were true. “Rachel once said she hated him.” I’m not sure why I confessed it, but it felt cathartic to say it out loud, and right here in the room she said it in. “It was after Wilson died. She accused him of wanting us to be perfect.”
Monica expels a low guttural laugh. “Everyone knew the Price kids were perfection. When your father runs the county courthouse and your mother runs the social circles, you kids had no choice but to mind your p’s and q’s. It was practically mandated for you to live out a flawless existence. If your parents were about anything, it was keeping pretenses. They made sure everyone knew it, too.”
A chuckle bounces through me. “That was old school Mom and Pops. Back in the day when there were still four Price children, my parents made sure everyone knew how good-natured we were, how congenial, how brilliant.” Wilson, Rachel, and Aston bounce through my mind, each one neatly tucked under a bed of dirt. Aston had a closed casket funeral, but I still see Wilson and Rachel sleeping peacefully in their formalwear, a rose tucked between their folded hands. “And now they’re perfectly dead.”
“Whoa, that got dark fast. Not you—you’re not dead.” She leans in, ready to pounce. Monica has been my self-appointed cheerleader for as long as I can remember. “What are you doing here, anyway? Stalking these empty halls, looking for a ghost? Are you picking up a few things for your father?”
“No. You had it right the first time. I’m looking for a ghost. My mother’s to be exact. He’s deleted her. No pictures, no clothes, not a bottle of her perfume. The attic’s been cleared out. It’s as if she never existed.”
Her face contorts in surprise, and in this low-lighting it offers a macabre effect. “What about the basement?”
She doesn’t finish the word before I bolt past the kitchen, down the dark mouth of the steep stairwell that leads to the dungeon as it was better known in our house, and my heart gives an erratic thump because no matter how old I get, this dank, musty pit still has the power to strike fear in me. Without fear of being called a pussy, I can honestly say I’m glad Monica is here, clacking her heels at breakneck speed in an attempt to keep up with me.
I flick the lights on, heart pounding into my ears, and squint at the dusty, arid space with mold spores floating to the ceiling.
“Empty.”
Monica swats me as she makes her way deeper into the pit. “It’s not empty. What do you call this?” She gives a barren bookshelf a quick thump.
“My father’s crap.” My father managed to salvage a few pieces of furniture from his own father’s estate. My grandfather was a wealthy but frugal man and these few pieces of sturdy oak furniture lasted him a lifetime. He looked forward to passing it down to his own son with pride, only to have it rot in our basement for the next twenty-five years. My mother hated it. By the time she inherited it, we were at capacity in crappy dressers and bookshelves, so the basement it was.