464

In five days the bank will send a person, probably young, probably with a smile on their face, to collect our keys. They like to appear polite when they’re taking your home from you. But the empathy is performative, and it’s not a thoughtful one. The New York Times would call it “embarrassing”, “0 stars for 0 shits given.” The house is just a bunch of stacked stones to them. But the converted carriage barn that has been our home for 32 years is a time capsule to us. 

Its floors give to our stomping. Its walls crack to the heaves of our anger. The stone absorbs the warmth of our breathy laughs and the windows mirror the joy of our dining room dancing. In five days there will only be a stillness. 

My mom and sister and I are sleeping on the floor in the living room under the ceiling where the sap stains of the last 30 Christmas trees weave together in long strands to look like a Pollock. 

The other night my mom rolled off the air mattress and spooked the dogs, who scattered, their paws tapping a frenetic symphony across the hardwood floor. What's a few more scuffs on the century old floorboard? The way I see it, it’s just another line to the story of the family that lived here before we weren’t allowed to anymore.

The plan is to pack everything away. My mom has spent the past month becoming a sales woman, circulating our possessions on online marketplaces. Frye boots, antique radios, a moose menorah. None of it amounts to buy the house back.

We divvy up the trinkets that don’t sell. What was once clutter is now memorabilia. I’ll find room for the iron lamps in the house I share with my husband. While 464 may have not been my home for some time, it has felt like an anchor, and leaving it because the bank says so feels like we might all float away. Where do we go for Christmas? Where will my sisters and I push our beds together? What happens to the ghosts we have felt watch us run down the hallway in the middle of the night?

There are three nights left in the house and a stronger echo now. We pour three glasses of Pinot Grigio. Mental breakdowns are on a rotating schedule. It’s my turn.

If I had abandoned my artistic ambitions then I could have a life of dependable income, savings and swooped to deter the bank and save the family home.

“Maybe I can buy it,” my sister, our family’s corporate queen, blurts out in her singular brainstorm. 

She’s creative and compassionate. She’ll pay for your bill and never send you a Venmo request. She will buy the house back and let our parents live here and then the dogs will have their backyard and we won’t have to part with the molding we etched our names into or the wall that tracked our growth in pencil and red pen and purple pen. Our kids can experience Christmases here and we’ll let their dogs run around the backyard when they move out but inevitably come back to seek refuge from the hefty and exhausting questions asked by life.

“Could you?” I surface from my woe-is-me meltdown. “Do you have that money? Could you do that at this point?”

At this point my dad has taken the Uhaul to North Carolina where his parents now live, chasing warmth and golf courses. He twisted his ankle when it went through the floor in the shed. The landscaping and the gardens are long gone. The weeds began their campaign against the perennials years ago. Everything is rotting. The shed. The shower tiles. The roof. But it’s our rot.

The decay is an art gallery of hardships. The weeping, the screaming, the dulling of hope and absence of confidence. Ah, yes, fascinating. This dangling gutter speaks to the crumbling of self under the societal pressure to appear to have it all figured out. Each daunting drop of gutter water represents the tick of a time bomb. That feels inappropriate to give to anyone else. It is our rot to live in, it is our gutter to fix. Leaving it feels like letting something stay broken forever.

My sister calls the bank as we’re toting a trunk full of coffee table books to storage. We’ve never read them but they feel so familiar we can’t bear to donate them right now.

She Googles “how to get a loan” and then her lips invert and her eyelids droop while her eyebrows arch. She is crushed by hope, by money, by racing time, by loss.

“Look, it’s not like we’re losing each other,” my mom bargains at dinner. She’s right. We still have each other and we still have most of the contents that made our home. So why does this impending foreclosure feel like death coming to collect a debt?

We have just brought a car load of things we never needed to the donation center. There is so much crap that accrues when you’re trying to hold everything together. Like we were trying to weigh down the house so that the anchor would never lift.

The emptier it gets, the more that’s exposed, the less time that we have, the more it feels like we’re floating away. 

In the emptiness of the house I marvel at the scratches. I hear the fights over who gets to wear the good rain boots between my sisters and I. I can see the swirls of smoke pluming off the pancake pan in the weekend morning light. I feel the terracotta kitchen tiles that kept our feet cold in the summer. We had to replace the floors with cheap laminate when there were too many cracks for bare feet and paws to endure. My sister and I would restore the floor if the house stayed in our surname.

“They’re pricing the house at $750,000,” my sister reports. “That’s insane.”

“It’s not worth that.”

“It needs that much in repair!”

Maybe it’s because my sister does not issue Venmo requests that she cannot afford this house. Maybe it’s because of interest rates, or avocado toasts, or daily lattes. Whatever it is, that is too much.

We are furious at numbers and less mad at ourselves. We are not more at peace but reach more of an understanding that we must go.

There are still some things to pack and photo albums to stumble upon. We can’t believe there were ever window boxes hanging from the kitchen with flowers in them. My mom notoriously smothers plants, once even claiming the life of an ‘immortal’ cactus. The exterior of our home looked so neat. The evergreen trim is fresh, not yet cracked by years of weather patterns. The roof looks new and promising, not yet a problematic (although enchanting) garden of moss. I smile outside, in bright orange pants and a pink plastic backpack, unaware that twenty-something years later I’d stand in the same spot, in black sweatpants, watching my mom lock the faded door one last time.

Perhaps if we protested, if we squatted, if we chained ourselves to the horseshoe door knocker that was supposed to bring us good luck they’d have to let us stay. But what would The Ledger say? “An embarrassment”, “Just leave already!” 

With one night left we walk down the driveway that used to feel so long and is now suddenly not long enough. We cross the street to buy a lottery ticket. Two lottery tickets. Okay, let’s make it 3 lottery tickets and 3 scratch offs. Maybe the horseshoe will work last minute magic. We’ll have enough for a down payment, and figure out the budget for repairs later.

We are not winners.

In the morning, our last morning, the sun fills the kitchen as it always does but there is no smoke to dance in its light. We sweep the floors one last time. The shell of our house hosts a montage of gatherings. Sleepovers, house parties, birthday dinners, dinner parties, holiday gatherings. They dance through the empty rooms leaving a shadow of dirt on the walls. I wish I could dust it into a mason jar and keep it near my bed and open it when I need a whiff of a house that was really lived in.

All the memories feel like they live here. And they get to stay here. And I'm jealous they're apart of the walls.

The air mattress has been deflated and packed into my car, which will be en route to my adult home in an hour or so. After 32 years these are our last seconds. And still, it feels like maybe we’re just leaving for vacation. 

Surely we’ll be back to sit around the fire pit in the backyard and watch the bats circle ahead. Of course we’ll shout “DON’T USE THE WATER” to the people downstairs before we take a shower. Obviously we’ll be back to add another streak of tree sap to the living room ceiling.

The person from the bank knocks. 

I already miss the birds that announce each day. Will the squirrels in the walls wonder where we went? My sister sobs at the front door. My mom locks the door. I cry a little under the seasonally expressive maple tree.

And now we’re locked out. Maybe we'll be back one day when we become ghosts and we'll join the memories in the walls.