Do They Remain

We had moved to a different house, just my mother and I. My siblings had all left home and I was the last one for my mother to shoo from the nest. I was a teenager full of big talk and a cowering fear of the dark (and snakes). 

Anyway, after shifting our lives into the new house, we couldn’t find a couple of things. One was the strongbox with the important papers in it. It had all our birth certificates, the divorce papers, diplomas, passports and a tiny box with our baby rings. We looked through every box and piece of luggage that came with us. We looked in the kitchen stuff and all the clothes. It was not there. My mother decided it was left in her closet at the old house. “Run over to the old house and see if the strongbox is in my closet”, she said. 

‘Can I go in the morning?”

“You can go now and be back before it’s dark.”

I grabbed my car keys and grumbled on my way out. I couldn’t tell her that I was afraid to go to the old house when it was empty and dark (I could never tell her I was afraid of the dark. She considered that silly).

 It was an old house, built in 1903. It creaked and grumbled in the night. It had lots of other people’s memories in it. I was sure some of them were not pleasant. I was also sure that some of those people could not leave their memories and didn’t like new people coming in and crowding up the place with theirs. I had never thought about them being there when I was growing up. The noises in the house might have been the other occupants wandering about. I always chalked the noises up to the house “settling”. And when something wasn’t where I left it, I never thought that maybe it was interfering with the way one of the previous memories should look, so it had to be moved. Of course, lots of noises came from our ancient furnace. It was huge and lived in our unfinished basement. Once when I was young, I was there when the beast ignited and it looked like the gates of hell had opened. It never occurred to me that all of these things were due to the permanent tenants and them tending their memories. We had lived there a long time and cluttered up every corner with pieces of our own history, happy and sad. But we had gone and taken our memories with us, except the ones in the strongbox.

I was not quick enough getting to the house, even though I drove at my usual ticket magnet speed. The sun was already behind the trees in the front yard. I ran up the front steps and unlocked the door. I could feel them watching me as soon as I crossed the threshold. I pushed back at them by looking at the spot where we always put the Christmas tree and the swinging door to the kitchen (Mom had always made it warm in the winter before we came downstairs for breakfast). Now there was no festive feeling in the living room and the kitchen door glared at me. I turned and bolted up the stairs, just like I always had. Even in the gloom, muscle memory had me reaching for the banister as I made the turn at the landing.

My brother’s room was on the east side of the house and was completely dark. The streetlight on the corner did shine a bit of light in my mother’s room. Her closet however was a dark foreboding abyss. I could feel them in there, resentful at my coming back.

“Just get the box and get out,” I told myself. I reached up to the shelf and felt nothing.  It wasn’t there. Now I had to check all around on the floor to find it. I dropped to my hands and knees and I could feel them crouching over me, waiting, impatient.

I swept the floor with my open hands. A dead roach, ick.  I felt boards, dust, fear and the box. I clutched at the thing and verified it was what I needed. I set it in the doorway and did a quick sweep of the rest of the closet, its cobwebs and the antique smell of my mother’s sachet. I did not want to intrude here ever again. There was nothing else that belonged to us. I could feel them willing me out of the house. As if they wanted to push me from the upstairs porch just to have me gone.

I escaped from the bedroom and ran for the stairs. I took them three at a time and jumped from the last landing to the main floor. I felt frigid fingers graze my shoulder as I left that step. I yanked the door closed behind me and drove the key into the lock. I was too scared to look in the window for fear of seeing them.

I fled the porch and sprinted to my car. Once inside, I checked the box. Everything was there.

I looked at the house as it crouched back into the evening shadows. All its memories and memory holders settling in until the next interlopers came. I started the car and drove back to the new place carrying the last box of memory tokens with me.

I heard that the old house had been torn down several years later. I wondered what happened to all the inhabitants. Did they remain like at a native burial ground? Or, did they gather their memories and wander away like forlorn vagabonds.

There was a train station built at the edge of town about the same time as the house. It had been for years. It was elegant for its day. We used to play there as kids and imagine how the fountain sounded as it bubbled and how the men at the ticket windows looked. We imagined where the people traveled and how they dressed. I like to think they went there and can take trips to other people’s memories. Perhaps people they missed from their lives could come and bring some of their memories.