The Maybe House

CW: language, substance abuse, suicide.

Every day after work, car seat cruelly erect against my aching back and the growing bags beneath my eyes gaining weight at every stop sign, I drive by the house. The yellow, sunny, westward pointing, cape cod style house with twin bird feeders out front. It was the crown jewel of that little block, just across from the gate of the community garden on the other side of the street. I’d slow down as I approached, crawling up the block at five miles per hour, and come to a complete stop at the ‘yield to pedestrians’ sign, stealing a long look. Then, hyper-aware of how strange I must look to anyone working in the community garden, yet with a stomach still full of longing, I drive away back to my own house.

           I drag my feet up the dull sidewalk with its crooked stones, not wanting to go inside but unable to think of any reasonable excuse not to, pulling open the front door on its squeaky hinges. I stand on the other side for a long time. Every day I am frozen here, in the spot where forty months ago my husband would come around the corner to greet me, embracing me even though I warned him not to; I was wearing gross scrubs from my long hospital shift with God-knows-what splashed on them. He would say “it’s worth it! I’ll change my clothes, too” and kiss me not once, but several times. Over and over, every happy, damned-to-hell afternoon.

           Finally I move, walking to the right and into the kitchen to make myself honey-lavender tea. The box boasted “herbal blend for stress relief” in bold, swooping calligraphy. It did no such thing for me, never had, but still I drank the stuff - the sweet, musky, new-age medicine I used to swear by, just for the sake of saying I haven’t given up on everything. Thirty-five months ago, Joe and I, starry-eyed newlyweds, would dance across this kitchen floor late at night with Lord Huron’s ‘The Night We Met” playing on the Bluetooth speaker. It had been our first dance song at our wedding, and then it was our almost-every-night song, dirty dishes sitting forgotten in the sink.

           On Sunday mornings this kitchen held the infinitely charming smell of flour, butter and sugar. Aprons on, flowers and frills round the edges for me and some ludicrously stupid dad joke printed on the front for him, bare feet skipping lightly across the floor. We flipped pancakes with our matching his-and-hers spatulas. One Sunday Joe had turned around with streaks of batter under his eyes like war paint, dropping into the most comical of fighting poses, and we’d fenced with our spatulas until the pancakes on the griddle started burning and set off the smoke detector. We’d laughed and he’d lifted me off the ground so I could turn the alarm off with the end of my spatula-sword. Then we ate the half-blackened pancakes, giggling at the awful burned flavor. Joe had taken one, burned beyond all hope, and flipped it across the room with his spatula. It stuck to the kitchen window with a pathetic splat and I’d laughed so hard maple syrup came out of my nose.

           Now I take my tea, already gone cold, to the living room, and sit in a daze on the couch where we’d stayed up late watching TV on weekend nights, nature documentaries on my night to choose and detective shows on his. He didn’t care much for nature documentaries, but he raised his eyebrows thoughtfully at all the interesting facts and marveled about them with me for days afterward to prove he’d been paying attention. I didn’t care much for detective shows, but I laughed at all the stupid jokes and listened intently to his theories, even reading the online fan forums with him, chin on his shoulder.

           I switch from tea to wine, still dazed, still re-living those nights, second by second, sip by sip, until – damn, I drained the bottle again – my drunken body is convinced the flush of warmth I’m feeling is his body heat next to me. 

           Up the stairs I go, swaying a little, into the master bedroom, and stand staring at the unmade bed. It looks just like it did after our nights of blissful ecstasy, him on top of me half the time, me on top of him the other half. The pillows are thrown about, sheets crumpled and damp. Except now the wrinkles come from my fitful tossing, the damp from the stress-sweat induced by recurring nightmares. He used to press me up against walls in fits of red-hot passion, but in the dreams he throws me against the door frame, fist closed around my throat, in a fit of white-hot rage.

           I have to stagger suddenly to the bathroom. Maybe I’ll throw up and maybe I won’t. Thirty months ago I did, when I woke up with my insides rolling like turbulent waters. Oddly, I didn’t mind the sensation. It didn’t really feel like a sickness. These were smooth, coastal waters inside of me, sweet waters that rolled down my cheeks in joyful tears as the pink plus sign appeared on one, two, three, four pregnancy tests. Gotta be sure.

           I do throw up now. Wine-colored bile unabsorbed by any dinner, sure to stain the toilet bowl if I don’t flush it right away. What’s the point? It’s stained already. I lay my pounding head on the rim of the toilet bowl, and stare at the bathtub where, eighteen months ago - two pregnancies ago - my dear Joe took a bath with all his clothes on, and instead of flirtatiously inviting me to join him, he’d invited the toaster. He’d brought our his-and-hers pancake spatulas in there with him, too, floating like two canoes that had lost their way on the river. That was his note.

           Eventually I manage to stand. I start back to the bed, ready to collapse. Then I see the crib. I see it in sharp clarity while the rest of the world has gone blurry and doubled. Inside, there is still the indentation of a tiny body – even though that is fucking impossible, where are the laws of physics when you need them? – on the spongey mattress and pink blanket. Twenty-two months ago, Joe and I stared lovingly at our baby Marley, sleeping so peacefully under her pink blanket, before we too laid down to rest. Sometime that night, while Joe and I romped so carelessly through our own selfish dreams, her little lungs stopped working and she died. Right there. Less than six feet away from my stupid fucking face.

           Now I run, clumsy down the stairs, back to the living room. I remember, nineteen months ago in here, Joe swept up by a current of confused sadness and anger, screaming at me. Why didn’t I know? All my years of nursing school and I couldn’t tell that something was wrong with our daughter? I cried horrid tears, trying to explain to Joe that Sudden Infant Death Syndrome – SIDS, they called it – was still a mystery to medical science. Sometimes babies just died, and no one really knows why.

           I think that maybe I should sleep on the couch tonight, away from the crib upstairs, but there’s another problem down here. The kitchen is the problem. I can see the goddamn kitchen from the couch, the kitchen where twenty-eight months ago I pulled out the vodka I kept hidden at the back of the pantry – not the shelf with the pancake mix, Joe would find it there – the goddamn fucking piece of shit vodka bottle that I took two sips from and slipped it back. Two little sips couldn’t hurt the baby. Not two little sips today, and certainly not the two little sips yesterday. No. Couldn’t hurt little Marley. We’d already named her and everything.

           The kitchen! The kitchen where, eighteen months and however many fucking hours ago, Joe had shoved his iPhone in my face, showing me an article about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and right there under ‘high risk factors’, was drinking alcohol while pregnant. I knew it would be there. I’d. Always. Known.

           Joe smashed the vodka bottle he’d finally found on the ground at my feet, the last of the alcohol running between my toes. I wished he’d smashed it over my head and killed me. I picked up one foot and slammed it down on the shattered glass. I didn’t feel the sting. We’d already named her and everything.

           Sometime after this memory, I finally fall asleep.

           The next day I don’t go to work. I walk. I walk the six miles back to the yellow house. It is mid-afternoon by the time I get there, and apparently sometime that morning a big ‘FOR SALE’ sign was placed in the yard, and the key to the front door was placed in a lock box hanging from the door knob. The combination to the lock box, I found out, was the street address. Not very secure, Mr. or Mrs. Realty Agent.

           Finally, after all these months of driving by as slowly as I dared, reaching out with invisible arms, the door opens for me. I remember touring this house during the long weeks of house-hunting with Joe. We’d barely listened to the realtor once inside, lovestruck. Both of us, with our spiritual, new-age minds, were entranced by the good vibrations of these golden-stained floorboards. We could picture ourselves so clearly making pancakes and dancing in the kitchen, staying up late on Friday and Saturday nights with the TV on, sharing a bottle of wine on the back patio. We’d left a little heartbroken. The place was just a tiny bit too expensive. I didn’t shed tears then, but I do now, standing on the same floors and feeling all the hope had gone out of them.

           Upstairs, the master bedroom is a little small, but that doesn’t matter; it leaves more space for Marley’s room. I stand in the middle of the floor, and it all appears around me. There’s a collection of stuffed animals piled on Marley’s bed. No matter how many she collects, Joe and I just can’t resist buying her whichever one she wants every time we visit the zoo gift shop. Her pink baby blanket is folded on top of her pillow; she still won’t sleep without it. On the wall above is a giant sheet of paper with abstract splashes of paint piled on thick. She and Joe finger-painted that one summer afternoon, and it we agreed it was absolutely the greatest Avant Garde masterpiece of the twenty-first century. In one corner was a little desk with a purple chair pushed under it. She’d started school this year. She was a diligent student, always sure to finished her reading before supper. We weren’t surprised. She’d always loved to learn, curling up between us and watching the documentaries I liked, remembering all the interesting facts, even the ones Joe forgot. She was so, so smart.

           I sobbed for hours on that floor, crying out in fury and despair, my brain ripped wide open as half a childhood flooded inside. Her first word had been “dolphin”, and she’d pointed at the dolphin swimming past us at the sea exhibit at the zoo. The dolphin had actually stopped and looked at her. What I wouldn’t give for a photograph of her smile at that moment. Her first steps had been toward her older cousins playing hopscotch in the backyard at a family cookout. She’d started crying when she realized she still couldn’t do what they were doing. Joe abandoned the grill and distracted her with finger paints. That always worked. I suddenly knew all the songs that we’d sing on long car rides, the names of every single stuffed animal on her bed, the foods she wouldn’t touch with a fifty foot pole and the ones she couldn’t get enough of. For Christ’s sake I knew which of her baby teeth had fallen out first! A lower central incisor—the one on the left! I said let’s leave a dollar under her pillow. Joe said ‘okay’ but left her five dollars instead.

           I heard her voice, delicate, the most beautiful I’d ever heard, sing a lullaby. Marley sang me to sleep. I woke up deep in a dream, and that was the last time I touched her. On the floor of her bedroom in our Maybe House, where I’d never touched a drop of alcohol since I took those four pregnancy tests, I hugged my healthy little girl. I smelled her hair and felt her smooth, warm skin. She told me she loved me, and I could only sob in reply. The door opened and Joe came in. Together, we put Marley to bed. I read her a storybook, and she fell asleep before I’d even finished. I stood over her, Joe hugging me from behind with his strong, protective arms, and we watched our daughter sleeping peacefully again.

           I fell back to Earth with a crash, but I was amazed to find that I did not break. I dragged myself to my feet, rising from the tear-stained carpet, and walked back down the stairs. I locked the front door and placed the key back in the lock box. It would be like we were never there.

           Back at my house, for so long haunted, the nightmares of Joe’s hatred had disappeared, and the ones in which I re-lived the morning we found Marley dead came less and less frequently. Two months later I threw out every wine and vodka bottle in the house. One month after that I went to my first AA meeting. Six months after that I sold my house to get that ‘fresh start’ everyone always raves about.

           I sold the house not out of fear, not to run away from the bad vibrations under my feet. That house, through some miracle of the universe, wasn’t haunted for me anymore, by Joe or our baby. I had left them at the Maybe House. Whoever bought the place undoubtedly smells traces of pancake batter on Sunday mornings, and maybe feels a little unexplained shifting of air, but they dismiss it easily enough. It’s only Joe, flipping pancakes with one arm and holding Marley in the other, swaying to the music only they can hear. I think, maybe, that’s why Joe and I felt such wonderfully warm energy from that house. We felt the long reach back through time, a brushing of fingertips from the peaceful ghosts that live there.