Abandoned Spaces

The cool late-autumn air snaps in my face, stinging my eyes, and cracking my lips as I stand in the empty street. Abandoned houses line the edge, in varying degrees of disarray, dilapidation and vandalism. I pull the white cashmere scarf higher, tucking my stinging chin into the soft warmth, then slip my fingers in the pockets of my camel-hair overcoat.   

Memories come to me: hot summers spent cooling in the neighbor’s yard, wet grass blades clinging to our feet and ankles as we leapt over a solitary sprinkler or chasing the ice cream truck down the street with crumbled dollar bills clenched tightly in one clammy hand, arriving at our journey's end heaving and sweaty. I recall my goldfish, swimming in a tightly contained bowl, pressing their faces against the glass to get a better view of the ocean mural

that sat just out of reach.   

Living here, I was the goldfish, constantly circling the tiny

bowl filled with tap water, plastic plants and artificially bright colored pebbles. The ocean mural was only an illusion. I had dreamt of a bigger world beyond this goldfish bowl, that I could be one of the very few who escaped to the ocean. For a long time, I believed that I had been the one who had broken away.

Through wind-stung eyes, I scan the houses, searching for the one that was so perfectly situated in my 8-year-old mind. The click of my Dolce & Gabbana stiletto-heeled boots echoes off the cheap siding and any windows left unbroken. I step carefully so as not to scuff the delicate suede, yet roll off the side of my foot anyway, mis-stepping on loose gravel.       

“Ridiculous” I think, “that I wore these here.” I purchased them second hand from that upscale consignment store in that upscale mountain town, worn maybe twice before being discarded by the original owner. They represent status to me, and in turn I wear them to represent to the world how far I have come, even if that distance is measured in second-hand shoes.

The wind gusts again, tossing my long dark hair forward, pushing me into a shuffling trot. Hunching my shoulders, I turn my face away from the wind. For a moment, I consider going back to the rental car parked half a block back, and making the search for my old childhood home comfortably from a heated seat. From the car, I see his face watching me. The crease between his brows,

the one that has taken up residence since my father passed, seems deeper in the thin afternoon light. I smile briefly, the action making my cheeks ache.  

The house of my youth was a bright, cheery yellow. Dad and I had painted it the summer before we moved, the summer before my world shifted at odd angles. We spent cool early mornings and dusky evenings together, turning the dull weathered-grey paint to lively sunshine. I would come in at the end of the day, just as darkness settled, with mosquito-bit legs and yellow-flecked hair that never seemed to wash clean.

The color is chipped and flaking now. The screen door hangs from the bottom hinge, reminding me of a child’s loose tooth dangling at the roots. Most of the windows have been shattered and broken glass litters the short cement drive. I step carefully, avoiding glass shards and the tall weeds that push through cracks in the crumbling concrete.

Reaching the side door, under the leaning carport, I test the doorknob. It turns with a protesting moan. The banging of the screen door and the creek of that one hinge that never was silenced sifts through my mind, a whisper on a memory breeze. This house had seemed so big back then, so full of life and energy. I can see now what I had never noticed then: the orange and green mosaic linoleum floors in the kitchen, the matching avocado appliances. I never noticed the cheap walnut veneer of the particle board cabinets, but I remember how the door under the sink peeled at the corner and my father’s voice travels across time, scolding me for picking at it and revealing the bare wood underneath.

I float through the house, conscious of the evidence of all types of critters making my old home their new. I search for my dad in the shadows, the man who used to swing me over his head, singing Elvis Presley and The Beatles songs. I search for the safe and secure feeling of a small child, knowing her parents would always be there to keep her from harm. I wonder who she would be if that had been the true story.

“Becca?” he calls out. My mountain man, clad in his uniform of flannel shirt and baggy jeans bunched above his hiking boots. Coatless, his hands are jammed in his pockets, shoulders pressed to his ears.  A smile tugs at the corners of my mouth as I recall our earlier disagreement: “I’m from Colorado, I think I can handle Kansas in November,” he had scoffed.

I turn back to wandering through a hazy past. There, the dining room table sat. There, the bedroom door I used to pound relentlessly with my feet in my outraged toddler tantrums. There, the bathtub where I spent warm, soapy play time. These giant memories of childhood contained in rooms so small I wonder how we functioned at all. Maybe the love we felt expanded the borders of this tiny house, filled in by the spaces of our bodies and the junk humans collect over the years.  It was expansive, until it wasn’t.

I stay for only a few more minutes, or several hours, lost in a time that was filled with light. It had dimmed, slipped away, like sand between my fingers, like my father’s last breaths on his deathbed, his rheumy eyes focused far away, breath rattling in slow, labored movements.

I turn to the mountain man with a small shrug.

"`Did you find what you were looking for?” he asks. He has hardly left my side these past few days, as I hardly left the side of my dad as he lay dying. Clutching the fragile, bony hand, I spoke to him of the days we went camping, or the nights we sat on the rooftop of this little house, stargazing. I sang the songs of my childhood until my throat clenched and tears blurred my eyes. And after I exhausted all the memories we had made for those first eight years of my life, we sat in silence.

            “I don’t think so,” I say softly, a fine mist of breath hovering in the air between us. “Maybe it’s not anything that can be found.”

            “I suppose,” he says, voice soft and low, “if something is forgotten, but not lost, there isn’t anything you need to search for in abandoned spaces. You can find it all here,” and gently taps the center of my chest.

I reach chilled fingers to his warm cheeks, my own again aching under an attempted smile. He gives one nod and steps aside for me to lead the way. I drift back through the house, reversing the memories I have just waded through. The warmth of the car is a comfort, yet a chill has settled in deeply. We drive through the streets, the last rays of light sifting through the remaining leaves on the trees. They are holding on as tightly as they can, but in the end, even they must let go and make way for the winter.