In These Walls

Alice was born on a Tuesday, at 3:13 in the morning. Her mother, Mona, screamed and pushed and did all of the usual things, and Alice appeared outside of her body and into the bathtub three seconds after the minute hand clicked into place around the clock that hung in the next room over. Her father, Paul, would tell her the story that way. He had tried to be there in the bathroom for the birth of his first daughter, but had been sent away by Mona and her nurse after nearly cracking his skull on the toilet seat in a fainting spell. He sequestered himself, safely, to the office next door. Paul figured the least he could do was listen to her pain. Plus, he thought, if he couldn’t handle being in the same room, he could damn well know exactly what second that the world started hearing the voice of his first child.

Mona and Paul never had any other children, so Alice held a solitary title in that house. It was a nice house. Nothing terribly impressive, but modest in the way that made everything more comfortable. It included a happy little girl, loving parents, and a dog, Lily, who had a gift for knowing when Alice or Mona was sad. Paul never admitted this to his wife or daughter, but Lily knew the particular long sigh of his that required a comforting nudge to the back of his knee. Lily also had a special liking for sharp cheddar cheese.

Two bedrooms, one bathroom, a boxer terrier, an insurance adjuster, a professional orchestral oboe player, and a growing girl. Neither the house, or the family, could have been happier, even through hard times that every family faces.

Alice was born in that house, and she loved it from the first second she got over her abrupt eruption into its only bathtub. Her parents and babysitters would often find her curled up in nooks and crannies that they hadn’t noticed before. When Alice started to walk, she would lean on walls and doorframes to catch herself, and then she would stare at them. Mona would laugh at herself sometimes, because she would be struck with the impression that Alice was trying to express gratitude in the direction of drywall, in the same way she would smile at Paul when he would break her fall. She stopped laughing when Alice began to talk, and some of her first words were, “thank you!”, said to wall and father alike.

Alice, as a toddler, was exposed to the idea that homes changed hands. Her own family never had a reason to move from one to another, so she was understandably perplexed when the Langs, from next door, moved all of their stuff out of their house and into a van, which then pulled out of sight. The van that pulled up a week later looked a little different, was holding different stuff and different people, who moved all of that stuff into that house that used to be the Langs’. When Alice put it together, with some help from Paul, she cried and cried and grasped at her concerned father’s slacks in desperation.

“We aren’t going to leave? Right? We can’t do that! They can’t have our house!”

Mona and Paul tried, they really did, to explain that no one would take their house. They really tried to get away with this explanation without promising that they would never move away, without backing themselves into that corner, but that was the only statement at all that would calm Alice down. They promised her that they would never move, and quietly prayed to a god they hadn’t talked to in a while that they would never have to break that vow.

Mona told her daughter that the house had always been theirs, and always would be. After another breakdown by her young one, she said that she herself had grown up here. Mona said that she had been born in a hospital, but her own mother, Alice’s grandmother, had been born in the very same bathtub as Alice. The girl stilled while listening, and so Mona told herself that erasing her own heritage was a white lie that would be cleared up later. Alice would someday understand completely why parents lie to their children. And, really, when would this ever come up?

Alice and her family never had to move away. She took her first school pictures on the concrete steps leading to the front porch, and cried on them a week later, digging her fingers into Lily’s fur after a teacher that day had admonished her for speaking without raising her hand. In the driveway she would draw with bright chalk, and then make her father move the car out of the driveway when basketball tryouts came up and she had to practice her layups on the hoop against the garage. She had her first kiss under the porch light that flickered inexplicably when it rained, as well as that night, when Paul thought there had been enough of that. Alice pulled her first and only acceptance letter out of the blue mailbox at the intersection of street and driveway, “only” because the university twenty minutes away was her solitary option. She fought and won against a rule that said freshmen had to live on campus for their first year, on the condition of Mona’s that Alice had to bring classmates without family nearby to their home for every holiday.

It came up again. Alice never lost her love for the house which held her childhood, adolescence, young adulthood. During those “ice-breaker” exercises that follow you from preschool to every job that you’ve ever had, her fun fact was always that she was born in the very same room as her grandmother. Her house was a part of her family, outlasting any one generation. She would always profess that her own children would be raised sliding down the very same flight of stairs on mattresses that she had. If they could all be born in that bathtub, all the better, but that wasn’t so much a hard rule as a preference.  She never questioned any of the story Mona had told her as anything but fact. Mona would wonder again and again how long was too long, but couldn’t really think of a reason that it was harmful.

Alice was born in that house, she grew up, she graduated high school and college. She did the thing that made toddler-Alice gasp and sob, and she moved away. She had an internship the next state over, and she knew it was time. She hugged Mona, and Paul, kissed the earth of Lily’s grave in the back yard, and thanked the walls of her home one more time for holding her up.

Mona died of a cancer that they caught far too late, three years later. Five days after Mona passed, Alice stepped out of the car and met her father in a desperate hug on the driveway where she’d once scraped her knee bad enough to draw blood for the first time, years ago. The funeral reception was held in their living room. Alice found herself leaning her whole back on those walls in absent moments, in between condolences, more and heavier than she ever had.

Alice stayed with her father, and Paul passed a year after his late wife. Alice stood by his side, in the same bedroom where he had spent the entirety of his marriage. Then Alice was alone.

She couldn’t leave. She wouldn’t. Her lineage was in this house, and she’d been able to feel that from the foundation up since she’d learned of its history. In the months after her father’s passing, she would walk the short passageways from room to room and brush her fingertips against the walls. She found and remembered nooks and crannies where she had the urge, even as a grown woman, to curl up very tightly and try to squeeze herself into them again. She’d felt so safe and small.

Alice began to clean her parents’ things out of the garage. She found a few family heirlooms right away, but there were boxes and boxes stack on top of one another, and she figured that she would have to do quite a bit of work to get to the old stuff that had been here for generations. She imagined old black-and-white photographs of her grandmother standing on the concrete steps out front, old hand-written letters in envelopes sporting her own address.

She kept the garage door open to the outside while she worked most days, and one of those days someone else crossed the threshold. A man, about her age, tall and reserved, timidly knocked on the wooden garage frame from the outside. He sheepishly apologized for startling and intruding and all of the polite things that people say, and introduced himself as Aaron. Alice shook his hand, waiting for him to get to the point. So many boxes to get through.

“I hope this isn’t too much of a bother, but my grandmother is in the car. She lives about three hours away, and she asked me to drive her here. She got a… a really bad diagnosis a few days ago.”

Alice nodded sympathetically to encourage him when he paused, wondering what this could possibly do with her, and getting slightly irritated as she could see the sun slipping behind a roof across the street.

Aaron wrung his hands. “This is really, truly, all she wants to do with one of her last days. Would it be okay if she walked through the house?” He turned and jogged toward his car, parked on the street, as they both heard the passenger door click open and closed. An elderly woman, thin and slightly stooped, crept into view from the side of the vehicle. Aaron melted into her side and supported her by her right arm. Alice just stared where he used to be, uncomprehending.

“Just a few moments, I promise. Really, just the downstairs. She wouldn’t even be able to get anywhere else.” Aaron introduced his grandmother as Eliza Moran.

Alice looked at the old woman, Eliza, into eyes that took time to rise high enough to meet hers, but which held determination and hope that Alice hadn’t felt in herself in months. Alice didn’t say a word, but gave a small smile and opened the door into the house. She wasn’t aware that she was going to do so until it had been done.

Alice watched as Eliza placed the palm of her hand not being gripped by Aaron onto the door frame leading into the home, and she began to understand.

She followed the pair as they made their way around the first level. Eliza would stop often, to rest or just to touch. Mostly both. When she rested, she favored leaning on a wall, rather than to the side of her grandson. Alice wanted to cry, die, scream, anything, she didn’t know what she wanted to do, but her world was upside down. She wanted to leave forever and to be buried here, all at the same time. With the family legacy of Eliza Moran.

Alice couldn’t be sure if she’d said anything at all the entire time that they’d toured the house. Eliza hadn’t asked her any questions, and Aaron threw her some concerned looks, but kept quiet as long as his grandmother did. They’d left, with a quick thank you from the young man, and a gentle squeeze on Alice’s forearm from Eliza that nearly made her burst into tears. When they’d gone, Alice sat on the cool stone floor of the garage, staring at the boxes strewn around her and unpacking none of them. She wasn’t sure that she cared what was in them, any more.