Distorted

I left home five years ago. As soon as I crossed that stage, high school diploma in hand, bypassing my peers swept up by a wave of crying mums and proud grandparents; I was done. The boot of my car held as much of my 18 years of life as I could stuff into three boxes and one suitcase. I’d armed myself with a bank account full of every tip and pay-check I’d received from my waitressing job and an early acceptance offer from a university two states away. As far as I could get from a place, I'd once called home.

The night before – as my parents sat in some fancy restaurant for a reservation with friends they’d forgotten to tell me about, undoubtedly arguing with each other behind plastic smiles – I packed away my clothes and books and bedsheets in neat little rows until my room was almost barren. Apart from the old wooden furniture, my bedroom was cleaner than it had probably ever been, and I laughed at thinking about how, if the situation was different, it might finally make my mother happy with me. At 10:07 pm they arrived home, my father slamming the door as their whisper shouting floated upstairs. I knew they weren’t being considerate of the fact that I might be sleeping, but rather they worried about the possibility that a commotion might alert the neighbours. That they would see through the cracks in the foundations of their picture perfect dreamhouse. They didn’t come in to say goodnight. Hadn’t since I was eight and old enough to read myself to sleep.

As I pulled out of the parking lot and left my formative school years in the back windshield, I thought about what my parents would tell their friends. The neighbours. The busybodies in the grocery store checkout line. Would they lie and tell everyone I had accepted a scholarship for some prestigious university overseas or maybe I'd travelled to Africa to work in humanitarian aid. Something they could brag about and say, “she’s made us so proud”. Possibly they’d invent a job with NASA or an internship at Google. They hardly knew enough about me to know what I’d actually be studying or what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I was sure they wouldn’t be bold enough to tell the truth.

That their daughter had disappeared without warning while they spent their day in board meetings and having sex with their personal assistants in hotel rooms paid for by their companies. There would be no missing persons report or fliers offering an egregious sum of money in reward for my safe return home. Nothing that would cast a shadow on their spotless reputations. I would fade further into the background of their lives as if a figment of their imagination. Only resurrected when one of their friends spotted me in one of the professionally shot family photos – stilted and artificial – and asked after me. That’s if they kept the frames up at all. My parents would have to dig up my coffin from the deepest parts of their memory, plaster a smile on their face and grit their teeth. They would spin some vague anecdote about speaking to me on the telephone last Tuesday and how well I was doing, and maybe they’d go visit me at Christmas. They’d have forgotten all about me by the time they brought out the first course. I mean, they hardly remembered I existed even while we lived under the same roof.

That’s why I was so shocked when they called me one Sunday, five years after I left town and never looked back, and asked me to come for a visit soon. I had no idea how they knew my number. I’d changed it after moving and never given them the new one. That’s why I didn’t respond for almost a minute after hearing my father’s voice through the tiny speaker. I almost convinced myself I was dreaming or having a stroke. Maybe I’d temporarily slipped into an alternate reality where it was normal for my father to have my number, to call me out of the blue and invite me over. Anything to explain why the fuck he was calling. There was no special occasion. Nobody was sick and dying, and there was no upcoming birthday to celebrate. They just ‘wanted to see how I was doing’ and ‘make amends.’ ‘They missed me’, they said through the crackling of the landline.

I wondered if they had finally snapped and gone crazy. If they’d learned a sense of humour and this was some kind of prank. Or perhaps they had early on-set dementia and had forgotten that I had never been much more than a roommate they had complained about having to spend their hard-earned money on. I told them I would think about it and immediately hung up. I spent the next two days trying to forget about it altogether. Until I came home from work to a letter in my mailbox. A one-way ticket dated two weeks from then, set to arrive at the airport an hour out from the town I grew up in. On the front of the envelope, my address; written in my mother’s sloping, elegant handwriting.

Nausea settled in the pit of my belly. How did they know my address? I’d not kept in contact with a single person from my childhood. The hairs on the back of my neck tingled as the growing sense of being watched settled into my skin. Then a thought popped into my head. Had they known the whole time? Had they known where I was all these years and never bothered to reach out? Suddenly I was 12 again and realising my parents were never going to care about me the way the kids at school were cared for. This confirmed what I had always known. I was alone in this world.

It took some deliberating, but I decided I would go. I would see what it was they wanted from me and if they really had changed. I told myself I wouldn’t give in to whatever manipulation tactics they might pull. I would be strong and remain distant, and when it was done, I would demand that they never contact me again. Even still, my bones were heavy with paranoia the following weeks.

I elected to hire a rental car to drive from the airport to their house. There was no way I’d give my parents the satisfaction of driving me, of having any modicum of control over me once more. And this way, if I needed to leave, I wouldn’t be forced to wait 20 minutes for a taxi. I parked on the street. The house had been repainted a soft eggshell colour instead of the previous grey and rows of gardenias lined the fence where there had once been neat box hedges. I breathed deeply through my nose before raising my hand to knock. My mother pulled the door open as my fist made contact with the wood, causing me to stumble back. She must have been watching me from the window, waiting.

She was smiling. That was strange in its own right but it was weirder because I knew it wasn’t my mother’s smile. Her smile never reached her eyes, she would never do anything that would cause lines to form on her face. Her smile always gave you the sense that she was laughing at you, rather than with you. Pitying you. My mother did not smile, but when she did it was always forced.

This was a genuine smile. It was happy. I felt immediately that something was deeply wrong. A shiver ran through my spine.

There was something wrong about her face, it was fuzzy around the edges as if she was wearing a mask. I rubbed at my eyes with closed fists trying to clear my vision, but the effect remained. I figured I was tired from my flight but the closer I inspected her, the clearer it became that something was off. It looked as if someone had tried to draw her face as accurately as possible after taking a long glance at a picture of it.

My mother reached towards me with outstretched arms and drew me into an embrace. I stood stiffly with my arms by my side, trying and failing to remember when she had last hugged me. Surely at some point in my childhood. Definitely not after the age of ten. She invited me inside.

This house was nothing like the one I’d left; cold and sparse, decorated as if a model home. It was warm and filled with colour and light. I wondered if somehow my memories of my horrible, lonely childhood had managed to warp my recollection of the house itself. But I knew that wasn’t right. This new hallway was illuminated by a warm glow and funky paintings hung from the walls. The dining table was set with a red gingham tablecloth that my mother would’ve called tacky, and a vase of sunflowers.

In the kitchen my father took a large tray out of the oven before pausing to take a long pull from the neck of a beer bottle. I had never seen my father drink beer before, he used to say it was the common man’s drink and that real men drank whiskey. He turned to say hello and where his face had once been clean shaven and ‘professional’, stubble grew freely. Like my mother, something was off, and it wasn’t just the facial hair. His nose was smaller than I remembered, eyes just a fraction too far apart. From afar, or at a passing glance it was the man I’d grown up with but as he stepped closer to greet me, his features shifted. It was like looking at an optical illusion and when I changed my gaze, the true image would slip into place.

They watched me. To anyone else it might seem they were worried, for I hadn’t said a word since my mother opened the door. But I could see it in their eyes. The suspicion. They were wondering if I’d noticed, waiting for me to say something. I stuttered out empty platitudes about being happy to see them and they shuffled me over to sit at the table.

Dinner was pistachio encrusted chicken breast served with a peach and goat cheese salad. When my father announced the menu, I stopped short, fork raised halfway to my mouth. My mother was allergic to pistachios. This was a fact she despised as she perceived any sort of weakness to be a flaw and my mother was not flawed. I said as much, but my mother just stared at me with an odd look and told me she didn’t have any allergies. She never had. And then she went on eating, cutting her chicken into bite sized cubes and placing them delicately on her tongue. Never breaking out in hives or becoming short of breath as her throat closed up.

I was beginning to feel as if I was going out of my mind. I managed to stumble my way through conversation, letting my parents do the brunt of the work, barely processing a word they said. I excused myself to my room citing exhaustion and an early night. My father followed with my bag and as I reached the top of the stairs and turned right, towards my old bedroom, he laughed at me. It wasn’t the same boisterous laugh he’d had at dinner when discussing his golfing buddies. It was sharp and croaky like it didn’t belong to him. I hadn’t seen my father laugh enough as a child to know which one was more his own.

My bedroom was to the left, he said with a curious look on his face, don’t you remember? And he pushed past me, guiding me down the corridor to a room I knew was not mine. I followed him slowly. Inside the doorway he dropped my bag, calling goodnight over his shoulder as he moved back downstairs. I locked the door.

The furniture was the same but there were pictures on the wall I had no recollection of. Myself and my parents at the beach, and in the snow, and with my grandparents. These were not my pictures. My mother hated the sand and the first time I’d been to the beach was with some uni friends a year after I left home. I had never met my grandparents, let alone taken photographs with them. They had both died before I was born. I sat down on the bed. It was made tidily with the same striped sheets I had packed in a box all those years ago. I sat there for hours, listening as my parents cleaned and made their way to bed. When I was sure they were sleeping, I slipped out the door and into the rental car. As I drove to the airport, heart racing against my ribcage I knew one thing for sure.

I was certain that those people were not my parents.