A call from the past

“Anything else I might wanna know?”

“Nothing that I can think of. The house belonged to a very old lady, a writer. She died a couple of years ago, at 110, in her bedroom upstairs. The property has been vacant since, but we have no records of ghost sightings. The heirs simply took their long time to decide what to do.”

My mom nods and I cling to her hand firmly, as a shiver travels down my spine.

“I think the house is just perfect for Brandon and me. I’ll take it.”

The real estate agent smiles widely while I hold even tighter my mother’s shirt’s cuff, and repeat the man’s words in my head.

My name is Brandon Peterson and I’m seven years old. I’m still deciding whether ghosts and other supernatural beings, like Santa Claus, really exist or not so, in the meantime, I’m just afraid.

While mom chats further with the agent, we slowly walk down the front pathway and I get to analyze the whole house from a distant perspective.

I guess it does seem a nice house to live in. The building is composed of two floors and an attic. It is cladded with coppery bricks and all windows fixture are a dark moss shade of green. On every windowsill, white geraniums long for a drop of water and try their best to survive the heatwave that has hit the city in the last two weeks. The house is very distant from the home I had imagined for mom and me, I had something more like Batman’s cave in mind, but I guess anywhere, away from dad and his weird moods, is a good place to be. If mom thinks this house is good for us, then I trust her.

We move our things a mere week after the agreement with the real estate agent. Mom is way more nervous than she dares to show, and the sticky mugginess of the late afternoon is making things even harder for her.

Despite the sweat dripping down the hairline on her nape, the purple blush on her cheeks, and the worried, absorbed look in her eyes, I think that my mom Emilia is the most beautiful woman in the entire world.

Her hair is caramel-colored, and I love the way she always caresses them behind her ears. Her skin is soft and porcelain pink. Her figure is slender and athletic, but her laugh is genuine and full. She was a little older than twenty-three when she gave birth to me, and my dad, Douglas, was fifteen years her senior. She has never said anything bad about him, but I know he made her suffer a lot because, as a direct consequence, I suffered a lot too. I feel much better since we left dad behind us in the impressive New York, to move here in the sunshine state of California. Here is where my grandparents live, although I have never met them.

Since we got here mom works a lot more than when we were in New York. She stays away for hours and when she’s home she is always busy on the phone. Whenever she calls, she shuts herself into the small study between the kitchen and the living room so that I can’t hear a single thing. I tried to eavesdrop and once I clearly captured the word “divorce”.

Between her long phone calls and work, I’m left with a lot of spare time to explore the new house.

When mom is away, I stay home with the lone company of my baby-sitter Carla, a fourteen-year-old cheerleader who spends most of her – our – time on the phone talking with her friends and doing weird videos that it takes ages to shoot and only last a bunch of hours on the internet.

I must say that my first impression was wrong. 

The building has a square plan and all the rooms are erected around the staircase, in the house’s core. The ground floor is composed by a tv room, a living room, the small study that mom uses to do her mysterious calls, a small bathroom, and the kitchen. It also comprises a porch in the front and a veranda in the back.

The upper floor, on the other hand, is constituted by two bedrooms – mom took the old lady’s chamber in the end – a playroom and a bathroom. 

The only space I have not yet visited is the attic, which is only accessible via a trapdoor in the ceiling of the narrow corridor that connects mom’s room with mine. I think that even mom doesn’t know how to reach it because there are no handles to drag down the stairs or any other hints on how to pass through that fort.

Today marks the cloudiest day I ever witnessed in my short life. The sky is pitch dark and loud thunders pierce the air with a regular and steady rhythm. Rain comes in buckets and gutters shortly start to spill water everywhere. 

It’s right after lunch and Carla stands near the living room window, with her back to the glass, trying to capture the perfect thunderbolt to include in her new video. As I sit on the couch, I partially watch the cartoon on the tv and partially gaze at Carla’s mesmerizing ritual.

Boom.

The whole house shakes and both Carla and I look all around, puzzled. It takes us seconds to realize that the TV has shut and, to Carla’s big disappointment, the wi-fi has left the building.

“Shoot!” she bitterly screams than looks at me confused. I guess she’s just realized that my mom pays her to take care of me. “Do you want to play hide and seek?” 

Her offer sounds fake but I accept. 

Carla walks towards the wall adjacent to the front door. “I’ll count to twenty.” She states as she lifts the right arm up to her eyes, bends it, and leans on the coatrack. 

By now I know the house so well I don’t even have to think where to hide: in the wardrobe near the entrance of mom’s bedroom which, naturally, belonged to the old lady. It is made in dark mahogany and baroque style and it’s so massive and heavy that nobody even dared to move it out of the house.

Boom.

I take my slippers off and climb the stairs with the tip of my toes and head directly to the wardrobe. I open its doors and budge away mom’s clothing, afterward, I turn and press my spine against the hardback wall that smells of mothballs.

As my breath steadies, I squeeze my hands on the wood and move the fingers as if I was playing the piano. Just as thunder strikes again, my pinkie slips in a cavity and meets a switch. As I push it a loud pop fills the air.

I know what it is. I rush out the wardrobe and run to the corridor where rusty iron stairs are slowly lowering from the trapdoor on the ceiling. 

“Brandon, you’re supposed to hi…” Carla’s voice vanishes as she sees what I see.

Boom. 

“Shall we?” she whispers after a couple of seconds. She walks past me, takes her phone out of the back pocket of her short jeans, activates the torch then starts climbing the stairwell. My heart beats as intensely as the thunder outside, but I follow Carla anyway.

The attic is dusty and stuffed with cobwebs. The wooden floor is covered in boxes with years handwritten on each lid. Carla has already made herself comfortable as she sits on a package and starts opening the first carton: 1990.

“This one contains notebooks and… photos.” She takes one out and scrutinize the old film. “Ugh, can you believe that this quality was acceptable in the past?”

I listen without really listening. I’m too fascinated by the room which lightens intermittently with thunderbolts. I feel like the old lady’s soul is in here, somehow.

“Oh my gosh. All the boxes contain the same stuff. So boring.” Mutters Carla. “Oh look, internet works again. Let’s go back downstairs.” Then she heads for the corridor and I remain there with only bolts of lightning as a source of illumination.

I found a box, 1975, that doesn’t contain notebooks and photos but a weird object I have never seen before. It’s like a little red plastic box with a pierced wheel on top. In each hole are letters and numbers and, in the upper part, a sort of tube hangs on two supports. The tube is connected to the red box via a twisted wire.

I take the tube in my hand and analyze it. I lift the object under my nose but the only smell that comes out of it is dust. Then I place the thing near my ears where it perfectly fits.

I look at the numbers in the holes.

I think this is some weird kind of phone and I decide to take it to my room to study it better. 

I most definitely think it’s a phone that belonged to the lady and that I’m supposed to use the wheel to dial but I don’t understand where the screen is. How am I supposed to know what I dial?

I insert my index in one of the holes and spin the plastic wheel till it hits a metal nail that stops my run. I wonder if it has an internet connection.

I turn the plug in my hands but realize that we don’t have that kind of plug anymore around the house so there’s no way to see if it works.

“Brandon, your mom is almost home.” Screams Carla from below.

I startle then decide to hide the phone under the bed and study it later.

I push up the heavy blankets and smile. Right under my bed, there is a plug that might work with my discovery.

I take the red phone and crawl with it under the bed. With a trembling hand, I connect the two ends.

Nothing happens, I notice with disappointment. I thought that something was going to light, that maybe a holographic screen was going to appear. I take the telephone to my ear and this time I hear a rhythmic and muffled sound that goes: tuh-tuh, tuh tuh.

I place back the telephone and inspect it once more.

“Brandon, your mom is home. Bye!”

I slither from under the bed and head back to the stairs.

Driiin. Driiin.

Driin.

I shudder, terrified. Slowly, I turn my whole body towards the bed and stare at it without even breathing.

Driiin. Driiin.

Driin.

Just as mom enters my room the phone stops ringing.

“What was that?” she asks pushing out her arms to hug me. I free myself before she can even touch me and drag my discovery from under the bed.

When she sees the object her eyes sparkle. “Oh my God! Where did you find this rotary phone?” she smiles. 

I explain to her about my adventure in the attic. For a minute I fear she might be mad at me, instead she seems very interested in uncovering more about the previous inhabitant of our house.

“My grandma used to have one identical to this,” she says after a little, “I spent many summers calling my elementary school friends with it. I can’t believe this one still works.”

“But how does this rorary phone work?”

“It’s R-O-T-A-R-Y.” She corrects me and right afterward she picks up the receiver and places it between her jaw and the shoulder, then, with the index finger in hole four, rotates the wheel till the metal nail and releases it. “I just dialed number 4. You proceed like this for all the numbers.” She explains while continuing this new and unfamiliar gesture. “When you’re done, the call starts”

As she says that, her iPhone rings.

I gaze up in wonder. “Cool. I like it better than the mobile, can I take it? Can I play with it?”

Mom nods. “Just pay attention not to call for real, phone calls used to be expensive.”

I smile and raise the Rotary phone in front of me. “This is my new favorite toy! Thank you old lady who died here.” I scream with joy. “Hang on, can you text with the rotary phone? Does it have Whatsapp?”

Mom chuckles. “No texting, no internet, when you miss someone you just have to pick up the phone and call.”

“Who do you miss, mom?”

She frowns and opens her mouth as to speak but stops.

“Dad?” I hint.

She shakes her head. “No, I don’t miss dad. Do you miss dad?”

“Not really.”

She sits on the bed and smooths the cover. She gestures me to sit near her and she hugs me very hard. “I miss my dad. And my mom.” She admits. “They weren’t so happy when I married your dad. I was young and I thought I knew better than them, so I left, moved to New York, and never spoke to them ever again. Now that we’re here in San Francisco…” she halts. 

“You should call them.” I hand her the receiver.

“It’s not so simple Brandon.”

“But you just said that it is. If you miss someone you just had to pick up the phone.”

My mom looks at me intensely. I can spot a tear in her eyes, but this time it’s not a tear of sorrow rather than a tear of hope. I hug her even tighter. “I’m here, mom.”

She kisses me on the forehead. “I don’t know what I have done so well to deserve a child like you.” She takes the receiver and places it once again to her ear, then with the rotary phone positioned on the knees she starts, dialing. She doesn’t even check the number on the iPhone, it’s like her finger already knows what to do.

I can hear the muffled tuh-tuh, tuh tuh, and mom’s heartbeat accelerate in her chest.

She is sitting on the edge of the bed; her whole body is sprung forward. Her neck is tense, and her look is vacant. She stares right ahead but sees nothing.

The tuh-tuh stops.

Mom’s heart skips a beat.

“Hello?” a deep and authoritative voice answers.

Mom takes a breath. “Hi Dad, it’s me, Emilia.”