Home > Horrid(4)

Horrid(4)
Author: Katrina Leno

Now, though, it was barely recognizable as the same place. All but two of the windows were smashed. One was boarded up completely. Two shutters hung at haphazard angles, and the grass was overrun with dandelions and looked like it would come up to about Jane’s shins. The brick path was littered with patches of weeds that had pushed aside the stone and made everything uneven.

“Jeez,” Jane whispered.

They hadn’t gotten out of the car. Jane didn’t even think her mother had looked up at the house yet; she was staring very purposefully at the center of the steering wheel.

“Mom?”

Ruth blinked rapidly and looked over at her daughter, keeping her eyes down. “What does it look like?”

“You want an honest assessment?”

“Please.”

“It sort of looks like one big tetanus trap.”

“Okay,” Ruth said, nodding.

“Are you going to look?”

“I’m going to look.”

“Soon?”

“Soon.”

A few seconds passed. Jane saw her mother’s lips moving quickly, silently—some private countdown she didn’t want to intrude on.

Then Ruth took a breath, lifted her eyes, and looked out the window at the place where she’d grown up.

Jane had only ever lived in their small house in the Valley. She couldn’t imagine leaving it, like her mother had, and returning so many years later to find it in near ruins.

“You okay?” Jane asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ruth said, sighing. “Look at this place. It’s a mess. I should have come back here so much sooner.”

“Did all this happen in two years? Since Grandma died?”

Ruth frowned. “I don’t think your grandmother was in her right mind the last few years of her life. I think she just let it go.”

“But it’s okay? For us to live here?” Jane asked. “Without, you know, contracting a staph infection or something?”

Ruth laughed. “The windows are the main thing. I called ahead and had them measured. They’ll start to replace them in the next few days, before winter sets in.”

The phrase winter sets in was entirely alien to Jane. In Los Angeles, winter meant it was sixty-five degrees out for a few weeks and people leaped at the chance to wear too-heavy jackets and floppy beanies. She had seen snow on a family trip to Tahoe when she was twelve, and she remembered it being exciting at first—but that excitement had worn off when her boots soaked through and she’d lost feeling in her toes.

Jane opened the car door and slid out. It was colder than she’d expected; there was a bite to the air that even the chilliest nights in California hadn’t managed to carry, and there was a breeze that blew Jane’s waist-length, wavy blond hair around her face. She caught it in her hands and trapped it in a low ponytail.

Jane heard Ruth’s door open and shut, and a few moments later, she was standing next to her, staring up at the house.

“It’s freezing,” Jane complained. “It’s only the beginning of October! Isn’t this supposed to be fall? I thought fall was, like, a gentle breeze and a pumpkin-spice latte.”

“That’s September,” Ruth replied. “October is basically early winter. Although we can still get you a latte, if you want.”

“Maybe later,” Jane mumbled, just as a gust of wind blew across the front yard, raising goose bumps on her arms and the back of her neck.

Ruth put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders. “I know none of this is what we wanted. If there was any way we could have stayed in California, honey…”

“I know.”

“We just owed too much on that house. I never would have been able to catch up. And Los Angeles is so expensive. It’s two lattes for the price of one, here.”

“I know.”

“And I love you very much, and I promise this won’t be forever. You’ll be applying to colleges this year. You’ll get into one back home, and you’ll go, and I’ll eventually sell this place and follow you there with my tail between my legs. We’ll make it work.”

“I know.”

“Can you say anything except I know?”

“He chose the worst time to die,” Jane said, just a little morbid humor between mother and daughter that made Ruth smirk and nod in agreement.

“Tell me about it. He certainly did throw a wrench in things.”

Jane had a flash of her father lying in his casket, looking waxy and strange in death, no outward signs of the heart attack that had killed him.

In the flash, his hands were clasped on his chest. He was holding a wrench.

Jane’s mouth felt suddenly chalky and dry.

“Mom—how come you never came back here?” Jane asked, a little nervous all of a sudden, like the chill of the air had worked its way into her skin and settled itself in her belly, to twist and writhe like some alive thing.

Ruth hesitated. It felt to Jane like she was deciding what to say, like she was carefully arranging her words into the most appropriate order. Jane thought back to Paula at the bookstore, the strange look that had come over her face, the way she had told Jane to be careful. Finally, in a forced kind of way, Ruth said, “It isn’t always easy. Returning to the past. Now, come on—let’s get inside and have a look around.”

She started walking to the house.

Returning to the past… Jane turned the phrase over in her head as she followed Ruth to the front door. She didn’t understand what it meant, or what it might be like to not want to return to the past. That was all she wanted to do; all she wanted in the entire world was to rewind, start the tape over, go back a few weeks or months and try a do-over, get her dad back and drag him to the doctor’s office before it was too late, fix whatever had gone wrong in his body that had made his heart turn against him.

Ruth fit the key into the lock, fumbling just a little to get it to move. When she finally pushed the door open, a wave of dusty, stale air hit them.

It was the smell of disuse, of empty rooms, of empty hallways, of two years without anyone walking around, without any air circulation. It was like mothballs stuck into the backs of closets, that sickly sort of smell that caused your throat to go dry, your saliva to evaporate.

It was a thick thing, a heavy thing. The feeling of neglect seemed to radiate from all around them. They stood in the doorway, peeking in, letting their eyes adjust to the dim light, and then Ruth stepped inside and Jane followed her and there it was, that phrase again, because walking through the front door felt exactly like returning to the past, in such a quick, immediate way it left her feeling a little dizzy.

Like walking through a familiar room in the dark and missing your step, knocking your hip into a chair you could have sworn was three feet away from you.

Like raising your hand to wave at someone in a crowd before realizing it isn’t who you thought it was at all.

Like a hollow swoop in the pit of your stomach from standing up too fast.

“What is this place?” Jane whispered.

Ruth actually laughed—and her laugh helped break the spell a little, helped return Jane to reality.

“It won’t be that bad once we fix it up,” Ruth promised.

“It’s like the creepy house in And Then There Were None,” Jane said. It wasn’t one of her favorite Agatha Christie novels, but the house on Indian Island gave her the chills just like North Manor did. She wouldn’t be surprised if a spooky voice started playing out of a gramophone, announcing their crimes.

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