The brick colonial sat at the top of its long driveway at the end of a cul-de-sac, lined with perfect grass and tall magnolias, where she would climb even higher than the house as a child. She parked at the top, next to a sign giving notice of the impending demolition. She reached over to the passenger seat to pet Buddy as she studied the house from the front window of her Prius.
It was wasteful to demolish a five-bedroom house to replace it and the one next door with a ten-bedroom house, complete with a guest house, pool, and private tennis court. But as she stared at the second-floor window in the middle that used to be Rob’s bedroom, with its polished glass and its pale-green shutters, Alice understood the demolition. Perhaps the house’s loneliness seeped from the structure, casting an unmovable black shadow that could be felt by all who walked by, as it could by her.
Alice got out of the car, turning the unfamiliar key in her hand as she walked toward the wood-and-glass front door with Buddy ambling behind her. As she tried to unlock it, the door stuck from months of little use. She yanked it open and stepped inside with Buddy.
She paused as her eyes adjusted to the house’s dark coloring. Almost-black hardwood floors coated the entire main floor, and a grand staircase in the middle split off at the top to the house’s two quarters. Instinctively, she walked the circle of the main floor.
She passed her mother’s perfume cabinet, with her parents’ wedding invitation and her own in matching frames, one of the only differences she saw, as if her parents had frozen time when she left for college. Alice ran her fingers over the collection of crystal bottles that stuffed the cabinet. Her father brought each sparkling bottle home after a fight with her mother. As a child, she had coveted them so much that Rob stole one for her. Alice would dab the sweet-smelling liquid on her neck before bed, like she saw her mother do.
Alice walked through the dining room where her parents’ best china was set on the twelve-seater table as if they expected a large dinner party to arrive any moment. In the kitchen, the oak cabinets—where Rob would organize all the items in the pantry in ABC order—were still the same. Applesauce next to beans next to cereal. Each time he found it out of order, he’d have to take everything out and start again. She remembered now that she would sneak in before he got home to put everything back the way he liked it. When she moved the items her mother had shifted, Alice’s chest had swelled with such purpose at completing this simple task for the person who did everything for her.
Across from the cabinets, a breakfast den held a six-seater table where each morning, after Alice checked on her science experiments in the shaky tree house, she studied her purple youth Bible between articles her father read to her from the paper. “Listen to this,” he would say to no one in particular, and Alice would snatch the rare offering of parental attention, enthralled by her father’s lulling voice as he read the latest story on the price of gas. They sat there until Maura and Rob woke up, when their mother would make grits and eggs and read the children’s daily vocabulary word.
But all of this stopped after Rob left.
Alice veered toward the closed door to her father’s office with his mahogany desk that faced out the window as she finished the loop, avoiding the French doors that led to a screened porch overlooking the river. At the sight of them, the loneliness after Rob left washed over her.
The memory was so sharp of her hours, days, weeks, years sitting on that porch, watching the leaves change. How she could go days without talking to another person. How she could see the tree house from the porch’s perch, longed so much to feel the sun on her face outside, to run in the grass, but instead remained a prisoner in the empty house. “Stay here, Alice,” her mother warned each morning as she left the house, perfectly primped.
She walked quickly back to the front of the house and climbed the grand staircase, where she had seen so many debutantes take pictures, her mother instructing them how to pose, pretending Alice didn’t exist since she refused to take part.
At the last step, Alice and Buddy stopped as she took off her shoes, ready for her mother’s screams to do so before she stepped on the cream carpet. She turned away from her parents’ closed bedroom door and walked down the hall, staring straight ahead so as not to make eye contact with the stately ancestors from her father’s side in the wall portraits. She walked past the closest door to Rob’s room, where Jamie lived after dropping out of college when Alice was young and again after his divorce, the only reprieve Alice got from her mother in the year after Rob left.
As she walked, Alice thumbed through a pack of green sticky notes that the estate company had told her to stick on anything she wanted moved to her own house. They would clear out the rest before the demolition and sell or donate it. Her parents’ entire lifetimes had been reduced to a stack of sticky notes, and green at that. “Tacky,” her mother would have said.
She opened the door to her childhood bedroom. The smell hit her first—a hint of lavender from the little baggies of loose lavender in the house’s drawers.
The walls were a light shade of pink she had always despised. A white bed stood centered in the room, which Buddy jumped on and quickly fell asleep. A desk and bookshelves crowded the right side, each packed full of books she had never opened.
On the left side, a white crib housed a collection of antique dolls. With their too-wide eyes and porcelain skin, they looked like something from a horror movie. Alice picked up the folded duvet from the bed and threw it on the crib to hide the creepy demon dolls. Every couple of minutes she jerked her head from the house’s creaks, half expecting to see a ghost. Although she hadn’t seen him since college, this was the exact place for him to show up again.
Alice opened the door to the bathroom and walked in front of the mirror, eyeing the door at the other side that would lead to the room she had stared at from the street.
She turned on the sink and splashed her face. As with a childhood bully that won’t stop whispering insults under his breath, she could hear every step of her socked feet on the bathroom’s tile, every drip of the faucet and patter of the water in the pipes. It echoed so loudly in her brain of the time after Rob left, when the dead quiet tingled in her ears, so different from before when Rob would practice scales on his guitar until three in the morning, sending the music bouncing off the floors. So different from mornings with Rob as bumps reverberated through the house, along with his yells of “dang” as he hit his toes on the baseboards in contrast to the rest of the family’s quiet. She missed that most when he left: those sounds that interrupted the polished quiet and gave it life, that reminded her she was where she needed to be, with him. She was home.
Alice shut off the water and went into Rob’s room.
With only her mother’s sewing machine on a bare table and spare dressers for supplies, the room looked soulless, but Alice saw it so easily as it had been before, with the record player and the KISS albums propped against the wall. Her brother’s twin bed had nestled in the corner farthest from the door with the band posters above it, all but the sheet stripped from his bed and books stacked in their place, as if it were a desk, since he rarely slept there.