Neither of us said much on the ride to my father’s house. I just silently looked out the window at the transformed scenery. The city had changed as much as I had since I left. In one of his letters my father had told me that Downtown had doubled in size, which was impressive, but still left it a dwarfed, meager percentile of the Manhattan skyline.
We took Interstate 80 to 215 South, then the ramp east to the Highland Drive exit.
As we pulled into my old neighborhood, the only thing I recognized was the 7-Eleven my father used to take me to every Sunday to buy me a Slurpee and a box of Lemonhead candy. What had been a Taco Bell on the corner was now a dental office—a peculiar and disappointing conversion.
In my eighteen-year absence the trees and bushes had grown, and the aged houses seemed to have shrunk. The street was beautifully tree lined. The area had gentrified as the older residents passed on and younger homeowners moved in, remodeling or outright demolishing the older homes.
The area of the city I’d grown up in was called Sugar House, or Sugarhouse as the locals wrote it. It was named for a sugar beet test factory that had resided there more than a century prior. Sugarhouse was one of Salt Lake’s oldest neighborhoods and the tiny home where I’d spent my childhood had been built before World War II on what had once been the Mormon prophet Brigham Young’s apricot orchard. One of the few original trees still existed in our yard. The tree produced copious amounts of fruit each year, and I remember watching my mom and dad pick the apricots and place them in baskets, which I’d sell by the side of the road for two dollars a bushel.
The backyard had been magical to me—my own fantastical kingdom where I battled bad guys and villains and ruled with a broom sword. Our backyard neighbor, an elderly woman I called Mrs. Betty, had two frenetic, cotton-white toy poodles that would stick their noses through the space between the fence slats and lick my hand, which delighted me to no end.
The dogs’ yapping would alert Mrs. Betty to my presence in the backyard, and I’d hear her slide open her back door and then push her walker through the grass to see me. Looking back, I think she must have been terribly lonesome. Sometimes she would bring me cookies, which tasted of rancid butter but were still sweet and welcomed.
The lady sitting next to me on the plane reminded me of her. I thought about what she had said to me about homecomings. I once edited a book by an author who had fought in the infantry during the Vietnam War. The book shared his emotional journey of going back to see the places where he had served. There was now a McDonald’s where there had been an intense firefight and he’d lost his leg and two of his best friends. I remember how his book made me feel. In some ways I felt the same anxious anticipation as Wendy slowly drove down my childhood street.
The house’s lights were off, leaving the home dark and still as if it had died along with my father. The yard’s only illumination came from the fingernail October moon and the vintage-style streetlamp that straddled the property line between my father’s home and the ivy-covered brick house to the south. In the dim light I could see that someone had already left a vase of flowers at the front door.
Wendy pulled into the driveway, put the car in park, and shut off the engine. The quiet of the moment struck me. Not just between us, but the whole new world. Downtown New York is never really quiet, something you sometimes forget until you’re away from it.
I suddenly wondered whether my father’s body was still inside. They wouldn’t have left it for me, would they? It was as if Wendy had read my mind. “He’s gone,” she said, adding, “the funeral home picked him up.”
I turned to her. “Was anyone with him when he died?”
“I was. And a nurse from hospice. He was in a lot of pain, so we had him on a morphine drip.” I could see tears again welling up in her eyes and, still looking away from me, she furtively brushed a tear from her cheek.
“I’ll get my luggage,” I said.
Wendy opened the hatch while I walked around and pulled out both bags and my carry-on. Wendy got out of the car and walked to the house’s side door and unlocked it using a key from her key chain. She propped open the door, then went to get the one suitcase I had left.
Passing over the threshold was like entering a time machine. I flipped on the kitchen lights then stepped up into the kitchen.
The first thing I noticed was the movement of the Black Forest cuckoo clock on the wall next to the refrigerator, its carved-wood pendulum swinging from side to side above the brass pinecone-shaped counterweights. The clock had transfixed me as a child. My father had brought it back from Germany, and it was unlike any other cuckoo clock I’d ever seen. It had three blue butterflies on its face that moved along with the rest of the clock’s mechanics. For the longest time I thought the butterflies were real. It was a constant in the magical thinking of my childhood.
Butterflies were a theme around our house. My father collected butterflies the way some people collect thimbles and little souvenir spoons. He gathered them in different varieties all around the house, from carved olive wood to plastic ornaments. When I was little, he told me they were “flying flowers” that had set themselves free from the constraints and stems of life. I believed him. I used to believe everything he said.
The house smelled antiseptic and dank, like a nursing home or some other place with sick people.
Wendy followed a little way behind me as I walked through the house. I passed through the kitchen to the small dining nook on the southwest corner of the house. There were the same oak table and chairs I had sat at with my cereal or Malt-O-Meal every day before school.
In one corner of the room was a glass menagerie case with porcelain figurines—soft-curved German Hummels and the larger, glossy Lladró pieces. Most of the sculptures were of butterflies or little statues of girls with butterflies. I remembered most of them from my childhood—especially one of a father holding his daughter’s hand. As I looked them over, there was only one I didn’t remember. It was a statue of a veiled bride holding a bouquet of roses. It seemed a little out of place in the collection. I wondered when he had purchased it.
I moved from the dining area to the front room. There were two couches in front of a tiled fireplace with a painted mantel and bronze lion-head andirons. There was a large framed picture of me above the fireplace. It was a picture I’d never seen before.
As I stood there, I remembered the flowers someone had left outside on the front porch. I went to get them and suddenly froze. Standing near the front door, I had a flashback of my father holding my mother down as she screamed for him to let her go. My heart started pounding heavily. That experience was indelibly branded on my mind and soul. It was the last time I saw my mother alive.
I fled the discomfort of the living room, down the short hallway that led to the bedrooms. I looked in the bathroom. The old tulip and windmill wallpaper had been stripped and painted over in a neutral taupe. The original black-and-white honeycomb floor tile remained. When I was seven years old I was fascinated by how much the tile looked like chicken coop wire, and one morning I began tracing between the lines with a Magic Marker, an act that earned me a rare spanking from my mother and a lengthy time-out.
The room next to the bathroom had been my parents’. The door was shut, which is how I remembered it. It was the home’s inner sanctum and I rarely went inside. I grasped the brass handle and opened the door. I was hit by a rush of cold air. The room was freezing.