House of shadows

The bright sun shadowed the old house, with its dark red bricks brown against the cloudless blue sky. The hot atmosphere had a heavy presence on the shoulders and was uncomfortable against the sticky skin of those who adventured outside. Heloise sheltered her eyes before glancing at her childhood home.

Bought by her grandpa and now hers to do as she wished. She thought a lot about selling it. Even if the unexpected inheritance she got from his passing was enough to cover what was left from her students debt, $20,000 wouldn’t compare to the money of selling the house. 

Breathing in deep the salty air of the seaside neighbourhood, she walked forward and while she unlocked the door, Heloise knew that she had made the wrong choice. She should have sold it without visiting as she had planned, but instead, she walked through the threshold and, as a lifetime ago, old wooden arches welcomed her and she was home; as she knew she would be.

The hardwood floor was dim with dust and the light filtered by the yellowed curtains was warm. Blinking a few times to make the dazzle go away and the entrance hall sharp, she stepped on the same old maroon rug and at the distance grandpa’s chair was visible. 

They had lived together there; mom, dad, grandpa and Heloise. After her father passed away she and her mother soon moved to another city where the cars would buzz under her window and people didn’t care to know her name.

Inside the house, she inhaled the stagnated but cool air and started to wonder, exploring as if she had landed in an old crime scene and was careful to not disturb what evidence was left.

The walls were filled with portraits. Her mother with her gorgeous blonde hair braided and dressed in a stark white dress dancing in her father’s arms. Their marriage. A newborn growing into a toddler. Then the young child she once was evolving into puberty.

Framed slices of life so close to her heart yet so distant from her reality.

(The scream of her mother eternalized between those walls, her body collapsing against the floor when the cops told her about what happened. The strong grip of her grandfather’s hand on her shoulder, keeping her still, waiting, waiting for her mother to recover. Even though she only did when they were miles away and the small town Heloise grew up in was reduced to a picture frame beside her bed.)   

Heloise was a visitor watching the house - so much bigger in a little girl’s imagination - come to life, taking in memories of a past time, a time that didn’t belong to her anymore. She could picture the father, so, so sweet, coming home and hugging her hello. Mother would be in the kitchen, still in her office heels, making dinner. 

Yet nothing drew her in, and she touched objects as artifacts of a lost era she didn’t belong to. Well into a career, engaged and happy, the grief that once struck her life and reduced her to nothing - the death of a loving father - had no space in her present. As it did the death of her grandpa. She was sad, she was, but she refused to let the memory of devastation lead her down when the damage was long done. 

Grandpa was sick and he had always been. His death and sanity long deteriorated and both the live-in caretaker and the many doctors had warned them about what was to come. If she dried tears, was for the idea of a strong but solemn man that once helped to raise her.

And in the echoes of ghosts, her mother strived. From the round-faced and bright blue eyes, cheeks still round from youth to the woman with a spine of steel, who raised a rebellious teenager into a responsible adult. Her mother’s touch was still clear in the position of the furniture as it was in her life. 

The overwhelming strength, determination to fight against the grief and take Heloise with her… in a house of shadows, only the memory of her mother was concrete.

She walked away from her remembrances past the door to the balcony. On the floor, some wooden boards were cracked while others were swollen. Time and lack of maintenance made themselves known as they always did. She took the horizon, so different and so similar, her height of a child keeping her from seeing the world as well as she could then, standing alone and as old as her parents were when they conceived her.

It didn’t matter, or at least it shouldn’t. 

Heloise went inside and walked straight to the stairs. She would check the rest of the house and leave, go back to her fiancé and their cat. 

But how could she rush away when the door to her room still carried the same old stickers? How could she turn her back to the carefully memorial of her childhood? 

Her grandfather kept everything immutable, a sanctuary against the unstoppable time. Sitting on her old bed with its yellow cover and butterfly drawings still hanging on the wall, she felt sad. Regret took hold of her because what grandpa treasured most wasn’t Heloise, it was the memory of a girl long gone.

The old man lived until the end of his life in the shadows of her sunny youth, lost in his memories and versions of people he loved. She didn’t feel precious, because it wasn’t her, it wasn’t about her, it was about the happiness he once felt and that alone brought tears to her eyes.

A sudden thought struck her and like when she was a girl and thunder touched the ground, she flinched and retracted into herself. But like any tormenting idea, it developed under her closed eyelids, flooding her brain and blooming as shivers across her back.

Grief could be the selfish act of hanging on each recollection and cherishing them until all that was left was the reminder of who was once there. How much did she cry for idealizations of a father she created within her memories? And how much did she cry for the man he had been?

And if she cried, then, was for the man she would never get know in the tainted memories she called hers.

For an instant, it was all too much. She stood up and left, walking past the closed doors of rooms she still had well preserved in dreams. She went to the upper floor, to the finished attic. 

Dark wood on the floor and walls painted white, it looked as pretty as she remembered. Opening one of the large windows she faced the fresh, although hot, air and felt the salt on her tongue. On the horizon, she could see the promise of the ocean. Comfortable on the sill, she took a moment to feel the warm breeze. 

Heloise could see the neighbour’s backyard from up there, the bench with carvings, the bushes, and also the complete disarray that was her garden. No, not a garden. Fierce vines, strong weeds and inhospitable flowers with more thorns than the illusion of petals. All of it deep-rooted, threaded in the humid earth, uncaring of observers.

Turning her back to the window, Heloise's eyes roamed the room and although familiar, although the same, it was different. She never spent much time up there, always preferring to play outside or make a mess of her bedroom. So when she observed it, it was almost a foreign room planted on top of the house she haunted in dreams. For that same reason, it was in itself a relief for her tense shoulders. 

(And remorseful head. 

How would she ever forgive herself for letting her grandpa die alone in the ruins of the life they once had?

How could she forget that part of her still lived in the same house, with the same rooms, even if in a different state?)

Another deep breath. With her neck tilted back, she appreciated the ever-changing design of spiderwebs reaching from the ceiling down to a shelve. Noticing the bookcase, she stalked towards it without a second thought, head begging to be filled with anything besides her memories. The first book she pulled back was poetry. Flipping through the pages, she saw a ten digits number scribbled on the footnote. The next one had a dedicatory from a friend of her father. The other, nothing.

Between the pages and books, there were lost pieces of paper with groceries list, cards and even leaves. She went through them randomly but not absent-minded. Her hands kept moving as if they could grasp the shreds of life left behind.

  When she reached the small black notebook, she thought of nothing special. With the black leathered cover worn out on the corners, yellowed pages and dust covering the text block, it was a worthless book turned into a forgotten relic only by the importance she gave to it.

As such, she expected a piece of past and while it was old, with small annotations about the building of a crib, or a drawing of her mother - with each trace a caress against the paper - or even the doodle of a butterfly she had made, the notebook was more than that.

It didn’t take her back to the past, however, but brought it to her.

In her hands, she could see a small poem copied down and was it her dad’s writing? Another page and a hash game - with victory to the X - and she realized it wasn’t the remaining of a life once lived. It was some distant reality, it was life, it was conserved and it was theirs.

In those pages, her father drew a newborn baby with the date of her birthday written under it. Another lost sketch between day-to-day annotations (what the garden needed, a renovation project, some simple math problems, another poem, the testing of a pen in loose scrawls).

In those pages, her father wrote and drew and in those pages, he still lived. As her younger self still did, with her colourful drawings and ripped pieces of paper, just like her grandpa did in the brisk numbers of a possible telephone on the footnote of an old book.

With nails deep in the cover of the notebook, she stared at it almost unseeing. Another page and the drawing of a young woman, again a caress in each stroke of the pencil - the careful shading and attention for the details of her expression and the curvature of her neck. Behind her shoulder, Heloise could see the old markings on the neighbours’ bench. 

Did her father stand close to that same sill, watching the same bench, watching someone else? Did it even matter? But it did, it did because it made him more than a hero, it made him human. 

He was sweet - so many hugs, so many stories - and he was compassionated - so kind, so attentive - and he was a coward. He refused to oppose her mother and his opinion was frail against the wind and did he ever had a chance to do more than admiring that woman? 

For an instant, he was alive. Mistakes, doubts, scribbled reminders, the man she would never know was made perpetual by his own fist.

In that small notebook, he breathed and he dreamed and he had never been as alive in her heart.

For once, Heloise loved him for him, and not for the father she lost.

For once, the house was not a tomb, but a dream of a different age brought back to life.