Oak Hill

On a brisk November morning I had stood at my father’s grave for the first time in ten years. It was also the first time I stepped foot on my family’s estate, Oak Hill. My father was the only person that called me by my first name, Jessabelle, when everyone else just called me Elle. It was unseasonably cold that day, my breath wafted around me like pipe smoke. The sun shone through a lens of low clouds and occasionally bounced off the granite tombstones in a kaleidoscopic dance. It was quiet, somber, and lonely, but the way the birds sang their melancholy tune was beautiful in its own way and it helped put my mind at ease.

I loved my father immensely, but I couldn’t bring myself to come see his final resting place atop a lonely hill nestled beneath an expansive oak tree that was as dead as him. My mother came out here every day, to tend the topiaries she kept in planters there to keep my father company. Every week she would call me and attempt dragging my ‘ungrateful ass to see my dead dad,’ it was the least I could do for him she’d say. Then at some point, she just stopped; trying to get me to go with her, stopped calling, stopped all communication. Concerned, I had gone to visit her at the estate, that’s when it was discovered that she was missing. No one knew for how long. Cops had searched her entire house but found no trace of her, so I went to my father’s grave hoping I’d find her there tending the topiaries, singing, and reading passages from his favorite novels. I suppose that was a pipedream.

One of those rare moments where you feel so incredibly helpless and alone had washed over me and I collapsed onto the grass adorning my father’s grave, giving way to the uncontrollable sobs that consumed my entire being. I wanted so much to find my mother, to have my parents back together, dancing again as they made dinner. I thought knowing my father was sick and when he was going to die was terrible, but not knowing what happened to my mother was even worse. Possessing the knowledge that I was the last alive of my family really hit hard in the isolated quiet of the vapory fog enveloped graveyard.

My sobs ebbed and flowed such as waves crashing over my broken heart. I half laid, half sat on the grassy knoll sometimes spewing incoherent words and thoughts as they rushed to the fore of my mind. The more I thought about the situation though, the angrier I started to become. Angry that my mother just left, angry that I didn’t try harder, angry that I let both of my parents down. I stood up from my kneeling position and yelled as loud as I possibly could, startling the birds lurking in the deadened oak tree’s fingers, and kicked the topiaries my mother loved so much. It fell over with a crashing thud that reverberated around me, displacing the looming silence pressing on my ears, and shattered the white urn that housed it.

Feeling foolish and an overwhelming sense of sadness at having destroyed something my mother loved and cared for with all her energy, I stooped to pick the shriveling topiary off the ground. That’s when I saw it. A small black notebook hidden on the side of the white topiary urn, stuck with severely discolored masking tape. It was bound with a single thin red ribbon with a small slip of paper attached to it. I was staring at the notebook, dumbfounded, with a plant in one hand, the notebook in the other, and studied the cover inquisitively. When I read my full name on the slip of paper all color drained from my hands and face as I recognized it to be my father’s.

My ghostly hand brushed off the red ribbon, I inhaled a shaky breath, and opened the cover. It was empty. I flipped through the pages of the notebook, and they too were empty. What did this mean? I had graduated from confusion to anger once again at having gotten my hopes up for nothing. Within my cold-stung fingers I clenched the notebook harder, drawing it up to my face for a closer inspection, desperate. Then I shook my head and sighed a defeated sigh. My breath long and drawn-out, it graced the pages of the notebook in a warm caress. That’s when I noticed something. A small speck of black appeared on the page. Stunned, I looked at the black spot as it slowly disappeared from my sight. That’s when it hit me, the ink must have been invisible, only activated by heat. I drew in another long breath, this time with renewed purpose and outpoured the warm breath from my lips closely to the page. A sentence sprang up from within the pages, and I read quickly, my heart leaping out of my chest in bated anticipation of what I may find. It read,

Leave Oak Hill, nothing is as it seems, we are awaiting your arrival where the sky meets the sea, and the sirens watch over us all.

A place where sky meets the sea? Where sirens watch over us? It instantly hit me. Siren’s Watch, our family boat was docked the year my father passed. Boats were his obsession and when he was no longer with us my mother just couldn’t handle seeing it anymore. She removed all images of it from the house and told me never to talk about it. I thought it was because it made her sad to think of dad when he was happy. Now, I thought perhaps something else was afoot. I ran to my car and drove to Oak Hill Lake, the next town over, where Siren’s Watch was docked.

I arrived at the boat slip a quarter after seven. It was dark by then and all the boat slip workers had left for the day. The lights lining the docks were the only thing paving the way as clouds were thick in this area and covered the full moon above entirely. I hesitated at the edge of the water, unsure if I should run toward the Siren’s Watch or get in my car and leave. But if someone had left this note for me, it must mean something important is waiting on the other side, so I mustered up what little audacity I had in me and trekked down the docks towards Siren’s Watch.

As I got closer to the five-foot yacht painted teal at the hull and white at the top with golden lettering on the stern, all the lights were on inside. Something which didn’t make any sense to me because I thought no one ever came to visit this boat. I stopped to listen for a moment to see if there was any danger or if I recognized any voices. Surely enough, I heard my father laughing his recognizable guttural laugh and my mother with her high-pitched squeal laughing in unison. I thought I was imagining things; my father wasn’t alive. My mother, missing. What if they weren’t? What if they were sitting in there waiting for me? I knew I couldn’t sit on this dock forever, I had to decide if I was going aboard or not. If my parents were somehow alive and aboard this vessel, I wanted to know, so I climbed up the back ladder cat-like and peaked into the back window of the living quarters.

Both of my parents were sitting on the sofa looking out over the dark, swaying waters of Oak Hill lake, and they never looked happier. I grasped at the door, hoping this wasn’t all a sinister dream, longing for them to be right across the glass in front of me. It opened easily and with a creak of voyages past. My parents turned at the exact same time, smiled at me as though I had just gotten home from school, and reached their arms out toward me in a welcoming greeting.

“Jessabelle, sweetie, you made it. We weren’t sure you would.” My father said in his comforting honey-soaked lilt.

I stared at them both, clutched their hands and whispered, “this isn’t real, you aren’t real.”

With their warm inviting smiles, and twinkling eyes, it was hard not to give in to the fantasy of what was happening right in front of me. I didn’t understand any of this. My father walked over to me, picked me up in his arms like I was five years old again, and spun me around emphatically before whispering in my ear, ‘your home dearest one, I waited so long for you to find me.’

“What is this? How are you here?” squeezed out through half-turns as my father swung me around.

“I know, we have a lot of explaining to do, sweetie. But I just want you to know, that I found it.” My father said, setting me down of the couch by the window.

“We found it.” My mother interjected.

“Found what?” I said, confusion at its peak.

“The Oak Hill treasure. We’re even more rich!” My parents said echoing one another.

“Everything will make sense dear; I promise. It’s all in the notebook.” My mother said as she gently patted my knee as she sat next to me on the couch and looked longingly toward the blackened water spread out beneath Siren’s Watch.

I stared at them in disbelief, with no knowledge of the Oak Hill treasure, and completely uncertain if my parents were in their right minds at all.

“You did bring it, right?” My father said dubiously, as though no one was to be trusted. Not even me.

I pulled the notebook out of my jacket pocket and held it gingerly within my fingertips as though it were a time-bomb waiting to go off. It was all so…surreal. I couldn’t fathom how my parents were here or what was even happening. I had watched my father’s burial from my bedroom window and cried like I had never cried before. As I tried grasping at the reality in front me of me, I noticed something from my peripheral. The couch I had been sitting on just minutes before, there was something strange peeking out from the zippered part of the cushion. I walked over to examine what it was, my parents eyeing me inquisitively from across the cabin. It was money. Cold, crisp, hundred-dollar bills, sticking out from this cushion as though it always belonged there. Glancing around the cabin with renewed interest I noticed money sticking out of every crevice, cushion, cabinet I could see. Yet, this somehow cemented the idea that I was in some very strange, not real, dream, and that any moment from now I’d awake in a cold sweat missing my parents all over again. The other part of me hoped, this was real.