Celebrating 25 Years of the North Carolina Literary Review
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Configuration (acrylic and oil on shaped birch panel, 59x60) by Robert Tynes
perils of mildew and corroded pipes, draped two rooms to look like sultans’ tents. Full of dents and chinks and crumbs of enchantment, the house was made, I believed, for happiness. “I know why you really left,” Mickle says with such intensity, my heart skips. “This house is hunted, that’s why you moved. Hunted by ghosts.” “Haunted – I think that’s the word you’re looking for – but there’s no such thing as ghosts, remember?” I pass him my iPad. “Don’t play anything loud or with guns in it.” Mickle tucks the phone in his jacket and swipes to a game before my feet hit ground. “Don’t stay long,” he says without looking my way. “I won’t. And I’ll be right there.” I point to the porch. “Where you can see me.” “Don’t worry, Mom.” The luminescence of the tablet gives Mickle’s face an eerie glow. “Ghosts are scared of vampires. Everybody knows that.” A vestige of sidewalk lies along here. Highway grass has overtaken the zoysia we planted. No azaleas grow by the steps. The closer I get, the worse things look. The barbed creepers of smilax shoot through every picket. I start at the bottom and go up until my gaze lands at the top two windows. The one that’s cracked sucks me inside.
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In my imagination, our bedroom walls still wear a Blue Ridge haze. Chinese chimes dangle inside the window frame. Those rectangles of painted glass, each the size of a biology slide, each painted with a delicate flower, broke into a bright, anxious tinkling at the first sign of wind. We weathered storms on an old coil mattress, the only one we could find to fit our yard sale bed. What a steal, we thought at the time, solid walnut: a big carved headboard of blooms, small footboard of vines. If I wanted, I could call up every room, squeak open medicine cabinets, count black and white tiles checker-boarding the kitchen floor. I could hear Suzy sharpening her claws on the Persian runner. But a house has to be lived in or it falls apart. I tried to stay. I padlocked the shop and slept here through spring, but when I woke, you were in the plaster walls, in cracks on the ceiling and creaks in the floorboards. My father came. “Baby,” he said, crying himself. “Time to come back home,” and he packed me and Suzy up and drove us away. The house seemed to take this to heart. In short order, it looked abandoned, as it was, and although the yard stayed mowed and the lights came on, the truth showed in clapboards that wouldn’t hold paint, in a roof that threw off shingles. I returned Sundays, watered the plants and ran the taps. Going room to room took effort. The air wouldn’t part for me to walk by. The scent of the house, as if a cabbage lay forgotten in the refrigerator’s bottommost bin, began to sicken me. For a year more, the place sat with its beds made, photos on the shelves. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets stood open and weighted to the page where you stopped reading, but spiders spun webs quicker than I could pull them down. I had to let go. Nearly everything inside sold at auction, but not a bid came in for the rococo lounge you and Albert hauled from the Atlanta market. I considered shipping it to the two of you, a reminder of the weekend you first brought him and Walt, his carpet of a dog, to meet me. That visit, and all the ones after, Albert baked and roasted and whisked. “Lawson,” he said one evening, “I believe Walter is sweet on Amy.” You laughed, and Albert, as tall but not so handsome as you, flared. “The poor boy is positively love-struck,” he huffed. “He can’t take his eyes off her.” I yawned, sleepy from too much wine and not enough food. “How can you tell?” I asked. Walt had a set of bangs that went from the top of his head down to his nose.