I never understood how something could loom like the spectre of death until I saw my grandmother's house for the first time. It hunched at the edge of the sea cliffs, gnarled as a witch's tree, three storeys tall and covered in fish-scale shingles painted black. The cursed thing even had a turret, and its triple windows glared down at me through the dusk like grey sisters.
It looked like an ornate coffin - one that had now become my home.
Two weeks ago I'd never given this place more than a passing thought. I'd never even seen a picture of it. Then again, two weeks ago Mom was still alive.
It wasn't until I was cleaning out her bedroom after the funeral that everything suddenly became real. Up until then it had all been so distant: a phone call, a coffin, an urn. I hadn't looked inside. Mom was gone; I didn't want to see what had been left behind.
Zoë arrived mere hours after it happened. She'd been just a state line away, and must've been Mom's emergency contact for her to have arrived so fast. I was sitting in this year's apartment in total darkness, not even realizing that the sun had set hours ago and I hadn't turned on any lights. It didn't seem to matter.
I usually thought of Mom and me as nomads, moving from place to place each year, but with the retro silver Airstream rumbling behind her battered, battle-scarred pickup, Zoë was the true gypsy. She looked every inch the part, with rich, raven-dark locks that fell to her shoulders in a torrent of untamed helixes, and strong, slender arms that were banded with intricately scrolled tattoos. She stared down nosy Mrs. Meier as she parked her house-on-wheels beside our end of the duplex, and though the old woman glared, even the white of her eyes yellowed from the cigarettes that seemed to alight on her clawed fingers like butterflies, she didn't dare say a word. Though she'd flaked on us a hundred times before, in that moment Zoë was my hero.
She was the one who found the photograph and showed it to me. We were onto the boxes by then, trying to figure out what could be salvaged, and what needed to be cut loose. Mom and I had so few possessions that I thought I knew everything she owned - but the photo slipped from the pages of Mom's Tennyson and spiraled to the floor like a pressed flower, utterly unexpected.
"This is it - your gran's house," she told me from somewhere in my peripheral vision as I stared down at the picture.
I looked away from the photo long enough to squint at her. Zoë was the first person Mom had met in the outside world when she ran away from home, back when I was three years old - but to the best of my knowledge, Zoë had never been to Marblehead. Not the one in Maine, anyway. "How do you know?"
She nodded at the shiny rectangle of paper clutched in my fingers. The black polish was mostly chipped away from my nails by then, but I couldn't bear to remove it completely, knowing who'd painted them in the first place. "Look at the back."
I flipped it over and was surprised to find Mom's familiar, cramped handwriting. Aislingate, 2002. Meaning, I was two years old when the picture was taken.
Meaning, Dad was still alive, too.
I stared at the house, trying to get a sense of the place. The building was too backlit by apricot and rose clouds to see anything properly, but I could make out the outlines well enough; the haughty tower, the brooding Victorian posture of the place. After nearly a decade and a half I was seeing it again - but if I'd been expecting any glint of recognition from ancient memories, I was disappointed. At the end of the day it was just an edifice, a place, yet another place Mom would never be again.
"Can't I just come live with you?" I growled, dropping the picture on Mom's bed. Correction: the bed that used to be mom's. The bed was on the list of things that I couldn't take with me, loose ends that needed to be tied up.
For a moment Zoë pressed her lips into a bloodless line, and as she stared at me, her hazel eyes unblinking, hope crested in my stomach that she'd actually say yes. It wasn't until that exact moment I realized the depths of the anxiety and terror that were roiling in my gut at being shipped off someplace without so much as a say in the matter - until, for the first time, I thought I might not have to go.
Then Zoë's forest of curls shifted, tendrils bouncing against her cheeks as she shook her head. "Sorry, kiddo - your mom's will was clear about that. You've gotta go live with your grandmother."
A knot of fury tightened in my throat, and I stared down at the picture again, wishing I could glare the thing into a twisted mass of plastic. "She never took me there - never even talked about the place, but suddenly it's the only place in the world I'm allowed to go? Tell me how that's fair!"
She didn't even hesitate: "It isn't, Mel. But your gran's the only family you have left."
"Pretty sure my dad's dad is still alive somewhere," I muttered sullenly.
"Correction: the only family who'll take you."
I snorted derisively. "Thanks for making me sound like such a prize."
Zoë leaned back against the wall and sighed, watching me coolly. "You know I'd take you in a heartbeat, kiddo. But even I can't argue with your family - your actual flesh and blood."
"Both of which are overrated." I looked back at the photograph again, not sure whether to be angry at myself or stubbornly proud of the finger-shaped creases it now sported. "Mom went most of my life without talking about these people - even when I begged her - so why didn't she even tell me this was gonna happen if she..." I trailed off, unwilling to finish the sentence. Like saying it would make the pandora box of the last week unfold all over again.
Zoë jerked one shoulder up in an instinctive shrug. "She probably thought she was gonna have more time."
Whatever lava-hot gates had been creeping closed in my throat sealed up entirely at her words; it was like a ball of molten iron was choking me from within. More time...I would've bled for that. Killed for it. In that moment I would've done anything for Mom to be alive again, puttering around in this room herself instead of lying in a meat locker waiting to be burned into dust.
Zoë's slow footsteps drew near, and the mattress sagged, springs squeaking faintly as she sat beside me with a faint huff. "Your mom loved you more than anything, but she wasn't perfect, kid. You can't demand that of anyone, even her."
"Especially her," I amended, bitterness souring the words on my tongue.
Zoë simply sat there and waited.
I knew Mom wasn't perfect - hadn't been perfect, I corrected myself. I still couldn't seem to get the tense right. One minute she'd been there in all her zany, spontaneous, air-brained glory, hauling me out of school to drive to the Grand Canyon or staying up all night to watch a meteor shower, and the next she was gone, wiped out of existence by a rogue minivan.
One minute. One single, stupid minute, and all this was the result. Mom wasn't the greatest driver, I'd given her holy heck about that for as long as I could remember - but she hadn't been the one who crossed the center line. Just that once, she had been perfect, but it hadn't mattered anyway. It wasn't fair.
"You can cry if you want," Zoë offered quietly, but I only shook my head. I still couldn't speak, but I knew no tears would fall.
She cried - not then, but later, when the apartment's contents had been poured into cardboard boxes and shiny trash bags, after we'd cleaned and scrubbed from top to bottom and the place stood empty like a socket without a tooth. Mom always liked the fresh, clean look of a new apartment, ready to be colonized, but this was the part I always hated. The part when, save for a few more dings in the walls or scuffs on the floor, it felt like we had never been here at all. Like the last year of my life had been just another dream - no, a nightmare. One that ended with me alone.
Orphan. It felt stupid to call myself that, as though I would be expected to wander soot-grimed streets with my possessions wrapped in a bundle, tied to a stick that I slung over my shoulder. Yet as I climbed out of the taxi and stood before Aislingate for the first time, cradling the soft cardboard box that held most of my earthly possessions as the straps of my backpack bit into my shoulders, I knew it was true. I was alone.
Terror burned inside me like a scream I wouldn't voice as the car pulled away, its motor snarling and then gradually decrescendoing to a purr and then silence as it headed back south, toward civilization. Marblehead was so far off the beaten track that I couldn't hear a single other vehicle as I stood there staring up at the crooked old house, just the wind through the grass that swooned against my jeans, and the muffled thunder of the ocean.
For a moment I had the curious sensation that the building was staring back at me, the spiky black fence at the house's apex like an obsidian crown, the cloud-silvered windows regarding me as a queen might a peasant. But was it glaring or simply watching me? -that I couldn't say. Yet in those first moments I was blind to all else around me, senseless to everything but the eldritch house; my new home, if only for a year. Then I would turn eighteen, and I could go wherever I wanted - to live with Zoë, or wherever else I decided.
All I needed to do was the one thing Mom hadn't managed to do here: stick it out and survive.
There wasn't any point in waiting; the briny air was cold, and the sun hung low behind over my shoulder, poised to sink behind the landward mountains and be lost to sight. It would only get colder the longer I stood here dreading what came next - meeting the grandmother that Mom so loathed that she hadn't even spoken of the other woman in a decade and a half.
Adaline. It didn't sound so terrifying, but surely Mom had her reasons.
The flagstone path was inlaid in the front lawn like gemstones, and my sneakers sounded too loud as I forced myself to traverse them, walk up the creaking front steps and shift the box to my left hip. Time to stop delaying the inevitable.
I put my hand on the filigreed brass knob, and opened the door.
💙
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NEXT TIME: Mel encounters a curious feline outside Aislingate, and follows the sound of mysterious fiddling to a secret beach - and an old friend she can't quite recall.