Little Girl Lost

  My father loves people to a fault. He loved Wilson up until he became the embodiment of a stoner, and then unfortunately much harder things that eventually sucked him down to the grave. My mind rewinds time right up until a week before Wilson was gone. He and my father argued over everything. You couldn’t hear your own damn thoughts over their nightly howls. My father loved him to a fault, but not through it.

  Rachel bounces through my mind—the last week of her life was quite different, wrapped up in murmurs, in heated closed door arguments between my parents. My father was highly disappointed in something she had done. Those were the only words I was able to decipher, the only ones that time has never erased. My father didn’t shed a tear at either of their funerals. He was stoic, strong, looking straight ahead, nose to the wind. When one of my uncles suggested he was a pillar of strength for the family, my mother scoffed. I never forgot that. But he shed rivers at Aston’s funeral. Gone too soon, my son, my son, he cried out in agony late into the night. I was the stoic one then, the one in shock, the one numb from the world and everything going on in it because I had inadvertently removed my only remaining sibling from the planet.

  A conversation we had weeks before the move comes crashing back to me. “I won’t tolerate any misgivings from anyone in this family, including you. Straighten up or I’ll straighten you out. Excise the sin from your body, son. The wages of sin is death.” It’s true. My father holds me to a higher standard because all of his other perfect children are dead. Perfect. That word circles around in my mind like a boomerang. Wilson was captain of the debate team, had his acceptance letter from Harvard. He was perfect until he wasn’t. Rachel. She seemed perfect to me. Liked the boys a little too much, but she was beautiful and they gave her all the attention she craved—the attention my father was never able to give her.

  And then there was Mom. She wasn’t his biggest fan, but she was tolerant. I miss her. I miss that cheap honeysuckle perfume she used to douse herself with. I miss that silk scarf she pinched around the neck a little too tight. I miss that orange lipstick, her Irish heritage that she wore like a badge for the world to see. I miss every damn thing about her.

  “You know what?” I pull myself off the sofa. “I think I’m going to head out and take a little drive.”

  “You want company?”

  “No. Allison is sleeping. Stay here in the event we need you. I won’t be gone long.” I head into the kitchen and pluck both my keys and my father’s off the counter.

  I’m going to see my mother, touch her things, bury my face in that silk scarf of hers, and weep like a pussy.

  I speed out into the dark and the fog retracts with each step I take, revealing the hardness of nature lying underneath.

  When is this cruel world going to open up and reveal where in the hell my daughter is?

  * * *

  Kemp Drive is situated on the border between the proverbial right and wrong side of the tracks. If you had any sort of wealth at all, you would consider this an unfortunate neighborhood to have grown up in. If you were enmeshed in generations of poverty, you would think this was a step up in the world.

  My father’s house, the house I spent my childhood scheming to get out of, sits back from the road, distant enough from the neighbors to let you feel as if you’re in your own little hemisphere. I park far enough away so that I can admire it in its haunting entirety once I get out of the car. A two-story bungalow with clapboard siding painted army green, brown trim that my mother hated and wanted badly to paint white. It looks gapingly large, enormous even in this strangled light. It crops up like a shadowed demon expanding its wings against the velvet background, the fog licking at its crevices.

  I head up the porch as the wood groans and creaks beneath my feet like a greeting from a decrepit old friend.

  “Long time no see,” I mutter, fumbling for the key. The door glides open without too much assistance as if the house itself were welcoming me inside. I flick on the lights, and just like that, I’m transported back fifteen years into my childhood. Same no-nonsense Shaker furniture, matching plaid sofas, an oval mirror hanging over the fireplace—the watchful eye of the Price home.

  My father handed me my rifle with a grunt. “Don’t look down the barrel.” He winked at me as if it were a dare, but I took it with glee and bolted for Aston. Of course, I glanced down into the dark hole of the barrel when neither one of them was looking. It was practically command once you asked me not to do it.

  “Let’s get out the damn door!” I circled my older brother like a gnat he couldn’t get rid of. Our father was the true barrier that day, insisting we take a pipe cleaner to those old shotguns we were hauling around.

  “Watch that mouth of yours or the old man will take it right off your face.” Aston shoved a bristled brush into the barrel of his gun, which sat in various stages of deconstruction across the dining room table. He shot a frown up at our father before reverting to me. “Clean your damn gun, would you?” He gave a little wink my way. Aston was three years older than me, already well past puberty, headed into that man body my mother promised us we’d own one day.

  It was deer season and my mother loved it when we brought home a kill. We ate venison through every winter I can remember, or at least up until that one.

  “Will do!” I cocked the rifle to check the barrel and Aston stepped right in front of me. I can still see that final moment in my mind like some well-choreographed ballet, a comedy of horrific errors.

  One powerful blast, the unexpected blowback knocking me to the floor. I glanced up and thought what the hell is that mess on the wall. Dad is going to kill us.

  “Dad is going to kill us,” I whisper as I make my way slowly to the dining room. The wall is pristine, covered in wallpaper, a repeating pattern of birds, blues and greens. What was once a den of horror has since been transformed into a Zen-like station.

  My mother hated this room after it was done. We never ate dinner in there again.

  I head upstairs, startled to note the wall of family pictures my mother proudly displayed throughout the years has been dismantled. In its place are the sparse pictures of Allison, Reagan, and me. A few of my father posing with his gold clubs, one of him on a deep-sea fishing trip he once took.

  Odd. But it must be depressing to look at all of the faces that have passed each and every day. I wish I knew he was having such a tough time. I flick the light on in the master bedroom, a simple room, white bedding, rocker in the corner, a nightstand, and a lamp. My mother used to heap a basket of her knitting needles in the corner, and she had the occasional magazine lying around. Her latest fiction read would be in hardback form right next to her side of the bed. I make my way to the closet, a walk-in that my brothers, sister, and I would use as our clubhouse growing up, and flick on the light.

  My heart drops. The entire left side of the closet has up and vanished.

  My mother died a year ago. Of course, she didn’t need any of those things anymore, but didn’t he? I stagger over to the dresser and pull open drawer after drawer, but all I come up with are men’s socks, my father’s underwear, an entire drawer dedicated to baseball hats.

  “Crap.” I snap them all shut. “Where did you put her?” I head to the hall and pull out the hide-a-ladder embedded in the ceiling. The attic is where my father kept all of those pesky things we once took pride in possessing out of sight, Christmas decorations—something my father dubbed seasonal crap, old bankers boxes filled with memories, trophies, ancient artwork ready to crumble at a glance, and volumes and volumes of the scrapbooks my mother worked on like some Lifetime marathon. She loved to document our existence while most of us still existed.

  The light flickers on, blinking in and out as if it were still considering its options, exposing the gossamer ensconced rotted out wood beams, the floor covered in a patchwork of plywood. I take in a nice hearty breath of that old familiar scent, sweet aged pine coated in dust—house breath Rachel used to call it. I have learned over the years that every h
ome has a scent, and ours smelled like kindling sweet and ripe for the burn.

  My eyes track over to the left and I stop mid-breath. Where once stood a towering mountain of all our memories, every over brimming box filled with Price family pride and joy, now lies a wasteland. Nothing but cobwebs and an empty space that feels large enough to park a semi in.

  “What the hell.” I sink down and take a seat on the squeaky floorboards, a plume of dust rising around me. He did it. He hauled every last speck of who we were, of who my mother was, and tossed it to the curb like some old relic that belonged in the junkyard. I leap down, shut the ladder with a thundering crash, and open closets and drawers, looking in every nook and cranny, scouring the garage like a thief looking to steal, but there isn’t one sign of anything. Every last drop of my mother, my brothers and sister has been effectively erased.

  I stagger back inside, back to the hall of horrors, as my brother and I used to call it, and scan the pictures one by one. I find myself, almost relieved that I wasn’t entirely erased, but Wilson, Aston, Rachel—my God, what did they even look like? My mind is refusing to give them up at the moment. But the most startling omission of all is that of my mother. Why in the hell would my father want to wipe out the memory of her? I realize that grief is a bitch. I intimately know that, but this kind of a purposeful cleansing feels outright evil. Soulless. And just like that, my heart sinks. My mother doesn’t live here anymore, not in any sense of the word. What I wouldn’t give to hear her voice one more time, have one last conversation.

  A brisk knock to the front door causes my spine to buck. We’ve never had trick-or-treaters here, not when I was young at least. The house is too far off from the street. I head on over, fully expecting to find a concerned neighbor. I bet they miss my father plodding around his cozy little compound, complaining about the weather, bitching about the lawlessness disease that’s gripped our nation. Barking the wages of sin is death at the top of his lungs at every God-awful hour. Instead, I swing the door open to find a well coifed, painted lipped, tits out and proud Monica Phillips.

  “Crap,” I mutter, not even trying to hide it. She’s made no secret of the fact she’s still after me. But I wouldn’t entertain it—not even months ago, if she were in L.A. and wearing a string bikini on a day that my dick decided it couldn’t get any harder without begging for relief. Not even on that day would Monica Phillips had been a prospect. And on that note, I wish to God she had been my neighbor back in L.A. because I never would have cheated. Allison and I never would have moved—she would have hated having Monica as our neighbor, but that nightmare could nowhere near compare to the one my infidelity embroiled me in. Embroiled Reagan in.

  “Is that any way to greet an old friend?” She gives a hard wink. “You going to invite me in or what?”

  I open the door just enough for her to slither inside with her high-heeled boots, her too tight dress, shiny around the waist from the fabric stretching thin.

  “My, my, let’s do the time warp, my friend.” She does an awkward hitchhiking motion with her hand. “Some things never change.”

  “We’ve changed.” I follow her over to the sofa and motion for her to take a seat as I fall into my old man’s favorite chair. “Dad’s chair.” I slap the armrest. “We used to monkey around on it as kids, but as soon as we heard that old Caddy pull up, we bolted for the four corners of the house.”

  Her smile pulls tight, bright red and dangerous. Monica always did have a demonic flare about her. “You kids were afraid of your daddy.” Her inked in brows hike high into her forehead. “I don’t see why not. Everyone else feared him, too.”

  My mind does its best to push back the curtain of the past and try to decipher if this were true. “Rachel once said she hated him.” I’m not sure why I confessed it, but it felt cathartic to say it out loud, and right here in the room she said it in. “It was after Wilson died. She accused him of wanting us to be perfect.”

  Monica expels a low guttural laugh. “Everyone knew the Price kids were perfection. When your father runs the county courthouse and your mother runs the social circles, you kids had no choice but to mind your p’s and q’s. It was practically mandated for you to live out a flawless existence. If your parents were about anything, it was keeping pretenses. They made sure everyone knew it, too.”

  A chuckle bounces through me. “That was old school Mom and Pops. Back in the day when there were still four Price children, my parents made sure everyone knew how good-natured we were, how congenial, how brilliant.” Wilson, Rachel, and Aston bounce through my mind, each one neatly tucked under a bed of dirt. Aston had a closed casket funeral, but I still see Wilson and Rachel sleeping peacefully in their formalwear, a rose tucked between their folded hands. “And now they’re perfectly dead.”

  “Whoa, that got dark fast. Not you—you’re not dead.” She leans in, ready to pounce. Monica has been my self-appointed cheerleader for as long as I can remember. “What are you doing here, anyway? Stalking these empty halls, looking for a ghost? Are you picking up a few things for your father?”

  “No. You had it right the first time. I’m looking for a ghost. My mother’s to be exact. He’s deleted her. No pictures, no clothes, not a bottle of her perfume. The attic’s been cleared out. It’s as if she never existed.”

  Her face contorts in surprise, and in this low-lighting it offers a macabre effect. “What about the basement?”

  She doesn’t finish the word before I bolt past the kitchen, down the dark mouth of the steep stairwell that leads to the dungeon as it was better known in our house, and my heart gives an erratic thump because no matter how old I get, this dank, musty pit still has the power to strike fear in me. Without fear of being called a pussy, I can honestly say I’m glad Monica is here, clacking her heels at breakneck speed in an attempt to keep up with me.

  I flick the lights on, heart pounding into my ears, and squint at the dusty, arid space with mold spores floating to the ceiling.

  “Empty.”

  Monica swats me as she makes her way deeper into the pit. “It’s not empty. What do you call this?” She gives a barren bookshelf a quick thump.

  “My father’s crap.” My father managed to salvage a few pieces of furniture from his own father’s estate. My grandfather was a wealthy but frugal man and these few pieces of sturdy oak furniture lasted him a lifetime. He looked forward to passing it down to his own son with pride, only to have it rot in our basement for the next twenty-five years. My mother hated it. By the time she inherited it, we were at capacity in crappy dressers and bookshelves, so the basement it was.

  Monica traverses an obstacle course of cleaning supplies as she makes her way deeper into the bowels of my old home. I wander to the dresser and give it my own pat-down as if greeting an old friend. I grip the ends and give it a shake as if offering up a hug and something jostles from up above—the thin edge of a piece of paper and I snap it down to find a thick envelope with my aunt’s name, Jolene, written in my mother’s neat handwriting across the front. Something in me loosens and I resist the urge to bawl. There she is. I’ve found her. Seeing my mother’s handwriting is almost as good as seeing her face.

  A dull thud hits the floor from across the room and I quickly tuck the envelope into the waistband of my jeans and pull my shirt over it. Whatever my mother has to say to my aunt, I want to drink down in private. Probably pages of family recipes. I’d relish to make them all. Or maybe directions to the venue of a gala she was hosting. If my mother was anything, she was old school, right down to the longitude and latitude minutia of life.

  “Everything okay?” I head over and help Monica out of the tangle of scattered work tools. When the weather got crappy, my father would tinker down here for hours. We called him the mad scientist. Rachel once corrected me when I said it and suggested he was just mad.

  “Oh hell.” Monica does a little tap dance as she falls into my arms. “Well, that’s better.” Her lashes bat up at me manically, and I openly frown at her as I l
ead us out of the dimly lit maze.

  “Ladies first.” I follow her up the stairwell and lead her straight through the house, turning off lights as we pass them by. The bitter cold air outside feels like a welcomed reprieve as it attempts to descale the past off my flesh with its sting. “What did you come by for, anyway?”

  She looks up, her hand finds a home over my cheek, heavy and weighted. Her skin glows against the dark expanse of nothingness behind her, and those lips look like a vortex of blood red darkness I never plan on getting sucked into again. In truth, I don’t find Monica attractive. I did once, and once was more than enough.

  “You are a beautiful man, James Brennen Price.”

  Brennen. I don’t think I’ve heard my middle name spoken out loud since the last time Monica said it. My father’s brother died just before I was born and my parents wanted to honor him in some small way. I’ve been hauling around my uncle’s ghost long before I ever did my siblings’.

  “I can’t imagine the pain you’re going through.” Tears slick her cheeks as if on cue. “You lost a lot of family in your young life.”

  I carefully remove her hand and land it at her side. “I often wonder what my family would have looked like if my brothers and sister were still here today. I imagine they’d all have families of their own by now. Lots of kids running around. But they took all those with them when they died. It’s just me. One kid—and I couldn’t keep track of her.” My voice cracks. Monica wraps her arms around me, leaping at the chance to offer me a modicum of physical comfort. Her perfume holds the scent of high school. Of all those years locked in a smothering relationship with her.

  “You have a family. You have your father. You have me.”

  I reach down in an effort to try to pry her off me and she tightens her grip. Her eyes widen as she buries them in mine. “And I think it’s time I told you about another family member you have.” She gives an audible swallow as her mouth contorts as if unable to finish the thought. “Our child.”