My stepfather, Paul, died when I was in graduate school. When I told Abby-Buster was the one who’d called and given me the news, his voice hoarse and halting-I added that I wasn’t traveling home for the funeral.
But Abby told me I had to go, that not only did my mother and my family really need my support, but I also needed to face and ultimately close the door on the things I carried with me from the past.
“That’s why I don’t want to go,” I said. “I’ve already closed the door.”
Abby shook her head. “No, you haven’t.”
When I saw my stepfather in his casket, his face painted and sunken, a Bible tucked between the fingers of his gnarled and wrinkly hands, I felt nothing. It wasn’t him. At least, it wasn’t the version of him I once knew. My mom had told me during a couple of our infrequent phone conversations that he was changed, a different and better man. No more drinking. Better, steadier employment.
I didn’t care or believe it.
And if I’d hoped to feel some kind of glee standing over his coffin, that didn’t come either. He was just a dead body, an empty sack of flesh.
Later, after the service and the burial, the muttered “Amens” and the repetitious words of the minister, we all went back to my mother’s house, the house I’d grown up in with my stepfather, Paul, and Buster. I told myself and anyone who wanted to listen that I couldn’t stay long, that I needed to get back to school as soon as possible. In my mind, I planned to stay for just an hour. No more, no less.
But as the reception went on, as more and more relatives and friends came by and offered their condolences to me, condolences that I accepted even though I didn’t feel I had lost anything, my eyes were continually drawn to one particular feature of the house-the staircase leading up to our old bedroom, where my stepfather used to terrorize us in his drunken rages. I hadn’t been up there for many years-not since I’d left home to go away to college-but in the wake of Paul’s death, I felt a curiosity about the space that figured so prominently in my nightmares.
At an opportune moment, I wandered over to the foot of the stairs.
The same drab brown carpet covered the stairs, worn at the edges and apparently not vacuumed recently. My heart thumped a strange, accelerated rhythm as I stood there, and the palms of my hands felt greasy and slick as though a thin sheen of oil coated them. I almost turned and walked away, back through the party and out the front door to my car, back to the life I’d made for myself away from that place. But Abby’s influence must have worked on me. She’d pushed me to go that far. I decided to go all the way and I took slow, measured steps up the staircase.
The boards creaked as always. The staircase felt narrower, more constricting than in my childhood. I was bigger, of course, and their world was shrinking. But where my hand made contact with the banister, I still felt that greasy slickness, a film my body seemed to be secreting as a defense against the past.
At the top of the stairs, I paused.
It still smelled the same. Faintly musty, a space in need of a good airing out.
To the right was the bathroom, a cramped little space with flaking wallpaper and rust-stained fixtures. And to the left, the familiar room I’d shared with Buster. I went to the doorway, my legs feeling stiff and awkward. I didn’t enter right away. I stood at the door, my hand resting against the jamb. It didn’t look the same. A queen stood in the place of our two twin beds, and the American flag wallpaper was gone in favor of white paint. But without a doubt I recognized the curvature of the ceiling, the shape of the window, the familiar view of the very top of the neighbors’ red brick house.
And it wasn’t lost on me that, when I stood in the doorway, I was standing in the exact same space and nearly the exact same manner as Paul on those nights when he came up to the room. I felt cold, a deep chill the likes of which comes only on the worst of winter days. It was spring and pleasant outside, but being in that room frosted me and almost made my body quake with a shiver. I was about to turn and go when-
“You look like you miss this place.”
I spun at the sound of the voice, almost falling down. I came face-to-face with my mother, who’d somehow managed-squeaky stairs and all-to sneak up behind me.
She looked strangely pleased to see me standing in that doorway, as though I were any child reminiscing about the joys and happiness of the past. “I guess we all miss our childhoods, don’t we?” she said.
I shook my head. “Not me.”
“Oh, Tom.” She reached out for my arm. My posture remained rigid. “You should come back more. You should have come back more when Paul was alive.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because we’re your family,” she said. “Don’t you have any happy memories of being here?”
“I have to get back, Mom. There’s school and everything. .”
She didn’t let go of me. “Really, Tom. I know it was tough when your dad died and I got remarried. But we did okay by you, didn’t we? Didn’t Paul?”
I took a step back and studied her face to make sure she wasn’t joking. But there was no smile there, no laughter in her eyes. Just a sadness I’d noticed ever since I was a child, its starkness emphasized by the age that was increasingly making its mark upon her-the graying hair, the deep lines around her mouth and eyes, the spots on the backs of her hands. “Paul beat us, Mom. He beat me. He terrorized all of us, including you.”
For a moment, she looked confused, as though I were speaking of events from a long-ago time she knew nothing about.
She started shaking her head back and forth, slowly, the puzzled look on her face not fading but instead only deepening. “Tom, Paul never beat you. He never laid a hand on any of my children.”
“You’re crazy, Mom. You knew about it.”
“You say these things to me. I just can’t understand why you children hate me so much. Was I such an awful mother that you have to make these things up just to hurt me?”
“No one’s making anything up, Mom.” I pulled loose from her grip, my anger swelling unreasonably. “No one’s making this up. Just admit what you know to be true.”
Her eyes filled with tears. She brought her hand up to her mouth. She looked like she wanted to keep the sobs from escaping from her throat. It worked, because none came. But she did manage to speak. “Not today, Tom. Please, not on a day like this.”
“Why won’t you say what I want to hear you say?”
Buster appeared on the stairs.
He reached the top, apparently having heard at least some of our conversation. The raised voices. My mother’s pleas. He looked angry, but rather than taking my side-which I’d thought he would’ve agreed with-he took Mom’s side against me.
“Tom,” he said, “this isn’t all about you and your hurt feelings. We’re all hurting here today. We don’t need you making this stuff up about Dad again.”
“I’m not making anything up. I just want her to admit it.”
Buster gritted his teeth. “Tom, you asshole.”
Mom looked at the floor, wiping at her tears.
I stared, waiting. The two of them formed a Maginot Line of denial. I couldn’t squeeze through. There wasn’t a place for me there. There never was. Never once were they on my side. Not against Paul, not against anything.
I brushed past them and left the house.
And I never saw my mother alive again.