It was Amy’s first trip down Holling Street since the night her mother died. For over twenty years she had avoided the old house, the street, and pretty much the entire neighborhood. She recognized the contradiction — a scientist who refused to look at the data. As much as she wanted the truth, her intellectual curiosity had always yielded to emotion whenever she came too close to her past. The house had become like the Ring Nebula, the dying star she had captured on that tragic night in her telescope. She just couldn’t look at it again.
Until tonight.
Amy parked at the curb, beneath a streetlight. The two-story frame house sat in relative darkness on the other side of the street. Just one light was on. It came from the dining room, or at least what used to be the dining room. As her eyes adjusted to the moonlight, she noted all the things that had changed. The tiny Douglas fir she and her mother had planted in the front yard was now over twenty feet tall. The front porch where they used to swing had been enclosed in makeshift fashion. The clapboard siding needed a fresh coat of paint, and the lawn needed mowing. Cracks in the sidewalk seemed more plentiful. Amy remembered how she used to skip over them as a child, determined not to break her mother’s back.
“You sure you want to do this?” Gram asked from behind.
Amy nodded. She started up the sidewalk, ignoring the cracks, letting her feet fall where they may.
As she climbed the front steps, the night could no longer hide the telltale signs of aging and neglect. Several broken windows had been boarded rather than replaced. The front door bore the scars of a previous break-in, or perhaps just a tenant who had forgotten his key. The porch railings had nearly been consumed by rust. The basement window was framed with water damage. Amy had expected some disrepair. Her mother’s violent death had stigmatized the property. Gram had tried to sell it after the funeral, but no one wanted to live there. An investor finally picked it up for less than the remaining mortgage. For the past twenty years, it had been rented to college students for less than half the going rate for a three-bedroom house. The owner was apparently content to let it deteriorate to the point where it could be razed and replaced by ghost-free new construction.
Amy knocked firmly. Gram touched her hand as they waited. Finally, the chain rattled on the door, and it opened. A young man wearing blue jeans and a white UC Boulder T-shirt stood in the open doorway. Something that resembled a mustache covered his upper lip. He was like a big kid who had grown a little facial hair to make him look like college material.
“You’re the lady who called?” he said.
“Yes.” Amy had called in advance to explain who she was. The students who lived there had no qualms with her visit. They actually thought it was pretty cool. “This is my grandmother,” said Amy.
“Cool. I’m Evan. Come on in.”
Amy stepped inside. Gram followed. Amy stood in the foyer, nearly breathless. It looked almost as bad as Amy’s apartment after the break-in. The fireplace had been boarded up to keep out the weather or worse. In traffic areas, the vintage seventies shag carpet had worn through to the floorboards. Wires dangled from the ceiling where there used be a chandelier. A collage of posters covered the cracked and dirty walls. A mattress lay on the dining room floor.
“You sleep in the dining room?” she asked.
“No, there’s three of us. We made that into Ben’s room. Jake gets the back bedroom downstairs. I get the small bedroom upstairs.”
“Who gets the master?”
He made a face. “Nobody. No offense, but nobody even goes in there.”
“None taken,” she said, seeming to understand.
“Is there anybody upstairs now?”
“No. My roomies are out sucking down margaritas at Muldoon’s.”
“You mind if I have a look around?”
“That’s what you came for, isn’t it? Be my guest.”
“Thanks.”
Gram asked, “You want me to come with you?”
“Oh, by the way,” said Evan. “Don’t mind the pet tarantula at the top of the stairs. He looks mean, but he’s okay with strangers. Well, most strangers.”
“On second thought,” said Gram, “I’ll wait here.”
Amy said, “I think it’s best I do this alone anyway.”
Gram gave her a hug. Amy turned and started up the stairs.
She climbed slowly, deliberately. With each step, she felt a rush of adrenaline. Her pulse quickened. Her hands began to tingle. The feelings were coming back to her. She remembered having lived there. Flying down the stairs on Christmas mornings. Racing up the stairs to her room each day after school. She stopped on the landing at the top of the stairway. Down the hall to her right was her old room. To the left was her mother’s. She tried to pinpoint her memory and focus on that night. Her mind wouldn’t take her there. Too much distraction. A strange mountain bike in the hallway. The pet tarantula in the tank. The lights had to go. There had been no lights on that night.
She flipped the switch. The present disappeared. She stood alone in darkness.
Fear filled her heart. Not the fear of tarantulas or other things that were there. She was feeling the fear of an eight-year-old girl. She stood frozen in the darkness, waiting for it to subside. It wouldn’t. As her eyes adjusted, the fear only grew. She could see all the way down the hall, through the darkness, right up to the door that led to her mother’s room. The fear was much worse than it had been twenty years ago. This time she knew what lay on the other side.
Her foot slid forward and she took the first step.
She felt the carpet between her toes, even though she wore shoes. She was eight again and barefoot, creeping down the hall toward her mother’s room. Her knees felt scratched from the crawl through the attic — the escape from her room. Another step forward and she could hear the oscillating fan. The door was now open. She saw the clump of blankets atop the bed. Finally, she saw the hand again, hanging limply off the mattress. Words stuck in her throat, but her mind heard them anyway. Mom?
A chill went down her spine as she was sucked from the room. She was spiraling down the hall, screaming helplessly, caught in some kind of cosmic explosion that lifted her from the hallway, the house, the planet. Dust and debris clouded her vision as she raced though the night at such incredible speed that the stars converged into an endless beam of light that seemed to bend with her movement and wrap around her fears. It wrapped tighter and tighter, until the fear subsided and she could make herself think. Thinking slowed the pace. Thinking dimmed the intensity. She was no longer going anywhere. She was back on the planet, a distant and dispassionate observer, a scientist logging what she’d seen on that horrible night.
The Ring Nebula. M 57. The fifty-seventh object in Charles Messier’s eighteenth-century catalog of fuzzy objects in the sky.
“Amy?”
She turned. Gram was right behind her on the steps. She had never left the landing.
“You okay?” asked Gram.
Amy’s hands were shaking. She was sweating beneath her jacket. She wanted to lie and say yes, but she was too overwhelmed.
Gram asked, “Are you going to go in?”
Amy looked at her grandmother, her eyes filled with emotion. “I already did. Come on,” she said, taking Gram by the arm. “Let’s go home.”