A typical child has one precious room. But I used to have two: one in safe, energetic Irvington, and another at my grandparents' house hidden away in the gloomy forests of Redding, Connecticut. I had inherited my uncle's blue walls and blue carpet, his poster of Dark Shadows, and a library of Charlie Brown graphic novels. While my room in Irvington was constantly evolving from Beanie Bears and Power Rangers into PlayStations and a Stratocaster, this room remained the same, colored by the growth of a typical '70s son. But beyond the dust-covered Mets pennants on my uncle's walls, there was the creeping eeriness of the rest of the house in Redding.
Each time my parents and I visited, I prepared to wrestle with new nightmares. But I also marveled at it all. The house itself was framed with warm oak on the outside and lined with cold bricks on the inside. Nature surrounded it from all sides. No matter how gruesome the rampant ivy and the fallen decomposing trees were, there was an eternal quality of the house, as if it were haunting its inhabitants. Unlike in my cul-de-sac in Irvington, here the concept of next-door-neighbors did not exist. The closest house was an indefinite length away. The driveway was covered with rotting, multi-colored leaves. I remember fearing the gigantic, slippery slate steps encroached upon by blossoming moss that “welcomed” the visitors, my parents and me. In the event that it had just rained, my grandmother would present an alternative route, through the garage thick with airborne dust and up the squeaking, brittle stairs. But whichever way we went, the path remained unchanged. My grandparents would never clear the moss, and the same spots on the stairs would always noisily creak “Beware!”
Our visit would usually start in the living room. I'd always ask my parents to let me open the heavy, sliding wooden door, and my grandpa would appear, offering a handshake to me with an iron grip. The scent of wool wafted from his pine-colored sweater. With him would be the corky walls. The shaggy, scarlet carpet. The peeling flowery wallpaper of the kitchen. Potted plants placed everywhere. Familiar troll dolls on the wall that never failed to bend my smile. Walls swelling with novels and VHS tapes, most of them concerning realistic nightmares like The Black Dahlia Murder and Fargo. Coming out of the wall, a stone fireplace last used in ancient times. Beside it, a graveyard of framed photographs, ghostly with varying levels of twentieth century sepia. And no matter how much all of this rattled me, these things came to remind me of family. I grew accustomed to eating a mix of cereal and bananas with my grandma in the kitchen. We carefully studied the photo albums, acknowledging the dead and smiling back at the living. We watched Fargo together, huddled around the TV decorated with the leaves and smell of devil's ivy.
I often liked to scramble upstairs. I'd sit on top of the lofty carpeted staircase that led to the bedrooms, gazing down at my grandma squinting up from the bottom, in the foyer. Over and over again I pushed off the top stair and slid down, my butt hitting the next step, each one shaking me as if I were hurtling down a course of icy moguls, until I landed in the affectionate embrace of arthritic hands and a soft wool sweater. As I was released, I'd spill onto the cold bricks and fly into the parlor, another room haunted by barely living azaleas and Raggedy Anns patched with age and cotton. I'd climb onto a piano bench by a rocking horse, which my parents would soon herd into our own house, and play childish arrangements of unorganized notes. My grandma would laugh and call me a “Nutsy Fagin”; I still don't know what that means. Much the same, when I entered the living room, my grandpa would call me “Herkommer” and tease me about whatever crossed his mind. The name means “Problems here” in Dutch, but none of us knew any Dutch.
“Oh, you're learning Latin now are you? Then what does 'pectus' mean?” he once asked.
“I don't know Poppa, I just started a week ago.” “But you have to know what 'pectus' means; it means 'heart!'” I scowled and became engrossed in the usual Yankee baseball game, while he quizzed me on the names of the players. He coughed a little from the medical treatment I didn't know he was having, but he seemed pretty much fine.
Love continued to outweigh fear, until an ambulance stole my grandpa from his usual reclining chair in the living room, one Thanksgiving. We were trying to enjoy mashed potatoes and turkey out of aluminum containers when cancer filled his lungs with fluid. EMS arrived and rushed him out on a stretcher. My grandma turned on the radio, which responded with Norah Jones “Don't Know Why,” hoping to dissuade possible burglars with sound, as if the sight of the house was not enough. When we got to the hospital, I asked the man with the fancy M.D. on his name tag how long it would be until my grandpa could leave. He ignored me. Instead he replied with the reasons why he would not be able to use a defibrillator, like the fragility of his old ribs, when “the time came,” which was four days later.
Yet at the end of that longest week of my life, when I returned to the house, it was mostly the same. Cancer couldn't claim the clues that a great grandfather had lived with his wife in the woods. His chair was left empty, his beloved cookbooks unopened, and his hug still not burned out of my mind. I'd nestle with the same old nightmares, despite being a teenager. The nightmare always happened the same way: I'd see my mother's childhood room, my grandparents' room, and then nothing but a melting candle following me through the corridor that led to endless emptiness. There were no sounds; there were no odors. I could deny that the chuckling dolls and sylvan smells scared me, but one thing could grip my throat so tightly with fear that my lungs filled with nothing but the enveloping emptiness. The Dark. He always went to sleep with a light on, which I remember as I routinely click the button on my nightlight at my home. I never talked about fears with him, but my grandpa could innately tell. We shared a naive sense of hope and a fear of what we don't know or understand.
And somehow, even without him there to smile, I could stomach the house. It got colder and colder as the next Christmas approached, and still, I volunteered to spend Christmas Eve in a house heated only by my grandma's love. I was going to bring her a lone present early: a space-heater. I realized that I can't find any more memories or adjectives about that chilly place because it burned away on that Christmas Eve. We got the call in the morning. The ground level had combusted, perhaps even spontaneously, and the fire spread to the rest of the interior, just as my grandma climbed out of the window and entered the arms of the speedy firemen. My parents and I wondered about a lot of things, but mostly about karma. If the house was somehow connected to my grandpa's own lifespan. As long as we had the house, we had him: pictures, mementos, and smiles. We buried his ashes but not his possessions and our pictures of him. They were cremated along with the house. The fire forced us to move on.
I switched off the nightlight, for good.