The last time I saw my sister I was sixteen, which made her eighteen. Long wild blonde locks cascading down to her hips. A mane, a halo, a crown, a frame for her mischievous eyes, and a flirty smirk. I swear I still find strands of her hair at our mom’s house, in the shower, in the corners of her unfazed bedroom, tangled in her hairbrush, caught underneath the living room rug.
When I was sixteen, my sister vanished, walked out of school in the middle of the school day into thin air like the wind snatched her, whisked her away into a secret dimension outside of time and space, never to be seen again. Immediately after her face became plastered on every street corner, in every newspaper, milk carton, missing person’s bulletin board in every drug store and supermarket, etc. Her eyes still burn at the back of my mind every time I close mine.
Twenty years after my sister’s disappearance I’m sitting in the passenger’s seat of mom’s third daughter, or my sister’s replacement. Mom’s pride and joy “Valentina”. Her beige leather seats set fire to my pancake thighs in the peak of Miami summer. I’m leaning forward to stick my face straight into the AC at full blast, blowing droplets of sweat off my face, as I watch mom argue with her once brother-in-law, my Uncle Carl, outside of my estranged and now deceased father’s hidden bungalow.
“I was married to that man for seventeen years Carl! He never took me out of his will and therefore this house is now legally mine and you have no right to be here!” Mom waves her hands in Uncle Carl’s face yelling so loud she just might wake my father up, make him punch out of his grave, crawl the three miles back here, and reclaim his house.
“This is ridiculous! Leave it to my idiot brother to keep your nagging ass in the will! This house belongs to the family, which you’re not a part of and haven’t been a part of in over twenty years!” For a second it looks like Uncle Carl is about to shove mom into the overgrown shrubs, that are practically holding their hands out to catch either of them, like two senior citizens with high blood pressure and asthma in a boxing match.
“Fuck you, Carl! I have the legal right to be here, unlike you. Get off my property before I call the cops!”
“Suck a fat one, Elaine! You’ll be hearing from my lawyer!” Uncle Carl stomps into his slick sedan with his incompetent frat boy comeback and speeds off. I turn Valentina off and step into summer’s furious blazing wrath. Mom’s already standing on the wooden porch, with the front door keys in hand, and her arms crossed. I walk up the porch steps and they creak like whispers beneath my feet as if they’re spilling the secrets that lie within the bungalow’s walls.
“It’s just like your father to slack off with the upkeep. I’ll be surprised if these vines haven’t made their way inside,” mom unlocks the door. I can hear the lock stubbornly turning like it’s taking its last breath. Mom pulls the door open and it feels like a mob of ghosts just rushed out like escaped prisoners and a musty smell greets us. Mom stands staring into the seemingly endless dim hallway.
“It’s okay, I have pepper spray,” I place my hand on her shoulder.
“I’m not scared, Eden”, she shrugs my hand off of her shoulder but doesn’t step in. “You’re younger, you should go first.”
I sigh and step into the threshold and it feels like I’ve stepped back in time, like we just opened a decades-long shut coffin, like I’m breathing air from 1994.
“Come on Eden, we don’t have all day,” mom gives me a little nudge as she comes in behind me. She fumbles for the light switch behind her and suddenly the hall is illuminated with a golden light. There’s a burgundy runner rug that stretches the length of the hall, old family pictures, and fish taxidermy hangs on the faded beige walls. I walk down the hall to meet my sister’s face multiple times in picture frames. There are several family pictures of the four of us together as if my parents never split up, as if my sister was still around, as if I never lost touch with my father, as if we never left 1994.
“Oh, what the hell Patrick!” Mom shouts from the living room. I follow the sound of her voice and see her standing in front of and incredulously staring at an oil painting of her face from when she was in her twenties, long before stress molded wrinkles into her fine china skin, long before her wire-thin lips naturally dropped at the sides, long before pain’s residue clouded her hazel eyes. The painting is coated with a growing layer of dust and is leaning up against a mahogany bookshelf that touches the ceiling, filled with every book ever written on world religions and South Florida wildlife. I’m not sure how to respond to the painting but before I can even think about forming a sentence mom instructs me to go get garbage bags as she begins to pull the books off the shelf.
I shuffle to the back of the room where the kitchen is and search the cabinets for garbage bags. I open the one underneath the sink to find a supply of black garbage bags. I reach for it, feeling something fuzzy behind it. Stuck to the back of the box are tangled long strands of blonde locks. I pull them off and pinch them between my fingers as a chill runs down my spine. “Oh Nicole, where did you go?”, I whispered under my breath. I can’t bring myself to toss away her precious locks so I place them gently back under the sink.
“We should just give everything away, I don’t have the patience to be making piles,” mom tosses a collection of books into a garbage bag, and dust leaps into the air like ballerinas in Swan Lake. “Unless you want to keep any memorabilia of your father.” I think of collecting every last strand of Nicole’s hair from this place and keeping it for a split second.
“I think I’m okay, but we’ll see.”
I start to bag the pile of newspapers and magazines and random junk sitting on the coffee table. My father dropped dead of a heart attack sometime on an idle Tuesday morning like God became pissed at him, gave him the finger, and abruptly pulled his plug. There’s a slight stain of a cup ring on the end of the coffee table. The last time I spoke to my father he had a thing for iced passion fruit tea and it’s like I can see the filled glass there, hear Nicole walk through the door stomping in with her beat-up converse and keys jangling in her hand, as our father read the paper on the couch with his feet up on the coffee table. At the very bottom of the newspaper pile is a stack of newspapers from May 1998, the time Nicole went missing. Her senior picture is printed on every one of them. Confronting them feels like Nicole is standing straight behind me breathing down my neck ready to finally tell us that this was all some sick joke. I half expect to turn around and see her thin frame in a mini skirt and crop top there and half expect Ashton Kutcher to jump out of the walls and say that we’ve just been punked. I pull two strands of luscious blonde locks from between the vintage pages.
“Your father was practically a hoarder,” mom begins to fill a sixth black garbage bag with books. “I mean Eden, really, look at this!” She pulls a neglected thick black photo album from the bookshelf with “Elaine and Stephen- August 26th, 1978” engraved on the cover.
I would never put it past my mother to just dump their wedding album in with the rest of the trash, she’s always had a gift for disposing of memories. Instead, she grasps the album in both her hands and gazes at it like the memories are teaspoons that got caught in the garbage disposal and that she now has to grease her elbows to fish out.
“Maybe you should keep that, you know.”
“Yeah, maybe I should.” Her voice is distant as she places the album aside. I move on to collecting the blankets and decorative pillows off of the couch. “You know what I remember?”, mom’s almost done with the bookshelf. “Your father had this habit of storing important items back here. It’s where he kept our marriage certificate and where he later shoved the divorce papers out of sight. Help me move this.” I go over and begin to push from one side as my mother pulls from the other. The shelf mulishly inches over and an instant thud comes from behind.
“That better be a hidden fortune that just fell.”
We peer behind the shelf. A garbage bag mummy lies a little over five feet long on the ground and I want to be imagining the strands of blonde hair I think I see intertwined with the garbage bag straps taped underneath duck tape. Keys begin to jingle at the front door and I hear the lock stubbornly turn once more on its deathbed. My mother is so white in the face that she looks like a lens flare and we both stare at each other, mannequins standing frozen still. I’m facing the entryway, I don’t know where to look but it doesn’t matter since it feels like my heart will kick out through my eyes at any second. A woman nearing 40 no taller than 5’3’’ appears in the doorway. She’s wearing an overall romper. Delicate and glorious blonde locks spill out from underneath her wide sun hat which shades her vibrant green eyes, the same ones that have unforgettably burned in the back of my mind for the last twenty years. My mother is shrinking underneath the hand of sheer fright in front of me. The garbage bag mummy begins to be showered with dust drizzling down from the back of the bookshelf. I make eye contact with the woman in the entryway. I let her honeydew melon eyes peek into my soul. A sense of familiarity picks the strings of my posture up and I let her name casually somersault out from my lips like I just saw her an hour ago.
“Nicole.”
Only one box was left in the attic. I had no idea what it was. The house had been empty for years, the “for sale” sign slowly rusting and fading in a tight market and poor economy. Miraculously, it sold. The house remained unfazed. If I concentrated hard enough I could still hear the playful laughter of children through the walls, the lively, irritated shouting of my grandmother for my grandfather upstairs, the sharp, tired bark of an old pug, the startling ring of the landline. If I concentrated hard enough I could hear the life that once filled this house until it spilled over like an overflowing bathtub. This house used to be filled with people. The grandparents, the party girl, the player, the wanderer, the kids. I pull myself back to reality, into the silent, desolate, dark walls of the attic.
My active imagination is picturing the most horrific things that could lie inside that box. I’m Jonah stuck inside the stomach of a whale of fear. My mother’s voice echoes in the back of my mind. “Don’t be silly,” it says. “Open the box.” With a quick mental review of bodily defense moves, I walk to the box. Its cardboard flaps are shut, with heavy dust coating the top, begging to be opened after years of neglect. So I do. Swiftly brushing off the dust and cautiously opening the flaps, I hold my breath and peer inside. In it lay a time machine.
The fear melts off of me like snow meeting the spring sun. I reach one hand in and start to pull the contents out. The first thing is a stack of pictures dating back before I was even a thought. I have a seat on the creaky wooden floor, making myself as comfortable as I could be. The pictures contain my grandparents, mom, aunts, and uncles. The groups in them gradually expand to include my cousins, myself, my sisters, and my dad. As I flip through them I watch time pass, the style trends come and go, the break-ups and make-ups, the trips and smiles, and the people age most of all. I watch people deteriorate from illness into nothingness while others fade out like their life was placed on editing software and the fade-to-black transition had been put at the end. A solid example of my grandparents.
Next comes a cake topper- a bride dressed in white holding a bouquet of flowers. The groom is long gone, yet I can still hear the wedding bells of unfulfilled promises. A reminder of things that could’ve been that never were. Dreams and fairytales washed away in the tides of divorce.
After the bride, there’s a chewed-up two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola. Looks like garbage, but it’s not. I can see the then young pug crazily running after the bottle every time it was thrown. I can hear her feet scratching against the hardwood floors and the amusement of those who watched her run.
Placing it aside, I pull out a cheerful representation of my grandmother, an intricate and delicate embroidery of a girl in a yellow gown standing under a canopy of lilacs. Something she tried to teach me during mid-summer nights on the couch by the fireplace.
A black hat with bold green lettering is stuck to the back of the frame. I detach them from one another. My dad and I had that hat custom-made for my grandfather as a sweet joke. The picture of his smile wearing it is wine staining my tablecloth memory.
At the very bottom of the time machine lies a framed professional picture of the grandparents, the party girl, the player, the wanderer, and the kids. My eyeshadow is too heavy and my lipstick is too dark but the image warms my heart.
What happened to these people you wonder? The party girl lives in the states, coming back every summer to get a taste of home. The player, who could never seem to settle down, got married. The wanderer still lives nearby, unaffected by the wrath of time. And the kids? They grew up. Now all that is left are the memories, tucked away in this time machine.
I realize that it’s time to close the chapter, to let somebody else make memories within these walls. A part of me though will forever live here, in the heart of my childhood memories.