Chapter One
I wonder if there’s any redemption, any forgiveness for our
sins. I’m thinking of my own
crimes, of course. Can allowances be made for age? I was
only twelve after all. Or for intention? I meant no harm. It occurs to me I’ve
returned home not only to bury my mother but also to bury regrets. I’m
desperate to escape the black cloud that’s shadowed my life for twenty-six
years.
Some houses hold secrets. In my case, it’s not the house
itself—not my childhood home in northern Indiana—but an old elm standing to the
right of it, just beyond the porch. It’s under that tree that my friend Sally
and I buried a dead baby girl we’d found in the town cemetery a few hours
earlier, in a box hidden in the long grass.
Now, decades later, standing on the porch as an adult on a
chilly winter’s day, I look over at the tree. Advanced age, Dutch elm disease
and a few storms have nearly done for it. It’s half its former size now: just a
two-foot trunk with a few shoots sticking out of it. It looks innocuous enough.
But even seeing the tree in that truncated state brings it all back. What Sally
and I had done was in haste, almost without thought. And yet. And yet. The
results were disastrous. We ended up getting our lives derailed and our
friendship ruined. We even inadvertently caused other deaths. And it was all
because we were two silly little girls who wanted to keep our discovery a
secret.
I shake my head. I can’t bear to remember. It’s said we can
escape worrying about the past and fearing for the future by focusing on the
here and now. So, I try to distract myself by looking around. I haven’t been
back in ages. I wonder if I can see my old home through the eyes of a
dispassionate observer.
But when I look around, what I experience isn’t the
distraction of curiosity, the stirring of interest in how it may have changed
since I last saw it. It’s dismay. Horror even. And then I feel surprise because
my husband, never the most intuitive type, seems to have read my mind. “A
dump!” Toshi says, frowning.
My thought exactly. A dump! I was last here in 2007, over
three years ago, flying to Chicago from Osaka and then making the two-hour
drive home. The house and grounds weren’t so bad then. Now the place looks
derelict, abandoned, uncared for. Did Mom give up?
A dump! It’s a two-story wooden house set in a grassy yard
that was crowded with flowers, bushes, and trees when I was a child. It’s big
and solid and has a front porch. I used to be proud I lived here.
No more. The house needs a new coat of paint, one of the
porch pillars is rotting, the windows are dirty, and the yard is a tangle of
weeds. Most of the trees bordering the road have been cut down, reduced to ugly
little stumps.
I walk over to the old red porch swing. A few seat slats are
cracked. I want to sit down, curl up with my legs under me like I used to do on
long hot summer afternoons. But the swing looks so rickety I imagine it would
collapse under my weight. I peer through a window into the living room. The
curtains are drawn so I see only my own reflection.
A woman in her late thirties stares back at me. She has a
wan, pinched face, a worried expression, long dark hair scraped back. She’s not
unattractive, but she doesn’t seem to like herself. Given the state of her
clothes and her appearance, she doesn’t take care of herself. She frowns at me.
I turn away impatiently, noticing how the bright red
shininess of the rental car we collected at O’Hare on arrival—-a Mazda—-makes
everything around it look old, ugly. Weeds thrust up between the slabs of the
sidewalk I used to play hopscotch on with Sally.
“I’m tired,” Toshi whines.
I wish he hadn’t come. I wish Mom was still alive. I
wish…many things! Most of all, I wish I was twelve again. That I could tell
Sally I didn’t want to play in the cemetery. That Sally hadn’t been so bossy.
That I’d put my foot down, saying, “I hate going there, it gives me the
creeps,” and walked home alone.
If only I had. Then we wouldn’t have found the dead baby
girl. Two children wouldn’t have died because we decided to keep her a secret.
I wouldn’t feel I needed to expiate my crime committed unwittingly so many
years ago.
Other wishes. I wish I’d visited Mom more. I wish my husband
still loved me. I wish I still loved him.
One of Mom’s favorite expressions: If wishes were horses,
beggars wouldn’t walk.
I wish. I wish. I wish. But it’s too late.
Mom! I deserve to be punished! How could I have been so
heartless, not coming back for all of three years when she kept begging me to?
I’d written long letters. I’d called. But I knew what she wanted. It was to see
me in the flesh. That regret, that guilt will haunt me for the rest of my life.
I blame that poor little dead baby. Coming back here would have meant
remembering her, confronting the memories again. I shudder, realizing that’s
exactly what I’m doing now.
© Lea O’Harra
1 comment:
Thanks so much for hosting! We are looking forward to reading your thoughts on the book on Jan 25th.
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