The house where she climbed all the trees and got stuck more than once. The house where she watched her father fall in love again. The house where she got her first camera and hid behind doorways to snap photos of her family, feeling more secure behind the lens rather than in front of it.
It’s the house where she would take Reed and hide them away in the closet or the basement when her mother would barge in unannounced in a drunken state to say she was taking Andi away—whether for the weekend or permanently.
It’s where she tried to protect Reed and their younger brothers from her mother’s fever.
Where she once crawled under the baseboards when she was home alone, and her mother chased her while calling her a whore.
Where her father found her crying in the dirt, a knife in her own hand to defend herself, and where she’d shouted to him that she didn’t want to live if it meant having to stay in that house alone again.
It’s the house where she watched her mother break down the door, then shout and scream and blame Randall for everything wrong with her before taking her own life before them in the dining room.
Andi swallows as she turns into the driveway and shines the headlights on the old garage.
I squeeze her hand. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” is all she says before she turns the ignition back.
An eerie silence consumes us when we step out of the truck. A low fog hangs over the streets and the dewy grass. Halloween decorations linger on porches and across fences. There’s a house two doors down where it looks like some kids had fun streaming rolls of toilet paper in the giant oak tree out front.
“We did that a few times,” I say, smiling over my shoulder at Andi.
Her lips twitch when she looks down the street. “To that tree, too,” she says.
“It’s a hard tree to cover,” I say as I come around the car. “It was a nice challenge. These kids, though… they couldn’t even wait for Halloween?”
The expression on her face is one I recognize. As if she wants to smile but has forgotten how.
I take her hand as we approach the front door.
The smell of old wood and mothballs hits us when the red door creaks open. It’s completely dark, and I take out my phone to shine the flashlight around.
Andi hits the foyer light switch out of habit. The yellow uncovered lightbulb flickers beneath a cobweb above us. And as the room is illuminated, Andi releases my hand.
It’s all I can do to watch her reach out for the staircase banister, her fingers running over the dust as if she can feel the past within those particles.
The Matthews only left a few pieces of furniture behind, including the enormous, ornate mirror I remember Tina being obsessed with when we were younger. The rule of ‘no running in the house’ was solely because she was terrified one of us would fall into it.
Her boundary couldn’t protect it from something worse, and they’d left it behind along with the grief accompanying this place.
The glass is still shattered at the bottom corner, with dried blood in the cracks that were ignored for the years after it was broken.
Andi presses her fingertips to her forehead.
“I never apologized to Tina for that,” she says softly. “I never apologized to her foranyof it.”
Her voice is breathy, almost short.
She ambles ahead and looks at the door beneath the stairs leading down to the basement and the chair beside it. I can see her fingers trembling when she pushes it slightly, and on the wood floor are two scratches from that chair digging into it.
My heart pounds, each beat feeling like a drum in my chest.It’s all I can do to manage her name through my sticky voice.
“Andi?”
She doesn’t say anything as she moves into the kitchen through the entryway at the back of the hall. The same cream-colored wallpaper with miniature blue houses and pink flowers is peeling back from the drywall. The cabinets' blue paint is faded and chipped. The linoleum remains cracked and rusted beneath appliances that have long expired.
Andi runs her hand over the counter, almost appearing lost in memory. Her fingernail snags on an indention in the top, and she picks at it like a scabbed wound.
“We never replaced this,” she breathes. “We never…” Her chin lifts, eyes darting around the room again. She moves to the wall by the broken-down fridge and spreads her palm over a hole in the partition, though she doesn’t speak.
