Headlights(28)

Everett Brown’s words ringing in my ears. Hannah Lawrence’s drawing in my pocket.

I remind myself I am choosing this. Driving into the night. Headed back to a place I swore I’d never return to in the whole of my life. A place I couldn’t make myself go before. I remind myself I am choosing all of this.

At least I know there’ll be whiskey.

Once again, the private drive. The overgrown trees. The outskirts of Cherry Hills. Remembering that first time, driving down the tree tunnel with the social worker. This time I just go, don’t let myself hesitate again. I shove my foot to the pedal, and I surge forward, hitting the downed branch, pushing through all the leaves and vines until I am out the other side. I don’t realize I’ve been holding my breath until I reach the clearing.

A hundred meters of lawn in front of me, the long winding gravel drive, illuminated only by my headlights. The house is dark. The gardens dead and rotted, the vines barely clinging to life, still climbing up the grand over-the-top walls of Whileago Manor. I haven’t seen the great stone structure in four years. Music pushes its way in, moves along the edges of the house, the sides of my skull. Dolly, Waylon, Hank. As if in the space between molecules, pushed into me by the night wind. All the songs. All the life and memories.

I shut off the engine. My hands are shaking. I get out, step foot on the grounds.

I feel something waking. I feel all of them. I will my heart to steady.

Gravel crunches beneath my boots. I input the garage code, realize it won’t work while the power is out. There’s a manual latch hidden around the side. An owl calls from one of the trees at the edge of the lawn. After a couple tries, the door finally creaks and lifts. I take a shaky breath, keep my eyes on the task in front of me. Catch movement out of the corner of my eye, ignore it.

In the garage, I use my cell phone light to see my way past the cobweb-covered paintings on the walls, ice scrapers, snowshoes, cross-country skis on their hooks. The sculpture in the middle of the six-car garage, some kind of deity or goddess, I can’t remember from where. It was my mother’s doing—Marianne Stansfield—she always loved for there to be something beautiful, in every room. Even one you might only just pass through. Her tastes always a little eclectic.

I try the switch even though I know there will be no light.

The door to the mudroom is unlocked. The music pushes in again, threads, short clips of voices. My heart pounds.

Something clatters to the ground somewhere in the dark.

“Stop it,” I say, out loud.

The music stops. I open the door.

The hall between the mudroom and the kitchen is still full of family photographs, images of my parents on their many adventures, others with their arms around me. My graduation, Josie and me at our wedding. All of it an assault in the cell phone flashlight beam, the reflection glaring back at me from the glass. My boots creak on the floorboards.

In front of the gallery wall, on the bench with boots beneath it, sits a stack of handouts from my parents’ funeral, CELEBRATING THE LIVES OF NOEL AND MARIANNE STANSFIELD.

In books and movies, characters always have one big life event, that singular thing that defines them from the past. The one bad thing that happened that made them who they are. But in reality, with real people, it’s five big things, ten. A hundred. You go to war and see and do things you can never take back. You see death in so many forms through your job that you’re constantly shocked at the capacity humans have for cruelty. You build a marriage and watch yourself destroy it. You even learn you can lose parents twice, it turns out.

You can lose a whole hell of a lot.

The smell in here is horrendous.

Past the hall, in the kitchen, I cover my nose and mouth with my arm. On the enormous center island sit vases overflowing with long-since rotted flowers. Maybe fifteen of them. A casserole dish full of fungus and mold. The stench nearly unbearable. I walk to the fridge and open it. All the dishes, the sympathy foods at room temperature. I close it immediately and gag, run to throw up in the sink. The tap at least still works, after a few sputtering tries.

Off the kitchen to my left is the informal dining room, then the formal one down a hall beyond it. I turn the other way, step through the opening to the right instead, to the house’s grand formal entry. A large round table in the middle with more rotting flowers. My mother loved giant arrangements, in three-or four-foot vases, changed them out weekly, themed around holidays or events in our lives. Everything sort of mountain lodge meets eccentric collector.

Behind the table, matching large staircases sweep from either side of the room up to the second floor. Beneath and behind them lies the sprawling living room and the thirty-foot-high floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the lawn and the trees that surround it.

And of course, the mountains beyond.

My phone light sweeping over everything, the darkness swallowing the rest.

Before the entry table and opposite the living room, is the front door, massive frame carved in oak. The one I first passed through, that first day here. Clinging to the social worker’s hand as we stepped through the enormous entryway. As I approached the table—taller than me—and walked around it, into the living room. I was six years old, and I’d never seen an indoor space so large, a ceiling so high. I didn’t know indoors could be this big. It made me feel as though I’d done something wrong, a feeling I wouldn’t come to understand for a long time.