She felt weary. Not tired as if she'd just gotten done with a mile run. Weary, as in her bones ached. Is this what it felt like to reach thirty?
She rose, then made her way up to her room. Her old room in her old house.
The stairs still creaked in all the same spots. She remembered as a girl how she
used to try to see if she could make it all the way to the top without a squeak.
Practice for when she would have to come home late and not wake her parents
after being out late. Something she never had to do.
Her room was at the end of the hall, at the front of the house, under the dormer and over the porch. She had picked it out when they moved in,
apparently. Her parents told her that. She was too young to remember. But it was
a good choice. Very artsy, she had thought, like a painter's garret in Paris.
She flopped onto the bed, calculating the familiar bounces. The ceiling
angled above her where the dormer was. Once it had been loaded with posters and paintings and drawings. And, yes, her My Little Pony mural she had painted.
It had been summer. She'd spent days working on it, checking to make sure the colors matched the boxes the toys came in.
That was probably when her parents started to get worried she'd be an artist.
She could tell. They were scientists. Art was something you did on the weekends
or while you watched TV, as a distraction. Not for a living. Starving in some flat with dirty wallpaper in New York City, smoking clove cigarettes. She smiled, picturing Lucius smoking his clove cigarettes, grinning through his huge walrus
mustache.
How we can change.
The ceiling was blank now, perfect for thinking, for leaving the past behind.
But that had proven hard to do the past few weeks. She hadn't expected it to be
so hard, being back. Golden Grove was just a place, like any other. But her hometown had other plans. It had leaked and spread into her like fresh watercolor paint. Or maybe it was the water washing, revealing what had been there all along. That she was home.
She shook her head, still lying on the bed. No, home is where you make it.
You make it—it doesn't make you. This was just old memories tugging at her.
What did they say? You only remember the good and forget the bad.
A thought unearthed itself from her mind. The closet?
She sat up. Pushed herself off the bed, kicking off her shoes as she went.
Over to the closet door. Opened it and fumbled for the pull-cord string on the side that turned on the light. The small space still smelled like old clothes and dust with a slight tinge of mothballs. Just the way she remembered it.
Squatting down beneath some of Carol's old dresses, she moved aside a few
shoeboxes on the bare pine plank floor. There. In the corner, one of the grooves
of the floor was just a little wider than its neighbor, with some scratch marks near the edge.
Reaching in, she pulled the board edge with her fingernail. It slipped a few
times, then slowly pulled up. She grabbed it and lifted it aside. Heart beating harder, she reached inside, feeling. Her fingers closed on a cloth bag, which she
grabbed and wrested through the small opening.
She made her way back into the room and sat on the bed cross-legged, then
dumped the bag out onto the quilt.
A variety of trinkets tumbled out. A few photos, some coins. An unused stamp, a rubber ball. A few colored wire bracelets she'd made with a kit she'd gotten on her third birthday. She remembered giving a silver necklace she'd made to Peter for his birthday that year. He'd been so embarrassed.
She spread them all out with her fingers. Her report card from second grade.
She smiled. All “satisfactories.” A photo of her in the pony Halloween costume
her mom had tried to make, with her mom's old blonde wig as a tail.
A folded note on pink paper. It was worn, as if it had been carried around in
a pocket for a long time. She unfolded it and read it, then sat still for a while.
