Whitehead Colson - Sag Harbor

The hedges out front were scraggly and disreputable, but the lawn was grazed down to regulation height. The house looked like it did at the start of every season, ready for us to open it up. “Do you want to go inside?” I asked.

“Will we get in trouble?”

“No one's using it.”

She said, “Okay,” and the way she said it zapped my groin, pushing my dick up against my jeans. It was almost dark.

The driveway led to the back patio. Weeds and low flowers sneaked through the cracks in the decaying concrete between the paving stones, and it was still light enough to see some anthills in there, too, the telltale volcanoes of orange dirt. In former days Reggie and me knelt over them with a magnifying glass from the Wharf Shop, tilting the incinerating beam on any unfortunate critters popping out for a hive errand. It was where we had arranged the doomed radio men and bazooka guys from our plastic platoons into the path of Tonka bulldozers, and, farther back, filled bright plastic buckets with water from the hose. The toddler games we found meaning in. We spent drawn-out afternoons transferring water from container to container, spilling some each time until the cement was drenched and we were all out and we cried for a refill. Crawling around like ants ourselves, doing nonsense things like that. Behind the patio, the backyard sloped up, and the pump still stood there like a rusted scarecrow, its underground pipes leading nowhere. I don't know if they ever led anywhere.

The patio furniture was piled on the screened-in porch, a rickety contraption that kept the sun off us on hot days and the rain off us on cloudy ones, the water rolling off the roof into worn-away hollows as we swung on the old rocking couch, watching this and kicking our feet out. The roof of the porch was directly under the upstairs windows and Reggie and me used to sneak out onto the tarpaper in Alcatraz breakouts. Not that we had anywhere to go. Eventually we got big and bold enough to jump over the side, that long seven-foot drop. We wasted a lot of time doing that. Wishing, Maybe this time we'll break something.

I told Melanie to wait there and scuttled through the furniture. We left the window to the junk room unlocked when we lived there. Maybe my aunt did, too. What was there to steal? We were more likely to be accidentally locked out than robbed. I shoved the window open, clambering onto the lumpy guest bed, which was covered with our old board games and my aunt's spy thrillers. Stained shades from thrown-out lamps and busted Weedwackers, fishing poles and plastic boxes full of screws. I walked around to the back door and let her in.

The house looked small from the outside. That was its trick. Step inside and it went on for miles. We were in the kitchen, where the pale green General Electric appliances hummed, the matching dishwasher and fridge and range nestled among the pink Formica countertops. The electricity was turned on and they sparked to life; the electricity was turned off and they shuddered into comas for nine months. The door creaked as I closed it, as it always did. You never forget your first creak. It was the original creak, the creak standard that I would compare all other creaks to. Everything in that house was my model for things out in the world. This is what a doorknob looks like. This is what a drain looks like. The first chair I called a chair was there in the living room, next to my one and only and ever lamp. My feet dangled for years until the floor finally reached up to meet them. Window. Couch. Coffee table. My everlasting objects.

“Cobwebs,” Melanie said, scraping her face.

A seafaring sort, my grandfather had paneled the living room in broad, brown planks of knotty pine that made it look like the belly of a ship. A buoy from his old sailboat hung over the couch, the name arcing across it in weathered black paint: MY GLORY. The old horseshoe crab was still there, the dried shell hanging on the nail my father had hammered into the wall after I brought it back from the beach. The only thing I noticed that was different was the TV, but I couldn't believe that the old black-and-white still worked, so I forgave its replacement. It took five minutes to warm up, making all sorts of frantic sounds, like you'd startled the people inside from their dozing. A white dot finally materialized in the middle of the screen. A white dot in a sea of blackness. The first star in the universe on the first day. It grew and spread and the sound came on and eventually the comedian hit his punch line, the weatherman told the future, the monster stepped out of the fog. You had to wait for it to come around.

“Nick's working tonight you said.”

“I'm not his keeper,” she said.

“Do you want to go upstairs?” I asked. Our eyes were getting used to the dark and a car came up Hempstead, illuminating the room and us in a lighthouse sweep.

“Okay.”

This was my old house where all the good things still lived even though we had moved on. Everything as it was. Even the boy, the one who always seemed happy. He had to be here. This was where he lived. Haunting the place in his polyester pants and fucked-up Afro.

Was the same bottle of hydrogen peroxide sitting in the medicine cabinet? The grisly white foam. He was always running around and not looking where he was going. It all bubbled up. I saw it clearly. I thought it had been the kiss that the song retrieved, but it was this place. My lost love's face was the two windows facing the street, the front door for a nose, and the three brick steps for a mouth. Darling. I hummed the chorus and I didn't care if Melanie heard. Certain songs got you like that. You could make fun of them, ignore them, try to tune them out, but the verses still got inside. People you'd never meet offered the words you were unable to shove past your lips, saying what you felt about someone once, or might become capable of feeling one day. If you were lucky. They spoke for you. Gathering the small, rough things you recognized in yourself.

The kids' rooms were on the second floor. I walked up ahead of her, my fingers lighting on the banister made smooth by all our hands, finding the nail heads raised by the settling wood. I anticipated each one before my fingers discovered it. I'd fallen down the stairs plenty when I was learning how to go down stairs. Slamming my stupid head across the steps and finishing in a bruised heap at the bottom. This was the place where I learned to pick myself up, because when I fell the house was always empty.

Elena's room was on the left, me and Reggie's was on the right. The shades at the back of our room were open, enough ambient light sneaking in for us to make out the two beds, the dresser, and the weird vanity table that had been moved up there before I was born, for lack of a better place. The mirror of the vanity was flanked by two mirrored wings on hinges — if you moved them into a triangle, leaving a slot for you to peek inside, the mirrors retreated into endlessness, tossing images of themselves back to themselves in a narcissistic loop. It looked like a tunnel burrowing through the back of the vanity, through the wall, and into an extradimensional beyond. It was amazing how long I could stare at that. The shouts of my friends playing with Reggie came up through the window, or my sister yukking it up with her girlfriends in the next room and I stood there staring.

“This was my bed,” I said. I sat down and spread my palm out. The bloom of rusted springs spotted the mattress. She sat down next to me. She said something and I responded, drawing up sentences from a reservoir. I hadn't been on my bed for years. The last time I slept in it — the night of that summer's Labor Day party — I hadn't known it was going to be the final time. A car crept up Hempstead, the headlights casting a window-shaped trapezoid across the ceiling. I knew the circuit — the light traversing the wall next to the vanity, creeping up the white ceiling tiles, then elongating and disappearing in the middle of the room. If the trapezoid blinked off there, the car contained strangers, revving up to 114. If it continued across the ceiling, it was my parents returning after a night out, turning into the driveway, driving the diamond into its home berth above my bed before my father shut off the engine. When that happened, I was safe from all the night sounds that had unsettled me since we were sent to bed. I couldn't sleep, even then. I followed each transit of light, hoping. When the light hovered and stopped, my parents were home and everything would be okay.