Cote Smith - Hurt People

I didn’t know. I fiddled with the cereal bowl my brother left out from yesterday’s breakfast.

“I bet your mother still cuts your hair with that bowl,” our dad said. “She always loved doing that. She thought it made you look like something out of history. Like Shakespeare or something.” He laughed, looked down for a while, lost in a memory.

“Ah, screw it,” he finally said. “Grab your brother. Let’s take a trip.”

“To where?” I said. “Do you want to call Mom? Let her know where we’ll be.”

My brother came into the kitchen, head down, and my dad’s brightness flickered away. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose we should.” I handed him the phone, but when he took it, he looked like I was handing him an object as cursed as the Stranger tape. He gave the phone back to me. “On second thought, let’s let this be one of our secrets.”

* * *

We drove around the city, and it was obvious my dad had no idea where he was going. We would stop at a light, and when it turned green he would veer off to the left or the right without any warning to the car behind us. When we hit downtown we rolled down the windows. People waved at my dad and he raised his hand in return, but we ignored the smiles that invited us to stop and chat. We drove on uncaring, an act some looked confused by.

We made a U-turn at the river and drove back through the city, past Limit Street and into a neighborhood with big houses we would never again afford. We took a right by a church I recognized. It wasn’t one we ever attended, but I remembered it for some reason — its low triangle roof, the basketball hoop in the middle of the parking lot. We took a left on another street and that too, the act of turning at that spot, the angle at which we curved from one street to another, felt familiar. Once on this new street, I recognized all sorts of things: fire hydrants, mailboxes, the shapes and slopes of driveways.

“Where are we?” I said.

“God, you’re dumb,” my brother said.

We came to a cul-de-sac, circled around, and stopped across from a house. A warmness in my chest told me I had been here before. My dad put the cruiser in park. He turned off the radio and stared at the house.

“Is this our house?” I said. My dad didn’t say anything. He continued to stare at the house, running his fingers over his mustache, his baby beard. This was our house. Or it once was. I was sure of it. I recognized the square windows, the one on the left for the hallway bathroom, the one on the right that went to the room my brother and I once shared. But it also wasn’t our house. The car in the driveway wasn’t our van. The basketball goal was somebody else’s, the birthday gift for some lucky kid.

“Why are we here?” my brother said. “Can we go?”

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” my dad said.

I stared at the house, trying to remember if it was always that light brown color.

“I’m bored,” my brother said.

“You’re bored?” my dad said. He wanted to stay a little longer, and so did I. “What if I do this?” He rolled up his window. We didn’t get why we were supposed to be impressed. “Wait for it.” He flipped a switch on a box attached to the center console. A steady static came out of the box’s speaker. This seemed to encourage him, and he started playing with the dials.

“What are you doing?” my brother said.

My dad put his ear to the speaker. “Don’t you hear that?”

“So what. Our TV does the same thing.”

“Patience,” my dad said, fiddling. “Patience perseveres.”

He messed around for a minute more, until, suddenly, a voice broke through the static. A woman talking. Words popping in and out, crackling like fireworks.

“Is that a ghost?” I said.

My dad stopped messing with the box and stared out the window, at our old house. “Not a ghost,” he said. “Now be quiet. We have to be quiet.”

I covered my mouth. When that didn’t work, I closed my eyes. I held my breath until the voice came back. This time clearer, but funny-sounding, like someone was sending words through a fan.

“He surprised me with it,” the voice said. “I was standing there chopping vegetables and he just came up and sat down by my leg. He said, ‘Mom, I got it. Look.’ And of course I thought it was something silly, so I didn’t really look. But he kept on, saying, ‘Look, Mom. Watch my shoe.’ So finally I look down, and there he is, my baby boy, tying and untying his shoe like he’s all grown up. Making the same face as his dad. That stupid face he makes when he’s concentrating hard. Can you believe that?”

There was a silence. We couldn’t hear the ghost on the other side.

“This one’s a talker,” my dad said.

“I know. So fast, right?… No, he wasn’t here to see it. He was so mad when he got off work … No, mad that he missed it … He doesn’t know about that … I know, but he’s got to work, so what can we do?… I know. I pray every night that won’t happen … Well, that’s all I can do.”

The speaker cracked again and fell into static. I closed my eyes, but the voices were gone. My brother and I sat up. Our dad didn’t turn from the window.

“Who was that?” my brother said.

“Just some lady,” my dad said.

“How can we hear them?”

“Sometimes we can hear people if they’re talking on a cordless phone. That’s all it is.” He wasn’t excited like us. He sounded like his football team had just lost a close one.

“Does she live in our house?”

“Who cares,” my brother said.

I stared at the house’s front door, hoping the lady would come out. “Can we go around back?”

My dad looked at me, his cheeks puffed up with pity. “We used to have fun back there, didn’t we?”

“I’ll take him,” my brother said, “if that’s what he wants.”

Our dad turned to the house again, rubbed his chin. “OK,” he said, “but be quick.”

We got out and went around the car, my brother crossing the cul-de-sac without me. I hung back for a second. “Do you want to come too?” I asked my dad.

He put his arm in the window. “No, son. No parent wants a cop approaching their door.”

* * *

I ran across the street and up the front yard. I laughed because it was funny; it was funny that my legs remembered running up this little hill. They knew exactly how many steps to take and when to tell my brain to stop. I ran around the side of our old house and into the backyard. It hadn’t changed at all. Here was the porch, weathered and gray, where my dad used to grill. Here was the spot where grass refused to grow, season after season, the spot my brother and I used as home plate the day our dad bought us our wiffle ball and bat. We used a small bush as first, an old sandbag as second, and a porch pole as third. All these things remained. No one had bothered to change them since we left, or maybe nobody could.

My brother came around back. “It looks small,” he said.

“What does?”

“Everything. It just looks smaller.”

“It looks the same to me.”

“What about the tree?” he said. “The tree is gone.”

“I don’t remember a tree.”

He pointed at a mound at the edge of our property. “It was right there.” He walked to the spot and put his hand to the ground. “See, there’s the stump. Here, feel it.”

I kneeled in the grass and spread my hand on the earth’s bump. It didn’t feel familiar. “I don’t remember any tree,” I said.

“Well, it wasn’t a big tree. More like a baby. Mom used to laugh at Dad because he would try to sit under it for shade. You don’t remember that?”

“I think I remember,” I said. “I mean, I want to.”

My brother shrugged. Behind him there was movement at one of the house’s windows. A hand parted a curtain, a woman’s face. The woman stared down at us, and I couldn’t help but think of my mother, even though this woman’s hair was small and dark. She stepped back from the window, and a second later the porch door creaked open, the same way it always had. The woman stepped outside. She had a cordless phone in her hand and set it on the railing. She didn’t say anything at first. She just watched as my brother circled the backyard, touching each base until he was home.