Shoshanna sat on the stump of the big elm she used to climb up and scrape her knees as a child. Her father hated the elm for that reason, she always walked back inside with bloody knees that left droplets across the clean floor of the kitchen, leading to the living room where she sat Indian style in front of cartoon show. There were brown marks on the carpet from where she always sat, right in front of the circular dents of where the coffee table had stood. Now there was nothing in the living room, or the kitchen, or the attic, nothing that was hers. It was too shocking at first, to see all of the whiteness where things had been, not color, but things had been there, in the living room. Things she thought she missed as she sat on the stump and looked at the wood door that led into the garage, and how the knot she had to jump to slap with her palm, a childhood game with her sister, was no higher then where he heart was standing up.
The realtor office has mailed her the keys and she sat with them on her lap. They said it was in the will, that “He had requested the transport of keys through manila envelope to his youngest daughter, who had liked the house the most”. She found it on her doorstep to her apartment with a note that said, “I’m sorry” in her landlord’s handwriting. As she threw her things inside she saw that the envelope had been slit with a box cutter. It was something that she had put up with while living there, slight invasions to her privacy meant the rent stayed cheap. The contents of the letter were thin, only a few sheets of paper and a plastic sandwich baggie with her father’s keys, four in tarnished silver, still on the key ring she had made him in back in second grade, a wine cork that each kid got to color with a carefully drilled screw attached to a ring. She ran her finger over the spots where the acrylic paint still clung on, and tried to picture if she painted a red fish or blue one for him.
The traffic across Eyeball Bridge was as steady as ever. She had the papers they mailed in the passenger seat and she kept glancing at them whenever a car got enough distance in front of her. The letter told her that her father’s place on the south shore was hers, no obligations, the deed was enclosed as well, as well as a milky, photocopied section of the will Shoshanna hadn’t known he made with his new wife. It read:
“To my youngest daughter Shoshanna I leave the house and everything that’s inside. She has been the most dear to me, and I want to leave it to her.”
That was it, two small sentences and no other sentiments, but she thought it was fitting, lined up with how her father worked, he had become obsessed with streamlining things. He had decided that quick and clean was the best way to do things. Shoshanna had told him that after the heart attack that he shouldn’t be moving the way he did, up and down the stairs to check the pipes, all of the cleaning, repainting the outside of the house. She had said that she understood that he was afraid.
“I’m not afraid of anything. I’ve just found the proper way to do things, and I want to spend some time doing things correctly.”
No daughter can force their father off of a ladder, nor tare a bucket of paint out of his hands, even if they say they’ll leave if he doesn’t come down. Because every father will always have the upper hand and say, “Hey, don’t feed me your lip, this is my house, and you don’t fucking live here anymore.”
The house was a different color than the last time she had been here. It had been blue, well he had been painting it blue from his ladder and now it was white. As Shoshanna got out of the car she thought that maybe this was done by the company, that they do this to houses, turn everything white, blanche all the color away, so that who ever gets it, doesn’t have to remember what lived there before. She left the papers in her car and cupped the sandwich baggied keys in her jacket pocket. Through the bay window at the front steps she could see the place cleaned, no furniture, no tacky wallpaper with the design that Shoshanna had called “wood diamonds” and her father had laughed.
“They sure do,” he said.
Something told her to keep the keys fresh and she walked away from the front door to the side, and saw the missing elm. And she knew her father had done this and terrible guilt welled inside of her that she knew couldn’t really be hers. The elm was a great thing, a thing to climb and play, and she had found solace with it a lot of the times. When summers were too hot she would sit underneath it and read her sister’s Nancy Drew books and when winter came she and her father used its big trunk as a target was snowball contests. It was where she found her imaginary friend.
The top of the stump had a ragged cut that was done at an off angle by her father’s electric power saw and when she sat down she had to spring back up and ease herself down again for it to feel okay. She pulled the keys out of her pocket and laid them in her lap and tried to figure out why someone needed to keep keys fresh, and what the fuck she was supposed to be doing here. She tried to remember the last time she had even talked to her father, what were the last words she had heard him say to him and not relayed through her sister. She leapt through past holidays she had been in town and been willing to bring herself over, crossing out seasons in the past seven years and settling on Thanksgiving of last year. She was positive his last words to her were “That’s really big.” It was in reference to the amount of wine in her glass. She had smiled at him and said, “ Go figure.”(Get back to this).
The person behind the seated Shoshanna hadn’t noticed she as she hadn’t noticed him. They were both in too deep of thought about something, her about her father’s voice and him about the general state of the house.
“Brown,” the man said. And this got Shoshanna attention and forced her head to turn and look up. The person was staring, open mouthed at the house, he was missing a top tooth, she could see the gap. The boots he wore were caked with mud up to the ankle and the tweed suit he wore seemed too much for the warm fall weather, and so did the wool slacks, both of which were torn at the joints and spattered with black muck. His hook nose seemed comically red and broken at the bridge, with eyes sunken back farther than they should, hidden behind a wild hair that was see-through thin at the top. His bow tie was undone.
“Brown,” he said again, “I remember more brown.”
There was a moment where she thought he would still talk, but realized he had no idea she was there and continued to stare.
“It was,” she said, “But that was a while ago.”
Her voice seemed to stir something inside of him, and still slack jawed her wandered his eyes over Shoshanna. “Do you know the Castles?”
His tone was slow and concentrated, like he was ready to be tricked.
“Yeah,” she said. “This is my house.”
The words fell heavy out of her mouth, like her tongue had pushed out a bunch of stone marbles, and she rolled her tongue in her mouth to taste for copper.
“Oh,” he said, still staring at her, then back to the house. “I was supposed to meet somebody by this tree. Do you know what happened to the tree?”
“Yeah, it changed like the house.” Shoshanna said and straightened up off the stump.
“Oh,” he said again, and now without looking he extended a dirty hand out towards her chest. “I’m Horace, do you mind if I sit and wait?”
She watched him rub the tips of his fingers with his free hand and didn’t speak for a little bit. She watched the man keep standing for a moment longer, bringing the dirty back to his face and putting the pointer finger into his mouth and gnawed on it, a nervous tick that sparked a shudder inside of her. Horace was the name of her imaginary friend from twelve years ago.
She gestured for him to sit and he did, crossing his legs and running a hand through stubble he seemed surprised to have as she backed her way to the garage door and watched him touch his thumbs to his finger tips in swirls. She popped the baggie and fished out the side door key. Shoshanna decided not to call out to him, and he still chewed his finger, watching the house.
The water still ran inside the tap in the kitchen, but stayed room temperature when she fiddled with the temperature knobs. The small splash that she lapped up to her face did little. Shoshanna wondered if this was some part of a game that her sister had concocted, to besiege the house and make her not want it. This seemed too creative for Daisy though, too intelligent for someone who lived with a husband who had three affairs in seven years. So, she moved back from the sink and stared at the kitchen from the farthest point back, staring at the cabinets doors all open, their black interiors reminding her of the tall flutes of a pipe organ she had watched while her father had gotten the second time. She thought that maybe this happens when a father dies and a daughter doesn’t have that much crazy left, that she has to start seeing things that aren’t there in its wake. She shut the cabinets one by one and shut off the sink.
Almost all of the doors were open, not just the cabinets, as she crossed from the kitchen, the basement door was thrown open, and she could spy the bathroom, her sisters, and father’s room at the far end of the living room, all ajar. The air smelled like paint and dust and she slid out of her loose sneakers and ran her black socks over the cream white of the living room carpet, swaying her foot from side to side like a metal detector looking for the copper splotches from her cut knees. But the cleaners had done their job and she couldn’t find a spec of herself.
Her room was the only door shut and she took big steps through the cream carpet and made it to the long T hallway of the ranch home. Shoshanna waited to hear the creak of her father’s boots from beyond the door, and wondered if this was all some strange joke to guilt her into coming home, to one more grimace from the white mustache of her father as he scrubbed her last remnant from his home. But the door opened like a feather thrown, lazy and slow, and inside there was a great whiteness with a mound of brown. Horace sat in the middle of her floor, Indian style, his hands rubbing his knees. He seemed to sense her and spun his head so that one big green eye could look her all over. From here she could count the red veins. And then he closed them and went back to looking at something in his lap.
After checking the lock on the side door, the front, and the windows in the kitchen she came back and Horace was still there, not outside anymore.
“The closet,” Shoshanna spoke, “is that how you got in?”
“Mmm-hmm”, nodded Horace, “I didn’t want to get Dad mad again.”
“He never liked you getting let in like a cold dog in the middle of the night.”
“Mmm-hmm,” nodded Horace again.
Shoshanna took three delicate steps into the room and cut to the left, in a wide berth to Horace. She tried to peak over his shoulder but his form slumped lower until he craned heavy over it.
“I feel tired. Can I sleep here?” he mumbled it out.
“Horace,” she started and then stopped. She tried to remember the last time she had spoken to him, if it had been good or bad. There was an image of him sunk low and his coat tails spinning as he walked out of their yard and into the neighbors tree line.
“I feel tired,” Horace interjected. “My legs hurt like I was running.”
“Were you running? Horace, where have you been?” Shoshanna got closer and Horace fell lower into himself.
“I was trying to find the house. I was supposed to meet the Queen of the Trees. Please, can I sleep here and wait for her?”
And Shoshanna didn’t know what else to do, he had fallen asleep in the middle of the floor, cradling something to his chest. She left the room and closed all of the open doors so that they did not slam and wake him, even the eleven cabinets and the basement. And she left out the side door.
She wondered what would happen now and got in her car and drove back to the North side of the bay.
The next day the sun was cast over heavy by clouds that swelled over into rain and she rain out of her car and into the house through the side again, still not using the front. She kicked off her shoes again and walked through the rooms trying to see where Horace was now. She tried all of the room on the top floor, he wasn’t huddled on the floor of her room, wasn’t in what was her sister’s small closet, from where she stood at the lip of their father’s room he wasn’t in there, nor in the bathtub, in any of the eleven cabinets or the sink. He last option was the basement.
Her father had furnished the basement with six deep coats of blue paint on the concrete walls and bushy brown carpeting that felt great on sore toes. He closed off the sub-pump in a special “outhouse” of loose particleboard. There was a home entertainment system and thick stuffed couch that she had, in her high school routine, found her way down to each day and played re-runs of cartoons or movies from her father’s terrible VHS collection, westerns or foreign films that were sent to him from a friend of the family. She had showed those movies to her current boyfriend, she had found some at the bottom of a box entitled “junk shit” beneath a stack of dirty clothes in her apartment. They had watched them all a few weeks back and she had asked him what he thought of them.
“They seem as boring as your father.”
And she hadn’t spoken to him for an hour after that even though he thought he had said something good, and she disliked that he apologized and said it was her fault anyway for making him think it was true.
Horace was asleep on the concrete floor, curled in a long “C” shape around one of the two supporting pillars. It was colder in the basement that she had remembered it, with no carpet, no couches, or television, the sub-pump in the corner was a tangle of naked pipes that seemed like a skeleton without the churning sound it had bellowed out every minute of her youth. Horace somehow seemed thinner than the day before, yes, his face had been dirty and red, but now it seemed more sunken in as she stood over him. His face had always been chubby, like how she thought a smiling uncle’s face would be. But, there was little meat to him, she could see the way the fabric of the suit spilled out around him loosely.
“Wake up Horace,” she tried. “Wake up. I want to talk to you.”
He didn’t move, didn’t seem to breath, his mouth open. He still smelled, worse even.
“Horace,” she brought her voice up. “You can’t sleep in on rainy days.”
That brought an eye open.
“I’m tired Shoshanna.”
A little ball of energy popped in her gut as she spoke her name. It was like falling back into roles, putting on a play.
“I know, you’ve been running. But Dad says you can’t sleep in on rainy days.”
Horace rolled his head up, and then with stiff arms drew himself to sitting. His hair looked thinner, most of the black mess around the crown now a ruddy pink.
“Dad isn’t here.”
The energy popped and fell into something soft in her chest.
“Oh, you know? I wanted to talk about that yesterday—to tell you.”
“I figured it out.” He spoke, not upset, just stating.
“And do you remember me?” she asked, bending at the knees to meet him face to face. His skin cracked and flaked around his nose. He had lost another tooth in his smile.
“You’re the Queen of the trees.” He picked himself off the ground, using the pillar to hold onto. Shoshanna wanted to help him, but he waved her off. “Shoshanna, you don’t have to help me.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Yeah.” He said and straightened out the line of his pants. There were more holes in his pants, two slits on one pant leg. And again Shoshanna tried to remember how they left one another, it was at the elm tree and he was walking away, and she thought her father was behind her.
“I’ve got something I want to show you.” Said Horace and he made stiff steps towards the stairs. Shoshanna followed behind him as she remembered each time they had raced up to the top and she always won, but that was his game, because her father would always scold only her for not being safe and not him.
There was a time when they were inseparable and the oak tree meant everything to them. It was where she had found Horace, he had fallen out as she was reading Nancy Drew, a really good one too, the case of the Whispering Staircase. He had landed on his back, his limbs splayed and he seemed just as surprised as Shoshanna was to see him at the base of the tree. He stood and his clothes were a size too large for his young adult frame. Shoshanna had made the tree sacred then, for having delivered her friend, and had spent as much time as possible outside with the tree and with Horace. The tree is where Horace slept at night, he climbed to the top branches and disappeared in the leaves, or in the winter climbed so high that she could see him from her window. She had protected him by laying down a ring of green army men, all in powerful stances, their rifles or pistols or radios raised to attack or call for backup from anything that would threaten Horace as he was asleep.
They stood on the cream carpet of the living room and looked down at a copper stain the shape of south America. It made her knee’s itch.
“I found it this. I think I might have done something.” Horace said, happy in talking as always, though there was a wheeze.
Shoshanna wasn’t sure what to do with herself, so she bent down and ran a hand in a large sweep over the whole area of cream carpet, and the stain was there, she felt the soft bristles of carpet become rigid. It all wasn’t in her head.
“You did it?” asked Shoshanna.
“Yeah, I think so.” Said Horace and he ran his thumbs in circles over his fingertips.
“How did you do it? Did you cut yourself?” she attempted to reach out to him, but he pulled back from her.
“No, no, I didn’t.” He rubbed his arm, and kicked at the floor. “I was just the only guy here. You left. Even though its your house now. And that’s when I figured it out, when I figured it out this was your house, I figured out that it was you on the stump, because you told me to meet you there when…”He stopped himself and looked over towards the far side of living room. “You told me to come back when he died.”
Shoshanna covered up the stain on the floor with her foot. “Why did I say that? When?”
“Everybody was mad. Your dad was mad at you and your sister, and he said that I had to leave or he was going to make me. He said he’d cut down the big elm.”
Shoshanna ground her foot on the spot.
“You whispered it to me to not come back until he was gone. But I didn’t listen, I waited a while, and then came back for a bit, just to check to see if he was gone, and every time I checked he was still there, and then you weren’t there and he still was, so I got scared and only came by every once in a while. But then you were at the stump.”
He smiled still, he had always liked talking. Shoshanna worked her face into different shapes to find the one that seemed the best fit. She gestured for Horace to sit, and they did together, him swaying as his knees bent and then dropping down, his legs straight in front of him.
“I’m trying to make sense of a lot things, Horace. I have this house now, but it was Dad’s. You said you saw him when you came back those times?”
“Yeah,” he nodded and there was a distinct pop in his neck.
“I need you to tell me about those. Can you do that.” And she knew he’s say yes.
Horace had told her stories, and that had made them friends. It was all that she needed out of him. He replaced Nancy Drew and became a soothsayer, whenever a day felt wrong, or things weren’t quite right, Horace had a story to tell.
“Did we ever talk about the green fields of Aberdeen?”
“No, tell me, please.” Was always Shoshanna’s answer. And they sat Indian style beneath the elm tree and he would tell his, his arms out in swooping gestures.
“Aberdeen is famous for its fields of green, the rolling hills and bluffs are covered in shiny green grass that sways when the wind blows and gets as tall as a newborn giraffe.”
“Really?” was always her second question.
“Really, its harvested by the community co-op, they work together and get equal pay so nobody is offended and then they sell it to the Easter companies. The green grass from the green fields of Aberdeen is shiny grass that’s always in your Easter basket.”
She’d always laugh and then the side door to the garage would open, the one with the knot so high, and he father would call her inside because he’d just gotten home. She remembered that she told him the story about the green fields of Aberdeen.
“Honey, that shit’s just plastic.” Was all he said.
Shoshanna and Horace had their pow-wow and she got her story. His hands weren’t as nimble and they seemed like they hurt, he winced each time he rolled his hands over to thrust his palms towards her as he brought home a point. She wanted to tell him to put them down, but knew he’d be hurt more by telling him to stop then the pain he was already in.
“And at the end of the day, he took the power saw from garage and he.” Horace stopped and stared, and even turned around and looked through the kitchen for a moment before turning back to face Shoshanna. “He cut down the tree. He cut down my tree. I didn’t know what to do, you weren’t there, so I ran out into the side yard, and then there was white for a while. I didn’t have the tree, so I just had to run in the white until I found my way back. I ran a lot Shosha, I ran a lot.”
Shoshanna nodded.
“You and me ran a lot.”
“This was worse.” He said. “This was real bad.” And he let his arms fall to the ground. After a moment of silence Shoshanna understood that he was finally done talking.
“Do you have more stories, Horace?”
“Yeah,” he said, “Yeah, there are a few, I can probably remember more.”
“Good,” Shoshanna stood up and he rocked as if to get up and she held out a hand. “Its okay. I decided that this will be your house for a while. As long as you can give me stories about Dad then it’ll be yours.”
Horace bit his lip and Shoshanna started towards the side door. She made it to the cold door handle and turned the key before he spoke up.
“I get to have the house?”
“Yeah,” she said, “But you can’t stop telling me stories.”
“Mmm-hmm” was all he said as she walked out the door.
Over the next month she came by everyday, and everyday Horace had a story to tell her. He also found things, and brought things back. In her room he found a blanket, a watered down purple fleece with bright pink satin edges that he held or sat on when telling stories. In the basement the shaggy brown carpet sprung up like moss on the floor and lower parts of the walls. And each time she came back he was thinner, even though he left some of his favorites each time, kettle cooked potato chips, chocolate bars and peanut butter, maraschino cherries. They were untouched on the counter-top. Shoshanna got to hear a lot of stories, even how he died, Horace had not seen it but had heard his new wife speaking on the telephone to someone, that he had, “dropped, hard as stone, and shook for a moment like he would rock himself back up, but then didn’t, and just laid there.” The will had said medical complications due to a stroke. And she wondered how thin Horace could get. How many more stories there could be floating around inside of that loose fitting suit.
Her father had told her that being alive was like being a photo album, and that being dead was like being a photograph.
“You remember people and places, things you like, and then you tell the to somebody else, and they tell you about their pictures. When you go through life its all about framing the shot up nice and leaving a good picture for the next person, so they’ll spread the word, so they’ll like the picture.”
She had agreed with him, because she knew that he would get up from the couch and rub her head and then leave her be.
“Just don’t forget.” He said, “We’re all pictures.”
At the end of the month Horace ran out of stories, and couldn’t move from his spot on her blanket next to the copper stain in the living room. He was a wicker man, stick thin and staring at her. There was a different energy in the house; she knew it as soon as she got out of the car. Horace knew it too, and they held a long stare from where he sat and her at the lip of the kitchen. Finally, Horace spoke first.
“I don’t know what to do Shoshanna. I don’t think I can run.”
Shoshanna held a finger to her lips and walked over him. Horace looked up at her, his mouth thin, his eyes big. She told him she had a plan, all he had to do was listen to her. He agreed, he didn’t know what else to do.
“Now bring yours knees to your chest and tuck yourself in tight.” Said Shoshanna, rounding her arms and gesturing him.
He paused for a moment, taking in what he had to do, and with sputtering, jerky, movements that sent taughtness all the way up his neck he brought up his knees, settled again and then wrapped his arms around. He still looked up at Shoshanna.
“You sure I won’t start running?”
She shook her head. “No, but I don’t think so.”
“Oh,” he said, but he seemed placated, tucking his head into his knees and Shoshanna pulled the edges of the blanket over him and tied him up, making a double knot at the top.
“Can you go lower?” she asked.
“Mmm-hmm.” He replied and the top of the bundle sank a bit and she tightened the knots on the top.
“Maybe a bit more?” He hands were on top feeling for air pockets.
“Mmm-hmmm.” Strained though this time. She tightened the knots more and then a bit more. The bundle was big enough to carry in her arms and she picked it up and didn’t feel him shift or his weight, like the inside of the blanket was filled with downy cotton. She felt him let out a breath and some more loose air escaped and she tightened down the knots as she laid him in the passenger seat of her car. She drove to the north side of the bay and tightened the knots down more when she got to the other side of the bridge, to her apartment, and again when she laid the bundle, now small enough to carry under one arm until it was nothing more than the size of a small melon. From the closet came the box “junk shit” and she laid it on the floor. She put the documents she had gotten from the manila envelope on the bottom, then the load of army men she had bought, and the key-chain cork from the ring of keys and nestled on top was Horace’s bundle. Shoshanna got to her knees and tightened the knots one last time and Horace struggled in the bundle. Shoshanna brought herself close and whispered something just out of hearing and Horace stopped. She put the top on the box and left it on the top of her bed for the rest of the day.
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