Open House

You’re back in your hometown to visit friends, and on a whim, you decide to drive past the house you grew up in. You get behind the wheel of your car and open the sunroof on this brilliant October afternoon. The ginkgo trees are adorned with clusters of golden fans, and the Bradford pears earn their keep for another year with their ruby-rich leaves announcing that hurricane season will soon be over. You’ve been lucky this year, earning bonuses that allow you to go on vacation instead of staycation. So you came home, only it’s not anymore. Not really.

You slow down as you pass your elementary school with its new playground. When you were a student there, the playground consisted of some monkey bars and a deathtrap metal merry-go-round. Now swings and slides are dotted around the gravel-pounded-to-sand acre. The tetherball pole has been repurposed as a flagpole waving the school banner. You wonder if the bike racks are still behind the lunchroom and remember taking your hair out of your Dorothy pigtails at the end of the day so the wind would billow it behind you as you flew past the baseball field on two wheels. It makes you crave a lemonade Capri-Sun and Skittles.

After the school, you drive past your best friend’s house. How many best friends ago was she? Thanks to social media, you’re back in touch, even had a reunion last summer in an Airbnb in a town roughly halfway between the cities you live in now. It was like no time had passed, a decades-later slumber party with no parents telling you to be quiet and go to sleep.

The trees seem bigger and the houses look smaller, as if time has distorted them. As you drive down your old block, you wonder if any of the same families remain in their brick ranch houses and populate the neighborhood pool on summer afternoons. You notice that the high dive is gone when you pass it, most likely for insurance purposes.

There’s a sign in your front yard, and you remember when you and your friends would steal Jimmy's mom’s realtor signs and put fifty or so in an adversary’s lawn to accompany the festoons of cheap toilet paper unfurling in the trees. This sign says Open House.

You don’t even hesitate, although maybe you should. The driveway is empty. Your dad made you park your vintage VW on the street because of the oil leaks. It feels like rebellion when you pull your car all the way up the driveway into the carport, beside the camellias your mother planted shortly after your family moved in.

You nearly forget yourself and run up the carport steps to enter through the kitchen, but curiosity holds you back, and you step around to the other side of the camellias and look up. Your treehouse is gone, as is the tree that hosted it. Probably taken by a hurricane or ice storm.

You remember the year when sleet covered the landscape in a thick sheet of white ice. Your dad had some industrial plastic sheeting, and he joined you and the other kids on your block sliding down the hill from your house, into the sleet-covered street, across it and into the frozen spillway until fingers and toes were frozen. When you finally tromped back inside, your boots showering ice crystals onto the carpet, your mom handed you a mug of hot cocoa, the steam warming your nose as the ceramic mug thawed your fingers.

You take a quick photo of the camellias to send to your mom after the open house and remember the time you tucked a variegated blossom behind your ear before you knew to check for ants.

Okay, the front door has been painted, as have the shutters and wrought iron railing around the porch. It looks better, but the rocking chairs where your mother’s bench used to be look completely out of place, and so does the tempered glass cocktail table between them. You always snuck out and back in through the front door. Climbing out of windows was for people who didn’t have a hedge of azaleas beneath their windows, and besides, if you got caught, it would be with your dignity intact, not halfway through a window.

Your heart hammers inside your ribcage. It was like this every time you snuck back inside: what is on the other side of the door? You were always afraid of opening the door to find your dad glowering there to take your keys.

You take a deep breath to steady yourself and twist the doorknob, then give the door a hard push, remembering how it would always stick in the frame. Someone must have shimmed it because it flies open with the force of forty mules and bounces back from the little rubber-capped spring still poking out from the wall.

The living room is mercifully empty of people, and the wallpaper you used to refer to as “Migraine in Avocado” is gone. You see that it’s still there, just painted over, the texture still visible even though the color doesn’t shine through.

You hear voices in the kitchen and half expect to see your extended family when you step into that space. Some of the assembled strangers look vaguely familiar. You recognize the realtor from her picture on other signs in front of other houses. Should you tell her you used to live here, or will that make her watch you like a hawk? You can always tell her later, but you can’t keep it to yourself later if you reveal it now. You introduce yourself with your bar pseudonym, the one you give to the random dudes who hit on you when you go out.

You’re instructed to make yourself at home and wander the property. The agent will be right there in the kitchen if you have any questions. And are you prequalified? You tell her no, that you’re just looking. She notices you running your hand up and down the kitchen’s doorless doorframe and tells you the wood can easily be replaced if the notches in it are a problem. You remember your dad digging his pocketknife into the wood to mark your height and your sister’s every year on your birthdays and tell her that it’s not a problem, that it gives the house character.

After a respectable amount of small talk, you excuse yourself to view the bedrooms. The hallway seems shorter than before. You go to your mom and dad’s room first. The louvred closet doors have been replaced with a pocket door that slides silently into the wall. Your mom used to hide Christmas presents on the top shelf.

The ensuite half bath has also changed. The gold-veined wallpaper has been painted over, but shimmering threads of gilt shine through in an appealing way.

You bypass your sister’s bedroom and enter your east-facing sanctuary, closing the door by habit and throwing your purse where your bed used to be. It lands on the floor with a thud, and you hold still, listening for footfalls in the hallway just like you did when you and your first boyfriend were locked into a steamy embrace that day in 10th grade when it snowed.

You examine the window and see that the screen frame is still bent from when you would pop it out of the window to hang your head out to smoke forbidden cigarettes.

You hear footsteps in the hallway and pick up your purse before you’re joined by the agent and a couple who look to be expecting a baby fairly soon. You compliment the accent wall, still papered in the pastel paisley you chose for it in 8th grade while the couple admires the Jack and Jill closets situated inside it.

You follow them into your sister’s room, and it’s still boring. The agent opens the closet to show its deceptive size. The prospective buyers admire the way it stretches back behind the wall. It was an excellent hiding place during rainy day hide-and-seek.

When the agent leads the prospective buyers into the master bedroom, another couple joins them, and you drop out of the group and return to your bedroom, leaving the door open this time. You listen as the realtor, Angie something or other, points out the dogwoods, azaleas, and hydrangeas in your mother’s flower beds. The new woman mentions the patio, and after you hear them leave your parents’ room, presumably to go out to the patio to see the gas line your dad put in for the grill, you open your closet door.

Your prom dresses don’t hang from the rod anymore, so you don’t have to push them out of the way to get to the back corner. When you kneel down on the floor to pull the carpet back, you see that it’s been tacked down, and you wonder if the loose floorboard has also been secured. You crawl back into the room and press your ear to the vent. After listening for a few seconds and deciding that it’s safe, you pull the pocketknife your dad gave you out of your purse and pry the carpet tack loose. You pause for a moment and wonder what will happen if you’re discovered pulling up the floor in a bedroom closet of a house on the open market. They can’t make you buy it, and if the floorboard won’t come up, you won’t force it. Carpet tacks are easily replaced.

Sweat forms a veil of tiny beads on your face, and you feel a drop slither down your spine. You should get out of the closet and join the group, or better yet, get in your car and leave. In for a penny, in for a pound. You pull the carpet back.

The board is just as you remember it, still bearing the magic marker graffiti you and your best friend put on it. You consider taking the board with you, but when you try to put it in your purse, it sticks out conspicuously. Damn.

A spider scurries up from the gap in the floor, and you suppress a scream. This would be difficult to explain if everyone came running. Instead of blindly reaching into the hole, where the spider probably has an entire congress of offspring, you shine your phone’s flashlight into it. Just as you begin to search the space with your eyes, your phone rings in your hand. You press the side button to silence it, then turn the volume all the way down and crawl back to the vent to listen again.

It sounds like you’re still in the clear, so you return to the back of the closet and look down into your childhood treasure trove. You don’t see any actual spiders, but there’s plenty of evidence of their existence and occupation of the space. The cigar box is still there, and there’s a faded green folder under it.

There’s no way to retrieve them without sticking your hand into the spiderwebs, but you do it anyway, fast, before you can change your mind. After wiping the sticky threads off your hand and arm, you remove those clinging to the yellow Hav-A-Tampa box and the green folder, you see that the folder is one of your old slam books, and you’re more curious about its contents than the box’s.

You visualize the realtor bringing another couple into your bedroom and finding you on the floor in your closet, rummaging through an old cigar box and reading a slam book from the eighties and doubt she would be amused. You slip the cigar box into your purse, replace the floorboard and press the carpet tack back into the corner. Clutching your folder in the same hand as your bag, you slip back down the hallway and out the front door, dignity intact, to get in your car and drive away, bringing these relics of your past into your future.