The Vessel

This was her mother’s house.

She could recognize it by the gaudy colors and the smells that made her wrinkle her nose. She hated the orange carpeted stairs that led up to musty rooms and closets filled with old dresses and battered shoes. In one room, the girl tiptoed around the relics of her mother’s childhood: dolls with uncanny faces and strawberry blonde hair, bright pink jewelry, and an old black and white television. In another room, the one that was hers for the summer, she hid from the paintings of Jesus and the embroidered Bible verses. In the forbidden room, lay baseball cards, bronze trophies, and photographs of a smiling teenage boy.

“What did you do, Diane?” Her grandmother’s voice was shrill, and she knew from the volume and how the floor creaked, that her grandmother was standing outside of her mother’s door. She counted down in her head: twenty seconds for her mother to open the door and another twenty seconds for her mother to chase her grandmother down the stairs. A minute for the screaming to begin. Like clockwork.

She sprawled out on her bed, pretending she was dissolving into her mattress like spilled water, and let out a sigh. Today was the day. She dreaded the day not just for what it stood for, but for how it swept over the house like a plague. The anniversary brought an unbearable silence to the entire farm. She thanked God that her mother and grandmother were screaming today; she’d take raised voices and shattering vases over her mother’s endless, empty stares. At least when there was screaming, she knew that they were still alive. The cemetery wasn’t any better. She was forced to look at her would-be uncle’s tombstone every June. She knew his name better than any other, but she had only heard it aloud a handful of times. Tommy. She knew they spoke of him when they said brother or when they referred to him in the usual strained, resentful tone. Listening to her family bicker about a boy dead before she was born was the slow sort of torture reserved only her, a torture she wondered if she deserved.

The girl buried the dread deep within herself and sat up, pressing herself off the bed with sweaty palms. She was supposed to fill the empty dresser with her clothes, but instead everything she owned slept on the floor or sat unused in a suitcase. She rummaged through the tangle of shirts and shoes before pulling out the outfit for this day, uncharacteristic of her colorful tees and jeans: a long black dress, tights, and heels. She pulled her hair into a tight bun, banishing her curls into the sleek hairstyle her mother wore. As she began smoothing out the wrinkles on her dress, the voices downstairs were loud enough to startle but not loud enough to understand. Her grandmother yelled something about family, her mother let out a deafening laugh, her grandfather shouted in response, and a door slammed shut. Then there was silence.

She began shakily applying lipstick when her mother’s voice came from the doorway at a near whisper. “Hi, honey.”

Her mother was beautiful in every way she was not. Her hair was straight, no unruly curls or uncontrollable frizz. Her mother’s freckles were soft and sparse, unlike her haphazard freckles which painted her face like blood splatter. Her mother’s skin never burned and her long legs were elegant, not gangly. Her mother wore the same outfit as her, but she looked regal rather than stiff. No one would guess her mother was in mourning if it weren’t for her red eyes.

“Hey, Mom,” the girl said.

Her mother settled down on the bed and motioned for her daughter to sit down next to her. She reluctantly joined her mother, to which her mother pulled her into a hug.

“You should stay home today,” her mother said quietly.

Relief unspooled in her chest, which she quickly admonished out of guilt. She cleared her throat and forced a frown. “Why don’t you want me there?”

Her mother turned toward the window, which overlooked several barns and the tractors. “I did something your grandmother won’t like.” She released a sigh that smelled of peaches. “It’d be best to leave the aftermath to me.”

The girl swallowed. Her mother was a known rebel, but nothing she had done had quite led to the violence and fallout she expected given the stories of her mother’s childhood. Tonight might bring the bloodshed this house promised.

“Are you going to be okay?” she finally asked.

Her mother returned her gaze to her daughter with a soft smile that almost hid the wobble in her lower lip. “I’m not going to die,” her mother said. “At least not today.”

She nodded and awkwardly placed a hand on her mother’s back. “I’ll stay here today.”

“Thank you.” Her mother stood up gracefully and straightened her shoulders before reaching down to sweep one of the girl’s curls behind her ear. “We’ll be back in a few hours. Call us if there’s an emergency.”

She nodded. Her mother squeezed her shoulder and turned toward the door, stopping only to look out the window one last time with a frown. Once she calmed the tremors in her hands, she returned her gaze to the hallway and went back downstairs.

The girl held her breath. She listened to her mother’s footsteps down the stairs, the minutes of silence before the yelling resumed, the bitter laughter. She waited for the front door to swing open, for the van to start, and for the wheels to pull out of the gravel road. Once the house was quiet - the freeing sort of silence that meant she was alone rather than lonely - she let out a harsh exhale and bolted out of bed.

Time was ticking. It was rare to have a day to herself, and she was not going to let it go to waste.

She quickly shed the mourning clothes and pulled on a t-shirt, shorts, and her scuffed tennis shoes. She had been barred from running around the farm, but she had long ago eyed a winding path from barn to barn, shed to shed, that she had imagined sullying with her footprints. Confident no one was watching her, she darted out of the house and into the sunlight and the rustling of flowers and the row of barns, burning bright red in the distance.

While she hated the house, she didn’t mind the barns. She pretended to hate the animals, but really she was ashamed of the time she wept over a stillborn calf while her grandparents looked down at the puddle of blood with nothing but annoyance. The barns, however, were always her favorite place. She loved the paint and the quiet and the smell of hay. She loved it even though she wasn’t supposed to, especially on this day.

Her would-be uncle, Tommy, had died in one of the barns when he was her age, freshly seventeen. No one said anything about how it happened, just that the barns were off limits. She ignored the rules and would spend her nights walking through the one empty barn almost every night. She had to. The only visitors in the house were her and her mother, but it felt like a circus or a wake. Too crowded, she murmured into her phone when she had a chance to call her friends. Like I can’t breathe. She would press her forehead to the window, imagining the rest of her life waiting for her on the other side of the cornfields. When her mother would raise her voice finally at her grandparents, the words Your Fault bouncing from wall to wall like a pinball machine, she would close her eyes and swear to herself that she’d go out to the barn when midnight arrived.

She took one last look at the barns, promising herself she’d go there tonight, and took off at a near sprint. She focused only on the path ahead of her, the burn in her lungs, the soft trickle of sweat, the pain seeping into her muscles. She had no room in her mind for Tommy, for her mother, for her grandparents, for anyone but herself.

She ran until her legs gave out, and she stumbled into the kitchen with a heaving chest and took a long drink of cool water. The house had never been so quiet; each breath felt as boisterous as an ocean wave or as sharp as a gunshot. She looked up at the ceiling and held her breath. She knew whose room was directly above her.

Like the barns, Tommy’s old bedroom was off limits. She had made the mistake of exploring the room as a child, which led to a week-long fight. She had since been true to her promise to never go inside his room, but today she felt like Tommy owed it to her. If she was going to be forced to mourn someone, she might as well know who he was.

She tiptoed into the room, wincing at the overwhelming smell of dust. When she turned on the light, she was met with what seemed to be a normal teenage boy’s room. She skimmed her hands over all the usual places: dusty comic books, an old record player, a baseball mitt, trophies, and photographs of her mother, noticeably younger but still as beautiful, and Tommy. She picked up one photograph of Tommy, who was smiling at the camera with a baseball bat slung over his shoulder. He had the same blond hair as her mother, but it was a tangle of waves and soft curls. He was almost unnaturally tall and tanned and muscular, and there seemed to be no part of skin free of freckles.

She swallowed. Her dad always told her that she looked just like her mother, but now she wondered, staring at Tommy, if that was a half-truth.

She set down the photograph and turned toward the twin bed, its quilt eerily free of wrinkles. Her friend had taught her the art of hiding things in your room from snooping parents. She took a deep breath and then shoved her arm under the heavy mattress, her hand groping in the nothingness until she felt a bundle of papers. She delicately pulled them out, and her breath caught. She held in her hands about a dozen letters, the lazy script faded and smudged with frequent handling and reading. She felt chills run through her spine, as if she had stepped onto sacred ground. She knew she shouldn’t read them just by seeing the opening lines: I love you unlike I have loved anyone before. Don’t you know that? It’s always been you. Do you remember that day we spent singing and kissing and talking in the hay? I wish we could go back to that moment. I’d spend every day for the rest of time with you there. She dropped the letters in her lap, her hands shaky and her eyes wide with fear. From the stack of letters, a photograph fluttered to the ground. In the small photo, a wiry teenage boy sprawled out in the hay, his dark curls stuck to his forehead with sweat, and he was in what looked to be a fit of laughter. She could barely look into his eyes because in them she saw unmistakable and endless love. She picked up the photograph and turned it over, revealing the same script from the letters: Your Samuel, June. Nausea swam up her throat like a bloated fish, and she shoved the letters back under the mattress and whispered a hundred hurried apologies under her breath. She suddenly felt so small, the baseball trophies and photographs towering over her like giants.

She remembered what her grandmother had once told her mother in a fit of anger: She’s just like him. She wondered exactly how much they all knew. She ran out of the room, the door slamming behind her.

It could have been hours or days or weeks by the time she heard the van crawl up the driveway. She had spent the rest of the afternoon in purgatory, reading the same page from her book over and over again, unable to remember a single word.

As soon as the front door opened, the angry voices spilled over the threshold and she jolted out of bed. She was used to resentment, bitterness, or really any shade of anger. This was different. She quickly shut the door to her own bedroom, and her heart beat so loudly that she could barely hear her chattering teeth.

Her mother stomped up the stairs with her grandmother close behind. Downstairs, her grandfather was shouting and slamming doors. Her grandmother and mother stood directly outside her door, and the girl backed into a corner, holding her breath.

“You shouldn’t have invited him,” her grandmother spat.

“Why not?” her mother asked, her voice high and sharp. “He had every right to be there.”

“And what right is that?”

Her mother scoffed. “You know exactly what that right was. What does his gravestone say? Brother. Son. Friend.”

Her grandmother let out a bark of a laugh. “I’d say they were more than friends.”

“That’s the fucking point!” her mother shouted. The girl’s eyes widened; her mother rarely swore. “Tommy loved that boy, and you practically killed him for it!”

There was a long moment of silence before the sharp sound of a hard slap to the face punctuated the quiet hallway.

Her grandmother’s voice was cold when she finally spoke. “Get out of our house by tomorrow,” she said. “And never come back.”

“You don’t have to ask me twice,” her mother hissed.

The silence that followed was worse than the words that came before it. She could only hear the throbbing of her pulse, the creaking of the floorboards, and the heavy breathing of her mother on the other side of the door. Finally, her mother opened the door and closed it behind her.

“I’m sorry,” her mother said. Both her mother’s face and eyes were red and swollen. “You shouldn’t have to hear that.”

“It’s okay.” She stuffed her trembling hands into her pockets. “Mom, why do we come here?”

Her mother walked toward her and pulled her into a tight hug. “We come here because I should never have left,” she murmured. “If I had stayed, things might have turned out differently.”

She bit her lip. “I just don’t know why I’m here.”

Her mother froze, and the girl immediately felt guilt slither into her gut and nest there, a heavy and stubborn feeling. Her mother finally said, “I promise this summer will be your last.”

She could only nod, that guilt now pooling in her throat like acid.

“Pack your suitcase,” her mother said gently as she stood, smoothing her hands over her dress. “We’ll leave tomorrow morning.” She kissed the girl on the head, once again delicately pushing a curl behind her ear before leaving the room.

She paced from wall to wall, trying to calm her breathing and still her hands. The house was back to its unbearable quietude. She couldn’t say she missed the screaming now, but the silence was stronger, it was louder, and it didn’t cleanse what came before it. It was a magnifier. She looked out the window, the stars softly glittering in the sky. She took a deep breath, grabbed the camping lantern she hid under the bed, and snuck out of the house.

Outside, the air was cool, and the tension in her muscles softened as she stepped out into what made her love summer nights: the breeze tickling her legs, the chattering of insects and hum of the lantern knitted together into a comfortable silence, and the warm promise of the sun tomorrow. She followed the light of the full moon to the barn farthest from the house, which was empty and quiet and hers. When she swung her lantern into the dark room, she smiled when she looked up to the rafters and found her oldest friend.

“Hello, Mr. Owl,” she called out, hanging the lantern on a hook on the wall. The light barely illuminated the barn, but between that and the moonlight filtering through cracks in the ceiling she could see the barn owl looking down at her with sharp eyes. He tilted his head slightly before letting out a soft hoot.

“What have you been up to?” she asked, leaning against the wall.

The owl didn’t say anything in response. She smiled.

“I’ve had a terrible day. Turns out this will be my last night here,” she said with a soft laugh. “So I guess we better make tonight count.”

The barn was quiet, the owl only making soft movements, and she pushed off the wall to stretch her arms high above her head, rocking from side to side. She had once been athletic. She remembered throwing around a baseball, and her grandpa murmured, Just like Tommy. Her mother had promptly thrown out the sports equipment and shoved paints in her face. Time for a new hobby. Her whole life she was banned from speaking of him, but Tommy lingered in every pained expression shared between the adults in her life. He was a grief that scarred. So no more baseball, no more sports, no more jogs through the woods. But she had turned this barn into her own private gym. The dirt floor was littered with her footprints, the remains of jumping jacks, lunges, or running around in small circles. She wound up a pretend baseball and threw it at the owl, wondering if he’d catch it, duck, or tumble down.

The owl sidestepped the imaginary ball, his claws scraping against the wooden beam. The owl watched her clumsy movements with his usual beady eyes and occasional hoot.

“My name is Sarah,” she said to the owl. “That’s who I am. No one else.”

The owl once again offered nothing in return, and she began walking in a wide circle with her arms stretched before her. Each of her footsteps echoed softly in the barn, and she tipped up her chin and braved the silence. She soothed that sore spot on her lip she always bit with her tongue and hummed a hymn her mother always sang, and she focused only on her hands. She wiggled her fingers, catching the light from the moon and the flickering lantern with her palms. She let out a breath in a loud huff. The silence of the barn, so different from the angry quiet of the house, had always been a refuge, but tonight it terrified her. Every thought she had set aside - the photographs, the letters, the fight - threatened to resurface. She looked up at the owl. He at least did not expect her to stay quiet; there was no name, no conversation, and no topic that was outlawed. The owl was patient as she cleared her throat to speak.

“No one wants to say his name,” Sarah finally said. “I don’t even know if I’ve said his name out loud myself.” The laughter on her tongue was bitter like the farmhouse coffee. “He’s why we are here in the first place,” she said, kicking the dirt with her shoe, “and he’s why we are going to leave.”

The owl gave her another soft hoot, and she looked up to the rafters, seeing the owl’s eyes fixated on her.

“Mr. Owl, do you know who Tommy is?” she asked. “Do you know what happened to him?”

When the owl responded with nothing but fluttering wings, she gazed at him with wide eyes and a small frown.

“I don’t really know either,” she said, coming to halt in the middle of the barn. “I know that he played baseball, he had curly hair like mine, and that he was born in December. Just like me.” Sarah swallowed hard, rolling her shoulders in tight circles. She once again wound up an imaginary baseball, throwing it up at the moon instead of the owl. “I know about Samuel.”

The owl let out a much louder hoot this time, and the barn seemed to groan against the wind and the scratching of the owl’s feet. She shivered at the sound.

“Mr. Owl,” she whispered, “do you believe that our souls never leave this earth? That we are trapped in whatever vessel that finds us first?”

The owl said nothing, and she looked down at her feet. She had heard that from Elena, a girl in her art class. Whenever Elena would lean over to grab the watercolors, Sarah would flutter her eyelashes and breathe only in soft sighs. While they had been painting sunrises and sunsets, Elena went on about the afterlife and some philosophy book she had read over winter break. Sarah’s friend Justin rolled his eyes. So pretentious, he mouthed from across the room. But she didn’t care. Elena had long, dark eyelashes and bright red lips she wanted to kiss. She spent her nights at the farm imagining Elena’s face and peeking glances at the painting Elena had given her, one of winter fields in the morning.

“I don’t know what to believe,” she muttered. “I don’t know if I could be stuck in a place like this.” She sat down on the floor, feeling the cold dirt underneath her sweaty palms. “What do you think happens when we die?”

The owl said nothing. She smiled to herself and said, “Thanks for being honest.”

Her mother refused to talk about death, even at church. At the mention of the soul or eternity, her mother would close her eyes and curl her hands into tight fists that rivaled black holes. She had asked her dad, before the divorce, why her mother always cried at the mention of heaven. Her dad had only smoothed his hand over her curls and took a deep breath. It’s complicated, he said. There’s someone she wants to see again, and she doesn’t know if she ever will. Before she could ask who, he had sent her to bed.

She peered up at the cracks in the ceiling, the full moon staring back at her like a bloodshot eye. She laid back onto the dirt, moving her arms and legs as if she were making a snow angel. Behind her the lantern began to flicker rapidly, the light illuminating the barn in rapid bursts before vanishing. The barn suddenly was completely dark, and she gasped. Even the moonlight could not reach her on the floor, and she turned her head toward the door to see that the lantern had died where it hung on the hook.

“Shit,” she said. “Are you there, Mr. Owl?”

When he did not respond, she felt as if she were in limbo. The darkness and the quiet were dizzying and heavy; she lifted her arms above her head, hoping to catch the moonlight once again in her fingers, but she couldn’t see her hands. She couldn’t see the owl, she couldn’t see the stars, and she couldn’t see the rafters. She couldn’t see herself.

Panic settled in and she sat up so quickly the blood rushed to her head in a violent wave. She widened her eyes as much as she could, and in the black nothingness before her, she could see everything and nothing all at once. There was no Sarah here. She closed her eyes, hoping she could find light and color in her memories, and she could hardly breathe as the world unfurled in tiny images. Sarah burning her hair with the straightener her mother bought her. Tommy’s soft curls dominating every photo. Her mother weeping in prayer, Tommy’s Bible on the bottom shelf, Sarah throwing up in the church bathroom after a sermon on love. Tommy and Samuel’s laughter filling the room as they kissed and made love. Sarah drawing Elena in secret, memorializing her smile with pink watercolors. The letters under the mattress, Sarah’s diary in an underwear drawer. Tommy sneaking out to the barn in the middle of the night to stand under the very same moon Sarah saw now. Tommy saying his last words to himself or to the stars or to an owl, determined to face the end of it all. I’m sorry, Samuel had written. She has seen the grief etched on her mother’s face, and she wondered what Tommy’s face looked like that night he died where Sarah now laid.

She hastily stood up and nearly keeled over from an impending headache. She opened her eyes as wide as she could and stared up at where the owl last stood, and she could see only his eyes in the moonlight.

“I’m not him, right?” she asked the owl, her voice steadily rising. “They all say I’m just like him, like I’m turning into him, but I’m Sarah, right?”

The owl made no response, and she grit her teeth. “Say something!” she shouted. “Fucking answer me!”

The owl’s eyes faded from view, and she choked down a sob in favor of tensing her jaw and baring her teeth. “No one will tell me,” she hissed. “You know my mother won’t even call me by my name?” Sarah kicked at the dirt so hard she winced, her toe throbbing in pain. “And my dad hardly calls me anymore.” She spat on the ground. “I hate being called honey or sweetie or baby.”

When the owl finally began fluttering his wings, she pointed her finger up to where the owl flew and said in a harsh whisper, “My name is Sarah.” Her mouth began to wobble, the telltale sign of crying she saw in her mother, and she bit her lip. “Right?” She took a step toward the owl before shouting, “Right?”

One step further into the barn was like a punch to the jaw, and she let out a whimper. In the darkness, she could only see Tommy and Samuel, their bodies sprawled out in a lazy tangle of limbs, their eyes drunk with contentment, with love. Sarah once again held her hands before her. She could not see herself.

“Maybe I am him,” she finally cried. “Am I even Sarah? Am I just biding my time until I end up like him?” She thought of Elena, of the way her heart danced when she saw pretty girls, of how her mother would still to this day say, Are you sure you and Justin aren’t dating? You’re so cute together. She trembled and hid her face in her hands. “Am I going to end up just like him, Mr. Owl? Is that why I keep coming back to this stupid barn?”

The owl let out a loud hoot, and she shot him a glare she hoped he could see. “Are you saying I’m just like him?” She let out a cry as she kicked the dirt again, her toe screaming in response. “For all I know, Mr. Owl, you could be Tommy, too. Stuck in this stupid barn, just like me!”

As Sarah finally burst into tears, her body shuddering with sobs she had suppressed all summer, the owl let out a sound so high-pitched and desperate that She covered her ears with her hands. The hoots felt like howls, even louder than her own screaming, and the quiet of the barn was consumed by their wailing, the shuddering of the owl’s wings, the cracking of her joints and tense muscles. When she howled at the owl again, asking him who he was and why he was stuck here, the owl shrieked so loud she took a step back. Get out, the owl seemed to say. I’m not telling you my secrets.

Sarah had no more secrets to give, and there were no more secrets she could take. She spun on her heel and tore out of the barn, tasting the salt of her tears and the ever present dirt in the air. She sprinted to the house, her legs burning from her earlier run and her breath ragged and loud, and she waited for the house to be flooded with lights, for the door to swing open, for her mother to ask her where she had been. The night, however, was oppressively quiet; nothing, not even the owl, could be heard except her own footsteps. The house was as dark as it was before.

She held her breath as she tiptoed upstairs, her fingernails digging into her palms so hard she drew blood. She crept down the hallway and paused as she came to Tommy’s bedroom. She swallowed hard. She wanted to kick down the door and scream at him. She wanted to lay at his feet all the blame he deserved, every memory of hers he had ruined. She wanted to read the letters and cry and listen to the records on the shelves. She wanted to make it right. She wanted to say goodbye.

She slipped quietly into his bedroom and took a small step toward his old desk. She picked up a photograph of him, one where he sprawled in the hay with a sleepy smile, and whispered, “I shouldn’t have read your letters. I’m sorry for what happened to you. But I’m leaving and never coming back.”

Weary, she collapsed on his bed. She felt as if her weight was crushing the letters hidden beneath her, and she wondered if she should bury them forever. She rested her hands over her heart and felt each beat shudder against her rib cage. As early daylight stretched over her face, Sarah dreamed of baseballs, curly hair, fluttering feathers, and two boys tangled in the hay, kissing each other’s freckles and laughing at some joke she could barely hear nor understand.