A House Is Not a Home

The latch on the white gate is nearly rusted in place, but if you know how to slide it just right, slowly enough that it doesn’t pinch your fingers, you can open it and find your way into the backyard. The green hill: eucalyptus trees huddled together in a far corner by the neighbor’s wall. To the left, a pathway that disappears beyond a row of trees. Follow the pathway of pink paving stones to the swimming pool. Deep and cold. Your brother once dropped a toy into the deep end. You swam eight feet down to the bottom to retrieve it and imagined that you would turn it over to reveal your dead father’s head underneath. You wondered why it was so easy to conjure up disturbing images like these when you’d barely ever ventured past the white gate with the rusty latch. 

Beyond the gate is a world rife with evil. You don’t understand what kind of evil, exactly, but your parents say that you can’t navigate it on your own. The man in the radio show that they listen to in the car has a lot to say about atheists and homosexuals and liberals, so maybe those are the evils. 

Back door. Next to the dog door. Next to the pollen-covered patio table and the grill that sits empty. After your father died, your mother found two garlic bulbs wrapped in tinfoil nestled inside on the blackened bars. There is a radio on the bench next to the door, weighing down the wooden slats and making them sag. You sat on that bench once with your friend, sharing a bag of chips and talking about boys. But there have been no friends here for a long time, and the bench is of better use holding the radio than waiting for guests that will never sit there. 

Slide open the door and you will come to the kitchen. The two-compartment sink is clogged on the left side, and there is a green film covering the stagnant water. When you wash your hands on the right side, you hold your breath to avoid the stench of spoiled food and mold. 

On the kitchen table is a printer, one of the only things in the house that still works. The day after he died, everyone from every corner of the family was suddenly in the house. Your grandparents sat at the table and printed pictures of your dad on cheap photo paper that smudged when you touched it. You liked seeing the pictures of your parents when you were young. You also liked the pictures of yourself as a baby. You were too young to notice the looks that passed between your grandfather and your mother, to feel the suffocating tension of two people that hated one another. To know that she hated him for abusing his son, and that he hated her for existing. 

You step out of the kitchen, feet padding softly across the cold tile floor. A set of stairs winds up past a delicate glass chandelier and a big round window, and halfway up the stairs is the landing where you saw your father alive for the last time. 

There is a permanent stain in the carpet where your brother’s vomit sat for days before anyone cleaned it. It’s the same spot where he sat every night watching cartoons on the tablet until the sun came up in the weeks after the paramedics came. That was, until your mother told him that he was acting “like some sick person,” that a seven-year-old had no reason to be moping around and acting depressed, because his life was easy and he should go to bed at a reasonable time and stop being disrespectful. Then he moved his long nights to his bedroom and you listened to the voices of Sonic the Hedgehog and Invader Zim through your open door while your face was pressed into your pillow, trying to hide the sound of yourself crying. 

Your room is at the front, big windows looking out at the ivy-covered house across the street, the one that sits abandoned most of the year because the owner lives in another country. It’s easy to make up stories about that house. Stories of adventure and of other worlds, of people who fall easily in love and use their superpowers to defeat monstrous villains. Of fiction and reality meeting one another at the bend in the street where two houses face each other and a lonely girl looks out her window. 

The closet in the room is where you hide out. You wrap scarves around your body and pretend they are sleeveless tops and pose in the little mirror and wonder if someday you will be beautiful. You put on the hand-me-down running shorts that your cousins gave you, the ones your mom called “slutty,” and wonder if someday you will look at yourself and think of anything besides that word. 

The bed, next to the closet, is where you wake, heart pounding, back sticky with sweat, in the middle of the night. Nightmares impossible to remember. The bed is where you will spend the endless, hopeless nights huddling inward against the darkness of the world only to find a deeper darkness inside, a well of despair that swallows up all that you are and all that you can ever hope to be. 

Across the hall from your room is the master bedroom, the room where he died. Even before it happened, your mother refused to sleep there. She had to sleep with the baby. Or She was sick and didn’t want to give him a cold. Or she couldn’t sleep and it would keep him awake. But really, the room gave her the creeps and she couldn’t handle the echoes bouncing around on the high, slanted ceilings. She couldn’t handle the mirror folding with the corner of the wall and reflecting the moldy, broken glass shower and the stale, poisonous air of the room, air laden with something that would stop her life at exactly this point, time never moving forward. 

But you don’t go into the master bedroom. You don’t look at the high ceilings or the bed in the center of the room. You turn left, into the bathroom where the mirror reflects the image of a scared little girl. The bathtub is full of filth, and you have to take in shallow breaths to avoid the smell. Here, the dishes are piled, the smell of rotten food, cups and plates and bowls halfway submerged in the muck that runs down into the tub and clogs the drain. There is one clean dish. A huge glass measuring cup, the size of a mixing bowl, sits on the counter next to the sink. There are still a few soap bubbles resting on the bottom, from the last time someone bathed. Your mother heats up water in the microwave and pours it over your brother’s hair to rinse the soap out as he leans over the sink. You are too afraid of the heavy glass falling on your head, so you go without washing your hair. It sits in a greasy, matted clump on top of your head for months, until you go to the community pool with your family and wash it in the locker room shower. 

Until then, you drag your fingernails across your arms to collect the gunk from your skin, then use a nail file to remove the gray film. Sometimes, you want to scream, thinking about the dirt, the layers of sweat and oil and dandruff that pile up on your scalp and coat your fingertips in grease when you adjust the hair tie that has embedded itself in your hair. But something feels wrong about washing with the glass measuring cup. There is never enough water to wash your whole body, and you are left feeling greedy for wanting more. You never feel clean, even after the shower in the locker room. 

Even when you move away, you never feel clean. The dirt clings to you, the bitter tang of the poisonous air. The images stay with you, the grimy sink, the garlic cloves abandoned on the bars of the grill. You dream about the house often. Sometimes in your dreams you are moving back into your old room, wearing the slutty shorts. Other times you are floating in the pool, looking up at the sky. Sometimes your father is there. Sometimes he is not. You’ve tried to start over in every place that you’ve lived since. But the things that happened there will always be a part of you. And you will always know that a house is not a home.

Ainsley Davis is an undergraduate English major at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has wanted to be a writer since she understood what a writer was, when her first story was written in crayon and titled “Do Guinea Pigs Dream?” She loves reading fantasy novels and creative nonfiction essays, and she feels most at home at the library or in a bookstore. Ainsley lives in Las Vegas with her partner and her two pet rats.

A Song for Ainsley