Little Girls(11)
She recalled an afternoon drive she had taken with her father so many years ago now. It was just before the divorce, and tensions in the household were running high. Laurie couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven—young enough to be confused at the breaking apart of her family but powerless to understand the fundamentals of what had gone wrong between her parents. That afternoon, her father had taken her out for ice cream and then out to the park. She had asked him where he worked—she had always thought the name, Sparrows Point, sounded mystical and beautiful—and her father had smiled with just the corner of his mouth. He turned the car onto the beltway. Soon, they were crossing the Key Bridge, the glittering expanse of the Patapsco River extending like a great panel of smoked glass. As they crossed the bridge, Laurie could see large cylindrical concrete towers rising up against the horizon, many of them spewing thick white clouds. “This is it,” Myles Brashear had told her as they reached the opposite end of the bridge. The landscape was filled with steel-and-glass buildings, industrial parks gridded with pipes, scaffolding like jungle gyms, and spacious paved parking lots twinkling with cars. Directly across the street from the factories, Laurie caught intermittent glimpses of marshland and ruinous little one-story houses with large TV antennas on their roofs. Even the air smelled putrid.
Laurie had stared out the window at the sights in horror. This was Sparrows Point? This was no magical wonderland like she had always pictured in her mind. She was about to say something about it all when her father pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road, slipped it into park, and remained staring out the windshield at the collection of foul-looking smokestacks that rose up like medieval turrets along the horizon. They remained there on the side of the road for a while, neither of them speaking a word. She watched her father’s profile and could see his cheeks growing flushed and his eyes becoming glassy.
After several more minutes, he rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, turned and offered her a wan smile, and said, “Pretty lousy little place, huh?” She wanted to ask if he was okay, because she could see there was some visible ache within him, but she couldn’t bring herself to formulate the words. Then he lightly pinched her cheek and said, “Let’s get home.” Laurie and her mother had moved out of the house two days later.
She found herself surprised at the welling of emotion that accompanied such a memory. It was one of the few good ones she had of her father, and even that one wasn’t actually good, just emotional. Sparrows Point had been a hideous industrial park instead of paradise, and so had her parents’ marriage. She had been too young to make the comparison back then, but it wasn’t lost on her now.
“Stupid,” Laurie told herself as she splashed cool water onto her face in the downstairs bathroom. When she heard footsteps out in the hall, she shut the water off and said, “Susan?” When Susan didn’t answer, she called out to Ted. But he didn’t answer, either. “Are you guys back?”
Beginning to feel foolish for talking to an empty house, she dried her face and hands on the neatly folded plain white towel at the corner of the sink. She was dragging the towel down her neck when she heard the footsteps again. They sounded like they crossed down the hall, through the parlor, and into either the dining room or the kitchen. Laurie dropped the towel and stepped out into the hallway. “Hey,” she called again, more sternly this time. “Is that you, Ted? Susan?” She cleared her throat. “Is someone here?”
The fearful look on Dora Lorton’s face as she peered up at the house while the Cadillac pulled away suddenly resurfaced in Laurie’s head. Again, she felt foolish for allowing her mind to toy with her already frazzled nerves so liberally. Yet she wondered if perhaps the old woman had forgotten something and come back. “Ms. Lorton? Dora?”
She crossed into the parlor and surveyed the empty room—the sofa still creased from where Ted had been sitting, the phonograph and piano, the musty little liquor cabinet, the geometry of daylight coming from the windows and playing across the gouged hardwood floor. Dust motes spiraled in the shafts of light. There were no open windows and thus no breeze circulating in the house, but she thought she heard the faint chiming of the crystal chandelier out in the foyer.
A door slammed at the opposite end of the house. Laurie jumped. It had been the front door. She turned and looked down the hallway to the foyer. The front door was closed, just as she had left it after coming back in from the porch. Had Dora Lorton come back?
She went to the door, opened it, and stepped back out onto the porch. The Cadillac had not returned, and there was no sign of Dora or Felix Lorton—or Ted and Susan, for that matter—anywhere in the vicinity. Disquiet settled over her like a shroud. At that precise moment, it was very easy to convince herself that she was the only person left alive on the planet, and that she had imagined the Lortons and had even imagined her husband and daughter—that anyone she had ever cared about had been just a figment of her imagination all along.
She went back inside, shut the door, paused, and then turned the dead bolt.
There were five rooms on the first floor in addition to two bathrooms—the parlor, the kitchen, a dining room with an adjoining antechamber that had once been a small sitting room but was now completely barren, and her father’s study. Just as Dora had mentioned, the carpeting in some of the rooms had been pried up in corners while sections of molding had been removed from the walls. Moreover, holes had been punched into the walls—and not figuratively either, as it seemed these depressions had been made from punching with someone’s actual fist. The crenellation of knuckles could be seen in the circumference of the holes. There was a full bath at the end of one of the diverging hallways as well as a small half bath out in the main hallway. With little emotion, she remembered her father had called the main hallway the thoroughfare. At the time, the word had sounded impossibly alien to Laurie. Now, it made the place seem less like a home and more like something constructed for strict functionality. It was a house, in other words, and not a home.