Sweet Water(4)

I was fortunate enough just to attend Carnegie Mellon University, my father’s position as maintenance supervisor my free ride, although everything I’ve taken away from that place still feels like it’s on loan—my borrowed life.

There’s whispering and commotion all around me, and I’ve been blindfolded for way too long.

“Okay, we’re ready!” Martin announces.

“Thank God!”

Martin takes off the blindfold, and my eyes are deceiving me after too much time in the dark. I blink twice, then reopen them and watch as Martin’s whole family appears before me—on the porch of a house that is not their own but one I know very well. It’s all wrong, and I wonder if the owners are here and if they’ll recognize me after all this time, outed as the girl who’s only been kept in the shadows of this fine estate, never good enough to hang out on the front porch, in the daylight, like we’re doing now. It doesn’t make sense.

Has Martin found me out? Is this some kind of weird Ellsworth intervention?

Martin looks far too happy for that, and so does everyone else, but if they knew about what happened with the boy who used to live here, they wouldn’t be smiling at all.

The women in Martin’s family are wearing dresses with far more obnoxious floral patterns than my own. My sister-in-law’s dress trails to her ankles, mere toothpicks set off by gold stilettos. The whole scene feels dainty and overdone, like an ad plucked out of a 1950s issue of Good Housekeeping.

As if the scene isn’t surreal enough, Martin’s family releases balloons into the sky, tiny translucent offerings to the gods, and William Sr. uncorks a bottle of champagne—Dom Pérignon—with a big old “Surprise!” just for me.

“Wow,” I say, but not before I’m blinded by the sudden flash of light.

A photographer, who I assume has been hired for the occasion, snaps my picture, which I’m sure is awful, because my mouth has fallen wide-open and won’t go back into place.

I don’t say anything because I’m not sure what this party is or why we’re here. All I can determine is that Martin’s family is gathered on the porch of the house I’d named Stonehenge when I was a little girl, my absolute most-loved home on my father’s Sunday drive-by route. We usually drove it after church, something to do on afternoons between the morning rush and lunchtime, but I never tired of it. Every season, the houses were decorated differently. Then later, it was the place that I fell in love with for an entirely different reason. This house held a piece of my heart, but not one I necessarily wanted to share with Martin. It belonged to someone else, and I can feel him like concrete in my bones when I stand here, sweat prickling my forehead. There was a boy who lived here, Joshua, and this place was his.

Well, it was ours, but Martin doesn’t know that.

This house was supposed to be passed down to Joshua someday. He would’ve never given it up. What happened to the Loudens? And why are the Ellsworths on their porch?

I glance up at Joshua’s bedroom window dormered in copper.

Stonehenge isn’t huge and it isn’t prodigal, but to my childhood eyes and even now, it is lovely, built entirely of chalky, craggy blocks with a large, castle-like wooden front door and leaded stained-glass windows at its sides. It has a backyard fit to serve a few fountains and a pergola closer to the road on the side yard that always seemed to have its own hemisphere. The pergola’s formation of long stone columns and open slatted roof reminded me of something out of my Greek mythology class and then later, after watching a TV special, of the great wonder of the world—Stonehenge.

So that’s what we called it, my father and me. We named many of the houses on our drive-by route—the Castle, the White House, Gargoyle Manor—but Stonehenge was my favorite. Mother, a florist, would’ve loved our drives. She liked pretty things, nature and plants especially magnetizing to her. Sometimes on our drives, Dad would pick out a flower or tree with her in mind and comment on how much she’d love it, and those were the moments between us that were truly special. It made it feel like she was still alive.

As I grew older, we didn’t go on our Sunday route as much, but sometimes on summer nights, I’d borrow my dad’s truck and cruise by this very house because I loved it so much. I’d told Martin all about it, but I didn’t think he was paying attention.

The part I didn’t mention was that if it were dark outside and the lights were on in the house, sometimes I’d see him—Joshua—the boy around my age who lived there. Such a large place for a single child and his two parents. I imagined he was probably lonely, and sometimes I fantasized that he’d see me passing by in my pickup truck and hail me to stop, invite me inside, play his guitar for me. But if I were really lucky, he’d be sitting outside strumming away, and I’d roll down my window and hear his sweet, sad melody. It sounded like the inside of my broken heart, the one that still longed for my mother and all the mysteries of the world I didn’t understand in her absence.

“Why are we here?” Now that my eyes are fully focused, I turn to Martin, and he seems very pleased with himself, standing there with a half-cocked smile.

“Sweetheart, don’t you see?” Martin dangles keys in my face. They aren’t a standard bump key set, as my handyman father would say, but a collection of skeleton keys on a large brass ring, the kind found in fairy-tale books. Right now, I feel like I’m in the middle of one, but the story is tainted. This house can’t be mine. There are things about the boy who used to live here that Martin doesn’t know. Even though the snow is melted now, I can still see the place from the porch where we last kissed.