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1
AUGUST
Ican’t see out the rearview window.
That seems like it should stand for something, be a metaphor of some sort, seeing as I’m heading back to a place I never intended to look back on.
But it’s not. I quite literally cannot see out the back window of my car because my entire life is packed into the back seat and trunk of the beat-up hatchback. I suppose that’s what happens when you’re on your own in the world. You have no one to caravan you home after college graduation, much less cheer from the family section as you walk across the stage to accept your degree.
Though I made peace with my predicament long ago, and there is some sort of calm resolve to only be responsible for myself and my actions and not have anyone weighing me down, holding me back, telling me what I can and cannot do. I’m free after a lifetime of not being so.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the only time it’s ever occurred to me to care that I’m alone in this world is as I’m driving back into Hope Crest, Pennsylvania, with no visibility out the back of my car and could very well get into an accident because of it.
To be fair, I didn’t intend to come here. So the universe should know that if something bad does happen, I didn’t want to be here in the first place.
My hometown is dark and quiet at midnight, the Delaware River lapping against the rocky canal shoreline. My finger presses the button to slide the driver’s side window down, and I let the late May breeze waft over me as I take familiar turns. For as much as my life was sad and lonely while I lived here, from birth until the age of eighteen, Hope Crest is actually a beautiful, idyllic small town.
With its brick-fronted main drag, family-owned restaurants and shops, top-tier education system, and penchant for town fairs and parades that usually crown a seasonal king and queen, Hope Crest is the kind of community every family wants their children to grow up in. For most kids who live here, it’s a wonderful existence that provides them with wistful memories and lifelong friendships.
For me? There is nothing here but ghosts and baggage better left in the past. Only a few bright spots remain, and I’m glad I arrived in the cover of darkness so I wouldn’t have to hear or see anyone who knows me or knew my mother.
That poor thing is finally back?
Shame how that awful woman treated her, but we don’t speak ill of the dead …
Do you think she’s upset that she’s gone?
I can practically hear the rumor mill spinning its wheel with talk of my return. They’ll all get a good look at me in the morning and for the next few weeks, since I’m being punished for the thousandth time in my life.
As if she hasn’t thrown me for a loop enough times in her mortal existence, my mother is getting one last laugh by forcing me home because of her death.
With a thumping heart and sweaty hands, I make the sharp right around a bend littered with weeping willow trees and head straight for the house I’ve dreaded returning to for years. The shoulder of the road catches my attention, and a flash of a memory escapes the box I’ve stored it in inside my brain.
Me, walking home on the cold, slippery road in stockinged feet after my mother failed to pick me up from the winter formal my freshman year of high school. Hoping that I didn’t get hit by some car who couldn’t see me in the sparkly black dress I saved all of my minimum wage paychecks to buy. And when I walked in the door, practically an icicle as tears streamed down my face for yet another night ruined by her antics, she proceeded to scream at me until one a.m. about how I kept her up, worried sick.
A sickly, numb feeling grabs me by the chest, a fight-or-flight response that kicks in and almost has me pulling the emergency brake as I coast over the cobblestone lining the bottom of the driveway.
Pulling up the long gravel drive of this particular house sends a queasy nausea through my gut. I’ve not heard my tires crunch over its path in four years. I’ve not returned to this homely ranch, which was so far from a home when I lived here, for my entire college career. Not since I left that August for my New York City campus. A full-ride scholarship and a bunch of minimum-wage jobs meant I wouldn’t have to rely on my mother for anything, and I hadn’t. Not the entire four years. Sometimes, I ate ramen six days a week, but it was well worth it if it meant never picking up a phone and asking her for a favor or a dime.
Receiving that scholarship had been a godsend, but it wasn’t as if I hadn’t worked my ass off for it. I graduated high school second in my class; being an absolute book nerd was probably a by-product of having no friends since your mother eventually drove them all away. Between that, my twenty-hour-a-week student work schedule, and this junker of a used car I bought by cashing in the generous high school graduation check my former employer gifted me, I hadn’t seen or spoken to my mother, Victoria Percy, since I left.
I homed all my focus into my degree in hospitality management. I interned for some of the most high-end luxury hotels in the world. I did a semester aboard a cruise ship, learning how to cater to guests on the high seas. My final year of college culminated in my spending three weeks in Thailand at a resort so beautiful, sometimes I still think I dreamed it. My future is bright. I have my pick of jobs, all of which are waiting on an answer to their offers.
Then, a day after graduating summa cum laude from Bethson University in Manhattan, I got the call from the Hope Crest police department that my mother had been found dead in her bedroom. She’d been stiff and cold, likely been there for almost five days before anyone in town noticed her absence. An undetected brain aneurysm. One second, she was alive; the next, it burst, and she was gone.
Most people would be shaken up, rattled, distraught, or depressed at the passing of one of their parents during the most pivotal point in their life. The transition from college student to real-life adult is a hard one for many, and losing anyone close to you during that time can leave lasting trauma. Hell, the death of a parent leaves lasting trauma no matter how old you are.
But that would mean your parent loved you in that unconditional way the person who births you is supposed to. Missing someone or mourning them would imply that they meant anything to you at all. Or that you meant something to them.
And for all her faults, I was my mother’s biggest. To say she couldn’t stand me would be an understatement. To say that I left her miserable excuse for a life behind the day I went to college would also be an understatement. For four years, I shut out any thought of that wretched woman.
Leaving Hope Crest and her was the biggest relief of my life. And her death, as horrible as it sounds, is a close second. I feel nothing about her passing except annoyed frustration that I have to return to the town I grew up in to close out her estate and affairs. What is possibly left of them, I can’t imagine. But I’m her only family, connected to that word by blood only. Her parents are long gone; she was an only child; my father, whoever he was, left before I could even walk, and she alienated anyone else in her orbit.
So it’s just me, forced back to the place of my nightmares and anxiety. At least after this is over, I’ll be rid of her for good. A therapist would probably find all kinds of things wrong with that statement, with my feelings about her death, but they didn’t have to endure her emotional torture or that household like I had. If anything, I think I’m entitled to these feelings.
As I walk up the rickety maroon stairs to the one-level dwelling I grew up in, I notice that the property is in worse condition than it was when I lived here. Makes sense, seeing as I was the one who did most of the upkeep. Some of it she forced me to do by withholding field trip signatures or promising money for a certain piece of special clothing I wanted, but most of it I did simply because I didn’t want to be embarrassed if anyone ever came over. It was bad enough that kids in our town knew how strange my mother was, but I didn’t want them walking through four-foot-tall grass if they ever risked coming over to hang out.
Now, the place is almost in shambles. Shingles have come off the roof in patches, the weeds are crawling up the siding in vines, and there is a pile of mail on the porch that looks old and weather-stained. My mother might have died suddenly, but it’s evident she wasn’t taking care of anything. I wonder idly what went on inside these walls after I left.
