Homecoming
by Emilie Helmbold
I end up on the front porch almost by accident, much the way my family had stumbled upon the house in the first place, when we were new to town fifteen years ago, when they’d been a deteriorating “for sale” sign nestled between the overgrown rose bushes. I’m in the neighborhood to meet a childhood friend for coffee, but not for another hour. I stroll aimlessly up and down the streets of the lakeside town I used to call home until I end up on the front porch of the house where I’d grown up. The outside of the house looks the same as I remember, with the pink and white antique roses still climbing up the columns, the black shutters silhouetting each window, and the eggshell white my mother had picked out from Lowe’s.
The town is small, and people talk. They began to talk amongst themselves when a for-sale sign appeared in the front yard of the house the summer I graduated from high school. When my neighbor told her book club that our house was for sale because my parents were in the midst of a messy divorce, the talk became deafening.
The residents didn’t stop talking when the for-sale sign was removed from the front yard, and I left for college. My parents sold the house to a business owner who lives there alone. I heard he gutted the interior as soon as my parents signed the paperwork. The Victorian woodwork and the blue tones that my mother chose to compliment the collection of nautical paintings my parents collected have been since removed.
I knock on the original stained-glass front door before I lose my nerve. I’ve nearly given up when an average-looking man with a receding hairline opens the door. Before he can ask me what I’m doing on his front doorstep, I’m explaining myself.
“I grew up here, and I was just wondering if could come inside and look around. I heard you remodeled?”
He seems confused for a moment, obviously never having imagined the daughter of two people he’d met once on formality would appear one morning on his doorstep asking for a tour.
“Uh, sure. Come on in.”
I step into the entryway, instinctually removing my shoes like I used to when I was young. My curiosity about the renovations isn’t the only reason I found myself knocking on the front door. I want to know if the house is haunted. I need to know. I’ve spent the last two years wondering if I’d been slowly losing my mind for years, or if there had actually been something unnamable, unknowable lurking within, either within me or the house itself.
It takes me a moment to reorient myself inside. Walls have been removed and added seemingly without logic. I was right in that the carefully chosen blue hues had been removed in favor of a basic shade of off-white and Michigan State memorabilia.
“I had the kitchen redone, if you want to see that?” I realize that I haven’t even asked his name or even bothered to mention my own.
I manage a faint “sure” as we walk in the direction of what had been the kitchen. The man wouldn’t see any apparitions in the kitchen doorway, as the wall that had once separated the kitchen from the dining room was gone. I remembered the shadowy figure that used to loom in the open doorway, even when I was sure that I’d closed the door just minutes before. The apparition would disappear nearly as soon as I saw it, never sticking around long enough for me to determine if it was a trick of my young, lonely mind or reality. I was never able to reach out to try and grab it.
“Nice,” I mutter.
As we turn away from the kitchen, I’m faced with the stairway. Since the first time I was left home alone after dark, I’d heard footsteps climbing these stairs. Always walking the same path: up the stairs, and down the narrow, unlit hallway, to my bedroom door.
“Do you hear footsteps at night?” I blurt out.
The confusion returns to the man’s face like an incoming tide. He looks at me as if I’ve lost my mind. I realize now that maybe I had been losing my mind. Maybe I still am? I make a mental note to look up psychiatrists when I return to college.
“I live here alone.”
“Sorry, right, I knew that.”
I realize how insane I must sound. The man looks at me with the same mix of pity and frustration that my dad would give me when I’d call him at work and make him come home early because the footsteps had returned. He’d speed home and search the attic, the basement, every closet; he never found evidence of an intruder.
“Do you think this place is haunted?”
I remember the hours I spent alone in the house, an only child with two working parents. My parents told me that everything I’d seen and heard for years was a figment of my imagination. When they started calling up local psychiatrists asking if they took our insurance, I stopped talking about the things that I saw when I was alone. My parents decided it was a childish phase that I’d grown out of.
“I think it’s best if you leave,” he says.
Without another word, he walks me back to the front door. As soon as I’m over the threshold, he closes it behind me. I hear the tiny clink of the deadbolt as I make my way back down the brick pathway.
The town is small, and people talk. They began to talk amongst themselves when a for-sale sign appeared in the front yard of the house the summer I graduated from high school. When my neighbor told her book club that our house was for sale because my parents were in the midst of a messy divorce, the talk became deafening.
The residents didn’t stop talking when the for-sale sign was removed from the front yard, and I left for college. My parents sold the house to a business owner who lives there alone. I heard he gutted the interior as soon as my parents signed the paperwork. The Victorian woodwork and the blue tones that my mother chose to compliment the collection of nautical paintings my parents collected have been since removed.
I knock on the original stained-glass front door before I lose my nerve. I’ve nearly given up when an average-looking man with a receding hairline opens the door. Before he can ask me what I’m doing on his front doorstep, I’m explaining myself.
“I grew up here, and I was just wondering if could come inside and look around. I heard you remodeled?”
He seems confused for a moment, obviously never having imagined the daughter of two people he’d met once on formality would appear one morning on his doorstep asking for a tour.
“Uh, sure. Come on in.”
I step into the entryway, instinctually removing my shoes like I used to when I was young. My curiosity about the renovations isn’t the only reason I found myself knocking on the front door. I want to know if the house is haunted. I need to know. I’ve spent the last two years wondering if I’d been slowly losing my mind for years, or if there had actually been something unnamable, unknowable lurking within, either within me or the house itself.
It takes me a moment to reorient myself inside. Walls have been removed and added seemingly without logic. I was right in that the carefully chosen blue hues had been removed in favor of a basic shade of off-white and Michigan State memorabilia.
“I had the kitchen redone, if you want to see that?” I realize that I haven’t even asked his name or even bothered to mention my own.
I manage a faint “sure” as we walk in the direction of what had been the kitchen. The man wouldn’t see any apparitions in the kitchen doorway, as the wall that had once separated the kitchen from the dining room was gone. I remembered the shadowy figure that used to loom in the open doorway, even when I was sure that I’d closed the door just minutes before. The apparition would disappear nearly as soon as I saw it, never sticking around long enough for me to determine if it was a trick of my young, lonely mind or reality. I was never able to reach out to try and grab it.
“Nice,” I mutter.
As we turn away from the kitchen, I’m faced with the stairway. Since the first time I was left home alone after dark, I’d heard footsteps climbing these stairs. Always walking the same path: up the stairs, and down the narrow, unlit hallway, to my bedroom door.
“Do you hear footsteps at night?” I blurt out.
The confusion returns to the man’s face like an incoming tide. He looks at me as if I’ve lost my mind. I realize now that maybe I had been losing my mind. Maybe I still am? I make a mental note to look up psychiatrists when I return to college.
“I live here alone.”
“Sorry, right, I knew that.”
I realize how insane I must sound. The man looks at me with the same mix of pity and frustration that my dad would give me when I’d call him at work and make him come home early because the footsteps had returned. He’d speed home and search the attic, the basement, every closet; he never found evidence of an intruder.
“Do you think this place is haunted?”
I remember the hours I spent alone in the house, an only child with two working parents. My parents told me that everything I’d seen and heard for years was a figment of my imagination. When they started calling up local psychiatrists asking if they took our insurance, I stopped talking about the things that I saw when I was alone. My parents decided it was a childish phase that I’d grown out of.
“I think it’s best if you leave,” he says.
Without another word, he walks me back to the front door. As soon as I’m over the threshold, he closes it behind me. I hear the tiny clink of the deadbolt as I make my way back down the brick pathway.
Emilie Helmbold is an MFA candidate at Western Michigan University. She is a lifelong Michigan resident, a setting that has inspired much of her creative work. Her work has appeared in The New Twenties magazine and the Small Town Anthology. Her plays have been produced onstage at the University of Michigan and the Kennedy Center Regional New Play Project.