Fiction, Christina Tudor

What you leave behind

Walk around in the square of the living room. Step on the hardwood and the carpet just to feel the difference against your heel. Stop by the kitchen and twist the timer still sitting on the countertop. Listen to the timer tick tick tick. It sounds like a sprinkler spitting water. Tick tick tick. Twist it again, bring it back to zero. Briiinnnggg. Do this just to know it works. The minute marks are rusting. This timer is as old as your second-oldest daughter who’s fifty-nine. Twist it again. Let it be the metronome to your footsteps. You have fifteen minutes before you must go back, fifteen minutes to remember everything you forgot while you were alive. 

Your feet move across the hardwood. You know when the floor will be uneven, where it will slant, what spots will creak beneath your weight. But there will be no sounds. You will not leave any marks. You could claw your fingernails through the paint in the living room and none of it will come off on your hands because you cannot leave permanent traces on this earth anymore. Someone nearby might be able to sense your presence, if they believed in that sort of thing, and even then, they’d have to convince themselves it was real. That you were real. 

The house is on the market after it bore your name since 1959, after you raised your children here, lived and aged with your husband, forgot things you never thought you’d forget like your daughters’ names and your wedding anniversary. You lived in this house until you died. Now your husband is dead too and at least one of you had to come back to see what you left behind.

On the stove, a note taped above the burners next to the bake button says HOT!HOT!HOT! like the extra exclamation points might help you remember but still you let the burners sit unattended until they glowed and smoked. You turned on the stove and let things burn, turned on the stove and burned yourself. Your husband learned not to leave you unattended in the kitchen, not to leave you unattended in a car, not to leave you unattended on stairs, not to leave you unattended. 

You’re not the only one who haunts this house. Traces of your husband linger. The pieces of paper with your phone number, his number, instructions for how to dial 911, the list of important dates you once forgot how to remember like 4/15-wedding anniversary and 1/12-Jennifer’s birthday line the side of the refrigerator next to his detailed calendars. January, February, March, April, May. He never made it to May, never paid the cable bill on the 15th or turned 93 on the 6th. As he neared his death, the writing on the calendar shifted from neat cursive to illegible scribbles as his hand shook, his body breaking down. The remembrance card from your funeral and your daughter’s funeral, dated three years apart sit next to the calendars. Yours has a picture of Jesus on the front. Hers depicts a patch of flowers and says our reunion will be a happy one. 

Inspect the dining room briefly. Remember the eight of you crowded around a table, pulling chairs in from other parts of the house to fit together. The beer and wine glasses and teacups in the China cabinet stack on top of each other collecting dust. You and your husband drank until you stopped and then gave in again. Then stopped, and then gave in again. If you looked hard enough, you could find the beer glass with your husband’s name on it and the tiny wine glass you drank from, pouring a fourth of a glass at a time. Repeating just a little bit, just a little bit, just a little bit to yourself each time. 

During your last Christmas in this room, your oldest daughter pulled a set of keys from your hand. You don’t drive anymore, remember? She asked. And you blinked into the white space in your brain, found a buzzing instead of clarity. I gave up my own life to raise you, you said, unsure of where the rage came from, wondered if was always inside you. 

Move on from this. Head upstairs. Open all the doors to all the empty rooms where your daughters slept at various points in their lives, rotating through the rooms as they got older and new siblings were born and others moved out. Go into the bathroom and stand in front of the mirror to inspect how your body looks, trace your curves with a curiosity for your body you were only allowed to feel when you were a child. In life, your body was a vessel for others. Whisper to yourself: mine, mine, mine.

Your husband left your room as you did. Walk around on all the bumps between the hardwood. Remember how you always picked up his clothes off the floor and brought them to the washer in the basement. Remember when you came home early one day and found clothes all disheveled like they were taken off hastily next to the nightstand. You picked up clothes that didn’t belong to you but were left behind by someone whose name you’ve never asked for and never wanted to know. Your husband moved out of your bed at your request, then the house. And you’d never come back together again completely. Eventually you told your husband he could come home. Not out of necessity but because the roof started leaking and the bank account wasn’t in your name and suddenly the front door was an open mouth that had swallowed you. 

Find all the photos before you go. Make eye-contact with everyone. Feel longing. You can remember their faces. You’ll never forget now. The timer is still ticking downstairs. You hear it brrriiinnggg again. For real this time. It’s time for you to go back. Walk out the door. You don’t need to lock it.