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Chapter Six
Edie
AfterJasperandMelindaleft, the house felt big and empty.The sun had set and the air had turned cool.I decided to venture up the second story.Jasper’s suggestion about getting a hotel had made me consider where I might sleep that night.
And why he was so eager to get me out of the house.
When I reached the top of the stairs, I found four closed doors standing off a wood-floored hallway.The first door led to a bathroom with black and white tiles and a shiny clawfoot tub.The next led to a linen closet, meticulously organized in the style my father might have learned during his military service.Most of the sheets looked like they hadn’t been unfolded in years.
The third was my room.
Though I’d never been in this house before, I knew instantly that the narrow twin bed had been meant for me.The eggplant sheets were my favorite color.The bookshelf was full of books that my father must have put aside for me, ranging from children’s classics to popular novels I remembered him suggesting on our occasional phone calls.Posters lined the walls that suited my interests through the years: horses when I was a small girl, followed by space travel as a preteen and human anatomy as a teenager.
A fine layer of dust covered everything.The room smelled musty, like the air itself was too old.That must have been why I couldn’t get a clear breath, why tears sprang to my eyes.How long had it been since my father had opened this door?I closed it quietly, as if I could keep the emotions inside me as still as the dust.
Behind the fourth door was my father’s bedroom.I felt like an intruder, but I walked in anyway.It wasn’t like he was coming back to complain about the invasion of his privacy.This space was also neat, so unlike the chaos of the first floor.The walls were white and bare, with a plain blue rug beneath his heavy-framed bed.The dark gray comforter was tucked in on one side of the bed and loose on the other, as if he kept to his side despite not having another person sharing the space.On the bedside table, a pair of reading glasses sat atop a thick paperback next to a half-empty glass of water.
Suddenly, standing seemed entirely too difficult.I lowered myself to the floor, hugging my knees into my chest.Yesterday, a man had been here.Today, he was gone.I would never get to ask him why.
Why had he become so obsessed with supernatural creatures that he was willing to destroy his life?
Why hadn’t he let me visit him, when I’d begged my mother to let me see him?
Why had he ignored me in favor of this madness?
For a long time I sat, trying to steady my breath.I could feel the tears like a storm cloud over my brain, but they wouldn’t come.Maybe I’d forgotten how to feel.In my job, I couldn’t let myself be distracted by sympathy or compassion.That detachment had spilled over into my personal life, where I couldn’t seem to make an actual connection with any of the men I met.I had the friends I’d made in school, but they’d settled into marriage and children and I burrowed myself into my career.We didn’t have much in common these days.My best friend was probably my mother, and a lot of the time I wasn’t sure I even liked her that much.
My butt was hurt from sitting on the hard floor.Instead, I laid back and spread out like a starfish.The sun was fully gone now, and the room was darkening around me.I shivered with my back against the cool wood floor.I knew I should get up, go downstairs, keep working on the mess my father had left.Instead, I laid on the floor, stared at the ceiling, and did absolutely nothing.
How long had it been since I did nothing?For years, literal years, there had always been more work on my plate than I could reasonably accomplish.I told myself I liked it that way.I had a tight schedule, well-honed so that I could make sure I fit exercise and chores and social obligations around my work schedule and still guarantee myself at least one night a week of binging the latest movies to hit streaming.Even sleep was an activity that I scheduled and measured in order to keep myself functioning.
Now, my schedule was out the window.I didn’t even know what time it was.My body was exhausted, but my mind couldn’t stop turning.Now that shock had worn off, curiosity had set in.Though I’d been quick to dismiss my father’s research earlier, I couldn’t help wondering what he’d done with the mass of information he’d collected downstairs.
Oddly, it was Melinda and Jasper who had made me shift perspective.They were lying to me.Jasper said he wanted to flip the house, but I hadn’t missed that he’d offered to buy the house as-is and haul the junk away himself.Which would give him unfettered access to my father’s research.
It was a lot of money to pay for the ravings of a madman.
Unless he wasn’t mad.
I pushed myself up to seated.Without thinking too much about it, I grabbed the flannel robe that was laid across the end of the bed.It smelled like detergent and unfamiliar man.I waited to see if a wave of nostalgia would come over me, but I felt nothing.
And I wanted to feel something.
My father was gone.This was my last chance to have some sort of connection to him, some sort of understanding.If I sold the house and flew back to Baltimore, I’d never have the answers to the questions that had nagged me my whole life.
Would those answers make my life better or worse?
I stood up, tying the belt of my father’s robe around my waist.It was warm.I stuck my hands in the pockets, finding only lint.Then, with jerky movements, I stripped the bed.
I wasn’t staying in a hotel.I was staying right here.
