Aunt Edie’s couch was still draped in an old blanket she had crocheted herself, its crazy kaleidoscope colors having faded beneath a heavy scrim of dust. Those colors were too bright to suppress completely, and Aaron dared to breach the threshold of the house as the blanket drew him inside. Slowly approaching the couch, he allowed his fingers to drift across the delicate loops of yarn he still remembered her knitting while he sat at her feet with a pumpkin between his knees. It had almost been Halloween, and Edie had allowed him to carve the pumpkin himself, warning him that if he got the sloppy pumpkin guts on her precious blanket, he’d be spending the rest of his childhood upstairs in his room.
He ran his hand across the top of the couch, feeling the yarn beneath his palm, only to watch the loops loosen and disintegrate before his eyes. His throat went sickly-tight at the sight of it, Edie’s precious blanket coming apart beneath his touch, a grim reminder that what was past was past. No amount of fond memory could bring back the dead.
Aaron forced himself to look away, focusing the camcorder onto the fireplace mantel, still decorated with glass candlesticks and Edie’s antique silver-framed mirror, all in their rightful places. The mirror was tarnished by decades of neglect, the mantel covered in dust, downy feathers, and mounds of bird droppings that had oozed and dried down the sides of the white-painted shelf. A faded photograph of Fletcher grinned at him from next to the mirror—Edie’s favorite of her late husband, one she had displayed in various parts of the house after he had passed. Aaron recalled a glass-encased pillar candle burning next to at least one of them at all times: a tiny makeshift shrine, complete with an eternal flame. The candle was there, too, sheathed in a thick coating of webbing and dust.
He glanced across the room to the hallway that led into the kitchen. The hall window was broken, shards of glass ground into the hardwood floor by years of trespass. There were footprints in the dust, smudges where curious intruders had run their fingers along walls and picture frames, traces of their fingerprints dotting the dust that papered the walls. And yet the place hadn’t been ransacked. Items remained in perfect, albeit fetid, order.
A flower vase sat in the center of the kitchen table, dead stems jutting skyward in search of sunlight, flower petals surrounding the glass vessel in a circle of decay. The broken kitchen window was covered up with thick plastic sheeting, now tattered and half-pulled away from the frame by wind or curious hands or both, suggesting that if Holbrook House
had
become a trespasser’s haven, the police had made a half-assed attempt at securing the property. Aaron didn’t remember seeing a broken window on that long-ago Friday afternoon, but even if it had been broken, he wouldn’t have noticed. He didn’t remember much of anything, only that the mail carrier had picked him up nearly a mile down the road and driven him back home, a fourteen-year-old Aaron too winded and weeping to explain that he didn’t want to go back, that he didn’t want to spend another second in that house ever again.
Aaron stared at a wooden sign Fletcher had hung above the window, a long slat of stained plywood he’d burned the words
Edie’s
Bistro
into the summer before he had died. It had been an anniversary gift Edie had girlishly giggled at before pressing a kiss to her husband’s cheek in thanks.
It felt strange to stand in that kitchen, surreal that a room that had once bustled with life was now so silent, so utterly inert.
Moving down the hall again, Aaron dared to stop just shy of the staircase that had given him nightmares for years. Part of the railing was still draped in one of Edie’s prized blankets. Its rotting fringe hung low, brushing the top of a table lamp surrounded by sun-bleached photos, many of them of Aaron himself—Fletcher and Aaron fishing at Bull Shoals Lake, Aaron openmouthed and laughing while his uncle held a largemouth bass up in victory; Aaron standing in front of the double doors of his elementary school with a Big Bird lunchbox held in front of his knees; Edie and Fletcher embracing in front of a Christmas tree while Aaron’s finger encroached into the frame at the top right-hand corner; another of Aaron in front of the same tree, holding up a wooden baseball bat over his head in triumph. Aaron still remembered that bat, taking it out into the backyard despite the winter chill. But it was difficult to focus on fond memories at the foot of those stairs.
He stared at the floor that surrounded the base step, at the very spot his aunt had fallen and broken her neck. They had said she’d taken a tumble, possibly light-headed from the injury she had sustained to her hand. But that was all they had disclosed, because what other details could you divulge to a traumatized fourteen-year-old boy?
He forced his gaze away from those floorboards and climbed the stairs with slow, deliberate steps. The upstairs rooms were the ones he remembered most. His old room was firmly anchored in the early nineties, posters still push-pinned to the walls, so faded they were nothing but pale green and yellow shadows of the images they had once been. The
Ghostbusters
logo stared at him from across the open door—the last remnant of childhood giving way to the likes of
Wayne’s World
,
Batman
, and
RoboCop.
Aaron slid his hand up the dusty length of a Bon Jovi poster, its top right-hand corner having flopped down in a paper frown. The paper crackled beneath his touch like a dry autumn leaf. His bed was unmade, covered in black-and-red striped sheets, his pillowcase twenty-one years mussed. A pile of CD cases were stacked one on top of the other on his desk: Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith No More, Guns N’ Roses and Ugly Kid Joe—nearly a dozen of the albums Aaron had re-collected over the years, the same albums Ryder had grown fond of because Aaron played them in the car. His heart clenched into a fist as he stared at them, suddenly struck by how similar he and his son had been. A tiny replica, only so much better; seven years upon the earth, gone in a blink.
He turned away, put the room to his back, took a steadying breath, and moved down the upstairs hallway to his aunt’s bedroom door. It was open, displaying a simple bedroom furniture set and a bed carefully made two decades before. Another set of photographs decorated a hearth centered on the side wall. A faded rug covered most of the floor, its dusty blue matching Edie’s comforter and drapes, reminding Aaron that it had been her favorite color, one that he’d search for anytime he bought her a gift for her birthday or Christmas or Mother’s Day. Without stepping further inside, Aaron used the camcorder to zoom in on details he was reluctant to explore too closely. A small vanity sat across from the bed, bottles of perfume carefully organized along its top. The oval mirror looked strangely discolored, as if the silver beneath the glass was starting to fade with age. The decay gave it a ghoulish appearance, like a haunted house mirror that magically displayed the dead. The wallpaper in one of the far corners was starting to peel away beneath the warped bulge of water damage—no doubt a roof leak that had spawned mold inside the walls.
Shutting off the recorder, Aaron shook his head and turned away, suddenly exhausted by the idea of fixing this place up. It seemed like an impossible task, the kind of thing only a masochist would take on, but he had little choice in the matter. The house was his, regardless of whether or not the state of Arkansas had failed to alert him of his inheritance for the past seventeen years.
We’re sorry, there must have been a glitch in the system.
Aaron had two options: sell the house or move in, and regardless of what he chose to do, fixing up the place was step number one.
He trekked back down the stairs in the paling light, the golden glow of sunset fading into an early evening purple. Stepping onto the front porch, he took a seat on the top stair, pushed his fingers through his hair, and breathed a sigh into the cicada hum that surrounded him. There was a lot of work that needed to be done. The dust needed to be cleared, the windows repaired and washed. The ghosts of his past extricated. He could only hope that once he started clearing the cobwebs here, his soul would be unshackled in kind. At least, that’s what Doc Jandreau had led him to believe, and Aaron
had
to believe. It was the only thing he had left.
Three
It was dark when Aaron jerked awake—so incredibly dark that he hardly knew where he was. The house shone in the moonlight like a silver ghost, its windows somehow darker than the rest of the night. Aaron pushed himself up to sit in the reclined driver’s seat, winced against the crick in his neck, and grimaced at the way that house seemed to glare at him from behind those three large oaks. He fished his phone out of the cup holder and checked the time: 5:25 a.m. He’d slept through the entire night. The Ativan he usually took for his anxiety had been forgotten in a bag still in the trunk, and the alcohol he drank to soothe his nerves was still packed away in the U-Haul hitched to the back of the car. Drawing his hand down his face, he gave a quiet laugh. The sun wouldn’t be up for an hour, but he still considered it his first success.
Plucking the camcorder from the passenger seat, he balanced it on the dashboard, grimaced at the awkwardness of the whole thing despite being alone, and pressed
RECORD
.
“Day one, Doc,” he told the blinking red light. “Still not sure about this whole thing; this place is a tomb.” He paused, shot a look through the windshield at the house he grew up in. “I don’t like the idea of sleeping in there. Just walking around inside feels, I don’t know…” He shook his head, frowning as he searched for the right word. “Inappropriate, I guess, like walking on someone’s grave. I doubt I’ll be able to handle it—I mean, maybe for the time being, but not to move in like I was considering. That whole idea was probably crazy, like you said. Except you didn’t call it crazy—you said it was ‘perfunctory’ or ‘impetuous’ or something really highbrow like that.” Aaron cracked a grin, but his smile faded as quickly as it came. “Evan might like it out here,” he continued, “but living here would be weird, at least without gutting the entire place, and t
hat would cost a fortune. I don’t know…” He glan
ced down to his hands, considering his words. “But at least I didn’t need any meds to sleep, and I haven’t touched the bottle. A step in the right direction. ‘Progress,’ as you’d say. And I think my appetite may be coming back, because I’m starving.” He leaned into the recorder and gave it a harried look—a look he was sure Doc Jandreau would question despite Aaron’s haggard expression being a joke. “Doc…”
He breathed into the lens. “I need pancakes. My mental health hangs in the balance.
”
After unhitching the rented cargo trailer from the back of his sedan, Aaron followed the intricate coils of streets into town, and ducked into the Blue Ox, a local diner that looked just as it had when he was a kid. The waitress that served him a steaming mug of bitter coffee smiled at first, but her cheerful demeanor quickly shifted to what Aaron could only assume was distrust. For a moment she looked as though she recognized him—impossible—or wanted to give him the small-town
we don’t take kindly to strangers
speech, but evidently she thought better of it and took his order instead.
A stack of chocolate chip pancakes later, Aaron tinkered with the camcorder, recording Ironwood’s backwoods Americana in quick, jarring snippets: the middle-aged waitress with her graying hair and her outdated Mayberry uniform, a couple of truckers sitting at the lunch counter guzzling black coffee and inhaling rubbery scrambled eggs. Had anyone asked him, Aaron would have sworn he was disturbed by the outdated décor and the small-town vibe; but the truth of it was, Edie had left him with a soft spot for vintage. The diner made him feel like he had been transported sixty years back in time, and that was somehow far more comforting than disconcerting.
Even the kid standing outside the diner window looked antiquated, with his scraggly dark mop of hair and his navy blue coveralls. Aaron raised an eyebrow at the boy in acknowledgment—the kid staring at him with a weirdly distant look on his face—but he didn’t respond. Raising a hand in hello, Aaron waited for the boy to reciprocate, but all the kid did was stare. His deadlocked stance was unnerving. Aaron glanced around the place to see if anyone else had noticed him, but nobody paid any mind. The waitress was refilling grungy white mugs, accidentally splashing coffee onto the counter when her gaze nervously flitted back to Aaron.
It’s the tattoos,
he told himself.
Probably why the kid is playing zombie outside as well.
He wasn’t sure why he was surprised at feeling out of place. Had he spotted his doppelganger wandering around Ironwood when he had lived here, his jaw would have probably hit the floor.
Aaron turned his attention back to the dark-haired boy, recalling the stories Uncle Fletcher used to tell about feral children living among the cedar and catalpa trees. The kid was still peering at him through the window, nearly glaring. It made Aaron nervous, and so he looked down to the plate in front of him that had yet to be cleared away. A moment later, he jumped despite himself; the kid slapped the palms of his hands hard against the glass. Aaron blinked in surprise as he watched the boy’s mouth curl up into a smirk before he turned and ran. Aaron looked back to the waitress and her consortium of long haulers, but the truckers hadn’t budged from their slouched positions, and the waitress didn’t seem to care about the loud bang that had rattled the window in its frame. She had better things to do than chase delinquents during her morning shift.
Aaron supposed he had better things to worry about as well, like where the hell to start when it came to cleaning up two decades of destruction. He nearly asked the waitress whether that kid made a habit of freaking out her customers when she dropped off his bill, but she fled his table faster than he could talk, returning to the truckers at the breakfast counter. One of the guys slid off a stool and pulled a cap over his hair. He wrapped his arms around the waitress and gave her a kiss on the cheek before shuffling outside with a wave of his hand. Aaron furrowed his eyebrows and paid his bill, then slid out of the booth and ducked into the parking lot. He caught the trucker climbing into the cab of a semi, wondering if Doc Jandreau would consider driving coast to coast therapeutic. Maybe Aaron would forget this whole thing and get a trucker’s license, leave his old life in the rearview mirror. But if he did that, the state would go after Evangeline for back taxes rather than him.
The house was his past. His responsibility. After he had Edie’s place handled, he could screw all and hit the road.
It was way too early to call water and power to request the house’s utilities be reinstated—they wouldn’t be open for another few hours, right along with the hardware store and the supermarket, so Aaron decided to take the opportunity to explore his old hometown. Maybe it was the fond memories of being a kid without any worries, but he was drawn to his old elementary school first.
Ironwood Elementary looked just the way he remembered it, save for one glaring detail: The windowless single-story redbrick building—rumored to have been designed by a prison architect—had the
elementary
part of its signage removed, left to simply read
IRONWOOD SCHOOL
with a disquieting gap between the words. The parking lot was abandoned, but that was to be expected; it was the dead of summer. Classes wouldn’t resume for at least another month. But there were fliers taped to the inside windows of the doors, and the sign out front read
S_AY _AFE THIS SU_MER!
spelled out in skewed marquee lettering. When Aaron pulled around the back to get a look at the playground, he spotted a football field where there had been nothing but soybeans, two yellow-painted field goals jutting up into the sky. The side of the building was painted in red and white—twelve-foot script reading
IRONWOOD WARRIORS
blazing bright against the bricks. The monkey bars Aaron remembered had been replaced. Where there had once been a triad of simple raw metal bars of varying heights, there was now a glossy red-and-white swing set attached to a covered spiral slide—the kind that heated up like an oven in the summer, so hot it could flay the skin right off your back. A couple of tetherball poles lined the far end of the playground, the balls removed to prevent theft, dingy white ropes swaying in the breeze. But it didn’t make sense that Ironwood would choose to send high school students to the elementary school rather than the other way around. Aaron’s curiosity getting the best of him, he doubled back to Ironwood High—a school he’d only attended for a few months before everything had changed.
What he found was a relic of a building so utterly covered in graffiti it easily rivaled the ruins of a dilapidated Detroit. Aaron turned the camera onto the high school’s fa
ç
ade, slowly panning across desecration that radiated animosity toward its middle-of-nowhere locale. Beneath what was left of the school’s signage, someone had spray painted the word
SUCKS!
with a giant exclamation point hammering the sentiment home. Another tag read
BURN ARKANSAS
and a third more eloquently declared:
THIS TOWN IS A GHOST
.
Aaron swallowed at that assertion, something about it making his stomach go sour. Those scrawled, paint-runny words felt heavier than they should have, as though they were speaking directly to him, translating to:
get out, go home, save yourself, run.
He took the advice and pulled away from the skeleton of a building that had, at one point in his life, been his school. He had only spent a couple of months in those halls when Ironwood became little more than a distant memory, a phantom of what it had once been, a ghost, just like the graffiti said.
The burger joint directly across the street from the defunct Ironwood High was still there, but the place he and the Holbrooks had frequented on Friday nights was now called Bennie’s Burgers rather than Fred’s. The joint radiated a sad sort of charm, holding out hope for a future that Ironwood couldn’t offer, let alone guarantee.
The Superette, which had been one of two grocery stores that served the community, had been converted into some sort of nameless club, its windows blacked out, oddly reminiscent of home. Back in Portland, he had started frequenting strip clubs to dull the pain, convincing himself that there was no better place to buy himself a dose of disease. He was lonely. He hated his life. And yet he still craved human contact. He blamed the Beatles. “All you need is love,” and if you couldn’t find love, a stripper in need of some extra cash would do in a pinch. Then again, the Beatles also claimed that “happiness is a warm gun.” He had taken that advice to heart as well, a never-been-used .45 caliber pistol lying in wait in one of a dozen moving boxes, safely tucked among his things.
The Dairy Queen where Fletcher took Aaron for ice cream was no longer a DQ, but some cheap knockoff. Whoever had bought the place had gutted the sign that had once shone proudly above the walk-up portico, leaving nothing but the iconic soft-serve cone. Dairy Queen’s white capital letters had been replaced by a close match to the original. Its new name—Mr. Ice Cream—blazed in the early morning sun.
There were a few buildings he didn’t recognize—a wonder that anyone would have the audacity to build in Ironwood at all: a coffee shop that boasted free Wi-Fi, a questionable-looking Chinese buffet, a mechanic’s shop that rotated tires for free with every oil change. Despite the businesses that had changed hands and changed names, the center of Ironwood looked just as it had in the early nineties.
The roundabout that caused more than its fair share of accidents was still there, a fifteen-foot-tall lumberjack carved out of pine posing for everyone and no one all at once. The giant held an ax over one shoulder, one boot propped up on a wood-carved steel beam that rested under his enormous boot. That lumberjack was the symbol of what Ironwood had once been—steel and lumber, both industries having left the area decades before. But the lumberjack kept smiling. Even when the local kids doused him in gasoline and set him on fire during Aaron’s fifth-grade year, the lumberjack continued to grin as flames licked up his sides. He was still tarnished and soot-black from feet to chest, and the platform he stood on continued to be surrounded by flowers. Edie had volunteered as the roundabout caretaker for a couple of springs, planting daisies and petunias along the lumberjack’s base. Whether people still volunteered for such a thing was a mystery, but someone had taken the time to plant pansies in Ironwood Warrior red and white around the giant’s blackened feet, as though doing so would invite good luck into a town that desperately needed it.
Aaron looped around until he reached the hardware store, called water and power to get the house back on the grid while he waited for the store to open, then weaved through the lanes in search of cleaning supplies that could put some sort of dent in the ruin that awaited him back home. He asked the cashier for the number of a local window replacement place, and then ventured to Banner Goods for provisions.
Along with the Blue Ox, Banner’s seemed to be the only place in town that was reminiscent of what it had been twenty years before. Bright sales signs for fresh fruit and bread decorated the windows, while a selection of potted plants and flowers flanked the sliding front doors. Eric’s grandpa had opened the place back in the fifties or sixties during Ironwood’s heyday, and after Grandpa Banner had had his run, Eric’s dad took over the store. Eric and Aaron had spent countless summer afternoons sitting up in Eric’s dad’s office, the title of “Store Manager” stamped on the door. They’d play Operation and Connect Four while Mr. Banner placed phone orders for produce and paper products. Eric had been proud of his dad owning Ironwood’s most successful business, gloating about how he’d run the place all on his own one day.
Aaron squinted at the store’s bright white façade as he crossed the parking lot on foot, wondering if Eric had changed his tune as he grew older, wondering whether it was possible for anyone in their right mind to
want
to stay in a place like this. Aaron hadn’t had the choice of whether to stay or go, but seeing Ironwood for what it was now, he couldn’t help but feel that his sudden departure had been a blessing in disguise.