Moving House

By Maggie Ruff

We pack up an entire house, my sister and I. She’s robotic, methodical, get it boxed up, give it away to the Salvation Army, throw it in the trash.

I sit in a rectangle of dust-free floor where Mom’s desk used to be, crying over an electric bill with Dad’s handwriting on the back and a twenty-year-old grocery store receipt.

The only keepsakes Laura wants are antiques; a chamber pot, curio cabinet, two Royal Doulton figurines. She lives in a townhouse she had built to her specifications.

“Nothing else here suits my décor.”

“What décor,” I ask, “sterile modernistic?” Her home reminds me of a hotel room, tasteful, but impersonal.

“I don’t want junk cluttering up the place, like this.” Laura waves a hand at the living room, dismantled, filled with boxes.

“It wasn’t always this way! Mom kept it nice.”

When Laura starts sorting the books crammed on built-in shelves, I tell her not to bother; I’m keeping all of them.

I buy a three-bedroom condo on the fourth floor of a secure building and fill it with as much as I can from the house. I sit on my parents’ couch now, watching their television and using their ancient VCR. Their pictures hang on my walls; the braided rug from the dining room covers the carpet in my dining room.

I do buy a new bed, Laura wants the frame of Mom & Dad’s for her guest room. She gets new mattresses though, the police took the top one to count the number of knife rips in it. I was conceived on that mattress, so was Laura.

“Melisse, will you stop? It’s like you’re enjoying making yourself miserable or something,” Laura says, after finding me sitting on the box spring, hugging Mom’s stuffed rabbit and panting from ulcer pains.

“Fuck off,” I say. “God, I wish I had a sister who’s human!” I catch the _expression on her face in the mirror over the bureau when she turns to leave. I want to stop her, but it feels like someone’s ripping my stomach apart.

My parents. Dad died ten years ago, of some gene mutation that made his body attack itself. He suffered for fifteen months before his heart gave up. Mom stayed on at the house, even though the neighborhood changed as the old families moved away. She had her garden, her escape. I was in New Hampshire, with another loser boyfriend when the call came from Laura. I filled my car with whatever would fit, put a seatbelt around Spanky the Guinea Pig’s cage, and drove straight home, the longest trip of my life.

Laura says my condo is a museum to the dead.

“It’s all the good memories from the home we grew up in,” I tell her. But on the mornings when I wake up at four o’clock and turn on every light, the ghosts are thick and the air like chalk dust.

I’m not even thirty yet; don’t feel experienced enough to deal with things like finding one of Moms socks lying in a box of towels. I put my hand inside to fill it out. It smells like her laundry detergent, and the bottom is stained, from too many trips out to the garden without shoes. I trace the brown imprint of her foot.

All that remained when I parked at the curb in front of the house were pictures of the crime scene and a tag end of yellow tape tied to the light beside the front door. The bastard who broke in hasn’t been caught yet. Our lives are dismantled; Laura’s and mine, and I don’t know how to put them together again.