At seventeen I
lived in a haunted house, but there were no ghosts.
It was the
nineties, and the economy had gone to shit. So had my parents’ marriage.
We lived in a
mini-mansion in an expensive horsey community in Southern California; from our
backyard pool, I could hear the horses whinny down at the equestrian center and
listen to the hollow pong of the
tennis balls on the courts nearby.
When my mother
left, she took with her my two younger siblings, both of the dogs, and almost
all the furniture. She left my father to try to sell the place, gutted and
hollow. I stayed with him.
One day I moved my
stuff out of my bedroom and into the empty formal living room. It didn’t have a
door, but it was so big, and I
thought it would be cool—funny—to make it my room. I had the entire downstairs
to myself. My dad’s bedroom was upstairs, at the end of the hallway. When he
was upstairs and I was downstairs, I couldn’t even tell he was home. Most
mornings, my dad left a twenty-dollar bill on the kitchen counter, and sometimes
that would be all I saw of him for the day—his money.
It echoed, the
house.
My best friend
Shayna and I rifled through my dad’s pockets and drawers and found his stash,
smoked it out back on the swing set. We wandered stoned through the empty
rooms, turning cartwheels and talking about how cool it was—the space, the
freedom. The weed.
Eventually Shayna
would go home to her family for dinner and I would microwave something or
decide I didn’t need to eat anyway because it would be good to lose a couple of
pounds, to touch back down under one hundred and ten. I would flip through
books or turn on the television for company. I would visit my little sister’s
and brother’s bedrooms. I’d stare at the indentations in the carpet, where
their furniture once had been.
I’d listen for the
tinkle of dog tags, for claws against the marble floor in the foyer, for
laughter or bickering or anything. That
was what haunted me, when I was seventeen—the specter of my loneliness. The
weight of absence. And in the vast space of it, I tried to become a ghost,
starving the fat from my bones, floating my thoughts away on exhalations of
smoke. I dared myself to disappear, too.
