Calliope: Voice of the Writers
The Great Novel Race 2008:
Feels Like Home
by Crystal Crawford
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Chapter 2: Familiar Yet Foreign
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Allison’s taxi pulled up to the curb just as the final arc of the sun sank beneath the horizon. She had forgotten how well the taxi drivers knew this small town, and her driver had no trouble finding the address she had given him, scribbled on a scrap of paper from the hospital’s front desk. Allison felt slightly ashamed for having to ask the nurse to look up her mother’s home address – what kind of daughter doesn’t know her own mother’s house number? – but she resolved not to let herself feel guilty just yet. There would be plenty of time for that in the days to come.
Allison stepped up onto the sidewalk, her carry-on bag draped over her shoulder, and the taxi driver quickly slipped out after her, hoisting her other suitcase from the backseat up over the ledge of the curb. He was an older man, the taxi driver, but surprisingly agile – he lifted the heavy case with no visible difficulty, then touched one finger to the tip of his right eyebrow and nodded, uttering a brisk “Goodnight,” and slid back into the cab. Allison turned to face the house, listening for the sound of the taxi cab pulling away, and allowing herself a moment or two for composure. It was a lovely house, a southern-style two-story with a wrap-around front porch, complete with rocking chair and bench swing, surrounded by a white picket fence bordered with flowers in deep pinks and bright purples. The house looked like something from a postcard, but it also emanated her mother’s personality, just the kind of home Allison could easily imagine her mother living in. Guilt flooded over Allison at the sight of this house, a house she had seen only in the photographs her mother had sent on holidays – foreign yet vaguely familiar. Allison had not visited it, not even once, in the four years since her mother had purchased it. What kind of daughter doesn’t visit her mother for over four years? She felt regret bubbling upward from her stomach but suppressed it – there would be plenty of time for that later.
Behind her, Allison heard the taxi cab finally pulling away - the driver must have hesitated for some reason – and then she heard it stop and approach again. She turned; the cab had barely made it to the end of the block and was slowly backing its way toward her. Thinking perhaps she had left something in the backseat, Allison waited until the car came to a stop in front of her, then approached the passenger-side window, which creaked its way down, the automatic-window system whining inside the door. Allison bent forward, lowering her eye level to that of the window, and the wrinkled face of the driver met her, leaning over across the seat.
“Ms. Johnson, right?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Allison. She thought about following it with a “how can I help you,” but left the “yes” lingering solitarily in the air instead.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Ms. Johnson, but I just couldn’t drive off without saying this to you.”
Allison wrinkled her eyebrows and tried to look interested but not anxious. “Yes?” she said again.
The driver locked eyes with her, his wrinkled face straightening with somberness. “Your mother was one of the finest women Westfield has ever known,” he said.
“Oh,” said Allison, not sure how to respond. She attempted to straighten her eyebrows from interest to agreement.
The driver turned his eyes down toward the seat, stroking the cushion with one finger. His voice trailed off. “One of the finest…”
Allison felt awkward and uncomfortable, trapped somewhere between gratitude for the driver’s praise of her mother and guilt in feeling as though she ought to know whatever story the driver was recounting in his mind; she ought to know why a man would say her mother was “one of the finest,” to be able to answer with a firm “Yes, she was,” and to recount a story of her own to prove it; but she knew scarcely anything about her mother’s recent life – she was little better than a stranger.
After a moment, the driver’s reverie broke and he went back to his duties, gripping the steering wheel with one hand and giving her a brisk wave with the other, and with a quick nod, turning to face the road. Allison heard the passenger-side window whining its way upward as the taxi cab slowly pulled away from the curb and back onto the street. She felt odd, a strange emotional paralysis, and she stood still for a moment, watching the cab reach the stop sign at the end of the block, waiting for the numbness to pass. When the cab had turned quietly out of sight, she turned back toward the house, closed one fist firmly around the handle of her suitcase, adjusted her carry-on bag across her shoulder, and made her way through the small white picket gate and up the flower-lined walkway toward the house, the suitcase’s wheels bumping along behind her.
The first thing to greet her as she entered the house was the smell of lavender. This took Allison by surprise; her mother had been in the hospital for over two weeks and the house had gone unused, so Allison had expected things to be a bit musty, for dust to have settled over all the surfaces, perhaps even for there to be a bag of forgotten garbage reeking from the kitchen. Instead, there was the soothing scent of lavender. The layout of the house and the arrangement of the furniture, however, were just what Allison had expected. The floor plan was open, spacious, with a wide foyer opening on the left and right to the living room and dining room, respectively, with the kitchen just visible ahead and to the right, accessible from both the dining room and the foyer. In the center of the foyer was a wooden staircase leading up to a balcony with several doors – the bedrooms, Allison guessed. To the left of the staircase, just past the living room, was a bathroom, and another closed door which Allison guessed to be a closet. The general feel of the house was one of welcoming spaciousness, with a high ceiling and the hardwood floors of the foyer transitioning seamlessly into the hardwood floors of the living room, dining room, and the short hallways on either side of the staircase. Placed here and there throughout the space were rugs of various colors, breaking up the monotonous sheen of the wood floors. In the foyer, against one wall, stood a sideboard decorated with candles and framed photographs, pictures of Allison and her mother, of Allison’s father, of other relatives, and even of people Allison didn’t recognize, newly made friends of her mother’s, she supposed. In fact, as Allison looked around, she realized the house was filled with photographs – on the walls in the hallway, on the tables and atop the piano in the living room, on shelves and surfaces in the dining room. Most of the photographs were of Allison and her mother and father, portraits and snapshots Allison recognized from her youth, but a surprising number of the pictures contained smiles foreign to Allison, groups of smiling people in pairs or trios or larger, arms around her mother, or standing near her mother, or some even without her mother in them at all, just groups of strange faces smiling back from dozens of decorative frames.
Allison dragged her suitcase up the stairs and looked for a spare bedroom; she didn’t want to disturb anything in her mother’s room just yet. The first door she opened was a storage room of sorts, with shelves of board games and a sewing table and some other various supplies. Beside this room was an open door leading to a small bathroom. The next door, though, revealed a bedroom, spare in furniture with just a queen-size bed, a nightstand, and a dresser. Allison supposed this must have been the guest room, and there was a bathroom attached, so it would serve nicely for her to stay in for a while. She set her suitcases down beside the bed and stepped back out into the hallway. She glanced down the stretch of balcony overlooking the foyer; there was one more unopened room upstairs, and Allison knew it must be her mother’s. Part of her wished to look in it, to see what her mother’s bedroom looked like, in what state she had left it, whether there was anything important to be taken care of. But another part of Allison, a bigger part, felt exhausted and worn, so she decided to leave the bedroom for another time, and trudged back downstairs to put on some coffee and relax a bit in the living room.
The coffee was easy to find, as was the coffee maker – her mother always left the coffee maker out on the counter, and the logic of her kitchen organization was such that the coffee was never too far removed from the maker. Allison put on some coffee and stood for a moment, enjoying the bubbling sound of the coffee percolating and the warm smell filling the kitchen, then walked through the dining room and across the foyer into the living room, sinking down into the large sofa and kicking up her feet to rest. She was exhausted in every way, having had little sleep on her flight and not yet having had time to process the emotions from the past few days. As she rested her head back onto the pillow, it occurred to her that there really was no point in starting a pot of coffee at this time of night; she really should be getting to sleep soon. She considered getting up to turn off the coffee maker, but her body felt so tired, and the couch so welcoming, and the sound and smell of the coffee were comforting. The moonlight slid in through the curtains of the living room window, cascading across and reflecting in the polished hardwood floors, and Allison rolled over on her side, face to the tall back of the sofa, and slipped quickly into sleep.
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