When I inherited my mother’s house, I was inheriting her mother’s house, and her mother’s before her.
It felt different than I remembered as a kid – bigger, emptier, colder… certainly dirtier. Reluctantly, I ascended the wooden stairs, ignoring their rhythmic groans of protest. As I stopped the flight, my hand lingered on the banister, and I found my eyes searching for things that had gone missing from my life since childhood. The floral wallpaper coiled inwards on segments of the wall like a wilting daffodil. Some sheets even having given up the pretense of adhesion and lay abandoned across the dark floor.
I turned into a bedroom on my left, pushing the door open with little resistance. The stale air hit me, and I instantly tasted the layer of dust lingering in the air as it fell like snow made from years of neglect. Inside, it was nearly empty, save for a sheetless twin-size bed pushed into the corner and a small dresser, missing handles and chips of pink-painted wood. I set my bag on the floor and took the lack of everything in. When I left, I knew that most of the things in my room would be tossed, but I thought she would have at least repurposed the space. Instead, it sat there as a shrine, abandoned years ago with my mother’s ambitions for me.
As I turned back to close the door behind me, my eyes fell on the door opposite the hall. The hair on my flesh stood, pairing with tiny bumps of alert skin.
Mom’s room.
As a kid, I had many restrictions related to my mom. I was not allowed to hug her or cry in front of her; I was not allowed to eat her special food; I was not allowed to wake her up when she was napping… and I was never, under any circumstances, to go inside her room.
The door was as shut as it had always been, but something in me felt nauseated by the knowledge that there was no more consequence to breaking that rule. My mom died – her ashes were downstairs, in the urn that I left on her china hutch. What could she do to me if I did go in there, haunt me for eternity? My laugh caught in my throat as I considered the woman I was mocking, and whose house I was mocking her in.
I closed the bedroom door and twisted the lock into place, perhaps a bit hastily. I tried to pay more attention to my breathing than to my rising anxiety. I willed myself to trust the process, and turned back towards the miserable bed that awaited me. With a quick rummage, I grabbed my evening pills and a bottle of water from my bag; drugs would do what my will could not. Within an hour, I was asleep.
When I woke up, it wasn’t yet morning – but something in my body felt wrong. Adrenaline worked its necromancy to awaken me and I jolted upright. The world around me was swimming, but I stood before I could orient myself properly and stumbled towards the closed door to the hallway.
I pulled the door option with an air of caution, and my eyes squinted at the intrusion of yellow light coming from the room across the hall.
Coming from the open doorway of my mother’s room, across the hall.
My mouth hung open, knuckles white on the doorknob in my hand. Slowly, silently, I pushed the door closed with baited breath. I willed discretion from the lock as I clicked it back into place, sealing myself back into the bedroom, before feeling my tension ease.
I never opened my bedroom door again.
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