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“Well,” Claire said as she stood in the middle of the graying living room, eyeing the mummified yucca standing by the kitchen door, “It certainly is something.”
“It’s awful is what it is,” Leon said, shutting the door with enough force for the glass to vibrate in its frame. He had seemed to be on edge since they started the drive, but now he was positively boiling; the uncharacteristic behavior puzzled Claire and fanned her curiosity in equal measure.
“Don’t be like that! It was home sweet home for… How many years?”
“It was never a home, just a house with my aunt in it.”
So, she ran into a wall yet again. It did not deter her. Instead she began to march up the stairs without a sound, all the noise swallowed up by the thick, green and yellow carpet; although Claire had an inkling that once upon a time, the yellow was white. Leon trailed after her with all the enthusiasm of a dog at a vet. His sour mood had begun with the call from his aunt’s lawyer. At first, she thought it was grief, but evidently, there was more to the story than he let on.
On a whim, she opened the first door on the right. The room was in severe need of deep cleaning, what with the smell of mildew floating in the air and the thick layer of dust covering a small desk. She moved over to the blinds. The exploding sunlight illuminated Leon hovering in the doorway like a vampire, waiting for permission to enter.
“I just don’t understand why you didn’t tell me,” she said.
Leon shrugged. “What difference would it have made? The woman hated my guts. We were never going to be one happy family.”
“And yet, she left everything to you.”
“The woman kept her money in a pillowcase, prayed to God instead of going to a hospital, and blamed the police for my mother’s death. I guess she thought she’s outsmarting the system somehow.”
“Your mom’s death? That doesn’t make sense.”
“She believed that if they had intervened sooner, she’d have lived.” He pushed a moldy box to the side, grimacing when it toppled over to reveal pristine boy’s shirts in various sizes. “You could never convince good old Eva that my mother was the mastermind of her own death.”
“Still. She was your aunt. She took you in. She must have loved you.”
“She told me that I’ll end up just like my dad when I knocked down a vase while vacuuming. I was nine.”
She didn’t just manage to kick the hornet’s nest, she managed to fall face-first into it.
Congratulations, Claire. You know that not all families are alike, so why don’t you learn to sometimes think before speaking?
“That’s… Horrible. I’m so sorry, I never should have assumed. It’s just… You never really talk about your family and I… I guess want to know that part of you as well.”
Leon looked at his boots long enough for her to think that he’ll call off the engagement there and then. Something about this place, the whole charade since the phone call—the inspection of the body, the burial, accepting condolences (the congregation seemed to have a liking for her; although many were even more curious about what happened to Leon? Why did he no longer come around? Does he still keep faith?), the reading of the will—rubbed him the wrong way, piling on weights invisible to her; and he might have reached his breaking point.
Her nosiness will be her undoing, Chris always warned her.
Leon began to speak in a low voice, the words pouring out almost too fast for her to catch. “My dad got involved with a gang. Worked his way up to management, but mom thought he’s not dreaming big enough. Next thing I know they are screaming and I’m hiding under the floorboards between dead mice and bags of money.” His lips pressed into a tight line, tracing a forgotten vinyl on a record player. “I loved my parents, despite their shortcomings, and thought if I love them right, they’ll reciprocate. I didn’t know what they’d been up to at the time. Perhaps I could have figured out if I had paid attention, but they were my heroes, you know? Well, Eva made sure to tell me what was what the first chance she got.”
“When you came to live here.”
“Yeah.” He smiled without any warmth to it. “This was my room, actually. For ten fun-filled years.”
She took another look around in the room, at the peeling plain white ingrain wallpaper, the familiar green carpet (the white was more brownish-gray than yellow in here) and at the small desk, suitable for a ten-year old perhaps, but not a teenager.
He was still not big on decorating, but the room made her throat constrict with sadness.
“I can’t really imagine you here,” Claire said, trying to keep her tone light.
“She hated personal touches. Thought them self-indulgent, a sign of vanity.” He pointed at a torn point on the wallpaper, a piece of scotch tape still clinging to it. “I put up one poster. I don’t even remember what it was, but it got me a night in the basement then a trip to the priest to confess my sins. She made me keep the tape there to remember that this world is only an illusion. A temporary tattoo got me ten Hail Marys while she tested her belt on my back. When she saw me kiss a girl? I ate the Word of God for dinner for a month.” His knuckles whitened as he clenched his fist. “My loving aunt. Wonder what she thinks now, looking down from her Heaven. Thank God that's not where I'm headed.”
She didn’t like this place, not one bit, from the basement she hasn’t even seen to the rooftop the aunt had had redone two years ago. Not the trees in the yard or the stained couch in the living room.
But mostly she hated what the place was doing to Leon. He seemed more collected standing in a circle of monsters than in his old room, with a blank look on his face.
“So, what do you want to do?”
“Dunno. Burn it all, knock it down? Although,” he exhaled slowly, looking at the car passing outside, “I told you, it was not a home. But perhaps we can use it to make our own.”
“What are you thinking?” Apprehension was beating at her chest. Surely, he didn’t mean for them to live there? After everything he just shared?
He crossed the room, his boots making a trail in the decades of dust. “Well, from what the first realtor told me, the area is highly sought after. The second could not stop talking about how if we fitted it with a pool and had it cleaned, even in this state it’d go for a lot. Let the buyers worry about the rest.”
“I think,” she said, pulling him to herself by the waist, “That’s a wonderful idea.”