No Way Home by Tyler Wetherall

Author:Tyler Wetherall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

17

Before our trip ended, Dad took us back to the Yellow House to see where I was born, just a short drive from where we were staying. It was as if he wanted us to see the beginning of the story. To show us, this was what it was all for. This was what we were running all that time to save.

When we arrived, the house had been painted gray and a big dog with glistening gums barked and growled and stopped us getting at our past. Dad pushed Caitlin forward. “You’re good with animals,” he said. Tentatively, she let the dog sniff her hand, and it promptly rolled over, panting heavily in the afternoon sun.

We walked up the drive, through the shadowy arches of the apple trees’ twisted branches, gnarled like an old man’s arthritic hands. We trespassed on the lives we could have led had Dad never got in trouble. Cait and I tugged at Dad’s sleeves, urging him back to the car, knowing how foolish it was to break the law now—of all times. But he wanted a closer look. “It’ll be fine,” he said, like he always had.

He wanted to peer through the windows to see what they had done to the rooms we had lived in. He pointed over to the lake, once home to two black swans, now present only in the glimmer of pond skaters, a shadow on the surface. He wrapped his fingers around the wire fence of the tennis court, overgrown with ivy, and his eyes animated memories I could not share. I stood close to him, listening eagerly to his silence, waiting for something to dislodge my infant amnesia, a glimpse of the house from a certain angle, perhaps, and I would see it suddenly through the blurry, colored orbs of a baby’s vision and hear the chirp of the ducklings Mom kept in the paddling pool—but nothing came. The opening pages of my story remained blank.

* * *

The gray house Dad took us to bears no resemblance to the Yellow House in my head. My Yellow House is inescapably beautiful, like a promise that can’t be broken. It has become a mythic place, a place we might go when we die. I built it on the backs of secondhand stories, told to me over the years, and then remembered and retold, so many times the truth has become lost like a fading photograph—curled at the corners with nostalgia and stacked in a box labeled photos #2.

My family moved into the Yellow House in 1981, shortly after Caitlin was born, in anticipation of more babies. Built in the sun-drenched wine country of northern Marin County, like Midas, everything the house touched turned to gold, from its lemon-yellow walls to the bleached-blond crowns of my brother and infant sister.

Mom spent her days barefoot and serene, padding around the eight acres of land with a pair of secateurs in her hand, watching Cait out of the corner of her eye to stop her shoveling dirt in her mouth.

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