Chapter 4 - The Eviction of the Ghost
The lock on my bedroom door had never had a key. Dad had removed the cylinder with a hole saw when I was fourteen, leaving an open circle through the wood so anyone passing down the hall could see if I was studying, sleeping, or staring at the wall.
Two days after the arrest, I returned to Elm Street with a police escort.
Deputy Ross stood on the front lawn, his arms crossed over his tactical vest, while an empty cargo van I had rented with forty dollars from an emergency victim’s assistance voucher sat idling at the curb.
Kyle was sitting on the front porch steps, wearing his sunglasses, an energy drink between his thighs. When he saw me step out of the van, he didn't stand up. He just spat into the grass.
"You’re really doing this, huh?" he yelled over the sound of the van’s engine. "You really think you’re coming in here after what you did to Dad?"
"Step aside, son," Deputy Ross said, walking up the driveway with his thumb hooked in his belt. "Ms. Miller has a court-ordered civil standby to retrieve her essential personal property, legal documents, and work tools. If you interfere, I’m taking you back to the county lockup before your mother can finish breakfast."
Kyle sneered, but he stood up and backed toward the garage door, muttering under his breath.
The house smelled different. It didn't smell like burnt butter or stale roast anymore; it smelled sour, like trash that had sat in the sun too long. Mom was standing in the kitchen, her arms folded across her chest, her face tight and gray. She didn't have her makeup on. Without the penciled eyebrows, she looked twenty years older, her eyes small and sunken into her skull.
"You're killing your father," she said as I walked past the kitchen archway. She didn't look at my swollen face. She didn't look at the bandage. "He had a hypertensive episode in the infirmary last night. The lawyer says he could have a stroke before the preliminary hearing."
"Then he shouldn't have thrown the punch, Mom," I said through my teeth.
"He was stressed!" she hissed, taking a step toward me before catching sight of Deputy Ross standing by the front door. She stopped, her voice dropping to a vicious whisper. "He gave you a roof! He gave you food! Who took care of you when you had pneumonia at twelve? We took care of you! And you repay him by digging through our files like a thief in the night?"
I didn't answer. I walked straight down the narrow hallway to the small room at the end.
The room had already been ransacked.
My mattress was flipped off the box spring. The drawers of my cheap laminate dresser were pulled out and emptied onto the floor. My winter coats, my work shoes, my old college textbooks from the two semesters I managed to attend before Dad told me women didn't need business degrees—everything had been kicked into a pile in the center of the rug.
On top of the pile, someone had dumped an open jar of used motor oil.
The dark, viscous sludge was soaking through the pages of my notebooks, ruining the fabric of my clothes, filling the room with the sharp, chemical stench of petroleum.
Behind me, Kyle laughed from the hallway. "Looks like you had a leak, sis. Terrible shame."
Deputy Ross took one step into the room, looked at the black pool spreading across the rug, and reached for his shoulder radio. "Station, this is Unit Four. I need a secondary patrol unit at the Elm Street address. We have intentional criminal mischief and violation of a temporary restraining order in progress."
Kyle’s smirk vanished. "Whoa, wait a second! That was like that when we got home! She did that herself to frame us!"
"You're an idiot, Kyle," Ross said, not even looking back at him. "You’ve got oil on the toes of your work boots right now."
I didn't look at Kyle, and I didn't look at the ruined clothes.
I walked straight to the closet. In the back corner, behind an old plastic laundry hamper that smelled of mildew, there was a low baseboard panel that had come loose fifteen years ago when the foundation settled. I knelt down, reached my arm into the hollow wall space until the rough fiberglass insulation scratched my forearm, and pulled out a small, flat metal case.
It was my grandfather’s tackle box.
Inside wasn't money. It wasn't jewelry.
It was my birth certificate. My original Social Security card that my grandmother had given me on my sixteenth birthday before she passed away. And three small, leather-bound diaries filled with every single date, dollar amount, and physical altercation that had occurred in that house since I was seventeen years old.
I stood up, tucked the metal case under my arm, and looked at my mother standing in the doorway.
"You always said I was useless," I told her, my voice coming out clear and level despite the wire brackets holding my teeth together. "You were right about one thing. I was useless to you for anything other than a signature. But that part’s over."
I walked down the hall, past the kitchen where the coffee maker was cold, past the living room where Kyle’s big-screen television sat like an altar to stolen money, and out into the clean, afternoon air.
As I loaded the three salvageable boxes into the back of the rented van, my mother’s voice followed me from the front porch, shrill and breaking against the quiet of the neighborhood.
May you like
"You won't survive three months out there!" she screamed, her hands clutching the porch railing. "You have no credit! You have no money! Nobody’s going to hire a girl who puts her own father in jail! You’ll come crawling back on your knees!"
I climbed into the driver’s seat, pulled the door shut, and turned the key. The engine caught with a low, steady rumble that drowned out the rest of her words.
