"Halfway House" by Zachery Morris
Photo Credit: Daryan Shamkhali, obtained and licensed through Unsplash
Start with the house. It’s technically a second-floor apartment tucked inside a four-story brownstone, but they only call it the house: I’ll meet you at the house; damn, I forgot my keys back at the house.
For a long time she couldn’t understand why people called them brownstones when theirs was made of brick the color of red wine. But now you can’t see the brick—the house is smothered in English ivy, a swath of green and green and green and windows and a door.
*
The first time the new landlord comes R. is home from college for her birthday.
She doesn’t like birthdays and doesn’t have friends left in the neighborhood so it’s just mother, father, aunt huddled around her in the fluorescent-lit windowless kitchen, homemade carrot cake she baked herself in front of them on the kitchen table, her brother sulking in the corner with his phone and the cat.
They’ve missed R.’s cooking. Her mother can’t cook to save a life, her father doesn’t eat unless forced, her aunt tries desperately but is decent at best, and the thought of her brother leaving his room long enough to cook a meal is a back-pocket punchline. She cooks relentlessly when she comes home, the house conceding the dull fog of cleaning solution to jerk seasoning on fire, rock salt and cinnamon, ground beef roused with sage and rosemary. Her grandmother taught her to cook. Get it just right and you’re in control for life, she’d whispered above the din of the gas stove.
Her grandmother died minutes before her eleventh birthday party, little R. finding the body crumpled into the corner of the small bedroom the two of them shared. It was her first time meeting death face to face.
Her grief feels like sunlight, illuminating everything around her, its source too overwhelming to stare down straight on.
Shortly afterward her aunt urged her parents to send her to therapy, warning that the consequences of discovering the body would linger. Her father was too quietly distraught by the death of his mother to comment. Her mother asked what the point of therapy was: tell me why the hell would anyone pay to give up good gossip to a white person you don’t even know.
She ended up fine, except now she’s thought about death every single day for the last nine years. She sits alone in the campus library wondering how anyone can fret over counting calories, over exams, over something as simple as sex, when everyone and everything everywhere is going to die, including her. Live, live, live, and then.
Her grief feels like sunlight, illuminating everything around her, its source too overwhelming to stare down straight on. She wonders if her perception of the world is so far deviated from the norm that she’ll never be able to pull it back to the center. The center of what? She thinks there must be another name for this besides depression.
The house is warm. Its straightforwardness is intoxicating. Ivy, windows, front door, living room, one bedroom divided into three, fight over one bathroom, low ceilings with the Christmas tree bent over at the top, light pouring through the front, hospital white light in the kitchen in the middle, roughshod carpet, peeling linoleum, couch sheathed in plastic wrap, too-big TV, books everywhere, plants everywhere. She knows how to exist here. Except months away at school are long enough for her to come back and recognize a new line on her mother’s forehead, the added touch of effort it takes her father to walk down the metal staircase out back to the garden. She doesn’t know how to unsee these private acts of violence.
They’re singing happy birthday and she wonders who in the room will die first, how the rest will react in each permutation of possibility. But when she’s home she can remember to pause it long enough to hear their tragic attempt at harmony, her mother’s effortless vibrato, her father’s affectionate mumble, a near lip-sync from her self-conscious aunt, a distracted mutter from her brother. She’d give up every dollar she’ll ever earn to possess this moment on tap, accessible to her at will for the rest of time.
They forced her to let them decorate the cake while she was in the living room, heaping on pink frosting, sugar and cornstarch sprinkles, twenty candles dripping white wax into the dyed sugar. R. knows the cake was meant for a delicate homemade cream cheese icing, but she feigns pleasant surprise. She thinks the surprise might be genuine. Wish for something.
Her aunt leans in to whisper, she can feel her grinning: sis, you’re almost a grown woman—put that wish to work. She realizes her father has turned out the kitchen light for the candles. She wonders if she should be concerned that she didn’t notice sooner. Her mother is more frugal but her father would sooner have them live in total darkness than add a cent to the electric bill. That’s why he loves the front of the house—light streaming in for nary a cent.
She contemplates wishing that no one in the kitchen with her would ever die, as a private political statement. They’re interrupted by a knock at the front door.
Her father switches on the light.
She does not yet have a proper name for that feeling, the way the man has looked at and past her, but she knows the texture of it intimately.
The kitchen sits in the middle of the house, living room in the front, the three slender bedrooms and the bathroom stuffed in the back. They wait a moment for her aunt to go back and hide in the bathroom. Then her father wordlessly permits her to make her way to the front door.
R. wonders pointlessly if her family is surprising her with additional guests for the cake cutting, the way neighbors used to pour in and out of the house when she was a child. Instead she opens the door to a tall, narrow man she has never seen before. He looks at her quietly for seconds that start to stretch until she feels her father’s presence behind her.
She does not yet have a proper name for that feeling, the way the man has looked at and past her, but she knows the texture of it intimately. She steps aside.
The man extends a hand to be shaken. The outdated custom makes her smile despite herself. Her father does not reciprocate. Right—right, sorry, the man says. He introduces himself with a name she does not yet know she’ll come to hate. He tells them that their landlord has died of a heart attack. Her father’s expression tells her what to feel before she can realize it herself.
Right, it’s awful—sorry, he continues. She sees her mother in the periphery, peering from the entryway to the kitchen. So anyway, right, I’ll actually need you guys out of here by the end of next month—end of May.
When the man leaves and her father closes the door she realizes that her mother has dropped a plastic cup filled with sangria on the floor, it seeps into the carpet like an ancient bloodstain. Let’s cut your cake, her father instructs. When they return to the kitchen she realizes that her brother has already cut out a jagged slice and spirited back to his room.
*
The man comes the second time when she is in the garden. They call the backyard the garden. A plot of land fifteen feet wide, forty feet long, enclosed by a pale brown fence.
When the other apartments were still inhabited, the communal garden drew them all toward itself at every hour of the summer months. In the absence of nearby parks it gained a muted mythic status, the four homes of the brownstone gathering for breakfast, afternoon cocktails, makeshift birthday parties, informal community meetings, urgent gossip sessions, card games equal parts soft and vicious, impromptu barbecues on the slab of concrete jutting out from the house.
As a girl, R. commandeered the grill under her father’s quiet watch, preparing decadent whole fish, spiced corn on the cob, lightly bloodied burgers with brioche buns soaked in honey butter. Her family is the last one left.
When her parents moved in twenty-three years prior, the garden was a single tree and a sheet of soil, scattered with a constellation of weeds and cigarettes. Now it is grass grown wild, cut every few years and strewn with flowers and weeds that have become indistinguishable, presided over by the mammoth sugar maple planted well before the neighborhood was given its boundaries, its new European name.
When R. was young her grandmother told her that the garden was a mirror of the island they had come from before R. was born. Everything was alive there, her grandmother would repeat when she sat outside on the plastic lawn chair, R. in the grass at her ankles.
Her grandmother told her the things she wasn’t supposed to hear. Told her there were hauntings on the island, spirits that lingered longer there than they did in other nations.
R. had never been to the island, would never go now that the world was shutting its gates one by one. As a child, she couldn’t understand why her aunt, moving every few months from house to house, hiding in the bathroom when strangers came, was so terrified of being forced to go back somewhere that was supposed to be so beautiful.
Her grandmother told her the things she wasn’t supposed to hear. Told her there were hauntings on the island, spirits that lingered longer there than they did in other nations. Shortly after she died, R. told her parents that she had seen her grandmother pass through the house on occasion, that once in a while she suddenly smelled the fullness of her cooking though no one was in the kitchen. Her father would respond with a silent smile, but her mother was superstitious, told her never to mention it again, and to never speak ill of the dead. R. could no longer remember if she had truly seen her grandmother or not. But now she wondered, if her grandmother did linger, would she depart the house when they did? They have three days left.
R. rushed back to the house after final exams, ready to resist, to fight, to chain herself to the stove for all of summer vacation, whatever it would take to keep the house. Instead she returned to the absence of feeling. She saw in her parents, her brother, not fear, not anger, not sadness. Only the smallest of necessary movements. An infrequent stream of remaining friends and neighbors stopped by to bid farewells, cardboard boxes manifested to swallow books and burnt pans and photographs.
Her aunt left a month ago, the morning after her birthday. The resignation of it all, the numbness stuns her. The luxury of her detachment, her hyperawareness of looming pain, becomes daunting to see refracted through her parents.
They visited a pro bono attorney while she was away finishing the semester, received no guidance, no hope. We thought we’d only get to stay here two years, not two decades, her mother says. She advised R. to read, to walk, to start packing. It felt like a small death, all of them shrinking into themselves and disappearing before it was time, well before life gave them no choice but to do so.
When she was young, when she had barely just learned to read, her grandmother urged her to go far away for school when the time came. Run away, see everything, do everything, talk to everyone, she’d insisted. R. had obeyed, gone to a new state with classmates who were the children of royalty, a roommate who was a movie star, a boy whose family home had a kitchen bigger than her whole house. Her grandmother’s admonition had been acceptable, had felt necessary when she had the house to return to. The strength of its sameness. Now it all felt like indulgence. But it doesn’t matter in the end, they’ll all die anyway.
The book is about trees, which makes it about death. The sugar maple will outlive them all, and then it will die too.
R. had always imagined each of their respective wakes, the post-funeral buffets, and the baby showers, the graduation parties, the weddings being held in the garden, always in the summer. The unmooring of the future sweeps before her in real time, measured by real estate investments and apartment vacancy listings. She lies in the grass below the maple tree, realizing she’s read the same paragraph of her book seven times in a row.
The book is about trees, which makes it about death. The sugar maple will outlive them all, and then it will die too. The cat twists its way through the knot of limbs above her. She never understands how it has free rein to run away yet never ventures beyond the house, the garden, even as it ascends the tree and witnesses the infinite expanse of backyard Brooklyn beyond it. She hears a shout.
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, what the hell, you can’t be out here. She sits up, pollen in her hair. The landlord emerges from the back of the garden apartment. The backyard belongs to this unit only, it’s private property, he hisses.
She stands, watches him, but does not respond. He now sees her more fully than he did the first time they met. You gotta go back upstairs, he says. I got someone coming to see this unit in ten minutes, come on.
She hears her brother’s voice echo from above. What’s going on? What’s he saying to you? She tells her brother that she’s fine, kneels down to pick up her book. Her brother winds his way down the twisted, creaking metal staircase anyway. The landlord is pecking away at his phone, willing her departure without words.
This is our backyard, we still live here, her brother says.
No, no it’s not, the landlord says. I’m going to call the police literally right now if you don’t get out.
Her brother’s is always the hardest death for her to picture. The length of limbs, the blood she can see pumping into his temples, into the hands he now curls into fists at his sides. He feels endless in a way that she is not, that her parents may have been briefly long before. R. tells her brother to come upstairs with her.
We’re in our yard and you can call whoever you want, we’re not leaving, her brother says.
The landlord holds the phone to his ear, begins to speak. With the passage of a half-second, with the vision of one, two, three police officers streaming in through the garden apartment, past the grill, past the concrete toward them, her brother’s death is now for a moment the easiest for her to picture—in the way he towers above her, the summered darkness of his legs, arms, face. It’s a death mask.
She tells the landlord they’re leaving. Her brother pauses but follows behind her. The cat remains in the tree.
The landlord hangs up his phone, returns to the garden apartment.
*
The landlord returns for the third and final time three days later on the last day of May to watch them leave, to start tearing apart the house before they’ve driven away.
R. never craves celebration or ceremony or ritual. It always feel tainted by definition, a pointless rebuke or amplification of the futility stalking them all. Except, as they prepare to depart, as they start to disappear, she craves it more than ever. A birthday cake, a sharing of stories, a demarcation. She wants to cook a final meal, bear witness to ephemera in its only acceptable form.
When they would sit in the garden her grandmother told her that the island they came from is the most beautiful place in the world.
Boxes falling into one another, walls stripped bare. The scars of the house are exposed—scratched walls, ripped carpet, burnt stove.
When they would sit in the garden her grandmother told her that the island they came from is the most beautiful place in the world. She’d leaned down out of the lawn chair to reach R.’s ear: I’ll never see it again as long as I live.
Last box, door closed. R. senses a river of grief, pain, displacement starting long before she existed, flowing long after she perishes. She watches her mother, father, brother wading in the middle of it, stuffing their rusted truck full of boxes. They move, keep moving. The smallest of necessary movements.
*
End with the house. Swallowed in ivy, emptied out to be gutted and refilled. She sees the pain that they leave behind, the pain ahead of them, hers her grandmother’s her mother’s her father’s her brother’s her aunt’s her landlord’s yours and mine. She leaves a piece of it at the house.
Zachery Morris lives in Brooklyn, where he works as a human rights lawyer and in his spare time writes short stories about food, ambivalence, and displacement.