Article by Skyler Williams Art by Jill Coleman
It was one of those windows that takes offense anytime you’re not looking out of it. It wrapped itself where two whole walls should’ve been. It stretched perhaps 12 feet from floor to ceiling. The mountains shone blue in the distance under the cloud-blotted sky. Nearer was the yard tilted at a forty-degree angle and enclosed by a wall of dense pines. Nearer still was a beech tree, at least I think it was a beech tree, just barely poking its way into view from the edge of the window. Its branches, though, reached across the landscape obstructing the background, adding to the tapestry. I still think of that view often. I couldn’t have been more than six the last time I saw it with my own eyes.
I spoke my first word staring out that window. The story was told to me so many times I can’t tell if I remember the moment or if it’s become implanted in my mind. My grandmother and I sat at the window staring out over the rolling blue green hills. Before I could talk, even before I could remember, we’d watch the birds come and go past the window. We’d watch them dance, eating from feeders hung from the branches of the beech tree. An occasional squirrel would make dashes for the feeder, much to Grandmother’s dismay. She’d hoot and holler and try her best to scare the squirrels away. It worked sometimes, didn’t others. The cardinal still stands out in my head, at least the image I conjured does. It landed softly on a branch of the beech tree in its full bright red commanding beauty. My grandma had turned her attention away from the window for a moment. I pointed and screamed “Cardinal, Cardinal.” I’m sure the words sounded broken and off as any child’s must, but that was my first, at least other than “dada” or “mama.”
Beneath and to the left of that window I had secured my hidey-hole in the bushes. When I was small enough, it was an obsession of mine to climb through the densest underbrush. I believed I’d find the portal to another world just like Alice. Despite never being successful in my quest, I never stopped dreaming it was a few feet away under the next thicket of doghobble. Where the portal was missing, I’d find little openings only a few feet high and a few feet wide, completely hidden among the bushes of mountain laurel, rhododendron, and doghobble. Nothing could touch me, and nothing could find me. The world outside didn’t exist. There was only dense greenery and dirt.
I created whole worlds shrouded in the bushes. I played with dinosaur toys and little army boys, creating stories with my fingertips. They’d battle and work together to fight even bigger monsters and threats. Most of all, the bushes were where I dodged my parents’ screaming. My first memories of the house are filled with the beauty of diverse species of trees and the woods in my backyard, but they’re equally filled with resonant sounds of screams that rang through the house in nights and days. The sounds were palpable. The house shook and quivered as if it too was trying to shrink away from the noise.
I heard the crash not too late one night while watching TV. It wasn’t the first nor the last I’d hear, but it is the one I remember. I couldn’t tell you what it was, probably a vase or glass or plate, but I knew it was shattering. It thundered in my eardrums echoing as the screaming only grew despite the walls and doors muffling the sound. Sometimes I think the house was trying to protect me, turning its hallway into a maze because finding whatever I was looking for was surely worse than being lost.
All the other memories of that time, when my innocence still lay untouched and gently sleeping, are vague, existing as small snippets of moments. I can’t seem to remember them in wholeness. The images sit in my head scattered like a splatter painting on canvas; time did not exist then. There is no before or after. There are just individual moments without connection to others.
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The light shone. It was midafternoon, I assume, on a weekend. The air that day seemed to rest heavy in the house. The sunlight felt choked and weakened.
“Your dad and I are going to be separated. We’re going to move into different houses.”
She seemed to be on the verge of tears. I didn’t understand at first, as most children probably wouldn’t. It is a lot to understand, the irreparable break in the foundations of childhood. To know the radical changes that would occur and the unknown of where they will lead. I remember, though, in that moment of breaking, feeling relief. The shouts would end, the smashing of things would cease, my hidey-hole may have no use, and the house may finally breathe again. The window would shine beautifully with afternoon sun basking the living room in an air of peace.
Not long after that, my mom moved out of the house and not much longer after her, my dad did too. That house on the hill lost its residents. My last memories were the garage stuffed with all my parents’ things slowly moving on to the truck, growing empty. I ran through the woods and the yard and the garden. Through the hallways of pine. I climbed the Japanese maple. Ran along the rose bushes on the boardwalk. Touched the swing I sat on with my grandmother. Ran up the hill with the terraced garden now barren and empty of vegetables. Finally, I made it into the house, empty and without a trace of us. I couldn’t imagine that people had lived there, that we had lived there. That once my parents had hosted gatherings and garden parties. That the whole extended family had gathered for Christmas around that large window, a fire burning in the hearth. But that fire had long grown cold.
I couldn’t imagine that anyone else would live there. I think the saddest thought was that no one would see that view of the mountains and rolling hills. The birds would no longer have the onlooking stare of me and my grandma. That it would all grow quiet and that warmth would fade and the whole hillside may grow into an eternal winter.
I too was afraid of that winter of muted love and warmth, not knowing what a broken family could begin to be. Not knowing where the next warmth would come from. My mom took me away. And like most things, the last image was through the rearview mirror.