The Graveyard Shift (9 page)

These Walls

It killed me when the Everton family left. They were my everything.

Jonathan and Gloria will forever be remembered smiling and dancing, the perfect coupling of gentleman and lady. Little Theodore will remain in my thoughts for the rest of my days, as well, with his crooked smile and warm heart. And of course there was sweet baby June, who used to stow fruit in her bed sheets for a midnight snack. She grew up too quickly, blossomed into a stunning beauty, and became the first lawyer of the Everton clan.

I watched them all grow, the adults and their children. They lived and loved, cried and laughed within my walls. And I helped them gladly whenever I could. They were my family and I had hoped against hope that legacy would keep future generations of Evertons here.

But, after nearly four decades of living with them, of births and birthday parties, of weddings and funerals, I was alone. The Everton family was gone forever. Last year, Gloria was eaten alive by pancreatic cancer, and within six months of her passing Jonathan followed suit. The doctors ruled his death as the result of a heart condition, and while they weren’t quite right, I knew they weren’t quite wrong either.

June and Theodore, no longer children and long since moved out with lives and children of their own, returned home for the funeral services. And when they did, they each brought their new families. For a brief time I was overjoyed at the prospect of once again hearing the pitter-patter of small Everton feet in the halls of Eastlake Manor, but I soon found out that none of them would be staying.

I prayed over June and Theodore, offered familiar rem
inders to them of games we had played together in their childhood. I tried to show them all the good yet left in this modest Victorian mansion. But they could not bear to face the constant memory of their parents’ lives that came with remaining in the home. And with that I could not disagree, knowing precisely how they felt. I didn’t argue, for I couldn’t convince them to stay. They didn’t even take the family wall portrait in the den, nor the furniture. Those were sold, along with the estate, to the bank.

How I
wish I could have spoken, to have shared my words with them. But I could not. Speech is an impossibility for me, for I
am
Eastlake Manor. My bones are strong, carefully crafted of pinewood framing and nails. My skin is lathe and plaster, painted proudly and smooth as silk. The wood-burning hearth in the great room is the heart that pumps my metaphorical blood. Boldly oversized sash windows are the eyes which allow me to look out into the world. And my spirit: it inhabits all. I was born of care and love, nurtured by family, and somehow have managed to continue living despite the frigid vacancy of my halls and hearth.

Teary
eyed and apologetic, June planted a For Sale sign outside the front gates. Always the stoic gentleman, Theodore watched somberly as his sister did the deed. Then, with their families loaded up in their respective automobiles, they waved goodbye. They were good children, the very best, in my opinion. And I don’t blame them for leaving me, for leaving the empty husk of this estate behind. There were no hard feelings. They gave me the happiest years of my life. I hope that wherever fate has led them the Everton clan is prospering greatly.

It is in our nature to adapt to change. But even so, when the Everton family left I was greatly saddened. More than once I contemplated ending it all, burning down these walls of plaster and sorrow with a quick flicker of the gas stove. But I never could muster up the courage. I spent two whole months wallowing in my own filth and depression. It was pitiful. Only when a man from the bank stopped to inspect the premises and threw a fit about its neglected upkeep was I forced to pry my
self from my lethargic state. The balding banker reduced the price on the For Sale sign before tearing off down the road in his fancy sports car. Out of shame I returned to work. If there was one thing I couldn’t afford, it was the attraction of the wrong sort of buyer.

After a few months more, my life did regain some form of routine. Watering the lawn, trimming the hedges, and cleaning the estate: all those things helped to keep purpose in my life once I was on my own. Occasionally the banker would return to assess the property, and each time he visited he left a little happier about the estate’s maintenance.
Eventually, and much to his surprise, he re-raised the home’s asking price.

Time passed as my solo routine became my life. My existence was a never ending work cycle, and one which reminded me of my departed family at every turn. But in the end, that was alright. All I had left in the world was time and memories.

The sun rose and fell, chased by the moon round and round without end. They had their routine and I had mine. And if I wasn’t exactly happy, deep in my heart I came the closest to peace that I’d ever been since the Evertons had left. Perhaps a year passed. Perhaps it was a decade.

And then one day a man came from the bank, a new fellow. His suit was of a peculiar cut I’d never seen before, very bland,
with a funny tie that was long and square, instead of a bow. But his smile was genuine and warm. I liked him immediately. I was surprised to find that, as he stepped through the cherry doorway and into the great foyer, he was not alone. Like ducklings, a young family filed into my foyer behind him. The family name was Dunkle.

Words cannot express how happy I was at that moment. I was overjoyed at the sight of not two, but three beautiful children standing beside their parents, admiring my handiwork. The mother and father, I learned, were named Peter and Alison. He was a tall, fire-bearded man who spoke with the intent of being heard. A defense attorney, I later found out, and a successful one at that.

Alison was tall as well, for a woman. Her hair was chestnut brown, tied up in a tail at the back of her head. She wore a dress that was inappropriately short, in my opinion, but I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. She seemed kindly, after all.

All three of the children were under the age of eleven. The eldest and youngest were both boys,
named Trenton and Tucker. And the middle child was an eight-year-old girl called Denise. I was excited to get to know them.

Was.

Right away, it was evident who ran the house: the children. While Peter was away (which was always) and Alison scrubbed my floors and made extravagant lunches, the children went on an unstoppable rampage of destruction. Trenton stomped mud onto my rugs. Tucker swung a wooden sword and painted scratches on my doors and walls. Denise ripped my wallpaper in chunks and threw it into the air like confetti.

When Alison found out, she sent them to their rooms to “think about what they’d done.” And so Trenton and Trucker scribbled crayon murals onto my hundred year old walls, and Denise ripped up the blinds. Apparently that was their way of thinking about it, by adding to the chaos.

Alison called it all “non-violent parenting”—something she relayed to a friend on the telephone in a huff of exhaustion—because she didn’t believe in disciplining her children and upsetting them. What she failed to realize, of course, was how much it was upsetting me.

Peter would come home on weekends and lazily buff out a few scratches or replace old, broken window shutters with cheap, ugly, plastic blinds. And then he’d go back to the office on Monday and the three children would paint more scratches over the old, leave new messes where messes had never been before, and tarnish more of my once pristine interior.

One day, I’d had enough. I decided that if Alison wasn’t going to do anything about it, I would.

It started when Tucker saw Alison’s back turned and he pulled out the wooden sword he’d used on me many times before. He crept immediately to the study, where he had been told repeatedly not to go. I saw the glint in his eye as he spied a lamp left behind on Jonathan Everton’s old desk, a lamp that Gloria Everton had carefully picked out for her husband some thirty years ago. All Tucker saw, however, was a target.

I warned him to stop. The carpet bunched up beneath his feet and he stumbled, bracing himself on the desk. He then glanced around the room, expecting to see someone. I assume he would have stopped and returned to his room, had he known he really was being watched. But he didn’t, and so he raised his wooden sword with that devious glint bubbling back up in his terrible little eyes.

And with an anger I’d not felt before, I swept the lamp high up off the desk and out of his path. The wooden sword instead carved a deep scratch into Jonathan’s writing desk, and my anger continued to soar. Beside the desk was Peter’s library, row after row of books sewn into a bookshelf; I made them rain down on Tucker like a hailstorm, and I assure you that as a lawyer, Peter’s books were anything but small.

In all my years I’ve never heard a child scream that loud.

When Tucker crumbled into his mother’s arms in a flurry of tears, she warned him about going into the study when he had been told not to. She assumed that he had been swinging his sword and knocked the books down on himself. As always, she sent him to his room, where he ripped his own books to shreds and tossed the paper
, in piles, all across his room. No real lesson was learned.

I felt good,
however. I felt vindicated. I knew these monsters didn’t respect me, and so I didn’t respect them. I didn’t feel bad when Denise went to shred more of my wallpaper and the door slammed behind her, startling her so badly that she ran back to her room in tears. I felt no remorse when Trenton threw a baseball through one of my windows, and I brought the window frame crashing down into the sill mere inches from his face as he came closer to inspect. And I felt pure joy when Trenton dared walk back into my study with his wooden sword, eyeing Jonathan’s lamp, and a single book on the bookshelf wiggled menacingly, as if to say ‘don’t you dare.’

He fled so fast he didn’t even close the door behind him.

Soon the children were telling Peter and Alison that I was haunted, but of course, as parents, they thought their children were just overreacting. By then I had come to hate them all—children and parents alike—and I knew that the only way to evict them as a whole would be to scare off Peter and Alison.

I toyed with Alison by opening random doors while the kids were at school, even if those doors were locked.
I disconnected her phone calls; I unplugged her vacuum and iron in the middle of using them; and when she stepped away, I even raised the temperature on the stove until the food she was cooking was burnt and ruined. This left her frustrated but not scared. She thought she was going insane, but didn’t question the house. She questioned only herself.

Peter, of course, was much easier to break. I unplugged his alarm clock and frequently made him late for work. I stopped running the refrigerator so the lunch he took to work would be spoiled. I even shuffled up his important work documents, and often threw them in the trash on mornings before meetings with important clients.

Soon, the family was livid… but not with me. With each other. Their snappiness toward one another left the children bitter and angry, with no one to take out their aggressions on but each other. They fought loudly, and often. Rather than scratch and dent my walls they were now filling them with the sounds of yelling and crying, of hurtful things said in anger, and I’d had enough of it.

One night Peter was awakened by the wind. The window was open, and he hadn’t remembered opening it, because he hadn’t. I had. And as he approached the window, asking himself this very question—hadn’t he closed it before bed?—I saw the resentment in his eyes.

“I wish I’d never bought this piece of shit house,” he mumbled, as he rested his hands on the windowsill.

And without second thought, I brought the window down
on all ten fingers so hard the neighbors said they could hear his scream from five blocks away.

When the moving trucks came the next day, Peter watched with a scowl (and two bandaged hands) as the team of movers hauled away his furniture and law books. His entire horrible family was gone by noon. And although the For Sale sign was once again planted in the drive, my heart was lightened to witness their departure.

I had done that, had succeeded in forcing them out of me. If only Gloria Everton had been able to do the same with her cancer, perhaps things would have been different. But she had not, and I told myself not to dwell on once future dreams now broken. Things had turned out the way they were going to turn out and the sooner I came to terms with that, the better.

I had just discovered something about myself. With Peter and Alison
Dunkle gone, headed to parts unknown with their rotten brood, I realized that I was capable of doing more than just self-maintenance and upkeep. I was capable of protecting myself. It was an unexpected revelation, given that I had spent my entire life with the Evertons as a silent helper, a mortar-winged guardian angel of sorts. Never before had I ever imagined hurting someone living within my walls. With my old family, such an act was unthinkable. But, as I unfortunately came to realize through experience, there would never be another family like the Evertons.

Within two months another family took ownership and residence of Eastlake Manor. In all fairness, there was nothing particularly bad about their manners, but I couldn’t let them stay. They were foreigners, and their native tongue droned endlessly through me like buzzing bees. It drove me to madness within two days. Coming from a superstitious culture, they were gone in three.