The A Street house

The A street house... 

The house on A street was the first proper house my partner and I had rented together, and I moved there newly pregnant. I ran a daycare as my home business, a role that seemed to suit our phase in life, so we set about making a picket fence around the place. We smuggled our favorite hen into the yard and tried to remain blissfully unaware of the town's ordinances. The house grudgingly accepted our presence, and we painted and nested and worked making it the hub of our businesses and soon-to-be expanding family. We used the downstairs bedroom across from the bathroom at the bottom of the stairs for the daycare nap room and guest room. It was on the shady side of the house and was perpetually dim, with a closet door that never seemed to latch securely.  

During that peculiar time in our lives as I was waxing heavy with our first child, I was taking art classes, and the teacher insisted we do a series of self-portraits. Trying to squirm out of such wanton hubris, I drew myself in charcoals wearing a feathered mask. When I drew my eyes behind the mask, they scared me. I hid the sketch in the back of the guest room closet. I pulled it out later to show my friends; the eyes seemed to have taken a life of their own, shadowed behind the feathery façade. I always put it back, faced the corner, and tried to forget it was there. When we moved out of the house, we never found that picture.  

After our baby daughter died, stillborn, and I had surrendered her body to the mortician, I wondered if she would haunt me. I had cursed her in my womb, after all. I had wished not to have a daughter. How could I not blame myself for her death? 

Since our house was in the middle of town and we ran our businesses out of it, we had people over more often than not. The Halloween after our child died, friends brought over a Ouija board. I had mixed feelings about it, because the energy of the house made me feel as though I was not alone. I was still in my mid- twenties and had only recently made the separation from my childhood religion, Southern Baptist. Ouija boards, dancing, and cards were definitely verboten. Trying to shake off my superstitions, I suggested we retire to the creepy back bedroom to try the board out.  

We refilled our glasses from the box of wine in the refrigerator and laughed into the quiet bedroom. Lighting candles to set the mood, we laid our finger tips on the plaquette. I resolved to let the spirit move me. Deep inside, I was uneasy, knowing that the veil is the thinnest near Samhain. I dreaded speaking to my newly dead infant daughter. Of course, the pointer began moving, and after we asked a couple of general questions, it spelled out her name.  

I broke the connection and went for more wine, pretending it was all a big joke. They didn’t know the cries I had sent out to the Universe as my daughter lay cold and still in the operating room. How I had called out to god, goddess, the universe, SOMETHING! Not to bargain for her life, because I knew she was gone, but for companionship in my life’s darkest hour. To know that I didn’t have to bear this terrible truth alone.  

The universe was silent.  

I vowed to that silence, that profound emptiness, that if it wasn’t there for me now, I could deal with everything else life threw me by myself. In my greatest hour of despair, I was my only comfort, and the act of consoling my partner, her father, was the only thing that kept me from curling up and dying with her.  

So that night, months later, I did not trust my self-destructive girlfriends and their catty, thoughtless ways. I suspected that the Ouija board was being driven by young, foolish women who were sorting out their own sexuality, fertility, and power. Still, those eyes behind the self -portrait that disappeared and the Ouija board messages from my dead, infant daughter haunt me like the memories and dreams for her life that we had between those walls, the empty nursery quietly dismantled, hidden in an obscure storage building to gather dust.