1. A Hollow Inheritance

Fox Hollow stood, a small country home in a clearing at the end of a long dirt lane. The trees circled the cottage and broke the sun softly over its stony exterior. Mud squished on to my boots as I stepped out of the rental car. Slinging my duffle bag over my shoulder, I approached the front door. My mother's stained-glass rendition of a red fox spiritedly jumping had finally been set into the wood of the door. For years, it had rested on the mantle. She must have had time this past year, I thought. I took a moment's breathe before turning the key in the lock and pushing the door open.

The living room was the same as I had remembered. Off-white walls and thick low wooden beams framed my mother's cream-colored furniture. As always there was a fully stocked fireplace. I slipped off my boots so as not to track mud on the worn dark rugs over the hardwood floors. I hung my olive green windbreaker on one of the iron hooks in the front entry.

I dwelt for a moment in one of my last memories of her.

The woman who I had once held in such high esteem was there crumbling before me. Was it possible that my mother, as I had thought her to be, was nothing more than a figment of my own powerful imagination? I had watched the world pass her by as she waited and waited for that mystic prince, my father, to come and rescue her. It was her nightly routine.

She sat at the kitchen table cupping a tall mug of chai tea, reading over prayers she had written in a fragmenting blue book. A cold electric bulb dimly lit her hunched figure. There were distant tears, held back at the brim of her eyes. They never escaped down her cheeks because she did not condone telling her children the truth. We were Catholic after all. Internally her thoughts waged wars against reality, trying to at least postpone it. One day, in the end, I had thought she might admit that she lived in too many dreams, but she existed in her ignorance, so she had not.

We all believed in too many miracles.

“Goodnight,” I remarked, unsure of how to say anything else.

It was the same “Goodnight,” I had offered her every night since that horrible day when I had first realized that love was a Ponzi scheme. It was the same “Goodnight,” that I gave as the shallow salutation when all other options were exhausted. I could not tell her I hoped life would get better because she lived in the dream that life actually could get better — and I was so tired of lying, of propping up that impossible reverie. Nothing is so useless as being the one realist in a swarm of hopeful believers. I could not give her wisdom or food for thought. There would be no advice or life hacks. There was nothing to solve her hopeless romanticizing of reality. There was nothing to say but “Goodnight.”. It neither acknowledged nor denied her problem. It did not feed. It did not starve. It performed as expected. It ended the possibility of further conversation. “Goodnight.”, that terminal phrase was so perfectly crafted to be so objectionably polite that no one —not even my mother, the reckless wheeler of imagined realities —could misconstrue its flagrant neutrality. It meant nothing, so it said everything I needed it to say.

“Goodnight.” She returned.

The house creaked in the wind. My mother clasped her hands together as if holding the world intact with their firmness. She was trying very hard to hide the ardor of her prayers, but the pink cold fingers suffocating each other allowed a silent story of truth to find me. She would stay up late into the night begging a silent god to give her more strength to face these trials. I knew that he would not answer, but like the lump in the back of my throat warning sobs, it was best to stay noiseless.

When I was younger, she had read to me. Well, she had read to my older brother. I had seated myself outside his bedroom and listened. Through the crack between the door and its frame, her voice carried tales of adventure and heroism. It was there in the cramped hallway of our little house that I shut my eyes and learned how to escape. I was not in Catholic school with angry teachers and cruel classmates. I was not in a neighborhood brawl. I was not hiding from the boys. I had truly escaped. Perhaps she had in this way fostered a similar love of fantasies and illusions in me.

Venturing further into the house, I set my duffle bag down on the kitchen table and headed towards the hall. The innocence of my younger days had filled the space with a foreign joy. Years had passed since I had been carefree. Those magical stories danced in my head as I ran my hand along the bare wall.

I could not deny there was comfort in the imagined places I could create where the villains were obvious monsters and the heroes were always given the resources to succeed. Yet at the end of my childhood, when monsters were friends and resources were scarce, the comfort began to feel misplaced. The paint was peeling; the storybook was closing.

I felt my first true pang of doubt when love struck at me. He had not meant to but an argument had inspired a breed of violent anger as new to me as the path of Atheism it would set me upon. The doubt built again when that silent god took friend after friend to cruel deaths of disease or accidental happenstance. And again when I looked through the skylight of my car, which was serving as my make-shift home, to see a bitter rain begin- the frame of the car my only insulation against the wild Wyoming autumn. If there was a god, I hated him.

How had she never questioned the fantasy of a perfect family? How had she lived in the nothing that controlled us and not felt the weight of something constantly present? How had she maintained that life was really going to be ok? Faith had given her every discomfort, every pain, every curse, and yet she had clung to it as though it might still be the solution.

I did not pity my mother, I just did not understand her. He was never coming back. We were never going to get that second chance at being a family. The fractures had splintered into breaks. For me, any thoughts that my personal trials, or the trials of my family, were somehow a single thread in the tapestry of a bigger plan was insulting. How dare a god abuse his beloved children and be called merciful for sparing them the potential suffering he had the might to inflict. I did not murder you, merely beat you within an inch of your life. Remember it could have been worse. Aren’t you blessed? Aren’t you thankful? If I read that story and had no context or preconceived notions of the characters at play, God would be the blatant villain. But we fear him, so we never speak an ill word of the master. Similar to the Nazis that shook before Hitler, we do not dare defile our god because he brandishes the bait of a greater good.

I am being harsh, I know. You don’t live a life like mine and come out dulcet. I am so tired of being kind and good and sweet and subdued. I am so tired of not knowing how to live on my own because I was conditioned, groomed even, to be a sweet little pretty housewife. I was nineteen years old when they asked me how serious my relationship was at Christmas. I was nineteen when they first suggested that I marry the same man who broke down because he had to go to math class instead of finishing his League of Legends adventure. I was nineteen when my mother starting talking to me, seriously talking to me, about wearing her wedding dress.

Now I am in my mid-twenties and single, and I am dying to prove them wrong. I am looking back over those nights in this empty house, and I am terrified, trudging through a world I was never supposed to know. I am fighting every moment to never end up at the mercy of that little prayer book, that silent god. I am horrified because I recognize that it would have all been easier to have signed away my last name to a man I never truly loved and stayed blissfully ignorant of reality. But then again, I look at this empty house and the memory of my mother’s clasped hands and I realize the paint was peeling for her too. She just kept covering it with fresh coats.

Now that the deed is in my name, I think will strip it of its paint. I will look at its bones and I will see what it is. When and only when I have come to know the structure- its faults and strengths, stains and splinters, then I will put up fresh plaster and paint beautiful things. I will create a home I want to have and I will never have to doubt its integrity.

My shelves will have storybooks, but they will always be branded for what they are- an escape from the real world, not a pathway to it. My children will know that monsters are real and I will give them the tools they need to fight those villains. I will give them truths and know-how. I will teach them to use their imaginations not as an escape but rather as a tool for solving problems and helping each other. It is not wrong to dream, but it is unfair to train children to put their stock in dreams alone.

I do not fault my parents because they were raising us as they were taught to raise us. They had been indoctrinated in a system that never allowed for anything but lockstep. They were like the thirteen-year-olds with pictures of Hitler on their bedroom walls thinking this was a man who could make the world better. They were not given a chance to see it from a different perspective. They had no idea that times were hard because they were on the wrong side of history, they were just obliviously living. But now, as their grown daughter, looking over history and knowing what that man was capable of doing- what he actually did, I cannot share their childhood fascinations.

What breaks my heart, more than anything else, is that each one of us could have been more. I think of the life my mother could have lived. She was a leader in her field, brilliant, creative, and kind. She could have been more, so much more. I know that she was trapped in a Truman Show-like nightmare, where you can only ever do so much. Your friends seem unreal. Your sky is just a massive screen blocking the real sun. Everything is orchestrated by someone far away, watching your life and planning the next big change. Now it’s over and I’m forced to face the fact that she will ever find the door.

I loved her, but she will never get to look for that door. I know she will never get on the little boat and sail across a tumultuous sea just to discover if there is, in fact, more. Had I not been pushed into the boat and swept up in waves of trauma, tragedy, and heartbreak I would have never slammed into the wall of my own Truman Show-ian nightmare. I applaud those that willing to board the vessel freely, those that rip the paint from walls, those that wonder if their posters show a man who is not a hero.

This past Christmas a friend gifted me a bible. I did not have the heart to tell her I no longer trust those words or characters. She told me, as she watched me unwrap it, that this book brought her calm. She said that every night she read a passage and even though she did not always know what it was supposed to mean she was always soothed by the text. I asked her if she went to the bible for all her troubles and she wittingly remarked, “No, but I consult the man behind it.” It took me a moment to process what she meant and then I questioned, “Does he ever consult you?” She laughed, thinking I was making some kind of jest but after a moment’s reflection replied, “I don’t matter. Not in his grand scheme. I am just a person fumbling through his plan. He doesn’t need to consult me. He’s got it all figured out.”

The heavy book rested in my lap and I found myself stroking the cover because of its leather binding and imprinted title. They all make such a show of religion and holiness, of their lack of doubt. They guild books in gold and leather and gift these extravagant tomes to other pious believers and forget that the answers to their questions are not nearly as audacious. When we parted each others’ company after dinner, she said, “God bless.” and I said, “Goodnight.” And I have to wonder if my lack of acknowledgment that she dwelt in a false reality, where chaos was somehow controlled and part of a master blueprint, was just another late night pressed up against my brother’s bedroom door hearing someone else escape into fairy tales.

That doorway stood open and I looked into the empty room. My mother’s neat handwriting and ruler marks labeled the years we had passed here. I was the only one left. Nothing is quite so lonely as being in a place where many are supposed to gather and none actually do.

“Mom.” I said, “I’m home.” 

Of course, there was no reply. She had been gone for an entire month. I would never see her again.