On Going Back

By Ashley Denchfield

The date is June 10th, and it is eighty-one degrees outside in Potomac, Maryland. I am wearing a tight fitting black long-sleeve shirt with a hood and a denim baseball hat that says BOSS bedazzled across it My eyes are hiding behind circular black sunglasses that cover the upper half of my face. I am six days away from my twenty-first birthday.

I am sitting in the passenger seat of my sister’s car. Her hair is tied back in a pink-checkered scrunchie. Her bare neck reveals the splotchy application of self-tan that she applied the night before. It takes the shape of a three on her neck, with two perfect circular ridges separating the tan and pale skin. We have been driving for seven hours through Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley from Asheville, North Carolina, to get here. The time is 5:10 pm.

Do you want to see Potomac?

She asks this as we’re crossing the state border into Maryland. We’re twenty minutes shy of the House that’s reappeared in most of my nightmares for the last ten years.

Yes, I tell her. She clicks her blinker down to change lanes. I do not know what I will feel until we arrive at the House.

I threw up the first time I came back, she tells me. I do not worry about throwing up. I do not worry about anything at all. My mind slips into a quiet, droning buzz. I do not know what I will feel until we arrive, and I cannot think about it until we do.

The sky is a pale gray today, clouds rolling in thick tufts with small bright pockets of light flashing through. The air is thick and humid, but I roll down my window to let it in.

Mosquitos swarm into the car, pouring in like water. I take little note of them, shooing them off with my flattened hand a few times a minute.

We drive onto the main road of town, and I begin to recognize myself in the buildings. There’s a dentistry sign that’s been up for eighteen years. There’s an ice cream parlor inside a white, wooden house. They served superman ice cream to me in a little cup with a plastic spoon.

We pull onto the strip of road that leads to our neighborhood, and I think I’ve seen these trees. I have no way of knowing if they are the same trees I looked at through the backseat of my father’s car, or if I’m searching for some sort of comfort in a place that feels familiar and new to me at once. Regardless, I’m looking at the sprawling branches, asking myself which of us lived here first.

The car rolls to the right, and we are at the mouth of the neighborhood. There is a stone monument announcing where we are. When we were kids, we sat on the cool stone sweating away our summer days. With the turn of each car onto the road, our voices screamed at them, HONK YOUR HORN, pumping our fists into the air and raising them victoriously if the car obliged.

There is panic in my body. It is settling into the bottom of my stomach, the way it would while climbing up a roller coaster.

It was 2010 when I first rode the Intimidator. A big red thing, it towered two hundred and thirty-two feet over the border of North and South Carolina, in the Carowinds amusement park. The ride angles straight up before plummeting down. As the car slowly inched towards the top, I felt my stomach drop. The ride was controlled. I knew where I was going to go, and what was going to happen, but I could not override the fear.

When the car began to round the bend of the peak and hover at the top, my father pulled loose screws out of his pocket. Man, these just fell off the roller coaster. I think this thing is gonna break. The car fell over the hump and we plunged down, two hundred and thirty-two feet to the ground. It feels a little like that.

We drive past an elderly couple walking their dog. I wave at them out of habit, and they smile and wave back to me. I remember the story my father’s ex-fiance used to tell about coming to see us girls in North Carolina for the first time. It’s nothing like Maryland here, the people actually WAVE at you, she’d say incredulously, enunciating wave like waay-ve.

But the couple today, here in Maryland, wave back at me, and it has been years since his ex-fiance, or since I, have lived here. Neither the street nor the people remember what happened here, and they wouldn’t recognize me if they did.

I have come back here so many times in my dreams, and in my memories. The tangible reality of the place feels incomprehensible to me. I can only equate it with driving into a world underwater or stepping into a dream. The land is so plagued with my own memories of it that it becomes impossible to see it as it exists. It is my place. One that lives in my mind only as bad and monstrous. I cannot see it as anything else.

Ours is the very last house on the street. We wheel around long curves in the road until we edge closer to the last turn. I see the house that belonged to our neighbor.

And then we are at the cul-de-sac, and I see the black gates of the House. They are smaller, so much smaller, than I remember them being. I suppose I am bigger now, too.

The House looks exactly as I remember it. Stony and grey, with big, cherry-stained wooden doors. The pond in the front yard has been covered up, and the broken glass of the garage windows have been fixed.

I am overcome with the feeling that I’ve been tricked into returning to the scene of a crime. A sticky, hot feeling washes over me as I prepare myself to see my own body lying somewhere on the lawn. I stare at the House, willing it to show me something and terrified that the sight of the House alone will reveal a truth to me that I cannot stomach.

I am waiting for something to happen. For myself as a girl to come running from the backyard screaming, her bob bouncing as her feet hit the concrete. For my father to emerge behind her, hands bare or wrapped around something hard and metal. I am waiting for anything at all.

But nothing comes. The House does not look scary, or haunted, or enclosed in darkness. There is no stirring coming from within. It is just a house.

I try to peer through the windows, seated and still buckled in the passenger seat of my sister’s car, and I realize that another family lives here now. One that has normal dinners, and normal fights, that knows nothing of the family that lived here before them. They moved into the House after the state of Maryland seized it. They fixed the broken windows and cleaned the corpses of birds that sat on the bathroom floor. They inherited the chandelier we left behind, and the arcade games downstairs, and they found the bunkers my father built. And they told themselves stories about the people who lived here before them—stories I do not exist in. I thought about knocking on the door. Introducing myself and begging for the chance to walk around the inside. But I didn’t, and if I had it would have been repainted, redecorated. It
would not be recognizable to me.

The House stands as it once was only in my mind now. It is preserved exclusively in my memory, and time will erode the face of it, warping the hallways and the rooms as it already has begun to.

Before it changed—before the walls were repainted, and the windows were fixed, and the hallways were warped—I lived there. I look different, just as the House does now, and we no longer show each other the faces we once had.

This House is alive because I have made it so. It heaves and claws as I breathe life into it. Without me, it is just a house. Without the House, I have no witness.

I tell myself I am ready to let go. To end our meetings in the night. To know there was no witness, only myself and these walls and corners which hid me from him.

As I look at the House, and the House looks back at me, we say goodbye. Perhaps for the last time.

There is something unspoken between us, as unchanging as the passage of time. We both know what happened here.

Ashley Denchfield (she/they) is a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is pursuing a degree in English, studying creative non-fiction. Her writing explores an unconventional and painful childhood, and trying to find magic and connection through it.