Breaking, Entering, and Leaving

“My mom probably won’t call the cops,” I thought as I pulled up parallel to my parents’ house late one evening in 2006. I had turned off the headlamps on my car as I got close, like I had seen in so many movies. I would have shut off the car engine and coasted to a stop also, but my Prius already turned off its gas engine when it was at low coasting speeds anyway, so there was no need.

I sat in the dark, looking at the front of the house, not expecting to see any movement indicating my approach had been detected. The house was huge with thick walls, encased in stucco. If my mother was home, she was likely drunk and listening to the stereo and/or television(s) at a loud volume anyway. Sneaking on to the property would be like getting the drop on someone in a coma.

My mother had asked for (and in later years threatened) shooting lessons and her own handgun. This would be one of the two times in the several years following my father’s death I would contemplate the likelihood of her having followed through on her plans to become armed and how it might impact my immediate future.

Counting on my mother having not changed at all, I quietly closed my car door and made my way to the shed on the back half of my parents’ property, clutching nothing but a flashlight in my right hand.

************************************************

“They are just books,” Karen said to me.

It was late 2003, not long after my father passed away. Karen and I sat somewhere in downtown Phoenix. It was dark out: I remember looking out the large picture windows of where ever we were, noting few cars passing by. I think someone else was there with us, but I can’t think of who it would have been. My memory in the months immediately following my father’s death alternate between vivid scenes etched in my brain forever and weeks of grey static, permanently lost to me.

I assume we must have been at a diner of some kind, because I remember I was drinking something hot out of one of those classic grey diner mugs. I stared into my black coffee, refusing to listen.

“They were so important to Dad. They are the only thing left that he valued that she won’t try to take.”

“You will always have your memories. That is really what is important,” Karen tried to reason with me. “She will use those books as leverage to terrorize you for as long as you let her.”

I looked out the window and back into my coffee, noting the different shades of black surrounding me.

****************************

I woke up one Saturday morning in 1997. I wouldn’t know it until I started drinking regularly years later, but walking outside of my room after a night of sleep in my parents’ house could have a similar feeling to awakening after an all night bender. Sounds of a Rolling Stones album on repeat in the stereo outside might bleed through the windows into the house, reverberating across the pink saltillo tile in the hallways. One of our cats might be standing on the island in the kitchen, grazing on a plate of full of a late night meal which had not yet been cooked when I went to bed the night before. I would see things. I would see remnants of the night before and try to imagine a chain of events which would lead to the aftermath I saw before me.

On this particular morning, I could tell my parents had been involved in an especially nasty skirmish. There was a broken wine glass on the floor in the dining room. There were some blanks spots, voids on shelves in the living room and the kitchen. I was trying to remember if whatever had been there the day previous could have been used as a weapon (likely thrown in a fit of rage) or if it would have been taken with as a potentially useful item as my father fled the house, which he often did after a bad fight with my mother.

As I surveyed the damage around the house, I noticed one of the porch doors leading to the pool was open. As I looked out past the doorway into the pool and the backyard beyond, my eyes were drawn outside to the grey overcast sky: it was drizzling rain, a rare occurrence in Arizona. But as my eyes began to return to horizon, I thought I saw a book floating in the pool. A book! Had Dad left his most recent sci-fi paperback on the deck the day before?

As my eyes refocused, I realized it wasn’t just one book in the pool–there were dozens of them. Hard back, paper back, old ones, new ones. There were some which hadn’t made it into the water, which were splayed open on the deck next to the pool, still being ruined as their pages soaked up the steady rain.

I gasped, my hand involuntarily covering my mouth, like an unlucky passerby in an episode of Law and Order, discovering a grisly murder scene when I had only meant to go out to get the morning paper.

********************************************

“One day we will only read electronic books,” Rick said to me. We were walking through a used bookstore, my arms already full of a few books I was planning on buying. “No one will have paper books in their houses anymore. Bookshelves will be used for things other than books.”

“That’s an awful thing to say,” I hissed, hugging the books I was going to buy closer to my chest, protecting them from these ideas.

“Why is it awful? People in more places will have access to more ideas. Fewer trees will be cut down. You could take 10 books on a plane with you in the same amount of carry on space that it currently takes for one book!”

I fingered a dog-eared corner of a Sylvia Plath poetry volume. “Sounds like all of the convenience with none of the magic.”

“What’s magic about a bunch of old paper rotting on a shelf?”

************************************

I walked quickly back to the shed, stopping every few steps to listen for movement or the opening of a door to the outside. As I opened the back gate leading back to the pool and the shed at my parents house, a motion-sensored floodlight clicked on, bright shine flooding my eyes. I cursed and hurried past the swath of light, breaking into a jog down the dirt path towards the shed.

I paused at the shed door, straining again to listen for any sounds of someone coming outside the house. Hearing nothing, I clutched the handle of the door, throwing considerable weight and my shoulder against it, as I remembered how it used to stick. The door gave way and swung open. I turned on the flashlight I had brought with me and aimed it at the corner of the shed where I had stacked up all of the books. All of my father’s books I hadn’t been able to take with me.

My mother insisted I start cleaning out Dad’s study and his bookshelves one month after his death in 2003. I had stuffed as much as I could into the Camry I would be driving back to LA the next day, but I couldn’t take more with me. I begged her to let me have more time to come and get them.

“Fine,” she said, “pack them up and put them in the shed.” The shed she referenced was a storage area which was joined to the garage on my parents’ property. The garage and the shed were detached from the house. My parents house was over 3,000 square feet–the shed was not critical storage space. And it was not in any danger of being full, especially with my father’s passing. I had dutifully packed up the books I could not fit into the car and carried them back to the shed, crying as I stacked each box neatly on top of the others in the back corner of the shed.

I blinked now as I stared at that same corner, illuminated by my flashlight three years later. The corner was empty, a light layer of dust covering the area where the boxes previously stood. My mouth went dry as I clicked off my flashlight and backed out of the shed, quickly closing the door and starting back towards the car, before anyone found me.

**********************************************

Basil has set up a website for my father’s writings. When we initially talked about the project and bought the URL, I envisioned scanning in what writings of his I had in my possession and linking them to the site. But Basil has used his magic internet researching skills and found articles, books, and short stories my father published that I had no idea existed. Even more magically, he has begun to track down and buy articles or books that we don’t already have copies of. Science fiction magazines from the 70s, comic-book-looking zines from the early 2000s–I can’t believe I don’t remember my dad’s stuff being published in these places. It seems impossible I never held them in my hands while my dad was alive, but I am so glad to see them now.

Basil is setting up a feature on the website so people will be able to download his stuff to their e-reading devices. People will be able to read my dad’s writing and keep his stories alive, which is what he would have wanted. I imagine someone downloading ten of his stories, excited about the hours of reading ahead of them, stuffing their e-reader into a backpack as they prepare for a long flight somewhere.