what? I’ll come back to town when Maryann and Lisa are here. I really can’t afford to take the time away, but…” He waved his hand.
I really want to tell him not to bother. I mean, if it was such a terrible imposition, then forget it.
But with as tense as my relationship was with my brother, it was worse with my sisters. Of the four of us, he had the coolest head. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to have him here, if nothing else to run interference.
“Okay,” I said. “I’d appreciate all the help I can get.”
He grunted in acknowledgement, which basically meant the conversation was over. He’d made up his mind, he wasn’t happy about it, and there was nothing left to discuss.
We both continued working our way through the rooms in the house, and damn it, this building and all its contents suddenly seemed huge and overwhelming. This entire project was even more daunting than it had been the day I’d arrived in Laurelsburg. Everything was heavier now, laden with my father’s unfulfilled expectations and the disappointment he’d taken to his grave. His grave on the side of a mountain I’d never see, let alone climb.
Was there something poetic in that? In my dad’s final resting place being somewhere I could never reach in a million years? The only people who’d ever see him would be the same people who saw the other two-hundred some-odd bodies littering the mountainside—the obscenely wealthy, the highly motivated, and the stubbornly determined.
There might come a day when one or more of my siblings made the trek just to pay their respects.
Not me.
“It’s all right, son,” my dad had said after he and my older sister had come down Mount Rainier. “Not everyone’s meant for things like this.”
For greatness, he hadn’t said. For getting to the top of a mountain that wasn’t even a technical climb. As if it was some character flaw that had kept me at the base camp and not a badly sprained ankle thanks to some ice.
Now I kind of wanted to take up extreme mountaineering just to show him and everyone else. But I knew me, and I knew I’d hate it and I’d be miserable, and even spite would never drive me far enough up a treacherous rock to see the place where my father would spend the rest of time.
Everyone in my family wondered why I had such an inferiority complex. Why the fuck wouldn’t I? I was the only one of my siblings without a graduate degree, never mind one in a prestigious field. My father was a bestselling author and a respected professor who’d even had to die in a way the rest of us lesser mortals could never aspire to.
Me?
I wasn’t shit, and no one was in any hurry to let me forget it.
My brother slept in the other guest room, which I hadn’t told him was getting emptied as soon as he left. He and my sisters would have opinions about it later, I was sure, but I’d cross that bridge when I got to it. Today had been tense enough, and tomorrow promised more of the same.
In my own bedroom, I couldn’t sleep.
I stared up at the ceiling, wondering if this place would ever feel like home. This room was better than the rest of the house—the first thing I’d done upon moving in had been to strip it of anything and everything that wasn’t mine. Well, aside from the bedframe, since I’d been too overwhelmed with my ever-growing to-do list to think about also disassembling the bed, moving it out, finding a place to put it (or getting rid of it), and going through the motions of acquiring another one. All the artwork on the walls was gone, though.
But then it had started to seem too empty, so I’d filled it up as best I could. My own art—either painted or purchased by me—went on the walls. I kept the door shut while my brother was here so he wouldn’t see any of it, but thank God I had this little oasis of my own in this alien place.
The room felt as close to mine as it ever would unless I emptied it, stripped the floor, replaced the carpet, painted the walls, and then crammed it with furniture and odds and ends that were mine.
Tonight, though, the room felt as empty as my dad’s giant house.
No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t the room that felt empty.