Finding Home || bxb

34

Being back at my old home staring at the place on the rug where I laid out bleeding as a child was not how I expected this day to go. Nor was it how I expected to start my journey into adulthood; by visiting the troubles of my childhood. The rug had been cleaned as best as whoever tried to clean it could, but I noticed right away patches of weird discolouration which could surely have come from nothing other than the intermingling of mine and my parents' blood.

It wasn't easy to push the memory or what happened back into my mind all the time, but the specifics, like the blood pooling around my fingers and my parents' faces so absent of any feeling unlike I'd ever seen before, were easily pushed aside. I remembered it all now. The feeling of blood in my nails for weeks afterwards no matter how desperately I tried to clean them. My hands were dry and raw and painful, so dry that my skin would start to crack and hurt as I splayed them open and only when I saw my own blood forming droplets under my thinned and sore skin was I able to feel I was clean of their blood. My blood I could handle, but to feel theirs on my hands...

The feeling of wanting to wash my hands was there again now but my sadness and my contempt and my despair rooted me to the ground where I sat, knees up to my chest, staring at those patches of discolouration in the carpet where I had seen my parents for the last time. There was a funeral of course, not that I could even begin to tell you who had organised it or who had been there. My grief had been too all consuming to pay attention to anything other than the two closed caskets in which my parents laid. I never saw their faces again.

When Allison came to pick me up, I had been sad but also a little excited. I was finally going to get everything my parents had left behind for me in the will from the lawyers that had been entrusted to give it to me.

I remember being shocked at the money in the accounts left in my name. I knew there was going to be a lot, but this much? I could retire a dozen times now at age 18 and spend the rest of my days travelling the world collecting expensive pieces of art that were just plain canvases in a frame supposedly showing nuances that lesser minds could never begin to conceive. My father had done well at his job and now all the rewards for that effort was handed down to me: a confused child now having to learn to be a man who definitely did not deserve to receive the riches of another man's work.

But it was the last thing in the will left to me that truly gave me a shock.

"What do you mean the house is in my name now?" I had asked confused. What house were they possibly referring to?

"Their house, yours. Your old one... where it all happened," explained the lawyer.

"I... I thought that house was gone. I assumed it was put on the market or something. Is that not what should have happened?"

I'd thought about that house a lot. We had just started the renovations; my parents were so excited. I was excited. And then John.

John was his name.

I never even knew why he had done what he did until I read about it in the news a few months later. The press had finally been able to interview him during his sentencing period and he had explained why he did it. That he'd been fired and desperate for money and angry. It made me remember a conversation my father had with my mother about having to fire a bunch of employees as soon as he was promoted. From then, I pieced together what I could of the situation, and I only wish I could throw it away and never think about it again.

But I couldn't do that and truly a larger part of me didn't want to. To forget it happened would mean to forget my parents and how could I ever forget them? I wouldn't ever dare trying lest it actually happen, and their memory becomes lost to me for all my life. I would never want to forget my mother's warm smiles and fiery red hair that matched my own or my father's comforting hugs and striking laughter. We didn't have much in terms of extended family, but we had each other and that had been enough.