The House On Dale Street

Chapter 12

27 years later-

We pulled up to the old house and sat outside for a minute, just looking at it. It looked so normal. It was fall, just as it had been twenty seven years ago, when we'd first moved into the house. Yellow and brown leaves covered the roof and every inch of the ground. An old Jeep was parked alongside the house, beneath the tree that shaded half the yard. There were trash cans sitting to the side, three of them, and a child's blue chair sat by the front door. Other than the trash cans and the child's chair, it looked exactly as we'd left it twenty-seven years before. Twenty seven years had taken its toll on the house, but it was still the same. Just a little worse for wear. We were quiet for a minute and then Hazel said, "Well, there it is..."

"It doesn't look too threatening," I said.

"I used to lay in that big old bed in that room and read Mademoiselle and Glamour magazines and watch Regis and Kathie Lee on that little television with the bunny ears..."

She pointed to the long window in the front where our bedroom had been.

She laughed, "That was when Anna Nicole Smith was doing those Guess ads, I was always looking for the new Guess ads in the magazines, back then, because I wanted to be like Anna Nicole..."

"She's dead now." I said.

"I know," Hazel said, "Everybody's dead now."

She meant Prince. He'd just passed the week before. She and I had been fans since we were teenagers. We used to listen to his music in that house. The movie Batman had just come out and Hazel had the tape- the soundtrack from the movie and she played it all the time back then. Lemon Crush was her favorite song on the cassette.

"Yeah." I said. I remembered the room, the big oak bed that had belonged to Mr. Ethenhurst's daughter and our cat Vanity walking around, looking up at the ceiling as she walked. Vanity knew there was something in that attic, long before we did.

"One morning, I was watching Regis and Kathy Lee, and you were working at Stitches, and, remember that little heater we had in the bedroom? Well, I was freezing, and I was in my pajamas, I was about to get dressed but I wanted my clothes to be warm so I laid them on the heater, I mean, directly on the heater – I'd done it before and it had been fine, but they caught fire! And I'd run into the kitchen and quickly filled up a pitcher with water and came back and dumped it on my clothes and the heater... I thought I was going to burn the house down!"

"You never told me that," I said, cutting my eyes at her, "were you crazy? Putting your clothes right on top of a heater?"

Hazel shook her head, "We knew nothing. Absolutely nothing. What were we doing out in the world alone at such a young age?"

"I knew some things," I said, smiling.

"We were just kids," said Hazel, "we were just kids."

"Yeah," I said.

"Remember Brown?" Hazel said, turning to look at me, "our dog? Remember one day he just disappeared?"

"Yeah. I do. I'll never understand that."

"Me either."

She asked me if I were going to knock on the door.

"I have to," I said, "I didn't come all this way to not knock on it."

I asked her if she wanted to come with me.

"No," she said, shaking her head, "I'm not getting out of the car. I'm not going anywhere near that house. I can't believe I'm sitting here looking at it now, to tell you the truth."