Part Nine: The House in Richmond
Noah and I moved in February, eight months after the arrest.
The new house was smaller — a two-bedroom in Richmond, on a street with maple trees that would be spectacular in fall and were currently bare and dignified in the winter cold. I took it on a long-term lease rather than buying, because buying felt like a decision I wasn’t ready to make, and the landlord, an older woman named Patricia who had lived next door for thirty years, seemed like the kind of person who would be straightforward about problems and not invent new ones.
She was. She brought us a pie the week we moved in and told Noah the backyard had a family of rabbits that came in the evenings if you stayed very quiet.
He spent the first three evenings lying in the frosty grass watching for them.
He saw them on the fourth evening — two adults and what he insisted was a baby, though I thought it was just a smaller adult — and he came inside and told me about it with the intensity of someone reporting significant news, in a voice that still had Owen’s cadence in certain places, in certain words, the way children picked up the speech patterns of the people who raised them, which was something I had decided I would be matter-of-fact about if it ever came up directly and had so far managed by being distracted whenever it nearly did.
I chose the house partly because it had no attic.
I have been asked, occasionally, by the therapist I started seeing in March and have continued seeing for reasons that seem clearer some weeks than others, why the absence of an attic was important. I’ve thought about how to answer that.
It wasn’t that I was afraid of attics. It was more specific than that. It was that the attic had been the place I’d been sent to be safe, and safety is a complicated word when the thing you needed to be safe from was inside your own house. When the danger had been sharing a bed with you for six years and packing Noah’s lunch and saying I love you in that distracted, ambient way.
I didn’t want a space in my home that knew that.
The house in Richmond didn’t know any of it. It was clean in that particular way of places that have no history with you yet. Every corner was still just a corner.
