I am empty again.
For hours they bustled around, removing bulky couches and mattresses, hauling box after box out the door, emptying every cupboard and drawer, stuffing all they own in a not-quite-big-enough truck.
When the job is finally done and all the helpers have gone, it is just the woman and the man alone inside me. Just like the way we started. The first night they slept here it was just them and me, nothing on the walls or in the closets. They laid on an air mattress under the vaulted ceiling and talked about my rooms and how they would fill them, about the puppy and the babies who would toddle on my floors.
“It’s really ours,” they said again and again.
Over the next days and weeks they made me theirs, filling me with their treasures and smells and disagreements and dreams. They scrubbed me clean and set everything just so.
The woman filled me with music from her guitar and the piano that eventually came to inhabit my front room. He listened to lots of podcasts about finance and sports and politics. During the day there was silence inside me, but in the evenings I heard reports of their day, of their triumphs and complaints, their laughter and sometimes crying.
About a year after they moved in the puppy came along and she peed on my shaggy beige carpets and chewed the man’s new brown dress shoes. When the puppy did bad things, the woman usually scolded her and then within an hour was scratching her fluffy white ears and talking to her like she was a baby. In the hot summer the pup found my coolest spot—on the tile in the hall where the air rushed under the bedroom door.
About a year later a baby did come along, the first one. The woman’s belly had grown (finally, after she had stopped vomiting). The junk in the spare room was replaced with a white crib, a rocking reclining chair picked up from an estate sale, and a handmade hot air balloon mobile. And so, so many tiny pink and purple clothes. All of a sudden, my bare closets were bursting.
When the baby came, the man spent many hours bouncing on a yoga ball to get her to stop crying. The woman spent many hours in the rocking chair feeding her in the middle of the night.
The baby grew. Later, she grew hair. In the blue bathroom, she cried each day as the woman brushed and wrestled the girl’s blonde locks into an elastic and then topped it with a bow.
The girl ate many forms of carbohydrates and cheese—macaroni and cheese, grilled cheese, quesadillas. And lots of waffles for breakfast, which when reheated the next morning in the toaster, almost always set off the fire alarm. What the girl didn’t like to eat was tossed from the high chair tray and happily gobbled up by the pup, who liked everything but fruits and vegetables. But if she liked what fell to the floor, she licked my white tiles until they shined.
The girl learned to crawl, then stand, then walk and run. More than once she ran right into the chipped corner of my laminate white counter top and ran to the woman, crying and holding her forehead. She learned to speak—da da first, and before long words like actually and gorgeous.
“How about we go to the park and then the baby will be here?” the girl suggested when the man and the woman told her she would be a big sister.
Over the next weeks and months the woman vomited and expanded again. In the bathtub, the girl washed her bulging belly, said she was giving the baby a bath. The pacifiers and burp cloths and tiny pink and purple clothes reappeared. The baby came and was a miniature, bald version of the girl, who had moved from the crib into a queen size bed in a new lilac colored room.
The man spent most days away and the woman and girl and baby spent most days with me. When the man came home in the evening, the pup jumped on her hind legs with excitement and tried to lick his face. The little girl told him all the events of the day, stammering and breathless. The baby was mesmerized by all the noise. Finally, the man made it to the woman for a hug and a kiss.
She cooked; he did dishes. Dishes in, dishes out, dishes in, dishes out. They painted my light oak cabinets black and argued about whether to add handles (in the end, they decided not to).
At night the man read to the little girl—three stories because she was three years old—and sang Jingle Bells and songs about Jesus until she fell asleep, while in the other lilac colored room the woman nursed the baby. With kids in bed, the woman and the man talked about grown up things or just flopped onto the couch together and looked tired. Sometimes one baby or both babies would start to cry again.
“Should we go in?” they asked each other probably a thousand times since the day the first one was born.
The people didn’t always get along. Sometimes they prickled or snapped at each other—the woman at the man or the man at the woman or both of them at the girl. Sometimes it didn’t seem like anything hurtful was said, but the woman retreated to the bedroom and the man retreated into silence. I gave space for each of them; they needed my doors then. But eventually the doors opened and the people started smiling and talking again.
The living room shelves became home to more and more bright-colored noise-making toys and enough stuffed animals for a zoo. The man and the little girl had many wrestling matches and tickle sessions on my living room floor.
“Commence tickling!” the little girl said once, and the man and the woman laughed and laughed. The man tickled the woman too, but over and over she begged him to stop even though she was laughing.
Through my French doors and past my patio, the orange trees—well, one of the orange trees—was heavy with fruit each winter, and the man and the little girl picked and juiced several pitchers worth of orange juice. They called it liquid gold.
The man assembled a porch swing for the woman, and they spent many hours there in the shade of the patio. In the winter they opened both French doors and let in the 70 degree air and daily cloudless sunshine. In the summer the woman sat under the fans they installed on the patio ceiling and sprayed herself in the face with a water bottle while the little girl splashed in the baby pool.
A baby swing and two flower baskets hung from my patio beam. In the baskets birds made tiny nests and tiny gray speckled eggs. The little girl loved to check on the eggs, which never turned into tiny birds.
There was more concrete than grass in the backyard, but the woman said she liked it that way because the little girl could ride her scooter and draw with chalk and Arizona grass is prickly anyway. The woman was noticeably bad at frisbee, but with some practice and coaching from the man, she got a lot better. The long, skinny yard was perfect for corn hole tournaments and mini soccer games.
Inside, my rooms were full. The people knew every inch of me—my quirks and my charms and my best hiding places (bathtub, kitchen closet, behind the couch in the front room)—and I knew all about them, could anticipate their reactions and interactions and what they needed from me.
Five years have passed since their first night on the air mattress. The woman and the man now walk through each of my empty rooms and remember the transformations—mine and theirs—that have happened here. The woman is taking a video on her cell phone. After they have gone through all of me, she stops recording and turns to the man.
“Well,” she starts to say but her voice cracks. She is crying. “It’s just so emotional,” she says to the man as she wipes tears before they can fall and pinches the bridge of her nose like she always does when she cries. I’ve seen this before, many times during my 26 years of life. I know what happens next. It’s time for them to go, but they don’t want to. Instead they lay together in the room where they slept every night for the past five years. This room got a new bed a couple of years ago, one that could fit all five of them at once—never at night of course, that was a rule—in the morning when the pup jumped up as she heard the woman and the man rustling awake, then the girl in her nightgown with sleep in her eyes and thumb in her mouth, then the baby cuddling and nursing and spitting up on the sheets. But the bed is now in the truck, so the man and the woman lay on my bare floor and marvel, almost surprised it seems, at finding themselves here.
“I can’t believe it’s over,” she says.
“A lot of good times here,” he says.
Yes, they do love me. In this final moment all my imperfections—the gaps between my baseboards and my used-to-be-white tile grout (“Really, who ever thought white tile grout was a good idea?” said the woman many times), the spot where the carpet is pulling up a little and the back door that has to be slammed shut, the clicking ceiling fans and blinds that don’t turn—are forgiven, cherished even. Finally they see me for what I have been all along—a place to be, to launch from and return to; a place to hold all they love and protect them from the relentless world. And though they are leaving, I will always be the keeper of what has happened here. When they visit those memories, they will visit me.
“I guess it’s time to go,” the woman says finally. They get up off the floor and walk through each of my rooms once more. They lock my doors and turn off my lights.
Outside, she stands close to me and pats my rough stucco which they had painted bison beige but actually turned out kind of green. “Thank you, house,” she says.
I watch the 20-foot U-Haul truck drive down Covina Street, turn, and disappear.
They are gone. They will never come home to me again.
For one night I am just a house again, without people to fill me and need me. To be a home, I need them; to have a home, they need me.
Tomorrow I’ll start a new life with a new family, be filled and loved again. But for tonight, I’ll rest.
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