Don't Bother Coming Home Chapter 1

A Story by Jamie C

Janelle Walters hasn't been back to the town where she grew up in almost 15 years, leaving behind an alcoholic father who hated her and siblings who wished she never existed.

Nothing about this old house has changed in fifteen years, Janelle thought as she pulled into the driveway of her childhood dwelling. Weeds had been allowed to choke the marigold garden that she and her sister Eliza had planted all those years ago. The white paint of the doors and shudders had tinged with the yellow of neglect and age. The basketball hoop had rusted, the backboard worn away long ago by weather and wind. Memories of unhappiness had almost been preserved perfectly.

Janelle palmed the key to the front door in her hand as she checked the screen of her phone for any new messages. She was hoping for anything that would prolong the inevitable, even if only for a few minutes. She checked her reflection in the mirror and gave a sigh to the emptiness beside her. She understood why her siblings were not with her now to do this. She hadn’t seen Eliza or her brother Travis in fifteen years. There had been no phone calls, no emails, no form of communication at all. While she understood their reasons, it didn’t lesson the pain all the same.

The wind was beginning to pick up pace and the clouds were ominous overhead. Janelle knew she was on borrowed time. She might have a little over an hour before John would call her and tell her that her siblings were on their way. They had no idea that she was in town and she wanted to keep it that way. All she wanted in the old house was a few pictures and mementos of her high school years. Nothing that Eliza or Travis would miss.

She stepped out into the crisp October air and made her way to the front door. She stared at the yellowed door which hadn’t been properly scrubbed down in years. She traced her fingers over the smudges of dirt that had probably been made by her or one of her siblings. She smiled at a small dent in the door and the memory of Travis trying to play sword fighting with her. Instead of swinging at her sword he hit the door and made the dent instead. It had been fun and games until the noise brought their drunk father stumbling out the door and grabbing Travis by the throat to drag him inside for the beating he had no doubt elicited from his father. Her smile faded as that part of the memory unexpectedly came back to her.

She took a deep breath and pushed the door open. Within seconds that familiar smell of dogs and dust invaded her nostrils. Her eyes, unaccustomed to the allergens, began to tear up almost immediately. She surveyed a room that was all too familiar to her. The worn recliner remained in its old place, right in front of the television and within arm’s length of the coffee table, with the light blue blanket draped across the top. Janelle never understood the attachment her father had with the blanket. Perhaps it was one of the few things her mother gave him without some sort of an agenda behind it.

Janelle sat down in the chair and tried to imagine the loneliness that had engulfed her father in the latter years of his life. The ever-present beer cans littered the room and confirmed what Janelle never wanted to believe. Her father was never able to regain sight over anything farther that his pork rinds and whatever bottle he chose to nurse that day. She couldn’t remember a time where he didn’t choose alcohol over reality, even unto his dying days.

The taste of blood brought her back to the present as she realized that she had been worrying her bottom lip as memories of her childhood came flooding back to her. She wasn’t there to reminisce about her fractured childhood. She was simply here to pick up the things that she never had a chance to collect fifteen years ago when her father open the front door and told her to never come back. The alcohol on his breath had been unmistakable as he grabbed her by her copper hair and shoved her out into the coldness of the world unprepared. Luckily she had been a smart girl even as a teenager and left a small suitcase packed in the garage. With her meager earnings from her summer job and a car she had nicknamed ‘Ole Unreliable, she went out into the world and never bothered to look back.

She had known it wasn’t just the incident of her father being in a drunken stupor that made her leave for good at the tender age of seventeen. It was something that ran much deeper than that. As much as she had tried in her younger years to change her appearance, there was no mistaking that she was the exact replica of her mother. She had inherited her porcelain complexion, copper hair, and green eyes. Eliza and Travis had the darker coloring of their father. They could almost get away with the lie that her mother wasn’t their mother at all.

There had been no photos of their mother but the memories of her were enough to tell Janelle that her mother was the only thing her father saw when he looked at her. How he hated to look at Janelle. The anger and disgust in his eyes the few times their eyes had been forced to meet. From her toddler years onward Janelle knew better than to tarry too long in the presence of her father. She would go through the back door of the house to go to her room and would go to the kitchen late at night to avoid the violence that would ensue should her father catch sight of her.

It was an existence that Eliza and Travis never knew because they didn’t bare the course of their mother’s appearance. Had her mother not have caused her father so much pain her life might have been infinitely different. The memories of her mother were scattered and few but the ones Janelle did have painted a picture of a woman steeped deep into the curse of mental illness and prescription drug addiction.

She had only been five years old when she found her mother dead on the couch. Eliza had still been in diapers and Travis had been at baseball practice that day. When Janelle entered the house she realized immediately that something was wrong. Her mother’s favorite music wasn’t in the background and the smell of dinner wasn’t wafting gently in her direction. She went to the couch to wake up her mother, thinking she was taking one of her long naps again. It wouldn’t be until many years later that Janelle realized that those long naps were caused by the pain pills her mother adored.

Her mother had been stiff and cold to the touch. Janelle shook her hard for what had seemed like hours before she realized that her mother was not going to wake up, perhaps ever again. In her five year old mind she hadn’t understood the concept of death and what it meant. She had never experienced it before. She scooped up Eliza out of her playpen and brought her back to the room that she shared with her sister. She had changed her diaper just like her mother had shown her how to do and waited for her father to get home.

She would never forget the moment that her father had come home from work to discover his wife dead upon the couch. Janelle had been staring out the window waiting for her father to come home. It had never occurred to her to pick up a phone and call for her. Her parents had never taught her what to do when she thought that danger was amiss.

“Daddy! Something is wrong with Mommy!” she had yelled breathlessly as her father came through the door. He still had on his uniform from work, dirt embedded under his fingers and caked into the lines of his face. He had stiffened immediately when he looked upon his couch to see his wife’s lifeless body.

He had went to her, shook her as hard as he could, begging her to wake up. When he had come to the same realization that Janelle had come to earlier his face blanked. At that moment, whatever soul he had in him departed and left a cold shell of a man. The ambulance came a little later, declared Janelle’s mother dead on arrival, and nothing more was ever mentioned. She never got any explanation of what happened. That following days after that were filled with family members she had never met before and unforgiving looks and remarks.

“It is unfortunate that the girl has her coloring,” one aunt had said.

“You’ll be reminded of that wretched woman every time you look at her,” another one had mentioned when she thought Janelle wasn’t looming in a dark corner, listening to every hateful word about her.

Janelle blinked back tears and forced herself to come back to the present. She was doing herself no favors revisiting her dark childhood. She came here with a list of very specific things. She was determined to grab them and leave this house as quickly as possible. She proceeded up the stairs to the room that had once been her haven against the hateful looks of her family.

It took her a moment to gather her senses as she took in the scene of her childhood bedroom. Not one thing had changed since she left fifteen years ago. The only thing different was the thick layer of dust that had accumulated over the years. The walls remained their pastel pink and the cast iron bed still had the pink and white checkered quilt neatly spread over it. Her collection of stuffed animals remained carefully assembled on her dresser and pictures of friends and old flames stuck out haphazardly from the framed mirrored.

The room was far from what Janelle had been expecting. She had thought the surely Travis or Eliza would have taken over the room and changed it to their liking, or at the very least her father would have rid the room of every trace of her. Why he kept it exactly as it had been on the day she left was a mystery to her. This meant that she couldn’t take anything from this room. Travis and Eliza surely knew that her room had not been touched in fifteen years. If she were to take anything then they would know that she had been here. They would know that she knew about their father’s demise. They would do everything in their power to keep her from finding out anything else.

This was far from the relationship that she wanted from her siblings. Janelle couldn’t count the times she had picked up the phone with the intention of calling them to make amends. John had kept in touch with her and gave her updates on her family. She knew that Eliza had went to college to study English, and Travis had graduated a year ago from law school. It has always been his and their father’s dream for him to become a lawyer. As soon as he graduated he came back to his childhood town to join to largest law firm in town as a junior partner.

Travis and Eliza had made it perfectly clear to anyone who asked just how much they cared about their sister. They erased the memory of her almost completely, save for the pale pink room that had not been touched in over fifteen years. Nothing in the house signaled that her father, Paul Walters, had any more than two children. Pictures of her two siblings lined the walls. Awards of the scholastic and athletic accomplishment crowded the mantel above the fireplace. Nothing at all to indicate that Janelle Walters had ever existed to Paul Walters.