This Is Not Really Happening

Heather got a text from the scout who confirmed there weren’t any threats lurking around the old neighborhood, no Ecstatics lying in wait. As we turned onto Hummingbird Lane, my childhood mind sought out the familiar. During the years I lived in Baton Rouge I had made numerous trips to New Orleans as it was pretty much unavoidable. But I always steered clear of my old neighborhood. Sandwiched between City Park and Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Vista was off the main path, isolated from the rest of the city while being just a few miles away from downtown. I hadn’t been down my old street since Barbara’s disappearance.

A lot of the houses I once knew were replaced with mansionettes, a result of Hurricane Katrina.

But as we crept up the street, familiar old houses began to appear. Apparently the neighborhood was on an ever so slight incline. Heather told me that Barbara’s house narrowly avoided flooding while two houses closer to Toussaint Boulevard had flooded. The Unitarian scout sitting in his car further up the street flashed his lights once to let us know we were clear.

I pulled up to the driveway as the vans parked along the street. When I got out, I caught the smell of sweet olive bushes. The maple tree in the front yard looked smaller than I remembered. So did the house. Heather pulled out her keys and turned to me.

“Feelings, huh?”

I nodded. “Lots of them.”

“I can imagine. Come. Let’s get set up.”

She unlocked the slide door that led into the glassed-in porch and I followed her inside. I took a deep breath and could smell the dusty vinyl from childhood. Dozens of families had inhabited this house since Barbara’s disappearance, but the aroma from my childhood still lingered. The glassed-in porch was empty save for fold out chairs and a card table, but up the steps and into the living room it was fully furnished with a couch, lounge chairs, and even a piano. It wasn’t the same furniture we had growing up, but it was very similar. I marveled seeing an old-style television box resting on top of a marble table that had to be the same table Barbara had once.

Noticing my attention, Heather noted, “I used the photos we took in high school to try to recreate it the way it was.”

She did an unnervingly good job. Madeline and Barbara followed, carrying boxes as the Passengers and researchers entered through the kitchen. Madeline put the box and sidled up next to me.

“How you holding up?”

“It’s…bizarre, Hon, really unsettling.” I had no other words for it.

The glassed-in porch became a makeshift command center with researchers sitting on foldout chairs calibrating sensors on laptops that rested on the rickety card tables. I heard some distorted feedback. Mini speakers had been placed throughout the house.

Heather pointed to some nodes on the ceiling. “They’re setting up the sound system for when you and I come up with a playlist. Do you remember what we listened to when, you know, we opened the portal?”

I shook my head.

“Same here,” she replied. “Well, hopefully the place should stir up some memories…for both of us.”

“Yeah, perhaps,” I said absently and headed into the kitchen where Barbara was stirring psychedelic mushrooms into a pot of boiling water while smoking a cigarette. She looked up at me and winced.

“I apologize about this. I don’t wish to trigger you to relapse.”

“It’s not a problem, Barbara, I never really liked shroom tea.” I pulled a cup out of the cupboard to make a coffee.

“I know,” she said solemnly. “I was the one who pushed them onto you. I’m truly sorry.”

I slammed the porcelain mug onto the counter beside the Keurig. “No. You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to come back after thirty years and become this woman who’s all contrite.”

Barbara didn’t say anything, she just nodded. I was about to walk back into the living room, but this was my chance. I had played out this scenario in my head for decades where I was the grown woman I was now and could cut her down for every thing she had done to irrevocably damage my sense of self-worth and confidence. I owed this to myself.

“Whoever this somber, reflective person you’re pretending to be…where in the hell was she when I needed her? Because I don’t need her now. I need the old Barb. Come on, Barbara, where’s that conniving woman I once knew? You know, the one who belittled her daughter, so she’d always be able to have someone to be better than. Where’s that gem? Don’t you dare be here now and not be her!”

I wanted Barbara to feel the way she often made me feel, I wanted to slice into her and destroy any semblance of self-respect she had because she would then know what it was like to be me growing up. But she didn’t say anything, and instead gave me an infuriatingly sympathetic look. I stormed out of the kitchen, pushing past Heather who was consulting with one of the researchers.

“We were listening to Radiohead by the way.”

About an hour later the four of us sat in the living room, listening to the playlist Heather and I put together after I took a minute to get Barbara out of my head. Heather, Madeline and I curled up on a smelly couch that reminded me of one I grew up with as music from my past played. Sitting quieting on the piano bench Barbara drank her tea and smoked her Virginia Slims as Catherine Wheel played.

Madeline drank Strawberry Hill from the bottle and passed it to Heather. “So… this is what you did in high school.

I shrugged. “To be fair, Honey, it’s before we had Internet.”

“I wonder if y’all would have me as a Wanton Woman,” Madeline asked.

“Oh, God no,” Heather replied, to which Madeline looked genuinely hurt. I placed my arm around her shoulder. “You’d be too pretty and popular for us to ask.” Heather and I both chuckled.

Madeline took another gulp of Strawberry Hill and burped. “I never felt like I was one of those girls, even if I came off like that. I always felt like I was just some stereotype whenever I was around the other kids and the real me was submerged. Daniel was the only…” she took a moment to hold it together. “Daniel was the only real friend I ever had.”

I squeezed her in my arm. “I know, Hon.”

There was a moment sitting with Heather and Madeline where I forgot what it was we were trying to do. Two people dear to me who I lost came back into my life and I was slouched on a couch with them both. But my entire purpose for being here was to let them go, to let Madeline go…forever. Seeing Madeline laugh with Heather, I wanted to stop this whole thing and force her to stay in this simeality with me, but I knew I was going to lose her either way. At least with her being liberated by this dismal simulation, I will have done something right. And Heather was wrong; Madeline would have been a wonderful Wanton Woman.

The music from my adolescence penetrated decades of emotional scar tissue, tore through the soul-sucking hours at work, paying bills, the divorce, and Pilates classes and revived the feelings of where I was when I first listened to these songs. I began to feel as though young Rhiannon was emerging through the body of this middle-aged woman. I was as sober as a preacher on Sunday, but I began to feel loopy as though I was high. Heather and I regaled Madeline on some of our teenaged antics as Radiohead gave way to Depeche Mode like the time we took all the Christmas trees that had been set to the curb after Christmas and made a barricade across Toussaint Boulevard.

Then the haunting notes from a lone guitar started…Street Spirit…that song by Radiohead. Barbara put down her tea and stood up.

“It’s time.”

We followed her from the living room, and I felt the same sense of wonder I did thirty years ago as she opened the door into the darkened hallway. Heather, Madeline, and I followed Barbara with the researchers and Passengers in the rear. The smell of dusty books meticulously placed over to the left were just as I remembered. And at the end of the hall was the door, the door that wasn’t there before, as though it was just overlooked, just as it had been in my dream. Barbara opened it, the door that shouldn’t be there. She walked in and we followed her in.