The House We Grew Up In

by Lisa Jewell

as a child, Megan knew this to be paradise. Because, she could see with hindsight, her mother told her so. Her mother existed entirely in the moment. And she made every moment sparkle. No one in Megan’s family was ever allowed to forget how lucky they were. Not even for a second.

She went to her window and took in the view across the rambling gardens, down to the old green hammock at the far end and the fields beyond. Memories fluttered about her mind, of days that had passed and died and were never to return. But when she turned her thoughts to the future there was nothing there, just space. She sighed and sat on the window ledge, pondering her lack of ambition, of forward propulsion.

Everything was halfway to being where it needed to be, everything was a work in progress, with no systems, no logic, no sense of organization about any of it. Everyone who came here—including Tim and Vicky—gushed and cooed about the charm of the place—“It’s so cozy! So welcoming!”—but they did not see the truth, that this house was the work of a disordered mind and all the enablers she lived with.

Seriously. I want to go somewhere. I really, really want to go somewhere!” And then, unexpectedly and overwhelmingly, Rory began to cry. He cried for his lost brother, his mad mother, his distant father, his sweet sisters. But mainly he cried for himself, for all the time he’d spent in stasis waiting to want to go.

You know how you have a memory of something, and it’s flat, you know, like a piece of paper. It’s just a fact that you can recall. A moment. And then other times that memory extrapolates itself into something three-dimensional with smells and textures and color? And you think to yourself, where was that hiding all this time? Do you ever get that, Jim? Well, as you know, that’s why I keep so many things, because of that innate energy that things carry, that shadow of a memory that each thing casts.

But I realized it wasn’t a ghost, it was his SPIRIT, and then I realized that a spirit is just another word for a memory, isn’t it? The stronger the memory the stronger the spirit. Because as much as I’d love to believe that the spirit lives on as a thing separate to humanity, I know that’s not true. It’s in our minds, in our hearts, that a person’s spirit lives on. And I felt SO SAD, Jim, that all these years I’ve denied his spirit because I couldn’t bear to think of him.

The thing that shone through the brightest about the disorder was the essential childlikeness of sufferers.