Horace didn’t much like going home. What with the long walkway dotted with thorns and the cliff in the backyard and the creaking of the manor’s stitched-together frame that echoed across the property in the slightest of breezes. Still, he knew a return was imminent when the note came to him last week:
Dearest Humbug,
Hello darling, hope all is well. How big you must be by now! You turned 14 last Tuesday, right? See, mommy never forgets. Anyways, I fear my body is chewing on something rather nasty at the moment. I’ll probably be fine, but then again my own mother died around this age after telling me she’d “probably” be fine as well. Funny how time can rhyme, isn’t it?
Regardless, this illness has given me much time to reflect about you and our life together. I can’t bring myself to write all that I feel here but would love the chance to speak with you. Would you be open to returning home? Just for a day, won’t keep you any longer. Do write back with your decision.
Love you forever,
Mom
Horace’s mom typically wrote eccentric letters but this one was different. Sadder. Janet read it again, her face growing more concerned with each scan of the page. Yes, he would be visiting his mother ASAP. No, she didn’t care about Horace’s weekend plans. Poker night at Josh’s (his parents had real poker chips!) would have to wait. Janet had already purchased a ticket for him on the Q5 express to Ivan’s Clearing.
It took 2 trains and 2 buses until he made it within a mile of the manor. Horace had grown so accustomed to city life that the emptiness out here was unnerving. It was just him, a lone trash can, and an expanse of forest that extended out to the left and right like an impenetrable wall. Vapor formed at his lips. It was so cold and his jeans had holes in them (“No use getting new clothes for growing boys!” Janet had said) leaving openings for the chilled air to brush against his exposed skin. In a word, this sucked. Hard. If only he had kept his mother’s letter hidden under the bed. He sighed and stepped into the woods.
The scent of sage and pepper and other grassy things hit him like a punch to the face. He thought back to the unopened Allegra bottle on his nightstand. In a matter of seconds, his eyes grew inflamed and snot streamed out of his nose in an unceasing waterfall of grossness. He wiped away the mucus on his hands and then blinked his eyes in a doomed effort to repel the burning. In brighter news, he could now see the top of the manor’s spire above the tree line, its slender tip jutting up into the sky like a rusted spear. He brushed the snot-filled hands against his jeans and kept walking.
Horace’s mom had never accepted his hatred for the outdoors. How he would prefer to stare down at the twin screens of his Nintendo DS instead of the white-tipped mountain range visible from their backyard. How a trip to the dentist was much preferable to a weekend camping trip. How an afternoon hunting deer could leave him crying and begging to return to Janet.
He emerged from the forest a couple sharp inclines and near-trips over scattered branches later. He was out of breath and his arms and legs would not stop throbbing. Plus, he was pretty sure that something had bit him on the back of his neck. He touched his hand to the spot and, yes, there was indeed a raised welt. Why people left the comfort of an air conditioned home was truly beyond him.
The Marlock Manor unfortunately did not fall into the category of air conditioned home. The structure was old beyond its years, as if it had emerged from a seed and sprouted at this spot not long after the dawn of time. The entire building was made of wood, its body rough and cracked and of varying shades of brown. At the manor’s center was a narrow column composed of actual tree trunks that extended up around 4 stories and housed the home’s central staircase. Rooms, each featuring a large rectangular window, were stitched along the sides of the trunk like precariously suspended branches destined to crash to the earth under any amount of stress. Atop all of this was the now rust-speckled metallic spire that made up about a quarter of the manor’s height. To sum it up, the thing looked ridiculous. It was as if its architect had based their design off of an elementary student’s doodle. In this case, the doodler and the architect both happened to be Horace’s mother.
As the story goes, his parents had decided to build a “manor” (don’t dare call it a house) after falling in love with Jane Eyre on one of their wilderness expeditions. The two had only known each other for about 3 months yet they had decided it was time to build a life together. Literally. Out of wood. So off they went to their favorite forest and got to work despite their limited architectural expertise. The fact that the structure still stood was a full on miracle.
Horace approached the front door, which was less a door and more a large slab of wood to be rolled into and out of place; a design choice that caused much confusion the one time he convinced a pizza delivery driver to make the trek through the forest. Horace touched the palm of his hand against the door, feeling the familiar graininess against his skin, before curling his hand into a fist and knocking. No response. He knocked again, this time a bit harder. Nothing. One more knock. Nothing still. He bent down and picked up the conspicuous key-concealing rock placed ever so slightly to the left of the front entrance. Empty.
This was the first time his mom hadn’t greeted him as soon as he stepped within 10 feet of the front door. She was typically like an excited puppy, kissing and hugging her “Humbug” as if to seize back a lost year with each tight squeeze. The fact that she still hadn’t appeared had Horace concerned. He would have to enter through the back porch.
Horace made his way around the side of the manor. He glanced up at the spire above him, its frame blocking out the noon sun. No matter how much he grew, the thing seemed to get taller each time he came home. He thought back to last night’s nightmare, the spire skewering him like meat on a kebab after erupting from the ground beneath his feet.
He saw his mother as soon as he stepped into the backyard. She sat at the edge of the cliff that bordered the manor, her feet dangling over the void. He stepped around the wilted remains of her tulip garden and called out:
“Mom?”
But she didn’t move her head. She was so…still. Horace started walking faster. Was she okay? She looked thinner than he remembered too. She had always been athletic and muscular but now she looked fragile enough to break in two.
“Mom?” Horace called out again, this time louder. She turned to acknowledge him, her eyes snapping back to reality.
“Humbug? Just look at you, practically a giant…” she said, her voice trailing off.
She didn’t stand up to greet him so Horace finished walking the length of the backyard and sat down beside her. Well, beside her plus an extra few feet removed from the cliff’s edge. Horace’s fear of heights was another thing his mother never quite understood. He could see her laughing in his face the day he begged her to stop doing sun salutations an arm’s length from the precipitous drop. She screamed back “Life without danger is not life, Humbug!” before moving her yoga mat closer to the void to prove the point.
“Hi mom.” The afternoon sun illuminated her face like a spotlight. Her brown hair was as long and thick as ever but everything else about her was different. Older. Halfway between the mom he remembered and a skeleton. He was sure her cheekbones didn’t use to protrude from her face like that. And those tendrils of veins branching down from her temples were definitely new. Maybe she really was sick.
“Sorry for not greeting you at the door,” she said, still staring off into nowhere. “Have had a hard time getting myself to move lately.”
“That’s okay,” Horace said.
A long silence. She moved her mouth sporadically but no words came out.
“Everything alright?”
Ignoring him, she returned to staring off into the valley below and Horace followed suit. It was a pretty view, prettier than he remembered actually. Was there always that river over there? Horace followed it until it vanished somewhere near the base of Mount Hoyasat. He tilted his head and squinted his eyes a bit and could just about see the overlook where he spent his 11th birthday, the last birthday he spent out here, when his mom finally spoke.
“Humbug,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, “I shouldn’t have had you.” Her body shivered as she said the words, moisture pooling at her eyes.
Shouldn’t have had me? Horace looked at his mom, whose tears began to multiply until she sobbed with the abandon of a dam bursting open at the seams. He searched within himself for any sort of similar raw emotion but everything was so numb. Even as a little kid, it was clear to him that the situation wasn’t okay. It was his idea to go live with Aunt Janet after all, a suggestion that caused his mom to run screaming into the bordering forest, her wailing audible from the manor for a full hour. Horace remembered being confused. She seemed to hate him so much. Isn’t freedom what she had always wanted?
“Your father and I…we thought we were ready,” she said, her voice peeking out between sobs. “We were sure of it, actually. I mean we had built this entire place by ourselves.” The manor creaked in the rising wind as if nodding along in agreement. “And so we assumed we’d have a baby and the baby would be adorable and fun – which you absolutely were – and things would all fall into place. But that’s not how it works. I mean your father didn’t even last a year.”
Horace couldn’t remember his dad, though his mom had practically conjured him back into his life with all her stories. When Horace was little, he thought of “dad” as an almost mythical creature. In one tale, his mom described him wrestling a gator off a little kid during a visit to the Florida Everglades, in another he broke a wingsuit gliding record after shooting his body through a triangular opening in a cliff face. It was stories like these that made him doubt the existence of DNA when it was first brought up in 4th grade science class. Him sharing genes with these two free-spirited adventurers seemed to break biology itself.
“We were so dumb,” she said, shaking her head. “We thought we could have you and it’d all just be normal and easy. Jesus, I didn’t even know to hold you! You were like some impossible to understand alien I was stuck with in this huge house -”
“Manor.”
Mom looked at Horace, silent for a second before the corners of her lips curved up into a smile. Then she laughed. Loudly. Her initial chuckle transitioned into an off the rails belly laugh as she doubled over clutching her stomach.
“God, we were so self-involved! We were literal children having a child. And then you grew up so fast and it somehow got even harder. Horace,” she wiped the tears from her eyes before putting a hand on each of his shoulders, “I just want you to know how sorry I am. I have zero idea how you turned out as well as you did, but I’m so proud of you.”
She gave him a kiss on the cheek. Horace thought something would change inside him, but the truth was he still didn’t feel much of anything. Yet his mom stared at him so expectantly, and he was nothing if not a people pleaser.
“It’s all good mom. Thanks.”
If she was disappointed by his response, she didn’t show it. Instead, she wrapped her bony arms around him in a tight embrace.
“Want to head inside?” she whispered in his ear.
Horace looked back at the manor, eyes gliding past the foyer, the “dance” room, his bedroom on the third floor, before following the spire up to its tip.
“Maybe we stay out here?” Horace said, scooting closer to her spot along the cliff’s edge, “It’s a nice day after all.”
Mom nodded. Horace grabbed her hand.