THE DOORBELL

“Mom!...how do you stay in this house alone? This house is so scary!” 

My sisters and I would ask our mom this every time one of us spent the weekend with her. Even though we are all adults now, with families of our own, we all share the same sentiment. To be fair, this isn’t the house we were raised in. That crazy household sold 20 years ago when the market soared, and our parents told us it was now or never to move back to the area of our mother’s childhood, a place they couldn’t quite afford back when we were all toddlers. No, this sprawling home was two hours west, in pastoral (and pricey!) wine country. Mom had found the house on a listing, and when she saw it in person, she told Dad, “THIS is it! This is the house I am going to die in! This is “grammy’s house”! We must buy it!” And so they did. And the thing is, she didn’t even have grandchildren yet!

Twelve years after purchasing the 4,500 sq. ft. house on the hill, on 25 acres, just as our mother manifested, grandchildren came, one by one, until she had 6. She promptly created a playroom for them before any could even walk. She created a children’s library before any could read, for they would one day! And the grandchildren loved it! The long hallways were filled with laughter and running feet. But the adult children remained uneasy. The house made “sounds”, and they didn’t like it. With a dismissive laugh, Mom told us the house did make sounds, but she found them comforting. She called them the “breath” of the house. WE?...found that creepy.

 One issue is that when any of us came to visit, we were assigned to the guest room, attached to a walk-through closet that led to an attic. The kind with a steep, sloping bare-wood ceiling and generations of forgotten stored treasures. This is where that unexplainable “groaning” sound came from. Maybe wind was squeezing through the house's cracks, but it sure sounded “alive” to us! After these ghostly sounds jarred us awake, if we wanted to go downstairs for a glass of water, our bodies braced for every step forward, not with comfort. To get this water, we had to cross the dim breezeway, climb the spiral staircase, and cover what felt like an unnecessary distance just to get a drink. 

 Downstairs, large rooms stretched out, their shadows amused by the tricks they played on the awakened sleeper. The house seemed to mock the 3 am riser. For these shadows and sounds were nowhere to be found during the day. But at this hour? The house had a personality. Indeed. 

Back in the guest room, it was impossible to tell whether the sound came from the attic or wafted up from the dark rooms below. The sleeper’s attention was torn in both directions. HOW did Mom do this? Stay here alone all these nights when our father was on week-long hunting trips? Or business trips all summer long? But Mom was never scared. In fact, she often fell asleep watching true-crime shows, with her windows open! We worried about our mom.

On this visit, my husband hadn’t come along. My young sons, blissfully asleep, had traveled to slumber land hours ago in the bedroom their grammy had created for them, complete with soothing stars on the ceiling, a sound machine for sleeping, a mini library for bedtime stories, and plenty of stuffed animals to cuddle with. The kids never heard anything in the house but love. I let this thought lull me back to sleep. Maybe my mind was just on overdrive. 

My eyes grew heavy, and I fell into my final blink when the doorbell rang and woke me abruptly! And you must understand, my mother doesn’t have a “ding-dong” doorbell, of course not. Her doorbell plays the Westminster chimes. But on this night, her doorbell sounded like Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2, better known as the Funeral March. Mom and I both dashed from our rooms and met in the middle of the breezeway. 

Over and over, the chimes haunted the house! Was there an electrical outage? A click of the light switch lit the chandelier above the foyer, casting long, creepy shadows over the dark rooms below, confirming the electricity was working fine. How I wish our dad were here! He was supposed to be! Mom called and asked if I wanted to come stay a few nights with her since Dad was supposed to return, and then we could have a nice family dinner. But Dad never came home; he didn’t even call to let Mom know he’d decided to stay a few more days on his hunting trip. Mom was irritated with him; I was slightly concerned, as it wasn’t like him not to at least let her know.  

As we cautiously made our way down the staircase, I came to the living room where Dad hung his trophy bucks. Mom reluctantly let him hang one, and they had one of their largest arguments ever when she came home from a weekend away and saw that Dad had added two more trophies to her carefully designed living room walls. But in this moment, the heads loomed as a backdrop of death to the sound of the funeral march that persisted throughout the house. My mom suddenly jumped at the rattling of metal down the hallway. From somewhere in the house, out of our sight, Mom soon recognized the sound. It was Dad’s gun cabinet. For a moment, I wondered where Mom’s dog was, “Tucker the Terrible”, we enduringly called him, her golden retriever who chewed everything but immediately responded to any unwelcome sound, before I remembered he had aged out. And at that time, Mom said she was never going through that kind of loss again and refused to get a new dog. How I wish now that she had.

 Now, it was just the two of us against…what? An intruder? What intruder rings a doorbell? No sooner had I finished that thought when the entire house went dark. Now, it appeared that our electricity was out! Or had it been cut? Yet… the funeral procession marched on. The gun cabinet rattled louder. Mom and I clung to each other as the moisture in my throat dried and my breath grew ragged.

When it came to raising us, Mom was the WORST in any emergency! Her first instinct was to put her hands in front of her eyes and freeze, leaving one of her daughters to be the strong one and to take charge. Other times, Mom would collapse into helpless laughter, the kind you get when you’re in trouble at school for laughing, and the angrier the teacher got, the more you couldn’t help but laugh. She knew about this maternal defect, and we often joked about it at family gatherings. She was the first to own her mistakes and laugh at herself. But there was no laughing tonight. Tonight, I saw the rare side of my mom: when she truly knew no one else could save the moment, she became fearless. 

My mom whipped a protective arm across my adult body, the same way she did when I was little and a passenger in the car, when she came to an abrupt stop. She told me to go upstairs with the boys and make sure they were okay. I argued, “I’m not leaving you down here alone! Come with me, and we will call the police from their room!” But she shushed me and gestured for me to “get upstairs…NOW!” I made my way up to the far bedroom, where the boys were still blissfully asleep; I didn't understand how, but I was grateful. I shut the door behind me, turned up the sound machine sitting on the floor, and dialed 911. 

Mom waited to make sure I was up with the boys. I didn’t realize Mom’s incredible instinct had kicked in. She used to joke that if she believed in psychics, she would become one, as it was uncanny how the events in her life that she had a gut feeling about turned out to be true. Tonight? Was to be one of those nights. 

* * *

The doorbell had stopped. But the rattling from the gun cabinet had not. The gun cabinet she and her husband had argued over. He wanted it displayed in the family room, as if the word “family” had escaped him, and he thought of that room as his solitary man cave. She did not like the idea that the guns, while, yes, locked up in the ornate metal case, made it obvious there were guns in the house. It hadn’t felt safe to her. She looked again at her living room, the room he'd decided to own as well. Each deer head seemed to leer at her with its glass eyes, as if it knew something she didn’t.

Now with her daughter securely upstairs with the boys, her resentment overrode her fear. She straightened her back and walked down the hall with determination. 

She had stopped caring long ago that her husband was gone so much. He put his love for hunting above everything else. Well, except for his work. She had begun to build the dream of “family life” without him. Her daughters would visit and bring the grandkids, and without Papa, create their own memories. She had hoped, however, that after this trip, he would make a real effort to come home for the dinner he knew she had planned with one of their four daughters and the two grandsons. But no, no, he let her down. Now she had to deal with this fear, all on her own. She didn’t even get the luxury to be afraid; for now, more often than not, she had to be the man of the house.

As she rounded the corner and entered the kitchen she had designed to look like a replica of a hundred-year-old chef’s kitchen, she stopped. Everything stopped. The house was silent, but suddenly cold. 

His scent, the scent she'd known from 36 years of hunting trips, filled the room and her heart softened; he had made it. He had been trying to put his rifle back into the locked gun cabinet…had he lost his key? But as quickly as Hope rose, it just as quickly she fell as he said to her, in a most mundane tone of voice, “I’ve been trying to reach you. Where have you been? You only think about yourself, always putting the kids before me. I thought you were going to have dinner ready? Isn’t that what you said?” As her conditioned response to defend herself began to form, she shouted, “Selfish?!… She was anything but selfish, but then refocused on what was in front of her.

Then he continued, “Look at this beauty! I’m going to put it in on that last free spot in the living room. You have no idea what it took for me to kill this one!” But she did. She could see it for herself: the left side of his head hung wide open, resting on his shoulder. His skin was pale and lifeless. It didn’t seem to faze him. As he spoke, blood slowly seeped out of the side of his mouth and onto her beautiful wooden floor, creating a growing puddle quite quickly. His left eye was missing, but he chattered on. She didn't notice until his torn camouflage shirt revealed a dark hole where his heart should have been, and it was then that she gripped the kitchen island in front of her. The only stable thing in the room.

Whatever had happened on his hunting trip, he clearly hadn't survived.

Yet as he made his way to the farmhouse sink for a drink of water, she naturally handed him a towel while he droned on about dinner and where exactly to put his freshly killed deer head. “Why not in YOUR office and not in MY living room?” she caught herself saying, absurdly. He stopped and looked at her with his remaining dead eye, threatening to slip out of its socket next, just as oblivious to her needs as he had always been. When he finally noticed the trail of blood that had followed him across the room from his gaping head wound, he looked at her again and asked her HOW she could allow such a mess to be all over the new kitchen floor? “You know what to do, clean it up!”

She froze. But this time it wasn't from fear. As she slowly took in her husband's gunshot body.

She lifted her chin and, without looking away, let the towel drop to the bloody floor. Her daughter's voice then came from upstairs...

***

“Mom?!”….I heard you arguing downstairs…. Dad’s HOME!”

I turned back to my phone and told the 911 dispatcher.

"Never mind, my dad's home now. We don’t need help after all."