“You closed? Like officially?”
His hand dove in his pocket, and he dangled a pair of keys in my face. “Yup. As of this morning, I officially own it.”
My posture relaxed slightly as I watched him slide the key into the lock and open the door. “Okay. Cool, cool.”
We stepped inside and stood in the foyer in silence while he looked around. “Wow. It’s like stepping back in time or something. Ain’t shit changed.”
He stalked into the kitchen and dining room before stopping in the living room. “The TV used to sit against that wall over there,” he pointed to the bare wall beside the window, “and every weekend me, Ez and El would make the biggest bowls of whatever sugary off-brand cereal Mama had on top of the fridge and sit right there and watch Nickelodeon all fuckin’ day long,” he reminisced with a smirk.
I smiled. “You three sound like me, Izzy, and Imani. Imani and I would always whine to Mama to buy us our own box of Cap’N Crunch because as the only boy in the family and the first-born, Izzy always got his own box that was ‘off-limits’ to the rest of us. We would sneak and eat some whenever he wasn’t around. We’d just run around the house looking like chipmunks with our cheeks stuffed full of cereal.”
“I think I’d like to see that, you all big-cheeked.”
Before changing the subject, I tore my eyes down to the worn carpet underneath my Nikes. “Have people been telling you it's good to have you home?”
“Everywhere I go. At the gas station, grocery store, everything. It’s crazy. People used to look at me like I was nothin’ but trouble, and now they look at me with hope or hate in their eyes.”
I agreed with a nod. “Yeah, that’s usually how it goes.”
He lightly ran his hand over the wall and sighed before walking down the hallway and stepping inside the first room on the left. “It’s creepy being back in here after all this time.”
“I can imagine,” I said from the bedroom doorway.
“I used to have a basketball poster of Michael Jordan on the back of my door and one of those over-the-door basketball hoops. I would cross up Ez every damn night, and it was like he never got tired of it,” he chuckled.
“I take it you two were close?”
He dipped his chin in a nod. “Ez and El were four years younger than me, and although they were twins, he looked more like me. Anything I did, he wanted to do with me and better than me. If he were still livin’, he probably would be.”
I let my chin sink toward my feet. “Again, I’m so sorry for your loss. I’ll understand if you don’t want me following you around. I’ll give you some space.”
I kept my distance as he walked down the hallway, stopping to spend a few moments in each room. Although they were empty, it was as if he could envision everything as it once was during his childhood. After spending some time inside the last bedroom, he walked out with a ghostly look on his face.
“Are you okay?” I asked, forehead crumpled in concern.
“Nah,” he said, wiping his hand down his face.
“Do you wanna go?”
“I was a fuckin’ fool for buying this shit,” he mumbled.
“What?”
“It’s like I’ve been fighting the demons of my past and trying to chase away the ghosts for all these years only to go and buy the house my fuckin’ family was murdered in. Who the fuck does that shit?”
“Elijah, you–”
“Have you ever felt suffocated?” he asked, interrupting me.
“In what way?”
“In every way. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s like the world is crumbling underneath me, and I'm in free fall. There's this darkness in me. It’s like I'm hollow. And then there's this sadness. This raw, God-awful fuckin’ sadness that binds me up so tight sometimes I can’t breathe.”
I bobbed my head. "I remember the night I found out my father was killed. It was like the world stopped breathing that night. Everything stopped. I wanted to scream, burst into tears, get drunk and kill myself, but all I could do was stare at the wall in silence. It was–”
“Maddening?” he asked, finishing my sentence while looking deep into my eyes.
“Exactly.”