Page 6 of Never Landing

Maybe it was a good idea to start during my vacation, in fact. I had my computer with me, so it wasn’t an unreasonable thought.

The moment I stepped into the driveway of my grandmother’s fabulous old house, though, all thoughts of cleaning up my CV and looking for a new job fled my mind.

The house was falling the fuck apart.

When grandma’s lawyer had told me about the inheritance, he’d said the taxes on the property were low because “its value had been impacted by some necessary repairs,” but I’d clearly had no idea what he’d meant. The charming old place where I’d spent years of my childhood now looked like a house from a horror movie, where the main characters had been dared to spend a night, and if they succeeded, they’d be given a million dollars.

Of course, no one ever succeeded. They were always brutally murdered by ghosts or Oscar Mayers or something. What could I say? I didn’t really watch horror movies. The real world sucked too much; I preferred my fictional worlds to be happy ones. Or at least fun. Not murderous. Cartoon mouse universe for the fucking win.

Too late to think about staying home instead, though, so I trooped up to the front door, let myself in with the key I’d beengiven, and stepped inside my grandmother’s house for the first time since I was eighteen.

A breeze blew through the foyer, hitting me as I stepped inside. There must be an open window somewhere in the house. Or just as likely, a broken one. Either way, that probably wasn’t good, since the place had been empty since my grandmother’s death some five years earlier.

I’d wanted to come back every summer of my teen years—no, the truth was that I’d never wanted to leave. We’d lived with my grandmother for four years in my childhood, starting when I was ten. And then my dad had gotten a new job in the city, and that had been the end of that. It didn’t matter that all my friends were in Cider Landing, or that I’d have been perfectly happy to stay with my grandmother forever—I’d always gotten along with her better than my corporate shark lawyer father and MLM-loving, PTA-attending mother. It didn’t matter that my grandmother had agreed, and said she’d be happy to have me stay. My parents had decided to go, so I’d been required to go too.

I’d begged and wheedled, shouted and cried, and it hadn’t mattered. I had been a kid, and I didn’t get a say in my life.

At first, they’d promised to let me come back in the summer. Then summer had come, and when my father had found me in my room packing a bag the day school ended, he’d laughed and said he’d just agreed so I’d stop being so melodramatic, and he’d expected me to be over it by now.

No, of course I wasn’t allowed to go spend the summer with my grandmother, now go play outside.

Wandering through the halls, looking for the source of the breeze, I was almost inundated with memories of the place. We’d lived with grandma for four beautiful years. The best years of my life. We’d eaten holiday meals in the old formal dining room. She’d taught me to cook in the homey gold kitchen—something I still absolutely loved to do, and didn’t get to do enough of,because I was too busy working. I ran my hand along the wide banister as I went upstairs—at age ten, I used to hop up onto the sturdy wood and slide down.

After we left when I was fourteen, I hadn’t been able to step foot back in the house again until after my eighteenth birthday, when my parents no longer held sway over me. I’d rushed out there, bag packed, and gone in immediate search of...of Peter.

My first friend.

My best friend.

The first boy I’d ever kissed.

My first love.

I’d asked my grandmother about him, and she’d given me a funny look and said she didn’t really know all the kids in town, but he didn’t sound familiar.

Didn’t sound familiar.

I’d spent four years wandering the woods around the house with Peter, bringing him home for movie night, refusing to spend time with anyone but him at my birthday parties, and...well, he’d been more important to me than my mostly absent parents, who’d wanted me to be more self-sustaining, so they could have social lives. He’d been more important than anyone.

How could she not remember him?

And I’d spent the entirety of my eighteenth summer wandering Cider Landing, asking after him. No one remembered a Peter my age. Maybe his family had moved away, they had suggested. He didn’t sound familiar at all. Maybe I’d known him somewhere else—like I didn’t remember sitting on my grandmother’s back porch eating snow cones in the summer and trying to make her porch swing into a blanket fort in the fall.

But no.

There hadn’t been a sign of him.

And that had been when I’d truly realized that my childhood was lost. I didn’t know Peter’s last name. Hadn’t ever met his family, except once, there had been an angelic little blonde girl he’d called Aurora, who I thought was maybe his sister. She’d given me a sad smile and said if I was taking Peter away, she hoped we were happy.

I wished I had taken him away with me.

He’d never taken me home with him, or even told me where he lived.

In short, Peter of no last name and no home...had never existed.

I’d spent the following year, my first year of college, in twice weekly therapy, half convinced I was schizophrenic and had made him up. My therapist had assured me that it wasn’t all that strange for children to fail to exchange last names, but I knew better. I knew better than anyone, Peter had been the most important person in my life for four years, and there was something wrong with me not knowing more about him.

I’d recalled odd conversations with him about where he lived—conversations where he’d sort of awkwardly changed the subject. My therapist thought maybe he was poor and ashamed of his home. It wasn’t that unusual, she said, over and over. Wasn’t unusual for me to not know his name, or where he lived, or what his dad’s name was.

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