Nonfiction by Wendy A. Warren

My childhood home is for sale. I frisk the house through the online window of technology, a voyeur. The real estate website reveals renovations made by the people who bought the place from my parents. They’re reselling it for more than twice the price for which Mom and Dad sold. The photos stir in me a dust-covered nostalgia for the place—and the ghost who lived there. I think of returning for a live look.

When I tell my parents the asking price, they are impressed and appalled, proudly scandalized in the frail way of the elderly. But the sale of the home has afforded them a stable, ghost-free late-retirement. 

I don’t ask my parents if they would buy back the house if they could; their memories are buried under a thin layer of dementia. I imagine they’re relived to be free of the house and its attendant ghost. They must have seen the little boy everywhere after he died. I only heard about him, never saw him. But he was there. Hearing about a ghost is different than seeing one; sometimes the competition you imagine is worse than the real version.

The house has been on the market for a week. It’s expected to sell soon. Would I buy it if I had the money? There’s a button on the website to schedule an in-person tour. The 1960s architecture and the spiders await demolition. It’s an old house, after all. This is my last chance to see my childhood home. Perhaps the real estate agent’s narrated tour would include the boy’s haunts; the places I kept living after he was dead.

“Here’s the breakfast nook,” the agent might say, gesturing to the space where I once ate oatmeal before catching the school bus, or did my homework—all the while listening to my parents wistfully talk of the ghost-boy. Maybe the agent would say, “Notice the view of the lush landscaping,” which is really the over-pruned white camellia my parents planted after he died. If he’s still there, that’s where I would find him.

Before they sold, Mom and Dad allowed the camellia to grow to towering proportions, the way their boy should have grown up. It was cut down before the house went on the market, the shrub a ghost of its former self. Just like my brother.

In wintertime, as an only-child, I collected the camellia’s white blossoms that fell in the snow, and counted them as miracles. I thought they were proof of the ghost that lived in our house, or in the impressions of the snow angels I made at the base of the memorial camellia. I would set the blossoms on my eyes and play dead along with my brother, wishing there were two of us. And, occasionally, wishing to trade places with him.

I take a last look at the real estate listing and decide not to visit my childhood home. If I went, I would nod and smile at the agent, and say, “It’s a lovely place, but I’m no longer looking for ghosts.” I close the browser and kick dust over the past.

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Wendy A. Warren writes fiction set in the Inland and Pacific Northwest. She grew-up on a small family farm in the barn-dotted foothills of Washington State. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in HerStry, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, Birdland Journal, and elsewhere. Wendy is a member and student of numerous writing and historical organizations, including the Horror Writers Association, Women Writing The West, WA State Historical Society, PNWA, Hugo House, and Grub Street. She lives in Seattle, WA. Learn more at WendyAWarren.com.