I’m five, holding my scooter in position at the front of our house. I’m staring down the driveway that stretches to the gate near the street when I hear the boom buzz of an airplane taking off. A new race begins.
I push off the concrete and go, go, go. The wheels rumble over crackling leaves as the wind sends my hair flying behind me like a cape. I scream past scarlet flowers as I look up at the sky then back at the pavement – I’ve still got the lead. Push, breathe, push, breathe. I’m more than halfway when I glance up and watch the plane soar past me and I know I’ve lost. I screech to a stop. My heart kicks as I gulp down air. Then I turn around, walk the scooter back to the house, and ready myself for the next round.
I will never tire of this game, even though I’ll never win.
*
I’m forty-one, sitting at my computer as I type the street name into Google Maps. I find Santa Monica Airport and I know I’m in the right area. I scroll left and right searching the virtual neighborhood until I find the fairytale house we all bought into. The Tudor construction of pointy roofs, dark frames, and white panels. The turreted column of windows along one side that spanned three stories – the mysterious attic at the top I was never allowed into, the second-floor bedroom where my parents slept next to an altar to foreign gurus, and the downstairs living room where my father sat in his cloth-bound recliner, a brown hooded robe draped around his body as he wolfed down the business section before work.
I think of other memories. When I got a packet of carrot seeds in my McDonald’s Happy Meal and poured all of them into one hole I’d dug into the grass. I wondered for weeks why nothing ever sprouted. Or when I got roller skates from Santa, but spent most of the time breaking in my wrist guards as I crashed onto the pavement over and over. Or the evening Mom asked me to collect flowers for the dinner table, and I clipped some fuchsia blossoms from the bougainvillea bush that turned out to be all color but no fragrance.
I’m trying to make this house about something other than that morning in March when Mom and I carried our suitcases down the driveway after a weekend trip up north. We opened the front door to a hollow echo. Stay here, Mom said in the entryway as she flicked on the lights one by one, the clack of her boots and swoosh of her skirt the only sounds piercing the thick quiet of the house. I remained frozen as instructed, but curiosity lured my eyes left into the living room. That’s when I noticed things were missing: the rosewood coffee table where I ate cereal before school, the Persian rug where I cuddled our Siamese cat until she was hissing to get away. And in the far corner, by the window next to the lamp, four tiny carpet indentations marked the place where my father’s recliner no longer stood.
*
I toggle back and forth around the front gate on the screen. I can’t access an angle to view the driveway. But in my mind I see the stretch of pavement, the curve right and then left, the side-lawn of flowers with no scent. And I imagine I’m there skating in circles and pulling up carrots because we didn’t move out in May, and my father stayed, and I won the race against the planes.
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