Hotel for Ghosts

I had finished putting the last of the pictures and memorabilia that summed up my dad’s far too few years on this Earth into a box that would soon be sitting in a corner of my mother’s attic, and then, before too long, my own. The last thing I had put away was a picture of my dad standing next to his brother Cody in front of my grandfather’s old house. I never met Uncle Cody, because he had gone missing when my dad was still a kid. The loss had caused my Grampa Jim to withdraw from the world and follow an increasingly steep course of medication until he died in that same house when I was two years old. While I don’t remember him, I have a formative memory from the one time I was in his house. I was about five, and my dad had sold the house after almost three years on the market. My dad never wanted me anywhere near the house, but there was no one available to take me off his hands. So, he brought me to the house for his final walk through before the sale was finalized. He left me in the living room with my toy dinosaurs, which I played with while he went upstairs. After a few minutes, I looked up from the imaginary jungle I had created on the living room floor and saw a door beneath the stairs. I distinctly remember thinking that the door hadn’t been there previously, which I thought was exciting. I stood up and began to walk towards it, calling out to my dad as I did. I had said something about the door, but I think that my words had started to trail as I got closer. I remember being so curious about it and feeling the most intense desire to open it up. As I reached for the doorknob, my dad’s heavy footsteps broke the most intense concentration I had ever felt. I looked up and he was dropping to his knees, hands on my shoulders. He was shaking me, tears in his eyes. “Where is the door?” He shouted the words with such force that it felt like they were all around me, coming not from my dad, but from the walls of the house. I started sobbing, startled by his tone and the feeling that I had somehow done a very bad thing. A few moments had passed, and a mournful expression replacing the panic that had made him almost unrecognizable. He pulled me towards him and held me tightly, apologizing profusely, and stroking the back of my head and neck as he tried to calm me down. He picked me up and carried me through the kitchen to the back door. As he did, I looked over his shoulder and saw that the door wasn’t there.

In the years that followed, I assumed that I had just imagined the door. I mean, I must have. But as I sat next to my mom in the now nearly empty memorial room, just us and a young woman carrying away the last of the chairs, I finally felt like I could ask her what had happened to my Uncle Cody. I had asked a couple of times growing up, but my mother never said more than that he had gone missing from the house. I knew that she kept quiet out of respect for my dad’s wishes, but what could it hurt now that he was gone? Her face, through pained contortions, bore the shape of a surprised smile. She squeezed my left hand, stared off into some far distant corner of the empty room, and began to speak.

“When your dad was about five, and Cody was seven, they were playing in the living room of Grampa Jim’s house in the summer. Jim was in the kitchen and had called your dad to come and help him with lunch. While they were in the kitchen, your dad said both he and Jim heard Cody ask about a door in the living room, but they hadn’t thought much of it. Then, they heard a door slam shut. Grampa Jim was furious because he thought that Cody had gone out the front door without permission. But when he got to the living room, the front door was still locked. The windows were also locked, and Cody’s shoes were still by the door. They searched all over the house but didn’t find him. The cops came and rallied volunteers from the neighborhood. They searched for a week and couldn’t find any trace of Cody. He had just vanished from the living room, and Jim spent the rest of his life refusing to leave the house. He said he was waiting for the door that Cody went through to open back up.”

I felt my expression turn somber and could feel a shallowness in my breathing, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about the door I saw or how my dad reacted. I told her I was just feeling overwhelmed with everything going on that day, but the truth is that it’s been weeks since the funeral and every time I enter a room, I am afraid. I’m afraid that I’ll see that door, or that I’ll see my Uncle Cody, unrecognizable but somehow unmistakable, waving me over to some room that I know wasn’t there a moment ago, and that my dad won’t be there to stop me from walking through and disappearing without a trace.