Home Before Dark

Grief is tricky like that. It can lie low for hours, long enough for magical thinking to take hold. Then, when you’re good and vulnerable, it will leap out at you like a fun-house skeleton, and all the pain you thought was gone comes roaring back.

Every house has a story to tell.

When you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you.

Every house has a story. Ours is a ghost story. It’s also a lie. And now that yet another person has died within these walls, it’s finally time to tell the truth.

Finally, I cry for all the versions of myself that have existed through the years. Confused five-year-old. Sullen child of divorce. Furious nine-year-old. Inquisitive me. Defiant me. Dutiful me. So many incarnations, each one seeking answers, leading me to right here, to right now, to a potential truth I have no idea how to handle.

Sometimes, Mags, a couple can go through something so terrible that not even love can fix it.

Few things in life are more disappointing than knowing your parents aren’t being honest with you.

[...] perception is a tricky thing. When people think of you a certain way, it's almost impossible to put that genie back in the bottle. And when the world considers someone a monster, people treat them like one, and it isn't long before that person starts to believe it as well.

I long for the quiet camaraderie only a library can provide.

He once told me our relationship was like a rose. Beautiful, yes, but it came with thorns. I liked it to the weather. It was always changing. Icy seasons. Warm spells. Months when we'd talk almost every day and long sections of radio silence.

I go to my father's desk, getting uncomfortable flashbacks to when Allie and I emptied my father's apartment a week after his death. It was rough. The entire place smelled like him - a soothing combo of wool, aftershave and old books. Every item dropped into a cardboard box felt as though a part of his existence was being locked away where no one could see it. Every tattered cardigan. Each worn-edged book. I was erasing my father piece by piece, and it gutted me.

What I do recall is colored by what’s in the Book. Instead of memories, I have excerpts. It’s like looking at a photograph of a photograph. The framing is off. The colors are dulled. The image is slightly dark.

Every house has a story to tell and a secret to share.

A saying I’d heard long ago came to mind: When you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you.

There’s more to the sentence, the unspoken part left dangling like an autumn leaf. I know what it is, though. Something vaguely sexist and patronizing. I get it all the time. Constant questions that would never be posed to a man. Am I skilled enough? Strong enough? Capable enough?

pain you thought was gone comes roaring back.

You know there’s no such thing as ghosts, right?” I said. “You’re wrong.” Maggie slid deeper under the covers. “I’ve seen them.

A naked Barbie lies facedown in the carpet like a murder victim.

He was, in many ways, a terrific dad, and not just because he spoiled me rotten. He was attentive and kind. He never talked down to me, like my mother did. And he never, ever underestimated me.

...make a handprint on the wall. That way you'll always be apart of this place.

When you stare into the abyss

Grief is tricky like that. It can lie low for hours

believe Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback to ever play the game. I also believe he’s an asshole.

The most popular “real-life” account of the paranormal since The Amityville Horror.

Twenty-five years ago, my family lived in a house named Baneberry Hall, situated just outside the village of Bartleby, Vermont. We moved in on June 26. We fled in the dead of night on July 15. Twenty days.

You don’t think Maggie has a problem?” “She has imaginary friends and trouble making real ones.