The Quiet Corner Part 2
Past my mom’s house and the fake medieval castle compound, up a steep hill and around the bend about a mile yonder. That is where my dad landed in 2006.
After a brief post divorce stint living with his parents, he bought a dilapidated farmhouse at the top of a secluded farm road. He liked to remind us that he got a deal on the old pig of a house because the former owner—a man who had built it in the ‘70s—had committed suicide in the basement by carbon monoxide poisoning after his wife died.
Not to mention, the road directly in front of the property was the exact spot where Judy Nilan had been struck and abducted by her murderer one year before.
A tragedy that still haunted the small Connecticut town. The realtor was having quite a hard time unloading this property, and my dad shook out to be the only guy with an offer.
Despite the discount-worthy history, my dad pledged to fix the place up and make it his big divorce-crisis project. There were setbacks and frustrations, but over the years he really did rehab the thing beyond recognition.
Photo of my bedroom that I found archived on a real estate site after my dad’s renovation. I remember many sleepless nights under that offensively ugly Walmart comforter. Also... please admire my Little League trophy for “Sportsmanship.”
My dad is a big fellow with blazing red hair and diffuse light-blue eyes that sit like pools back against the terrain of gruff carpenter’s skin. The kind of guy who’s real-life smart but not especially book smart. Clearly affected by the churning of the world, but from a distance under layers of accrued emotional padding. A builder more than a talker.
The mythology of the recently divorced redhead moving into a house perched on Red Head Hill Road was just too funny. I love when life’s symbolism is that obvious.
My dad and I were the curious ones of the family.
One of the brightest memories I have of early childhood is squatting in a crystal-clear river with my dad one summer afternoon on a trip to New Hampshire. I was helping him build little structures out of rocks beneath the current so that guppies and crawfish would be swept into the strategically placed enclosures. Something about successfully capturing those tiny critters within the rock constructions we had built together felt thrilling beyond words. Now this is what life’s about I thought to myself. Whatever this is.
Another early memory is crawling alongside my dad through the puckerbrush, inching closer to the edge of a swamp in the dense New England woods. Once we found a good vantage point, he switched on the camcorder and filmed a family of beavers as they diligently built their lodge, unaware of us. Our low, mumbled commentary can be heard throughout the footage, as if the beavers were suspects whose motives and movements we were trying to decipher.
After the divorce, our adventures continued on Red Head Hill Road in the form of nighttime walks with our mutt—the apple of my eye—Cooper. An activity my other siblings were not even slightly interested in. My dad and I would walk big loops under the moon along solitary farm roads and through dewy fields, with Cooper zigzagging through the night.
My siblings and I settled into a new reality of 2 houses, as we helter-skeltered that 50/50 custody agreement lifestyle. Eternally waiting to be picked up or dropped off. Never having the right clothes, homework, or backpack at the right house. Rooms that were places to sleep, but never fully felt like home.
A few weeks after we moved in, the house was broken into. They stole two Dell laptops—one belonged to my dad, the other my sister and me. I felt especially slighted this time. My moms house was one thing, but my dads house, too?
We found our dog Cooper upstairs, trembling inside a closet, which naturally made me imagine the whole event through Cooper’s eyes about a thousand times.
Cooper
Unlike my mom’s house, the doors were never left unlocked at my dad’s. He installed a security system immediately after the break-in.
This did not stop the nights from becoming strange on Red Head Hill Road.
Life stumbled forward precariously, like the wind pushing a balloon into the point of a knife. I felt like air inside an enclosure just after the roof, walls, and floor had disappeared. Urgently exposed. This did not make for good sleep.
As I lay awake, the repetitive chorus of crickets and peeping frogs filled my ears to the brink with a shrill panic. The familiar country sounds morphed into horrible visions of darkness. Darkness that felt like both my own but also sooo beyond me.
I was not the only one struggling with these nights.
My youngest sister began having intense night terrors. She would sit bolt upright in bed, screaming, eyes wide with fear, pointing frantically at the blinking light on the Wi-Fi modem as though it were the source of some invisible force gripping her.
She cried that she wanted to go home.
It was unbelievably difficult to snap her out of it. My dad and siblings and I were completely bewildered by her affliction. We could hardly believe what she was going through outside of our own perception.
Standing there in the middle of the night, my family gathered cautiously around my sister, was when it first occurred to me that maybe our house was haunted.
Haunted not in a quirky charming way, but in a scary way.
Talking to my little sister about that period now, she does not remember many specifics, but she does recall feeling gripped by fear at night during these strange times.
(If you reading this hi Becky ily :* stay sleeping soundly girl.)
As if the night terrors weren’t enough, the alarm system my dad had installed began blaring in the middle of the night for no apparent reason. We’d all jump out of bed and peer into the darkness while my dad circled the house with a flashlight.
He never found anything.
He’d mumble something unconvincing about an electrical malfunction, and we’d all “go back to bed” feeling even less settled than before.
Then came the 2 visitors.
One night we woke to the sound of a tremendous crash outside. We rushed to the windows, only to find complete stillness.
The next morning my dad found heavy tire tracks tearing through the lawn before disappearing over the edge of the driveway and down into the woods. At the bottom sat a car wrapped around a tree.
My sister and I climbed down the hill and scavenged a wallet and a few personal belongings from inside. No driver remained.
My dad recognized the name on the license immediately. It belonged to someone he’d gone to high school with who still lived only a few miles away.
My dad took this opportunity to teach a simple moral lesson.
If you find someone else’s wallet, or money, no matter what, you return it.
I found the entire situation very strange and exciting, so I offered to help carry out the good deed.
The man looked startled when my dad and I appeared on his doorstep holding his wallet. My dad explained that us kids had found it and thought he might want it back.
The man visibly relaxed.
With a sheepish smile, he explained he’d been driving home from the bar the night before and had simply... failed to follow the curve in the road. He’d landed in the woods, decided to cut his losses, and staggered the rest of the way home somehow mostly unhurt.
The man and my dad shared an awkward laugh as if they were on the same team in life.
As we turned to leave I urgently asked “what about that car?”
Always a concerned Capricorn.
A question no one responded to.
Screenshot from a video of me at my grandmas house a few years earlier.
A few months later, on a spring Sunday morning, we heard another crash.
This time we looked outside to find a sedan embedded in the front lawn.
A woman wobbled out on high stiletto heels.
She looked like no woman I’d ever seen in our little corner of Connecticut.
Long, wavy red hair. Big boobs. A frilly purple skirt. Dark red lipstick.
I thought she looked like a beautiful princess, quite frankly.
My dad stared through the window.
“What in God’s name...”
He walked outside.
“Are you okay? What happened?”
She answered in a thick Russian accent, avoiding every direct question my dad asked.
“Ohhh... you have kids! How cute!”
She gestured to my siblings and I as we gawked from the doorway.
“It looks like you’re hurt,” my dad said. “I’m going to call 911.”
“Oh no, no. Not necessary. I make you and the kids some breakfast, yes?”
She looked directly at me with an animated face. “You like pancakes, yes?”
Before I could answer my dad interrupted
“Oh, uh-well I don’t think so. Are you sure you’re okay? Can I call someone for you?”
Eventually a tow truck arrived and hauled her car out of the yard, leaving behind a crater of overturned dirt.
Some time later a dark-haired man with a mouth drawn into a tight line pulled up to collect her. She gave us one final beauty-queen wave before climbing into the passenger seat and disappearing around the bend.
My dad later said with a chuckle that she was an “international internet model” who came from the castle.
“I can’t even guess what goes on over there,” he said, shaking his head.
I thought about those two visitors often while living on Red Head Hill Road.
Their visitations seemed to possess some kind of hidden information about life that landed just beyond the seams of my perception.
The boundaries of the world were trembling with mysterious energy.
I knew this feeling.
It was there when I glimpsed the lives of strangers who crashed into our lawn.
Or when I listened to music on my iPod during the forty-nine-minute bus ride to school, staring out the window at the rushing New England landscape. Hoping no one noticed the tears streaming down my face as I listened to that song by Grizzly Bear
“Can’t you feel the knife?”
Or it was that strange magnetic pull beyond the cornfields, where the woods were dense and a river rushed alone in the shade.
Google maps image of the cornfield near the house
Winter evenings meant quietly watching Fox News with my dad, or whatever true-crime series or action movie dvd had arrived from Netflix in the mail.
Every December, a small gathering of mourners placed lit candles beneath the tree outside our house to honor Judy Nilan.
In the summer, my dad would take us to the beach in Rhode Island with almost no parental preparation whatsoever. We’d pile into the minivan wearing nothing but our bathing suits and drive an hour and a half with no food, water, or sunscreen—details my mom would not have forgotten.
By the end of the day we were sunburned, dehydrated, and starving.
On the way home we convinced him to stop at a gas station.
My youngest brother consumed an entire liter of orange soda and a family size bag of blue doritos in under 10 minutes.
Then immediately threw up all of it.
My sisters and I spent the drive home holding our feet off the floor and screaming while the orange liquid rolled around the minivan with every turn.
My dad glared at us from the rear view, half genuinely angry and half laughing.
“What is wrong with you freaking animals? I can’t take you anywhere!”
In the fall my sisters and I developed a habit of crawling out the bedroom window onto the gently sloping roof. Something about ignoring my dads protest and squeezing through the narrow window carrying a blanket and a drink made it feel like quite the glamorous little event.
Once I settled out there with my eyes closed, the texture of the crows' calls, the smell of the dying leaves on the wind, and the warmth of the sun seeping into my hair—it all had a way of pulling me into the depths of my melancholic nature. There, where a coin spins: darkness, pain, and sadness on one side; poetry, rich sensation, and a glimpse of something that felt like truth on the reverse.