Museum

The security guard comes out of his hut as we pull up to the boom gate. 

Mom rolls down her window. 

“Sorry, ma’am, it’s closed unless you work here.” 

“Oh,” she says, disappointment thick in her voice. “But I did work here, once. A long time ago. I’m a social worker.” She fishes into her purse and pulls out her ID card from her current job at the Department of Human Services. “I have a lot of good memories from this place. I was hoping to look around one more time before it’s demolished.” 

I stare straight ahead, hoping the guard won’t see the incredulity on my face as he mulls over Mom’s statement. She’d lied so quickly, so effortlessly. What if he has records of former employees? 

“All right,” he says, sighing. “You have twenty minutes, and stay in your car.” 

We don’t, of course. Once we’ve driven around the backside of the Danvers campus, we pull our car up onto a flat space among the overgrown grass and get out. 

“What if he sees us?” 

“He’s not gonna see us,” Mom says. “The trees are blocking his view. And look! That door is open.” 

Mom is unhappy that it is just an old administration building, filled with stale air, empty offices, and cobwebby hallways. It’s nothing like the last abandoned mental hospital we got into, where there were surgical rooms with chairs bent back under overhead lights, and wood-paneled dorm rooms with motivational posters featuring sharks leaping out of water, or kittens dangling from branches. Hang in there. 

∞

It wasn’t just hospitals we broke into over the years. We also snuck into shut-down schools and hotels and countless forgotten, rotting houses. Mom always walked away with a souvenir, usually something she could use in the kitchen: a ladle from the school cafeteria, the dusty martini shaker from the hotel bar. 

I asked her once what it was about abandoned buildings that drove her to bend her morals—lie to security guards or break open stuck windows so I could climb through and let her in. 

“I like the stories people leave behind,” she said. “All the things we see, knowing they were touched by someone who had an entire life. Now they’re gone, and what we see inside is all that’s left. Like a museum.” 

∞

Two days after the car accident, I come back to your house. I sit in the driveway for a long time, crying and trying not to be sick thinking about going inside. 

Once I work up the courage, I move through the house like a detective, piecing together your last hours before you left that day. Each little corner, each item in the home is an exhibit, perfectly preserved. 

You had breakfast looking out at the lake. I can tell by the half-filled coffee mugs and the newspapers spread out on the table by the window. There are dishes by the sink, eggshells and flecks of salt and pepper still on the plates. Your laptop is folded and silent on your end of the couch. Outside, the gentle waves on the little beach lap quietly at your empty inner tube. 

The fridge is the worst part—half-eaten jars of pickles, leftover paprikash. The last slice of the Sara Lee birthday cake you bought yourself a week earlier, after insisting you didn’t want cake this year. A martini shaker filled with the watered-down remains of a drink you made the night before. 

Weeks later, after you were really gone, I hired someone to clean up the house and asked them to throw away everything in the refrigerator. It was starting to smell, but I couldn’t do it myself. After opening it the first time, I couldn’t look in there and see your unfinished life sealed in jars and wrapped in foil.

But even after the fridge is clean and the furniture rearranged, your house is still coated with your fingerprints: The seashells you messily hot-glued onto the mirrors in the bathroom. The trinkets I brought you from around the world, carefully arranged on the built-in shelves. Your curly handwriting on the walls, labelling the door handles and light switches. Your small sandals by the door, waiting forever for you to come step into them again. 

You left behind your own museum full of artifacts, but unlike the ones we explored together, these objects are not shrouded in mystery, nor are they the sole containers of your story. If this house is ever demolished, your history will remain, archived inside the hollow room in my heart.