“Another Life”

By Christopher Locke

Another Life

When I was 19, my mother and I were going to murder each other if I didn’t move out. However, standing on the front porch hugging her and my stepfather after I packed, I cried. Sobbed, actually. I knew nothing could ever be the same. And even if someday I did return, if I flamed out gloriously and crawled back humiliated and broken, I knew I was gone for good.

My girlfriend’s Toyota Tercel was packed tight with the essentials: clothes I’d lumped into plastic bags; my extensive collection of punk rock albums, (which would later all be stolen); a journal I’d never written in given to me by my sister; an “Old Ghosts” skateboard, (also soon stolen); a 13-inch black and white TV; and a smudged baseball signed by every member of the 1978 Red Sox—in a fit of lamentable buffoonery, I added my own signature in blue ink when I was 9.

The weather that day was fittingly overcast. Early November. I looked back as I drove up the hill, my parents waving from the steps. I wiped my eyes and tried to avoid potholes, the Tercel’s  suspension unforgiving.

I arrived at my girlfriend’s place on the seacoast and was shown my room: Evelyn was 18 and lived with her mom in a Victorian sprawl shaded by a legion of doting maple trees. Her mom had been divorced for years and clearly liked me; when she’d take Evelyn and me out to dinner, she’d smile across the table and say things like: “Oh, Chris, in 30 years you’re going to be such looker.” I was like, Wait, what’s wrong with me now? I didn’t realize how deep her affection ran. She once burst through the front door as Evelyn and I were having sex on the couch, but she walked in with her back turned, pretending to be calling the cat until Evelyn and I could disentangle and snap our trunks back up, out of breath and fumbling with the TV remote.

Besides that, for the first month at least, things seemed good: I got a job as a waiter at a fancy breakfast joint in the center of town. At night, Evelyn and I would meet up with our friends Brianna and Karen and go driving around, smoking clove cigarettes and cranking New Order on the tape deck. We’d roll up to out-of-the-way convenience stores and ask frustrated middle-aged men to buy us beer. Later, creeping about the cemetery in Portsmouth we’d tell ghost stories while ducking behind carved angels resplendent with moss. I’d chug my fourth or fifth Coors Light until my head percolated. And at some point I’d look up at the black and mottled sky and literally breathe a sigh of relief that I didn’t need to hurry home because I was breaking curfew again, setting the stage for another midnight confrontation with my mother.

Everything changed in March when Evelyn had a breakdown and was taken to the hospital by ambulance; Evelyn had been on and off different antidepressants for years, and always seemed to vacillate somewhere between radiant joy and the darkest hollows. But I loved her, or thought I did, and I would just wait for her to come back around—which she always would—and everything again felt like normal.

This time was different. I was eating dinner with Evelyn and her mother at the dining room table when Evelyn abruptly excused herself and went upstairs. We heard her yelling a few minutes later. I found Evelyn hiding under her bed in tears, covering her face. As I reached for her, trying to console her and saying her name gently, she yelled “No!” over and over, swiping at my hand. Finally, her mother called 911 and she was removed from the house. I could only look on helplessly as the ambulance doors whumped closed.

After visiting Evelyn in the hospital almost every day for two weeks, I was met by her mother on the porch in her bathrobe. She was waiting for me. Wild-eyed, she pointed and said things like “You did this to her! This is your fault! You caused all of Evelyn’s…suffering!” She spit that last word out at me. Suffering. And I was dumbfounded, almost furious, because I didn’t understand at the time that some parents who lose their children will grasp at anything to keep themselves from going under too.

I threw Evelyn’s car keys on the porch and walked away. Big hero. Now what, I thought.

I went to my one room apartment a couple of blocks away; staying at Evelyn’s had always been just a stop gap until I found my own place. Apparently, I found it at a boarding house with five other dudes on Ham Street. We all shared a bathroom down the hall next to a toaster oven. We paid the same $60 per week, utilities included, for single rooms that came furnished with a dresser, desk, and double bed.

I sat on the edge of my mattress and finished some Thai weed my buddy Scott had gifted me. I blew the smoke out the window and tried to think of a plan. All I could think about were hot meals and a bed that didn’t smell like someone else’s perspiration. I put Morrissey’s new album on and laid back down, reading the lyric sheet:

Hide on the promenade
Etch a postcard:
"How I Dearly Wish I Was Not Here"
In the seaside town
That they forgot to bomb
Come, come, come, nuclear bomb

I played the album over and over. Partly because I believed Morrissey sang my truths, but mostly because I didn’t own anything else; my albums got snatched off the porch as I was moving in a month prior.

I turned back to the open window and felt the first real spring day give way to evening and its strange perfumes, the soft patter of cars knocking up and down the street as their headlights blinded the back fence and a few withered snowbanks. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew it wasn’t this. The idea of college was still a mystery. I wanted to go home but I didn’t know where home was.  

I stood up and flipped the album over. I was worried about Evelyn. Almost every time I had driven up to the hospital, I saw figures silhouetted in the windows staring down at me. After I’d park the car and lock the door, I’d look back up and think those people probably hoped I was someone they knew; someone who once loved them in another life.

END

Christopher Locke’s essays have appeared in such magazines as The North American Review, Parents, The Sun, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Slice, Atticus Review, Jet Fuel Review, and New Hampshire Magazine, among others. He won the 2018 Black River Chapbook Award (Black Lawrence Press) for his collection of short stories 25 Trumbulls Road, and his latest book of poems, Music for Ghosts, is forthcoming in 2022 from NYQ Books. Locke received the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award, and state grants in poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. He has been nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize many times. Chris lives in the Adirondacks where he teaches English at North Country Community College.