these windows tell lies // welcome to sycamore house

Ezabel Sycamore

He climbed through his window and stirred dust on the sill. The silk webs sewn across the outside had been torn by his repeated disturbances. It was simpler to escape silent and unnoticed, rather than to explain to the one Sycamore who cared (Lilith) why he spent so much time away from the house. So far there had been no detections of his absence, or perhaps just a silent acknowledgement of his inability to remain grounded. His unpleasant history with foster homes and orphanages continued to publish day by day chapters of his condemned presence in a room that belonged to the dead. He didn’t have the heart to tell Ezra that he was a forgotten orphan in a house full of broken hearts and dead eyes. He also didn’t have the heart to tell Lilith that he wanted to leave and bunk with his best friend instead.

He was in limbo.

The springs in his bed groaned beneath his weight as he kicked off his shoes and pulled up his socks for a comfortable fit. He could actually hear voices echoing outside of his door, and not one muffle resembled a shout. That was promising. He decided to prop it open to alert the residents that yes, I’m still alive, hi everyone, say hi if you want, but I know you won’t, and stood in the corridor to eavesdrop on the conversation downstairs. Genuine conversations between Sycamores were not something he heard often, unless it was Lilith trying to comfort Miss Aggie the senile woman, or Ara the toddler, or the rest of the teenagers in the house who could barely hold themselves up. Their grief for Blaire and Laila bled into the walls like the stench of a corpse. Ezabel couldn’t help but focus on his own life. It was distant from the roots of this orphanage. He had never even met Laila, and hardly ever spoken to Blaire.

Maybe that was why they hated him so much. He didn’t know them or their love, and pretending was hard.

He heard the fateful word “inspection” and froze. There was a dead silence – eerier than usual – that chilled the hallways. Then he heard movement.

House inspections were something he remembered. Ms. Bo’s house was inspected to ensure that her fostering ability was up to standards. She passed, of course, because they had their own bedrooms and plenty of food and enough money to last decades. Emotionally, Ezabel had been disconnected from that entire family, but that was never something the agency took into consideration. They didn’t care about his happiness, just his health. Both declined after he ran away, but one step led to another and another. Somehow he ended at the top of the hill, holding hands with Ezra in a warm bed. It was just like Ma said, life gets better.

Now he was learning how to read. It was a good way to occupy time originally meant to be spent cooped up in the Sycamore house, where there was no reason to attempt conversation. He didn’t want to be looked at with scorn. He was a nice boy, he knew he was. They just didn’t want him here. He was sure even Lilith pretended to care, but he appreciated her efforts a lot. She was one of the nicest people he had ever met.

He didn’t know what an inspection meant here. The conditions were poor compared to Ms. Bo’s house. Were they at risk of being shut down? Arwen’s voice snarling downstairs told him yes, this was a big deal. It was time to tidy up.

When she told him to lock up the basement he nodded, and shuffled downstairs to do just that. He didn’t know what to think about all of this, but if he could help save this house then he would try. Where would they put these people if the house was emptied out? Would they move them to another foster, or leave them homeless? He couldn’t imagine them in the streets, especially Miss Aggie and Ara. They wouldn’t do that, would they?

Curled upon the couch under a sea of blankets, life seems gentler. In a velveteen world, it’s an escape from these walls, an escape for when the gardens have stopped flowering and I’ve engraved every etching on Blaire’s grave into the foreground of my mind so heavily that migraines are quick to come and hesitant to go. Leaving the house to venture out further than was visible from that broken window in my broken room terrified me, because although Septimus and Ezabel lived for their freedom and we closed our ears to the faint slidings of their bedroom windows opening, closing, each time they came and went, the flight was fearful. Running was a reminder of where we’d come from. Too many memories that we’d fought to burn. Too much to lose.

Truly, I’d wanted to help – to lose another family all over again didn’t add up with the words that slipped through the door when Silas and Arwen came home: ‘someone's coming to inspect the house’ ‘they’re coming.’ For the longest time, we’d been neglected, forgotten, had our spirits crushed and our dreams turned to ashes, but we’d been together. They wanted to take that from us, and we knew they could. The splitting was an impossibility taken too long to become a reality, and whilst this isn’t home, nowhere else would feel like Sycamore House did – the same feeling encapsulated in the fibres of my disgruntled dress of the day we stumbled upon its open doors.

How times change.

Times when Blaire would hug me before we retired to our separated bedrooms each night and Arwen, that roaring inferno of a sister I’d never understood yet never been able to bring myself to fear, wasn’t the quiet that set my teeth on edge each time I rounded corners to see her there and we still took the time to set flowers in the single standing vase on our single dining table and the doors weren’t permanently shut in fear of outside forces upsetting the remaining stability of a home hanging in the balance. Those times were nicer.

Truly, I’d planned to help – had been waiting for the summoning I was almost certain wouldn’t come – yet when it did fall from Arwen’s lips the temptation to stay beneath the tepid fortress I’d made for myself was enough to make me reconsider my position in this mess amidst a crumbling castle. But there were promises to keep, ‘promise you will be okay, tell me you will be alright,’ and the world comes to life – as the burden of wrapped warmth peels away from my shoulders, finding a new home in the creaking floorboards – and it’s corrupted with burning dinners and six pairs of feet moving in disjointed unison, up, down, up, down – the most togetherness I’ve heard in months.

Their urgency is wasted on me, a lost soul slowly moving through a movie coming to life, playing in fast forward. Manic footsteps down the corridors, and all I can manage is a slow shuffling up the staircase, because even one foot in front of the other is an effort these days.

To the attic, where the summation of the tragedies we’re living out had been confined to

one

single

box

and there’s a difference to the silence here. It’s promised, not unstable like the periods of peacetime we move within on the landing below, ready to erupt at any point. I’ve always admired the quiet, but this is foreign. It’s unsettling, prickling at my skin and crawling beneath my veins, reminding me why it was that nobody liked to venture too far from the main living room, where things always felt a little warmer.

There’s a box in my hands that I almost left behind when those alternate silences shook hands in the creaking of the closing attic door, because the memories scared me more than I’d ever thought possible. It’s miserable to leaf through the photographs we’d stowed away, because the scowls outweigh the smiles and today, there was only room for smiles. I’m left with two sorted piles – one much smaller than the other – and in my hands, they don’t feel right. Like the photo of the ten of us standing in front of an uncharred house needed a follow-up photo of the nine of us grimacing in front of half a house, just to see where we’d come from, whether we were better or worse off, then or now. Like the self-portraits they’d all been kind enough to humour me with the privilege of taking was a joke of an already pathetic childhood. As if the two meagre bundles couldn’t possibly be enough to summarise the endured years of our adolescent lives – that there had to be more.

Memories come and go in fleeting glances – a photo of Miss Aggie in a state of graceful youth I can’t remember ever having seen settle in her now-glowing cheekbones; Arwen and her bonfire hair picking at grimy fingernails with Silas pressed beside her in the shade of an oak tree, stealing a glance her way she doesn’t see; a Septimus too young to be playing with fire and yet the flame from the struck match lights up his face as if he’s made the most fantastic discovery in the world, so we don’t say a word against his happiness; Edgar and Lilith, younger than they are now, faces void of the stresses to come in a future where all these images are nullified, but in their moment, they are complete. Weightless pieces of polaroid film passing from box to hand to hand to box. I allow myself a faint smile of reminiscence, am grateful for the distraction from abnormalcy, until a new photo falls into my hands and the faces staring back at me hit me with the force of lashes dragged across our faces from our father’s whip a long time before the shutter of the camera sealed the moment in silicon gloss.

Blaire, staring into the lens, glittering eyes holding all that love I remembered them holding, a set smile upon his face he would have surely regretted mustering, his steady arm wrapped around my shoulder and my face buried into his side. The motion blur of my waving hand suggests laughter; the visible corner of my mouth, upturned in amusement, a confirmation. Happy, I don’t remember the time or day, but it’s real and it hurts. The walls are too shiny and the floor is too clean and the world beyond the window behind us is too colourful but I can see again and it’s the first glimpses of green and blue that I’ve seen in months.

Too perfect.

It’s not fair.

It’s not fair.

It’s not fair.

Everything’s wrong because everything was so much more right than what it is now and this whole idea was stupid and I blame Arwen for making me do something other than mourn our deaths and count our losses because blaming other people is a lot easier than facing the world but shredding the photographs nobody has touched for years and now I see why and sending them over the banister in their messy strips isn’t so bad of a substitute for misguided blame and it’s easy to watch all our old lives float to the ground in their last remnants of glory and I’d laugh if the novelty hadn’t worn off exactly seven seconds after tearing them all to shreds because

they’re gone.

Those smiles, those scowls. Gone.

Truly, I’d meant to help – in the small way that I could and had always been taught to be present as, staying out of sight, quiet and mute, the slight figure of a girl living in her brother’s shadow.

But it’s this snap in my mind when I see Blaire – real happiness – and compare his face with the ghosts that reside here now, the artificial happiness we wear, and it’s too late to leap from the top of the stairwell and stop the multi-coloured confetti from falling, preserve those few moments of true bliss, because she’s here and she’s staring right at me and she’s walking through everything we were and I’m falling and we’ve already lost this war.

‘Go away! Leave us alone!’ We’re fine, I’m fine.

‘Too many strangers, you’re not allowed here.’ Klaus with that TV Ezabel on that doorstep Patricia with those fake condolences but she never came to pity us and in a way I’m glad of that.

‘I want you to leave. I want you to drown.’ Like Laila, like Blaire, drowning in their own bloods.

‘Go kill another family. Just not mine.’ Pleading, almost. Begging, almost.

Below, a storm comes to life. I don’t see it – with bent knees and wracking sobs, hands that grasp the balusters of the balcony like they’re the immovable bars of a jail cell (I’m trapped) and a head cocooned in grief, there’s a storm coming to life. The tears already blossoming across my cheeks tell me it’s been too long coming, that we’ve been crawling from room to room with lightning in our hearts for the longest time – days, weeks, months, years. Waiting.

I want Blaire. I want him to find me clutching to these rungs so he can loosen my grasp on the splintering pieces of wood, whisper distractions to stop my lips from vocalising such horrible things, staunch the tears because they burn. But he isn’t here, and he won’t find me, and I won’t be freed and the tears will continue to burn down my face, into this desperate night – tears that will never burn more than the truth that this is all that is left.