Mom had really lost it after we came back. There had been alot of time between Lagos and Doddie when we were just wandering. Sometimes we'd walk places and we'd find somewhere, abandoned. That was the first time I realized that not all land was someone's property, that there were these breaths of communal space that existed with the shadows of other lives inscribed in the air around the place, like Freud's mystic writing pad. Sometimes places just lost their way. Sometimes their owners had died, inside, alone, and disappeared into the ground.
Once, we found a place where the sun shone sharp, this was maybe in Georgia, or Alabama somewhere. Mom had a pair of gold-colored flip-flops on and a summer dress that always made her seem like something you could slip under with a flashlight, light-up from within, project spring.
The place we found that day was a house, where the grass outside was growing to the doorknob. That was grass you could vanish into. Almost. We'd walked up to the door and it seemed impossibly sealed, like someone had welded it shut. But that wasn't the truth. Which is another thing I learned in that in-between time before Doddie-- that the truth isn't always what you think it is. The truth was that all you had to do was push the door hard enough and you were inside. No furniture; just nature overgrown, light pouring down from the holes in the ceiling making idiosyncratic patterns. Mom blended right in, her mossy heart, so soft and easily punctured. For a long time I thought of my mother as moss and my father as fire.
"Mozie, baby, we can't live like this anymore," mom said, that day, whispering close, as we stood there in the center of that old house. "Let's go home."
"Where's home?" I asked.
"Your grandfather's house."
And that was that.
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