Liz Allen - Halfway Home

 

It was a quarter to midnight, New Year's Eve 1997. We got a call that our house burned down. I was 13 at that time, my sister was 15 and we were on a family ski trip. So, when we came back to the house, we had just our ski clothes and we came back to like an empty carcass. I remember my dad turning around and being like, "Guess we should go to a hotel." And my mom being like, "There'll be an indoor pool. It's a good thing. We packed our suits." And so went, we checked into this hotel and kind of started an adventure for me. We sometimes got to eat room service or go to the continental breakfast before school.

 

My mom had went back to the house and rescued a couple bowls and she would put them out on the counter with some fruit and cereal for the morning so we'd feel a little bit like home. So, my mom was kind of a ray of sunshine. I called her the month of May. She was a secure attachment for me, really, as a kid. My dad was-- drank quite a bit, and he was fairly inconsistent, like, emotionally also. His physical presence was really inconsistent. But she kind of made the best of it always. If he didn't show up for dinner, we would sing into spatulas around the kitchen. I remember her trying to teach me what vain meant. It was like a vocab word in sixth grade. She put on Carly Simon, You're So Vain. And we listened to it, like, 14 times. [chuckles] 

 

And she really made the best of every situation. And this was no exception. I remember sitting on my bed. My sister and I, at this point, for the first time ever, were sharing a room. In the hotel, the kitchen was in between, kind of dank kitchen and tiny living space. My parents were on the other side. And so, I was sitting on my bed, trying to do my homework, and I realized I needed scissors. But when your house burns down, you don't have things like scissors or markers. I mean, you really don't have anything. And I remember being pretty frustrated. My mom was like, "Well, we'll just go to Staples." And I was like, “School supplies [excited] in the middle of the year. This is awesome.” [audience chuckles]

 

And we dragged my sister. We walked out of the room and down the hallway, down the elevator, across the lobby, across the parking lot, and went to Staples. And I got to get a whole bunch of stuff. I got scissors, I got a ruler, I got some markers. My mom let me buy. It's kind of ridiculous. My mom let me buy a $24 stapler. [audience laughter] It was like two pounds. It was for a desk for adults. We had no desk, [chuckles] I was not an adult. [audience chuckles] But it was awesome. It felt really special. And of course, there's no place to put that stuff in a hotel room. So, it just sat in the Staples bag on the floor.

 

And that's kind of what my life was like at that point. I was a little bit famous in school. I got to get out of gym class, and things seemed to be moving along, which is why it was a little bit surprising. I woke up a couple weeks later in the middle of the night like 1:30 in the morning, and to crying. Now there's a lot of hotel noises. There's weddings go on and grandparents visit grandkids, etc. But this was a different-- Like a different sort of noise. And it felt really close. I remember pulling back the covers to my bed, and creeping out towards the door to the kitchen. There was a light coming out through the bottom and I could hear crying coming from the kitchen. And I just remember being a little nervous, not sure what to do.

 

So I like cracked the door just to peek so I could kind of peer in. And there's the fluorescent light of the hotel room and the kind of drab kitchen cabinets. On the counter was these individual yogurts, tiny bags of carrots. When you have a hotel refrigerator for a family of four, you can't buy the big yogurts, you have to buy individual stuff so it fits. And in the middle of the kitchen was my mother on her knees, crying. She had on these like pink rubber gloves, a sponge and some soft scrub. I don't know where those items came from. And she was cleaning our refrigerator. It was confusing to me as a kid, right, I lived in a hotel. People came and made our beds and cleaned our stuff for us.

 

I didn't know what she was doing, why she was crying. It was like 1:30 in the morning and why she was cleaning. So, I just watched her and I really felt her loss. It was the first time it dawned on me that this was like real loss. Like we had lost our photo albums and she had lost her wedding dress. I had lost my bike and my stuffed animals, my favorite pillow. And we had lost other things too, these intangibles, the driveway where we learned to ride our bikes and the banisters that we pretended to be horses. The garden she and I kept in the back. It was the first time I realized we weren't going home. We were not ever going to go home. And my eyes started to fill and I closed the door. I rested my face against the door frame and I cried. And together we grieved.