All through the winter of 1976 my mother had been singing sounds, stitching them together for months to make my middle name. When I was born in a snowstorm at the end of February, right before the thaw, she named me Amany and said it meant, all things beautiful. What she didn’t know was that the sound Amani already existed for centuries in Arabic and had a meaning all its own on the other side of the world. Wishes… aspirations. This is what I would come to be filled with, how I would learn to escape reality and then shape it.
On that day the nurses hovering in attendance like angels in white would say I looked like both my parents: ivory skin, blond hair with a tinge of strawberry and blue eyes. All this was recorded on the certificate of birth with one small exception only a mother would notice, something mysterious in my left eye. Segmental Heterochromia, a little brown patch in all that blue. She called it my little window. Native American cultures of our region called it ghost eyes and believe that people with that gift could see into heaven and earth. So, it should come as no surprise that I was swaddled and kissed; then carried home to a hard and haunted house where I would come to see things most people never see. It couldn’t be a coincidence. It had to be my destiny.
The house that my father bought because of my impending arrival just three months earlier made my mother sad. She missed the light and bright rental apartment in Arlington where she had raised my sister Melissa for the four previous years. She missed painting by the picture window, the quaint kitchen with all the amenities and the neat sidewalk where she strolled and greeted neighbors.
Now, because of me, she was out in the country, in Lorton, Virginia, near the notorious penitentiary. My father was drunk when he went to see the house after work one evening with a questionable friend. It had been dusk and perhaps that’s why he couldn’t see there wasn’t a toilet in the bathroom or that there were rust stains in the sink or mouse holes in the wall board. He believed his friend who said he was getting a good deal. And having lived a protected, happy childhood his whole life—“a storybook childhood,” in his words—he didn’t realize that badly built houses make unhappy homes, especially in winter.
Winter is what makes a drafty house hard. No water for bathing or washing laundry or dishes makes a house hard. Deceased spirits lurking around make a house hard. The only thing my father has to say for himself now is, “I must have been crazy to buy that house.” The thing that always gets me about this statement is the word “crazy”, it lights up neon red whenever I hear it. And after all these years, when I think of Lorton and that house, even though it has been bulldozed and leveled to the ground, “Crazy” still comes to mind.
My mother went crazy in that house while my father went to work. I had only seen three full moons. I was suckled on her breast by her sweet sadness and then came the acrid smell of adrenaline. I felt the shifting energies. I felt the depression and could smell the change in my mother’s scent as her chemistry shifted and the scales tipped towards mania. Until finally, when I was three months old, she disappeared with me …
“She ran away with the baby,” everyone whispered. No one really knew what happened. One day we were both gone. It was Spring after a hard winter, and she sprung. She needed to get away from that house. It felt like it was breathing on her. She ended up at a childhood friend’s place in the Midwest somewhere, inside the comforting kind of home that reminded her of her childhood. A traditional two-story clapboard house with dormer windows up top and a wide welcoming front porch. The kind of house where you could make a home, where something tasty was always simmering on the burner of a cast iron enameled stove, the promise of something good floating on the air…
Not like Lorton.
Eventually, the yearning for my sister, Melissa, brought her home from the illusion. She had a big mothering heart at her center, and I believe that’s why the house my father picked out was such a disappointment. It resisted her every attempt to civilize it and make it cozy. She would sew lace trimmed curtains for the windows. Replace the linoleum. Cut branches of forsythia for tall vases on the table. The house scoffed at her. Instead of the delicious aroma of roasting meals or baking cookies, the oven would confound her with irregular heat and offer burnt offerings instead. When it was time to do the dishes or wash clothes the faucet when turned on would provide a rusty sludge with a thud instead of water. When she tried to make breakfast in the morning a mouse would pop up with the toast. The hardest blow was the inability to get the land to perc for a septic tank. The dreaded outhouse remained. Imagine trying to march your toddler out to the bathroom in 6 inches of snow and freezing temperatures. This wasn’t the 1800’s. It was 1976 and plumbing existed, just not at Lorton.
My father didn’t want to come home to that house either. My mother’s depression and the to-do list being long, the days he went for beers after work and didn’t come home until everyone was asleep increased. Crunching numbers all day as a statistician in a beige cubicle for a government agency, he wanted to feel like himself come five o’clock. The life of the party. Just for a little bit he wanted to take off his tie and make loud raucous jokes, congregate at the bowling alley or sports bar with coworkers. Drink pitchers of beer, sometimes out of a woman’s high heel shoe if he felt like it. Time would get away from him and then he would see my mother’s sour face when he got home. His daughters would be sleeping, the bed sagging and no matter how many times he lit the pilot light, it would go out. He would fiddle with the flu or adjust a window, but it didn’t matter, there was always that damn draft. He couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Was it coming from his wife?
After two hard winters, mother gave him an ultimatum: quit drinking or leave. He left us…the chill at his back.
The house conspired against me as well. A dark entity stole my sleep by lording over me at the edge of the bed. My beloved dog ran away, the hamster choked to death, the kittens were still born and deformed, our beloved innocent bunny was cornered by the cat and killed. I was the one who discovered the cat devouring bunny’s bloody carcass in the closet. Her precious face and eyes eaten down to the bone. I hurled the cat from the house. It clawed deep into my forearms as it went. Yet, it would stay. It was the predators feeding on the dark energy, who licked their chops and always stayed. The giant wolf spiders crept ever so slowly and stayed. The snakes slithered between the radiator holes and the mouse holes and stayed. Hornets invaded the back porch and harassed me as I passed to my only solace…the forest, the only place I wished to stay.
I’ve gotten ahead of myself. We must go back to after my father left, back to the Spring of 1978, Easter. That was when the high vibration showed up and the light changed. That was when the roof blew off the Lorton house. Or so my mother still insists. That was when the mystery at the center of my life began…formerly known as…the black hole that threatened my very existence on the planet. The unknown quantum event that changes the course of my life. Was it a mystical experience, malicious spiritual interventions, a manic episode? Please bear with me for a little while more. You can come to your own conclusions.
