The Bike.

It was blue, that bike. I haven't consciously thought about it in years although it does sometimes come to me in the dreams of replayed childhood. Blue and sparkly. The kind of sparkly that you only see on the worn out kiddie rides at county fairs these days. By the time it had come into my possession, the white banana seat had grayed under layers of the adhesive of long lost tape jobs, the flared handlebars were speckled with the rust of a thousand dewy mornings, and the spokes bent where baseball cards had been attached with clothespins.

I didn't care. I loved that bike.

And it wasn't until I started describing this bike that the memory of how I came by it returned to me like a developing Polaroid. Slowly, and with ever more detail until the clarity of it broke my skin.
My mother had driven me to the house my sister and I had lived in with my father. I was seven years old when we left with our clothes and a few toys. On the last day of second grade, it was as if we had stepped through a veil from one life into another, and yet, here were back again. Now, as a nine year old, it seemed so surreal to return to this place, although at the time I didn't have the word "surreal" to attach to that tilting feeling.

When we arrived, the owner of the house, the man I had only known as "The Landlord" was waiting on the stoop. A tall man, at least to me, and gaunt he had scared me at first but had easily won me over by introducing me to the wonders that lie in a roll of Necco wafers.

I tugged my mother's hand. "Mom, can I go in?" She spoke to deny me, but the Landlord interrupted her.

"It's empty." he said, standing to hold the screened door open, "She can't hurt nuthin'" My mother let go of my hand, and I slipped past him and he shut the door behind me. My eyes adjusted quickly to the dim light of the living room and I was glad to see that the faint smell of this house was still present, not quite masked by the Pine Sol. The landlord had spoken the truth. It was empty. The furniture I remembered was no longer there, not even the footprints of the heavy recliner and the matted place in the carpet where the rocking chair had been erased by a rug cleaner of some kind.

From the door I could see the dining room where a big oak table had once held my birthday cake. The doorway to the bathroom where I had won a game of hide and seek by crawling into the front loading washing machine. Crossing the rug, I followed the el of the dining room into the kitchen, where one day our black lab had gotten so excited that she put her paw through the glass.

From the door I watched my mother and the Landlord stand in the back yard talking. He looked up and startled, I back away and decided to go to the one place I needed to see most of all. My bedroom. At the entrance to the dining room, a cheap hollow door lead upstairs and I opened to climb the matted tan steps toward the landing.

I suddenly giggled at the memory of the Christmas night when my step-brother Tommy, a teenager, and I had sat on these steps and took turns burping into his brand new tape recorder. His red mopped head bent low over the microphone while I waited with my hands covering my mouth and my barely contained mirth. He swallowed hard and from somewhere deep inside him a word like "baseball" would be borne on the belch. Quickly he hit the "stop" button and we would play it back, collapsing against each other in tears. We kept playing them back until finally I made myself sick with laughter and too much Coke, and the game was over.

I giggled again when I reached the place where I had thrown up, but my laugher reverberated on the landing. Sobered, I opened the door to the room I had known as Tommy's room. Gone were the Kiss posters, the X-wing Fighter that had been suspended from the ceiling, and the Marvel comics. The tape recorder was gone. I turned, closing the door behind me and crossed the landing to the room that my sister and I had shared.

As I expected, it too, was empty. Our beds. Our Fisher Price farm. Our Barbie dolls, records and books. All gone. The walls were freshly painted, but I crossed the floor to find a minute dent in the drywall, the impact of a Weeble thrown in frustration. On this geometrically patterned linoleum, I had made my first stand and bloodied my sister's nose in response to some injustice. Despite the spanking I received for it, it had been worth the pride I felt because although she was only 15 months my senior, she stood a head taller and had 20 pounds on me.

None of the things I'd left behind when my mother took custody of us were anywhere to be found. The sadness threatened to overwhelm me, until I remembered the shed. I dashed down the stairs and flew out the screen door and into the backyard where my mother was wheeling the bike my sister had gotten for her birthday two years previously across the grass.

The gears tick- tick- ticked as she wheeled it past me, calling back “Let’s go, Alia.”

“No.” I pleaded.

She stopped and scowled at me. “What?”

“I…” stuttered slightly. “I need to see what else is in there.”

With furrowed eyebrows she shook her head “There’s nothing else.”

I didn’t believe her. I didn’t …want…to believe her. I strode purposely toward the shed in the hopes that she had missed something. Anything. Grownup eyes missed things all the time and I need to see for myself. Leaning into the shed, I closed my eyes and counted to three Mississippi before opening them again.

There, against the inner wall stood Tommy’s bike. Lacy cobwebs bridged the handle bars some sort of fuzzy cocoon had attached itself to one of the front spokes. The tires were gray and flat and it…was…beautiful.

“Mom!” I gasped. “Mom!”

Her face, back lit by the afternoon sun appeared around the doorjamb. “Yeah, I saw that. It’s not ours.”

I ran a finger over the torn vinyl of the once-white seat. “I know. It’s Tommy’s. They put it in here when he got his ten-speed.” I looked at the dust on my finger and pleaded with her.”Can I have it?”

I was surprised to hear the Landlord’s voice, but he had joined my mother at the entrance to the shed. “I tried callin’ them. They didn’t want it. Gave me your number so’s you could come get that one.” He gestured to my sister’s bike. “Seems to me it was meant for her.”

My mother rolled her eyes and looked again at the bike with chagrin. “It’s a boy’s bike.”

“I don’t care.”

Silence stretched between the three of us as I watched the wheels of decision turn behind my mother’s hazel eyes. I chanted the word “please” silently, as a pilgrim might silently pray for a miracle at the steps of a cathedral.

“Please”, the words tumbled past my lips. “I need it.”
And I did I needed this one thing that I had left of the first seven years of my life. Of the little brown house at the end of a dead end street where the path next to the tree led down to the bay. Where I had spent summer mornings skipping stones and singing to periwinkles and then eating my peanut butter and fluff on the concrete steps. Of the yard where I potions out of rainwater, dandelions and ground up acorns.

I didn’t have the words to plead with her for the single reminder of a life before I realized that my father was human. And that humans were breakable. And that life had shattered him.

“I need it.” I stated again, my voice breaking. “Please.” The word hung in the air like the millions of dancing dust particles lit by the one shed window.

She sighed. “Okay.”

At some point, the bike was taken to a shop where it was cleaned up, refitted with tires and brakes and a combination lock and plastic coated bike chain were purchased. I rode that bike all that summer…even after one of the pedals fell off and the seat had long since lost all the cushion. I realize now that I must have looked utterly ridiculous half –pedaling around the neighborhood, but I didn’t care. As fall came I rode it less and less, and when it was stolen during a weekend trip to my grandmother’s farm, it was no great loss to me. It was okay. I was okay.

Every once in a while when I have time to kill, I get off the interstate and take a right onto Veranda street. Then a left onto Berwick. I park at the end of the street and look out onto the ocean and remember. The little house is gone now. They tore it down to build a bigger house with bigger windows. The shed too, lost in the footprint of the new house.

I never saw Tommy again, either, but that’s okay too. I passed on the fine art of word-burping to my son who if I may say so, does a pretty mean “broccoli”.