What haunts me

It isn't the boarded-over windows in the front door, nor the fogged up enclosure in what used to be our open-air side porch, both of which provide a creepy feeling that I suspect is really more about the personal stuff that haunts me.

It's the house where my dad continued his desperate efforts to remake me in his own image, always trying to make me more athletic.

It's the house where he spent countless drunken nights stumbling around and swearing at his personal ghosts, for whom mom and Karen and I were sometimes stand-ins.

It's the house where he and mom fought over his drinking.

It's the house where I once accidentally landed on my sister's head in the swimming pool when I was trying to jump over her and slipped. (Thank God she wasn't hurt.)

It's the house where I overheard him arguing with my grandmom over whether my mom had ever given him "plenty of sex."

It's the house where I first remember being sexually abused by someone: my dad. I've been told that it had happened once before, when I was younger, but I don't remember that.

It's the house where I chose my side, rooting with mom for Notre Dame over dad's Alabama preference in the 1973 Sugar Bowl, even though I didn't know squat. 

It's the house where we stayed with my aunt while mom tended to dad in the hospital after his accident in PA.

It's the house where he finally shot himself while the rest of us were off on vacation. Mom told us he died of a "cerebral hemorrhage."

It's the house where my uncle told me, "You're the man of the house, now."

It's the house where mom finally told me, maybe as much as two years later, that he'd killed himself, and how. 

It's the house where she also finally told me he wasn't my biological father.

It's the house where mom first introduced us to the man who would become (far and away) my worst sexual abuser and, much later, due to the silence about that into which he manipulated me for so long, my stepfather.

It's the house where my wife and I first made love.

It's just a house. But what a freak show my childhood in it was.