We never answered the phone in the yellow house. We’d find it lit up with messages, glowing in the dark with three blinking red dots after a long drive from my grandparent’s house. For too long it was too high for me to even reach. Slowly the phone became eye level, and later I grabbed it to dial friends from summer camp. Propped up next to the computer, wireless, innovative, brand new. 

The phone sat directly behind me at the dinner table. Ringing telemarketers interrupted, on countless occasions, my mom, who was trying to read Phantom Tollbooth aloud. Still, my mom interrupted herself on countless occasions, too. She would jump up at the ding of the washing machine downstairs or the beep from the one minute warning on the oven. With my thoughts all Phantom Tollbooth and my nose filled with scents of fresh bread, I couldn’t concentrate on the mission at hand. When our mom slipped down the basement stairs to switch the laundry from washer to dryer, my sister would switch her tater tots for my broccoli. I sat, unbothered, legs swinging, and satisfied with our trade.

I never understood why my mom was always going, going, going, never put her feet up, never answered the phone. I talked her ear off, and she sat quiet. I asked her one too many questions, and she told me to go away. I knew she had secrets, old people always do. I went to my sister, the only person in the same position as me, but she too was old and out of reach.

One night after coming back late from my grandparent’s house, we tiptoed through the backdoor and my mom went to the phone to listen to messages as usual. In the dark and anonymous kitchen all I could feel was some foreboding stranger’s voice, hushed but blaring through the peaceful evening. I can’t remember the words, only the expression on my mother’s face that I had never seen before and the subsequent scurrying of my sister and I up the backstairs.

So, it was in a cool and sunny September morning that I told my mom my truth. And it was on a log bench in a meadow that she told me hers.

“I remember the call that scared us. In the yellow house,” I hinted, “It was the first time I had known any of your secrets. It was the first time I was confused. I get it now. I’m sorry I always wanted to know.”

My mom sat uncomfortably far from me on the bench. She looked out at the tall grass lining the edge of the open green surrounding us. She explained, “I’m sorry I keep so much from you. I don’t know what I would’ve done differently. It was the only way I knew how to protect you two. I was scared when I heard that name after so many years, so I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how they found me. I didn’t want them to find you two.”