Our house wasn’t there. Mr. Starrett’s house was on the left, with his red F-150 in the driveway, and the Petrovs' house was on the right, with no cars in the driveway but all their super-early Christmas decorations on the porch and lawn (it wasn’t even Halloween yet) — and there was nothing between them.

Homesick

by Trismegistus Shandy

part 1 of 3

There are dark moments in this story, but I promise it has a reasonably happy ending. Thanks to MrSimple for beta-reading. This story is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are all my other stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.

We’d all gone to see the new Tombs of Atuan movie, Mom and Dad and Kiara and me. On the way home, we chatted about the movie and got into an argument about whether they’d gotten Ged and Tenar’s relationship right. Those were the last normal moments of our lives.

Then Dad turned into our subdivision — still normal — turned onto our street — still normal — approached our house...

...and it wasn’t there. Mr. Starrett’s house was on the left, with his red F-150 in the driveway, and the Petrovs' house was on the right, with no cars in the driveway but all their super-early Christmas decorations on the porch and lawn (it wasn’t even Halloween yet) — and there was nothing between them.

Dad parked on the street and we all stared in confusion.

“This can’t be happening,” Dad said, gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turned white.

“What happened to our house?” Kiara asked.

“Let’s go ask Mr. Starrett what happened,” Mom suggested. “It can’t have — I mean, he must have heard something if not seen it... it’s only been a few hours.”

“It can’t have happened,” Dad insisted. “There’s no way — there’s no room between them for our house to have ever been there!”

“It can’t hurt to ask Mr. Starrett,” Mom insisted.

“I’ll go,” I volunteered, and unbuckled my seat belt and got out.

I walked up to his door and rang the bell. After I’d waited a minute or so, he opened the door and looked at me blankly. “Can I help you?” he asked.

“Mr. Starrett, did you see or hear what happened to our house?”

“Your house? Where do you live? I haven’t noticed anything —”

“Right there, Mr. Starrett,” I said, pointing to the space between his house and the Petrovs', though I had a sinking feeling when he asked me where I lived. I’d mowed his lawn for him ever since I was big enough to handle a push mower, and he’d always invited me in to have a glass of tea afterward. Was he starting to get senile, or...?

“Nonsense,” he said. “I know the Petrovs; they don’t have any sons, only daughters...” He squinted at me for a moment, then said: “No, you’re way too skinny to be one of the Petrov girls in disguise. What’s this about?”

“Never mind,” I said, “sorry to bother you,” and turned and walked down to the street to get in the car.

“He didn’t recognize me,” I said.

“What?” Mom asked. Kiara started to sob.

“I asked him if he knew what had happened to our house, and he asked me where I lived.”

“Was he wearing his glasses?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe he needs new ones...”

“Mom, I told him I lived right next door, and pointed, and he said I obviously wasn’t one of the Petrov girls... meaning he thinks of them as his next-door neighbors. He didn’t notice our house wasn’t there. He doesn’t remember us.”

Dad finally let go of the steering wheel and pulled his phone out of his pocket. He dialed somebody, or tried to, but he got an automated message saying that he had no service. Not that there wasn’t any reception, I mean, but that he didn’t have a valid account with a cell phone provider. Mom, Kiara and I all tried our phones and got the same message.

“So we don’t exist anymore,” Dad said. “Our credit cards and debit cards won’t work, either. Who knows if our cash will still be good?”

“Why wouldn’t the cash be good?” Kiara asked.

“Because — I think we’ve fallen into an alternate world, somehow. A lot like ours, except we never existed here... and who knows what other differences there might be? Like what the currency looks like — whose face is on the twenty-dollar bill, for instance?”

I thought back on the drive home, trying to remember if I’d seen anything weird — stores or churches or street names that weren’t like I remembered. But all I could remember was our argument about how the movie had turned Ged and Tenar’s friendship into a typical Hollywood romance.

“We can’t just assume that,” Mom said. “We need to talk to other people we know. Surely some of them will recognize us?”

“Maybe we just don’t live here in this world,” Kiara said hopefully. “Maybe we live in another subdivision. Or in another city. And we’ve got cellphones with Sprint instead of AT&T or something?”

“It’s worth a try,” Dad said. “Who is the most likely to still know us in an alternate world where we don’t live here?”

“Our parents,” Mom said. “Mine live closer. Let’s go there first.”

Grandpa Haines was out clipping the front hedges when we pulled up in front of their house. He didn’t give us more than a glance as we approached, and I had a sinking feeling he didn’t recognize our car. It wasn’t until we pulled into his driveway that he turned to look at us.

“Let me talk to him first,” Mom said, and got out of the car. The rest of us watched and waited; I realized I was holding my breath only when I couldn’t do so anymore and let it out in a huff. Mom went over to Grandpa and said something, and he replied... his face looked puzzled. Mom said something else and the puzzlement changed to something else — wariness? Suppressed anger? He said something else, and Mom replied with a sweeping gesture at the house. Grandpa shook his head and said something short — just a couple of words. Then Mom turned around and ran back to the car, jumping in and slamming the door.

“Drive,” she said, and started sobbing. Dad put his arm around her for a moment and then started the engine.

“Where are we going to go?” Kiara asked.

“We need to figure that out,” Dad said, backing out of the driveway. “And we can’t waste gas just driving around... I’m going to stop in the first parking lot that looks like a safe place to sit for a while.” He pulled into the Walmart shopping center near Grandma and Grandpa Haines' house and parked, not making any effort to be close to the store’s entrance.

“So,” he said, twisting around so he could look at all of us, “any ideas? We could go to my parents' house and see... but we don’t have enough gas to get there, and I’m not sure filling the tank is the best use of our limited cash.”

“I was born eight months before you,” Mom said. “If this is an alternate world... whatever changed here to make it different from ours happened before I was born. So you probably don’t exist here, either.”

“And Grandpa and Grandma Blair probably don’t live where they do in our world, either,” I said, thinking. “Didn’t you move around a lot when you were a kid? In this world, they could have ended up in a different house in a different city when they finally settled down.”

“Yeah,” Dad said. “If it’s an alternate world that diverged at a specific point in history, before your mother or I were born, then that’s almost certainly true. But is it? Do we have proof of that?”

“We could go in the Walmart and buy a newspaper,” I said.

“Or go to the library and look at the newspapers for free,” Kiara said.

“We’ll do that,” Dad said. “But before we burn gas to go to the library, is there anything we want to buy at Walmart?”

“Food that doesn’t need to be cooked or refrigerated,” Mom said. “We can’t afford to eat out, not even the cheapest fast food. We need to make our money go as far as we can, before...” She trailed off, and I wondered if she was thinking about begging, or ways people with no identity could earn cash under the table.

“Let’s figure out how much we have, first,” Dad said, and we pooled our cash and counted it. It wasn’t much: less than a hundred dollars all told. We also had four cellphones, and Mom and Kiara had a little jewelry, but Mom didn’t think they could get much money for it.

We argued about the grocery list for way longer than we ever had before. Dad pointed out that we’d need to save some money for warmer clothes — today was unseasonably warm, and we hadn’t worn our coats to the theater, but we’d need coats within days. Finally, we went in the store and carefully looked at the Nutrition Facts on a bunch of different packaged foods, trying to get the most calories we could for our money. It was mostly store-brand bread and snacks. Mom had a mostly-full bottle of multivitamins in her purse, which could help stave off malnutrition. We had a tense moment when Dad paid the cashier, but she didn’t blink at the money — it must have looked like the money she was used to.

From there, we drove to the nearest library. Mom and Dad looked at the recent newspapers and news magazines; Kiara and I got on one of the computers, and after trying to log on to our Gmail and Facebook accounts and finding, not surprisingly, that they didn’t exist, we looked at several news sites, then at articles on historic events that had happened since Mom was born, and didn’t spot any differences. We looked up some books that were written and published pretty recently and all of them existed in this world. We couldn’t check anything out, because Grandpa and Grandma Haines lived in a different county from us, but even if we’d been at the library near home, our library cards wouldn’t have worked.

We went back to the car and compared notes. “I don’t think the alternate world hypothesis holds water,” Dad said. “The butterfly effect — if something small changed forty-three years or more ago so your mother and I were never born, over time the changes would cascade and we certainly would have seen some kind of differences, and probably dozens. That Walmart wasn’t built until your mother was in college, for instance.”

“And Dad didn’t paint the house blue until I was in high school,” Mom added. “And our subdivision might not exist at all, or could have a completely different set of houses with different residents, if we were in a world that diverged before we were born — instead of just having one fewer house.”

“Then what happened?” Kiara asked. Nobody had an answer.

We ate a sparing ration of store-brand saltines, then drove to a Goodwill, where we each got a warm coat, a stocking cap, and either a flannel shirt or a sweater. Or tried to. We didn’t quite have enough money for all of them, so Dad wound up just getting a coat and no extra layer to go under it. By then, it was getting late, and we drove a short distance from the Goodwill to another, larger shopping center and parked for the night. We talked for a couple of hours about what to do next — ways to get food and money and maybe some shelter other than the car.

“Downtown has more services for homeless people,” Mom pointed out, and everybody was quiet for a moment. It was the first time anybody had used the h-word. Then she said: “You know... the soup kitchens and homeless shelters.” We’d all volunteered at the soup kitchen a few times. If we went back, none of the volunteers would recognize us.

Then Dad said: “But there’s nowhere you can park for free downtown. If we lose the car... when we lose it, because when we run out of gas, it’s going to get towed within a few days of being stuck in one place... yeah, we should get downtown however we can and make use of the soup kitchens and homeless shelters. But for now... I think we should focus on finding ways to earn money. And ways to live without spending money.”

But of course none of us knew which businesses were likely to hire people with no valid ID. We all had driver’s licenses, but if they looked us up in any kind of database, we wouldn’t be there. It would be trial and error, and panhandling at expressway exits and intersections in between hunting for work, and probably some hungry nights before we figured out what other homeless people had figured out a while ago — or died.

The next morning, we were all sore and stiff from sleeping in a half-sitting posture, hungry, thirsty, and in urgent need of a restroom. It was too early for the stores in the shopping center we’d parked at to be open, so we drove to a nearby fast food place and went in to use their restrooms. On the way out, I took a longing glance at the menu and the people being served breakfast, knowing that all I had to look forward to was crackers and a multivitamin.

Once everyone else was done with the restroom and we all met back at the car, we ate a few crackers each, and then split up to go look for work. Dad said I should go with Mom, and he’d go with Kiara; he didn’t want Mom and Kiara walking around by themselves. So Mom and I walked around for hours, talking briefly to the managers at all the businesses we could find that were open on Sunday mornings. Hardly anybody was hiring, and the ones that were wanted us to fill out employment applications that asked for information we couldn’t give — address, phone number, Social Security Number. How did you find people who were hiring under the table for cash? We had no idea.

Around one or two o’clock — we didn’t check the time very often because we wanted to make the batteries on our phones last as long as possible — we went back to the car. Dad and Kiara weren’t there, and Mom worried about them out loud as we ate a few more crackers. (We’d found water fountains by the restrooms at a couple of places, and drunk as much as we could there, and Mom had refilled the water bottle she’d brought with her to the movie theater.) But they returned to the car an hour or so later, having had no more success than we had. We were all too exhausted from walking more than we were used to to go out again for a while, though we might have had better success at that time of day than earlier in the morning, when a lot of places weren’t open yet. I fell asleep for an hour or two, and I think some of the others did, too.

Later on, we went out looking for work again, still with no success. After we all returned to the car around sunset, Dad moved the car a few miles to another parking lot, a shopping center in easy walking distance of a couple of fast food places and a gas station — fresh territory to look for work in tomorrow.

I'll post one chapter every two or three days, finishing up just before Christmas assuming no power outages or something.

Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.