Moving Out

It was a massive old house. One that sat in front of the woods with its towering brick walls and dusted over windows, almost like a bad omen. It was a colonial style house, set on a couple of acres that was mostly inaccessible due to half of it being in the thicket and laden with thick bramble. It was secluded. Quiet. Remote.

“Wow! They have horses in their backyard!” RJ cheers from behind a mountain of boxes and bags stacked in the backseat of Bucky’s ancient pick-up truck. He was jabbing at the window, pointing at one of the neighboring houses that were so far away that the term neighbor felt wrong. “Do you think they’d let me feed one an apple? Horses love apples, dad, I saw it in a movie once.”

“A movie, huh?” Bucky scoffs as he twists and contorts his body to peer out of the driver’s side window. It would be just his luck to back his beat-up truck into their new house because he can’t see through the back window with all their boxes of shit stacked in the bed. “Well then it must be true, if you saw it in a movie.”

Honestly, Bucky was just relieved his son was finding positives about them packing up and hauling ass out of DC after he was fired from his job a month ago. Most twelve year olds would pitch a fit after having to leave the apartment they’d lived in for their entire lives just to move to the middle-of-nowhere cornfield that made up this part of Isle of Wight County. You’d think a colonial would be a gorgeous old house too, something with a wrap around porch or a fenced-in yard or a barn or something. But this house was all sturdy brick walls and perfunctory windows on both of the two floors. The bare minimum for a decent sized family of farmers back in the fucking 1800s. There was a basement, which was unusual this close to the coast, but that was the only bonus.

Thank God RJ wasn’t a history buff, Bucky wasn’t all that eager to explain the only thing of import about Smithfield, Virginia was the hundred year old ham museum.

“Then I’ll feed the horses whatever it is that horses eat, geez dad,” RJ huffs. Bucky can hear him flop back into his seat and can’t help the smile that comes to his face at the image of his son pouting in the backseat. His attitude is slowly getting worse the closer he gets to being a teenager, but for now he’s still small enough for it to be cute when he tries to act like a mini-adult. “Do you think there’s any kids my age around here?”

Bucky winces thinking of the house they passed with a homemade ‘Bless This Mess’ sign hanging on the door and the old lady sitting on her front door step, literally knitting a blanket like some kind of after school special. “I’m...not sure. I’ll guess we’ll have to do some exploring, huh, kiddo?”

As soon as the truck is backed down the driveway and parked as close as Bucky can get to the front door, RJ is grabbing his backpack and bursting from the car like a caged animal. Which, his father knows, is an exaggeration cause they’d lucked out with the traffic and it only took three hours to get here.

“You better help me carry in these boxes, RJ!” Bucky calls out to his son who’s already sprinting towards the woods behind the house to explore.

“Exercise is good for you!” the little shit yells back before disappearing into the trees. The realtor had mentioned a creek in the woods when they’d been touring the place a couple weeks back and there’d been no peace in the Barnes household since.

“Exercise, my ass! Get back here!” Bucky barks, rolling his eyes at the distant laughter he hears coming from the direction his son had run off in. “How the hell am I going to do this single-handed?”

He doesn’t even spare the empty sleeve of his shirt a glance as he turns his back on the box-laden truck behind him and approaches their new home. It’s not like they need anything out of there, anyways. Bucky and an old friend of his had spent the last week bringing down all the heavy furniture to the house while RJ was in school, just to save money on a moving van.

Pausing before the heavy wooden door, Bucky can’t help but feel like he’s in over his head. There’s no traffic symphony as a backdrop, just deafening silence only interrupted by a stray breeze ruffling the branches of trees every so often. The nearest grocery store is a twenty minute drive away, hell, it’s nearly a two minute drive down a bumpy gravel driveway to get from the road to the house. It’s different. Strange. Almost suffocating. It feels like the house itself is in a pocket carved just past reality, like time passes differently here.

“There’s half a boat back here!” RJ yells, sprinting out of the woods just as quick as he ran into it.

Bucky shakes his head, trying to mentally pull himself out of the weird train of thought he’d been stuck on. The move had him drained and exhausted, he just needs a good night’s sleep on a bed that isn’t a leaky air mattress.

“Just half?” He chuckles at his son’s antics, letting the boy run up and crash into his left side. It’s enough to knock him out of his staring contest with the spyhole drilled into the door, hard to be stuck in his head with RJ by his side. “Ready to see the new place?”

“Yeah. Did you put my stuff in the cool room? The one with the big windows like we talked about?” RJ questions, unable to contain his excitement as his dad unlocks the front door.

“Yes, yes,” Bucky groans in mock exasperation, hip checking RJ as he uses his remaining hand to try and unlock the deadbolt that tends to stick. “All I ask is that you keep the closet clear in there, okay? The entrance to the attic is up there, and it’s where I’ve been storing all the old stuff the last family left behind.”

“Anything cool?”

“I’ll let you check before I toss anything out, sound good?” Bucky asks, waiting for a nod before grinning down at his son and shoving the door open. “Without further ado…”

RJ bursts through the front entrance to the empty foyer at the front of the house. There wasn’t enough furniture from their two-bedroom apartment in DC to fill the house, making it seem even more large and empty than it already is. The only thing left in the foyer from the previous owners is an ostentatious chandelier dangling from the high ceilings and collecting dust and cobwebs to shine dim light through like the world’s most grim stained glass windows.

Though, you wouldn’t have been able to tell the house was hollow and boring from the way RJ was buzzing around the front room. The second he ran in, he threw his bag to the side and off he went. It was a mostly open floor plan, meaning when his son ran into the living room, he could loop back through to the foyer by running through the kitchen and dining room. Which he did. Several times.

“It looks like a haunted house!”

Rolling his eyes and chuckling fondly, Bucky sits down on the last step of the staircase, waiting for his kid to lose steam so they can decide what they’re going to do for dinner tonight.

There’s a door beside the bottom of the stairs, hanging slightly ajar and letting up a cold draft. It’s one of several doors that line the walls of the foyer, but Bucky knew this one to be the entrance to the basement. The washer and dryer are down there along with an ancient persian rug covering about a third of the frigid cement floors. He’d only been down there twice, but it was enough to conclude that it was his least favorite part of the house.

Bucky nudges the door shut with the toe of his boot, he swore he’d firmly shut the door last time he was in here. It would just figure if the door had trouble latching and would constantly be swinging open all the time. He’d have to add it to the mile-high list of home improvements he already had to do.

The place was the definition of a fixer upper, it was probably the reason the price was so low. There’s water damage in the basement, the attic is only half-finished, and almost all of the walls downstairs need redone. Someone had done a number on the living room and Bucky was going to have to get real crafty with drywall putty if he didn’t want to be looking at the guts of this house 24/7. Whoever lived here had had some serious issues.

“Do I have to go to school tomorrow?” RJ flops down next to his dad on the stairs, panting after his impromptu sprint. “I can stay at home and help you paint, and stuff.”

“Nice try, booger boy, but you’re not skipping school,” Bucky sighed, reaching over with his right hand to mess up the boy’s short, dark hair. “If it makes you feel any better I can save the painting for this weekend? Have you decided on a color for your room yet?”

“Light blue, and stop calling me booger boy! I’m not a baby anymore,” RJ huffs, knocking into his dad’s side, trying to escape the hand tousling his hair.

“Aw, shucks, but you’ll always be my baby, RJ! Gimme a kiss,” Bucky grins as he pulls his son into a loose headlock to press kisses all over the top of his head, much to his dismay.

“Let me go, you evil old man!” RJ grits out through the giggles spilling out of him as he tries to wiggle away.

“Old?! Oh, you’re in for it now!” Bucky gasps indignantly, curling his hand up at an odd angle to dig his knuckles into RJ’s scalp, making him yelp and squirm down and out of his dad’s grasp. “I’m only thirty, you watch your mouth.”

“You’re ancient. Totally over the hill!” RJ laughs from where he’s sat on the hardwood floor in front of him, using a single sneakered foot to poke at Bucky’s knee through the holes in his jeans.

“I cannot stand this teenage attitude. The disrespect around here,” he mock sighs, folding his arms across his chest. “And here I was about to ask you what you wanted for dinner.”

“I take it back! Can we get McDonalds??” RJ begs after throwing himself across Bucky’s lap, making him laugh.

“I swear, sometimes I don’t know whose kid you are,” Bucky rolls his eyes, standing up and towing his ornery son along with him. “We haven’t been in Virginia since we visited grandma and grandpa over the summer, and you wanna eat boring old McDonalds?”

“I want sprite, though,” RJ argues, following his dad to the front door. “We’re gonna live here, we can explore later. Can we just get McDonalds for tonight, pleeeease?”

It’s been twelve, almost thirteen, years he’s been raising RJ as a single parent. Nearly thirteen years to build up a tolerance to those goddamned puppy dog eyes that HAD to have come from the boy’s mother, because Bucky hadn’t gotten away with nearly as much shit when he was a kid. You’d think he’d be better at resisting by now.

“Only if you help me carry in some boxes first, ok?” Bucky bargains, already succumbing to the fact that he was a spineless fool when it came to his son.

RJ cheers like he got a resounding ‘yes’ and bolts back outside to the truck, grabbing their overnight bags from the passenger seat and strapping as many as he can over his scrawny shoulders. Bucky shakes his head fondly, and goes to follow his example when a low, drawn-out creaking interrupts him. He turns around apprehensively, praying to God that it’s just the floorboards and not something new that he’ll need to fix.

When he turns around it’s to see the basement door has creeped it’s way open again, not even the slowly dying sunlight that pours into the foyer from the outside is enough to illuminate the dark emanating from down there.

The basement door is put to the top of his mental to-do list as he quickly exits the house to help his son with a particularly heavy duffel bag