House Keys by Laura Zera

Every couple of years for the last fifteen or so, I’ve pulled a single key from my desk drawer and wracked my brain for the story of its origin. A standard shape and cut, it has a piece of a white label affixed to one side, B+M in my handwriting.

Who are B+M? They trusted me with a key to their home, and not only did I fail to return it, I evacuated them from my conscious mind.

My ritual has been to systematically visualize a specific period with its associated location and people. For example, at the end of 1987, when I was eighteen, I lived in a rental with my sister and her husband in a suburb of Vancouver, Canada. A school friend happened to live in one half of a duplex next door and her family invited me for dinner on several Sundays. Her mother felt sorry for me, perhaps—my life had kicked off without much of a mooring— and I welcome pity as a late-in-the-game substitute for parenting, so I always accepted. Did my friend give me a key at some point?

But her name started with T, her mothers with L, and her stepfathers with H. Her older stepbrothers name started with B. I would never have written his initial on a key to their house, and he didnt have an M in his life, though its a scenario Im sure he dreamed about.

Same period: nights and weekend shifts in a clothing store at the mall. A coworker took a platonic shine to me. Here, I maintained distance. She said she played volleyball in Finland, and later, that she’d never visited Europe. Her boyfriend would look at me for three seconds too long. Their house, strangely, was also one half of a duplex; their wedding, which I attended, unintendedly small. But she had a D name, and he an N, and had they given me a house key, I know I would have returned it.

Hope wanes that my brain will ever unravel this mystery and yet I continue to try. B+M’s key could have landed in the trash on any number of occasions or moves over the years. I hang on to it, keep it accessible.

Are B+M still together? (Note my assumption that they originally comprised a “together.”) Are they living within gas-tank radius of where I lived for most of my life? Were they a family I tried to choose for myself, because my own had been a nonstarter? I dont know. Theres a chance I might have been important to B+M, and I wont throw away their key.

I first visited my fathers house when I was sixteen; we’d not shared an address for fifteen years. A few months later, I moved in, having nowhere else to go.

I used the keys like a tenant on a month-to-month lease—non-committal, curfew-blind—as did everyone else there: my father; his second wife; his stepson; the woman from church his wife invited to stay; the woman from Mexico his wife brought back to stay.

The whole crew pushed off eventually. My father sold the place and took an apartment next door to his office. I slept in his RV for a December and a January, then left for a commune six-and-a-half thousand miles away.

It was already my observation that you can peg the quality and tenor of your in-house relationships by how you feel when you’re steps from the door, key in hand, about to let yourself in. Are you braced for a hurricane? Ready for the dull emptiness of dead air? Smiling before your foot crosses the threshold? Quiet like a mouse?

My dad died in 2009. After that, I stored the keys to his house in the drawer with B+M’s. Dad possessed all sorts of cute and kitschy keychains—he was a Tupperware distributor, so lots of those miniature bowls with seals that really detach—but these keys are on a blue rubber keychain branded with the name  of an auto shop. Responsible for a fleet of vehicles as part of his business, when he wasnt in the office, he was at an auto shop.

I possess all sorts of cute and kitschy keychains, collected from years of traveling the world, but I cant bring myself to change it.

These are different keys than the first ones. A different house. A third wife. He gave me this set when I was thirty-four and I stayed while he and his wife traveled to Finland, just before I moved to Seattle. Whenever I returned to visit, I could let myself in, make it my home base for a day or two.

I liked unlocking the door of that house, because I knew I’d be met by their pug, Winston, and Winston would be excited to see me, and my dad and his wife would be excited about Winstons excitement, and, except for Winston, we would all have herbal tea in Tupperware mugs.

There was a time I considered returning the keys. I mean, it was about a half a second. Dad had passed away, and his wife emailed my sister and me to say she didnt want a relationship with us anymore. She and my dad were an item for twenty-one years, and she’d become important to me. We spent the last night of his life together, bedside at the hospital.

Stepmother Two put my father’s personal papers and photos in plastic tubs and left them outside for me to pick up. But I could have gone inside. I could have.

She sold a few years ago, moved back to her native Finland. I keep the keys as evidence that for six years, I had a family home where I smiled before my foot crossed the threshold.

In 2002, my mother sold the house I lived in until age fifteen.

When the purchaser—a land developer—arrived on possession day, he found the keys didnt work in the locks. My mother peered at him through the entry window, not the slightest bit packed, but righteously indignant and oblivious to the contractual agreement—a hazard of her psychosis.

The realtor assisted in her eventual removal, and, a decade into our estrangement, her absence offered the only reason I could accompany my morbid curiosity and walk the halls once more. An architectural landmark in its heyday, the house was about to be demolished, unsalvageable after severe neglect.

This bothered me not a whit. I would have poured accelerant, lit a match. I’d run away from this house. Left one night with three plastic bags and no plan other than to crash at a friend’s while I finished tenth grade.

Now I looked in to see the living room emptied of furniture, a staging ground for building materials that might be reusable. Scarlett O’Hara would have refused the curtains hanging in the showcase windows, though, water stained and moldy. The effort it used to take for me to maneuver those curtains, the muscle to move that waterfall of fabric. The vulnerability I felt after dark if the curtains remained open; the same vulnerability if they were closed.

“She has a lot of keys,” the developer said, holding up a gallon-sized Ziploc that bulged with its fullness. Believing the mafia and I—and maybe that I was part of the mafia—broke into her house on a near-quarterly schedule, my mother had the locks changed to match. When she dared to go out, she carried the bag of keys in her purse. How heavy her purse must have weighed. How important that bag.

I hadnt possessed a key to my mothers house for most of my life.

The developer dropped the bag and it jangled as it hit the ground. I walked away.

At her new apartment, my mother installed an additional lock that could only be opened from the inside. No keyhole on the outside. And no one in her life to whom she might give a key.

B+M, Im sorry I dont remember you. If I did, I would want to offer my thanks.


Laura Zera’s work has been published in the New York Times, Catapult, DAME, the Rumpus, Hippocampus, Full Grown People, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and other places. She is working on a novel and revamping a previously represented memoir. After 17 years in Seattle, Laura recently moved home to British Columbia. Her website is laurazera.com and she’s @laurazera on Twitter.

Illustration by Sarah Salcedo


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