A Stranger's House (32 page)

The Saturday after I'd quit at the lab, Tom, Grady, and Martin started in on the roof, but not before Grady and Martin had taken a look at my steps. Martin and Grady both turned first to Tom, who pointed at me.

Grady had said, “Did you find these?” and took a tentative kick at the bottom step.

Tom stood with his hands on his hips. His head was down, and he stirred the leaves at his feet with the tip of one boot. We hadn't yet spoken to each other beyond asking if the coffee had been made, what the weather for the day would be.

I said, “All by myself.”

Martin, smiling, not yet into his trance, looked at the steps and took the same small kick as Grady had. He turned to me. He said, “Nice job,” and grinned, and we all laughed.

Then they were up on the roof, Martin with Tom behind him, the two of them pulling up pieces of asphalt shingles to show patches of decayed and rotting shake shingles.

By the following Sunday night they had stripped the front half of the roof of all shingles; cut out and replaced rotten or broken rafters with new pieces nailed right in against the old, what Martin called “sister rafters”; and replaced roof boards that had been broken or mildewed with new pieces of plywood. Then tarpaper had been laid over it all.

I had watched most of it, not able to do much, but wanting to. Martin, as always, was doing most everything, from working the Sawzall quicker and more proficiently than Tom, to laying out the odd pieces of plywood, to nailing them onto the rafters, his hammering strong, two hits and the nails driven deep and solid into the wood. Tom seemed almost an assistant, Grady when on the ground only handing up pieces of wood, when on the roof only throwing down broken, replaced pieces.

In my frustration to start working, to start up again, I decided I would form the junk heap, the boards from the porch before then only strewn around the front of the house. The broken, stiff asphalt shingles and the rotted shake shingles beneath them seemed to
have rained down before the house, Grady almost gleeful at times in throwing them from the roof in twos and threes.

The first thing I had to do, I knew, was to find where I wanted to put all the trash, all the junk, some of it salvageable—a lot of the wood would be good for use this winter—some of it, like the asphalt shingles, useless. And so I went around the house, the sky still gray, gray all weekend long, gray every day since I'd done perfusion, and for a moment, just a moment, I thought of Mr. Gadsen, and of Chesterfield, and I tried to imagine who would be at the old man's funeral. Will, Sandra, Paige, and Wendy. Those people. But not me. I was working.

I walked around the house, trying to find some cleared area that would hold all this trash until we had somebody come haul it away. To the right of the house was out; the trees were thick there, and as I looked back into them and away from the house, some dark feeling fell into me, and I thought for a moment that it was a cramp. But the darkness of that feeling—a low twist, not an ache—told me that that wasn't it.

I stared back into the woods, and felt at the base of my spine, the skin on my back tightening up, the beginning of a shudder, and I looked down, took in a deep breath, my skin prickling over.

I went around to the rear, and I could hear the men working up on the roof, Grady saying something about a custom skylight. “I'll just put my foot right through this roof board,” I heard him say, “and presto, custom skylight.” I heard him laugh, heard Tom give a small chuckle. I heard nothing from Martin.

The area behind the house was clear, just ground covered with leaves and gray, dead grass for about fifteen yards, then trees again. To the left was the narrow trail back to the barn.

I heard from the front of the house more shingles falling down, slapping onto those already lying on the ground.

The barn would be just as good a place as any, I thought, and I headed back, walked the hundred yards or so along the path over-grown with tall, dead weeds, trees on either side shoving into the trail, trying to take it over.

I had my arms crossed, holding myself, as I came up to the barn. Nothing was any different now than when I'd first been back here with Tom the day we were here alone, and my curiosity came back,
the wonder at why Martin and Grady would not come out here, at why they seemed to freeze up when mention was made of the barn. They were glad to do anything else, eager to work, to be at this house, and yet they would not come out here.

I started looking at the barn, watching once again the rafters and the thick, black beams, and I thought for a moment of the barn with the patterned slate roof, the one Tom and I had stood at and cried. The barn that would never come down, I knew, ever, simply because the roof had been built right. Our own barn was nothing compared to the grandness of the other.

I went on inside, the world growing darker because of the clouds and the black wood around me, darker than any day here yet, and I looked back to the house, just to see it from here now that all the leaves were gone, now that the sky was gray. I wanted to see the house framed by the open barn door, a black frame that would surround the house, hold it down to size, make the work that needed to be done seem possible.

From where I stood, the open barn doors framing the house perfectly, I could see my window, the window on the room that would be my own, the room I had not long ago believed and hoped might someday be a nursery. But the window was black and empty, the room inside the same, I knew.

I looked at my window, at its emptiness, and suddenly I became aware of what was behind me as I stood staring: nothing, only the emptiness of the barn, beyond the broken planks of the back wall only woods on up the hill, beyond the hill more trees, and more nothing. I was afraid to look behind me, to
see
that nothing, and yet I looked.

I saw nothing, and I shuddered, this time all the way down and into my arms, and I ran, ran as fast as I could, the distance between me and the house seeming to grow as I ran, the trees all pushing toward me as I ran along that path.

Finally I made it to the front of the house, where shingles still came down, two, three, four at a time. Tom and Martin and Grady were out of view, from above me merely the sounds of hammers and the low screech of nails being pried up. They were no longer talking.

I picked up a piece of plywood, pulled it away from the house to
where the trees were not so thick. I pulled the piece of plywood as far as I imagined was necessary, just far enough to get it away from the house, to keep it from making the place look like the town dump. I let the piece drop flat on the ground, the whoosh of air from beneath it sending up dead leaves that collected over the tops of my shoes. Quickly I knocked those leaves away, went to the pile of junk, and started moving things.

But I could not shake the fear I had had of almost losing myself in the barn, the feeling of the forest closing around me, just as the garbage bag in the perfusion room had swallowed up Chesterfield's carcass. That would have been me, I knew, if I'd waited in the barn any longer. And I thought I knew then why neither Grady nor, especially, Martin would go out there. It had been that feeling of being swallowed, I thought. Of being lost.

That night, after Tom and I had dropped them off at the Friendly's, I had asked Tom if Martin and Grady could work weekdays on the house. I told him I was going to be out there anyway, that I might as well have company, and company that would work.

He looked both ways down Route 9, waiting for traffic to clear, and pulled out of the Friendly's parking lot.

I said, “Tom?”

“I heard you,” he said.

He was quiet awhile, and in the darkness I saw him shift in his seat. These were the most significant words that had passed between us since he had watched me cleaning the blisters on my hands. My hands were still bandaged, and I had worn canvas work gloves all weekend long, hauling those pieces of wood and shingles. My hands ached as I sat next to him, waiting for an answer. But I did not mind. The ache was for a good reason. We had gotten work done.

We were almost to Cooley-Dickinson Hospital by this time, but I did not look for the maternity wing, would not stare back at the window of the room Paige had stayed in when Phillip was born. I would not do that anymore, and as we passed the hospital I kept my eyes on the road, listening for an answer.

I said, “You guys are almost done with the outside. You just have the rest of the clapboards to go. And then. Then comes all the inside
stuff, and you know I need the help. I can't be out there all day by myself and expect to get much—”

“The money,” he interrupted.

“The quicker we get this work done, the better,” I said, “and let's be honest, those two aren't nearly as expensive as what we'd be paying otherwise.”

“We'd be doing it ourselves otherwise,” he said quietly.

“That's the point,” I said, surprised at how quickly and efficiently my words came from inside me, as if it weren't me doing the planning, the calculating. “We'd be taking forever to get all this stuff done, killing ourselves all our weekends. And I don't expect they'll turn us down, either, even though they're working week nights. I don't have to stay out there all day. We can cut off around three or so, and I can get them back here to town so that they won't miss work. I think they'll say yes. So the quicker we get the work done the better.” I paused, took a breath. “The quicker we get it done, the sooner I'll be able to go back to work. At the lab, or wherever. Then the money will be coming in again. And the work will be done already. Except for, you know, things that we'll do next summer, like painting.” I paused, took another breath, this one deeper, the air colder inside me. “And the money we have already,” I said, “is from my mother. It's from her house, for our house. That's what it's for.” I was looking at my hands, at how the plastic Band-Aids reflected light from streetlamps we passed under. My hands seemed plastic in places there in the dark, all gray and shiny. They seemed artificial.

He turned and looked at me a moment, and turned back to the road. He hadn't looked at me long enough to allow me to turn to him, so that when I did his face was away from me, looking out his side window.

He had said no more, and I took that to mean what I wanted it to mean. Two days later—a Tuesday—I dropped Tom off at the newspaper, then picked up both Grady and Martin in the cold early morning of the Friendly's parking lot.

They enjoyed working every day, too, as far as I could see, talking with one another as they tore out the cupboards and cabinets in the kitchen, me in other rooms breaking back baseboards. All the kitchen cupboards and cabinets, Tom and I had decided, needed to
go. It would be easier just to buy new ones, the old ones scarred wood painted over blue, hinges bent and broken, shelves splintered and cracked. Next to go in the kitchen, once I'd gotten the base-boards pulled out, had been the linoleum floor, Grady starting at one corner, Martin the other, the two of them gently rolling back the edges, the linoleum breaking in places into huge scraped and beaten dull-yellow pieces, large, odd shapes like the maps of foreign countries. The two of them had contests to see who could get the biggest piece of linoleum up without breaking it, and, of course, Martin won each time, each time his face breaking into his old grin, Grady acting perturbed and incensed and disappointed, all to make Martin smile that much more.

Beneath the linoleum was the hardwood floor, the brown of wood murky and hidden beneath the remnants of black resin. Still, I had felt good that day a week or so ago, felt as though somehow, finally, things
had
begun. Starting again had finally shown me something tangible: a gutted kitchen, pipes naked and shiny, waiting, the walls empty now. Martin and Grady and I had been working hard, filling our lives with emptying this house.

“Okay,” I said, and put my hands on my hips. The fire in the stove popped, that sound followed by a slow hiss inside. “Okay,” I said again, “we'll take a break. All of us. In celebration of Martin's calling me by my first name.” I rubbed my hands together, felt the warmth from the stove on my back. “I'll break out lunch, and we can all relax.”

“Sounds great,” Grady said.

Martin said, “Sounds great.” He paused. “Claire.”

I moved toward him, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He backed up, let me pass by him, and I patted him on the shoulder. I said, “Thanks, Martin,” and he smiled again, gave what I thought could have been a blush, his face going a little red all the way up to the top of his head and on into the gray, slicked-back hair.

 

Every day now I brought with us a picnic basket full of food, a small cooler with a six-pack or so of soda, and a thermos of hot coffee. The soda wasn't for me; after a week solid of offering them coffee, and having them turn me down, I'd finally asked Grady what they would want to drink. “Nothing,” he'd said, then he said, “Soda pop's fine.” Since then I had brought the cooler, even though each day the highs had been hovering around forty degrees.