A Stranger's House (9 page)

This was my mother's history, the only facts I knew that day, only a sketch, but one that made fear fill up in me. Accidents, I thought, are real and will happen. That was why the word had been created, a label for this unforseeable yet inevitable factor of life. And my life, I had seen, would be filled with them; my father had disappeared, and there was no one to protect me from them. My stomach seemed to tumble, and I was dizzy a moment, closed my eyes, leaned on the chain-link fence at my face. My father was gone, and I had been playing a child's game when I ought to have been waiting for yet another accident to occur. He was gone, and the sounds he made—the crack of the stairs as he went down them and to work each morning, the engine turning over in the garage and the crunch of tire against gravel as he backed out of the driveway, him stomping snow off his shoes on the porch outside the door at the end of a
day—would never come back, sounds simply gone from the face of the earth.

I opened my eyes then, and the world was made of ugly colors and shook in my tears. I put the back of one hand to my face, tried to block tears from leaving my eyes while my stomach still twisted, and I remembered his voice. But it was more than that, more than memory: I
heard
him, as if he were just behind me to my left. I heard him say
This is Claire Shaw,
and was astounded at how solid his voice became inside me. I took in a breath and quickly turned, expecting,
knowing
he was there. But he was not. There were only kids, like me, playing a game that involved moving, moving from a hurled object that, if you weren't quick enough or weren't paying attention, might harm you. Only kids, and their own sounds in the world: laughter, yells, running. Sounds I made. Things I did.

This is Claire Shaw
I heard again, this time a whisper, warm in my ear, my father there with me; and I decided then, only a little girl, that I would not let fear consume me, not let it kill me as it had all but done to my mother. Though he hadn't spoken to me since that time, I listened, listened to this day. And I had lived.

 

Tom and I said nothing on the way out to Chesterfield, through Haydenville and on past the lumbermill, Route 9 now narrow and twisting along the bank of the Mill River, water this time of year only deep enough to glaze the rocks across the bed. In Williamsburg we passed the General Store, the parking lot packed with cars. I wanted to tell Tom to pull into the gravel lot behind the place and let us go in, have a look around, but I said nothing. We were moving, driving somewhere, the earth turning beneath us, and for that I was thankful. We were going to what could be our house, I thought. A home, our own, and I settled back in the seat.

Outside Williamsburg we turned onto 43 and headed south, the road bordered now with trees, and for the first time I saw the changes in colors that had already come about, the hardwood trees giving up the green for autumn. The color usually started at the tops of trees, off to one side in a certain spot, where a single branch would be filled with yellow- and orange-edged leaves, a sprinkle of color that made you see the shape of the tree, shape you'd taken for granted since the trees had filled out with new leaves last spring. The farther out we got, too, the more trees had already begun the change until it seemed color was all around, not yet the cascades of red and orange and russet and yellow, but the hints, the edges, that let you know things were about to move into fall.

Chesterfield itself sat up on a hill, one of the first at the edge of the Berkshires; houses, some old, some not so old, sat along both sides of the highway. There was a church, and a gas station, a
market and post office, all the lawns neatly trimmed, some clapboard sidings brown and weatherbeaten, others in clean, white lines and angles, still others shingled over.

It was a beautiful, small town, and as we passed through it I could see us stopping for gas and talking to the owner of the station, going to the post office for Christmas stamps, stopping in the market for milk on the way home. I could live here.

The road fell down toward the gorge, and from the crest, just beyond the main strip of town, I could see the Berkshires before us, and the colors etched into the green, here and there a stark bush already gone red, the whole upper half of a maple given over to orange.

I looked at Tom. He looked at me. He smiled.

“What do you think?” he said. He looked back at the road. He was still smiling.

I said, “I can see us here.”

He said nothing, put the car into low gear, and we moved down into the valley, fields below us to the left, to the right those trees. On both sides of the road ran old stone fences, rocks fallen over here and there, but for the most part neat and sturdy. I wondered how many days those walls had seen, how many sunsets and snow-falls and thunderstorms and summer afternoons, and how many anonymous cars just like ours had driven past them day after day while they just waited for a shift in the stones, the giving way of earth from rains and melting ice to make those breaks in the line where stones had fallen back to the ground, back to where they came from in the first place.

I could feel the engine running hard, feel the pull of the brakes as we headed to the bottom of the valley, and then we crossed the bridge, the stream only boulders and rocks outlined with slow-moving water. On the other side of the stream two hills shot up, the road going between them, following another stream, this one to the right, on my side. Three or four houses were on this side, some kept up, others a little shabby, but houses all the same.

I said, “Our future neighbors.”

Tom said, “Don't jump the gun. We're just up here to look.”

We were almost there; the drive up didn't seem half as long as it had Thursday night, but then things had been different: the end
of a workday, the setting sun shining in our eyes as we headed down here, other cars of other commuters to contend with.

The houses stopped. We went another quarter mile or so along that stream, and took the dirt road off to the left. Slowly we drove another hundred yards back in, and we were there.

He turned off the ignition, and we sat in the car, just looking.

It was a different house now, here in daylight, the sun straight above us, no shadows to hide things, give darkness to detail.

A porch sat in front of the house, a makeshift thing, just two-by-fours and planks nailed together, two wooden steps leading up to it, no railing. Just a platform under which could live any number of small animals. The roof was covered with asphalt shingles, and looked strong enough. At least the roofline seemed straight. The chimney, though, needed some reworking, and I wondered how much that might cost, a few of the bricks at the rim looking as if they might fall off any second now.

“The porch will have to go right off,” Tom said. “And we'll put up a new one. Probably in the spring. But I'd tear that thing off right now, if I thought we could get away with it.”

I said, “But that would be jumping the gun.”

Tom turned to me, and smiled. We kissed.

He pulled the keys out of the ignition, popped open his door. I was still sitting, looking; the cool gust of air from outside filled the car. He closed the door.

I climbed out. My left arm was still useless, and gingerly, steadily, I held it next to my abdomen, pushed shut the door with my hip.

The house had been painted an ugly sky blue years ago, the paint on the clapboard bubbled, chipped, in some places nonexistent; you could see the gray wood in patches across the front of the house.

I said, “The house has age spots. Those unsightly liver spots.”

He laughed, and we moved to the front of the car. He put his arm up and I came to him, leaned against him with his arm around my shoulders. We took a couple of steps toward the house, but Tom stopped. He stood still, and I felt his body stiffen.

“Shit,” he said.

I looked up at him. His arm was still around me. “What?”

“The keys,” he whispered. “I forgot the keys. I forgot to go to the realtor's and pick up the stupid keys. Shit”

We were quiet, the two of us staring at the house, the engine ticking, a breeze high in the trees behind the house.

“Well,” I said, and broke the quiet.

Tom looked down at his feet, then back to the house. He took his arm from around me, put both hands in his pockets. His shoulders sank as he moved toward the porch. He went up the two steps, those boards, it seemed, ready to break under his weight.

I followed him. Our footsteps on the planks of the porch were hollow, loud.

Tom had his hand at the door. The door, too, was scarred with bubbled and broken paint, and had nail holes in the wood where, I imagined, someone had once put a knocker or hung bunches of Indian corn. The exposed wood of the door was just as gray as anywhere else, and I was already starting to picture what we would do: how the front door would be scraped of its paint; the exposed wood stained; this porch, if I could talk Tom into it, kept, reinforced and replanked, a railing put on, maybe a roof put up over it so that we could sit out here on days like this and eat lunch or dinner, watch fireflies come out in the summer. There was so much I wanted to do, and I even envisioned a dried grapevine wreath from the General Store on the front door, some final, simple touch that would turn this Handyman's Dream into our home, regardless of the fact we would have no children to fill it, bring it alive with hope and care.

I wanted to go inside, too, to see what the place looked like in daylight, to see exactly where things would start, with exactly which room we would begin to rebuild. I wanted to see my room, that room upstairs.

Tom tried the doorknob. Nothing happened, and I walked to the left down the porch to one of the windows off the large front room.

Again my footsteps were hollow and heavy on the planks, and as I leaned toward the window, thinking of how loud my steps were, I thought I caught a glimpse of a shadow, movement out of the front room and into the kitchen.

I swallowed quickly, then looked again. Both the front room and kitchen were filled with light, but nothing was in there, only the floors, the doorway into the kitchen, that same dark, cheap paneling on the walls. It had been only my imagination, I knew, remnants
of the dream last night still playing through my head. I took a deep breath, cupped my hands to the window, and peered in.

And then there was a face, right there, not an inch from mine, its eyes bloodshot, open wide, the mouth open, chin drawn back, and I screamed, staggered back and away from the window, still looking at that face, one I hadn't imagined. It was there.

It was a man, I could see now, gray hair thinning at the top and slicked back, his teeth white and horribly perfect, his mouth wide open. He was staring at me, his eyebrows up, his forehead wrinkled, but for all his expression his face was still blank somehow, and in that instant, I knew it was in his eyes, somehow dead, gray-green and dull, and this emptiness, I knew, was what frightened me most, what would stay with me.

Tom turned to me as soon as I screamed, but seemed frozen where he stood. I could not see his face—my eyes were still fixed upon the face in the window—but then the front door swung open, Tom, too, startled and flinching as if the open door were a fist coming at him.

Another man stepped out of the open door. My adrenalin was flying, the pulse banging in my bandaged hand, feeling as if the blood would spurt up through the threads, fill the dressing.

I looked to the man, saw that he was only a teenager, could have, in fact, been one of the undergrads I saw everyday: his hair was black and flat, and he had thick, black eyebrows, his skin pale and acne-scarred. He had on a white T-shirt and jeans, and stood dusting off his hands. He was grinning at us.

I looked at the window, but the older man was gone.

The teenager finished dusting off his hands, then put them on his hips. He was still grinning. He said, “What can I do you for?” He shook his head to get the hair out of his eyes, the sharpness and quickness of the move showing me he'd done it a million times. He reached up and tucked a lock of that black hair behind one ear.

Tom looked at me. I was still breathing hard. “Uhmm,” he said as he looked to the teenager, then to me. He reached up and put his hand to the back of his neck. He said, “We, uh,” and paused. He took a breath. “We're looking at the place, actually. Rita Longford sent us up here. The realtor?”

Tom looked at the boy, waited for some show of recognition, but
nothing changed about him. He only grinned. I brought my hand down, took in two shallow breaths. I looked back in the window. There in the glass I could see only my reflection, and the trees behind me, so that it looked as if I were inside that empty house looking out at me, here on the porch, looking in.

I closed my eyes, took in one more breath, then opened them.

The boy had crossed his arms, and had stopped smiling. Finally he said, “Oh. In town.” He looked at his feet. His hair fell from behind his ear and down into his face again. “You going to buy the place?”