Picture This (4 page)

Chapter 6

The House

T
he house had been waiting, stuck in time at the moment of unimaginable despair, staring in vacant hunger. There had been deaths before; the ebb and flow of people had washed through the old house like tides, but grown children or new people had always followed. First came the young lovers, bleary with the fright of buying a house, not knowing that the house had selected them, called to them as they drove by, heads hanging out of car windows, or walking by, pausing as the house issued a call to them if they were a suitable fit. As the house pulled them into the heart of the kitchen, blowing future dreams into their palms that stroked windowsills and banisters, the couple would talk and murmur.
We could put the nursery here. . . . I could look out the window when I cook. . . . Do you think this hot water heater will last? . . . Oh, how the windows rattle; we'll freeze.
On and on they would talk, inhaling the memories of others, the people who had lived in the house before them, through babies, love, dogs and cats, clamorous sounds, coughing in the night, birthday parties, doors slammed in anger, the muffled murmurs of sex that followed.

If these visitors were not right for the house (and so many were not), there were ways to send them away—a precipitous drop in temperature, a door creaking shut as they examined the darkest corner of the basement or a closet.

The last inhabitants had ended with calamity after a long and good life. The crack of the shotgun had jarred the house to the foundations, a final assault after the prolonged agonies of illness. No one had been drawn to the house for years, and without people, the house had grown soft and overrun by encroaching rodents, colonies of ladybugs, and the persistent battering of wind, rain, snow, and sun. The demise of an abandoned house is marked by a sagging roof, door frames tilting from lack of touch so that doors can no longer close, the floors on the verge of buckling. Not that all this was happening in the old Costello house, but it was coming. The house longed for the press of bare feet on the floor, the good scrub of vinegar and water on the windows, and the pelting sound of human voices bouncing off the walls and ceilings.

A good house, a truly good house, can hold multiple generations, stacking up layers of families like cordwood. This house had waited so long and had all but accepted its demise, ready to let go of hope, when the woman and dog had slowed their walking outside the property. She had been drawn by the scent of the wisteria down the road, lapping at her in drunken waves of fuchsia and purple. She had picked an armload of flowers, and then she came back and stood directly in front of the house, her feet spread wide, her head tilted as if she heard the halting heartbeat, the dog at her side. The house took a chance and let loose with a vibration of light and sound, squeezing the cellulose in the beams, letting the iron in the nails add to the subtle symphony. The dog led her in closer. There she was close enough that the house could beam its promise to her, set memories of summer nights to humming on the porch, let the upstairs windows in the three dormers catch the sun in a wink.
Give me one more go at it,
said the house.

Chapter 7

Tess

T
here is a surprise in everything that the unseen moves. There are miracles at work.
Tess read one poem per day. She had just read these words from the Nigerian poet Ben Okri, and the words were staying with her. Since Rocky had arrived on Peaks, Tess had learned to expect the unexpected from her. She had just gotten a call from Rocky. “Come to the old Costello house. I just bought it.” Did that mean she was staying permanently? Had Hill finally courted Rocky long enough and hard enough to win her over? Were the two of them buying a house together? As Tess tossed one leg over her bike, she scraped her ankle on the pedal. If her synesthesia had been intact, she would have seen a brilliant orange line shooting up her leg. Now she only felt the colorless throb of pain.

Four months ago, the surgery that had repaired her exploding appendix and knotted-up colon had chased away nearly all her precious synesthesia. She had been tossed out of her multisensory world of synesthesia and into the drab world of the five senses firing predictably, one at a time, without intertwining, and she thought she had lost her mind, or the mind that she wanted. Now all she had left was a whisper of her coupling with numbers and shapes, which was entertaining and somewhat comforting, but nothing compared to her full Technicolor synesthesia. Before, numbers 1 to 10 had been softly molded cubes lined up like soldiers. The numbers 11 to 20 had climbed up a slope, and 21 to 30 had broadened and merged to the right. Now the way she saw the number 7, her granddaughter's age, was like a dim memory of a cube seen through a haze, indecipherable and frustrating. In her physical therapy, she no longer felt the tingling buzz of constricted muscles as the sound of bumblebees.

Tess parked her bike by the yellow truck outside the Costello house. Now that Rocky owned it, she had to stop thinking of it as the Costello house. Why did Rocky buy a house with such a painful history?

She opened the front door and yelled, “Welcome Wagon.” Was Rocky too young to even know what the Welcome Wagon was? Rocky and Cooper appeared from the kitchen and greeted her.

Walking with her young friend through the house she had bought with alarming speed, Tess felt useless: she could neither smell colors nor see the colors of Rocky's name, nor experience the colors of dust and mold as yellow and blue.

“How can you stand it?” Tess demanded. It was morning, and Rocky's deep brown hair caught a glint of sun as it poured through the living room window. Old polyester curtains, stiff with dirt, were tied primly to each side. Even from the arched doorway between the living room and dining room Tess could smell the dense scent of dust and mold.

“You cannot imagine how gorgeous my life was and how bland it all looks now,” said Tess. “I'm complaining, aren't I? I'd be dead without the surgery. You have my permission to tell me to shut up.”

“I don't want you to shut up,” said Rocky, shining her flashlight into a closet. “I do want you to tell me that maybe, just maybe, buying this house was a good idea and that for at least an hour we won't talk about the girl who now refuses to call me back. Why do I see this house with bright pulsating light at its core while my brother and Isaiah think it's the worst piece of shit on the island? Isaiah said the beavers have invaded the property down the road, damming up a stream to make a pond.”

Tess tried out the window seat and pushed open the window, letting the cool morning air rush in. It would be a lovely spot to read, to curl up with a grandchild and watch birds at the feeder on a winter afternoon.

“You've been hanging around me for too long. Maybe my synesthesia is circling around you like a cloud until I can get it back. But if you see something that no one else sees, I can only tell you this: Believe what you see. And if it is the unseen that speaks to you, believe that too.”

Tess tried to loosen her neck muscles by rotating her shoulders up and down, pulling her arms behind her, then spreading her shoulder blades wide by stretching her arms in front of her.

“I should do that too,” Rocky said. “I stayed awake most of the night, trying to get a feel for the house. I have a gut feeling that this house has got more life ahead of it.”

Rocky ran her hand across the faded images of daisies in the wallpaper that lined the walls of the living room and the entry from the front door. What was stirring in her? Sitting on the window seat, Tess wiggled her toes under Cooper, who had sat on her feet. Tess hadn't had a dog in years, but if she ever had a dog again, she wanted it to be a clone of Cooper.

“You're going to tell me to smudge the house with dried sage, aren't you?” asked Rocky.

Tess tried unsuccessfully to picture Rocky gliding through the house, holding the burning incense of a tightly wadded hunk of dried sage. “Smudging” was a way to cleanse a house of old spirits.

“No, but I'm impressed that you know what smudging is.”

Rocky cranked open another window in the kitchen, the kind that opens out like an arm welcoming the day. Moist ocean air slipped in through the screens in fishlike waves. She and Tess continued walking slowly from room to room, stopping in corners, admiring another bay window and a stair railing worn smooth by hands. As Tess let her hand run along the wainscoting and door frames, feeling the nail holes, she said, “Tell me again what happened when you slept here last night.”

“I heard a shudder, or a sigh,” Rocky responded. “I don't know what else to call it. You know how kids shudder when they've been crying hard? Like that. Except, it was the house.” Tess stopped walking, her attention focused entirely on Rocky. “But I must have fallen asleep. I woke up at one point, or at least I think I was awake, and it looked like there was water running down the wall, just for a few seconds. Now that I say it out loud, it sounds ridiculous.”

“I have to say that I am more than a little shocked. This area of things—smudging, crying houses, phantom water—is not generally in your repertoire. But it all points to a general sadness that happened at one time in this house, which we know is true about this place.”

Tess wore a tank top, long cotton pants, and sandals with rubber soles. A little chill rose on her arms, and she rubbed them as if she could scrape off the offending goose bumps. Tess knew what had happened in this house; everyone did. What was surprising about Rocky was that she was not alarmed in the same way that others were.

As if she had heard Tess's thoughts, Rocky said, “I'm not freaked out. If anything, I completely get it. It's sad, but it's not like the place is haunted with vengeful energy. Even I know that's not true.” Rocky turned to Tess. “How do we mend a broken house? This kind of thing is your area, not mine.”

Tess had pulled her hair up in a fat knot on top of her head, and the morning chill now found her neck. “This is all speculation on my part. There are only so many things that I know how to do. I'm a semi-retired physical therapist. I'm not sure that qualifies me to fix a sad house. Have you told anyone else about this?”

“No. Isaiah would tell me to air it out and shampoo the carpets.”

Tess wore light pants with enough Spandex in them that she could easily squat without popping the stitches. Now she rested in a squat, one of her favorite thinking positions, with her feet wide and her butt down. Rocky leaned into a door frame, tapping her foot with uncontainable energy.

Finally Tess stood up, arching and stretching her spine. “When my mother died, I was eight years old, and what I remember most after her death was the lack of color. She knew I had synesthesia. She had it too, even though she didn't know what to call it back then. My world was stripped of color for months after her death. That's what has happened to this place. It's been stripped of color. Even with my synesthesia MIA, I can tell you that this house has been drained of color. What you can do to help this house is to bring life back inside it.”

Tess rubbed one hand along the floor.

“I think all you have to do is to love it again, like the Costellos did, back when they were young and healthy. They loved it by just living and breathing. A house carries the vibration of the people who live in it. This house wants to start over, just like you started over with Cooper.”

T
ess had completed her methodical examination of the entire house, running her hand over old bathroom sinks that stood on aluminum legs, over a claw-foot bathtub balanced on four bricks, over the pantry shelves that still held specks of flour in their crevices. It had taken both of them to heave open the warped door to the widow's walk, only to discover rotten boards in the decking. Finally, Tess sat on the front steps of the porch with Rocky.

“Here is what I forgot to tell you,” said Tess. “I dreamed of a doctor bird last night.”

“Are you waiting for me to say something?” asked Rocky.

Tess got up, and together they walked around to the back of the house. Every bit of the woods surrounding the house threatened to engulf the house with its green reach. Several animal trails opened into the dense shrubbery.

“About what?” Tess squinted her eyes against the blast of a summer day.

“About dreaming. Do you want me to formulate some hypothesis about your dream? Most people expect me to.”

“I didn't say one thing about asking for your interpretation of my dream. In fact, you interrupted me. What I was going to say was that I dreamed of a doctor bird, which is a very rare hummingbird found only in Jamaica. They have long, dramatic tails that look like the train on a black wedding dress. And the feathers are iridescent black, shot through with green. The bird in my dream got very large and sat down in a chair. He whispered something, and I desperately wanted to hear him, so I got closer. It sounded like ‘reunification' or ‘reunion,' or maybe the words that he said just looked like a reunion. And his words smelled like allspice,” said Tess. “This is very strange that my multiple senses are firing as usual in my dreams. Heartening, really.”

For the first time in months, she was truly hopeful that she could return to who she really was, not simply putting on a good-natured smile. Becoming herself was a hard-won achievement that had taken many years, and she was too old to pretend to be happy with less.

“I had never considered the multiple layers of complications available when a dreamer has synesthesia. It makes sense that you would dream as you used to be, just the way people with amputated limbs dream of being whole,” said Rocky. “Is there more?”

“Yes. When I woke up, I could have sworn that I heard Cooper barking, like he was very far away. I didn't like that part. There was an urgency in his barking, an alarm,” said Tess.

“I was never an expert with dreams. I left that to the other therapists. But I know the basics: treat everything in the dream like a story and let the dreamer make her own way to figure out the meaning.”

Tess swatted at a mosquito. “These miserable creatures aren't supposed to be out until dusk. What's wrong with them? Maybe they're confused by the early heat.” But the desire to make sense of her world was too powerful to be distracted.

Returning to the content of the dream, Tess whispered, “Rare, bird, shiny, black, message, reunion, Cooper barking, message, doctor, allspice, good dog, bird, doctor, black feathers. I've almost got it.”

But she lost the links between the images as quickly as they emerged. Without the connecting fibers of her cross-firing senses, she felt hobbled. “Gone. Just when I thought I had it, gone.”

“It must be like trying to see in the dark,” said Rocky.

“I couldn't agree with you more,” said Tess.

Rocky shoved her hands into her pockets. “What if Natalie doesn't ever call me back? What if I scared her off?” she whispered.

Tess wasn't surprised by the abrupt change in topic; she'd felt the undercurrent of the girl since she first arrived at the old house.

“Is this what the house is all about? Oh, good Lord. Are you suddenly trying to make a home based on one phone call from an unknown girl? What does our gallant Hill think about all this?”

“He's celebrating the end of the school year with a camping trip up near Canada,” Rocky told her. “He'll be back in two days, and believe me, I can't wait to see him.”

Tess was not surprised. The last time she had seen Hill and Rocky together she had felt a tinge of envy, then wonder, at two people so clearly on the verge of love.

“You're the only person I know who could have seen through the disaster to get to the heart of this house,” said Tess, hoping this qualified as the good assessment that her friend needed. But why did she have the horrible feeling that Hill would never live in this house?