The Dwelling: A Novel (52 page)

“I—” he started, but didn’t have anything to add.

She raised her hand in any case for him to stop. “I don’t know quite how to say this so I will be blunt,” she said. “I—I love this house. I always have, I think, from the moment I first walked in, something in it has spoken to me.” She blushed, looked away, embarrassed.

“I would like to die here.”

The words hung in the air between them, the space filling up with unexpressed exclamations and
bons mots
that occurred to Richie, but would not come through. He didn’t know what to say. But the frail woman in front of him did not understand.

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he said. “This is not a—” and words failed again.

But Mrs. Darnley, this new Mrs. Darnley, Glenn, so thin, smiled knowingly and sadly at him. “I know this house. It’s a special house.” She walked from the mantel into the dining room and peeked into the kitchen. She gazed upward at the ceiling, seeming to see something there that wasn’t. She cocked her head, as though listening. She turned back to Richie, who watched with disbelief.
She can’t know. She thinks it’s all character, fires in the living room, antique tubs and nicely done floors—

“There’s so much
life
here, Richard,” she said.

They locked eyes.

He nodded. Knowledge passed between them and Richie felt a slight change in the air. A warmth, and electricity. It seemed almost as though the house was leaning into her. There was something about the air that seemed suddenly musical, without the sound. As though it were whirling and dancing, and it was, he could feel it move past his face, ruffle his hair. She smiled into the blank spaces of the house and saw. Her hand ran down the archway between dining room and living room, affectionately. She blushed again, furiously, searching his face for confusion, sympathy, fear.

“I would like to trade houses, if you will. I have a lovely house just outside of town, perfect, really, for a writer. It’s quiet and rural, and very well set-up. If you would do me this small favor, I would leave you the house when I go. I have no family, you see. Some very, very good friends, but I have other things. No one wants someone’s house.” She giggled. “Except me, I suppose.”

“I couldn’t—”

“Please, promise me you’ll think about it before you answer—I know how outrageous it sounds. I know this is your house.” She looked down to the floor.

Richie exhaled. It was all he could do to stay in one place, not jump up and run out of the house; all he could do not to scream,
yes! take it! let me out!
But he couldn’t do it. The woman didn’t understand. She thought the house was full of life.

“The house likes me,” she said. “It does. It wants me.”

He shook his head. “You don’t know.”

She nodded and the air danced around her, like little balls of light. “Yes, I do.”

As if to prove itself, the house came to life. Music played in the little room under the stairs and footsteps clomped through the attic. Children giggled through the walls. A dog barked.

Glenn smiled happy and laughed. “It wants me to stay, forever.”

November was bleak.

Not much moved around the house at 362 Belisle Street, but not much moved on the street at all, except at prescribed times, when the children left for school, and parents left for work. The streets were silent and cold most of the day then. In the evening, cars pulled into driveways already dark with night. Children came in early.

Twice a day a young woman, who sometimes wore the anonymous pink uniform of the cafeteria worker, cleaning lady, nurse’s aide, walked up the stone walk to the red front door at 362 and disappeared into the house. She came out an hour or so later, and sometimes people saw her. Leaving or arriving. No one was sure if she lived there, or if she just came and went. No one thought about it.

Grown-ups might buy and sell the properties, but children are the true denizens of any residential street.

The children know where the other kids live, and don’t care about the places where there are none. They find the best bush for hiding under, the best trees for climbing. They know the shortcuts to everywhere: town, the store, the house with the sweet, soft crab apples. They know which yards have biting dogs, and where the good dogs are. Kids are the first to get wind of a fire, a break-in, a broken window, new car, pool, playground, the first on hand to watch the new neighbors move in. With a speed that would have been unthinkable in an adult, the children pass stern judgment, often well-earned, on the status and progress of a neighborhood.

Long before it was even empty, the children were aware of the house at 362.

The young woman who came and went there was of little consequence to the children who crossed the street to pass by the house, especially if they happened to be out after dark. They knew she didn’t live there. And they know who did.

Kids, if they saw the young woman coming or going, sometimes spat between their fingers. It was usually for luck, but was also a kind of charm, like warding something off.

Kathy Rossana, in her first year as a home-care worker, had already expressed extreme discomfort at the circumstances of the woman she cared for at 362 Belisle Street. She had told her supervisor not long after her first week that the woman was really too ill to be cared for at home.

“She should be in a hospital,” she told her supervisor, Madelaine Dufresne. Ms. Dufresne, an RN of many years, listened to the girl sympathetically as she talked, nodding in all the right places, by rote, really, having heard the new girls tell the same story about very nearly every elderly person they cared for. The problem with these girls was that they were
so young.
It seemed to Madelaine that every one of them believed anyone over sixty belonged in either a hospital or a home, the connection between frailty and wrinkled skin and disability inseparable in their minds. They understood (yet) little of dignity and the right to manage your own health care. And the woman had a very good health plan.

“Unless we get a call from her physician, she is to stay where she is,” Madelaine said obliquely. She did not look at the woman’s chart. If she had, she would have seen the name of an unfamiliar doctor, and that might have set alarm bells ringing.

“Let’s just see how it goes for a while longer,” she told Kathy.

Kathy heard the dismissal in her supervisor’s voice, and her youth and inexperience prevented her saying very much more, but she did allow herself (and Nurse Dufresne) a small uncertain look before she left the office.

Kathy, only a home-care worker for six months, had twelve people to care for. There was not a lot of time to be spent thinking about Mrs. Darnley.

But sometimes she did.

Mrs. Darnley was tall but thin-thin, her flesh sapped of tone and shape so that it might only have been a sheet strewn aesthetically about her. She was yellowed and unhealthy-looking, but so were most of Kathy’s cases, ill or elderly as they were. It was a terrible job in many ways, but terrible in that it yanked on Kathy’s still tender heart for hours after she left her last home. She sometimes cried on her boyfriend’s shoulder, but he was getting less understanding and lately she had been keeping it to herself, holding it close like the resentment she began to feel against her boyfriend. Lots of times she felt terribly alone, like the people she served. She was very tender with them.

She left her supervisor’s office that day, deeply concerned, because in spite of her youth, she had an instinct, and her instinct told her that something was very, very wrong with Mrs. Darnley. With the whole situation, really.

For instance, sometimes when she arrived, letting herself in with her own key (feeling each time she did it like an intruder or robber, as though she hadn’t any right), she had the feeling that she was interrupting.

Murmurs of voices coming from upstairs.

“Mrs. Darnley,” she would call out, but not too loudly in case the woman was sleeping. She slept a lot, clearly quite ill in spite of other options. Each time she heard the voices, she expected to meet members of the family, upstairs, standing around the bed, dark looks of sorrow and concern on their faces (and, well, expected the questions to fly at her, angry and confrontational,
why isn’t our Glenn in the hospital?
). Each time, she mounted stairs to walk into an empty hall, and an empty room, the silence as foreboding as the murmur of voices.

She arrived later than usual at Mrs. Darnley’s and as she approached up the walk, she saw a figure pass in front of the large, lighted front window, through the curtains. A large figure, a man, she had been sure, and her heart had pounded just a little faster as she thought, This is it, the family, the confrontation,
why isn’t our Glenn in the hospital?
, and because of her youth, she felt an instant guilt, even though it was not her responsibility and she
had
brought the matter up more than once. She braced herself, took deep breaths, and let herself in with her key.

But no one met her at the door.

“Hello?” she called out, thinking that a preoccupation with
why isn’t our Glenn in the hospital?
had made the family member miss the sound of the key turning in the lock, the door swinging smoothly and quietly open. Footsteps, the careful placement of the bag on the floor.

“Up here,” had come back weakly, in answer to her call. From upstairs. The voice, however, had not been masculine at all, but had been her own lady, Mrs. Darnley.

She could not resist a quick peek into the living room. But before looking, even, she knew she was mistaken (overtired), because there were no lights on downstairs. If she was spooked then, it was only at the thought that a man was wandering around in the darkened rooms.

Upstairs, she found Mrs. Darnley in bed, as usual, in the yellow room that smelled like illness and Kathy’s own grandmother’s washing room. Disinfectant. It was as familiar to her as the smell of urine and vomit. A consistent part of the job.

“How are you today, Mrs. Darnley?” Kathy had asked, as usual, but she could see exactly (in spite of what Madelaine Dufresne would later tell her) how she was: she was a dying woman.

Mrs. Darnley smiled weakly at her. “Right as rain.”

“Have you had family here today?” Kathy asked softly, gently running a warm damp cloth over sunken flesh. Flesh moved with the cloth if Kathy wasn’t very, very gentle and she was aware of this. She did not soap the poor woman, her skin seemed beyond that kind of cleaning, filtering as it did, her own cancer from inside. The room smelled unpleasantly of it.

Glenn’s eyes danced at Kathy, the only part of her that still seemed to live.

Had she winked? In any case, she did not answer, but soon after closed her eyes and either rested, or feigned sleep.

That same day, Kathy had noticed Mrs. Darnley’s dinner tray from the Disability Meals was untouched, more so than usual. Even the tea was still lidded and had grown cold.

“That’s not what I hear from Disability Meals,” Madelaine had said to Kathy, when she claimed Mrs. Darnley was alone at all times.
She doesn’t have family there,
she’d said.

“The way I understand it, a man answers the door and takes the tray up,” Nurse Dufresne had said reassuringly. “If at any time that door is not answered by someone, they will call us. We’re the first line of defense. Twice a day they are there; twice a day you are there. You’re not to worry so, Kathy. There’s plenty of years to worry yet.” And she had been dismissed.

It all became a moot point, anyway. Because the same day that Kathy expressed her last concern to Nurse Dufresne, a man called the office and told her that Mrs. Darnley’s family had arrived to take her home.

“Home where?” Kathy said, suspicious. Nurse Dufresne shrugged. “I don’t know. You said she had an accent. Maybe England.” The thought had long run out of her head. Since the call, as far as she was concerned, the case was over. It was someone else’s affair now.

She did not mention to Kathy how strange and distant the call had been, or how in the background there were odd sounds that invoked smoky, beery memories of youth.

Of course, Disability Meals got the same call.

The pain was often unbearable. When it was like that, Glenn would fade away into her mind. There were things there that were pleasant. There were things there, also, that were mercifully blank.

Her arms and legs were numb much of the time. On occasion she would drift back from a pleasant place to find the bed shaking with a gentle motion and see the dark outline of someone at her feet, rubbing, stroking, coaxing life back into her flat limbs.

Sometimes she spoke.
Kathy?
she might say. Or
Is that you Mrs. Parkins?
And a voice might come back, or not.
Staizer,
would sometimes come, a firm reply. Or a kindly
Ssssh, Mrs. Darnley, go back to sleep.
Sometimes, Glenn would just smile and say nothing, but fade back into summer, or on a boat, floating serenely on a lake, with her laughing man telling her stories she’d already heard while waves lapped (kindly) against wood.

She was aware, blissfully, of humanity in the room. There was, it seemed, always a murmur of kindly voices, whispers not of concern but anticipation, quiet and low so that they never disturbed her. She was unaware, blissfully, much of the time, of her sundered appearance and the lingering presence of death.

They came in and out, heedless of time. Time followed them. It was sometimes 1922 and music played. It was 1972, 1985, 1944. The room would swirl around her, a bedroom, a sitting room, the walls changed, grew photos and pieces of art, curtains billowed with summer air, or did not, a flap of solid blind blocking out the gloom of November. A little dog sometimes sat beside the bed. If Glenn opened her eyes, he would be there, the little yellow dog, panting happily to see her, his wiry tail thumping up and down against the wooden floor.

Sometimes she would find herself in a field of tall, rolling grass, where the air was fresh and the sun warm. A woman would come to her and say, over the muffled laughter of children,
Oh my, Mrs. Darnley, we have to get you back to bed. They’ll be coming soon,
and she would gratefully take her hand and the two would go back to bed, Glenn smiling questioningly at her, and
Staizer not Parkins
would say
Soon, dear, very soon.
Her smile was bright and calm and like the sun of endless summer.

Glenn woke on Thursday with the light slanting nebulously against the far wall. There was no way to tell what time of day it was, but there was a feel of morning to it. She would have liked then to sit up. Her limbs and any will to use them had long departed, however, so she lay on her back thinking about sitting and enjoying even just that.

She was, she realized, pain-free. Her body had little feeling at all, although she was cold. The room was empty. The yellow walls that she had once found so disturbing and falsely bright seemed pretty then, an imitation of sunlight, made more real by the slant of white light on the wall opposite her bed. The ceiling above her was an old pressed-tin roof—much sought after by period purists who would never truly be able to appreciate the charm and quality of something that had withstood time and occupation in quite the way of a resident of the era. The whole house was that way. It had stood, waiting, passing the time, moving forward reluctantly, but defiantly pulling along its past as a gesture to endurance as well as dignity.

The muscles of her face were averse, but Glenn smiled into the air. “Hello, house,” she whispered. Or may not have.

She felt surprisingly well. And that was how she knew.

Sometimes she closed her eyes. And sometimes she held them open for a while.

They gathered.

Around her, when she opened her eyes, were the people of the house. They smiled down on her kindly, sweetly, hopefully, and with a perfect intimacy. They watched over her.

In time, the old woman, her smile only a tug of flesh at the corners of a worn-out face, the permanent inhabitant of the yellow room, reached out her hand.

Behind her, children watched, wide-eyed but not frightened. The warm, kind woman from the field rested her hand on the thick hair of a red-headed child. She smiled, too.

“Come with us, Mrs. Darnley,” the old woman said.

The tall man who had taken care of so many details for her—although she sensed a naughty, unhealthy streak in him—said affably, “We officially extend your invitation, my dear. We’ve waited for you.”

The old woman’s hand, a claw nearly, but the age tattooed there was one of love and children and care, reached over and rested her hand very near Glenn’s so that she need do nothing but—

Glenn took her hand.

The light on the wall shifted and changed until it was not really light, but the suggestion of it, a glow from nowhere in particular, and everywhere.

Glenn rose up from the bed, her body strong, thicker, heavier; sturdy. The faces and voices around her expressed pleasure and hands reached out and touched her.
This is your home. This is your home. This is your home.