“Do you think there’s someone inside?” Lindsey asked.
“It’s dark.”
“It’s spooky.”
They looked at each other, and my sister said what they both were thinking. “It’s dry!”
They held hands in the heavy rain and ran toward the house as fast as they could, trying not to trip or slide in the increasing
mud.
As they drew closer, Samuel could make out the steep pitch of the roof and the small wooden cross work that hung down from
the gables. Most of the windows on the bottom floor had been covered over with wood, but the front door swung back and forth
on its hinges, banging against the plaster wall on the inside. Though part of him wanted to stand outside in the rain and
stare up at the eaves and cornices, he rushed into the house with Lindsey. They stood a few feet inside the doorway, shivering
and staring out into the pre-suburban forest that surrounded them. Quickly I scanned the rooms of the old house. They were
alone. No scary monsters lurked in corners, no wandering men had taken root.
More and more of these undeveloped patches were disappearing, but they, more than anything, had marked my childhood. We lived
in one of the first developments to be built on the converted farmland in the area—a development that became the model and
inspiration for what now seemed a limitless number—but my imagination had always rested on the stretch of road that had not
been filled in with the bright colors of shingles and drainpipes, paved driveways and super-size mailboxes. So too had Samuel’s.
“Wow!” Lindsey said. “How old do you think this is?”
Lindsey’s voice echoed off the walls as if they stood alone in a church.
“Let’s explore,” said Samuel.
The boarded-up windows on the first floor made it hard to see anything, but with the help of Samuel’s safety light they could
pick out both a fireplace and the chair rail along the walls.
“Look at the floor,” Samuel said. He knelt down, taking her with him. “Do you see the tongue and groove work? These people
had more money than their neighbors.”
Lindsey smiled. Just as Hal cared only for the inner workings of motorcycles, Samuel had become obsessed with carpentry.
He ran his fingers over the floor and had Lindsey do it too. “This is a gorgeous old wreck,” he said.
“Victorian?” Lindsey asked, making her best guess.
“It blows my mind to say this,” Samuel said, “but I think it’s gothic revival. I noticed cross-bracing on the gable trim,
so that means it was after 1860.”
“Look,” said Lindsey.
In the center of the floor someone had once, long ago, set a fire.
“And
that
is a tragedy,” Samuel said.
“Why didn’t they use the fireplace? There’s one in every room.”
But Samuel was busy looking up through the hole the fire had burned into the ceiling, trying to make out the patterns of the
woodwork along the window frames.
“Let’s go upstairs,” he said.
“I feel like I’m in a cave,” said Lindsey as they climbed the stairs. “It’s so quiet in here you can barely hear the rain.”
Samuel bounced the soft side of his fist off the plaster as he went. “You could wall someone into this place.”
And suddenly it was one of those awkward moments that they had learned to let pass and I lived to anticipate. It begged a
central question. Where was I? Would I be mentioned? Brought up and discussed? Usually now the answer was a disappointing
no. It was no longer a Susie-fest on Earth.
But something about the house and the night—markers like graduations and birthdays always meant that I was more alive, higher
up in the register of thoughts—made Lindsey dwell on me more in that moment than she normally might. Still, she didn’t mention
it. She remembered the heady feeling she had had in Mr. Harvey’s house and that she had often felt since—that I was with her
somehow, in her thoughts and limbs—moving with her like a twin.
At the top of the stairs they found the entrance to the room they had stared up at.
“I want this house,” Samuel said.
“What?”
“This house needs me, I can feel it.”
“Maybe you should wait until the sun comes out to decide,” she said.
“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.
“Samuel Heckler,” my sister said, “fixer of broken things.”
“One to talk,” he said.
They stood for a moment in silence and smelled the damp air coming through the chimney and flooding the room. Even with the
sound of rain, Lindsey still felt hidden away, tucked safely in an outside corner of the world with the one person she loved
more than anyone else.
She took his hand, and I traveled with them up to the doorway of a small room at the very front. It jutted out over what would
be the entrance hall of the floor below and was octagonal in shape.
“Oriels,” Samuel said. “The windows”—he turned to Lindsey—“when they’re built out like that, like a tiny room, that’s called
an oriel.”
“Do they turn you on?” Lindsey asked, smiling.
I left them in the rain and darkness. I wondered if Lindsey noticed that when she and Samuel began to unzip their leathers
the lightning stopped and the rumble in the throat of God—that scary thunder—ceased.
In his den, my father reached out to hold the snow globe in his hand. The cold glass against his fingers comforted him, and
he shook it to watch the penguin disappear and then slowly be uncovered by the gently falling snow.
Hal had made it back from the graduation ceremonies on his motorcycle but instead of calming my father—providing some assurance
that if one motorcycle could maneuver the storm and deliver its rider safe to his door, another one could too—it seemed to
stack the probabilities in the reverse in his mind.
He had taken what could be called a painful delight in Lindsey’s graduation ceremony. Buckley had sat beside him, dutifully
prompting him when to smile and react. He often
knew
when, but his synapses were never as quick now as normal people’s—or at least that was how he explained it to himself. It
was like reaction time in the insurance claims he reviewed. There was an average number of seconds for most people between
when they saw something coming—another car, a rock rolling down an embankment—and when they reacted. My father’s response
times were slower than most, as if he moved in a world where a crushing inevitability had robbed him of any hope of accurate
perception.
Buckley tapped on the half-open door of my father’s den.
“Come in,” he said.
“They’ll be okay, Dad.” At twelve, my brother had become serious and considerate. Even if he didn’t pay for the food or cook
the meals, he managed the house.
“You looked good in your suit, son,” my father said.
“Thanks.” This mattered to my brother. He had wanted to make my father proud and had taken time with his appearance, even
asking Grandma Lynn that morning to help trim the bangs that fell in his eyes. My brother was in the most awkward stage of
adolescence—not boy, not man. Most days he hid his body in big T-shirts and sloppy jeans, but he had liked wearing the suit
that day. “Hal and Grandma are waiting for us downstairs,” he said.
“I’ll be down in a minute.”
Buckley closed the door all the way this time, letting the latch snap into place.
That fall my father had developed the last roll of film that I’d kept in my closet in my “rolls to hold back” box, and now,
as he often did when he begged just a minute before dinner or saw something on TV or read an article in the paper that made
his heart ache, he drew back his desk drawer and gingerly lifted the photos in his hand.
He had lectured me repeatedly that what I called my “artistic shots” were foolhardy, but the best portrait he ever had was
one I took of him at an angle so his face filled the three-by-three square when you held it so it was a diamond.
I must have been listening to his hints on camera angles and composition when I took the pictures he held now. He had had
no idea what order the rolls were in or what they were of when he had them developed. There were an inordinate number of photos
of Holiday, and many a shot of my feet or the grass. Gray balls of blurs in the air which were birds, and a grainy attempt
at a sunset over the pussy-willow tree. But at some point I had decided to take portraits of my mother. When he’d picked the
roll up at the photo lab my father sat in the car staring at photos of a woman he felt he barely knew anymore.
Since then he had taken these photos out too many times to count, but each time he looked into the face of this woman he had
felt something growing inside him. It took him a long time to realize what it was. Only recently had his wounded synapses
allowed him to name it. He had been falling in love all over again.
He didn’t understand how two people who were married, who saw each other every day, could forget what each other looked like,
but if he had had to name what had happened—this was it. And the last two photos in the roll provided the key. He had come
home from work—I remember trying to keep my mother’s attention as Holiday barked when he heard the car pull into the garage.
“He’ll come out,” I said. “Stay still.” And she did. Part of what I loved about photography was the power it gave me over
the people on the other side of the camera, even my own parents.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw my father walk through the side door into the yard. He carried his slim briefcase, which,
years before, Lindsey and I had heatedly investigated only to find very little of interest to us. As he set it down I snapped
the last solitary photo of my mother. Already her eyes had begun to seem distracted and anxious, diving under and up into
a mask somehow. In the next photo, the mask was almost, but not quite, in place and the final photo, where my father was leaning
slightly down to give her a kiss on the cheek—there it was.
“Did I do that to you?” he asked her image as he stared at the pictures of my mother, lined up in a row. “How did that happen?”
“The lightning stopped,” my sister said. The moisture of the rain on her skin had been replaced by sweat.
“I love you,” Samuel said.
“I know.”
“No, I mean I love you, and I want to marry you, and I want to live in this house!”
“What?”
“That hideous, hideous college shit is over!” Samuel screamed. The small room absorbed his voice, barely bouncing back an
echo from its thick walls.
“Not for me, it isn’t,” my sister said.
Samuel got up off the floor, where he had been lying beside my sister, and came to his knees in front of her. “Marry me.”
“Samuel?”
“I’m tired of doing all the right things. Marry me and I’ll make this house gorgeous.”
“Who will support us?”
“We will,” he said, “somehow.”
She sat up and then joined him kneeling. They were both half-dressed and growing colder as their heat began to dissipate.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I think I can,” my sister said. “I mean, yes!”
Some clichés I understood only when they came into my heaven full speed. I had never seen a chicken with its head cut off.
It had never meant much to me except something else that had been treated much the same as me. But that moment I ran around
my heaven like… a chicken with its head cut off! I was so happy I screamed over and over and over again. My sister! My Samuel!
My dream!
She was crying, and he held her in his arms, rocking her against him.
“Are you happy, sweetheart?” he asked.
She nodded against his bare chest. “Yes,” she said, then froze. “My dad.” She raised her head and looked at Samuel. “I know
he’s worried.”
“Yes,” he said, trying to switch gears with her.
“How many miles is it to the house from here?”
“Ten maybe,” Samuel said. “Maybe eight.”
“We could do that,” she said.
“You’re nuts.”
“We have sneakers in the other pannard.”
They could not run in leather, so they wore their underwear and T-shirts, as close to streakers as anyone in my family would
ever be. Samuel, as he had for years, set a pace just ahead of my sister to keep her going. There were hardly any cars on
the road, but when one passed by a wall of water would come up from the puddles near the side of the road and make the two
of them gasp to get air back in their lungs. Both of them had run in rain before but never rain this heavy. They made a game
of who could gain the most shelter as they ran the miles, waltzing in and out to gain cover under any overhanging trees, even
as the dirt and grime of the road covered their legs. But by mile three they were silent, pushing their feet forward in a
natural rhythm they had both known for years, focusing on the sound of their own breath and the sound of their wet shoes hitting
the pavement.
At some point as she splashed through a large puddle, no longer trying to avoid them, she thought of the local pool of which
we had been members until my death brought the comfortably public existence of my family to a close. It had been somewhere
along this road, but she did not lift her head to find the familiar chain-link fence. Instead, she had a memory. She and I
were under water in our bathing suits with their small ruffled skirts. Both of our eyes were open under water, a new skill—newer
for her—and we were looking at each other, our separate bodies suspended under water. Hair floating, small skirts floating,
our cheeks bulging with captured air. Then, together, we would grab on to each other and shoot up out of the water, breaking
the surface. We sucked air into our lungs—ears popping—and laughed together.
I watched my beautiful sister running, her lungs and legs pumping, and the skill from the pool still there—fighting to see
through the rain, fighting to keep her legs lifting at the pace set by Samuel, and I knew she was not running away from me
or toward me. Like someone who has survived a gut-shot, the wound had been closing, closing—braiding into a scar for eight
long years.
By the time the two of them were within a mile of my house, the rain had lightened and people were beginning to look out their
windows toward the street.