by James Smythe
Deanna reappears in the doorway. ‘Lane isn’t coming,’ she says. ‘I told her she can have lockdown here or there, but she chose here.’
‘Foolish girl.’
‘I’m going to call her every hour, check she’s not gone out.’
‘We can trust her,’ Laurence says.
‘I wouldn’t have trusted myself when I was her age,’ Deanna replies. ‘Anyway, the twins are getting dressed. What time are you on?’
‘Ten,’ he tells her. He goes to the wardrobe and pulls his suit out – the gray suit, the lemon-yellow tie – and as he dresses himself he hears her go downstairs and switch on the TV. He hears his name mentioned, and then the set goes quiet.
‘Can we go swimming?’ Sean asks.
‘Later,’ Deanna says. ‘Maybe we can go in later.’ She’s packed all the cleaning supplies and the toolkit, and she pulls them both out of the trunk of the car. She wants to start clearing the house out, getting rid of the crap that’s been left, making sure that there are no splinters. There is furniture in the house; wooden tables and chairs that match the walls and floors and make it feel like the set of a horror movie. She pulls up outside the front, driving as close to the house as she can. There’s no real space for the car, just the dirt and gravel ground. ‘Watch yourselves,’ she says. ‘No running, no picking up anything that looks as if you shouldn’t pick it up, okay?’ She looks at the twins. ‘And stick close,’ she says, ‘No idea what’s waiting to bite you in this place.’ She snaps her teeth at them, and they both laugh.
The front door sticks and she has to shoulder it as hard as she can, really putting all of her weight into forcing it open. It finally swings, a hard arc that makes it smack into the wall and kick up clouds of dust. To Deanna’s eyes the house looks as if it’s barely holding itself up. It’s a building of pencil-drawn monochrome, the walls slightly askew, in need of a ruler. Rays of light hit the dust that seems to fill every part of the place, the light coming from not only the windows, but also through the cracks in the walls. There’s a smell inside that she struggles to recognize, that’s not totally unpleasant. It’s on that fine line, and it needs such a clean. They should have hired somebody, she thinks.
‘Right,’ she says, and she opens her bag, pulling out cloths and disinfectant sprays. ‘We need to get this place a little more habitable.’ She holds a cloth out for each of the kids. ‘Help me today, maybe we think about buying you guys a videogame later in the week. Deal?’ The kids snatch the cloths from her hands, and she shows them how to use the spray on the work surfaces in the kitchen, and how to wipe them down. She knows she’ll have to go over it again, but this is fun, the three of them working on this. She knows that when this is done, the place might feel like more of a home.
There’s no water from the taps; she writes it into her phone as something for Laurence to sort out when he arrives.
The delegates usher him onto the stage. ‘This is official,’ one of them says, ‘so treat it with some goddamn respect, you hear?’ He’s smiling while he talks, so Laurence smiles too; but it sounds, for a second, like an actual threat. ‘You do us proud,’ the man says. Not, ‘Do the party proud,’ Laurence notices. He takes Laurence’s hand, reaching for it and forcing the handshake.
Laurence reaches the stage and the flashbulbs go, the cameras all pointing at him. He’s got a speech that was prepared for him and he uses it while he speaks, but only as a frame. Most of the time he tries to be as much himself as he can.
They ask questions, and he poses for photographs. He checks his phone and his Twitter, his Facebook, his emails all scream alerts at him as people congratulate him. Amit takes the phone.
‘Clear your notifications,’ he says. ‘You won’t have time to read them.’ He pulls a schedule out.
‘No,’ Laurence says, ‘nothing else today. I’m going home. Family time.’
‘Bullshit,’ Amit says, laughing.
‘No,’ Laurence tells him. He asks for Amit to get him a car and he loosens his tie. He texts Deanna: I’m coming home.
The house looks exactly as Laurence has been picturing it: the same ramshackle wooden walls; the same dock that stretches off out and over the water; the same view behind it, the mountain and the houses in the distant opposite, and the sun above them. The driver takes them along the dirt track that runs down the hill towards the shoreline and Laurence watches the house get closer, as if it is becoming more real, and it reveals itself to him in broken windows and splintered wood. He feels the peace washing over him, a sense that this is meant to be – at least for now. Barely ten minutes from their other house, yet it feels like a different place entirely. He winds the window down and smells the air, listens to the sound of the tires on the gravel.
Laurence watches as the driver takes the car back up the hill, leaving him alone outside for a second. There’s just him. He can’t hear his family, not at that moment; and then he goes up to the front door, which is opened wide, and inside. He hears them upstairs, singing some song that he vaguely recognizes from the radio. Deanna is mostly humming the melody, but the kids know every word. He doesn’t shout to let them know that he’s here, not yet.
He walks through the downstairs, which is open-plan, a living area with 1950s wood-framed sofas around a fireplace, then the kitchen behind and the table for four, the units that are the same wood as everything else. The man who owned this place must have been a carpenter, he thinks; maybe he did this all himself, and built the house with his own two hands. There are gun racks on the walls, empty slots of what was once there; and a hook with a dust outline shape of what was clearly a mounted animal head. Laurence stands by the window at the end of the house, looking out over the water.
‘How did it go?’ Deanna asks him. She’s at the foot of the stairs. He didn’t hear her come down.
‘Good,’ he says. ‘It went well.’
‘I love you,’ she says, and he smiles.
‘It’s so peaceful here,’ he tells her. ‘This is amazing.’ He’s transfixed, staring at some far-off point in the distance. There’s a thin layer of mist stopping him from seeing what’s actually over the other side of the lake, only the thin shapes of what have to be houses and trees, but that isn’t stopping him. ‘I wasn’t joking when I said that I had always dreamed of this,’ he tells her.
‘I know.’ She stands next to him while the twins run around behind her. ‘Thank god you’re here. There’s no running water.’
‘I’ll turn it on,’ he says. He doesn’t stop staring out at the lake.
The cellar door off the kitchen opens onto stairs that go down into total darkness. There’s a smell of more than damp: of absolute wetness, wet mud and wet stone. Laurence and Deanna both peer down into the black.
‘Looks like it’s flooded down there,’ Laurence says.
‘Could be from the lake.’
‘Could be.’ He pulls off his suit jacket and rolls up his sleeves.
‘You should change,’ she says.
‘Didn’t bring anything,’ he replies. ‘I can get this cleaned. It’ll be fine.’ He opens his toolbox and looks for the torch. It’s not there, so he takes out his cellphone and turns the brightness up, holding that out in front of him as he takes the first few steps down. The stairs are wooden, a stained and polished pine, and they creak underneath his weight. He puts his free hand out to the wall to steady himself. ‘I’ll do this,’ he says. ‘You stay up there and call for help if I die.’
‘Don’t,’ she says.
‘It’s fine. Joke.’ She hears him smiling. He steps down again, a few more. In front of him he can see the floor now, the bottom of the steps, and there is water there. He can’t tell how deep, because it’s black with dirt and grime. ‘Pass me a stick or something?’
‘Wait,’ she says, looking around. There’s nothing. She runs past the kids, who are now playing with their phones on the sofas, sitting in little clouds of dust that puff around them every time that they move (like Pig-Pen, she thinks, from the Peanut
s cartoons), and she goes outside to the trees that line the road. She finds a branch and takes it back to him, passing it down.
‘About time,’ he jokes. He holds it in front of him and steps down again, watching the stick go into the water until it stops. ‘Ankle level,’ he says. He sits on the steps and they creak horrifyingly, as if they’re being pulled off the walls.
‘We need these replaced,’ Deanna says.
‘They’re fine. They need oiling or something, maybe a supporting strut.’
‘You say that as if you know what it means.’
‘It’s a strut. It supports.’ He pulls off his shoes and socks and folds the bottom of his suit trousers up to his knees. ‘Or something.’
‘You’re not,’ she says.
‘What else am I going to do?’ he asks. He steps down into it and the water swirls around his feet. He gasps. ‘Cold,’ he says. ‘Jesus, that is cold.’
‘Can you see the water pipes?’
‘Give me a second,’ he shouts back. From where Deanna’s standing at the top of the stairs she can’t see him now, only the faint flashes of his phone’s light as he swishes it around. ‘Okay, got it,’ he says. ‘It’s rusted to hell.’
‘Can you turn it?’
‘I don’t know. I need a wrench or something.’ She picks up the bag and takes the first few steps down, and they groan. He wades closer and she places it slightly further down the stairs, within his reach. He grabs at it, stepping up. His feet are filthy, she sees. ‘I’ll get on this,’ he says. ‘You tell me if it works?’
She stands at the sink and turns the taps on, and there’s a dribble of brown sludge from them and a gurgling, but no water. She waits, as the clangs of him struggling with the pipe echoes through the stairwell. She thinks about Lane and how it’s been a while since she last called to check in, so she dials the house; but there’s no answer; she dials her daughter’s cellphone, and there’s still no reply. She leaves a message and then tries again, letting the phone ring and ring.
‘Shit,’ she says.
‘Mom!’ Sean shouts, hearing the word.
‘I didn’t mean it,’ she mutters back. ‘Laurence,’ she calls, ‘I can’t get hold of Lane.’
‘She’ll be fine,’ he shouts up to her.
‘I told her to stay in the house.’
‘So go and pick her up. Force her to come here, be with us. She can help me dredge the cellar out when I’ve got this working.’ She hears the noises still coming, the strain in his voice as he fights against the decades-old plumbing of the house, trying to make it habitable. When they moved into their first apartment, there was a superintendent to fix anything that broke; when they bought their house in Staunton itself they had it gutted and renovated and made as modern as possible, switches and buttons put in, digital rather than analog to run their lives by. Working with the old is new to them.
‘I’ll take the kids,’ she says. ‘We won’t be long.’
‘Bring me a Coke?’
‘Sure,’ she says. She goes to the kids. ‘Come on,’ she tells them, ‘we’re going back to the house for a little while.’
‘I want to stay here,’ Sean says. He doesn’t look up from his game, but Alyx does.
‘You can’t.’
‘Mo-o-om,’ he says. He hits the whine in his voice, a note that he and Alyx have perfected over the duration of their lives; some pitch that manages to work in the same way that Deanna’s angry voice does. It’s worse when it’s in harmony.
‘Fine,’ she says. She shouts to Laurence. ‘Sean’s staying up here.’
‘Can I swim now?’ Sean asks.
‘When your father’s done,’ she says. Alyx stands up and coughs away dust, and she and Deanna leave. Sean sits and listens as the engine starts, then he watches them drive up the track until they’re gone.
Laurence struggles. It’s hot down in the cellar, or he is; he sweats, and he hears the patter of it dripping into the water around his feet. He tries again, because he’s sure that there’s some movement; an almost-infinitesimally small amount, but it’s still movement. Eventually this will open up the sluices. He stands still, planting his feet in the murky water, and he really fights the thing. It doesn’t move and he doesn’t move. Total stillness.
The light has gone out on his phone, some sort of standby mode having kicked in, and he’s in the dark now, but he doesn’t stop. This is necessary. The house means something. Securing it, actually working on it, that’s a way of making their future seem as if it’s going to happen. His phone rings, Amit’s name on the screen; the photo of his grinning face that was taken on their first meeting.
‘Where are you?’ Amit asks.
‘At the lake house.’ Laurence doesn’t let go of the wrench; he’s still forcing it, still trying to get the water to flow.
‘You shouldn’t have run off. There are people asking for you.’
‘Tell them it’s family time. Tell them this is the sort of candidate I’ll be: a man who gives a shit about stuff like that still.’
‘You done the questionnaire yet?’
‘No. Not even close.’
‘Larry.’
‘Amit.’
‘You need to, you know that.’
‘I know,’ Laurence says. He looks down, pulls the phone away from his ear. It’s wet with sweat and, as he wipes the screen of the phone on his shirt, the light dances across the muddy water at his feet. There are ripples and he feels the water lapping at his ankle, the energy that it carries coming through and tickling the hairs on his legs. The sound of it echoes in the space. He wonders if this is an effect of his effort, maybe the pipes shuddering as they try to let their water out. It picks up, suddenly more violent, tiny waves coming from the far wall. ‘I have to go,’ he tells Amit, and he hangs up the phone, shining the light again. The waves bounce the light around. He walks towards the wall that the ripples seem to be coming from. He crouches and presses his hand against it, feeling around. There’s a crack in the concrete; it’s only slight and he can’t tell if that’s the cause of this, but it feels like it is. A crack like this, there has to be repercussions. He wonders where this has come from.
The house is empty and quiet apart from the reverberations of the water in the cellar as it eases, as the waves die down. He thinks about washing his feet, which are the color of soot now, so he walks upstairs and through the kitchen, to the outside. The back door is already wide open. He pads along the dock and catches himself looking across the water again. He’s sure that he can see something in the distance, across the water, through the mist, a light, or the reflection of a light. He stares at it. It’s almost hypnotic, for that second.
It’s only so slight.
He sits and dangles his feet in the water, and they are wet, and he looks down at them to see if they’re clean yet and there is Sean, suspended underneath, the crown of his head jutting from the surface. Laurence stares for a second as he tries to parse what he’s just seen and then he hurls himself down from the dock and he pulls at his son’s head and shoulders, trying to yank him up, but the boy doesn’t move. Laurence heaves in air and then dives down, frantically pulling at his son’s limbs, using his body almost as a ladder to get lower, and then he finally feels the weeds that are wrapped around Sean’s foot and ankle, going between his toes and all around, and he wrenches but they won’t tear. The weeds are like thick rubber.
So he feels lower, to the root, thinking that might be easiest. He finds it up against concrete at the bottom of the house, the foundations at the base of the dock. This is where the weeds have grown, boring into the concrete and cracking it. The wall here leads to the cellar. This is what caused the flooding; and what Laurence felt around his own legs, his son’s frantic and desperate kicking before he stopped breathing.
Laurence pulls that part of the plant out somehow and thinks, in that second, of those moments where people find superhuman strength when in crisis, and Sean’s body drifts upwards. It’s free. He grabs it and he pushes his s
on’s head above water, then climbs out onto the dock, pulling Sean with him. He tries to give him mouth-to-mouth as he knows to do it. He pushes on Sean’s chest, worried about doing it with too much force. He doesn’t want to hurt him. He turns his head and he breathes into his boy’s lungs again.
‘Please,’ he says, ‘oh God, please,’ and he breathes again; and then so does Sean, coughing up water. He doesn’t open his eyes, and his breathing is shallow and labored, heaves that sound somehow less than human. Laurence runs for his phone and dials 911. He shouts about where they are but the address is hard to find. He describes it to them and they say that they’ll be minutes. Support him, they say. Keep him breathing. If he stops, breathe into him again. Keep repeating this.
He does. He hangs up and he waits for the ambulance and he watches his son’s face so closely that he hopes Sean can feel his hot breath on his skin, willing him to stay alive.
It’s only a minute before the Staunton Sheriff’s department arrives. They come tearing down the track and the deputy gets out and rushes to the boy, taking over. Laurence backs away and watches it all as if from a dream.
Deanna storms through the house, shouting Lane’s name. She goes to her room and throws the door open and her daughter is there, on her bed. There’s a boy with her; he’s not like Deanna imagined, being clean cut, wearing a bright rugby-style shirt; or, he was. Now, it’s on the floor at the foot of the bed. Deanna doesn’t even look at him; she stares instead into her eldest daughter’s eyes.
‘I’ve been calling you.’
