The Switch House: A Short Novel

by Tim Meyer

  “Don't think about it too long,” Abbie said sternly, directing her eyes to her subject. “Wait too long and your mind will make up lies for you. Gut instinct—are you still head-over-heels-crazy-in-love with your husband, Angela Shepard?”

  Angela replied, “Yes, I love him.” The words came out sounding automated, and she wondered if Abbie sniffed out her lies.

  “That's the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Every day?”

  Her eyes darted in different directions. They lingered on the wall behind Abbie, specifically on the framed painting of a bouquet of roses, one that looked oddly familiar. She couldn't shake the feeling that they were the same roses Terry occasionally bought on his way home from work. The flowers he staged on the rustic wrought-iron table near the stairs. It seemed impossible but her brain went fuzzy with a sudden flash of deja vu. Even the table upon which the vase rested looked like hers, copper-glazed legs and all.

  “Yes, every day,” she said, as if she were a robot reciting a programmed response. “We have our struggles like any couple. Especially after...” Her eyelids fluttered. “...but we do the best we can and move on. And there's love. Even if there's no sex, at least there's love.”

  The psychiatrist seemed satisfied with her summation and flashed a brief, mandatory smile. “Look at the time,” she said, checking her watch. “Hour's up.”

  Thank God, Angela thought, rising from the couch that seemingly wanted to cradle her. She swore she felt arms wrapping themselves around her abdomen and pulling her back down. As she followed Abbie toward the front door, she glanced back. No arms, only the soft indentation where she had spent the last sixty minutes. As she left the office, the couch pulled on her memory strings, making her think she'd seen the furniture before, not in her living room, but somewhere else.

  Maybe in a dream.

  Maybe in the Everywhere.

  * * *

  She walked in through the front door and smelled dinner baking in the oven. When she turned the corner and stepped into the dining room, she immediately spotted the table and its enriched appearance; the lacy tablecloth, the pricey, ornate silverware they had received from Terry's parents on their wedding day, and the two vases overflowing with an array of flowers sporting chromatic petals. Terry bent over the table and set down a salad bowl and a plate full of mixed vegetables. He glanced up at her as she stopped and clutched the center of her chest in surprise.

  “Hey, babe,” he said with a faint smile.

  “Hi,” she said, not even realizing she was grinning. During the drive home, she had found it hard to concentrate, feeling empty and lost in her own mind. All those terrible feelings, those purged emotions, suddenly meant nothing as she glimpsed her husband setting the table. His hair was slicked back, just the way she liked it, and he'd thrown on an apron with the words F*CK THE COOK printed across the chest.

  With a hand over her mouth, she chortled. “You're actually wearing that thing?”

  He looked down, reading the words with a teeth-baring smile. “Oh, so you like my apron?”

  “Yeah, I do. Where'd you find it?”

  “It was buried in the linen closet. Remember when you bought it?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Your birthday. Six years ago. It was supposed to be a gag gift.”

  “Figured I'd put it to good use.” The corners of his mouth stretched.

  She considered this behavior odd, and couldn't stop the question from forming in her head, from exiting her mouth. “Terry, what is all this?”

  “What?”

  She shrugged and glanced around the table, examining every plate, every special detail. “This.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know.” She knew how the stress of everything had affected him lately. During filming, the slightest criticism had turned into a full-blown argument. For the first few weeks anyway. Terry had shut down for the latter half of the season. He had barely spoken to her, which had prompted Barry to nudge the couple in a dark new direction; one Angela wasn't exactly prepared to travel down. “This isn't... you.”

  “What do you mean this isn't me?”

  She disliked Terry when he played stupid, but, whatever trick he had stored up his sleeve, it came from a good place. She decided not to push him away, promised she wouldn't let the conversation veer into those familiar angry places.

  “I just... everything's been so weird lately. I don't remember the last time you cooked dinner.”

  For a second, he looked like he wanted to do more than just argue—he looked like he wanted to explode. His face went slack and pale, his shoulders slumping. He breathed heavily through his mouth. Just when she expected him to lash out with some venomous remark about how she didn't love him anymore or about how far their marriage had fallen, his face broke into a huge grin. “I know. I haven't been a great husband lately.”

  Angela sighed. “No, Terry. That's not what I meant.”

  “It's okay,” he said, almost jovially. “I admit it. I acted like an ass on the Switch. I embarrassed you. You don't have to say it if you don't want to. But I was a bona fide dickhead to you, and I'm sorry.”

  She didn't argue.

  “I can't explain it. It was like I was someone else. Every day we were filming I thought, 'This isn't me. This isn't who I am.'” He frowned. “I'm better than that. We're better than that.”

  Angela nodded. “The show ended weird for both of us.”

  “Do you think we made a mistake?”

  She placed the strap of her purse on the back of the chair in front her and sat down. She propped her head on her hands, as if her swollen cranium were too heavy for only her shoulders to support. “I don't feel any better. About this house. About what happened.”

  “That's how I feel, too.” Terry scratched the little hair he had left on his head. Angela always found bald men, or balding men, somewhat repulsive. Then again, when she had met Terry almost ten years ago, he had an entire head full of long dark strands. But times change. So do tastes and she no longer minded the inevitable baldness. The thin wisps of hair and the visible dimpled texture of his scalp didn't exactly turn her on, but it wasn't as off-putting as she had expected. “I don't like what the show did to us.”

  “It was supposed to be a vacation.”

  They had spent two months in Vermont living in someone else's home, using someone else's amenities, sleeping in someone else's bed. Living someone else's life. The show was supposed to be an escape from reality but it hardly felt like one. They left with the intent of cleansing their souls but came back with another devil in their trunk. The cameras being shoved in their faces all-day-everyday issued a lot of stress, wedged a wrench between them, though they didn't help matters with their bickering and subsequent silent treatments. Barry, with his itinerary and list of demands, definitely complicated things. Their producer had been a hard-ass from day one. He acted like he was the director of a two-hundred-million-dollar Hollywood production. The guy had seemed chill and levelheaded during preproduction but the script flipped the second they stepped foot inside the Vermont house and started shooting.

  Terry nodded. “Yeah. Now that I'm back here, though,” he said, shivering, “feels like I never left.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “What do we do?”

  Angela shrugged. “I talked to the realtor earlier.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. No bites. Not so much as an inquiry. She wants to drop the price down another ten large.”

  “Well, that just sucks.”

  “I can't keep living here, Terry.”

  “I know, babe.”

  “This house. This town.”

  Terry sat down next to her and rubbed her shoulder. She leaned her head on his arm. “I grew up in Red River,” he said. “It's the only place I've ever known.”

  “There are other towns,” she told him, wrapping her arms around his midsection. “I can't live in this one anymore. It's tainted. For the last eight mon
ths, a dark cloud's been floating over Red River and it hasn't left. The air tastes funny and always smells like smoke. I'm suffocating here.”

  He stroked her hair, pushing the golden clumps behind her ear. “We'll figure it out.”

  “Will we?”

  “Of course.” He kissed the top of her head. “We always do.”

  II.

  THE THINGS THAT HAPPEN LATE AT NIGHT ARE GONE IN THE MORNING

  The clock on the nightstand read 3:03 a.m. when she kicked the covers off her body and got up to pee. She hustled to the bathroom, her bladder feeling like it was on the cusp of bursting. In fear of it emptying involuntarily, she elected to skip turning on the lights. Squatting on the toilet seat, she urinated in the dark. The sound of her piss hitting the water drowned out the drone of the air conditioning unit. As she relieved herself, she stared ahead at the bathtub, the site of many fond memories.

  Ma-me.

  Bubble baths.

  Ma-me.

  Bubble fights.

  Ma-me.

  A small ocean infested with rubber duckies and Power Rangers.

  She forced herself to look away. Her eyes settled on the wall, immediately drawn to a peculiar white dot in the center of nearly-absolute darkness.

  What the hell?

  She wiped herself dry, yanked up her pajama bottoms, shut the toilet lid, flushed, and then crept across the bathroom to the far wall, her eyes glued to the small pinprick of light showing through.

  Close enough, she knelt down before it.

  Sure enough, she was face-to-face with a small hole in the wall, no bigger than a popcorn kernel, and it was letting in a considerable amount of light, heavenly white, the kind of brightness that would blind if shone directly into the pupil. Confused, Angela stood up and looked out the window, into the backyard. She peered down and saw nothing but shadows and the pale glow of the moon and the stars. Not enough light to produce the brightness she was seeing through the hole.

  She shuddered when she glimpsed the overturned soil in the backyard. Terry had never bothered to put seed down after the police had combed it, leaving the whole area to look like a long row of prepped graves sans caskets. In some vague way, the backyard was indeed a burial site.

  An empty one.

  Angela bent down on one knee and stared at the small hole. She debated whether to look into it or not. Some feathery sensation swept across her neck, lacing her bones with chills. The hairs on her arms rose, becoming so erect her flesh hurt. She swallowed an invisible ball lodged in her throat. She didn't know why, but she felt she should wake Terry, that he should be here to witness this tiny phenomenon along with her. She looked over her shoulder, back toward the bedroom, contemplating whether to disturb her sleeping husband. Terry hated being roused for any reason, especially when something wasn't an emergency. He valued his sleep the same way bears did, dealing with intrusions just as angrily.

  No, she wouldn't wake him. She turned back to the hole and closed one eye, putting the open one in front of the porthole.

  (open water, choppy and endless, stretching beyond the fog-filled horizon. A small wooden ship she's seen in movies about pirates, complete with black sails and a crew of grimy bandits, twenty figures in all. They're distant. They're shouting. Barking commands at each other. She can't tell what they're saying, she's too far. They scurry around the deck, working, fighting, yelling. Suddenly, the water around the boat bubbles and churns. Something rises from below. Tentacles, eight total, larger than the ship in scale, ascend the misty-gray atmosphere, climbing the air well above the ship's mast. The men on the deck scatter in a panic. Some hurl themselves overboard, screaming. Others work double-quick to carry out their captain's demands. Both acts prove futile as the tentacles come crashing down, smashing the ship to splinters. As the boat lay in ruin, Angela spots something else, just beyond the destruction: a lone figure, dark, shadowed, and watching. Not the scene. But her. The unknown shape spies her from a distance, floating above the flotsam with its arms folded across its chest, examining, waiting, ready for)

  She pulled herself back, breathless. Her chest heaved and she placed her palm over her heart as if to stop it from leaping out of her chest. Another frosty, feathery something ran down her spine, the wintry sensation twisting and curling as it went. Her breath caught in her throat as she stepped away from the hole, the glimpse into her own private dreamworld.

  What did I just see? She followed up her question with a more important one: Was it real?

  She crossed the threshold and closed the bathroom door out of precaution. Surely whatever was behind the wall, the decimated pirate ship and the gargantuan sea beast, could not come through, but the situation disturbed her so much she couldn't help but think anything was possible.

  She tiptoed across the carpet, over to her side of the bed, climbed in and pulled the covers up over her head. Sleep was far from her thoughts. Staring into the darkness for the next four hours, until Terry's alarm went off, Angela cried and questioned her own sanity.

  * * *

  On his knees, Terry craned his neck toward her. “You saw what now?”

  “I told you. There was a tiny ship with little men on it.”

  Terry's eyes widened with alarm.

  “Don't look at me like that.”

  He returned his eye to the hole. “I see pink insulation. It's an outside wall, love. Whatever created the hole didn't go through the sheathing.”

  “I know that now. I'm talking about what I saw last night.”

  “Uh-huh.” Terry frowned. “And you saw... tentacles?”

  Angela chewed on her lower lip and looked elsewhere. “Yes.”

  “I see. Uh, babe...”

  “Don't.”

  “No, I believe you.”

  Angela eyed her husband warily. “You do?”

  “Of course. I mean, I don't think you actually saw what you think you saw, but it's possible you had a waking nightmare of some sort.”

  “A waking nightmare?”

  “Yeah, you know. Like you were awake but still dreaming. That's a thing...” He said this last part as if trying to convince himself it was true. “Look, I'm no doctor. But I think the stress of coming back here has put your mind in a frenzy. Hell, last night, I had some strange dreams myself.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Yep.”

  “What were they of?”

  Terry arched his brow and looked up as if the images in his brain were projected on the ceiling. “I don't remember exactly. But I do remember them being strange.” He sighed and reached out to grab her hand. She let him. He squeezed gently and, for the moment, she felt safe and secure, the fear for her own sanity had all but subsided. “We'll get through this. We will. We just need a little more time. Once the checks from the show start rolling in, we'll start getting serious about this house hunting thing. We can move anywhere you like.”

  Her eyes expanded. “You mean that?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “What happened to 'Red River is the only place I know' mumbo-jumbo?”

  Terry shook his head adamantly. “Don't worry about that. I was being selfish. I want you to be happy. We can move anywhere you want. I'll even go to Pennsylvania so we can be near your folks, if that's what you want.”

  She considered this with a smile. “Well, not too close.”

  “I love you, Angela Shepard.”

  “I love you, too, Terry Shepard.”

  He got to his feet and kissed her on the lips, the sensual touch lasting for a long time, much longer than she expected.

  III.

  SEASON PREMIERE

  They gathered on the couch with a bucket of popcorn and two glass bottles of Coca-Cola. The season premiere of Let's Switch Houses! was a commercial or two away from starting. Barry had called them an hour earlier, asking if they were excited or nervous and how they planned to celebrate once the show had aired. He had returned to being the Barry he'd been before they had started filming, amiable and kind, not the monst
er he had become on set. She told him “pretty excited”, though that wasn't the truth, or close to it. Nervous didn't even cover it. No, Angela feared seeing herself on the small screen. No one would consider her overweight, but the old adage “the cameras add ten pounds” crept up on her like a ninja ten minutes before show time and she immediately started checking her stomach for evidence of chub rolls, the backs of her arms for hanging flab. She found none, but the old expression continued to repeat itself inside her head regardless. Not only was she scared of looking plump, but she also wondered how Barry and the post-production team would depict her. She had given them all aspects of her role as Terry's other half—the somber wife who tried to keep her husband happy, the sad wife who held onto past mistakes, and the angry wife who sometimes took her frustrations out on her husband—they were all there, all caught on film for the world to see. It was up to the editors which one they wanted to portray, which “Angela” they thought prospective audiences would relate to best.

  She suddenly had a very bad feeling about this.

  “You okay?” Terry asked, shoveling a fistful of popcorn in his mouth.

  “Yeah, just a little nervous.”

  “We're about to be stars.”

  “That's what I'm kinda nervous about.” She lied. She didn't think the show would launch her into celebrity stardom like other reality television stars. She wasn't aspiring to be a real housewife or a castaway survivor or reach The Bachelorette status. She was going to be Angela, the woman who'd taken her slice of the American Dream and ruined it with one simple mistake, one terrible moment.

  They're not going to pity you, she thought. They're going to hate you.

  She had already achieved local celebrity status because of what had happened, in fact, “the tragedy” had trended on Facebook for almost twenty-four hours when the news initially broke. So in a way, the public already knew her. About her. And, from what she'd been told, pitied her. Was rooting for her to come out of this on top. Maybe that was why Barry and the other producers had selected her. Because she needed this. She needed a victory.