A Stranger's House

by Bret Lott

  I lay there, unable to move. I thought of my dream, of three children that never were, that might never be. I thought of my hands gone, those stumps, and of Mr. Gadsen.

  With everything I had I pushed back the covers, swung my feet around, and sat up. I felt dizzy for a moment, the blood falling from my brain down to my heart. It took a moment before the room became steady, the floor a place where I could put my feet and trust it would not move beneath me.

  We drove through town, the mid-morning September sunlight brilliant and cutting. For some reason the streets seemed filled with mainstreamers from the state hospital, men and women with nervous twitches and shambling feet and layers and layers of clothing. People who, when walking through town, might bump into you, call you by someone else’s name and look at you as if there were something wrong with you. There was, of course, the short, stocky Suntan Man in front of the bank at King and Main, his shirt already off, his bald head and chest and arms greased up for the light. In front of the county courthouse strolled the black man with the carved wooden cane and high boots and wool cap, the man I’d accidentally brushed up against one summer morning when I was heading out the door of the Laundromat on Market, both arms hugging a basketful of fresh, clean clothes. His odor had stayed on the hand that had touched him longer than any formaldehyde ever had, though I scrubbed and scrubbed that hand when I got home, scrubbed it in hot water until the hand was nearly scalded, the skin nearly raw.

  We moved through town toward Smith, perched at the top of the hill, that gray stone tower looking down at us all, and it seemed that the streets were suddenly taken over by Smith girls in long pre-winter coats belted or loose, some with colorful earmuffs, some with scarves, all with leather gloves or mittens. They traveled in packs, three or four or five at a time, stopping to read the menu outside the French restaurant, pushing open the glass door into the bank, looking through the tables full of used books in front of another shop. All adult, their cheeks flushed with the cold, their eyes bright, alive.

  Of course I was bitter. I had always wanted to be one of them. I’d seen them all my life, watched them as I grew up, hoping that some day I’d end up there somehow, in one of those dorm-palace dining rooms you could see from the street, rooms filled with golden light at night, only the corners and top edges of oil paintings hung on the walls visible from the sidewalk. On spring and autumn nights the sound of crystal and silver and laughter resounded through open windows onto the street, where I walked when I was a girl for just that purpose: for sound and company and beautiful lights, my mother at home, closed up in the house the death of my father had left even more empty.

  On those spring and autumn nights I walked around Smith, my hands deep in my coat pockets, my shoulders up in the cold. I always stopped and looked in those windows, watched for the faces of students, but from the street it was nearly impossible, the old dorm houses so high atop their basements that I could only see the lights of chandeliers, those pieces of portraits. I longed to go inside, to see those paintings in full, to stand back from them and take in the portraits of people long dead, and to know who they were and why their likenesses hung there. I wanted to touch the linen, the service, to eat dinner with those girls. To be there.

  But inevitably I had to leave, to head down the hill and through the main street and beyond the bend in Route 9 to where my mother and I lived in a small old home, two stories with only two bedrooms. The house I’d grown up in, the house my mother had holed up in, afraid of the world.

  Unlike every other friend I had when I was a child, it had been my father who had taken me to my first day of school. It had been my father who carried me from the car to the administration office of the elementary school, carrying me because, I insisted, my legs wouldn’t work, Mother back at home, afraid already of what might happen to her only child. It had been my father who, me sitting on his hip, had said in his granite voice This is Claire Shaw, my daughter, who will be starting school here today, my name at once important and forever.

  It had been my father, too, who had signed my grade reports after that, who’d helped me with my homework, who’d taken me for walks down to the river or to the playground, protecting me from cars racing past on Route 9 as we crossed, his judgment impeccable, always knowing precisely when to cross and when not. And it had been my father who’d taught me to tie my shoes, his big arms around me as I sat on his lap, his slender, rough fingers nimble with those clumsy shoelaces, and I was convinced he was some sort of magician.

  So that, when the officer arrived on our front porch one November afternoon, my mother and I were irreconcilable strangers, not knowing one another: me, a sixth-grader, a grown-up, I believed; my mother, a child in my eyes, only someone to keep house, prepare meals, and wait with me for my father’s return from work.

  A freak accident, the officer said. He stood before us in our front room, the room decorated as it would be until my mother died: my father’s chocolate Naugahyde recliner facing the trees and sky out the front window; the sofa covered with a wedding-ring quilt; thick, brown drapes; framed photos of the three of us on the walls. In any one of those pictures—from the pale, tinted colors of their engagement picture, my mother’s head tilted to the right just enough, her chin held high, my father’s face just above her shoulder, his cheek nearly touching hers, to the last picture before his death, a picture in which we three stand stark against bare, black trees, coats on, all of us smiling, my mother’s hand up to block the setting sun—it is easy to see her fear, the wariness that signaled some hiding on her part, the startled shine in her eyes. It was easy to see.

  The officer stood before us, snow that had collected on his shoulders and boots melting away, dripping off the parka and down his sleeves as he turned his hat in his hands, snow melting off the brim and crown, dripping to the rug beneath him. A freak accident, he said again, and told us of how my father had apparently taken his eyes off the road for a moment and, of course, off the truck in front of him, that truck loaded with soft, white pine two-by-fours and weaving its way along old Route 2. Perhaps my father had turned to light a cigarette; perhaps he flipped through some of his tally sheets on the seat next to him, rechecking how many cases of what food supplies he would send to the last restaurant he’d visited on his route; or perhaps he just looked at his watch, wondering how long it might be before he would pull into the driveway at home. But the look away gave him just enough time to miss seeing the red brake lights of the truck rear up at him, those boards sliding back at him, the road dusted with a fine, new snow as the boards slid backward across the hood of his car and through the windshield, the glass exploding into small green jewels splashed across my father, the boards sinking into him.

  The officer, of course, did not use this language to describe what happened. Green jewels and soft, white pine and the look at the watch were only images I played in my head again and again while growing up here in the Pioneer Valley, my mother from that day on staying indoors even more, turning down invitations from neighbors to dinner or lunch, PTA meetings; those invitations growing fewer and fewer until they disappeared entirely. Not long after his death my mother moved his recliner away from the window, turned its back to that view, and pulled closed the drapes.

  No, the officer’s words had been only a report as he stood before us while a young woman, my mother, sobbed into her hands, me with one arm around her waist, the waist of a stranger, my other hand covering my own face as he said, Failed to negotiate and Hazardous road conditions and Sincere regrets. Those words.

  A week later I was out on the blacktop at school, playing dodgeball, when suddenly one of us looked up to the sharp blue sky, and pointed. Most of us turned to the sight, a lone B-52 bomber banking across the sky as if it were some huge black bird drifting on currents of air. I heard some of the children talk of how bomb shelters honeycombed the hills between South Hadley and Amherst, a fortress where the military would hide when war broke out. When was the word they used, uttered without fear by children
. Play resumed, but I still watched the sky, watched the big airplane until it disappeared behind hills to the south, and I began to know then the fear my mother felt, the world closing down around us, my father gone with the simple act of glancing at a watch and the gift from God of a light blanket of snow.

  Though I was only eleven—only, I saw that day, a little girl—my mother began to make sense to me, her fear sinking into my chest like so many pine boards. Her fear was clear to me, suddenly, like the change in weather from the day of the funeral to that day with the plane. The day of the funeral the snow was still coming down, and the handful of flowers I tossed onto the casket sent the snow-flakes that had gathered there up and away like white ash in a light breeze. Now all that snow had melted, the sky open and clean.

  She was right to fear, I thought, and I moved from the circle of kids still playing dodgeball to the chain-link fence encircling the playground. Her life came to me then, and pieces of it seemed to fit somehow: her own father had died, I knew, when she was only four. It had been in the spring, I remembered my mother telling me one time, and he and some friends had gone up to Sunderland for the first swim of the year in the Connecticut. He’d climbed a low-hanging tree just north of the bridge up there, and dived in head first, breaking his neck on a submerged log that hadn’t been there the year before. So there was that loss, that vacancy with which to begin her life. When she had been a senior in high school—two weeks, in fact, before she was to graduate—her mother had been found to have cancer. Before summer was over she had died in a hospital room in Springfield, having lost fifty-six pounds—that number important enough to my mother to have been passed on to me—and leaving my mother to the care of an aunt and uncle in Newton. She moved to a town she’d been to only once before, a town at the other end of the state, where she knew no one, loved no one.

  This was my mother’s history, the only facts I knew that day, only a sketch, but one that made fear fill up in me. Accidents, I thought, are real and will happen. That was why the word had been created, a label for this unforseeable yet inevitable factor of life. And my life, I had seen, would be filled with them; my father had disappeared, and there was no one to protect me from them. My stomach seemed to tumble, and I was dizzy a moment, closed my eyes, leaned on the chain-link fence at my face. My father was gone, and I had been playing a child’s game when I ought to have been waiting for yet another accident to occur. He was gone, and the sounds he made—the crack of the stairs as he went down them and to work each morning, the engine turning over in the garage and the crunch of tire against gravel as he backed out of the driveway, him stomping snow off his shoes on the porch outside the door at the end of a day—would never come back, sounds simply gone from the face of the earth.

  I opened my eyes then, and the world was made of ugly colors and shook in my tears. I put the back of one hand to my face, tried to block tears from leaving my eyes while my stomach still twisted, and I remembered his voice. But it was more than that, more than memory: I heard him, as if he were just behind me to my left. I heard him say This is Claire Shaw, and was astounded at how solid his voice became inside me. I took in a breath and quickly turned, expecting, knowing he was there. But he was not. There were only kids, like me, playing a game that involved moving, moving from a hurled object that, if you weren’t quick enough or weren’t paying attention, might harm you. Only kids, and their own sounds in the world: laughter, yells, running. Sounds I made. Things I did.

  This is Claire Shaw I heard again, this time a whisper, warm in my ear, my father there with me; and I decided then, only a little girl, that I would not let fear consume me, not let it kill me as it had all but done to my mother. Though he hadn’t spoken to me since that time, I listened, listened to this day. And I had lived.

  Tom and I said nothing on the way out to Chesterfield, through Haydenville and on past the lumbermill, Route 9 now narrow and twisting along the bank of the Mill River, water this time of year only deep enough to glaze the rocks across the bed. In Williamsburg we passed the General Store, the parking lot packed with cars. I wanted to tell Tom to pull into the gravel lot behind the place and let us go in, have a look around, but I said nothing. We were moving, driving somewhere, the earth turning beneath us, and for that I was thankful. We were going to what could be our house, I thought. A home, our own, and I settled back in the seat.

  Outside Williamsburg we turned onto 43 and headed south, the road bordered now with trees, and for the first time I saw the changes in colors that had already come about, the hardwood trees giving up the green for autumn. The color usually started at the tops of trees, off to one side in a certain spot, where a single branch would be filled with yellow- and orange-edged leaves, a sprinkle of color that made you see the shape of the tree, shape you’d taken for granted since the trees had filled out with new leaves last spring. The farther out we got, too, the more trees had already begun the change until it seemed color was all around, not yet the cascades of red and orange and russet and yellow, but the hints, the edges, that let you know things were about to move into fall.

  Chesterfield itself sat up on a hill, one of the first at the edge of the Berkshires; houses, some old, some not so old, sat along both sides of the highway. There was a church, and a gas station, a market and post office, all the lawns neatly trimmed, some clapboard sidings brown and weatherbeaten, others in clean, white lines and angles, still others shingled over.

  It was a beautiful, small town, and as we passed through it I could see us stopping for gas and talking to the owner of the station, going to the post office for Christmas stamps, stopping in the market for milk on the way home. I could live here.

  The road fell down toward the gorge, and from the crest, just beyond the main strip of town, I could see the Berkshires before us, and the colors etched into the green, here and there a stark bush already gone red, the whole upper half of a maple given over to orange.

  I looked at Tom. He looked at me. He smiled.

  “What do you think?” he said. He looked back at the road. He was still smiling.

  I said, “I can see us here.”

  He said nothing, put the car into low gear, and we moved down into the valley, fields below us to the left, to the right those trees. On both sides of the road ran old stone fences, rocks fallen over here and there, but for the most part neat and sturdy. I wondered how many days those walls had seen, how many sunsets and snow-falls and thunderstorms and summer afternoons, and how many anonymous cars just like ours had driven past them day after day while they just waited for a shift in the stones, the giving way of earth from rains and melting ice to make those breaks in the line where stones had fallen back to the ground, back to where they came from in the first place.

  I could feel the engine running hard, feel the pull of the brakes as we headed to the bottom of the valley, and then we crossed the bridge, the stream only boulders and rocks outlined with slow-moving water. On the other side of the stream two hills shot up, the road going between them, following another stream, this one to the right, on my side. Three or four houses were on this side, some kept up, others a little shabby, but houses all the same.

  I said, “Our future neighbors.”

  Tom said, “Don’t jump the gun. We’re just up here to look.”

  We were almost there; the drive up didn’t seem half as long as it had Thursday night, but then things had been different: the end of a workday, the setting sun shining in our eyes as we headed down here, other cars of other commuters to contend with.

  The houses stopped. We went another quarter mile or so along that stream, and took the dirt road off to the left. Slowly we drove another hundred yards back in, and we were there.

  He turned off the ignition, and we sat in the car, just looking.

  It was a different house now, here in daylight, the sun straight above us, no shadows to hide things, give darkness to detail.

  A porch sat in front of the house, a makeshift thing, just two-by-fours and planks nailed
together, two wooden steps leading up to it, no railing. Just a platform under which could live any number of small animals. The roof was covered with asphalt shingles, and looked strong enough. At least the roofline seemed straight. The chimney, though, needed some reworking, and I wondered how much that might cost, a few of the bricks at the rim looking as if they might fall off any second now.

  “The porch will have to go right off,” Tom said. “And we’ll put up a new one. Probably in the spring. But I’d tear that thing off right now, if I thought we could get away with it.”

  I said, “But that would be jumping the gun.”

  Tom turned to me, and smiled. We kissed.

  He pulled the keys out of the ignition, popped open his door. I was still sitting, looking; the cool gust of air from outside filled the car. He closed the door.

  I climbed out. My left arm was still useless, and gingerly, steadily, I held it next to my abdomen, pushed shut the door with my hip.

  The house had been painted an ugly sky blue years ago, the paint on the clapboard bubbled, chipped, in some places nonexistent; you could see the gray wood in patches across the front of the house.

  I said, “The house has age spots. Those unsightly liver spots.”

  He laughed, and we moved to the front of the car. He put his arm up and I came to him, leaned against him with his arm around my shoulders. We took a couple of steps toward the house, but Tom stopped. He stood still, and I felt his body stiffen.

  “Shit,” he said.

  I looked up at him. His arm was still around me. “What?”

  “The keys,” he whispered. “I forgot the keys. I forgot to go to the realtor’s and pick up the stupid keys. Shit”