A Stranger's House

by Bret Lott

  I said, “I know. I’m aware of that,” and then I put my coffee cup down, looked out the window. Snow still fell, and I could see outside bare branches of trees filling with snow, white-edged black limbs, and I knew that when we left this morning, went out the door off the kitchen and descended stairs clouded over with white, I would see the dead Christmas tree still leaning up against the foundation next door. There almost a year now.

  I said, “Tonight, when we get home, I want to start packing. I want to start putting things in boxes and lining them up in here so that when we go, when we move, we can go as easily as possible.”

  He had his cup to his lips, and looked at me over the brim, the reflection of the lights above us caught in his glasses, and I pictured him at work before his computer terminal, clicking up stories all day long, the green monitor with its green letters reflecting up into his eyes headlines like VALLEY COUPLE’S TRIUMPH COMPLETE.

  He put the cup down, looked at the magazine open on the table before him, and closed it. He said, “You’re not even listening. You’re not even hearing me.” He paused. He hadn’t looked at me.

  He said, “Let’s get going. I’ll be late, with this snow. We need to go.”

  When he climbed out of the car in the parking lot of the newspaper, he gave a small wave, turned and headed for the door, where inside he would work away at that computer, do his own job, his own work, reading more press releases, I assumed, of more women impregnated by turkey basters or anything else, sperm handed over in plastic Baggies from some willing masturbator. He would read of more triumphs today, more glorious victories.

  When he had waved at me, there had not been even that small automatic smile, the thoughtless one. Even that was gone, his face straight, still.

  Martin and Grady stood stamping their feet in the snow, both of them blowing into hands in fists at their faces, Martin’s stamping exaggerated, his feet lifted a little too high, the time between dropping one foot and lifting the other a little too long.

  Grady opened the passenger door, Martin his backseat door, and they climbed in.

  Still there were no words between us. Still Martin shoved himself into the far corner. Still there was something dead hanging in the air.

  Once we were through Williamsburg and on 43, back almost in the Berkshires, the snow was thicker, heavier, the road before me covered with snow except for two thin black lines stretching out in front of us.

  I said, “So how was that ‘odd-ball’ shift you guys worked yesterday afternoon?”

  “Work,” Grady gave out quickly. “Just work.”

  Past Chesterfield, the black strips on the highway grew narrower, traffic through here lighter, and the valley and road falling down toward the gorge were new again, different once more: snow was everywhere, still not too heavy, but enough to have veiled the meadow to the left. To the right the leafless black trees were stark and quiet, the dark-green pines cloaked in white, uppermost stones on the fences bordering the road impossibly white, a soft, continuous cushion of white.

  I’d seen this drive in late summer, and in autumn, and now I’d seen it in winter. The only season left was spring, and already I longed for that, for the burst of new buds, bright green from iron gray branches.

  I longed for that, and it seemed, as we glided down the road toward the stream at the bottom and the narrow bridge over snow-hidden stones, that even the gray sky and snowflakes were pressing in on me along with all else, those things I’d cried over last night. Suddenly the inside of the car seemed smaller, the three of us crammed inside a machine that crept through the world outside our windows toward a house that would shelter us, and I was afraid. I wanted to be in that house. I wanted the stove on. I wanted the scraper in my hand.

  When I parked the car, I looked out the windshield only a moment at the house, different yet again, new: snow had collected on the roof, the windows black below white, the chimney poking up into the gray sky, the yard hidden by white. The junk heap, I could see from here, was sprinkled with color: broken yellow Formica from the counters, fake, plastic brown from the paneling, sky blue from the clapboards, all shrouded in white, the colors that much brighter for it.

  I was first out of the car, Grady and Martin slower than usual, as though there were something they wanted to discuss between themselves before heading in. They stood at the car a moment, looking at each other, and then went up the stone steps, stomped their feet once inside. Grady closed the door behind Martin, Martin shrugging off his jacket, though the room was no warmer than the air outside. He lay the coat across one of the sawhorses he had built, a piece of awkward, temporary furniture inside a house torn apart

  It was dark inside, and the first thing I did was head for the stove. I bent over it, moved my hand for the latch on the stove door, but here was Martin’s hand right next to mine, reaching the latch first, his hand big and calloused and red from the cold, the nails bitten down to the quick, and I turned, looked up.

  Martin’s face was right there next to mine, closer than it had been the first time I’d seen him through the glass of the window that first morning. The day I’d screamed out of fear at his face, and I saw that no matter how sorry I had felt for him when he had been moving dishes around in Friendly’s, or how much in awe of him I had been when he was piecing together a foundation or shimming in a floor joist, there had always been a piece of me that had held onto that fear of him, a piece of me that had clutched my first impression of him: head at the window, dull eyes, teeth together. That fear was always buried down deep in me.

  Until now. Now here he was, his face near mine, his hand at the stove, ready to do for me what I had intended: to start up the heat in the house, to warm it up, to make it more and more my home. He wanted to do this for me, and his face no longer gave me that fear. Fear melted in me, all in an instant, in just that flash of time, long enough for me to see in the creased lines beside his eyes the sorrow that had been a part of who he was, and in the lines of his forehead the years of work at just living, and in his eyes the practice of just being, the forced preoccupation with getting along that involved the awkward stomping of feet against the cold, the staring at the wheel of the bicycle in front of him, the echo of words Grady gave so that it would seem to everyone, anyone—me—that Martin was only a human. Not any different from me. Not at all.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. He looked at the stove, opened the door.

  I stood up, and I felt good again, here, inside my house. Let the snow come. Let it fill these woods, that canyon, cover that road. I was inside here, and the open space out there was not a part of me. I was inside, and soon it would be warm here.

  Martin squatted before the stove, and wadded up a few sheets of newspaper from the stack at the end of the hearth. He put them in, and picked up some kindling from the box next to the paper. He glanced up, behind me. He nodded.

  Grady, behind me, said, “Look, I’m sorry about yesterday. About blowing up at you like that.” He paused. “That story,” he said, “that story’s just not something I like to talk about. So I’m sorry.”

  I half turned to him, and I could see from the corner of my eye Martin striking a wooden match on the side of the stove, then gently placing it inside, the quick flicker of flame into life, the crack and hiss.

  I looked at Grady. He had his arm across his chest again, clutching his elbow, just holding on, the arm useless at his side. He was looking at the floor.

  He shrugged. “Martin thinks you should know more. He thinks you ought to know the rest of the story.” He got a strange smile on his mouth, his lips parted, teeth together. He was still looking down. “He thinks you ought to know more about this brother and his wife and the sister.” He gave a cold laugh, jerked his head up, and looked at the ceiling, at the cracked plaster up there, laths showing through in places.

  I looked up, too, for a moment thought of the work involved and what we would be doing: scraping and scraping and scraping away, and then I was aware of the conscious shift in my b
rain away from the matter at hand: what Martin wanted me to hear.

  “He thinks,” he said, and blinked something back. With his free hand he quickly reached up to his eyes and rubbed them, let the hand drop. “He thinks you need to know what the story is. For some reason.”

  “Say,” Martin said. He was still at the stove, feeding it bigger pieces of wood, and I could feel the first faint traces of warmth on my hands and face.

  “He says,” Grady said, his voice loud now, forced, “that he wants you to know because he knows you’ll take care of this house. And he just wants you to know. Because he trusts you to take care of it.” He stopped, and his voice rang through the room, through the house.

  But there was nothing I wanted to know. There was nothing. I wanted only to work, to make the shift from Grady’s grandfather’s house to our house; wanted to attack that ceiling, to scrape it clean of old plaster, and examine the laths, tear out old ones, put in new, plaster over the ceiling again, and get on with living, with moving here.

  I wanted to know nothing, and I said, “Don’t say anything. I don’t want to hear anything. If this has to do with Mr. Clark and what you almost told me once, I don’t want to know. And if this has to do with you two living together, I don’t want to—”

  “Hah!” Grady let out. He was looking at me, his arm still across him, still holding his elbow. Martin was peering into the stove, putting in another, bigger piece. “Yeah,” Grady said, “you and your espionage. You and your following us home from Friendly’s. Wow. That’s impressive, you and your research and investigative skills. That’s a joke. That, and your telling fat old Blaisdell about me, and then him coming over to our place and telling me to lay off you guys. Hah, that’s a joke. What do you think? Do you think this world goes on and I don’t know anything? There’s more I know than you do. There’s more I know about this goddamned fucking world than you’ll ever know, that’s for certain. Like you think I don’t know the same car that we ride up to this trash pit everyday is following us home and parking on the street across from us. Like I don’t know that.”

  Martin was standing, finally, and had both hands in fists at his sides. He was looking at Grady, his jaw set, his eyes narrowed to slits.

  “Well?” Grady said to Martin. I was between them again, the two looking at each other as if I weren’t there.

  Grady said, “You want me to tell her more. The truth. But I’m not going to do it.”

  “I don’t want to know,” I said quietly. I looked at the wall before me, fixed my eyes on where I’d left off scraping wallpaper yesterday, the jagged edge of paper like broken glass, above it the ugly pattern of long-dead flowers, below, the yellowed plaster wall. “I’ve got to work,” I said.

  “Are you shamed?” Martin said to Grady, and I closed my eyes, bowed my head.

  “Ashamed,” Grady nearly shouted. “Ashamed is the word. Not ‘shamed.’” He stopped. “And no, I’m not. I’m not ashamed.”

  I wanted to say something to stop this, wanted to say anything. I wanted to walk across the room, pick up the scraper from the windowsill, and work, but I was frozen there, my hands now at the sides of my head, a few inches from my ears, as though that might keep their words from me.

  They were both quiet, and I listened, waited for words from either of them. I waited, dreading any sound, my eyes closed, only the black before me, the heat now fading into me, seeping into my clothing. I listened, dreading any words that might break the silence, but then they came.

  Grady said, “Because that’s between me and you,” and his voice had a broken edge to it, as if he were ready to cry but hadn’t yet made that fall. “Because Grandma Clark’s dead and Grandpa Clark’s as good as dead. This is all that’s left. And because I love you and it’s between you and me, and when I say it, it’ll be gone, just like this house. When I say it, it’ll be gone, and this house will be gone.”

  “No, it will not,” Martin said, his voice lower now, even quieter. “You are ashamed,” he said.

  “No I am not!” Grady screamed, and I squeezed my eyes shut, grit my teeth, brought up my shoulders as though to guard myself against a coming blow. “Can’t you see?” he said, sobbing now. “Can’t you see? When I tell, when I say, she knows, and it’s gone. You and me. Who we are. Can’t you see that?”

  My eyes were still closed, and the words came through me all tied together, leading into one another, hitting and falling around me, and then the room was filled with Grady’s quick breaths, his sobbing.

  “No,” Martin said, his single word huge and awful in me. “I cannot see,” he said.

  Grady’s breath stopped, held in, I knew, and I heard him turn, felt his hard footsteps across the floor. I opened my eyes to see the front door slam closed behind him, and felt the cold push of air from outside move in. Through the windows I could see him running off toward the road. His back was to the house, the snow falling steadily. He ran, and when he reached one of the trees, a leafless, black-limbed tree like every other one here in these woods, I saw him jump and reach up, pull down a limb and break off a good-sized branch. The bough shot back up, snow that had collected on the branches showering down. Grady, still running, disappeared from view, edged out of the window frame.

  “I cannot see,” Martin said, and I looked back at him. His head was down, his hands still in fists at his sides. Then he whispered, “Come with me,” and he turned from the stove. Slowly he walked across the room to the bottom of the stairs, and started up, forcing, it seemed, his feet to move up each step.

  When he got to the landing where the stairs broke into two sets, one to our bedroom, the other to the room that would be mine, he stopped, and looked back at me.

  I hadn’t moved.

  He said, “Come on.” He paused. “It will be okay.”

  I wanted to back away, to get out, because I did not know what was going on here. That was what frightened me most. I did not know. Yet the only thing I could do other than follow him was to go out the door and into the world out there, the world outside this house, a world that would crush me, I knew.

  I moved toward him, slowly, carefully, and found myself at the bottom of the stairs and moving up, first one step, then the next, then the next.

  He had already turned, and I saw him hesitate a moment, look up toward the room that I’d claimed for my own, the room that, in a life previous to this one, I had envisioned as belonging someday to a child of our own. But now it would only be my room.

  And it was the room Martin would not enter, I remembered, the room he had never gone into, from the first day we were in here, Martin standing a few steps down and looking in at us, rubbing the place where my scar would have been on his hand, to the day he would not roll the marble across the floor, to a morning just last week, when I’d called him up to help me with the baseboard and a nail that I could not seem to loosen. Even then he’d stood a couple of steps down, out of the room, just looking in at me, at the baseboard.

  Now he was mounting those stairs, me at the landing, looking up at him. He got to the last step before the bedroom, and he stopped. He stood there a moment, and seemed to tighten his fists even more, bringing them up to his waist, then near his chest. He held them there a few seconds, and let them fall again, loose there at his sides. He stepped into the room.

  I started up, a moment later in the doorway.

  His back was to me, and he stood square in the center of the room, facing the only window. He was looking at the wall, at the gray plastic paneling. His hands were flat against his thighs, his heels together, as though he were at attention. He was looking at the wall, examining it from where he stood, his head moving slowly back and forth, from top to bottom.

  Then he took two huge strides toward the wall, and he attacked it. He put his fingers up to the paneling where it met the ceiling, the molding already gone, taken off by me the day he would not help me. His fingertips fixed in the small space between ceiling and paneling, he ripped a piece of paneling down, and I could hear th
e high, quick screech of nails pulled out, and the sudden crack of paneling breaking off from the rest of the wall into one of those shards. With that pull, that snap, Martin gave out a high-pitched, small cry, just a crack of sound from him, and he let fall that piece of paneling, reached up to the top of the wall again, wedged in his fingers again, snapped down again. I could see the strain in his back, the force of his arms, the sudden give of the paneling, and the next cry as another piece broke off.

  I stepped into the room then, and said, “Martin,” but he didn’t respond, only broke off yet another piece. His eyes never left the wall, and my stomach started to twist up, to cramp, because I didn’t know what was going on.

  The wall behind the paneling was no different than any other wall in this house: old, yellowed wallpaper, the pattern only dark blue lines that ran from top to bottom, I imagined, though he’d only torn off the top foot or so of the paneling, all with his hands, piece after piece. He’d already gotten off the narrow strip above the window, and now he was on the left, pulling, tearing, breaking it off.

  He hadn’t slowed down yet, and with each piece off, more and more of the old wall exposed, it seemed he was giving out more small cries. He pulled at a bigger piece now, pulled and pulled, nails crying against his force, and then it broke off, the sound cutting through me, my adrenalin growing now as he staggered back with his own momentum. He let that piece fall from his hands, went at the wall again, his hair loose now, wisps of it caught in the gray light of the snow-filled window before him.

  He was at the left of the window, almost halfway down the wall, when he shoved one arm down between the paneling and the wall, the other hand reaching forward, toward the corner of the room, gripping the broken edge of the paneling. He was bent at the waist, his feet spread apart to steady himself. His face was half-turned to me, and I could see something of that trance he fell into time and again. But it was different now, fierce, the eyes half-closed but focused, as if searing the wall with his line of sight, his mouth open and teeth clenched, his cheeks flushed with work. Then, with one great cry, one great shot of sound from him, he pulled at the paneling, and the rest of that side of the wall, from the window to the corner, broke free, the nails moaning, then giving and breaking free, and he fell on his side onto shards already there, the huge piece of paneling on top of him up to his waist. But he scrambled up, pushing aside that piece, moving toward the right side of the window, starting into the paneling there.