House of Windows

by John Langan

  For the second day in a row, I spent the deep hours of the night awake, my body shaking, it was so desperate for sleep, my brain unable to shut down in the face of what I'd lost. Not to mention, what I'd seen while I was losing it. That—I didn't know what to call it. Hallucination was probably the appropriate word, but it didn't feel right. I didn't know what did. I would close my eyes, and I would see the empty house, the doorways, the faces. I would hear Roger saying, "Boy, the best part of you dribbled down your mother's leg." I would relive my baby sliding out of me. Every half hour, one nurse or the other poked her head in the doorway, saw I was awake, and asked me how I was feeling. I didn't know how to answer. What I was mostly was empty. Aside from my tears while I was losing the baby, I hadn't cried as much as I would have expected. I hadn't gotten that used to being pregnant in the first place. It had seemed incredible that there was another living being growing inside me. I guess it's different once you can feel the baby move. I sat beside Roger and thought, Today, he's lost both his children.

  I waited until he came home to break the news to him. For the first couple of days he was at Penrose, I was afraid for his heart. The doctor told me everything was under control and Roger was going to be fine, but I didn't want to tempt fate, you know? I kept my promise to the nurses and saw my ob-gyn that following morning. He was more sympathetic than I expected, so much so that I started bawling in front of him. He made a speech about this being difficult but for the best—nature's way of sparing a life that couldn't have survived on its own. I nodded, drying my eyes and blowing my nose on the tissues he'd had ready at hand. The most important thing, he said, was that I appeared to be all right physically, and that that continue to be the case. I had to take care of myself. Mentally, it was normal to be depressed, even angry. He gave me the card of a Dr. Hawkins, a psychiatrist he'd referred patients to in the past, and made me promise to call her if I was having trouble handling this. I swear, the air the last couple of days seemed to be full of promises. I promised to call the psychiatrist if things started to get too bad. When I got in my car to drive back to the hospital, I had the strangest thought. I sat there with both hands on the steering wheel, looking into the windshield, where I could see my reflection, this woman who'd been a mother-in-process and who now was not, and I thought, This is the price of Roger's words. For a second, that idea took hold of me—I was absolutely convinced it was true—I saw Roger's face framed by a doorway, eyeless, the skin peeling away, blood pouring from his mouth. As quickly, it was gone. I shook my head, started the car, and drove back to the hospital.

  Roger recovered rapidly. I probably could have said I'd lost the baby right away. By the time I was more sure of his condition, the hospital seemed like the wrong place. Roger knew I was keeping something from him. He kept asking me what was wrong. Nothing, I said, it was only the strain of everything. "Don't let yourself get too stressed," he said once, his second-to-last day there, "you've got someone else to think about." Somehow, I managed to smile at him.

  The afternoon we came home, I told him. He was on bedrest for another week, which frustrated him. "I've been in bed a week already," he complained to the cardiologist, who told him to do as he was instructed or they'd be seeing each other again a lot sooner than either of them wanted. Having a heart attack made Roger nervous, you know? Before, you said that it can happen to anyone, at any age, which is true—and which was what Roger was trying to convince himself of the time he was in Penrose. A thirty-year-old can have a heart attack, but how do you react if they do? You're surprised. You say, "Wow, that's young for a heart attack." Because you associate heart attacks with being old. How many times have you heard someone talk about turning forty or fifty as entering heart attack country? Throughout his week in the hospital, Roger said, "I can't believe I had a heart attack." The second or third time I heard him, I realized what he was actually saying was, "I can't believe I'm old." I reassured him, told him yes, it was crazy that a man in his shape could have this happen to him. Secretly, I thought about his love for cheese, and cream sauces, and ice cream.

  We came home, with instructions for a new diet, and I put Roger to bed with the latest issue of Dickens Quarterly. The apartment was still a wreck from Roger and Ted's excursion into ultimate fighting. I'd returned for a couple of hours the day before to clean up the worst of it, but the place was a mess, books all over the place, glass in the carpet, bloodstains on the floor. I dug out my cleaning supplies from under the sink, got down on my hands and knees, and started to scrub the floor. It's therapeutic, cleaning—it is for me, at least. From the bedroom, Roger called, "Honey? What are you doing?"

  "Cleaning," I said.

  "Are you sure that's a good idea?" Roger asked. "In your condition?"

  My condition. My condition which wasn't a condition; a condition of wasn't. I stood and went through to the bedroom, where Roger lay on the bed, pillows piled up behind him, his cheap half-glasses on. He was wearing an old conference t-shirt with Dickens's faded face on it. Without removing the rubber yellow gloves I'd pulled on—a wet sponge in one hand—I sat down on the end of the bed and said, "Roger, I lost the baby. I'm sorry."

  "Oh, honey," he said, dropping the journal and leaning forward, his arms open. I moved into his embrace. "When?" he asked.

  "While you were in the hospital."

  I felt him nod. I was expecting him to ask me why I hadn't told him, which I didn't want to have to answer. He didn't, just kept his arms around me. I'd also assumed I would cry when the words came out, but my eyes stayed dry. What I felt was more relief, relief and calm. Roger sniffled, and suddenly was weeping freely. I wound up consoling him, saying, "It's all right," repeating my doctor's words to me about nature sparing a life that couldn't have survived on its own. If I didn't entirely believe that—if I couldn't stop from connecting the miscarriage to Roger's cursing Ted—I didn't let on to him. I tried hard not to think about it.

  Overnight, everything changed. Not in a big, dramatic way. It was more like sadness had entered our lives—our life. Until that moment Ted banged on the door, we'd had tough times, some very tough times, but no matter what happened—if all Roger's old friends ignored us; or Joanne called us every hour on the hour every night for a week; or she showed up at the front door of the motel we'd thought we could escape to—oh yeah, she was insane, all right—but it didn't matter if she was, not really, because she was on the outside. She could do whatever she wanted, she could say whatever she wanted, but she couldn't get between the two of us. I'm sure she realized this, and it drove her nuts. That combination of events, though, Roger's disowning Ted, his heart attack, and especially losing the baby, did what Joanne couldn't. It found its way into what we shared and—it didn't ruin it, no—it kind of tarnished it. Things were no longer as joyful. It wasn't as if I took up drinking, or Roger stayed out all night, or the two of us fought all the time. You noticed it in more subtle ways. We didn't wait for each other to be awake to have breakfast, anymore. We didn't read the Sunday Times together. We watched TV while we ate dinner. None of it was anything anyone would have worried about—we weren't in any danger of going the same way as Roger and Joanne. Things were different, that was all.

  Although I struggled not to, at odd moments, I would hear Roger's curse. I would be driving across the Bridge, on my way to teach at Penrose; or I'd be in the fruit aisle at Shop Rite, wondering whether the Fuji or the Golden Delicious looked fresher; or I'd be walking back from the mailbox, sifting through the day's tally of bills and junk—and that zero-degree voice would burn my ears. "You are an embarrassment and a disgrace." "All bonds between us are sundered; let our blood no longer be true." The space I'd seen the night I lost the baby—that other Belvedere House—would crowd my vision, those doorways, those murmuring faces. Then they were gone, the sounds, the sights, and I was at the wheel, behind the shopping cart, holding a half-dozen envelopes. Probably, I should have talked to Roger about it. Scratch that: definitely, I should have talked to him. It was just—we hadn't
said anything to one another about his disowning Ted—Roger's heart attack, and its attending drama, had pre-empted any and all other discussions, and by the time he was home again, there was the miscarriage to talk about, and the further we went from that parking lot, the harder it was to bring up. I assumed Roger would chalk up his words to the heat of the moment, and as for what I'd seen—I really didn't want to contemplate what that might mean for things like my sanity.

  Hard as it was to believe, the world continued around us. When I'd entered the MA program, the economy had been going strong. We were almost at the end of the internet boom. By the time Roger and Joanne signed their divorce papers, the economy was folding in on itself and the 2000 election was stuck in recount. Roger couldn't stand Bush. He never got so caught up in the divorce that he couldn't rail about what an idiot the guy was. He used to say, "If we must have a Republican for president, why on God's green earth couldn't it be McCain, and not that vacuous boob?" I voted for Nader. All of it—politics, the economy, world events—took place in the background, if you know what I mean. We paid attention to the bombing of the Cole, to the start of the recession, but none of it compared to what we were undergoing—good and bad—none of it was very real to us.

  Do I have to say that changed on September 11? What I remember most about that day—aside from the images on TV—was frantically trying to reach Ted. We were under attack. Planes had crashed into buildings. No one knew how many more might be on their way to what targets. Anything was possible. It was completely reasonable whoever was doing this would want to aim for military bases as well. The thing was, we didn't have Ted's phone number anymore. Roger had torn it out of all our address books after his return from the hospital. I tried calling information, but couldn't get through. Roger was in class. I actually dialed Joanne's number—that's how desperate I was—but it was busy. She lived in Manhattan, remember. Midtown, but who knew how safe that was? No doubt everyone in her family was calling her. I was frantic, pacing the apartment, listening to the beeping of one busy signal after another. I decided I was going to ask Roger for the number when he came home. He had a great memory for that kind of thing, and however hard he would have tried to pry Ted's number from his mind, I knew he'd be able to retrieve it if I insisted.

  About ten minutes before Roger ran in the front door saying, "Oh my God, honey, have you heard?" I tried information again and got through. In a remarkably calm voice, the operator asked me what number I wanted. I told her. She gave it to me and told me to have a nice day. Bizarre. I punched in Ted's number, and waited. I was sure the line would be busy, if it was working at all. It wasn't. After what felt like hours, it started to ring. It rang, and it kept on ringing. I wondered if I'd dialed the number correctly; I wondered if it would still ring for me if the phone on the other end had been destroyed. It kept on ringing, what had to be fifty, sixty, seventy times. I considered hanging up and trying again, but was afraid I wouldn't be able to get through. I was hoping that, if I let the phone ring long enough, someone would pick up and I could ask them if Ted was okay. All the while, in the background, the TV was full of the pictures of the Towers burning, the Pentagon burning, of huge plumes of black smoke pouring into the sky. You could hear various talking heads saying they didn't know who was behind this; they didn't know the extent of it.

  Finally, the other end picked up and I heard Ted's voice say, "Hello?"

  I was so relieved I didn't even take the time to feel relieved. I practically shouted, "Ted! It's Veronica—your father's—Roger's—are you all right?"

  There was no reply.

  "Ted?" I said, "Can you hear me?"

  He hung up.

  When I called back, Ted's number was busy. I wasn't surprised he'd hung up; though I hoped maybe that wasn't the case, maybe wires had crossed somewhere and severed our connection. No—I knew he'd done it. But at least I'd heard his voice. I replaced the phone in its cradle, and Roger rushed in full of disaster. I didn't tell him about the call I'd just made. I thought I should wait for him to bring up Ted. He didn't. We spent the rest of that day glued to the TV as it replayed the same awful sights over and over again. Everyone, all the reporters and anchors and pundits, kept saying that what had happened was unimaginable. No, I thought, it's only imaginable. This is the kind of thing you read about, that's supposed to remain safely confined to the pages of a Tom Clancy novel.

  Roger never once mentioned Ted—or Joanne, for that matter. It's strange to say, but what I realized on 9/11 was how completely my husband had rid himself of his former life. I was disappointed that he didn't suggest calling Ted—to tell the truth, I was the tiniest bit upset he didn't try to call Joanne, either. I mean, sure, she'd been a monster to us, but on a day like this one, you could look past those kind of things, at least to make sure of something as basic as whether people were alive. I could've come out and said I'd attempted to contact both of them, but each hour that passed without Roger uttering their names made what I'd done seem increasingly weird.

  Do you remember what it was like, those days immediately after the attacks? I had been working on an article on Hawthorne, so I had reread a bunch of his stories and was about to begin The House of the Seven Gables for what must have been the twentieth time. The morning of the eleventh, I'd read the first couple of pages of the book when the phone rang and my friend, Alicia, was asking me if I had the TV on, a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I put the novel down and didn't pick it up again for the rest of that day. Later—I think it was the following morning—I noticed it lying where I'd left it. I tried to go on from where I'd left off, old Maule's curse on Judge Pyncheon: "God will give him blood to drink." I couldn't do it. The words on the page refused to add up to anything. My eyes kept returning to that pronouncement. "God will give him blood to drink." Eventually, I gave up on Hawthorne and cleaned the apartment, instead. When I was done, I was tired and sweaty and didn't feel any better, but I'd found a way to pass a couple of hours. During the week that followed, I cleaned the apartment every day, sometimes twice the same day. I emptied out cabinets and scrubbed them and their contents. I rearranged the furniture in the living room. When I heard Roger say, "I disown you; I cast you from me," when I saw that whispering space, I ignored them and put my back into shifting the couch. I unscrewed the light fixtures and soaked them in the kitchen sink to remove the layers of accumulated grime. I rearranged the furniture in the bedroom. When I saw the words, "God will give him blood to drink," I ignored them, too, and tugged on the bed. I emptied out the closets, and put Roger's clothes in two piles, one to keep, and one for the Salvation Army. Roger saw what I was doing and didn't comment. His response to the disaster was to focus his complete attention on his classes. He sat at the kitchen table for hours with oversized photocopies of key passages from the books he was teaching, filling the copies with notes in half a dozen different-colored pens—one for each theme he was pursuing. By the time he put them aside, they looked like a strange combination of map and modern artwork.

  One afternoon that first week—I'm pretty sure it was Friday—I drove into town for more cleaning supplies. On my way back, there was an accident on Main Street and the detour the cops had set up sent me down onto Founders, past Belvedere House. Do you know, it had been months since I'd seen it? In person, I mean. None of the routes I routinely traveled took me onto Founders, and I didn't exactly go out of my way to drive it. Now here to my left was this huge house squatting in the middle of its lawn like—like I couldn't say what. It wasn't empty; I knew that. I'd been inside it, had been with Roger in it. The house was practically a labyrinth, stuffed full of furniture and decorations. Few places were less empty. And yet, as the light shifted on its windows, I was absolutely certain that, were I to pull over, cross the lawn to the front door, and walk inside, I'd find the whole thing hollow, only walls and ceiling. I kept driving.

  Pretty early on, I had a feeling that, when we went to war—because, right away, it was obvious to me that we were going; it was only
a question of who and when—I had this feeling—a conviction—that Ted would be sent. I wasn't sure exactly what Ted did. I knew he was a sergeant in the Special Forces, but I wasn't clear what that meant. I'd asked Roger, once, what Ted's job description was. He'd said, "He and his friends do the secret things," as if I had any idea what those kinds of things might be. I'd pursued the question, asked him what "secret things" were, and he'd said, "Infiltration, reconnaissance, sabotage, assassination, that business." I didn't know how accurate Roger was—though I've since learned he was more or less on target—but I knew that Ted had been in the Army for a while, which I assumed meant he was experienced at his job, which I assumed put him at the top of the list of the people who'd be sent.

  I was right. When the soldiers put their boots on the ground in Afghanistan, Ted's unit was among them. I'm not sure exactly what he did in the early days of the war, only that he was part of a lot of very intense stuff. That's how his best friend described it to me. Yes, I talked to Ted's best friend, a guy named Gene Ortiz; although he told me everyone calls him Woodpecker. I contacted him after Roger disappeared, when I was trying to fit what had happened to us into some kind of sense. I had questions about Ted, about his time in Afghanistan, so I did some research, found out who his CO had been, and called him. When he heard I was Ted's stepmother, he was very helpful. No doubt because he couldn't see me and think, "You're Ted Croydon's stepmother?" I'd been afraid he'd think my request to speak with someone who'd served with my stepson was morbid, but he said he completely understood. Specialist Ortiz and my stepson had been close to the point of inseparable, the CO said, he was sure the specialist would be happy to provide me any information I might need. "And Mrs. Croydon," the CO said, "may I just say how sorry myself and the rest of the men are about Ted? Your stepson was a model soldier—I don't think there was a man who knew him who didn't admire him. Working with him was a pleasure and a privilege." I thanked him. It was kind of nice to hear someone saying all this. The CO added that he'd tell Specialist Ortiz to expect my call and assist me in whatever way he could.