This is your guilt. You are condemned.
The desert air cooled. I wore only jeans, sneakers and a t-shirt. I couldn’t stay out all night. I decided to find a home with a phone and call it in as an emergency. I would offer no explanation other than there is a woman and she needs help.
I found myself walking again, through backyards, around and over low, split-rail fences set in brittle grass. I was looking for a light, some sign that another, normal person was awake, watching late-night television. I imagined a man like myself, a sort of laid-back dude who wouldn’t scream when I knocked on his door and told him I needed to use his phone. He would be dressed in sandals and a polo shirt with barbecue sauce on it, would be on his third or fourth gin and tonic. He would listen to my story and nod in sympathy. Sure, brah, you can borrow my car. We’ll sort it out.
But I found no houses with lights on. I saw no people through any of the windows.
It’s a ghost division.
I decided to test the truth of that.
The house I chose was another stucco sprawl, its peach walls light in the night, with wooden beams extending from the façade like rounded cigar ends. It reminded me of the Alamo. I rang the doorbell, which gonged solemnly behind the thick wooden door. No lights were on and I knew no one would answer, but I used the heavy iron knocker anyway. The knocks echoed hollowly, and another five minutes passed. Once I was certain no one was watching me, I stepped to the left, and jabbed my right heel at the base of the foyer window. It vibrated. My second kick sent one thousand cracks through the pane. The third turned the webbed mass into a rain that seemed very loud in the night. I braced myself for the howl of an alarm.
No alarm sounded.
I turned sideways and slid through the narrow window frame, my feet crunching on pebbled safety glass and tile. Inside, I searched for a blinking alarm panel, but saw only dim walls and a wider opening into the sunken great room. I reached for a light switch on instinct, thought better of it, and waded deeper into the house with my hands in front of me.
‘Hello?’ I said, loudly. ‘If anyone is home, I’m sorry. I’ve had an emergency and I need to use the phone. Please don’t shoot. I just need to call an ambulance.’
I waited a while, but no lights came on and no one answered me. My vision became attuned to the darkness and I realized there was not a single stick of furniture in the great room. The air carried new paint and carpet chemical smells. The house might never have been inhabited. I stepped down into the great room and looked up at the high-vaulted ceiling and the railing of the exposed second-floor hallway. No one watched over me. I looped around to the breakfast area and into the kitchen. I found a panel of four switches and flipped the first one up. A small recessed light came on, illuminating a desk area near a phone jack, but no phone. It was a bill-paying area just off the kitchen and the light was minimal. I did not think it would attract attention, and I doubted there were any neighbors on this street. The light boosted my confidence.
The refrigerator was empty, the yellow and black Energy Star tag still dangling over the door. The freezer’s ice maker had not even produced its first cube. The unit was still warm, not even plugged in.
The house had a first-floor master suite. I arrived at it through a long, carpeted hallway, passing a laundry room and a bathroom on the right and a small den on the left, none of which had any furniture in them either. I threw the master bedroom light on and was confronted with a king-sized bed. My eyes registered sheets and pillows and a blanket with a south-western motif and my skin prickled as I jerked back, expecting someone to sit up and start screaming at me. But the bed was empty, the creased pillows and sheets square, unused.
Absurdly I lowered my voice and said, ‘Hello?’
No, if someone was home, you would have been beaten with a baseball bat by now. A realtor staged it for showing, that’s all. They just never got around to staging the rest of the house.
I went into the master bathroom and turned another light on. A large oval tub with dust and dead moths in it abutted a hexagonal shower stall with streaks of drywall dust on the glass panels. The low, almond-colored vanity featured his and her sinks. After making sure the water wasn’t brown, I used one to splash cold water on my face and used my shirt to blot my face and hands dry. I turned off the bathroom light, but the darkness was too severe. I found the toilet alcove and flipped the switch. It cast just enough light on the end of the bedroom to put me at ease.
The walk-in closet was large and empty.
I stared at the bed. After a time, my legs felt rubbery and I sat on the edge of mattress, so firm it might have been designed to discourage actual sleeping. But it was softer than a sidewalk and cleaner than a lawn. There were no memories here. No one had lived in this house. No one cared about this house. Nothing could hurt me here. I would be safe for the night, for a few hours, just until the sun came up. I folded the sheets back and kicked off my shoes. I leaned over until my head touched the cool pillowcase. I pulled the covers up to my shoulder and listened to the house around me. It did not creak or shift. There was only silence and solitude. I bet myself that I could scream at full volume without drawing a response, and the thought was so freeing I almost did. Tomorrow I would steal her car and go home. Tomorrow . . .
I fell into a pleasant state of sleep without dreams.
Hours later, but still hours before dawn, I was awakened by the distant but distinct sound of careful footsteps crunching on pebbled glass.
SHE
The happiest summer of James’s life took place at the house on Gaynor Lake. The small body of water was hardly a mile across, in a private development along the Front Range of Colorado. There were fewer than fifty homes lining the shore, and only two on the western side, where the Hastings and Tanner families vacationed. James and Stacey learned to water ski there, behind a low, sparkling red and silver boat with a Corvette engine. They swam all day, throwing the football over the dock and diving to look at each other in golden bands of sunlight above the darker plane below their feet. They got sunburned and his hair turned almost as light as hers. That August seemed to broaden his shoulders, put calluses on his hands and thicken his forearms. He became more than a boy and less than a man.
They played poker for bottles of her dad’s Michelob, which she filched from the garage and stashed in her sun tote. She used SPF 4 and let the sand dry on her back. They rode the little Puch moped down the dirt county roads to the general store where you could still buy chocolate Cokes and stole a cigarette lighter to share their first joint. They smoked it on the other side of the lake, cavorted in the water for an hour and then rode home. To this day he remembers vividly, totally and painfully Stacey’s wet green swimsuit sticking to the seat as she leaned against him, holding him as the cloud of dust trailed behind them, and the heart-shaped impression of moisture it left on the black leather when they got off.
He took Stacey out to where herons unfolded from the marshy north bank, taking flight over the bow while he paddled the canoe into the cat tails. There were garter snakes and leopard frogs, crawdads and skimmers, and, though he fished to impress her, he never caught so much as a sunfish.
There was a wooden dock and a boathouse at the end of the long concrete ramp, a great lawn with a sand volleyball court and a terrace with the grill and umbrella table, all leading up to the house. With the blinds raised over the wide sliding glass doors and the A-frame windows above, the den bedroom was the perfect place to lie back and watch strange things come over the mountains. Thunderheads that towered miles above like stacks of white balloons and gray-bearded titans. Branches of lightning that forked out in seven directions and doubled themselves on the black water mirror of the lake. Rolling gusts of eighty-mile-per-hour wind white-capping the usually placid surface of Gaynor before fat raindrops cupped it in a million places. Once, at the end of June, just after they arrived, baseball-sized hail splashed shingles from the roof like poker chips, pounding them off in a splintery rain.
Th
ey talked about how different time was here than in Tulsa, how strange that they had not been able to come together until their parents, old friends from church functions, lured them away from home. James remembered the time they had a playground crush-argument in sixth grade, and later that night ran into each other with their parents at Burger Chef & Jeff, stealing haughty glances and bonding subliminally over their fried chicken baskets. Stacey laughed about the time when fifteen kids from school went to see Footloose and how she called him Ren for weeks after, teasing him because he wore skinny ties and tried to make his hair like Kevin Bacon’s. How even though she had other boyfriends and he had other girlfriends in high school, he was the one she called that time she ran out of gas. He drove out to the south side of town with a can to get her mom’s Vega rolling again and followed her all the way home.
They had their first kiss on the dock, standing under the stars while their parents stayed up late playing spades and drinking gin around the dining-room table, listening to Neil Diamond. Under the pool table in the basement, she let him roll the straps of her one-piece down her shoulders and the taste of the lake was fresh on her skin. He kissed the triangles of white inside the darker lines of her breasts until the wide buds became firm in his mouth, making her laugh, her telling him they weren’t popsicles. How tentative as he crossed the border of stubble along the inside of her thighs, testing the thick folds and her wetness for the first time. How clumsy her hand, a girl uncertain and a little bored, pulling him against her thigh, against her hip bone, his first orgasm with a girl. How strange and natural their fluid scents were, like the lake, as if it had been soaking into them for weeks.
Sneaking upstairs after, eating a late dinner of cold barbecue ribs and corn standing in the kitchen, amazed at their own daring, and finally off to their separate bedrooms, neither sleeping, the night sweaty and bug alive, they can almost read each other’s minds in this moment, both knowing each is dying for tomorrow to arrive so they can begin again.
Tulsa was so hot in the summer, being in Colorado was perfect, and they always said one day they would come back. It was an annual tradition.
‘When we’re all grown up and married, think we can come back and live here and have babies?’ Stacey asked him on the last night. They were swimming again, the water black around their gooseflesh skin. ‘I want to live here when we’re rich enough to own a lake house.’
And James said, ‘I guess that would be cool.’
Stacey laughed.
It was the place they fell in love, the first time either fell in love. It connected their plain childhood to their unlikely future, and for that its power would hold sway over the rest of their lives. The parents never had a clue. They were very good at hiding everything, and, though it was only a month and went so fast, it lasted forever.
27
At first I did not know where I was. I raised my ear from the pillow and looked down to the foot of the bed where the faint band of light cut across the bathroom and I thought I was home, in the master bedroom in West Adams, looking out at my own hallway. The grinding sound was coming from the other side of the house. The space I inhabited felt disorganized, and the succession of recent events toppled forward like dominoes and I remembered I was in a stranger’s house, the empty house in Sheltering Palms. I had broken a window . . .
The crunching noises continued a few seconds more and then the house fell silent. I thought of Annette, the alabaster form she had become. It did not seem likely - and I did not want to believe - she had followed me here. Whatever was wrong with her, she was not coherent enough to follow me. But no one else knew we had returned to Sheltering Palms. We had not spoken to anyone. Which meant that whatever had made the noises on the broken glass was either a curious neighbor who had seen a light on, the owner or owners who had come home, or, a preferable alternative, the thing in the entryway was not a person at all, but an animal. A deer or coyote, perhaps. But animals come searching for food. There wasn’t any food in the house. If not lured by the scent of something edible, what other reason would an animal have for stepping over a ledge and sliding through a narrow window frame? None.
There were only two reasonable responses. I could get up, walk down the hall and confront them. Explain my situation, apologize, hope for the best. Or I could try to escape through one of the three windows to the right of the bed. I had not paid much attention to them before lying down. They were just three tall black rectangles behind the layers of drapes, the first a heavier fabric of light green or blue, and the filmy gauze layer against the windows. I could not make out any latches or cranking handles that would open them, but there had to be a way to do so. If someone came for me I could push the drapes aside, rip out a screen and leap into the night.
I rolled over and rested my head on the pillow again. I would wait them out. I had not heard another sound for at least two minutes, and I was banking on the possibility that the trespasser was another wanderer, like me. He might snoop around, realize there were no valuables, and decide to move on to the next vacant home. I positioned myself so that I was facing the doorway, which I had left open. The hallway beyond was dark, and the angle was wrong. I could see only a few feet into the hall, and only the left-side wall. If the trespasser chose to come into the bedroom, I would not see him coming; he would just appear in the doorway. My only other avenue of escape was not an escape at all, merely a hiding place. The walk-in closet to my left had a door, but I doubted it locked from the inside.
The next few minutes seemed very long. Five minutes might have passed, or half an hour. I imagined that I heard footsteps going up the stairs and along the hallways overhead, but the harder I concentrated the more ambiguous the sounds became. More silence passed, and my ears began to ring. I flexed my jaw until the ringing went away. At some point I caught snatches of conversation, faint but rhythmic, convincing me there were two or more of them. The voice or voices were low, not especially urgent. The words were indecipherable, mumbling. I pictured two uniformed policemen standing at the end of the hall, whispering into their shoulder mics and conferring with each other. They were getting ready to move on me. Then those voices stopped and the air grew heavy, closing around me in a pocket, until I could hear nothing but my own breathing. I felt as if I were in a bubble, my senses dimming. I kept blinking and popping my ears.
Something swabbed the floor. Or a wall. It was the sound of clean rubber, a new windshield wiper sweeping over moist glass. Someone laughed. It was disturbing in its casual release, the sound of a tired father having one last chuckle at a sitcom rerun before nodding off. After the tapering sigh of a laugh, someone said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I know’, and the volume of this voice was so low it might as well have been a radio in a car parked a block away.
You’re hearing things.
Focus. For the love of God, what is going on here?
‘Some kids,’ I mumbled to myself. ‘Just a bunch of kids out screwing around.’
Immediately I regretted speaking. As soon as I finished the half-whispered sentence, something banged loudly and vibrated at the end of the hall. It sounded like someone dropping a wooden dowel rod on the tile floor - ah ha, he’s down there, now put that thing down and let’s go.
This commotion finally snapped me out of my passive resolve to wait them out and I bolted upright. I shuffled my feet under me and backed against the wall. There was no headboard. I willed my legs to launch me from the bed, into the hall, the closet, out the window - anywhere - but they refused. I was trapped now, waiting for the inevitable footsteps and explosion of anger in the room. Any second now the lights would flash on and I would be caught. I stared at the doorway, and waited.
And waited.
The footsteps did not come. The hallway was carpeted. Were they creeping toward me in their stocking feet? What did they want? If I had angered them by coming into this house, why were they drawing it out? Why not just turn on all the lights and shout, demand I reveal myself, attack?
An interminable minute
passed, then another. I pressed myself against the wall and forced myself to breathe through my mouth, into my cupped right hand. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness and I could see as well as I was ever going to see in here, at least until the sun began to rise. What time was it? How long had I been asleep? I was certain I had been out for hours, and that dawn must be coming soon. The promise I made to myself to get up and leave was repeated over and over, but, the longer I waited, the more times I told myself in a minute, the harder it was to move my legs. They began to cramp. A brave version of me kept daring the cowardly other, and the other shriveled at the challenge. My left leg was falling asleep. My back was stiffening. I knew someone was here. I had not imagined the grinding glass sounds in the foyer. I wanted to scream.
I believe I remained locked in this position for two hours or more. It seemed much, much longer than that by the time I finally realized I was spooking myself and no one was in the house. Or that if they had been, they were long gone now. The still silence had returned, returned and expanded in a torturous test of my ability to remain immobile, and nothing had changed. I almost burst into tears, but was afraid to show any emotion. I was tired, so exhausted I began to lose my fear of being found out. Nothing made sense. There was simply no logic that explained why anyone - the house’s owner, a cop, teenaged vandals, or even Annette - would wait so long to make their presence known.
The Haunting of James Hastings Page 20
