Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

“He didn’t show up, though, right?”

  “No. He was already dead by then. But our mother didn’t write back, either. I waited a few months, and then wrote another letter, and then another…five in all. The last one, I didn’t even bother with the PO box—I included our home address and phone number in Autumn Creek.” He shook his head. “Stupid…but still she never got in touch.

  “In January of 1995, though, right after Dr. Grey went into the hospital, I got a call from a Police Chief Bradley in Seven Lakes. I remembered him from when we were little, when he was still just Officer Bradley—he’d been a friend of our father, our real father, and he would come by the house once in a while to see how our mother was doing.”

  “Did you ever tell him about the stepfather?”

  “I tried to,” my father said. “Once. But I was so scared I botched it—he had no clue what I was talking about—and then afterwards, the stepfather just knew somehow, knew that I’d been bad…and from then on, believe me, I knew better than to even think about telling.

  “Anyway, it was Chief Bradley who called to tell me about our mother’s death. He said he regretted not getting in touch sooner—they’d already had the funeral—but he’d only just found our last letter to her.”

  “She did receive it, then,” I said. “And she kept it.”

  “I think she just forgot to throw it away,” my father replied. “It came out during the conversation that the stepfather was dead, too, for going on four years. Four years—that just killed my heart. I mean I’m sorry, he had power, I know he did, but four years was more than enough time for her to, to get past that.

  “And then the final straw: Chief Bradley said that the other reason he was calling, besides just to let us know—in her will, our mother had left everything to her sister, only it turned out she was dead too, and had no heirs. So Chief Bradley thought that it was only right that we should get the property, and the house. ‘I’m sure that’s what your mother would have wanted,’ he said.

  “But it wasn’t true.” My father looked at me. “It wasn’t true, and I couldn’t pretend any longer. I don’t know what we did wrong, what we lacked, but she didn’t love us. She didn’t love us.

  “And that is why I decided to call you out,” he concluded. “What happened to Dr. Grey, that was hard, but I could have coped with it. But our mother…finding out that our mother…” His eyes brimmed with tears again.

  “How did the stepfather die?” I asked next.

  “He had an accident of some kind.”

  “An accident.”

  “That’s what Chief Bradley told me. He wasn’t more specific, and I didn’t care enough to ask questions.”

  “Well that,” I said, “that isn’t the response I was hoping for.”

  “I really doubt we could have had anything to do with it, Andrew,” my father said.

  “Just because you don’t think you could have killed him—”

  “Not just me. I don’t think any of us who knew him could have done it. Including Gideon. Besides, Gideon wasn’t desperate for our mother’s love. The only love Gideon ever needed was Gideon’s.”

  “There are other reasons for killing someone.”

  “Like revenge?” My father shook his head. “Gideon has the same problem hating people as he does loving them—in order to feel that strongly about someone you first have to think of them, and Gideon would rather think of himself.”

  “He seems to do a pretty good job of hating you.”

  “Only because he can’t ignore me. If we weren’t trapped in the same head together…”

  “What about money?” I said. “Xavier told Penny he was going to Michigan to collect an inheritance.”

  “Well,” my father admitted, “it’s true that Gideon wanted me to take the house in Seven Lakes. That was the catalyst for our last fight.” He looked at the scar on his palm. “I’d thought I had Gideon settled down, ready to accept his place in the geography, but then we got that phone call. When Gideon found out I’d told Chief Bradley I didn’t want our mother’s property, he was furious. He said that the property was rightfully his, and I had no business refusing it.”

  “And that’s when he tried to take over?” My father nodded. “And what about before then?” I asked. “Is it possible that sometime earlier on, while the stepfather was still alive, that Gideon might have gone to him and tried to demand, I don’t know, some kind of advance on his inheritance?”

  “…and then killed him when he said no?” My father was skeptical. “That’s hard to imagine. I told you—”

  “Maybe he didn’t do it personally. Maybe he called out somebody else, somebody new, to do it for him. That could be what Xavier was for.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about Xavier, and I’m embarrassed that I don’t, but—”

  “Do you know where we were, the day the stepfather had his accident? I mean, is it even possible that we were in Seven Lakes that day?”

  “I don’t even know the exact date he died. I never asked.”

  “Father!”

  “I didn’t care about that, Andrew! I was glad to hear he was gone, but the questions I had for Chief Bradley were all about our mother.”

  “Do you know approximately when—”

  “Late spring of 1991. Which was a pretty chaotic period for us. That was when I had my big blowup with Dr. Kroft.”

  “Dr. Kroft…so there’s a chance we were locked up in Ann Arbor when the stepfather had his accident.”

  He nodded. “It depends on the date. For most of April that year things were pretty stable; I lost some time, a couple hours here and there, but no really big chunks. Then on April…29th, I think…I had a session with Dr. Kroft where we tried a forced fusion, and the next five days are all lost time, although the last three of those days we were in lockdown in the Psychiatric Center. They let us out on May 6th, and then the next day I went back to the Center for what turned out to be my last session with Dr. Kroft. That was the session where I lost my temper—and then for the next two weeks, more or less, we were back in lockdown.”

  “More or less?”

  “The last two weeks of May are a complete blank,” he told me. “When I blacked out on the 18th—or maybe it was the 19th—I was still on the ward. When I woke up on June 2nd I was on a Greyhound bus, on my way to Seattle.”

  This was a version of events I hadn’t heard before. “You woke up on a bus? But I thought…you always told me you decided to leave Michigan.”

  “Well I did,” my father said. “I mean I could have gotten off the bus in Chicago and turned back. But when I checked my wallet, I found a cashier’s check for what looked like my entire savings, and a number to call to have my possessions forwarded…so I had a pretty good idea that if I went back to Ann Arbor, I wouldn’t still have an apartment waiting for me, or a bank account—and I was sure I didn’t have a job anymore. And besides, there just didn’t seem to be any reason to go back. I was done with Dr. Kroft, done with that whole chapter of my life; it was time to try something new. So I decided—I decided—to stay on the bus and keep going.”

  “But…” I stopped myself. This was definitely a topic to be explored in more detail later, but for now it was a side issue. “So two whole weeks are missing. May 18th or 19th through June 2nd.”

  “Right.”

  “Which is not good.”

  “Well, that depends on what day the stepfather died…You could look it up on his tombstone, I suppose. The cemetery’s just outside Muskegon, so it’s practically on the way.”

  “You know where the stepfather is buried?”

  “I know where our mother is buried. They had adjacent plots.” He gazed out at the mist on the lake. “If you do stop there…”

  “You really want to say good-bye to her?”

  “She was our mother,” he said.

  We talked a while longer, then sat, not talking, longer still. Eventually my father stood up and said he was going for a walk in the forest. I offered hi
m back the funeral program, but he didn’t want it. “Keep it yourself,” he said, “or throw it in the lake.”

  “Keep it where? I can’t just leave it lying out, and I’d rather not bury it…”

  “If you really want to hang on to it,” my father said wearily, “you can put it up in my room.”

  He turned away and disappeared; I went into the house. As I climbed the steps to the second floor I was struck by how quiet it was. Usually there are at least four or five souls in the common room, or up in the gallery. Today there were none. It felt as if the house were empty, though I doubted everyone could be outside; probably a lot of them were just hiding in their rooms.

  A soul’s own room is an intensely private space—as private, in its way, as a singular person’s whole mind—and ordinarily permission to go inside, especially unaccompanied, is a sign of great trust. In this case, however, I think my father was just too tired to worry about me poking around. Not that there was much for me to poke around in. My father’s room is the definition of Spartan: four walls and a bed pretty much describes it.

  It was this very simplicity that inadvertently led to me being nosy. I had to find a place to put the funeral program. It was obvious that my father didn’t want to have to look at it, so just dropping it on the floor or on top of the bed was out. If he’d had shelves or trunks or a filing cabinet I could have stuck the pamphlet in there, but he didn’t, so that left only one place: under the bed. When I reached beneath the box spring, though, there was already something else down there. I grabbed onto it, meaning only to shift it aside a little—I swear—but ended up pulling it out to look at it.

  The something was a painting. Oil on canvas, like the kind Aunt Sam did, but in a very different style than hers. The painting showed a woman hugging a little girl. There was no background, no sense of location; just the two figures. The girl’s face was hidden, pressed to the woman’s breast, but the woman’s face—the most detailed part of the portrait—was aglow with love, and even if I hadn’t recognized her from the photograph in my wallet, her identity wouldn’t have been hard to guess.

  I slid the painting back beneath the bed, and the pamphlet along with it. Resisting the temptation to hunt around under there some more, I got up to go…and that’s when I saw the Witness standing out on the gallery, staring in at me. She was one of the older Witnesses, a girl of eleven or twelve.

  “What do you want?” I asked her brusquely, embarrassed to be caught snooping.

  She didn’t answer, only turned and walked out of my field of view. I stepped to the doorway, but by the time I got there she was all the way across the gallery. She disappeared into the nursery.

  I didn’t try to follow her. Instead, I went downstairs and gave the mystery door another try. It still wouldn’t open. On a whim I tried knocking; that didn’t work either, and the echo of my knocks in the empty common room spooked me so much that I quickly stopped. Finally—feeling the draft again—I got down on my hands and knees and listened at the crack under the door. I heard a faint irregular sigh that might have been muffled snoring.

  I stood up, and felt eyes on me again: the Witness was back, watching me from the gallery. This time, I didn’t ask what she wanted; I left the house. “Sam!” I called, hurrying across the geography to the column of light. “Time’s up, Sam.”

  We were in Indiana already; Aunt Sam and Maledicta had made good time. They’d been good, too, except for a twenty-dollar dessert orgy that I caught the tail end of. I didn’t make a big fuss about that; it was midafternoon, and I was anxious to get to Horace Rollins’s grave before dark, to see if he’d been cooperative enough to die in April, early May, or June.

  No such luck. The death date on the gravestone was May 24th, which put it right in the middle of the two-week blackout period. So we weren’t in the clear.

  It was going on six o’clock by the time we left the cemetery. We could still have made it to Seven Lakes before nightfall, but while I didn’t want to show fear or hesitation, I also didn’t want to push it; next morning, I decided, would be soon enough.

  We went back to Muskegon and found a motel. To avoid a repeat of the previous night’s events, I asked for two widely separated rooms. But when we had our respective keys and it was time to part company, Penny was suddenly reluctant. “Wait,” she said.

  “What?” I replied, instantly on guard.

  “It’s still me,” she promised. “Not…not Loins. But I don’t want to become Loins tonight, or anybody else either, so do you think you could just sit with me until I start to fall asleep?”

  “Ah…Penny…”

  “Please? I know it’s awkward, after…but I don’t want to wake up in some stranger’s room tomorrow morning. Or with another hangover.”

  “You know if you do switch, I might not be able to do anything about it.”

  “I know. But…please?”

  We went to her room. Penny lay down on the bed, and I sat in a chair.

  “How far is it to Seven Lakes from here?” Penny asked. “I know we’re close—”

  “Very close. Less than an hour away.”

  “What will you do when we get there?”

  “Go up to the house first, I guess, and see if…if there’s anything to see. Then maybe the town library.” She flashed me a quizzical look. “Old newspapers,” I said.

  “Oh right.”

  “Hopefully there’ll be a story about his…how he died. With enough details so that I don’t have to bother the police about it. The police, I guess they’d be our third stop. There’s a Police Chief Bradley who might be able to help.”

  “You’re brave,” Penny said.

  “I don’t feel brave. It’s just my job.”

  “You know,” she said, “this is as close as I’ve been to my hometown since my mother died.”

  “That’s right,” I said, “Ohio. Would you want to go there, after—”

  “No!” Penny said firmly. “There’s nothing in Willow Grove I need to check on. Ever.”

  “Nothing about your father, even?”

  “I know what I need to know about him.” A small smile attached itself to her face. “My grandmother told me lots of stories.”

  “That must have been nice,” I said. “To have at least one good parent. Even if he died.”

  “What about your biological father?” Penny asked. “Was he a bad person?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know much about him. I know he served in the army, and that he drowned a few months before Andy Gage was born, but as for what kind of person he was—if we have any stories about that, I haven’t heard them.”

  “Well maybe you’ll hear some tomorrow. Maybe we’ll meet someone in town who knew him.”

  “I don’t know, Penny. I’d rather not talk to anyone in Seven Lakes if I can help it. I’d like to just go in, find out what I need to about the stepfather, and then go home.”

  Which reminded me: I picked up the phone and tried to call Mrs. Winslow again. “Still no answer?” Penny said, after I’d let it ring two dozen times.

  “No.” I hung up. “I don’t understand. Where could she be?”

  “Remember it’s earlier there. She could still be out…well…”

  “Out looking for me,” I finished for her. I grabbed the phone again and dialed Dr. Eddington’s number. His answering machine picked up, and I left another message, talking until the machine cut me off.

  I replaced the receiver in its cradle and started to sit down on the bed. “Sorry,” I said, catching myself. “I guess I should go to my room now.”

  “You don’t have to,” said Penny, looking uncomfortable. “I mean…if you want to stay, I won’t—”

  It was probably a bad idea, and if I’d seen even a trace of a smile on her face I’d have left immediately. But this wasn’t Loins being coy; it was Penny, still frightened of what she might do if she were left alone. And when I thought about being alone myself, with all the things I had to worry or feel guilty about…

 
I lay down carefully, staying as close to the edge of the bed as I could without falling off; Penny likewise scootched as far over on her side as possible. We remained like that, talking quietly, until at some point, drowsing, I reached out an arm, and Penny did too, and we clasped hands long-distance, and in that way fell asleep.

  In the morning I slipped out quietly while Penny was still snoring and went to my own room to shower. As I stepped into the shower stall, Adam surprised me by appearing on the rebuilt pulpit and asking for his customary two minutes. “What’s the matter?” he said. “It’s only been a few days. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten what it’s like to hear voices.”

  “I was getting used to the peace and quiet, now that you mention it,” I said. Then: “I’m not sure you deserve any time out, after what you pulled in South Dakota.”

  “All I did in South Dakota was turn on the TV—it was Sam who went to the bar. And even so, you gave her half a day in the body yesterday…but I’m not going to harp on that.”

  I let him have his two minutes, which were actually more like ten. When he finished, I tried to see if any of the others wanted their usual morning time, but Aunt Sam and Jake wouldn’t even answer my call. “They’re hiding in their rooms,” Adam informed me. “A lot of the other souls, too. They’re scared; they know where we’re going today.”

  Seferis wasn’t scared, though. When we got out of the shower, he ran through a modified workout, mindful of the body’s still-sore hands and arm; and after he finished, I got back in the shower and rinsed off a second time. By the time all that was done, Penny was awake. She knocked on the motel-room door just as I finished dressing.

  We ate a quick breakfast and then set out. The drive was no more than forty miles, but it seemed to take forever; I passed the time by digging my fingers into the seat upholstery. “We could still turn around,” Penny said, when she saw how white my knuckles were.

  “No.” I shook my head. “I have to do this.”

  Seven Lakes sits right on the edge of the Manistee National Forest. The lakes that it is named for are more like big ponds, and according to my father their exact number varies from year to year, depending on the amount of rainfall. We saw the first one just moments later: a kidney bean–shaped body of water that lapped up against a bend in the road. It hardly seemed large enough to support more than a token fish or two, but there was a man in hip-waders standing out in the middle of it just the same, making a lazy cast with a fishing pole. The man looked around as we drove by, but between the big straw hat he had jammed down on his head and the glare of the morning sun off the water’s surface, I couldn’t see his face.