No Doors, No Windows

by Joe Schreiber

  “No,” he said, horrified. “I—”

  “What a wonderful idea.” Marquette held up her arm, pulling back her sleeve for him to see skin. “I’ve got goose bumps,” she said. “I think that’s a marvelous thing to do. You can certainly put me down for a copy.” She looked at Sonia, beaming. “And you’re so right, this house would be the perfect place for a writer … secluded, quiet, with plenty of space to spread out. I believe it’s available for rent, but let me call and confirm that.”

  THEY FOLLOWED HER OUT TO THE PORCH, neither one of them speaking until Marquette climbed back into her car and shut the door. Then Scott turned and looked at her. “The next Nicholas Sparks?” he asked. “What the hell was that about?”

  Sonia shrugged. “You’re a writer, right? Why not give it a shot?”

  “I told you, I write greeting cards.”

  “And fiction, you said.”

  “Some.” The lie, already coming back to haunt him, and he thought of something he’d once heard his father say: The more you lie, the more you have to remember. “Not novels, though.”

  “Well, maybe it’s time to branch out and try something a little different. Don’t you think you’re up to it?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “What happened to being so intrigued with this house?” She was driving them up the bumpy road, keeping her eyes straight ahead, but Scott felt as if she were staring at him, waiting for an answer. “All of a sudden you can’t wait to run away again?”

  “I’m not running away from anything. My life is in Seattle, my job—I can’t just drop all that and move back to town.”

  “How long would it take you to finish it, a month or two? You’re telling me that your employer wouldn’t give you a leave of absence so you could help get your father’s affairs in order? I thought you were the big swinging dick back at the greeting card factory.”

  Scott looked at her. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m helping you gain closure.”

  “What, you’re a shrink now?”

  “You could use one.”

  “I’ve got that covered.” It was silent in the car as they reached the intersection where the dirt road merged onto the two-lane highway that would take them back toward town. Sonia stopped the car and looked at him thoughtfully across a distance that seemed to encompass all the years they had spent apart.

  “Let me ask you this,” she said. “Do you think you could finish the book? Do you have any idea how you would end it?”

  Scott opened his mouth to tell her no, it wasn’t his story to tell. But what he said instead was, “I don’t know. Maybe I might have a few ideas.”

  “So give it a week. See what happens. If nothing comes of it, hey, it’s an extra week you got to spend with your nephew.”

  He wanted to look at her and tell her to take him to the airport. Instead, he found himself looking back over his seat and through the trees, to the house.

  THE NEXT DAY, SCOTT WROTE A CHECK for six hundred dollars plus a security deposit and signed a one-month rental agreement for Round House. Owen picked him up at Marquette Luther’s office and drove him down to a Hertz in Manchester to rent a car for the time he’d be staying here in town. When Scott had called Seattle to ask for extra time off, the reaction from the home office had been what he’d expected: Of course, Scott, take all the time you need. Please don’t hesitate to let us know if there’s anything we can do for you. His boss had gone on to share a story about losing his own father to a massive coronary, and Scott had felt obliged to listen until the man, realizing what he was doing, had signed off with a beefy “Be well.”

  If Owen was surprised by Scott’s decision to stay in town—or indeed felt anything particular at all about it—he kept his feelings to himself. The drive down to the car rental place was quiet except for the electronic chirps and blips from Henry’s handheld video game. It looked expensive, and Scott wondered where it had come from. Owen, who wore a flannel shirt with a T-shirt underneath reading I’m not a gynecologist but I’ll take a look, smoked cigarettes and blew the smoke out the window. His ashtray was already a carcinogenic pincushion bristling with yellow-stained filters.

  “You ought to come out to the house yourself,” Scott said.

  Owen grunted.

  “Dad never said anything to you about it, did he?”

  “About what? Some house in the woods?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dad and I didn’t really talk.”

  “So, then, he never mentioned anything about a house?”

  “What?”

  “Dad never told you about—”

  “Jesus, man, no, okay? Fuck.” Owen shook his head, inexplicably furious. Scott had told him all about the house and how it matched the one that their father described in The Black Wing, and Owen seemed to have nothing to say about that either. The miles spun out indefinitely. The radio was broken; it only got static and talk radio. At last they came to the Hertz near the airport, and when Owen pulled up in front of the office, Henry put down the video game in alarm, as if he’d forgotten that Scott would be following them back to Milburn. Owen was scowling at him as well in what looked like expectation and discomfort, shielding his eyes from the midafternoon sun.

  “You got money for gas?”

  “Sure.” Scott took out his wallet and withdrew four twenties, handing them to Owen. “That okay?”

  His brother took the bills and folded them between dirty fingers. For the first time, Scott noticed how badly the yellowing nails were gnawed down. “I was wondering if you could maybe float me. You know, since you’ll be around for a while. Until work picks up.”

  “How much do you need?”

  “A few hundred, just for groceries and shit.”

  “I’ll hit the ATM on the way home.”

  Owen nodded as if he’d expected nothing less. He looked back at Henry, still gripping his video game. “Put that goddamn thing away already. Giving me a freakin’ headache.” Then he swung the pickup around, tires squealing, and drove out of the lot, leaving an exhaust cloud in his wake.

  Scott was watching him go, thinking it wasn’t safe for Owen to be driving like that with his son in the truck, when he felt a sudden electric shock go through his head. It was so surprising that, for an instant, he thought he’d somehow bumped his head into a live wire, even though there was nothing behind him. He looked around anyway, rubbing the back of his skull, too stunned to think. Within seconds the spasm was gone. He stood outside the car rental office for another moment before going inside.

  ROUND HOUSE WAS COLD.

  On his first night, Scott put two sweaters on and wandered the first floor, stomping his feet and hugging himself while he explored the various doorways and slanting side halls, searching for the source of cold air. He almost expected to find a window wide open or a hole in the wall. Some of the doors were locked, but the only key he had was for the front door. Walking from the kitchen through an oval antechamber into the extremely old sitting room with a hearth and mantel, he found a window. It didn’t open to the outside but onto another room, perhaps ten by twelve, with two rocking chairs, shelves, and a wooden cradle in the rounded corner. The air here felt particularly still, as if it hadn’t moved in decades, and was as glacial as a deep freeze. Scott looked at the cradle, too small for anything but a child’s doll. Who had lived here, and when?

  Did Dad come out here and write? he wondered, and then: Did Mom know?

  He followed the flight of stairs to the second floor. Here was the sinuous hallway that ran the entire length of the house, with closed doors that had stared blankly at one another like frozen corpses for the last hundred and forty years.

  Frozen corpses? Where did that come from? The writing room that Sonia had shown him stood at one end of the corridor, the door open just as he’d left it. They hadn’t needed a key to get inside the house, but many of the upstairs doors were locked.

  SCOTT WENT BACK DOWN TO THE KITCHEN. He had picked up a few
supplies—deli meat, peanut butter, multigrain bread, instant coffee, and a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin. He busied himself with putting away the rest of the food, found a dusty glass in the cupboard and rinsed it out, added ice and some gin and an olive. He’d never been much of a drinker—he’d bought the gin only because he thought Sonia might come by for a nightcap—and it felt particularly strange to be sitting here under the cold kitchen lights, shivering like an arctic explorer, drinking alone. Regardless, he took a sip, gasped, shuddered, and took a bigger gulp, letting it warm him slowly from the inside.

  At length, he returned to the dining room.

  For some reason, he’d set up camp here rather than in one of the upstairs rooms. Moving his belongings upstairs felt too permanent, and he liked the feeling that he was here only temporarily, until he came to his senses and realized the absurdity of this whole enterprise. So this was where he had put his suitcase and his laptop bag, along with an inflatable air mattress borrowed from Owen, a sleeping bag, and a pillow. He opened the suitcase and took out the stack of pages that comprised his father’s manuscript. Lacking a table or desk, he took the pages and his laptop to the settee and sat down, immediately uncomfortable. He was going to have to get some real furniture in here, even if he had to rent it. Temporary or not, four weeks was more than enough time to earn yourself a sore ass.

  He turned to the last page of the manuscript. The text went all the way to the bottom of the page, but it ended with a paragraph break. The last thing that his father had typed was:

  Faircloth heard the door swing open and stopped his ministrations with the pistol to look up. What he saw standing in the entryway made him suck in his breath and then fall absolutely still.

  The thing in the doorway grinned back at him. At once, with the clarity of absolute terror, he understood everything that had happened up till now–and he grasped what had occurred here, in this place, and what it meant for him, forever after.

  Okay, Scott thought, but what?

  Knowing he was only going to make himself miserable, he turned on the laptop, already feeling awkward about the writing process. Greeting card copy was so short, usually fifty words or fewer, that he always wrote it by hand, often on Post-it notes stuck on corkboards he kept hanging around the office. One of the things he always liked about it was that with the right background music and atmosphere, he could usually bang out the whole thing in one night—from inspiration to execution. Sometimes there was even an element of self-hypnosis to it. If he had to write a Christmas card in July, he’d turn the air-conditioning down to sixty, put on a sweater, and mull some cider. No need for that now. He slugged gin and shivered.

  Reading the last paragraph of his father’s story over again, he opened a new document and looked at the blank screen, the blinking cursor.

  He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what the book cover might look like. The Black Wing, by Frank Mast and Scott Mast. And a picture of a dark, spooky, slightly curved hallway leading into darkness. Or maybe the oak door in the corner of the dining room, halfway open.

  He got up and walked over to the door. Was his story somewhere behind it, waiting inside? He touched the cold doorknob, so cold it could’ve been hot, turned it, and opened the door, looking at the empty closet. Why, of all the doors and hallways in the house, had his father chosen this particular one to imagine the hidden wing behind? Scott looked at the scratch marks inside the door and touched them, running his fingers into the random, reckless grooves.

  It was late. He blew into the air mattress until he was light-headed, but it still wasn’t firm. There was a leak somewhere. He unrolled his sleeping bag and lay down on it anyway, suddenly too tired even to brush his teeth, and switched off the flashlight. His first breath in the dark tasted of metal shavings, a slightly toxic flavor. In the silence there was the faint hiss of the mattress softening beneath him. The sea was lapping up, rising to engulf him, and he sank down beneath the waves.

  SCOTT AWOKE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT with a start, his heart pounding. It was as if there had been a loud noise somewhere in the house, a thump or a crash that had startled him from his slumber, that had ended just as he’d come awake. It was completely dark. Why hadn’t he left a light on?

  I did. I know I did.

  He sat up in the sleeping bag on top of the completely deflated mattress and waited, counting the seconds, but it was resolutely silent. The house was freezing, and he had to pee. The feeling of urgency versus the cold air reminded him of going camping as a child.

  Groping for the flashlight, he climbed out of the bag, still fully dressed, mouth thick and gummy from the gin, and walked out of the dining room and down the hall that led to the entryway. The house had several bathrooms on the first floor, but he still wasn’t sure where all of them were; the closest was under the stairway ahead of him. He went in, emptied his bladder, splashed water on his face, and drank from his cupped hands. Now the water tasted slightly rusty. Wasn’t it supposed to get better, the longer you used it? The pipes shook and rattled deep in the walls. He glanced at his watch: It was three in the morning. No more sleep for him.

  The insomnia had been a parting gift from his mother. When he was a child, his nights had been filled with the reassuring sounds that emanated from her sewing room, the steady whir of the Singer machine and the occasional creak of her footsteps as she got up to get something, a piece of fabric or a cup of tea. In the master bedroom, his father snored thunderously, gnashing his teeth and fighting the Vietcong in his sleep, while his mother sat sewing, tapping the Singer’s foot pedal, a woman driving nowhere. In the mornings, she had looked harried and run-down, burning toast, spilling juice, touching the corner of her lip as if trying to remember something from the drawn-out hours of the night. When Scott and Owen came home from school, she would be normal again, smiling, but Scott had found himself wondering what that thing was that she’d wanted to tell him after a sleepless night. After her death, he was struck by the fact that his relationship with her had been an unfinished conversation. In death, she had become much more articulate. At the funeral, he remembered Owen looking at him out of the corner of his eye, and Scott had gone back to the house afterward, up to the sewing room, and slammed his head into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. Right away it had made him feel better. Ten years later: therapy. White pills. The crack in the wall was still there.

  A sharp electric jolt ran up the right side of his neck. He winced, not moving, waiting to see if it would happen again. It didn’t.

  He walked out of the cold bathroom, wiping his hands on his jeans, and went back to the dining room, searching his suitcase for his medication. He had the vague memory of leaving the pills at his father’s house—Owen’s house now, he reminded himself, home of the cracked wall. He could visualize it so clearly. Was that part of not taking the meds? He conjured up a memory of his mother’s pale face, standing in the kitchen with burned toast in her hands, crying about something. It made him wonder what other memories might be lying dormant in the corners of his mind, waiting for the lights to come on.

  In the hallway, something rattled, and Scott felt his blood jump. He stopped in his tracks and held his breath. The radiator clattered a second time, the noise fading into a sustained gastrointestinal gargle. All around him, the subtle irregularity of the house made its minor incidental noises. Scott thought about the locked rooms upstairs. It would be good to explore them by daylight with Sonia, if he could ever get the right set of keys.

  He crawled back into his sleeping bag on the flattened mattress and lay staring blankly at the ceiling, waiting for morning to come. Time passed in the funny way it did in the middle of the night, somehow quicker and more slowly, in fits and starts; every time he looked at the clock on his cell phone another twenty minutes had passed while he’d lain there listening to the house, thinking of nothing.

  When day came, it was raining.

  OWEN DIDN’T TALK TO HIS SON on the ride to school. His head was throbbing from last nig
ht’s bender, and the world felt far away but still too close, muffled by a thick layer of insulation with an occasional spike of noise or sunlight piercing through. Going back to bed felt like the best way to handle it, a few more hours of sleep followed by some strong coffee, but he had things to do today, chores that wouldn’t wait.

  He pulled up in front of Henry’s school, pressed both hands against his eyes, and pushed until it hurt. “You got your stuff?”

  Henry nodded and climbed out, putting on his backpack.

  “Okay, then.”

  “Bye, Daddy.” Leaning over to kiss his father’s stubbled cheek, Henry slipped out and ran through the puddles, jumping over some and into others. Owen sat watching him melt together with all the other kids until he couldn’t see him anymore. He drove his truck back through town in the pouring rain, wipers slashing at the downpour. Dead leaves caked the road, plastered to his tires in a soggy brown mush. November had arrived, the fall already shot to hell; at the ripe old age of thirty-one, he could feel it, not just in his pounding skull but in his busted knuckles and arthritic knees, blizzard weather here before deer season even got started.

  For a native New Englander, he’d been caught embarrassingly off guard by the sudden drop in temperature. Tonight he had promised Red they’d go out to Lawson’s Woods and jack a deer. Owen didn’t savor the idea of bundling up and trudging through the rain-soaked trees with a gun in his hand any more than he cherished the certainty that he would be the one dressing out the animal, hacking its hide off while Red stood by, slugging coffee brandy and reliving his glory days in the NFL.

  Nobody knew exactly what a guy like Red Fontana was doing up here in Milburn anyway. At thirty, he’d played professional football, a big-shot New York playboy with a smoking-hot supermodel for a wife and a multimillion-dollar career. A year later, he was washed up, finished, a late-night talk show punch line. The supermodel wife was dead—a dance club overdose—and rumor had it that Red had gone broke defending himself against speculation about his involvement in her death. Bye-bye, contract; so long, endorsements. He was done with football, done with New York, done with the tabloid columnists who had been his best friends. He had retreated north with his new wife, Colette McGuire, who—rumor also had it—had married him mainly to piss off her parents. Attaching himself like a tick to the McGuire bloodline, he’d moved into the house and made all sorts of new friends and local suck-ups here in town. Chief among those friends and suck-ups—for reasons Owen had yet to fathom—was he himself.