He drove down Main Street, toward what was left of the Bijou Theatre, pulling up in front of the blackened, sloping shell of the building where workers were hauling wheelbarrows of black debris out into the rain. They all looked as miserable as he felt; without realizing it, Owen drew some measly measure of comfort from watching them shuffle about their work anyway, heads down, backs stooped. He’d gone to school with some of those guys, played ball and run around with them, making plans for the future. After a certain point, who had a choice how their lives went? Owen tried to remember where the point had been for him.
Instead, he got a flash of his mother running up the aisle with her arms raised and her hair on fire, screaming, a burning angel.
Owen parked and got out, lit a cigarette, and walked over to the temporary chain-link fence that surrounded the demolition site. For fifteen years since the fire, the Bijou had sat here with nobody doing anything to it, rotting like a corpse at a viewing. Now the Milburn Historical Society, headed up by none other than the McGuire family, had finally decided to fix it up.
Flicking the cigarette into a puddle, he looked through the fence at one of the hard hats, a Latino guy with an earring, leaning on his shovel. “Hey.”
The wetback turned around, water dripping off his helmet.
“You speak English?” Owen asked.
“Yeah.”
“Lemme talk to your foreman.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Just get him, okay?” Owen heard his own voice rising slightly. “Before I sic INS on your ass.”
The guy tossed his shovel and walked over, and Owen felt the adrenaline swelling in his temples, temporarily overtaking his headache. Eight thirty in the morning and he was already in a fight. That moment of critical decision—he’d missed it again.
“I’m a fucking U.S. citizen, asshole.”
“Oh yeah?” Owen showed teeth. “Let’s see your green card, shit-bag. Or did you leave it in your car with your seventeen kids?”
“The fuck did you just say?”
“You heard me.”
The guy was starting to come over the fence when a man in rolled-up shirtsleeves and a tie stuck his head out of the trailer. “Hey!”
Owen and the wetback both stopped and looked over.
“What’s going on here?”
“You the foreman?” Owen called back.
The man came down off the steps, scratching his head with a pencil. Off to the left, the Latino employee had already faded away. Owen imagined him muttering to himself in Spanish.
“We ain’t hiring,” the foreman said.
“Red sent me.”
“Is that a fact?” The foreman looked him up and down, visibly underwhelmed by what he saw. “What’s your name, gruesome?”
“Owen Mast.”
“Is he gonna know you if I call to check it out?”
“Be my guest.”
“Great.” Now the man just looked tired. “Come on around the side, go on up to the trailer, and talk to Mike, he’ll get your paperwork. We pull a twelve-hour shift here, half hour for lunch, no benefits. This ain’t no union shop. You call in sick, you show up hungover, you’re fired, no second chances, I don’t care who your friends are. Got it?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Owen was already walking toward the trailer. He felt a hand on his shoulder, stopping him.
“You ever done work like this before?” the foreman asked.
“What,” Owen said, “demolition?” He gave the guy a grin that cut deep into the corners of his cracked lips. “My whole life.”
DURING HIS FIRST TWO WEEKS in the house, Scott fell into a routine, a means of breaking up the day, not that it amounted to much in the end. He spent the morning drinking coffee in his makeshift office in the dining room, staring at the blank computer screen like a passenger staring out the window on a transatlantic flight. Usually he’d type a dozen words and delete them, go to the kitchen for more coffee, come back, sit down, and repeat the process. On-screen, the view remained unchanged with no land in sight.
Ladies and gentlemen, the captain has turned off the FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign; you may now feel free to roam about the house.
At midday, he would give up and wander upstairs, turning on lights as he went, exploring the rooms whose doors were unlocked, catching an array of peculiar smells—mothballs, wet wool, and rotting cedar. He checked out closets and cupboards and doorways that led nowhere, telling himself that if there was inspiration here, he’d find it. But all he found was emptiness, that same sulky, sullen vacancy that seemed to radiate from the hub of the house in vast invisible spokes.
Then, late one Saturday afternoon, just before dark, while walking through the hallway outside the sitting room, he found something new.
It was an old theatrical poster, probably from the sixties. It was hanging on a narrow patch of wall behind a door that he hadn’t opened before. The poster art was so simple as to be almost meaningless, a line drawing of a room with three walls that didn’t quite come together in the corners. Below it, the text read:
One Room, Unfinished
Debuting in September at the McKinley, 23rd Street
And below that, in small, almost reluctant letters:
A play by Thomas Mast
Scott looked at the poster. He saw no year on it anywhere, no indication of its age except for its overall poor condition. There was something familiar about it, though, not just the name of the play but the odd artwork as well. Thomas Mast had been Frank Mast’s father, Grandpa Tommy, Scott and Owen’s grandfather, a man Scott had never known, a name that didn’t come up often in conversation. “Not a New Englander,” Frank had said. “A city man. Too slick for his own good.” Coming from his father’s lips, it was nothing less than a condemnation. But what was the poster doing here?
Scott unpinned it from the wall, peeled one corner back as if there might be some further indication of its meaning on the other side, saw nothing but blank space, and wondered what he’d been hoping to find. Some hidden message? A note written just for him from some half-forgotten relation? It was the sort of detail you could use only in the world of make-believe, where clues added up to full and satisfying explanations. Even the title of this play—One Room, Unfinished—suggested nothing of the sort, though Scott thought it was absolutely appropriate. No one in his family had ever finished anything. Rather, it seemed that things—fires, ambition, alcohol, madness—were always finishing them.
He stared out the window. It wasn’t raining anymore, but the sun was already draining from the western windows, creeping away in embarrassment of another wasted day. His spine ached and his stomach was sour from the coffee, the computer screen still blazingly blank. He held his trembling hand in front of his face, but he couldn’t tell if it was his hand shaking or his eyeballs. His blood sugar was crashing; he had to be hungry, but the thought of his provisions—dry cereal, canned tuna, lunch meat—only made him more nauseated. Returning to the kitchen, he went against all conventional wisdom, poured himself a gin to settle his nerves, and called Sonia.
“It’s me,” he said. “You want to get some lunch?”
“At four thirty in the afternoon?”
“Dinner, then.” The gin was already working. He thought about swinging by his father’s old house and picking up Henry, seeing if the boy wanted to come along with them for a meal, even if it meant bringing Owen too. “Are you at the bar tonight?”
“Lisa and I split the weekend,” Sonia said. “How’s the writing going?”
“Good.”
“You’ve been at it for what, almost two weeks now? Making any headway?”
“Yeah, it’s actually going really well.” Another lie—one more to remember. Why did he feel compelled to hide the truth from her?
“You sure you want to knock off for the day?” Sonia asked.
“You should always quit when you’ve still got some momentum.” Over the years, his brain had become a tip jar full of writing nostrums, often contradictor
y. Quit while you’re ahead. Don’t stop if you’re rolling. Keep regular hours. Don’t hold yourself to routine. Make an outline. Go where the story takes you.
“Okay,” Sonia said. “Why don’t you come by the house in an hour or so. Does that sound all right?”
“Sounds good.”
“Scott?”
“Yes?”
“Nothing.” She paused. “See you in a while.”
Hanging up, he allowed himself to breathe. They had history between them, a lot of it, maybe more than he had with anybody else on this earth that he wasn’t related to by blood, and he still didn’t know where to begin. He didn’t know exactly when he’d first met her—growing up here, it seemed as if they’d known each other forever—but he remembered exactly when and where he’d first become completely, agonizingly aware of her.
They had been in English class, in the spring of their senior year, laying out an issue of the school newspaper, the Milburn High Graduate. All the other students had left for the day, and Mr. French was back at his desk, correcting papers, while Scott and Sonia tried to find enough space for the Ski Club photo. They’d reached for the picture at the same time, their hands brushing against each other long enough for them both to realize they’d touched, and she’d looked up at him. Later that afternoon, they walked home together and talked on the phone that night for two hours—about school, and their families, growing up in Milburn, which Sonia called “the ghastliest little hamlet in New Hampshire.” Like him, she had dreamed of running away; but she had actually done it at age twelve and gotten as far as the city limits before the sheriff caught up with her and brought her home. Scott, who’d always dreamed of leaving but had never mustered the nerve, could only stand in awe.
A week later, she’d invited him over to her house for pizza, and they planned their escape together, just the two of them, for real this time. At the end of the night, Sonia had kissed him, and Scott levitated home feeling like he’d just discovered an antidote for gravity, the omnipresent loneliness that he’d lived with for so long that he was scarcely aware of its existence. In all the years they’d known each other, he felt as if she’d been hiding this side of herself, or he’d just been too blind to see it. Now, with graduation less than a month away, he couldn’t believe he’d waited this long. He felt like a man on a long train ride looking at a pretty girl, waiting to talk to her, only to exchange a brief word before she stepped out of his life forever.
So he took a chance and wrote her a long letter. In essence, it said he really did want to run away with her, wherever, to do whatever—college, Europe, the Peace Corps—as long as they were together. He finished it by saying that he’d fallen completely, totally in love with her, and if she didn’t feel the same way, he’d understand, but he couldn’t just let her walk out of his life without knowing how he felt. He passed it to her one morning before class and spent the next three hours squirming in his seat. At lunch, she’d found him outside the cafeteria and led him outdoors, under the shadow of the old gymnasium, and kissed him. “You jerk. What took you so long?”
What followed was a week of pure bliss like nothing he’d experienced before or since, sneaking out at night, crawling in each other’s bedroom windows, staying up late and never sleeping. Then, the day before the senior prom, he’d tried to call and she wasn’t home. When he’d driven by the house, her father had come out and told him to go away. “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”
After that, it didn’t matter how often he called or came by, the results were the same. They didn’t see each other that summer, and when fall came, they both ran away, but in different directions. When he thought back on it, he wondered if he’d scared her off or whether—in his darkest imaginings—it had been something worse.
She doesn’t know about that, he thought. She couldn’t.
But in the back of his mind, he wondered.
HE SHOWERED IN THE DOWNSTAIRS BATHROOM, pulling back the mildewed vinyl curtain to peer through the steam into the opaque mirror as if he expected to see someone looking back at him. As children, he and Owen had scared themselves with the story of Bloody Mary, whose face would appear in the mirror if you stood in front of it and chanted her name thirteen times.
By the time he’d shaved and gotten dressed, it was almost totally dark outside. Gusts of wind tumbled dead leaves the size of giants’ hands across the huge, empty yard that divided the house from the surrounding woods, and he recognized the smell of snow in the air. It was the first time he’d been out that day, and the change in weather shocked the Pacific Northwesterner in him, which was far more used to rain and fog. Winter’s here, he thought, with an irrational sense of panic, and then immediately: I’m not ready. I shouldn’t even be here.
Pills, he thought absently, and reminded himself to get his prescription refilled at the pharmacy. He thought of the random brain zaps he’d been experiencing, something to tell his doctor about back in Seattle.
Driving into town, he marveled at the illusion of distance between his house and civilization. Surely an illusion was all it was, a minor miracle of subjective perception. It seemed to take longer than ever just getting to town, and he passed no other cars, the damp, empty road telescoping in front of him, stretching out like a child’s idea of time. Two miles east of downtown, he followed another country road to a four-way intersection where a ramshackle junk shop stood under a bright lamp with a hand-painted wooden sign that read EARL’S EMPORIUM. He parked and went up the steps, knocked on the front door, and saw Sonia on the other side, smiling a little awkwardly, making him think of how she’d looked eighteen years ago, almost half a lifetime.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hi.” And then, because of the fine lines above her eyebrows: “Is everything all right?”
“Sure. Good to see you. Come on in.”
As always, they had to navigate the coves and shoals of Earl Graham’s junk shop to get to the actual house. Sonia led him between long tables piled with tagged items, old parking meters and drive-in speakers, racks of incomplete military uniforms, ear trumpets, and glass cases of campaign buttons for losing senatorial candidates whom Scott had never heard of. Earl had been an old Communist from New York back in the post-Eisenhower era, cranking out a mimeographed newsletter from his one-room flat on Mulberry Street, but sometime in the 1960s, he’d gotten tired of politics and headed up here to get married and sell junk to tourists. Some of this stuff had no doubt been here the last time Scott had set foot in this place; the nearness of the past both warmed and chilled him.
“Dad?” Sonia stuck her head around the corner of the living room. “I’m going out now, okay?”
Behind her, looking into the room, Scott glimpsed a skeletal, trembling, almost unrecognizable wreck of a man he barely remembered, his nearly translucent skin colored only by the glow of the plasma TV screen. Oxygen tubes ran into the plastic mask covering his nose and mouth. A machine beeped. Scott looked away, abashed by his own reaction. It was as if some smaller, weaker organism had donned the skin of Earl Graham and was rapidly suffocating within it, and there was really nothing to say. He told himself Earl hadn’t seen him standing there; he could still slip away unnoticed.
He walked into the living room.
“Mr. Graham?”
Sonia’s dad glanced up at him, almost alarmed.
“It’s good to see you again,” Scott said. “It’s been a long time.”
Earl nodded guardedly, not moving. “Uh-huh.”
“I remember Sonia and I used to come out here and play board games on Friday nights, right there in the junk shop. We got pizza and stayed up late. You always kicked our butts at Trivial Pursuit.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“No, you did,” Scott said. “I still don’t know how many golf balls there are on the moon.” And he did a peculiar thing, something he’d never imagined himself doing, certainly not spontaneously. He touched Earl Graham’s shoulder, not patting it exactly, just allowing his hand to
rest there on the fragile bone for a moment, an acknowledgment of the memory connecting them. “It’s good to see you again.”
The old man cleared his throat and looked away.
SONIA WATCHED HER FATHER turn away from Scott, wincing at the rawness of the moment, like discovering a bruise where you didn’t know you had one. It seemed like forever since they’d sat together here playing board games and talking about the articles they were writing for the school paper. Every so often, Earl would interject some comment about how they ought to publish one purely Communist issue, just to see how big of an uproar they could create. He even came up with headlines for them: Students! Throw off the shackles of capitalism! Embrace the Workers’ Alliance! You have nothing to lose but your pencils!
Thinking back on it now made her lonely for those days, when her dad was strong enough to carry an armoire into his shop all by himself and his laugh could fill the entire house. They’d all been so much younger then—the world itself had felt like a lighter place, spacious and more promising.
“Go ahead,” Sonia told Scott. “I’ll be right out.” After he left, she went back into the living room and bent down next to Earl. “You’re sure you don’t want anything while I’m out?”
No Doors, No Windows Page 5
