“It was just a figure of speech.” It wasn’t, of course; at the time, he’d meant it as literally as anything he’d ever said in his life. The experience of finding himself back at the computer, writing about an encounter that he’d felt absolutely certain he was experiencing, had knocked the legs out from under him. Saying so out loud, just speaking the words, had granted him a peculiar relief that had allowed him some exhausted version of sleep. Truly crazy people didn’t think they were going crazy—or was that just a misconception?
“So?” she said. “How long has it been?”
“Since what?”
“The meds.”
“I don’t know. A couple weeks, at least.”
“What were you taking?”
“Lexapro,” Scott said. “Why, are you a pharmacist?”
If she noticed his tone, she ignored it. “How long have you been on it?”
“About three years.”
“Ever gone off like this before?”
“No, but—”
“Why did you stop?”
“I didn’t anticipate being out here for so long. I ran out and just never got around to getting a refill. I guess I thought I was doing all right without it.” He wavered, debating whether or not to continue. “And the writing is going really well too.”
No reply. He looked up, staring out the window. He pictured her staring back at him with a gaze that could outlast a glacier.
“Really,” he said.
“I don’t see this as being a good thing for you, Scott.”
“I got my sex drive back. That’s a bonus, right?”
Sonia didn’t laugh. “Eudora Gordon is our local pill pusher. Go see her.”
BUT HE DIDN’T, not just yet. He felt much better this morning, stronger, and there was simply too much of Round House that he still wanted to explore. His recent success with the writing had emboldened him, stoked his curiosity, and now there was an entire ring of keys that he hadn’t tried yet, doors to be opened, whole unseen rooms to be investigated.
At the end of the second-floor hallway, he found the stairwell that he knew he’d have to stumble across eventually—a bare, unassuming set of steps that led up to the heretofore unseen third floor. Oddly, there was no railing or banister, as if the builders had never intended visitors to go higher up in the house than the second story.
But there’s always another story, right? he thought, and barked a laugh. Was that funny or just insipid? Back in Seattle, they would have known the difference.
He carried his coffee cup with him, feeling the temperature drop with each step. Invisible spiderwebs traced schoolbook cursive across his scalp and neck. At the top, he paused and sipped from the cup as he stared down the long hallway that took form in front of his slowly adjusting eyes.
The third-floor corridor was as wide and long as the concourse of an old-fashioned ocean liner from the Gilded Age. Flocked scarlet wallpaper rose in hundred-year-old patterns on either side, a winding floral print that made him want to reach out and caress it. At one point, he stopped walking, momentarily certain that he’d heard the faint sound of music, like an old, scratched 78. He put his ear to the wall and listened, vaguely aware of the distant, canned-sounding crooner’s voice warbling:
We don’t want the bacon,
We don’t want the bacon,
What we want is a piece of the Rhine …
Scott opened the door in front of him. The room that it revealed was empty. Stopping in his tracks, he listened again and heard nothing. The music was gone. Had it even been there in the first place? He thought about what Sonia had said about his medication. No question that the world without it had become more tactile, deeper, revealing whole layers that he hadn’t noticed before. It was as if a protective veneer had been stripped away and now everything came at him with heightened texture, including the continuously smoothing nature of the overall design. He took another step, dragging his hands along the wallpaper, feeling the patterns intertwine against his fingertips. What would it be like if all of a sudden he awoke to find himself sitting at the laptop again, describing this scene?
I don’t see this as being a good thing for you, Scott.
“But I’m fine,” Scott said aloud. And he was. He was here, that was for sure, and he felt clearheaded, no depression, better than he had felt in a long time.
And writing. What more can you ask for?
The next three doors he tried were already unlocked, and each of the rooms was empty. The knob of the fourth wouldn’t give. He put one of the keys in it. It turned halfway and stopped. Scott tried the next key, and the next. The process was already going to require more patience than he could muster. He was getting ready to give up, or at least go down for more coffee, when the lock clicked and the door swung open.
He entered what was definitely the biggest of the rooms he’d seen up here so far. In the middle stood a bed in a rough-hewn oak frame, neither masculine nor feminine. Old partially melted candles in brass candlesticks and bookshelves surrounded the bed, with an old hand-cranked record player standing on a nearby wooden cabinet. His first thought, that this might have been the source of the music he’d heard earlier, proved false—there was no record on the turntable, and the device was buried under so much dust that he doubted it would work even if it had been cranked up. Dried flowers that looked as if they’d turn to dust if he touched them stuck out of a chipped porcelain vase in the corner. More books. The smell of the room was faintly familiar, redolent of some faded old cologne or hair pomade that men might have worn back when they listened to music like the kind he’d heard earlier.
Scott glanced at some of the books and saw that they were poetry: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Pablo Neruda, Shakespeare—love poems. He looked from the bed to the candles, then back at the books. His glance caught on a slightly open door in the corner of the room.
It was a closet. Inside, hanging on a hook, he found a fuzzy green sweater with a hole in the sleeve. Scott brought the sleeve up to his nose and inhaled, and some buried part of his limbic system registered the cologne as one of his father’s, though he didn’t consciously remember the man wearing any kind of manufactured scent. He lifted the sweater off the hook. There was something heavy in the pocket, and he took it out, a pack of Lucky Strikes and a monogrammed gold lighter, with the initials FLM. He’d never known his father to smoke. Frank Mast had always referred to cigarettes as coffin nails and the people who smoked them as gaspers.
He opened the pack of Lucky Strikes. Only three left. Scott took one out and, on impulse, inserted it between his lips just to see how it would feel. Even the paper tasted stale; the dried-out crumbs of tobacco that landed on his lips and tongue had no flavor left at all. He flicked the lighter, testing the flame, and as it illuminated the closet, he saw something hanging on the wall.
It was a painting. It wasn’t large, perhaps twelve by fourteen, an original in a wooden frame with curved corners. The subject was the house itself. The artist had painted it from the perspective of the woods at dusk. Represented here, Round House looked even bigger than it did in real life, sprawling and tall, with lights in the upper windows gazing back at the viewer.
Scott took a step closer. There was a shadow in one of the upper windows, he thought, a semitransparent blur of gray against the dull yellow, a figure peering out from inside. It made him think of Sonia’s father looking out at him, and Colette’s Aunt Pauline, people so close to death that they hardly seemed part of this world at all. Scott reached up toward the canvas and touched the brushstrokes that had laid the image out, felt nothing but the dust that had accumulated over the decades, a slithery filthiness that made him retract his hand with a grunt of revulsion as if he’d accidentally touched a dead rat. Still his gaze stayed riveted to the shape painted in the window as if he expected it to move.
He thought of the painter, his great-grandfather, Great-Uncle Butch’s father, H. G. Mast, the one who had hanged himself in Paris. In his family, talent might not have been
quite synonymous with madness, but Scott thought the commonality between them must have been sizable, at least as big as the house staring back at him from the canvas, and the thing leering inside its window.
It’s me, he thought with a start. It’s my face.
From elsewhere in the house, somewhere downstairs, he heard his cell phone chiming, drawing him back to the present. Hard to believe how well sound traveled in here. His mind flashed to Sonia. He started to leave the room. The hallway was colder than ever, and he put on the sweater without thinking about it, headed for the staircase, wearing his father’s ghost.
“I WAS GONNA DRIVE out to the cemetery,” Owen’s voice said, sounding as foggy and remote as the frozen gray vapor gathering outside the windows. “You want to come along?”
Scott looked at the date on the phone display. A straitjacket of realization tightened over his chest, compressing his lungs and heart. With everything else that had been going on, the novel and the house and the medication that he hadn’t been taking—
“You there?” Now his brother’s voice was faint, echoing from the far side of some distant harbor. “Scott …?”
“I’ll meet you there.” Without knowing why, or even realizing he was doing it, he put his hand against the kitchen window and pushed. Some subconscious part of him was wondering how hard he could press before the glass shattered and sliced into his palm. “Greenfield Cemetery, right?”
But Owen had already hung up.
SCOTT DROVE THROUGH TOWN looking for flowers to bring to his mother’s grave. The closest he could find was a fake sweetheart bouquet from the convenience store outside of Milburn, and he started plucking off the little heart-shaped ribbons and sequined appliqués from the green cellophane as he drove. In the end, what remained looked so bad that he threw the whole thing out the window, where it caught on a barbed wire fence, a chintz remnant flapping in the breeze. He stopped the car and got out. The northeast wind carried the smell of the coming blizzard they were predicting on the radio, and he felt the barometric changes ringing through his skull like some archaic navigational tool.
He walked along the road back to where the flowers hung, took off his gloves, and put both hands around the stiff plastic petals, squeezing until he felt the sharp metal barbs piercing his palms. The harder he squeezed, the better it felt, until blood trickled from his clenched fists and he finally let go, leaving the crushed fake flowers dripping on the fence. The congestion was gone; he could breathe again.
HIS MOTHER WAS BURIED on a barren hillside that looked even worse under the gunmetal armada of low-hanging clouds. Scott’s fingers throbbed in the iron air as he gazed through the gate. The grass hadn’t been mowed for months, and the stones were half buried in dead leaves. On the other side of the fence, he saw Owen leaning on his truck. He took off his sunglasses and regarded Scott with raw and glassy eyes.
“Fuck, man,” Owen croaked as Scott approached, “what happened to your hands?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“You cut them all to shit.”
Scott pulled out a pair of gloves from his coat pockets and put them on, squinting across the landscape. “This place is an embarrassment.”
“The bank foreclosed.”
“On a cemetery?”
“It happens around here more often than you’d think.” Owen’s red eyes disappeared behind the sunglasses again. “They’re calling for two feet of snow by nightfall. Let’s get on with it.”
Scott thought they were going to walk to the grave, but Owen got back in his truck, so he climbed into the passenger seat. Henry was sitting in the middle in a dirty coat and mismatched mittens, looking as if he’d missed breakfast. He had a soot-colored smudge on his cheek that Scott wanted to wipe off, but he didn’t want to remove his gloves and scare him. He settled for putting one arm around Henry’s shoulder and promising himself he’d take the kid out for lunch when they were finished here.
Owen drove over the narrow cemetery road, stopped again. “Hold on,” he muttered, got out, kicking leaves and weeds away from the stones. He shook his head and climbed back inside, and they drove again, stopping, getting out, looking around again, and pulling aside more leaves. The third time, after he’d driven clear around the far side of the cemetery, he just got out and walked to the nearest cluster of graves, standing there. When Scott climbed out, he was holding his face in his hands and breathing deeply. He recognized the expression of his brother trying not to throw up.
“Is she out here?”
Owen didn’t look up at him.
“Maybe we should just go home,” Scott said.
Owen mumbled something and sniffed. Clear liquid dripped from the tip of his nose. “What?”
“Our family,” Owen said, “is so fucked.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve and frowned at Scott. “Where’d you get that sweater?”
“I found it back at the house.”
“Ours?”
“Round House.” Scott shook his head. “The one out in the woods.”
“What are you doing out there, anyway?”
“Same as always, finishing Dad’s story.”
The embalmed pallor in Owen’s cheeks made his eyes look even redder and glassier, like an amateur taxidermist’s idea of verisimilitude. “Dad didn’t start it.”
“What do you mean?”
Owen didn’t say anything. Scott reached into the pocket and pulled out the old pack of his father’s Lucky Strikes. He took one of the two remaining cigarettes and gave the other one to his brother, who accepted it in silence. They both sat on tombstones smoking while Henry watched them from inside the truck.
“Shit, man.” Owen spat. “How old is this thing?”
Scott shrugged but didn’t put it out, even though his eyes were watering and he was trying not to gag. Owen threw his butt into some dry leaves, and Scott watched as a thin flame appeared, rising tentatively over somebody’s grave. He imagined another fire, this one starting in the graveyard, spreading west in the wind to swallow up the whole town in one all-consuming conflagration. The possibility held a certain fatalistic appeal. He wondered what Owen might think of it.
“Why don’t you move away from here?”
Owen looked at him. “Where? And do what?”
“I don’t know, start over.”
Snorting, Owen walked over and watched the flame rising like a spectral hand from the ground, fingers lengthening as it clawed its way upward along the edge of the old stone. He ground it down with one dirt-caked boot. “Still running away,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What did you mean when you said Dad didn’t start the story?”
Owen gazed up at him. “Grandpa Tommy.”
“What?”
“He used to sing me songs.”
“Wait, you actually met Grandpa Tommy?” Scott thought back to the theater poster he’d found for the play One Room, Unfinished, written by the relative that his father called the city man, the one with holes in his shoes.
“When we were little,” Owen said, scraping the burned leaves from the bottom of his boot onto a gravestone. “You weren’t around. I think you were out of the house with Mom or something. Grandpa Tommy was up from New York, and he got his guitar out. I was probably five years old. I’d never seen anybody actually play guitar before. I thought the music just came from some magical place or some shit, I don’t know. Anyway …” Owen shrugged. “He played a whole song for me, like five times. That’s how I learned it.” Was there a glimmer of pride in his voice? “That’s when I started to play guitar.”
Scott couldn’t remember ever meeting his paternal grandfather, the failed playwright and evidently a musician as well. Like many of the details about his family’s past, it could have meant something but didn’t. Looking out at the graveyard, he realized that he’d never really tried to have any true connection with the men and women he called relatives. Now they were almost gone, like a matched set of delicate objec
ts, crystal or bone china that had been recklessly dropped and smashed throughout the generations until he and Owen were the only two adult Masts remaining. The most misleading thing about his family had been the illusion of durability: In the end, it turned out the only thing you had to do to invalidate your family was ignore it. While Scott always somehow held himself above Owen because he’d escaped town and gone on to get a high-paying job, Owen had been the one who was more connected to daily life and whatever remained of the Masts. Owen was the real person; Scott was the anecdote, the Christmas card from the coast.
He forced himself to suck down what was left of the cigarette until it burned against his fingers, and then held it there. Owen was still looking at him, wiping his lips.
“I could use a drink,” he said. “You want to go back to town?”
Scott shrugged. “Sure,” he said. And then, “Let me take Henry out, buy him lunch.”
Something ugly twisted over Owen’s face, a spasm of dislike. He shook his head. “Forget it.”
“Hey, look, I didn’t mean—”
“Go get your hands bandaged up,” Owen said. “And get some more of those pills while you’re at it. You look like you could use them.”
“Owen, wait.”
“You’re not some shining example of something, you know. You’re not some great success story. You’re just as fucked up as I am. Shit, you’re worse. You can’t even see it.”
Scott nodded. It didn’t seem to make his brother feel any better. Owen walked back to his truck, got in, and drove away, leaving Scott to walk back through the graveyard to the gate, where he’d left his car. The wind was rising, howling across the barren terrain. He was almost to the gate when he saw the stone behind a snow-choked pile of leaves.
ELEANOR MAST
LOVING WIFE AND MOTHER
“IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE ARE MANY MANSIONS.”
Scott realized he had nothing at all to leave here. After standing in front of the grave for a long time, he took off his bloody gloves and laid them on the pile of leaves in front of her stone, a fitting monument in some way he couldn’t describe.
No Doors, No Windows Page 11
