A Stranger's House (31 page)

I swallowed, and I looked down from him. Giving him the words he wanted would be too easy. It would be simple for me, and my world wasn't an easy one now, I saw. I would have to fight my way through it, even if it meant fighting with him. My words were my own. My discovery of those steps was my own. He could wait.

I dropped the cotton ball into the trash basket beneath the sink, pulled another from the bag on my lap. I tipped the bottle of alcohol again, started swabbing my right hand, the pain cool, welcome.

He took a deep breath, let it out, and said, “You were going to say something?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

“What happened to your hands?” he said, and hidden in his voice I thought I could hear some concern for me, but concern cloaked in his wanting to know more about my quitting than the state of my fingers and palms.

“Work,” I said. I was watching my fingers, still hoping to see some change in them, some beginning of healing, but nothing happened. I said, “At the house. I went out there today,” and I stopped. I would tell him no more of my day than that. I could feel my muscles tense up, ready for his questions, for his probing, for his bringing into our apartment his reporter's skills to get at what happened today.

But he only pulled off his glasses, started cleaning them again, this time with the front tail of his shirt. He was quick about it, the same old movement, the same old husband.

“Here's a story,” he said, and moved into the bathroom. He leaned his back against the wall across from me and slowly eased down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, his knees up in front of him. He closed his eyes, finished cleaning the glasses. “Saw it today, from Phyllis, one of my stringers.” He slipped the glasses back on, opened his eyes. It wasn't getting the glasses clean that mattered, I finally saw, but doing something with his hands that mattered. He looked down to the linoleum floor, his arms crossed. “At seven twenty this morning,” he went on, “one whole wall of an old house over in Belchertown collapsed. The owners, a retired couple who moved out from Boston last year, were in the house. The husband
was in the kitchen downstairs, and managed to get out. He'd thought the whole place was coming down.”

He wasn't smiling telling me this. It was, of course, another of his attempts to cheer me, but it wasn't a real attempt, only the recitation of a story, news for the paper, nowhere in his voice the spark of humor he'd always had before. His arms were still crossed, his eyes still on the floor.

He said, “But the wife was in the upstairs bathroom, brushing her teeth. It took a couple of minutes, too, for the wall to fall down. Phyllis said the husband watched most of it from outside on the lawn. The wall just disintegrated, bricks peeling off in rows starting from the top. The husband described the sound to Phyllis as a ‘cascade of bricks.' ‘Just a cascade of bricks,' the man said over and over.”

He paused, and looked up at me. He said, “Do you want me to go on?”

I was still looking at my hands. After a few moments, I said, “Go on only if the wife is okay. If she's dead, don't.”

“She's fine,” he said, his eyes back on the floor. “She's not hurt at all. Once her bathroom wall started disappearing, she tried to get out and couldn't get the door open, though it turned out it wasn't even locked. The wall kept falling, the wife pressed up against the bathroom door, the bathroom wall just peeling away.” He paused. “When the wall finally finished falling, there was the wife, standing in the bathroom upstairs with her robe on. Her husband was down on the lawn, looking up at her. One whole wall of the house was heaped on the ground, the bathroom, their bedroom, a study, and downstairs the kitchen and living room like some sort of dollhouse, the rooms all open to the outside.”

He paused, waiting, I knew, for some word from me, but I gave him none.

“The wife went hysterical. She broke down, crying, scared to death. Neighbors had started coming out by then, the fire department showing up a few minutes later. By this time the husband was upstairs, trying to get her to open the door, but she wouldn't budge. She's sitting on the floor of the bathroom with her back to the door, more neighbors accumulating, looking up at her. Finally an EMS squad is all that's able to get her down, the husband back
downstairs and outside looking up at her. They get her to open the door and take her downstairs, and her husband comes up to hold her, but she breaks down all over again. Turns out she's gone crazy because, in addition to the wall falling down, her husband didn't try to save her. Phyllis was there by that time, and heard her crying to her husband, ‘Don't you touch me. You left me up there. I don't know who you are.'” He paused. “That's a quote.” He stopped again, took a breath. “Finally the EMS truck takes her over to Cooley-Dickinson, the husband following in his own car. They were married for thirty-seven years, and the wife wouldn't even let her husband ride in the truck.”

He stopped, and let out a heavy breath, as if there were air he'd held inside of him through the whole story, something he'd kept back from me.

I said, “Point of story?”

“Point of story,” he said, “is that you know me. We've been through a lot, maybe even more than a wall falling down, and I've been here. I haven't run out of a house on you yet, and I'm not about to. And so I'll keep the volume on the TV down low for you, and I'll fix breakfast for you, and I'll bandage your hands for you, and you can quit your job, too. I'll even send flowers to Gadsen's funeral, if you want me to.”

I looked up at him, too quickly. He was still looking at me. “Will told me,” he said, and slowly I looked back at my hands.

He said, “But you're scaring me now, because I'm not sure I know exactly who you are.” He paused. “I just want to make certain I know
you,
and that you won't run out of a house that I'm in. I want to know you.”

He waited a few more seconds, waited for me to say something, anything, I imagined, and then he pushed himself away from the wall, stood, and moved into the living room. A moment later I heard the sound of the McDonald's bag being crumpled up, footsteps into the kitchen, water running.

The second cotton ball I held in my hand was the same shade of pink as the first, and I threw it in the garbage. I wanted it away from me. Then I bowed my head, my elbows on my thighs, my hands out in front of me, the palms up, and I cried, cried for dead hope, for a husband who, I saw, had just surrendered in his own
way to no hope, to living the rest of our lives with just ourselves, and though I tried with each breath in to make my body relax, make my muscles ease up, they did not. I sat there, the cold air of the room like an ice fire in my hands, my body wound too tight, and I cried.

 

“Uhm,” Grady said from behind me. “Uh, Miss Templeton.” He stopped. “Claire,” he said. “Martin says that he thinks you're working too hard. That you're doing too much.”

I had the metal scraper in my hand, shoving it up along the wall of the front room, the wall with the two windows that looked out to where the porch had been. The wallpaper solvent was working well; as I pushed the scraper up, wads of old, wet wallpaper were falling, leaving exposed the bare plaster wall, yellow with age.

We'd finally torn off the ugly brown paneling just that morning, the three of us—Martin, Grady, and I—each with claw hammers in hand. It had taken us only an hour to get it all off, the plastic coming down in brittle shards, shapes that looked like large brown pieces of broken glass. We worked at different places in the room, me beginning at the front door and working my way across the front wall, the wall I was peeling wallpaper from right now; Grady at the other windowed wall, the wall that held the window from which I'd looked the very first afternoon we had been here; Martin had started at the fireplace wall and gone on to the staircase wall, tearing out all the little detail pieces of paneling above the mantel and on the low wall where the banisterless staircase came down into the room.

It had only taken us that hour to get it all down, rip it from the walls to expose the ugly, pale flowered wallpaper I was peeling down now. Grady had been the slowest of the three of us, though I knew he wasn't taking his time. Martin was in his trance, and worked as quickly and proficiently as ever. I, too, I'd realized in the past three
weeks, had my own trancelike state, the mode I clicked into whenever I entered the house. Every day, now.

Fifteen minutes more and we had gathered up all the plastic shards littered through the room and moved them to the junk heap, each of us gathering as many pieces as possible into our arms and carting them outside and dumping them. Grady had at one point taken one piece and sailed it like a Frisbee back into the trees, letting out a crazy yelp, but the piece didn't go very far, only flipped and tumbled through the air. I'd heard Martin give a little chuckle, and Grady had turned to me and smiled. But I would not join them in their small break from all the work we were doing, and I looked down at the heap, picked up a couple of pieces of paneling here and there, and tossed them to the middle of all the junk. Grady stopped, went to find the piece back in the trees, his feet breaking dead leaves everywhere, making a rushing sound, a static of sorts, as he headed through them back to the heap, the piece he'd thrown in his hands. Without a word he dropped it onto the heap, headed past me and back inside for the next load.

I pushed the scraper up again, and more wet wallpaper fell, cold on my arms, slipping down them and to the floor.

“Miss Templeton,” Grady said again, and only then did I realize I hadn't answered him, hadn't acknowledged him at all. I was in that mode.

I turned. Both he and Martin were standing there, Martin, as always, a few inches behind him. But he was looking at me now, the ability to look at me for several seconds without letting his eyes dart away new in him. Now that we had been working up here every day, the three of us had become closer, friends, and Martin's looking at me and telling Grady he was concerned for me almost made me want to stop, to put the scraper away. To take a break from here, this house that, if all went right, we would be able to move into some time early next year.

But I looked past the two of them, saw the wallpaper on the wall, on all the walls, wallpaper with a thick pattern of bouquets of brown and pink roses in rows up and down the walls, and I knew that they were wrong, that I could work harder, that I could keep going. I could.

“I'm fine,” I said. “I'm just fine. You don't worry about me. I've
told you guys before that I'm fine.” I turned, placed the scraper on the windowsill, and went to the stove in the fireplace. I opened up the front, tossed in a couple of chunks of wood, and stood back from it, my hands out in front of me, soaking up the warmth.

Tom had bought the stove last week in a costly celebration of the roof having been completed and the rotten and broken clapboards all replaced, as well as the fine brickwork Martin had done with the chimney and hearths through the house. He had been as meticulous measuring and marking the lay of bricks as he had been with the tapping out of clapboards and rolling the marble to find bad spots in the floor, and as a result the fireplace here, after having a chimney sweep out from town to clean things up, was ready for use. The stove had been a surprise, Tom last Saturday morning leaving us here to work by ourselves while he went into town. “For supplies,” he had told me, with no show of any emotion, no smile, no shine in his eyes for the surprise. Two hours later he had shown up with two men in a flatbed truck following him, the stove, huge and black and cold, tied down in back. The four of us had simply watched as the men, burly teenagers who seemed no older than Grady but who could have easily snapped him in two, muscled the stove in, set it up on the hearth, and drove away.

I was glad for it here in the front room, the stove bulky and warm, the sky outside cold and gray and threatening as it had been most days the last three weeks, folds of gray and darker gray here and there a regular occurrence now.

They didn't have to worry. I was okay.

“Still, uh, Miss Templeton,” Grady said, and took a step closer.

“Will you please?” I said, and turned from the stove. “It's Claire. It's not Miss Templeton. It's Claire.”

“Claire,” Martin said, his voice strong and clear, and I had to pause, look at him there behind Grady.

He was smiling at me. I said, “Martin. That's the first time you've called me by my name.”

“Claire,” he said again, grinning even bigger, showing even more of those teeth, and he looked down, moved his feet in some small, self-conscious shuffle. He looked at me again, only this time as solemn, as grave, as I'd ever seen him. “Claire,” he said, “you do not need to work so hard. Not as hard as this.” He put his hand out
in an awkward gesture toward the walls, brought his hand back just as quickly.