The Bargaining (7 page)

“Oh, well that's just wonderful,” April says, the change in her tone launching me from fresh comfort.

“How is it that I've been driving for this long and still can't ever remember to check the gas gauge?”

I lean over and see that the needle is well past empty. My hands start shaking all over again at the thought of stopping the car this close to whatever just happened.

“I'm sure a few more miles won't make a difference,” I say, doing a bad job of keeping my voice from quivering.

“Relax, you'll be out of your cage soon enough,” April says. “Besides, we're meeting the agent in town now. That'll buy us a little time. And there's a gas station at this next exit.” She's pulling off the road before I can think of a reason not to—a reason that wouldn't force me to explain what couldn't have just happened.

The gas station is surrounded by cement. Not a tree in sight, which makes me feel only a little better.

Even past the closed door, I can hear music playing through the speakers at the station. It sounds tinny and hollow, a melody that runs like an undertow through the mind. You don't know it's there, but it grabs you every couple of seconds if you stop to consider it. I don't know how the attendant doesn't want to run screaming through the place every day just to block the sound of that bland, festering tune.

I survey the pumps under the awning. We're the only car parked in this giant station, but we're not the only ones here. A kid sits hunched by the door of the market, sitting so still his khaki coat practically camouflages him to the wall he leans against. If not for the way his knees knock together to the rhythm of that insidious melody, I might not have seen him at all. He's dirty and he looks tired, but his eyes are wide and he's staring at me.

I pull out my phone, determined to banish the outside via a wall of my own sound.

When I illuminate my screen, it's not on the home menu. The camera app is open.

Did I open that while I was holding the phone?

Confusion slips away along with my breath when I scroll to the last picture taken. Because it's of the woods. And a face
is staring at me from the tangle of trees, not more than five feet away from where I stood in the clearing.

To someone else, it would be a tree, the face just a distorted twisting of bark and moss. But the whites of the drooping eyes and the yawning mouth are unmistakable, the arms by the sides of a sinewy body in muddy rags, limbs unnaturally long and curled around the neighboring tree.

And those white, gaping eyes are looking directly at me.

4

F
EAR HAS AGAIN REDUCED ME
to a basic set of senses. The transition took place somewhere between the gas station and the house, and I don't so much welcome the feeling back as simply acknowledge it when it arrives, this way of existing that coats me against hard questions. Only instead of hearing each minute sound, instead of seeing each trickle of light that passes through the dense foliage, instead of feeling the dampness of the house's interior, I notice the smell.

It must be evident from my face, because April says, “It just needs a little airing out.”

“Uh huh,” I say as I see many, many things that could serve as the source of the mildew.

There's the moth-eaten mauve sofa directly in front of
us, the crumpled yellow bedsheet in the corner that even
looks
damp, the gray wool coat hanging on the hook by the front door, not to mention the entire house appears to be made of wood that's been soaked in a hundred years' worth of rain, from the floors to the trim to the banister leading to the second floor. The wallpaper is doing a poor job of covering whatever horror lies behind it, puckering and bubbling every two feet across every wall.

“Penny, look!” April lunges for the gray coat by the door and spreads it to reveal, well, a coat. “Do you think it could be vintage?” she lifts her eyebrows at me, like maybe she's hit on a language we can share.

“Please don't try it on,” I say.

“Hmm, maybe not.” She frowns. “Actually, it's kind of small.” I can tell by the boxy shoulders and the way the buttons are on the right side that it's a boy's coat. As April's face continues to fall, I think she's arriving at the same conclusion.

“Oh.” April frowns deeper. Her thumb uncovers an Old Navy label beneath the collar.

“I'm pretty sure you would have caught something if you'd put it on, anyway,” I say, not comforting her and not really meaning to, either.

“Maybe.” She considers this, then hands me the coat any
way. “But oh, Penny, look at this place. It's even more incredible than I'd pictured!”

I stare at her with the same wonder with which she gazes at the home surrounding us. I think for a moment that we've somehow managed to stand side by side in two different houses.

“What? You don't think it's beautiful?”

“No.”

“Well, don't hold back,” she says. I know I've hurt her feelings, though I can't imagine how she would have expected me to feel about this place that means such different things to her than it does to me. She sees the realization of a long-sought fantasy finally fulfilled, the claiming of some real estate ambition she's fostered from her career's infancy.

I see the bottom of a deep, deep hole.

The hem of the coat dances against my leg, and I watch as an impossible draft moves the fabric's corner against my dirt-smudged knee. I reach down to pull it away, and my hand slips into the pocket instead, my fingers scooping up a small plastic button and a dulled pencil stub. I drop them back into the pocket and look again at the Old Navy tag my thumb covers like April's did a second ago. I scoot my thumb over and find the name Dodson written in black marker.

April lifts the coat from my hand and sniffs it in three
places. “Not the source of the smell. The coat stays,” she declares, replacing the jacket on the hook by the door with misplaced decisiveness. It's almost imperceptible, but I can tell that some of the rapture at her find from a second ago seems to fade.

“I thought you said this place was built in 1850.”

“Around then,” she says, her smile returning.

“But that coat's obviously newer, unless the Carvers shopped at an Old Navy on the Oregon Trail. And I'm no expert on design, but that funkadelic wallpaper . . .”

“Well, the record shows one or two owners after the Carver family, in addition to the banks, but there's not a lot of information on title transfers.”

“And that's real estate speak for . . . ?”

“It means I have basically no idea when those families sold or how much they sold it for,” she says. “Part of the charm of short sales and foreclosures.”

“I see.”

“So, where's your camera?”

“In the jeep with the rest of my life,” I say. Two months suddenly feels like life without parole.

“Excellent. Because you have an important job.” April is fast becoming an expert at ignoring half of the words I say. I get the sense my dad prepped her.

“Great. I was just wondering when you'd finally put me to work.”

“Your job,” she says, again ignoring the sarcasm, “is to ­document the before and after.”

“That sounds a little existential.”

“Come on, you know! Capturing the house before all of our renovations, then after.”

I trace my finger absently along the banister beside me, which instantly gives me a splinter.

“Um, I think this place needs a little more than a new coat of paint. Seriously, April, the smell.”

“Well it's been vacant for years,” she says, but I can tell from the way she shoves the words out that it's getting harder for her to ignore my negativity.

“But who even knows if it's safe to stay here?”

“The plumbing and electricity are old, but preliminary reports say they're sound. We'll have to see what the inspections say, but it's fine for now.”

And this.
This
is the moment I realize April is far too good at pretending like she's not full of shit. Is it possible she's actually this clueless? I reflect back on the dinner conversation with Dad, the moments after April's grand announcement about her first historical find, on Dad's skepticism, on Rob's half hearted congratulations. I am horrified to ­realize
I have zero understanding of how April does her job. If she even knows
how
to do her job. She bought a house sight unseen from a Realtor who could barely make time to meet us long enough to turn over the keys.

And Dad let his wife drag me off to a possibly condemned structure to camp out for the summer.

“It didn't feel like a clue when the agent insisted on meeting you in town instead of at the house?” I ask, no longer capable of disguising my incredulity. “You weren't, I don't know, maybe ten percent afraid that she knew the whole thing might flood the minute we flushed a toilet? Wait, does this place even have indoor plumbing?”

“And that's where we stop. I mean it, Penny. It's home for the next two months. Start calling it that.”

The finality she can so easily assert, the sheer stubbornness that is her “bonding” with me, is the first evidence I've seen of the April that Rob warned me about. The woman of chocolate cake legend.

My heart warms at the thought of Rob, a feeling I never would have been able to predict three months ago. Being the new kid in school three quarters of the way through my junior year should have done me in, but driving to campus five days a week with Rob had me wondering every morning if maybe I would be able to survive it. Stranger things had
happened. I now had a quasibrother, one who made me forget enough of the bad stuff that I actually felt like I could pour the little white pills down the sink. Then once Dad (using words that sounded more like April's) convinced me to pick up photography again, suddenly I had something to fill the space carved out of me.

The camera I have, but I miss Rob already.

I sneak a peek at my phone and see that I only have one bar. Life without parole—in solitary.

“You can talk to me that way, but Linda doesn't take kindly to scoldings,” I say to April.

She looks at me like I've given her something new and exotic to worry about, which brings me a hint of joy.

Outside by the jeep, the trees sway in the breeze, and I look up at the sky in search of something, the moon maybe.

I remember Rae doing that, except she wasn't looking for the moon. It was one of the first times we hung out together, and she was looking up at the sun as it nudged the clouds out of the way.

“You're not supposed to do that,”
I'd said.
“I think you can go blind or something.”

“That doesn't seem fair. It's the closest we'll ever get to a star, and we can't even enjoy it.”

I reach behind my ear and trace the cluster of stars we
each had inked there so we could be closer to them than the sun would ever allow us to get. I wonder how many times Rae thought back on that day when we each sat in a ripped vinyl chair and lied about being eighteen. Mine came out better than hers. She resented me for that.

“The sun seems shy,”
I'd said another time.

“That sun . . . what a pussy,”
she'd said. Rae could ­dismantle a serious thought in five words, a quality that should have been maddening but brought me relief more often than anything. It felt nice to have the weight of those types of thoughts lifted occasionally.

And then I remember the heaviness that would settle in later, the holes she left after taking away so much of what I wanted to feel for myself. The confusion at how so much empty space could weigh me down.

I open the cab of April's jeep and grab my camera case from where it toppled to the floor. As I climb out and close the door, I search the area, suddenly aware that my surroundings have shifted, though I don't fully understand until I hold still for a moment. That's what's changed—everything has gone still.

The breeze has stopped blowing, the groans and creeks of the deep forest have quieted. Even the leaves on the branches have stopped trembling. I exhale and see my breath form in front of my face.

April appears in the doorway of the house.

“Find it?”

“Hmmm?”

The breeze returns, carrying the cloud of my breath with it, and the leaves resume their dance without missing a step. The events at the rest stop are too fresh, and I feel my entire body seize up at the memory of that twisted face that couldn't have been anything other than a tree. Except . . .

“Your camera.”

I hold up the case, forgetting for a moment that I was holding it. I scan the forest once again before following April back into the house, seeing nothing more than shades of green and brown through the approaching night.

“This looks to be the master bedroom,” April says when we're back inside, nodding to a room situated to the right of the stairs. “It has the smallest bathroom I've ever seen in there, but it's a bathroom. There's one more next to the kitchen. Oh, you have to see the kitchen,” she says.

She leads me by my wrist into what I first assume is a closet, until I see a large basin sink and what looks like a green and white table with burners attached to the top and cupboards stacked next to it.

“It's a Stewart. This has to be worth thousands on its own!” she says.

“Does it work?”

April shrugs. “I haven't checked yet. Look, the interior of the oven is blue. How adorable is this?”

I have stopped listening to her and am looking out the tiny door leading to the back of the house—what would be a backyard except that the trees have taken ownership of it. I can hardly see past the dark that their canopy creates. A rusted latch that used to brace the door from the inside is bent and warped, hanging on by a single loose bolt.