The Dwelling: A Novel (39 page)

Barbara ran to her, dropped to her knees beside her. The front of the little girl’s faded cotton dress was red with blood. The man lowered his gun and turned his back, began walking away. Then he disappeared. They were dead, all of them.

Their father had shot them. She staggered to her feet and lurched in the direction of the barn. Behind her, the child spoke.

“It’s all right,” she said, her tiny voice a lilt. The sky began to clear. Halfway between the barn and the little girl, Barbara stopped and turned. Mariette was standing. The blood on her dress faded. She spun, arms out, smiling. Dancing.

Out of the barn came the others, groggy, grinning. Each of them touched her. They called her Mama. Petey came out. He hugged her and joined the children, who by then were making their way up the hill.

Barbara followed them. She was their mother. Mariette and Peter dropped back and waited for her, grabbing her hands.

“Let’s run,” Mariette sang. They did. They ran over the hill and down the other side. It was a beautiful day, endless summer, and Peter’s laugh echoed across the hill.

Dennis arrived to pick up Petey on Friday night, only to find the house empty. He waited for several hours before calling Barbara’s mother and, finally, the police.

A search of the house turned up a note. The note, in Barbara’s handwriting, stated that she and Petey had run away. They would not be coming back. They could do what they wished with their things.

There was an investigation. Dennis was closely watched. He had a perfect alibi. The days before their disappearance he had been, consistently, in the company of employees, or publicly with his fiancée. He was investigated, nonetheless.

Barbara and Petey never turned up. Eventually, the house was cleared. Elizabeth Staizer asked Dennis, of all people, to sell the house for her. She didn’t know a darn thing about houses.

Bad penny.

Glenn smiled wryly into her cell phone, listening with only half an ear since the (fated) first description of her soon-to-be new—
falling into your lap, Glenn!
—listing. The woman on the other end of the line was an acquaintance from Howard’s days of teaching. She struggled to remember even what the woman looked like, and could remember, despite being told in the introduction, only her first name. Dee-Dee.

Dee-Dee had taught with Howard, years before. She’d retired before he had, even.

Imagine the course life takes. A twist, a turn and then—

Back where you started.
It was downright amusing,
she thought. If the whole thing just wasn’t too perfect.

“—and I thought right away of you!” she said graciously into the phone. Glenn’s smile was pasted on. It all seemed too pat.

A house on Belisle.
Do you know Belisle?
Dee-Dee had asked, quite innocently, and Glenn’s mouth had pursed to answer quickly, some sort of comfortable nonremark about having had a listing on Belisle previously, but she had stopped short of saying anything.

“You must know it,” Dee-Dee had continued. “It’s not terribly far from downtown,” and she had launched into a virtual register of streets leading up to Belisle, all very familiar.

“It’s just a lovely old place. There’s two floors and an attic—I think it needs work still—but there’s three bedrooms, and a massive living room. Fireplace. It’s really a very good-looking house, you know. Dennis would be so glad to get it off his plate, if you know what I mean—”

Dennis? Glenn struggled but remembered no Dennis, horrified suddenly that she might be losing her memory. She remembered only the brightly brittle woman, a woman so pained that there almost appeared to be sound when she moved, her movements harsh and sudden, as though provoked only by necessity and circulation.
Poor thing,
she’d thought then.

The wrong house, Glenn thought suddenly, and for reasons felt somewhere in the pit of her belly, like a wrong step not taken, she sighed with relief. Not the same house. Couldn’t be.

“Dennis?” she asked politely. It wasn’t the same house. Not the same.

“Dennis Parkins. He’s an old friend of mine. Well, his mother is an old friend, anyway. It was—I think, and I don’t want to gossip—his ex-wife’s house. I have no idea what is going on, so don’t ask. But, for whatever reason, and he didn’t say, he’s selling the house. There’s nothing wrong with it, but she’s taken off, I guess. Poof. Gone. Took her—and his—son with her. Bad divorce, I’m thinking. Anyway, all of that is none of my business. All I know is that his mother remembered that I had sold my place—do you remember the old place on Kennedy? Good god, Glenn, when the hell was that? Fifteen years ago—I love my place on Washington. Never leave. But anyway, Gladys remembered you—of all things!”

Dee-Dee rambled on and so did Glenn.

The house.

Bad penny, you,
she thought but not all together unfondly.
It can’t be.

“It’s in the three-hundred block,” Dee-Dee said, interrupting herself. “Do you think you can take it on?”

Of course, it was the same house exactly.

It was all so unlikely, so serendipitous, that she didn’t even bother mentioning it to anyone at the office. Elsie asked her what was new twice, and Glenn, a secret on pale lips, said nothing.

She listed it on the multiple listings site, and quietly put an ad into their regular section of the Sunday paper, and nothing more. No one noticed.

For two weeks she didn’t bring it up to prospective buyers, although it seemed always there in her thoughts, a secret, a shadow, a knowing of something not quite tainted, not quite bad, but by then something…
fated
with undertones that she did not care to examine. Glenn drove by, peeking behind half-lids, but never once stopped in.

Stop calling me Shirley, went the old joke.
Stop calling me, surely,
she heard.

When she did think of the house, unbidden, she thought of the terrible fragility of that woman, her determined brightness followed always by the vague, frightened look of the lost. She did, Glenn admitted, have the look of someone who would choose escape.

She’s taken off, I guess.

Very likely. The ex-husband, then, the one who had given her the settlement (that was what she had said, wasn’t it?
I have a settlement,
as a way of explanation about buying the house at all, as though saying,
I have a coupon
), was the vendor on the listing and Glenn sometimes felt like a conspirator on the wrong side of the ideology.

Very little of it mattered, she realized, although did not admit, in the face of other, more pressing, distractions.

If they were together at the office, at the appropriate time, Elsie and Glenn would have lunch together. Glenn picked at hers and Elsie frowned and watched her sideways.

“You’re a rake, Glenn Darnley,” she said with a sniff one day. “Are you on a diet? Did you meet someone? ’Cause it’s not flattering, you know. To lose too much weight.”

“I’ve not lost much,” she said, with what she hoped was conviction. Like her, the conviction was thin.

Elsie shrugged. “You should get it checked. Maybe you have a tapeworm or something. I would kill for a tapeworm,” she sighed, forking a mouthful of lasagne into her mouth. “You lost a bit, girl.”

The two of them took very early lunches (for very different reasons). Glenn did not eat breakfast any longer, her stomach being too delicate and tender to comprehend food at an hour before ten, and Elsie because she really couldn’t wait between meals. If she noticed Glenn fading by the time it was just after one, she didn’t mention it. Almost without fail, Glenn was not in the office in the afternoons. Without telling anyone, she would go home in the early afternoon and sleep. Sometimes she slept for several hours, sleeping through her phone, her pager, her fax, waking to a list of client calls and offers that she couldn’t get up the stomach for, literally, lunch having coiled its way through her stomach into her intestines, or worse.

It’s fine,
she told herself.

Lunch is a bad penny, ha ha. Turning up.

She slept through entire afternoons, only dreaming occasionally. When she dreamed, it was pleasant; as fitting, she dreamed of houses. Rooms of yellow, blue. Flowers bloomed in yards. Summer breezes blew through musical rooms.

Always, Glenn considered new clients. By rote, she went through lists of needs and wants and the property on Belisle sometimes seemed appropriate.

There were no takers throughout the summer. Whatever charms the house held for its previous owners and for Glenn herself remained masked, replaced by a silence and neutrality that did nothing for its appeal. Once or twice, with carefully selected viewers, Glenn tried to drum up enthusiasm for the very things that had always appealed to her in the house: with flash and drama she pulled down the little bed in the room under the stairs; she ran a hand up the shiny banister and pointed out the tin ceilings and the sweetness of the little blue room. She told the story of the tub coming through the window, and opened and closed the specially fitted, arched door in the master bedroom, it seemed mostly, to deaf ears and blind eyes.

Around August, she gave up, and decided that, for good or bad, the house was going to be her personal white elephant; she also gave up understanding why.

Dennis Parkins, the ersatz vendor, perhaps waiting to get all of his “settlement” back out of the house, refused to budge on the asking. The grass grew up around the hedge and no rain through July kept the house covered in a fine layer of dust. It began to absorb the character of “the abandoned house” so popular in teen movies. One nearly expected shadowy figures to walk past blind windows.

She did not drive by at night. At night she slept. Sometimes the house, like a bad penny, would turn up in dreams.

You’re not helping. Not one little bit,
she would think to herself. Always, the house stared back silently.

Who, me?

Richie Bramley was the sort of handsome that had an undertone of manipulation to it. When he smiled—a bright, broad, toothy smile—it was the smile of a boy who knows he can get what he wants, if he can only charm his companion. In this way, it was impossible not to like him. In repose, when the smile faded without the scrutiny of the person he was trying hard to charm, he took on a vulnerable quality that had the same effect. Glenn was thoroughly taken.

She took him on a tour of the usual places, mostly multiple listings of the sort that every single man or woman was looking for. Small, easy, carefree homes with no maintenance and maybe no memories. When he stared ahead out of the window of the car, his lovely, fulllipped mouth turned slightly down at the corners, not in anger, but more like sadness, or exhaustion. Dark half-moons clouded the underside of his eyes. He did not elaborate, but mentioned a teenage son and that he was moving from a rather larger home to something smaller, and Glenn assumed—as with most of her single clients—that there was a break-up or divorce in his past. Glancing sideways at him, she decided he looked very sad.

There was something wrong with everything that she showed him. As much as she inwardly sighed, with each wasted mile on her car ticking away slowly at her 6 percent on houses that were beneath her, she understood. With some clients, you could practically hear a
click
when they walked into a place that would be right for them. Some people, of course, clicked with everything. Everyone clicked with something. Whether they bought it or not was another story, but Richie did not seem comfortable in any of the small, characterless homes that she pulled him through.

His reasons were equally unspecific. And after several hours, he had the good nature to be apologetic about it. He ran his fingers through his hair and chuckled.

“I guess I’m not sure exactly what I want. I just want something…” and he trailed off, as though he had nothing further to add. Glenn waited, but still had the feeling that she was cutting him off.

“I have something you might like,” she said carefully, keeping her eyes on the road—even though she didn’t really have to at that point. At some time in the drive between homes her body had gone into a kind of autopilot. The familiar street names whizzed by: Cranston, Gibbons, Lane Drive.

She hadn’t even known she was going to say it.

“It’s a lovely place on Belisle,” she said.

The sun had come out and shone on the front of the house with the golden light of late day. A recent rain had brightened the exterior. Windows shone back, hiding secrets coyly, like long lashes.

“Just lovely,” she said. She watched his face in profile as he stared out the window of the car at the big house she had inexplicably brought him to. He grinned.
Too big,
he said.
Too much.

He, of course, couldn’t hear the
click.
Richie Bramley, she realized, was looking for the house on Belisle.

And maybe, it was looking for him.

Stop calling me, surely.
She smiled.

The kitchen was full of empty boxes, stacked in a crazy pile. Some had been neatly opened up and folded flat; these were shoved in behind the too-large table, pushed next to the back wall of the house. The girls had folded them in the afternoon, before the beer began in earnest. The stack threatened to fall over with every passing guest. The unpacking was over, but the party was just getting started. It had seemed like a good idea at two in the afternoon with his buddies, and their girls (who did most of the unpacking, truth be told, like little steam engines, they were) running up and downstairs in a fury of industriousness, all the enthusiasm of new starts in every sip of coffee, every bizarre discovery in one of the boxes,
Hey! You guys! Richie has hockey sheets! Bwahhhhh!
and later, the sweet escape of liquor.

The party was getting too big. Richie grabbed another beer from the fridge and caught sight of a pretty girl out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t know her. There was also a guy he didn’t know smoking a cigarette next to his mother’s ancient, maybe antique, buffet. The ash end was long and ready to fall. There were a half-dozen beer bottles on the buffet that he could have tapped the ash into, but the guy just stood there, jabbering away, gesturing with it sometimes. Richie stared, fascinated. He was very stoned. And getting pretty drunk. But pretty drunk wasn’t bad.

He took a long, kindly swallow of the beer in his hand, not very cold, but good, it tasted
good.
It tasted like a party. He liked a party. Parties were
fun.
A person deserved a little fun after moving. He took another (kindly) swallow of the beer and felt around in his shirt pocket for his smokes. They weren’t there.

The pretty-girl-he-didn’t-know looked a little young, maybe mid-twenties. Young for his crowd. He found his smokes on the counter and pulled one out. There were only three left. He frowned. Was he smoking that much? He was trying to cut down.
Aah, it’s a party.

“Bay-beee!” Steve walked into the kitchen and pulled open the fridge door peering in. “Uh-oh…time for another run. Who’s okay to drive?”

“I saw Jimmy standing up.” Richie laughed, the drawn-out guffaw of a drunk. “Myself, I’m a little over the limit,” he added needlessly. It was getting hard to focus. He would have to watch it: it was a delicate balance between drunk and
pretty
drunk.
(Gotta maintain. Aaah, it’s a party.)

Steve pulled out a beer and twisted off the cap. “This isn’t even cold.” Frowning, he opened the fridge, grabbed a mittful of beers and put them into the freezer. “That’ll do it,” he said cheerfully. “Don’t forget those are in there, buddy.”

“You put ’em there. You remember,” Richie slurred.

Steve swallowed beer. “Well, what d’ya think? ’Nother beer run, or kick everybody out? Your place, your call.”

“Who’s that girl?” Richie nodded into the dining room. The guy had put out his cigarette. In a back part of his brain, Richie hoped it was in one of the empties on the buffet. The other part of his brain was focused on the girl.

“Who?” Steve said, without looking. Richie gestured again. Steve shrugged.

“Dunno. I think she came with Roger and them. Roger and them? That right? Roger and
they?
What is it, writer-boy?”

“Correct usage would be
‘them guys what come with Roger.’
Or alternatively,
‘Who the fuck cares?’”

Steve howled, but not at the joke, which seemed to pass unheard. Instead he yelled, “Jenniferrrrr! Baby. Ass. In. Here.
Now!”
He smiled broadly and Jennifer (his Jennifer) pushed through the crowd into the kitchen, somehow filling the room with her…Richie struggled with the word. With her…
lifeness,
he decided. He grinned at his own bad word.

She smelled fresh from the outside air. Her cheeks were pink in the soft light of the kitchen. She opened her arms and hugged Steve with affection. It was genuine. “Steve! How’re you doing?” she said easily. She did everything easily.

Richie grinned. Over his shoulder she locked eyes with him, then blinked away.

“Grand, just grand. Haven’t seen you in a while. You’re scarce. You’re rare. You’re damn near endangered in these parts.” They let go, and Steve opened the freezer and grabbed her one of the cold beers in there.

In the interim she said hello to Richie. “How are you, bud?” she said. Her voice was a little tighter, a little more formal, in spite of the familiarity.
Bud? Since when am I “bud”?

“Can’t complain,” he said, garnering all his resources so that he did not slur his words.
Have to watch it.
“This is my housewarming. This is my
house.”

She looked around, taking in the stacks of boxes at the door and then the crowd that spilled from the living room into the dining room. The noise was a drone of unintelligible conversation. “So I heard,” she said. “I ran into Wendy and Lois at the bar, they said they were on their way here. Housewarming…nice place. Maybe I could get a tour later,” she finished.

Steve gallantly opened her beer and handed it to her. He felt the change in the air and pecked her cheek. “I’m going to go find Bev. Just about time to call it a night for me. Not a bad idea,” he said, cuffing the air in front of Richie and nodding meaningfully.

Richie smacked his cheek back lightly, and with affection. “Yay? Kick ’em out, then,” he said, just barely. Steve laughed and disappeared into the crowd in the dining room, swallowed up, whole.

Jennifer was watching him over the delicate sip she took from the bottle. Over her shoulder the little blonde had stopped looking at him. He avoided looking too hard at Jen.
My Jen. No, not my Jen.

“So,” she said. “How’s the new book coming?”

“Coming right along,” he lied brightly.

She nodded, raised her eyebrows. “Good for you. How’s RJ?”

At the mention of his son, there was a sobering click inside him that he did not appreciate. He furrowed his brow at Jen, resenting her. “Great. How’s the
boyfriend?
Is that who you were at the bar with?”

“Yes, and he’s fine, thank you, employed and everything,” she said pointedly.

“Did you bring him here?”

She shook her head. “Sent him home.” They looked at Richie’s floor for a moment, his new floor in his new home.

Richie grinned at the floor, remembering. “With a lick and promise?” he said. Their old thing.

She laughed shyly. “No. Just ‘good-bye.’ We’re kind of casual now.”

“You’re blushing,” he said, forgetting the boyfriend in light of circumstance. Light of her face.

“You’re drunk,” she said, but affectionately.

Their eyes met again and held for a second longer. He wanted to reach out and touch her hair or her shoulder or something, and realized it wasn’t lust. He just wanted to touch her. All the beer he’d drunk throughout the day rolled over in his stomach and he felt suddenly very drunk, and tired. Maybe even tired of being drunk, if that was possible. Maybe bad, like he wanted to fold himself into a fetal position at her feet. He forced a grin on his face and drained the beer in his hand.

“How’s the Job?” he said meaningfully, and hurtfully, making her sigh. Whatever moment might have come next disappeared. Richie was grateful and didn’t listen to her answer, instead peered over her shoulder and tried to catch a glimpse of the other girl, who had disappeared. He leaned over too far accidentally and swayed, catching himself.

She said quietly, “I thought you quit drinking.”

“I said I was going to drink ‘no
more,’”
he said flippantly, slurring the R in drink. “Also, no
less.”
He pointed at her, swaying a little too close.

“Okay. Well, it was nice to see you again,” she said sarcastically. “As always.”

“Come on, Jen. At least gimme a hug.” And he plunked his empty bottle down on the counter and reached around her, engulfing her. He squeezed her warmly for a moment, and felt that click that he hated so much, that nakedness. She hugged him back, sincerely, and he felt her relax into him. Their bodies were familiar to each other, as familiar as the dance of emotions, the anger-love, the reactionary words. Her breasts pushed into his chest. Her hair smelled like outside and the skin of her shoulder was warm and soft under his chin until he couldn’t stand her closeness, her nakedness. His hands slipped down her back and groped her ass, one cheek in each hand and he squeezed.

She pushed him away. “Same old Rich,” she said sadly. She wandered off into the party, leaving him alone in the kitchen, a grin pasted over lips that wanted to sneer. It was the
sadly
that did it.

He found the blonde. The living room was packed with people, most of whom he knew only casually. Steve had left with Bev. The clock that was propped on the mantel at a crazy angle said it was after one. He was getting anxious for the party to break up. He was still drunk, but had started nursing a beer instead of guzzling them. He was feeling a little sick. He would feel worse in the morning if he wasn’t careful. He was tired. Dubs was in the corner telling dirty jokes to a bunch that had come over from the bar. Richie wandered over. “Hey,” he said.

Dubs shook his hand, wrist-style, and said, “Nice place,” before continuing with the story.

Richie waited for the punch line of the joke he’d heard already that day, before telling the group that it was time to call it a night. “I got my kid coming in the morning,” he said. The crowd from the bar went quiet at the mention of real life.

The blonde was over by the buffet again. Someone had rummaged through his cupboards and found a box of crackers. She and some other girl were eating them. Richie sauntered over as best he could. “Hello,” he said, keeping focused on the words in his mouth. His eyes were at half-mast, mostly from being tired. “How do you like my house, and who are you?”

She smiled sweetly. “Ashley,” she said, widening her eyes appealingly. “Is this your house?” It was a lie, and he could tell, but he let her have it.

“It’s my new house,” he said. He realized it, then. He’d hardly thought about it. He’d bought a fuckin’ house. “I’m Richie Bramley,” he said, and then, gesturing grandly and nearly knocking over a beer bottle on the buffet, he added, “And this is my house.”

She introduced her friend and Richie didn’t hear the friend’s name, but he chatted with her politely in a bid to confuse the blonde and nudge her interest up a notch. It worked mostly because the girl was a girl. Jen wouldn’t have fallen for that. When she started telling him a story about her dog, he leaned in especially close and listened with what he hoped was an intent expression. Because the stereo was loud, he was able to lean in with his head tilted downward, listening, allowing his eyes to rest on her breasts. They were nice little round ones. When she moved her arms in the story, they jiggled happily.

Like a bowl full of jelly,
he thought.
Two bowls.
And then he giggled. The story wasn’t funny, though. And she said, punching him lightly on the arm (first contact), “What’s so funny about that?” But, of course, he hadn’t been listening and could think of no plausible answer.

“I’m sorry, darlin’,” he said, standing up straight and looking into her large brown eyes. A brown-eyed blonde. Very nice. “I was just thinking about how you are as cute as a little bunny,” he said, stealing—mostly for himself—a line from a movie. “And that made me laugh.” Her eyes blinked a little slower than they should have and he realized (gleefully) that she was a little drunk. It made him bold. He reached an arm around her waist and pulled her into him. There was a nice curve to her, between ass and waist. Quickly he wondered, guiltily, if Jen was still at the party and dismissed it on impulse.
Fuck it; not my Jen.

She laughed, let him hold her a second too long before squirming away without much force. He reached for her again, but only lightly—he didn’t want to scare away the little bunny—and whispered in her ear,
You are very hot.
She smiled and giggled and did not try to get away.

He let her talk. Slowly, around them, the party broke up, disappeared. Dubs wandered over to say good-bye and remind him about the football game. “Around two,” he said. “You bringing RJ?” and Richie went blank.
RJ?
Looked confused.

Shit. Richard Junior. RJ.
“Yeah,” he said, recovering quickly, letting go of the girl and assuming a serious expression for the moment. “Around two. See ya, buddy,” he said, and they shook hands again.

Dubs checked out the girl with an unreadable expression and from somewhere near the door his wife called him and hollered a good-bye to Richie. “Happy housewarming,” she singsonged.

Richie raised a hand. “Thanks, Brenda. See ya!”

The door slammed and it was suddenly quiet, the room empty, and Richie and the girl (Amber? Angie?) were standing too close together. She stared at him openly, a knowing expression on her face.

“’Nother beer?” She shook her head. She did not move away. He reached around and pulled her to him again and smiled close to her face before putting his mouth on hers. She tasted like cigarettes and gum. She made a sound in her throat and kissed back, and between them heat spread.

“Wanna see the house?” he asked, low, everything suddenly different. She nodded, and put her beer down.

She was bent backward over the edge of the bed. Richie had pushed her T-shirt and her bra up over her breasts and her nipples were poked up at him, hard and red in the dark room. Her jeans were unbuttoned at the waist, but not off. He buried his face between her breasts, pushing them together against his cheeks, hands full. She pressed her pelvis against his. His hard-on pressed against the tab of her zipper. They were silent except for the noises made in their throats.

He rubbed her nipples with his thumbs and she squirmed under him. He kissed her mouth and pulled his lips over her chin and neck and over the fabric of her shirt and onto her chest, finding breasts and, at the same time, tugging up her T-shirt. She raised her arms, and they paused long enough to take her shirt off. He pulled his off and it was flesh on flesh. Her body was warm, she was fleshy and firm, not skinny like so many girls.