“Stellar to have you on board, man. Right after I got hired, they appointed a female CEO and she’s hired only women since. I thought I was going to have to file a discrimination suit. Where my bros at, ya know? I mean, the office has some nice scenery now, but I want someone to enjoy it with.” He chucks my arm a little too hard. I battle with whether I’ll share his worldview with Julie when I get home. Is the commiseration worth turning her against my one friend in this town?
The bar is exactly what I expected. Tin signs and faded motel art cover the faux-wood paneling. A fat folder spilling customer tabs is wedged beside the register. Bottles of liquor aren’t lined up neatly on display; they’re wedged behind tchotchkes. A bottle of Wild Turkey peeks out from behind a bas-relief placard showing a lady leaning against a stove with the saying THE KITCHEN IS CLOSED DUE TO ILLNESS. I’M SICK OF COOKING. Peach schnapps rests between a taxidermic fox’s legs.
We take turns buying a round each, then Sam says he has to get home to watch the game. I compliment his choice of teams; they’re doing well this season and I’d have bet on them if I hadn’t promised Julie I’d stop. He high-fives me and punches my arm again. I will myself not to flinch.
Sam checks his reflection in a Bud Light mirror. He pinches his goatee to no noticeable effect and straightens the collar of his polo. “Later, man. Hasta ma?ana.” He heads for the door.
I order one more. The old bartender, who’s been silent until now, tells me my face is new. “Where’re you from?” he says without much interest. He reaches across the bar to wipe down the area where Sam was sitting. I notice the wrong way the last joints of his fingers bend.
“We’re from the city. We moved into the big house at the end of Stillwater.”
He looks up sharply. “The end of Stillwater, you say?”
“With the wraparound porch, yeah.”
“Well, they’ve all got wraparound porches over there, so you’re not helping me much, but you’re saying the last one before the woods, is that right?”
“That’s the one.” I take a sip. “Why?”
“I know a bit about that house. Do you?”
I pause. “I know I live there. What else is there to know?”
“A family lived in that house for a long time, parents and a handful of kids—little slices of people, they were. Pale. Fuzzy.”
“But what about ’em?”
He runs his thumb inside the waistline of his jeans, inching up the flesh of his belly behind his thin T-shirt and then letting it fall. “Well, the boy child was seen so little people wondered if he was real. Shined like a shaded bulb, if you know what I mean. Now the girl, I knew a bit because my buddy dated her back in high school. She had troubles. My friend was never allowed in the house, but he was enamored for a short while until her father told him not to come near her anymore.”
I ask the bartender for more pretzels. He refills the bowl with a warning: “Careful, those suckers’ll make you thirstier, and then you’ll be wobbling your car home like the road is a tightrope.”
“No reason to reveal the trade secrets. I’ll take a glass of water, too.”
The bartender fills a pint glass for me. “Now, the girl had a habit. When they were out, she’d keep scribbling in a notebook or on a napkin or any little scrap of paper she could dig up. My buddy said he didn’t even think she knew what she was writing most of the time. She’d fill up a piece of paper and then flip it around, start writing the other way. Layers. He said he’d wonder if she was listening to him when he talked, but she could carry on a full conversation while she wrote. I’d say he was a little relieved when her father forbade him from coming round. He wanted to understand, and he was getting the idea he couldn’t.”
“So what happened to her?” I catch sight of the clock in the mirror behind the bar. I realize I should get going.
“Oh, she ran away from home not long after that. Her parents died, and then the state tried to track her down but couldn’t, so they ended up putting the house on the market.”
I ask for my tab. I thank him. “I’ll be back in case you think of any more stories.”
The bartender looks at me as if I’ve misunderstood.
I drive on the four-lane highway, until the heavy trees thin and side streets offer themselves. I look for kids running around after dinner. I hunt for the lights of TVs in windows, but still, the neighborhood is silent. It’s later than I think, I tell myself. You wanted quiet. This is what you wanted.
7
JAMES IS LATE getting himself home from work one night, and I consider looking up the location of the nearest OTB parlor, but stop myself. He might still be working or maybe he’s made a friend. I wonder why the living room looks so clean and realize James’s boxes are gone. The lower shelves of the bookcase are solid now with his collection of crime novels, urban histories, sports biographies. I hunt through the house, wondering what he’s done with the rest of his stuff, if he’s stashed it in closets. His movies are tucked into the video cabinet. The board games are stacked, haphazardly, in a cupboard in the basement. The desk in the guest room is piled with office supplies. I peek out the back door and find the flattened cardboard boxes slid behind the recycling bin. Granted I’ve been nagging him to do this for days, but in the end he’s finished unpacking before I have. I feel a wave of guilt, and then joy that I won’t need to bring it up again, that I can praise him when he arrives home, and then I claim his productivity as my own and give myself the night off from unpacking my lingering boxes.
I wander the yard, surveying what needs to be done. Behind the house, where the birches are dense like teeth in a mouth, I find a spot where the foliage grows weak. A row of stones lines the short end of a patch of dirt. Memorial. What I’m looking at is a grave. I try to talk myself out of it, but I circle the spot, hunting for clues. It doesn’t even seem like a secret that’s trying to be kept.
A large bird circles overhead, but I know it’s my imagination that makes it a vulture, and I look back to our house and then the house next door and see the old man in the window for only a second and I wonder if he knows something about this.
Could there be more of them? I wander, rooting with my eyes, in the backyard first and then through the woods with no luck, and on the other side, where the forest meets the beach, I stop looking down and lift my head to the water, and my windpipe is overwhelmed by a gale, and my breath clogs with the force of it, and my mouth fractures into a grimace as I gasp, and I squeeze the meat of my arms, and I try to harness my heartbeat to calm myself, and my nostrils feel full of sand, and the potential of the moment paralyzes me.