HOUNTED HERSELF

Chapter One: Moving In Part 2

"Tell me again why we're doing this," he'd said, the night before we signed the papers, lying in the dark of the old bedroom with the moving boxes already stacked against the wall like patient furniture.

"Better school district," I said. "Lower taxes. You said yourself the commute out here was getting.."

"Eleanor." Just my name, which from Charles always meant: I can tell when you're handing me the version of the truth that's easiest to carry. "I'm not asking what we're telling people. I'm asking you."

I lay there a long moment, looking at the ceiling, at the water stain shaped vaguely like a rabbit that had been there since before Sammy was born. "I don't know how to explain it," I finally said, "in a way that doesn't sound like I've lost my mind."

"Try me."

"There's a house," I said. "There's been a house, since I was a girl. I used to walk past it on the way to school, and I felt.." I stopped. "I felt like it was waiting for me. Not in a frightening way. Or not only in a frightening way. Like a place can be lonely the way a person can be lonely, and somehow it had decided that loneliness was mine to fix."

Charles didn't laugh, which I have loved him for, in the years since, more than almost anything else he's ever done. He turned onto his side and looked at me in the dark, and after a while he said, "And it's still for sale? After thirty years?"

"It's been for sale, off and on, for thirty years. Nobody stays in it long."

"That's not a recommendation, El."

"I know."

"You know I have doubts about this."

"I know that too."

He was quiet long enough that I thought the conversation had ended, that we'd go to sleep with the matter unresolved the way married couples sometimes do, agreeing without agreeing simply because the hour has grown too late to keep arguing. Then he said, very softly, almost to the ceiling rather than to me, "Okay." Just that. Okay. As if the word itself were a kind of door he was deciding, against his own better instincts, to walk through. I have thought about that okay more times than I can count, in the years since. I have wondered what it cost him to say it, and whether I ever once thanked him properly for paying it. The truth, if I'm being honest, and I am trying very hard to be honest. Even where honesty and accuracy turn out to be two different animals. I let people believe that the move was his idea. I let them believe for longer than I should have, because it was easier than explaining the alternative. He'd found a listing one night scrolling through his phone in bed, the way he did when he couldn't sleep. And showed it to me sideways, half-apologetic, the way you'd show someone a photograph of an old flame. Funny, isn't it, that this is even on the market. I remember being so calm about it. I remember saying huh, and turning the page of my book, and not sleeping again until almost four in the morning.

That part is true, as far as it goes. What I left out, for years is telling it that way. That I'd circled the listing myself days before he ever found it. Circled it twice, in red pen, on a flyer I'd torn down from a grocery store bulletin board and folded into my coat pocket like a stolen thing. I don't know why I told it the other way for so long. Maybe because admitting you went looking for something makes you responsible for what it does to you once you've found it.

We pulled onto Birchwood a little after eight thirty, and there it was, sitting back from the road further than its neighbors. It stand behind birches just starting to drop their bark in long curling ribbons, exactly as I remembered, down to the crooked porch step on the left that nobody, in thirty years, had ever bothered to fix.

The U-Haul was already idling in the driveway when we arrived, two movers leaning against its flank smoking cigarettes they put out the moment they saw the car. Charles was out of his seat almost before we'd stopped rolling, directing them with the particular satisfaction of a man who has found, for once, a task that wants exactly the kind of competence he has to give. "That one's fragile, the tape says fragile, can you read, son" Sammy stayed wedged in the back with his comic book and refused to come out for love or bribery, until I produced the snacks I'd packed for exactly this situation. I had learned, by then, that snacks were the only currency that worked on him reliably.

"Samsam," I called through the window, "you can't live in the car."

"I can," he said, without looking up, "if I have snacks."

I had snacks. I always had snacks, that year.

It was while the movers were arguing about the angle of a dresser that I first saw Walt, though I didn't know his name yet. I didn't know anything about him except that he was standing at the property line in a cardigan too warm for the weather. His watching us with the unhurried interest of a man who has lived somewhere long enough that watching the neighbors arrive has become a form of entertainment he no longer apologizes for.

When I crossed over to introduce myself. "You're the new people," he said, in the tone of a man stating a fact rather than asking a question.

"Eleanor," I said. "And that's Charles, and somewhere in that car is our son, though he's refusing to be born into this family today."

Walt laughed, a good laugh, easy, the kind that made you trust a person faster than you probably should. "Walt," he said. "Lived next door going on twenty years now. You'll want to know the trash schedule's backwards from what the city website says, and the mail carrier comes around two, not eleven like she's supposed to."

"Good to know."

"You from around here...originally?" he asked, and something in the way he asked it not quite suspicious, but close, the careful attention of a man who collects small local facts the way other men collect coins. Id answer more honestly than I'd meant to.

"I grew up about a mile that way," I said, gesturing vaguely toward the school I could no longer see from here. But I knew exactly which direction it sat in, the way you know the direction of your own heartbeat. "Haven't lived here in thirty years."

"And you came back to this house." He said it slowly, looking past me at the birches, at the porch, at the window on the second floor that would, within the hour, become Sammy's. There was something in his face I couldn't name yet and wouldn't be able to name for a long time after. Its not quite alarm, not quite pity, something closer to recognition. The look of a man watching someone walk toward a door he already knows the far side of.

"Is that strange?" I asked, half-joking.

"No," Walt said, after a pause just a beat too long to be entirely comfortable. "No, I don't suppose it is." And then, brightening, the way people do when they've decided not to say the thing they were about to say. "Welcome to the neighborhood, Eleanor. You let me know if you need anything."

I would come to know that sentence very well, over the years that followed. I did not know, that first morning, how literally I would eventually need to take it. Sammy finally emerged from the car around noon, blinking like something newly hatched. He stood in the gravel driveway looking up at the house with the particular blank assessment of a child deciding whether a place is going to be good to him or not.

"It's big," he said, which from a seven-year-old is neither praise nor complaint, just data.

"You'll have your own room," I told him. "Right up there." I pointed at the window on the second floor. Its the one that used to watch me, all those years ago, the one I'd never told anyone about except, eventually, one person, on a different night entirely, beside a different kind of water. The window did not, of course, do anything at all that afternoon. Windows don't move. Nothing about that first day announced itself as anything other than ordinary. Maybe hot, a little humid, smelling of cut grass and the movers' cigarettes, Charles swearing cheerfully at a dresser that wouldn't fit through the doorway at the angle he wanted it to.

Sammy ran the upstairs hallway twice, claimed the room with the window. He stands in the doorway and announces "mine" with the absolute confidence of the very young, and spent the rest of the afternoon arranging and rearranging a shelf of plastic dinosaurs with the gravity of a man laying out battle plans. Charles and the movers fought the dresser into submission by two. By four, the truck was empty, the movers paid and gone, and the three of us stood in our new kitchen eating sandwiches off paper towels because the plates were still somewhere in a box marked, unhelpfully.

"Well," Charles said, looking around at the bare walls, the taped boxes, the long gold afternoon light coming in slant through a window that needed washing. "We did it."

"We did it," I agreed.

He looked at me a moment longer than the sentence required. "You happy?"

"Ask me in a year."

He laughed, but there was something underneath it. There always was with Charles, not quite worry, not quite doubt, just a kind of patient watchfulness. A look of a man who has agreed to something he doesn't fully understand because he trusts the person asking him to agree to it. I have thought, many times since, about how much faith that takes. I have thought about whether I deserved it.

The days that followed had the particular shapeless quality of any new household finding its rhythms. The boxes flattened and stacked at the curb, picture hooks driven into the wrong studs and patched and tried again. A long debate about which wall in the dining room could survive a bookshelf without listing into the floor. Charles found, within a week, an actual hardware store two towns over to replace the one that had become a coffee shop, and came home from it looking more settled than he had in months. The particular settledness of a man who has located the nearest source of wood screws and can therefore, on some fundamental level, relax.