Picture This (3 page)

Chapter 4

Natalie

N
atalie had been afraid of the dark when she lived with her third foster family, or was it the fourth? She was only seven years old, and although she had tried to hold on to her sense of time—in the same desperate way she had tried to hold on to everything, including her favorite baby blanket—she could never be entirely sure of her actual age when she reached into her memory. The early years in foster care were fluid. The third family did not beat her, and they fed her, and no one in the house told her to take down her pants to hurt her; along with the second family, the third was a vast improvement over the first. But they would not let her keep a light in the bedroom, not even the tiniest night-light. She was not allowed to keep her bedroom door open so that a welcome wave of light might wash into the room. She could have slept if even the slimmest blade of light had pierced the room.

Mr. Burkhardt, the dad, said big girls didn't need to have night-lights or hallway lights. He was of the opinion that total darkness provided the essential ingredient for the best sleep.

“Why would you need lights to go to sleep?” he asked. But he wasn't asking, and Natalie finally understood that his question was meant as an absolute rule after she offered every reason under the sun for a night-light. The darkness was solid and wet and unforgiving. There were no streetlights outside the Burkhardts' house, and Natalie pulled the covers around her face as much as she could without smothering herself.

Creatures of the night waited for her to move or show fear; they thrived on it. Even at age seven, she understood this. Monsters wanted to see her fear. She lay stiff and unmoving, frozen in place, praying to live until daybreak. When enough of the dense night had dissipated to convince her that the dawn was emerging, sometime around 5:00
A.M.
, she could afford to move and soften her body. Then she slept, only to be startled awake two hours later by Mrs. Burkhardt.

“Time for school. Get up, Miss Sleepyhead.”

Did other children live with this same danger each night, living one breath away from the monsters that threatened to rip them to pieces? Mr. and Mrs. Burkhardt had each other, and Natalie knew they fell asleep to the blue light of the small television set in their bedroom. She longed to sleep on their floor, to slip along the baseboards so that she could be in the light with them. She craved it the way she had craved food in the other family. If she could only have the smallest bit of light, she'd be safe and she could sleep.

Natalie found pillow-padded nooks and crannies in the classroom where she could sleep for precious moments until the teacher came looking for her. There was a tunnel in the play structure where she could curl into a ball and fall asleep to the safe hum of fluorescent lights and the voice of her teacher and the other children. At the Burkhardts', she began to hide in the house long before bedtime; sometimes she turned into a flat piece of paper and slid under the couch. Other times she hid behind the big chairs in the living room, tucking her head into her knees. She only vaguely recalled the screaming and spitting when the Burkhardts found her and had to carry her to her bedroom.

T
he trick with darkness was to become the boss, to own it, to have control over it. Now, at age eighteen, Natalie loved the absoluteness of the darkness, the density of it, the way it dared her to lay open her secrets. When she moved to her own apartment in Worcester after the emancipation, she did not turn on her lights for the first week. The first night left her huddled in a corner, her cell phone gripped tight, a flashlight in her pocket pressed to her belly. She dared the creatures of the night to show their ugly faces, and when they did not, she uncurled her spine. As long as she made the rules, darkness was unable to slide its damp tongue along her neck. This place was hers, and she could choose whether to turn on the lights or not. She steeled herself to join in with the terrors of the night. She showered in the dark, walked the perimeter of the small apartment in the dark. This place was hers; it lacked the monsters of other places. She had checked every closet, under the bed, every shelf, and she had rubbed her hand along every crevice. This was a place where she could live in the dark because she chose to.

Chapter 5

R
ocky had owned one house, and that had been with Bob. She had been thirty-one when they bought their house, and she had wondered if she was old enough or smart enough to buy a house. All along, however, Bob had said, “It's only wood and mortar.” Together they had purchased the house in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains.

They had a friend from Boulder, Colorado, who had visited them, and he asked, “Aren't the Berkshires really foothills themselves?” And it was true: compared to the Rockies, with their sharp peaks and ridges, the Berkshires were rubbed down like half-eaten muffins, dotted with thousands of acres of white birches.

Rocky was now a newly minted thirty-nine, and she was looking at the house on Peaks Island, the one that had sat vacant and uncared for. If she bought it, she would have to figure out everything on her own.

“It's just mortar and wood,” she said unconvincingly to her brother. She held the cell phone uncomfortably close to her ear as she sat parked in the beat-up yellow truck in front of the Costello place. On the second story, the house had three gabled windows that stared back at her, their dark green shutters like mascara on three eyes. A widow's walk perched on the top of the house, a tiny room ringed by a deck. A wide porch faced the road. She had called the agent who handled the property the night before, after making two more calls to the number that Natalie gave her.

“Let's see if I've got the whole picture,” said Caleb. “Unless you can do therapy long distance, and I so hope you can't, this means you're quitting your job at the college. Have you told them yet? Have you told Mom yet?”

“Negative,” said Rocky. “You know I always talk to you first.”

Aside from college and graduate school, Rocky and Caleb had never lived more than twenty miles apart. Until Rocky moved nearly four hours away after Bob died. Summer was Caleb's busy time painting houses; she had reached him on the job, two stories up on an old colonial in Leeds. In the winter months, Caleb made sculptures of musicians: euphoric, sax-playing women and spine-tingling men, arms held high with a fiddle. Rocky had sold five of them through a gallery in Portland over the winter, with a list of people who were willing to wait. She chose not to tell him about Natalie. Not yet.

“F
ull disclosure means that I have to tell you of the dire circumstances related to this house before I sell it,” said the Realtor. He was a young man with a sober demeanor who had introduced himself as a first-generation Puerto Rican from Brooklyn. His body was compact and muscled. He drove an old Ford Bronco.

“Does that mean your family has been in the States for one generation?”

“My parents were born in PR, and I was born here. Like I said, first generation.”

Rocky already knew all about the dire circumstances of the house. This was where an old fisherman had killed himself after the debilitating illness and death of his wife. His wife had been dead and buried for two weeks when Mr. Costello had cleaned the house, carefully covered the stacked firewood with a blue tarp, and nailed a warning note to his front door that admonished the visitor to call the Portland police and not to enter until the police got there. Then he covered his head with the side bag from his lawn mower and shot himself. His attempt at tidiness was not entirely successful: the cleanup crew was forced to wash down the living room walls with bleach. Who would want a house that was soaked in pain, remembrance, and unbearable tragedy? Which was precisely what Caleb would ask later when she called him back.

“Why do you want to buy a crap house that's got mouse shit for insulation when you have a good solid house back here? And that is just plain gross about the lawn mower bag.”

Why did she want this house? There were over fifty houses for sale on Peaks. But a house where grief took a stranglehold on a widower more than three years ago? Somehow that seemed within the realm of good judgment; she understood the landscape.

When Carlos the Realtor showed her the house, he said, “I assume you'll be tearing down the old house and building new. It's a valuable lot, almost big enough for three parcels if you apply for a variance.” He stood in the entryway and made sure that he touched nothing. His thick black eyelashes grazed his glasses as he spoke.

Rocky leaned her spine against the molding of the kitchen door. “This house has good bones.” She had heard people say that before but never imagined that she'd be the one saying it.

“Nothing's going to happen without an inspection. Can't get a mortgage without one,” he said.

“What happens if I don't want a mortgage?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I'd like to buy the house outright. Cash.”

“Is there something you don't like about the mortgage system?”

“I want to move quickly, before I change my mind. Forget the inspection,” said Rocky. “I have money from my husband's life insurance. This would take a massive bite out of it. . . .”

Carlos shifted his weight. He put his clipboard on the kitchen counter.

“This is important. You're not buying a pair of shoes here. I personally will not let you buy this place without an inspection. I don't care if you have all the cash in your back pocket right now. You need to know if the roof is ready to cave in, if the place has termites.” Carlos paused and seemed to reconsider his approach. “I don't know what your husband did or how he died, but you should respect his memory by doing this right. He meant for you to have life insurance money to take care of you, not for you to throw it away. I'm scheduling an inspection, and you need to chill about this.”

It had been twenty-four hours since the girl had called her, and Rocky was well on her way to buying a house.

Carlos was able to make things happen quickly. The heirs of the property were thrilled with Rocky's offer and never haggled over one cent. Carlos brought in an inspector in record time. By the next day, Rocky and Carlos were in Portland, waiting for the real estate attorney to arrive so they could sign, initial, and date the final ream of documents. As they waited, Carlos filled Rocky in on his rise in the world of real estate.

He told her that he'd grown up in a single-parent household in Brooklyn. His mother smoked crack and most of the time left the kids alone to raise themselves. “I was in Juvie Hall by the time I was twelve. All the other boys liked it there because it was the best they had ever had. That's what turned on the light for me: I knew I didn't want jail to be the best place I'd ever live. From that moment on, I made choices. Did I want to smoke crack with my mother and be like her? No. So I didn't smoke crack. That first choice helped so much that I kept making other choices. Did I want to have a job other than selling drugs? Yes, since I wanted a life expectancy beyond age twenty-three. So I finished high school. Did I want my younger brothers and sisters to live in foster care? No. So I got a job and took care of them. My youngest brother goes to college now. He's in his third year, studying criminal justice. Did I want my kids to have a father who walked out on them? No. So I had to learn to be a father, which is a lot harder than selling houses and anything else I've ever gone through.”

Rocky had gradually accepted that life on the island was more personal than her life had been in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. There was something butt-naked about the way people did business here. Once again, she was conducting a business transaction thinking that it might be an in-and-out sort of event. Now, after she'd heard about the decline and rise of Carlos's lineage in heart-rending detail, Carlos had given her his stamp of approval on her housing choice.

“Nobody wants to buy real estate with bad history,” he said. “I didn't go to college, but I can tell you that the history that happened in this house is gone and you're getting an island house for $50,000 less than the going rate. In my old neighborhood we called that. . . .” He paused, censoring his memories. “We called that a very good deal. Congratulations.” He nodded with approval.

A
fter signing all the final documents and acquiring the keys, she hopped the first ferry back to the island and took care of business in her little cottage. Isaiah had rented it to her the previous October, almost apologetically. It had two small bedrooms, a kitchen with hard-worn linoleum, and one room that served as living room and dining room and looked out to the ocean over the top of a quarter-mile stand of dense bittersweet. Peterson the cat appeared on the deck, responding to the sound of Rocky's crunching footsteps on the driveway. The calico had a daytime life amid the bittersweet that had a lot to do with rodent annihilation. Cooper greeted Rocky's entrance with his full-throttle, body-twisting euphoria, as if he was amazed at her return. She fed both animals and made sure that Peterson was inside for the night.

“Cooper, I need your stamp of approval on the new house. We're sleeping over.” The dog lifted his head from his post-dinner grooming and cocked one eyebrow.

This was one reason why she should go back to the university: she was seeking validation from a black Lab. But she wanted to see what it felt like in the new house with Cooper by her side, and she was a bit spooked about spending the first night alone in the house. She was considerably braver with a ninety-pound dog on her side of the equation.

They stood in front of her new front door, and she said to the house, “Show me your worst and loudest. Let's get everything out on the table.” It had been forty-eight hours since Natalie called.

Rocky unlocked the side door to the kitchen and began her private inspection. The sink had gone yellow with singular determination. Piles of mouse droppings dotted the kitchen drawers. Cooper's black claws clicking on the linoleum announced his movement around the kitchen. He lowered his head and sniffed, following ancient scents of children, family pets, and the final months of illness and death.

No one had lived in the house for three years except right after Mr. Costello's death, when his horrified cousins had spent just a week emptying the house of personal possessions. Catastrophes of such proportions formed a solid, epic fable for the islanders. Speculations about what makes a man take his own life flew around the Island Café for months, according to Isaiah. Did he do it out of love? Madness? Profound depression? Every man gripping his coffee cup wondered aloud if he would do the same thing. The Costellos had been married for forty-seven years. Had there been no kind friend, brother, or bighearted niece to hold tight to Mr. Costello until the worst of his grief began to ease? Rocky had tasted the desire to end her life in her addled thinking during the months after Bob's death. What was it that pulled her so securely to a safe harbor? Finding the big black dog for one thing.

Three years is a deadly time of loneliness for a house. Just like cats, houses shouldn't be left untended for longer than three days; three years is devastating. A house has its own mental health requirements, the primary requirement being occupancy. Carbon dioxide must be exhaled into the drywall, skin detritus needs to flutter about the crevices like snow, and houses even welcome bits of flicked earwax in reserved spots along the far corners. Left alone too long, a house forgets how to breathe and grows anxious as the water sits too long in the toilets tanks. An old woman had been gripped by disease here and died in the arms of her husband. And he had been unable to conceive of life without her. Love had exhaled and never inhaled again here. Nearly all of the consciousness that remained in the floorboards, cupboards, and windowsills was gone when Rocky arrived and said, “I'll buy it.”

She wanted to resuscitate the house. She opened the kitchen windows. A breeze brought in the thick scent of wisteria from the adjacent property.

Rocky and Cooper spent the first night with only a leaky air mattress that she dragged in and inflated with her bike pump. The living room, with its gaping fireplace, seemed the most central location to camp and get to know the house. She dove into her sleeping bag as soon as it was dark. Cooper lowered his bulk to the side of the mattress. Rocky scrunched her way closer to him and let one hand fall onto his warm back. She wanted to see and hear everything the house had to say. When the weight of darkness took hold without the benefit of ambient light from any human source, she was grateful that Cooper was by her side.

Rocky didn't know what to expect, but something had repelled others from the house, some continued taint of suicide from Mr. Costello that would be loud and ominous. What she wasn't expecting was how the house would voice itself.

Was a house like a child or a dog, reverberating to emotions around them, unable to put the waves of sadness into words? Rocky unzipped the sleeping bag, determined to take the pulse of the house even though her heart pounded and she felt small in the belly of the house. She wasn't like Tess: she didn't smell colors or see time passing in shapes. But if this house had come to her, if it had walked into her therapy office, she would have said, “Tell me why you're here.” Which was what she said to the house now.

“Tell me . . . ,” she started. Before she could finish, she was sure she heard the house sigh, the kind of sigh that a child makes after a long crying spell has ended. Then she sat for hours, as witness to the sad house, letting it expel the shudders of crying so that it could move on to begin its new life. She would later think that the sound had to be the wind or the house settling, that she had perhaps dreamed about the muffled noise. And she did fall asleep several times, waking to listen again. She wanted her 4:00
A.M.
brain to experience the house, the time when thinking goes spiral and catastrophic before morning light restores reason.

She woke once and saw moonlight reflected in Cooper's eyes as he sat by her mattress. The wall with the open windows looked oddly wet, gleaming as water does, as if a steady sheet of water flowed along the wall from ceiling to floor. In her half-slumber, this phenomenon seemed understandable, even a sign of rebirth. Such is the way of 4:00
A.M.
thinking. In the morning, she only half-remembered the water, but when she did, she touched the wall in many places and all that she felt were the brittle flakes of wallpaper.