House Next Door

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  The package was not for us. It was addressed to Mr. Buford A. Sheehan, and the return address was that of a medical supply house in New Jersey. I shook it. It rattled faintly, like pills. Oh, damn, I thought. I don’t want to bother the Sheehans, but if this is medicine she’s getting wholesale, she may need it right away. I never knew Buck’s name was Buford.

  I finished my Tab and then went grumpily upstairs, slid my feet into sandals, and walked across the driveway to the Sheehans’ house. It was still and quiet in the afternoon heat. The nurse’s yellow Rambler was gone, but Buck’s car was parked in the driveway. I hesitated on the back deck. If Buck was with Anita, I really did hate to disturb them. But I remembered that Virginia had said that the nurse gave Anita a pill just before she left and that she slept soundly for three or four hours after that. Buck was probably spelling the nurse because she’d had to leave early. So I walked up to the back door and raised my hand to knock softly.

  The back of the house that Kim built is all glass; sliding doors open onto the deck, and the glass lets in the entire sweep of deep woods behind, soaring up the remnant of the ridge that once ran along the lot. It is a lovely sight, looking out from inside. Even on that terrible, humming, unreal night it had been a lovely sight. I had never looked in from outside during the daylight hours. You got a glimpse of the kitchen to the left, all warm, waxed birch and white Italian tile bricks, and a full view of the den and living room beyond the kitchen, and the bottom of the stairs that wound up into the top two floors from the living room. Blinded with the glare from the glass and perspiration running into my eyes, I could see nothing at first.

  I heard the sounds, though, and I stayed my knock, puzzled for an instant by the half-familiar, half-disturbing noise. A rhythmic sort of muffled thumping. Soft keening, a kind of strangled, rhythmic grunting. Then a liquid crashing, as if from broken glass. Alarmed, I pressed closer to the sliding door.

  The man and the woman were on the sofa in the living room. They lay in full view. They were naked, thrashing, pumping, deep in the embrace. Their heads were at the far end of the sofa facing me, their legs entwined and frantic and uncontrolled. The keening rose, the grunts soared into guttural cries. Profoundly shocked and embarrassed, I stood frozen for a moment, fist raised, heart pounding. I whipped my head around, preparing to flee as quickly and quietly as possible from my unwitting intrusion into this ultimate intimacy and communion between Buck and Anita Sheehan. A blur of red caught my eyes as I turned my head, an intrusive, jarring banner that was so dreadfully, terribly wrong in the room that it tore my eyes back, frantic as I was to be away from there and gone.

  Anita Sheehan sat on the bottom step, facing the sofa. Her long robe, scarlet as running blood, was flung away from her tumbled legs. Her skin was the pale white-green of an underwater swimmer in the green-washed light slanting in through the trees. Her hands were clasped loosely in her lap, palms up, like those of a child receiving instructions. She rocked her body slowly back and forth, moving only from the waist up. Her face was turned to the sofa, but her eyes looked beyond it into the trees outside, and beyond those into nowhere. Into nowhere, nowhere-never, finally and forever. Her face was absolutely still and quiet.

  I looked in blank, vibrating shock back into the living room. There was a white-frosted Gilbey’s gin bottle on the floor beside the sofa and a glass on the coffee table and a sprinkling of crystal litter on the polished wood of the floor directly beneath the woman’s foot. Buck Sheehan gave a great cry and heaved in spasm, and I raised my eyes slowly to the woman’s face. It was contorted in a silent rictus, the mouth open and square like that of a child crying. Virginia Guthrie’s face in passion was no longer beautiful.

  This time I did not pace my kitchen floor in hiccuping shock and horror, as I had done after the terrible denouement to Pie Harralson’s party. I ran straight back, across my driveway and into my kitchen, still clutching the packet of medicine, and I called Pacewood Hospital and asked for the doctor who was treating Mrs. Anita Sheehan. My own voice sounded faintly amazing to me, ringing coldly and precisely through the dome of humming distance that had settled over me.

  “Carl Hunnicutt,” said the dry voice I remembered, presently.

  “Get over to Mrs. Sheehan’s house,” I said. “Right now. Mrs. Anita Sheehan. Something terrible has happened.”

  And I hung up before he could answer.

  I called Walter at the agency and asked him to come home. I hung up again, before he could say anything. The phone began to ring, and I did not answer it. I went upstairs and sat down on the side of our bed and picked up from my bedside table the book I had been reading the night before, and I read steadily until I heard a car shriek into the driveway next door. Then I rose and pulled the drapes. By the time Walter came thudding up the stairs into the bedroom the smart blue Pacewood limousine had come ghosting into the Sheehans’ driveway and had gone away again. I saw it from the window that faces the street, but I did not see who was in it. The doctor’s automobile followed it out into the street, and I saw that too, but then I pulled all the drapes, so that the entire room was dim and shut away from the house next door.

  17

  PART OF THE ULTIMATE agony of the whole thing and, perhaps, part of the cause of it, is that we never told anyone. Not about the still horror of that hot afternoon living room. Not about our own personal, ringing horror earlier, in that night house. I think now that if we had, if I had told Claire about those two things, told even the other neighbors, at least about that afternoon, that some of the spiraling horror might have been avoided, some anguish mitigated. At least the finished tapestry might have been different, if no less terrible. I do not believe the whole cloth of the thing could have been destroyed, but perhaps some of the threads might have been broken. We might have gained some credence, Walter and I, if we had told. We might have been believed to a greater extent when we began to talk of what we thought. But to speak of either seemed unimaginable, impossible, and we did not tell.

  I still do not know who knows about that last thing, that final thing that sent Anita Sheehan back into her New Jersey hospital and into unbroken quiet and, I pray, some final peace. The doctor, probably, but I have not seen him again. We did not see Buck again either, although Claire Swanson called Anita’s cousin in Philadelphia when they returned from the island to find the Sheehans gone and Charles and Virginia Guthrie preparing for the around-the-world cruise they had been saving for Charles’s retirement.

  Marguerite Condon told Claire only that Anita had sunk back into catatonia and had been institutionalized again, and that it seemed unlikely that she would pull out of it. Buck, she said, was drinking again, but had agreed to start at AA once more, and they would just have to see how that went.

  “She was very cold and distant to me on the phone, Col,” Claire said one evening a few days after they’d gotten home. It was the first time we’d seen them. Walter had been taking our calls and telling my callers that I had a rotten summer cold. But of course that couldn’t go on very long, and so the last time Claire called I’d motioned to him to tell them to come on over.

  “She was polite, but she acted as though it were all our fault somehow,” Claire went on plaintively. “And she can hardly talk about Buck. What in God’s name happened, do you think? There must have been something. Didn’t you see or hear anything at all?”

  “No,” I said. “I was at work. They just…weren’t there that night when I got home.”

  “Didn’t you call to see if anything was wrong?”

  “Who’s there to call in an empty house? I didn’t see any cars, so I thought they must have gone out or something.”

  “Gone out? With her so zonked out on pills she can’t walk?”

  “I just didn’t think about that, I guess.”

  “There’s something funny, something not right about all this,” Claire said.

  “There’s nothing right about any of it, Claire, for God’s sake. It’s tragic,” said Roger Swanson, looking
at the bulk of the Sheehans’ house, dark against the evening sky. Still. We sat in the den. I would not go out onto the patio.

  “No, I mean there’s something that somebody isn’t talking about, or something. Everybody is acting so queer. You, Colquitt, you look ten years older—well, I’m sorry, but you do—and you don’t talk, and Walter acts like he thinks somebody’s following him, and Virginia is acting just odder than hell. What’s with this cruise, anyway? They’ve been talking about it for a million years, but it was for when Charles retired. How on earth can he just take off now? How can they get ready to leave day after tomorrow? Why right now? Virginia won’t even talk to me. The maid answers the phone and says she’s out. She answered the door when I went over there the other day and said Mrs. Guthrie was out, but she wasn’t, because her car was there and I saw her pull the curtains aside up in her bedroom. Why on earth didn’t Buck let anybody know where they were, that they were going back to New Jersey? He must have been around some of the time before they transferred Anita back, he must have come home to sleep. What are they going to do about the house? Anita’s cousin didn’t know.”

  “Anita must have been sent back almost immediately, Claire,” I said, trying to control my breath. “I guess he stayed at a motel nearer the hospital, or something. Obviously, he didn’t let me know what had happened because I wasn’t home when it—when she got sick again, and I guess he didn’t have time later. Or didn’t think of it if he was drinking again.”

  “Virginia must not have been home when it happened either, or Charles would have known something about it,” said Claire, frowning. “He only said he understood Anita was back in the hospital and Buck was staying with her. He didn’t even know they’d gone back to New Jersey. He said neither he nor Virginia knew any more about it than that, and if I’d excuse him, they had a lot of packing and arrangements to tend to. That’s when he told me about the cruise. He sounded so funny that I didn’t want to pursue it. So that’s when I called her cousin. I’m surprised you didn’t think to do that.”

  “I…don’t know why I didn’t. I was just so sorry to hear she’d been taken back to the hospital, and I guess I thought they’d call when they needed us.”

  “Well, how did you know about it? I mean, if nobody saw them go…”

  “Charles told me,” I lied.

  “But Charles said he heard about it from you!”

  “Well, Charles is mistaken, and I don’t know anything about any of it, and I just don’t want to talk about it any more, okay?” I said, close to tears. I have never had any secrets from Claire aside from the very personal and private textures of Walter’s and my life together, and I did not know how to evade her natural distress and curiosity. But it was unthinkable that that awful thing be spoken of, or the other. They were, in the strictest sense of the word, unspeakable.

  Walter started to say something, something to serve as a decoy for Claire’s puzzled, troubled probing, but she rose to her feet and looked at him, and then at me.

  “It’s time we were getting home, Roger,” she said quietly. “Colquitt, I am certainly not going to pry and dig at you. I think something is terribly wrong and it’s near to killing you, and I think that whatever it is, it has happened to Charles and Virginia too, and I am desperately sorry. When you feel you can talk about it I hope you’ll come to me. I only meant to help.”

  “I know,” I said, beginning to cry silently in the unlit den. “I know.”

  “We’ll see you, then,” she said, and they let themselves out the kitchen door.

  We sat silently in the darkened den for a space of time. I stopped the weak, hopeless crying after a while, feeling only the currents of our silence and the ache of grief that Claire’s hurt, stiff little speech had left. I don’t think I’m going to be able to fix that, I thought. Something is broken with Claire and me now.

  Presently I said, “Walter.”

  “Yes.”

  “We have to talk about this now. I know what I promised you. I know I said I wouldn’t talk about it anymore. But that was before this. We can’t pretend this didn’t happen. It wasn’t even any good trying to pretend that night over there with Kim…didn’t happen. If we don’t talk about it we’re not ever going to be able to talk about anything again. We’ve hardly said a word to each other since that afternoon. Something horrible is happening to all of us. If I don’t have you with me I don’t think I can stand it.”

  He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “All right, Colquitt, I guess we do have to talk about it. Tell me what you think.”

  “I think…what Kim did. I think that there’s…something…in that house that is destroying everybody who lives in it. I think it’s something that can somehow isolate what’s the essence of you, the things you absolutely need most to keep on existing, the you-ness of you. I think it takes your life force, your vitality, and sucks it out of you. I think it needs the core of your life in order to live itself. I think it gets what it needs by working on your hurts and weaknesses, or something like that. We thought Kim was obsessed with it, almost crazy, but he sensed it first.”

  “Do you have any idea how you sound?” Walter said to me across the darkened den. He had not moved from his reclining lounger, where he’d been sitting when the Swansons came in. He reached over and switched on the lamp on the table beside the chair, and light came leaping into the room.

  “Crazy, probably. As crazy as Kim. I don’t care. Do I sound any crazier than what’s been happening over there?”

  “Well, not to me maybe. But how do you think you’d sound to anybody else? Look at what we’ve got over there: two families who moved into a new house and who had tragedies in their lives. It may look hideously coincidental, but that’s just how it does look. Coincidental. This can’t possibly be the only time in history that two successive families have had…bad experiences, bad luck, in the same house.”

  “But it’s the things that happened to them! Not just bad luck, Walter, not just tragedies. The very precise things that those particular people couldn’t withstand. The precise things that, out of all the things in the world, would destroy them. Why not other things? Look at Pie and Buddy—what mattered most to her? Her perfect, careful little world, all made up of puppies and babies and her husband’s job and her position in the world. Her daddy. Gone, just like that. Those exact things.

  “And Buddy, what mattered most to him? Her. His baby. His job. His future. Gone. Poof. And Lucas Abbott, Walter, with that wonderful reputation and social standing, that marvelous position in the firm, his beautiful wife and daughter, his dignity. And Kim. My God, what about Kim? What mattered most in the world to Kim? His talent, his architecture. Where’s that now? Why not—oh, a bad sickness, or her mother, not her father, or why not something else that they could have stood? Why those things?”

  “Colquitt, those things that happened to the Harralsons weren’t all that unique. They were awful, but they weren’t…specialized. If that’s what you’re implying. A miscarriage. A stroke. Two nice, upstanding, solid guys who turned out to be gay. Bad business, but every one of those things happen every day of the world to somebody, somewhere.”

  “But to the same people in such a short period of time? To the same two people, all that, when nothing else had ever happened to them until they built a house and moved into it? And happened in front of the very people they’d most want not to see them? His senior firm members? His wife? Lucas Abbott’s wife and daughter, his business partners? I agree with Kim, Walter, I absolutely know Buddy Harralson and Luke Abbott weren’t homosexual. It was something the—the house put in them at that particular time, when all those people were there to see it.”

  “If you’re going to take that tack, Col, your reasoning is all wrong,” Walter said. “If it goes after people who live in it, what about Abbott? He didn’t live in that house. Matt Gladney didn’t. Kim Dougherty didn’t.”

  “But they were all involved with it, don’t you see? They came close. Close enough so it coul
d smell out what their best things were, and their weaknesses, and go after the good things by using the weaknesses.”

  “Colquitt—”

  “Virginia Guthrie didn’t live there either, did she, Walter? But she was close to it. She was involved in it. She stayed too long, she stayed long enough so it would know what mattered most to her too—her dignity, her control, her genuine caring for other people and her ability to help them. The life she’s built with Charles. Do you think she’s going to be able to live very easily with herself after what she and Buck did to Anita? Or with what she did to herself, to Charles? God, don’t tell me you think Virginia Guthrie and Buck Sheehan have been having an affair all this time and just happened to get caught in the act by the wronged wife! The house did it, the house made them do it!”

  “‘The devil made me do it!’ Colquitt, honey, this just can’t go on. You’re making yourself sick. Badly sick.”

  “No, wait, Walter, let me finish. Okay, so the Sheehans move in, and what happens? She’s lost her father and brother, and her son, and almost her husband, and her mind for a long time. He’s almost lost her, and almost lost his whole profession, and he has lost his son. But they’re putting it all together again. All right, does she fall and break her back? Does he have a wreck, or lose his job and go on unemployment, do other members of their family die? No. It starts on her with the son. You want to try to explain that movie on TV and those phone calls? You really want to try to trace them? You wouldn’t find anything, because they didn’t come from anywhere. Not even out of Anita’s head. They came from the house. So what does she have then? What’s left? A bare hold, just the barest hold on her sanity. And him. As long as she has him she can make it somehow. But then one day she comes downstairs and sees that she doesn’t have him anymore. He’s drunk on the sofa screwing the one woman she trusted more than anybody except him. And him, what did he lose? What mattered most to him? Her. He lost her, for good and all, and he lost his control, his sobriety. Don’t sit there and tell me there’s nothing wrong with that house. Just don’t you tell me that.”