The House That Wasn't There

by Elana K. Arnold

  There had been a storm, and lightning, and, after all, he’d been carrying a metal-framed umbrella.

  “Stupid, stupid,” Alder chastised himself, though with his ears underwater, his voice sounded muted and far away.

  Maybe a bolt of lightning had struck the umbrella, and the shock of it had knocked him unconscious, and for some reason his brain had conjured up the whole thing, like some weird fever dream. That made a whole lot more sense than an oversize, fully clothed, walking, talking Mort inhabiting a mysterious house that appeared and disappeared.

  And, Alder decided, feeling better by the minute, there was no sense in worrying his mom with all of this. After all, if he told her that he’d been struck by lightning, she’d want to take him to the doctor—probably even to the emergency room—and who could tell what they would want to do there? Tests of some kind.

  Alder couldn’t imagine what kind of tests they might run at the hospital, but he suspected that needles might be involved, and the drawing of blood, which Alder hated more than almost anything. At his eleven-year-old wellness check, he had been surprised, and not in a good way, by what his pediatrician cheerfully called a “screening,” which sounded like they were going to see a movie but instead involved the withdrawal of three small vials of his blood, extracted from the inside of his elbow by a needle and a long clear tube. He was in no great hurry to go through that again.

  And besides, Alder told himself as he flipped the stopper to drain the tub, listening from beneath the waterline as the bath began to empty, he was perfectly fine. Whatever might have happened was behind him. What mattered was that he was safe, and Fern was safe, and the storm was over.

  With that resolved, and feeling much better now, Alder dried off and put on his softest pajamas, along with thick warm socks. And then he went to join his mother for dinner.

  When he woke the next morning, the sky outside his window was the brightest, clearest blue Alder had ever seen. It was becoming increasingly difficult to believe that a storm had even happened, let alone the strange, impossible oddities that were so ridiculous as to almost make Alder laugh.

  Still, he double-checked all the doors and windows before he headed off to the bus stop—no reason to tempt fate, he told himself, picking up Fern for a moment and kissing her fuzzy head to say goodbye.

  But when he saw that Oak was standing in the space between their two driveways, as if she were waiting for someone, he felt his stomach begin to curdle. Alder had no desire to discuss what might or might not have happened. It became evident quite quickly, however, that the conversation was going to take place with or without him.

  “I’ve been waiting out here for nearly twenty minutes,” Oak said, but her tone was cheerful. “Did you sleep at all last night? I barely did. I was tossing and turning until three o’clock in the morning!”

  Alder grunted, vaguely.

  Oak must have taken the sound as encouragement, for she went on, “I’ve been trying to figure out what on earth happened to us. That was the weirdest thing that I have ever experienced in my life. And that . . . thing . . . you know him?”

  She was talking about Mort, Alder knew, which meant that his theory about electrocution must have been wrong, if Oak had the same memory. “He’s not a thing,” Alder said, speeding up a little as they headed to the bus stop, as if he could somehow escape Oak and all her energy, all her questions. “He’s an opossum.”

  “A four-foot-tall, talking opossum who wears boots and carries a pocket watch,” Oak said, too loudly, Alder thought.

  “Shh,” he said crossly, though he didn’t know why it felt important that no one hear them.

  “How do you know him?” Oak pressed.

  They had reached the corner. And here came the bus. Alder didn’t want to talk about any of this, but he definitely didn’t want to talk about it on the bus. “Later,” he said as the bus pulled to a stop, as the doors hissed open.

  “When?” said Oak, her voice insistent.

  “Later,” Alder said again. He began to climb the steps and looked over his shoulder at Oak.

  Her lips were pressed together in a line; her hands, on the straps of her backpack, were tight fists. It was obvious that he wasn’t getting out of this. “Come over after school,” he said begrudgingly. “I’ll show you.”

  All day long, Alder kept an eye on Oak wherever he could: in Mr. Rivera’s class; at recess and at lunch; during PE, when they had to run around the track. Oak, he noticed, was surrounded by a circle of friends wherever she went, even though she was so new to the school.

  It seemed, he felt, terribly unfair. He felt this especially keenly during PE, at the end of the day, when he noted that not only was Oak surrounded by a circle of friends, she also seemed to have no trouble at all taking off from the pack when she was ready to run—swifter than them all, like she was made for it.

  “You should join the cross-country club,” Marcus yelled admiringly as she flew by him and Beck, who were taking turns timing each other doing sprints.

  “Maybe,” Oak called back.

  Marcus had never asked him if he wanted to join the cross-country club, Alder thought miserably, clutching a cramp at his side as he jogged slowly around the track. Not that he would have wanted to. But it would have been nice to be asked.

  Finished with their sprints, Beck and Marcus loped onto the track. Alder watched the way they matched each other, pace for pace, Marcus lengthening his strides to keep up with Beck’s longer legs. They were laughing about something.

  Were they laughing at him? Alder quickened his pace, tried to stand up straighter, to look more athletic.

  Beck and Marcus had disappeared from Alder’s sight line; they were so much faster than he was that they’d rounded the bend and would be coming up behind him soon. He imagined what he looked like from behind: his T-shirt was sticking to his back, sweaty, and he knew his hair got fluffy and unruly when he ran. He probably looked ridiculous.

  Here they came.

  “Looking good, Alder,” called Beck as they flew by, bread-and-buttering around him.

  “Thanks,” Alder called back, trying not to sound as winded as he was, but then immediately doubting his response—had Beck been sincere? Was he being mean?

  Exhausted both by running and the mental effort of trying to decide what everything meant, Alder slowed to a walk, then stopped, hands on his knees as he tried to catch his breath. The cramp in his side had tightened to a sharp pain. He closed his eyes against the brightness of the sun.

  At the end of the day, just like usual, Faith was waiting for them in the bus.

  “Hiya, Alder, welcome aboard,” she said.

  “Hiya, Faith,” Alder answered, but his heart just wasn’t in it.

  At the top of Rollingwood Drive, Faith said, “See ya, tree kids,” as Alder followed Oak down the three black stairs. And then the bus pulled away.

  Alder trudged down the hill toward home. Oak was at his side. He could feel her there, the way she rolled up onto her toes with each step.

  “I’ll just pop home and drop off my stuff,” Oak said. “Then I’ll come over.”

  At least Mom wasn’t home, Alder thought. Her car was gone, and a note on the kitchen counter told him that she’d be gone for a while:

  Off to the bank and the post office and the library! Clean that stinky litter box.

  xoxo

  Mom

  When she went to the library, Alder’s mom could lose track of time entirely. Once she’d sat right down in an aisle, so taken by a book’s description, and had read the whole thing then and there, cover to cover.

  Meow, said Fern. She hopped down from her cushion in the patch of sunlight on the window bench and stretched, front legs sticking straight out, her rump and tail way up in the air behind her.

  Alder took a minute to scratch her head, and then he got the scooper and a paper bag. The litter box, which they kept in the smaller bathroom, did smell a bit suspicious.

  He’d managed to clean it, scrub
his hands, and spray some air freshener in the litter box’s general direction before he heard Oak knocking at his door.

  “Coming,” he called, and he picked up Fern before he opened the door so that she couldn’t dart outside.

  There was Oak, and she’d brought someone—Walnut.

  “Hi,” said Oak. “I thought I’d bring Walnut over to see Fern. You know, since they’re related. I don’t know . . . it just doesn’t seem right to keep siblings apart.”

  Alder relaxed a bit for the first time in what felt like forever. Maybe Oak noticed it, because she smiled. Alder smiled back. He opened the door wider. “Great idea,” he said.

  Chapter 14

  It was the second house in two days that Oak had been inside that looked both the same as her house and also totally different. The shape was the same—the short entry hall; the living room off to the left and the hallway, presumably with bedrooms, off to the right; the wooden window seat in the living room. The pass-through to the kitchen and the dining room. But everything else was different. Oak’s house had been covered in a coat of white paint right before they moved in—all the walls, all the ceilings the same bright noncolor. “Fresh and clean,” her mom had said, satisfied. And Oak hadn’t thought to question it. After all, she hadn’t even wanted to move in the first place; why would she care how the new place was painted?

  Looking around Alder’s home, Oak felt suddenly very sorry that she hadn’t insisted on color. For color was everywhere here: the entry hall was a butter yellow; the table near the door was lavender; an assortment of colorfully striped hats and scarves crowded the hooks nearby, and a basket on the floor overflowed with balls of yarn and knitting needles.

  Still cradling Walnut, Oak followed Alder into the living room. Her heart felt pierced through with envy; it was a riotous, joyous comfort of colors and textures and things. Here, the walls were painted a gentle blue. In the center of the room was a long, bright pink velvet couch, slightly sagging in the middle. Three afghan blankets were strewn across it, one in zigzags of bright pinks and purples and greens; another, a series of squares in every color of the rainbow, banded together by black; the third, all plum.

  There was an overstuffed bookshelf with too much to take in all at once: books and knickknacks and pieces of pottery, a stuffed animal and a couple of succulents, candles. These books, she noticed, didn’t seem to be arranged in any order at all—not by subject, or color, or height. They were stacked and leaned in a mishmash mess that would probably make her mother’s eye twitch if she ever saw it.

  Next to Alder’s couch was an enormous waxy green fern, so large that it practically swallowed the short table on which it perched. In Oak’s arms, Walnut struggled to get loose, so she bent down and set him on the floor. The kitten made a beeline for the fern and stood up on his hind legs to sniff it.

  Alder’s kitten—who, Oak now realized, must be named after this plant—watched as her brother explored a bit. She looked on curiously as Walnut peered underneath the couch, as he reached for and batted at a ball of yarn that must have escaped from the basket in the front hall.

  “Does your mom knit a lot?” Oak asked.

  Alder shrugged and blushed red. “We both do,” he said.

  “That’s pretty cool,” said Oak, and she walked farther into the house, through the kitchen (painted apple green) and into the dining room (violet). There she found more books and puzzles and stacks of papers. She counted seven coffee tins full of pennies and buttons and nails.

  She stopped and stared at a portrait on the wall, a picture of a fat dark-haired baby who must have been Alder, and two grown-ups, all posed together beneath an enormous tree. “That’s your mom,” she said, pointing, “and is that your dad? I’ve never seen him around.”

  “That’s because he’s dead,” Alder answered. His voice sounded pinched.

  “Oh,” said Oak. She looked away from the portrait and she felt, suddenly, her eyes filling with unexpected tears. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” said Alder. He didn’t make eye contact with Oak. “He’s been dead since I was little, so I don’t really remember him.”

  That didn’t, Oak thought, make it okay, but she understood that it was just a thing that people said, whether it was true or not. “I’m really sorry,” she said again, because she wanted Alder to know that she meant it.

  After a moment, he looked up at her. “Thanks,” he said.

  Then Oak returned to looking around, though her heart wasn’t in it anymore, and though the feeling she’d had before, of envy, was extinguished. “You have a record player,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to use one of these.” She thumbed through the records and pulled one out. Canary in a Coal Mine, it was called. The front cover was a picture of a yellow bird in a cage, but the door to the cage was swung open. “May I?” she asked.

  Alder shrugged. “Sure.”

  But Oak found that she wasn’t really sure how to make it work, other than sliding the record out of its case and placing it on the turntable. So Alder came over and flipped a switch, and the record began to spin. The arm lifted up and rotated over on top of the spinning record, then dropped down gently so that its needle rubbed against the record’s surface, along its tiny grooves. There was a scritch-scratch sound, and then music.

  First, a harmonica—one long, high note, held for many moments, and then the tone dropped and a song began. Slowly it stretched out, each note attached to the one before and the one after, like taffy, but sadder. And then another instrument joined in. It sounded sort of like a guitar, but not quite.

  “That’s a banjo,” Alder said, as if he could tell that Oak was wondering.

  And then a man’s voice, singing.

  Way down in the coal mine

  Where all men are alone

  Way down in the coal mine

  Far away from home

  Way down in the coal mine

  Canary sings his tune

  Way down in the coal mine

  In the long, dry afternoon

  Oak listened, and as she listened, she flipped over the record sleeve. There on the back was a photograph of the singer. He was young, with a thick dark beard and longish brown hair brushed back from his forehead. Oak felt a shock of recognition; she looked up to the portrait on the wall and then back down to the record sleeve in her hands. Then she glanced over at Alder to see if he had noticed what she had noticed, but he was staring off as if into space, listening.

  Oak turned the record sleeve over again, so the picture of the bird was showing, and she said, “I like the music. It’s really good.” She set the sleeve down on the table.

  Alder smiled, kind of shy. “I like it too,” he said, but that was all he said.

  When the song was over, Alder flipped the little switch again so that the arm rotated up and away from the record, settling back into its rest, and the record slowed, then stopped.

  “Come on,” Alder said, heading back into the living room. “I’ll introduce you to Mort.”

  The kittens were entwined amid the unspooled yarn; like rays of floppy sunshine, the soft yellow loops of spun wool danced across the couch, the floor, wrapped around one leg of a chair.

  Oak could imagine the fun the kittens had had, and she could picture the path they’d taken, batting the ball of unfurling color under the couch, across the floor, around the leg of the chair, and into a patch of warm sunshine where they had ended their play in a fuzzy pile of yarn and each other. Their eight orange-and-white-striped legs crisscrossed and tangled, their two sweet faces turned toward one another, and one of them, Fern or Walnut—it was impossible to tell which—softly snored.

  “Whoa,” said Alder, and though that was all he said, Oak nodded. Because she felt certain that he was thinking the same thing she was thinking: look how much fun they have together.

  Like it or not, she thought, for the good of the kittens, she and Alder were going to have to be friends.

  “Okay,” she said. “Tell me about Mort.�
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  Alder pointed up to a shelf full of knickknacks and books. “He’s up there,” he said.

  Oak stepped toward the bookshelf. What she had thought before was a kid’s stuffed animal she now saw was something else: a taxidermied opossum, oddly smiling as if it knew the secrets of the universe.

  “What . . . ?”

  “It was a present from my dad to my mom,” Alder said. He was pulling a chair closer to the bookshelf, and he scrambled onto it so he could reach the opossum. “They found it at some weird shop in Seattle, before I was born.” He grasped the opossum, gently but firmly, and held it out to Oak. “Here,” he said.

  She hesitated. Honestly, Oak had no desire to touch that weird dead thing.

  “It’s not really dead,” Alder said. “I mean, it is dead. But not, like, rotting.”

  “Mm-hm,” said Oak, and because Alder was still holding it out to her, she took it. It was heavier than she’d expected, and not soft at all like the kittens; the fur was soft, but it was solid underneath. “I mean,” Oak said, walking over to the couch and sitting down, “it is dead. That’s its name, after all.”

  “Its name?” Alder hopped down from the chair.

  “Yeah,” said Oak.

  Alder flinched a little, like maybe Oak’s tone made him feel like she thought he was stupid or something.

  “I mean,” she started again, trying to make her voice gentler, “Mort means ‘dead.’ In French?”

  “It does?” said Alder. “Huh.”

  Now Oak felt bad that she’d told him.

  “I always thought it was, like, short for Morty.”

  “Totally.” Oak nodded.

  “Except,” Alder said, more to himself than to Oak, “it makes way more sense that they named it Mort because it means ‘dead’ than because it’s short for Morty. Since it’s . . . dead.”

  Alder looked deflated, like he was being forced to reevaluate something he’d always seen one way, as something else.