A Stranger's House

by Bret Lott

  “Listen to me!” Sandra shouted. Her eyes were closed, her hands in fists at her temples, but I could not stop. There was nothing to stop me. I had to finish my job.

  I took from the counter the thick, stubby Rongeurs shears, shears that looked more like pruning shears than a surgical instrument.

  The pain, this cutting through me, was at my wrists now, and in my eyes and mouth and tongue.

  I put the tip of the shears to the skull where the ears met, and I took the first snip, cut through bone. It had taken more effort, more muscle than I could have known.

  “I only wanted to know what to do,” she said. She was crying now. “I only wanted to know. Is there anything wrong with that? Just to know the right thing to do? What the right thing to do was?”

  I took the next snip up, and the next, clipping through the skull, right along the bone, thick and ungiving.

  “Because I wanted to hear from you what was right, because I trusted you and I loved you. Because I didn’t know, I really didn’t know, and because I’d already done it.” She was sobbing now, her voice octaves higher, beyond quivering, beyond trembling.

  I pushed the tip deep and toward the nose. I took the last snip, watched the bottom blade of the shears surface through bone, meet with the upper blade.

  The pain was at my knuckles, a tingling, a sharpness.

  “I had it aborted before I ever even talked to you,” she said, her voice suddenly gone steady, quiet, stone cold, and I looked up at her, the pain solid now in my eyes, in the movement of muscles winding back into my brain.

  She was looking at me now, our eyes finally meeting.

  She said, “I went to the University Health Center. I climbed up on a bed. I spread my legs open for them, for a smiling woman, a woman,” her teeth clenched, the word woman seething from her. “A smiling woman did it to me, brought it out of me, talking me through it while things inside me twisted and pulled, and all the time I listened to her I didn’t hear anything. I only heard Jim’s voice, saw him wearing that sweaty T-shirt and shorts and those basketball shoes, the basketball there at his hip. I just heard him saying ‘Abort it,’ and here I was. There I was. I’d already done it before I even talked to you. And so your not helping me, your never talking to me, your hating me since then wasn’t a matter of you letting me down. Because I’d already done it. I just wanted to see if you were human enough to talk to Mr. Gadsen. That’s all I wanted to know from you. And you weren’t, and so anything you may have told me to do—abort it, keep it, or just comfort me, just talk to me—I knew I could ignore, because you ignored that old man.” She stopped. She let her eyes leave me, and looked down. “So, no, you didn’t let me down.”

  I turned to the skull, its fruit inside, ready to be displayed, ready for science. I was trying to let her words mean nothing to me, trying to keep them outside of my head, out of my ears, my attention here on this research, this head, this job.

  I dropped the shears to the floor, the pain in my hands near my fingertips, and I thought that if I could get to the brain I would know something, know why we were here, all of us, and I thought that the pain in me would disappear, too, and so, the head cupped in my hands, I placed my thumbs on the edges of the skull along the cut, and I pried back the bone, pried and pulled, cartilage and thickened tissue giving way and tearing, and then the skull was open wide.

  Inside it lay the brain. The brain. The center of the animal, the center of us all. It was gray, convoluted, a gnarled mass of cells like small thick worms nestled snug and safe inside the skull.

  It showed nothing to me. There was nothing I could see, only the tissue now gray gelatin, the Formalin set. It was only a brain.

  The pain in me broke, but, instead of the sharp cry of fire through me that I’d thought would happen, it was only a dull ache, the immense pressure of my blood through me, through my own hands and legs, through my own brain, and through my heart. It was only my own blood banging through me, seeking somehow release, the pressure simply too much to bear, and so I dropped the skull, the brain, watched it fall as if in slow motion to the floor, where the brain shattered, broken into a half-dozen pieces, useless now. Of no consequence.

  Chesterfield, I thought, and I moved away from it lying there on the floor next to the guillotine, backed up until I touched the green-tiled wall. Chesterfield, the name of a rabbit, a pet, and the name of the town we would move to. The place where we would, I finally saw, forget about hoping for children.

  Slowly, carefully, I peeled off the gloves. I gave no thought to the scars, gave no thought to the stink of Formalin-thick air as I pulled off the surgical mask. I put my hands to my temples, closed my eyes, my eyes, it seemed, swelling with the pressure, my tongue filling my mouth, choking me as it, too, swelled with the ache of blood in me.

  Sandra said something to me, words I couldn’t recognize, and I opened my eyes. She looked at the brain on the floor, then at me, her eyes open wide. She said something again, and started moving toward me.

  I could not hear her, I knew, because I was listening for my father, listening for him one last time, waiting to hear my name because I knew that if I did hear him I could live through this, could live through anything. I’d lived this long on just the one time he’d spoken to me when I’d leaned against the chain-link fence and had watched the bomber slice through the sky. I’d lived this long. Now I needed him again.

  I listened for him, and I heard nothing, just the growing momentum of white sound already there, the sound of blood through me, cleaving me with its silence, slicing through me. Only silence.

  I watched as Sandra still came toward me, a hand out in front of her, reaching for me, her mouth moving, her eyes full, but I heard nothing. I knew hope was dead in me, dead and gone with the dead air in my ears, dead and gone with my father, my inheritance my mother’s fear of the world, and now I had only to wait, I saw, until the world took over, and killed me. There was no hope.

  Sandra’s hand touched my arm, and I shook it free, twisted away from her. I looked at her one last time, her face without expression, her hand taken back, no longer reaching for me. I turned and left the room.

  When I got to the house in Chesterfield, I immediately got out of the car rather than sit in the front seat and look at it, as Tom and I had done every time before. I was through with sitting in some sort of wonder, awe at a house. There was work to do, and I knew where I wanted to start.

  I went around to the trunk, put the keys in, popped it open. I reached in to Tom’s toolbox, fished through all the paraphernalia in the huge, red metal box, and pulled out a claw hammer. Next to it lay an old shovel, and I picked this up, too.

  I went to the porch.

  I stood there only a moment, looking at the old porch, at the gray plywood, the nailheads, and then I dropped the shovel, and started hammering, banging at the two-by-fours of the steps up, the hammer like ice in my hand as I banged away, busting rusted nails, splintering wood, the vibration through my hand, my arm, my body a welcome jolt, some hard, real thing in me.

  It took me all day, but I dismantled the porch by myself. I’d torn off piece after piece, my mind on nothing but wood, nothing but the task at hand, nothing but the splintered, beat lumber and rusted nails I broke up and tossed aside. The porch supports had come out easily, those posts merely a foot or so into the ground, no concrete poured to anchor them down. When I’d finally gotten the platform of the porch off, gotten the planks twisted free of the frame, I found fieldstone steps up to the front door, steps hidden by an ugly porch.

  The first thing I did was to find a strong piece of wood, one of those two-by-fours that hadn’t been killed by dry rot, and start poking at the mortar between stones, checking just as Martin had to see if it had gone bad, if any stones were loose and needed to be re-mortared. None did, and I dropped the piece of wood, then kicked at the stone steps. They were sturdy, strong; the stones, I could see, carefully selected so that the steps themselves were flat, level. As soon as I cleared them of the
lumber, saw how carefully they had been put together, I went to the trunk of the car and got a tapemeasure from the toolbox. I measured the height from each step to the next. They were each exactly eight inches high, eight inches deep. Exactly.

  Then I stood, looked at the wreck of wood, at the dull ground that had been covered for who knew how many years. I looked at those beautiful steps, steps right up to the front door, and I decided I didn’t want the porch Tom had promised. I wanted these steps, my discovery, some sort of triumph while working out here alone, Tom somewhere in Northampton right now, reporting on a case at the courthouse or a rezoning move in the City Council chambers. This is all I want, I thought. These steps.

  I looked at my hands, saw the blisters, some popped, the skin white and dead, others bloated with fluid. I flexed my fingers, felt the pull of muscle and skin. I hadn’t felt the blisters, had felt nothing all day, only the cold hammer, the rough wood of the handle on the shovel. I could see my own breath in front of me, the calm roll of steam with each breath out, and I saw that the sun was already down.

  I went home.

  I went into the apartment, my hands finally aching, taking in the pain of destroying the porch all day. But, I reasoned, the pain was something I could take home with me from the house, and from my steps.

  I walked into the kitchen. Through the doorway I could see Tom in the living room, a beer in his lap, a sack from McDonald’s on the coffee table. He was staring at the set, “Jeopardy” playing on it. He’d been home for a while, and had put on an old flannel shirt and jeans.

  Without looking from the set, he said, “Will called the paper today.”

  I said nothing, merely pulled off my coat. I felt my hands, the skin, tightening up. I hung the coat on the back of one of the chairs in the kitchen, and moved into the living room, past him on the couch. I went into the bathroom, and brought from the medicine chest a bottle of alcohol, the box of Band-Aids and a few cotton balls from the half-empty bag beneath the sink.

  I sat down on the toilet seat, and said, “What did he have to say?” With one hand I gently twisted the cap on the bottle, broken blisters on my fingers. I got the cap off, and tipped the bottle onto a cotton ball, started swabbing the palm of my left hand. The alcohol was cold at first, but then it dug in, and the pain just went deeper. I tipped the bottle back again, soaked the cotton ball again, swabbed again.

  Tom stood in the doorway, leaned against the doorjamb. He was chewing something. He swallowed, said, “So you quit.”

  I didn’t look at him, but touched the blisters, dabbed at them. I was watching them, looking for some difference in them now that I’d applied first aid. But nothing happened. The blisters were only dark red, near-raw flesh beneath thin sheets of dead skin.

  I said, “I guess so.” The cotton ball in my hand was a soft pink now, and for an instant I thought of Chesterfield, thought of his white fur and his blood, but I pushed that thought away, replaced it with the stone steps I’d found, the clean lines of the cold stone, the sturdy feel of them beneath my feet. I looked up at Tom.

  He had his arms crossed now. He looked somehow content, settled, ready to stay where he was until I gave him what he wanted, whether it was the words I’m sorry I quit or I’ll go back tomorrow and apologize for walking out. For a moment, my husband waiting for me, waiting, I thought of giving the words to him, of just telling him what he wanted to hear so that he would leave me alone, let me tend to my raw hands by myself. I thought, too, of telling him of the stone steps, of the ice-cold feel of rock mortared into place, hidden for years by a poorly built porch, the steps hidden away like some secret the house didn’t want to give up.

  I opened my mouth, ready to speak. I wanted him out of here, and I knew speaking would do it for me. I took a shallow breath, readied myself to force words from me, but I stopped. I stopped, because I knew that if I spoke, told him of rock steps he would see himself soon enough, I would lose something of the peace I’d collected all day, and something of the accommodations to the loss of hope I’d gathered out there in the cold, my blisters growing with each hard bang of the hammer, each shovelful of cold ground.

  Because, I knew then, that was what I had been doing all day long. I’d been trying to accommodate myself to a new world, one in which no hope for children existed, no hope for the sort of love only children can give, the love that looked upon you as though you could do no wrong, though you knew how wrong you could be, knew the lie in it, that you could, indeed, do everything wrong.

  I’d been working through the day to accommodate myself to a loss that had never existed, a feeling that some part of me, a physical piece somewhere hidden in the contours of my heart, had been excised, removed as though through surgery. Now, though I’d felt hope were there, I knew in my brain it was not. I’d spent my day aligning myself with this new freedom, freedom from hope. The stone steps leading up to the house were my own, I saw. Not his.

  I swallowed, and I looked down from him. Giving him the words he wanted would be too easy. It would be simple for me, and my world wasn’t an easy one now, I saw. I would have to fight my way through it, even if it meant fighting with him. My words were my own. My discovery of those steps was my own. He could wait.

  I dropped the cotton ball into the trash basket beneath the sink, pulled another from the bag on my lap. I tipped the bottle of alcohol again, started swabbing my right hand, the pain cool, welcome.

  He took a deep breath, let it out, and said, “You were going to say something?”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

  “What happened to your hands?” he said, and hidden in his voice I thought I could hear some concern for me, but concern cloaked in his wanting to know more about my quitting than the state of my fingers and palms.

  “Work,” I said. I was watching my fingers, still hoping to see some change in them, some beginning of healing, but nothing happened. I said, “At the house. I went out there today,” and I stopped. I would tell him no more of my day than that. I could feel my muscles tense up, ready for his questions, for his probing, for his bringing into our apartment his reporter’s skills to get at what happened today.

  But he only pulled off his glasses, started cleaning them again, this time with the front tail of his shirt. He was quick about it, the same old movement, the same old husband.

  “Here’s a story,” he said, and moved into the bathroom. He leaned his back against the wall across from me and slowly eased down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, his knees up in front of him. He closed his eyes, finished cleaning the glasses. “Saw it today, from Phyllis, one of my stringers.” He slipped the glasses back on, opened his eyes. It wasn’t getting the glasses clean that mattered, I finally saw, but doing something with his hands that mattered. He looked down to the linoleum floor, his arms crossed. “At seven twenty this morning,” he went on, “one whole wall of an old house over in Belchertown collapsed. The owners, a retired couple who moved out from Boston last year, were in the house. The husband was in the kitchen downstairs, and managed to get out. He’d thought the whole place was coming down.”

  He wasn’t smiling telling me this. It was, of course, another of his attempts to cheer me, but it wasn’t a real attempt, only the recitation of a story, news for the paper, nowhere in his voice the spark of humor he’d always had before. His arms were still crossed, his eyes still on the floor.

  He said, “But the wife was in the upstairs bathroom, brushing her teeth. It took a couple of minutes, too, for the wall to fall down. Phyllis said the husband watched most of it from outside on the lawn. The wall just disintegrated, bricks peeling off in rows starting from the top. The husband described the sound to Phyllis as a ‘cascade of bricks.’ ‘Just a cascade of bricks,’ the man said over and over.”

  He paused, and looked up at me. He said, “Do you want me to go on?”

  I was still looking at my hands. After a few moments, I said, “Go on only if the wife is okay. If she’s dead, don’t.”


  “She’s fine,” he said, his eyes back on the floor. “She’s not hurt at all. Once her bathroom wall started disappearing, she tried to get out and couldn’t get the door open, though it turned out it wasn’t even locked. The wall kept falling, the wife pressed up against the bathroom door, the bathroom wall just peeling away.” He paused. “When the wall finally finished falling, there was the wife, standing in the bathroom upstairs with her robe on. Her husband was down on the lawn, looking up at her. One whole wall of the house was heaped on the ground, the bathroom, their bedroom, a study, and downstairs the kitchen and living room like some sort of dollhouse, the rooms all open to the outside.”

  He paused, waiting, I knew, for some word from me, but I gave him none.

  “The wife went hysterical. She broke down, crying, scared to death. Neighbors had started coming out by then, the fire department showing up a few minutes later. By this time the husband was upstairs, trying to get her to open the door, but she wouldn’t budge. She’s sitting on the floor of the bathroom with her back to the door, more neighbors accumulating, looking up at her. Finally an EMS squad is all that’s able to get her down, the husband back downstairs and outside looking up at her. They get her to open the door and take her downstairs, and her husband comes up to hold her, but she breaks down all over again. Turns out she’s gone crazy because, in addition to the wall falling down, her husband didn’t try to save her. Phyllis was there by that time, and heard her crying to her husband, ‘Don’t you touch me. You left me up there. I don’t know who you are.’” He paused. “That’s a quote.” He stopped again, took a breath. “Finally the EMS truck takes her over to Cooley-Dickinson, the husband following in his own car. They were married for thirty-seven years, and the wife wouldn’t even let her husband ride in the truck.”

  He stopped, and let out a heavy breath, as if there were air he’d held inside of him through the whole story, something he’d kept back from me.