Knock Knock

by S. P. Miskowski

  "Yes," Greg admitted. "Strange and fucking awesome!"

  "No," she said. "I mean sure, it's great to inherit something, but this is too much to think about right now."

  Greg considered this. He sat on the sofa next to Lydia and put one arm around her shoulders.

  "Sorry, babe," he told her. "Sorry. I was just looking at the benefits. It's obvious who this woman must be."

  "Don't say it," she warned. "I don't want to deal with it. I know we have to claim the money and the house, but I don't want to deal with this right now. Does that make sense?"

  "Yeah. I know. You have enough going on. But."

  "I know, I know."

  "We need to be practical right now."

  "I told you: I know. I get it. Just shut up about it, just for a couple of days, okay?"

  When Lydia was ready, they talked it over and came to a decision. The deal was: They would ignore the attorney's suggestion that they hire a real estate agent. They would go to Skillute, tidy up the house, sell its contents, and then sell the house itself. Cut out the middleman and take all the profits. Between that and the cash account, they could make it until Greg was working full-time again.

  They vowed not to waste a single dime. They would clean up and sell off this property for whatever they could get. Then they would load up the car and drive straight back to the city. No questions asked.

  Today, listening to Greg go on and on in his fake tourist guide voice about the scenery and the history of timber companies and unfounded leftwing assumptions about blue-collar people, Lydia wondered how she'd been tricked into such a stupid plan. She was dreading every minute of the next two months. Greg was the one who thought driving down to Hooterville would be a cool adventure. They should have handed the house over to a broker, but Greg was afraid they wouldn't get full value for it, and he didn't want to pay someone to do what they could do just as well. Now Lydia wasn't sure she cared about the full value.

  The attorneys said they were not at liberty to discuss anything about this Beverly Dempsey. Here she had left her house and her savings account to Lydia, and she wasn't even allowed to ask if the woman was her biological mother. Fifteen, even ten years earlier she might have been curious. Now she was having a child of her own. She had resolved the questions that had mattered to her when she was younger. She had decided who she was and what she would do with her life when she married Greg. Now suddenly she had to take a giant step backward and deal with this woman she had never met.

  Courtesy of the law firm, they had photos of the house's exterior. Greg saw nothing wrong with the chubby front porch, nothing but a landing really, painted in slick layers of crimson with a metal railing. He had no problem with the ornate green trellis, the wrought iron lawn furniture painted creamy white like cake frosting, the collection of windmills and wooden geese. Lydia wondered how she had spent their marriage ignoring and overriding Greg's taste, or lack of taste. He seemed to possess a superhuman ability to immerse himself in his surroundings, no matter how ugly.

  After a lot of thought she decided it wasn't the house itself or even its location that rubbed her the wrong way. The thing that irritated her about their plan was that it was all they had. They were out of options, and the feeling of being at the mercy of fate and circumstance grated on her nerves every day.

  It was unsettling to realize that all of their future plans now depended on reselling a tiny house they had never seen in person. They had pitched it to everyone they knew who might consider it an investment, or a second home for retirement. They strained relations with a few friends who stared incredulously and asked if they had taken a look at the stock market lately. So they had no prospects. Add to this the fact that neither of them knew anyone in Skillute, or Longview, or anywhere south of Alki Beach, and Lydia had to wonder if they were making a huge mistake.

  She held on until the last minute to the fantasy that her doctor wouldn't let her go. At first she hoped he would say she was too far along to travel by car all the way to Skillute but as he so rudely put it, she was as strong as a horse. Then she imagined they would be miles from a qualified interim doctor. That would be it. A month or possibly two without prenatal care was impossible. Her doctor would simply say no. Yet he stunned Lydia with the news that two highly rated physicians were located near her new home.

  "It won't be my home. We're not staying," she said.

  "You're one lucky girl," her doctor told her.

  "Did I explain that this town is in the middle of nowhere?" She asked.

  "Nonsense," he told her. "Plenty of people your age have bought houses in Longview and Kelso. Skillute is probably the same. This is a lucky break for you and your husband. Congratulations."

  She didn't feel lucky. In a moment of paranoia Lydia wondered if the doctor was aware that she and Greg couldn't afford their medical insurance much longer unless they sold the house she inherited. Maybe he was just breaking away from this deadbeat patient. But wasn't his job to care for her until the baby was born? Yes, she told herself. He was a doctor. That was his job. She was being silly to think otherwise.

  She didn't want to give in to another crazy idea. She'd faced enough of those lately.

  The shadows of fir trees cast the Toyota in semi-darkness. They seemed to fold in from both sides of the road and then arc together gently toward the right.

  "Not as bad as you imagined, is it?" Greg asked.

  "Warm and cloudy?" said Lydia. "Yeah. Nice."

  "Honey," he said. "At least it isn't raining."

  With this true statement, her panic started all over again. Greg didn't understand why she felt the way she did, and neither did she. Nothing they said to one another made any difference at the moment.

  How could she say that she had barely been able to cope with being pregnant, and now the thought of living in the country alone with her husband and baby in what was almost certainly the former home of a woman who had given her up for adoption made Lydia want to hurl herself from the car onto the asphalt? No, this was not a thought she could share with Greg, who was already guilt-ridden about not having a job. Not a good and healthy thought. Not a tell-all, sharing thought.

  Breathe, she told herself. Breathe. Be still and think of the center. Yet here came the analytical copy editor in her head, armed with a hundred questions: The center of what? Herself? Where was her center, now that she was housing a whole, new, second person inside her skin? What was she, other than a canvas, a tent around this other person? How could she have a center of her own? Every organ in her body was accommodating this other being. It was living off of her diet, her protein, her carbs, her fat, and the vitamins she took every day. It was sucking up the minerals in her bones so that she had to take supplements to save herself from depletion and exhaustion.

  Every day these questions interrupted Lydia's meditation, cut short her stretching exercises, made her stare at the ceiling and talk to herself. Middle-aged people she knew, and even friends her own age, who were skittering toward middle age, talked incessantly about centering, being centered, tapping the center, finding the central place. This was not strange to them, this feeling that there was a center, that there must be one.

  "Jesus!" Greg shouted.

  The car jerked to the right, then slid and squealed sideways out of the lane, spitting gravel. Lydia looked up at the line of dark, blank trees rushing toward the car. She screamed.

  A final shriek of brakes followed and there was a sort of lunging and landing on the shocks a couple of times. Then everything stopped. All noise stopped and the dust devil surrounding the car went slowly spinning away.

  When the dust settled, they were sitting perfectly still in the Toyota, on the shoulder of the road close to the line of trees, but not pressed against them as Lydia had expected. She slid one hand across her swollen abdomen and waited for the sign: there it came, the solid kick that told her the baby was untouched, just barely aware of things threatening Lydia's very life. She was merely the protective jacket, a vehicle who
se purpose was to do the one thing she hated most: sit still and wait.

  She found her voice:

  "What the hell is wrong with you?"

  "Sorry, babe! Sorry!" Greg sputtered.

  "Shut up!" She said.

  "I am so sorry," he went on. "Honey. Is everything okay?"

  He was looking at it. Not at her, but at the belly that housed his child.

  "Why the hell did you do that?"

  "There was an animal," Greg tried to explain. "An animal ran out in front of us! Didn't you see it?"

  She shook her head. After all she had accepted, all the changes she had taken on in the past few months, this was too much. If Greg panicked at the sight of a small animal, what else might he do, to endanger their lives?

  She climbed slowly out of the car. She almost slid underneath it; the right side was jacked up several inches, next to the tall line of Douglas firs obliterating the light for fifty yards in either direction.

  "Watch out!" Greg called and scrambled after her. "Here I come, babe."

  They edged along next to the car, Lydia shuffling, balancing around her belly, and Greg chasing after her, his arms outstretched. Lydia steadied herself against the side of the car and made her way to the back bumper. There, a few feet from the trunk, in the dust, lay the long body of a rabbit, stretched out as if it were sunbathing, toes pointed downward as she'd seen cats point their feet while napping. Only a thin, scarlet line running down the underbelly told her that it was damaged. Otherwise its shape and its fur showed no sign of injury.

  Greg reached the spot and looked down. Both Lydia and Greg followed one, two, three drops of blood leading away, until their line of sight included, on the far side of the road, a small pile of entrails, heat gently rising into the warm air.

  Lydia felt her cheeks flush. She turned away before Greg could say another word. She climbed back along the tilted car. Her suede loafers kept sliding, crunching fir needles and leaves underfoot. She opened the passenger side door, slid in, and pulled it shut after her. She sat shivering while Greg tried to recover from the dry heaves that had him doubled over like a sick child behind the car.

  Greg was right. She should have waited for him outside. Less than two miles from their destination he had insisted he needed a Coke to settle his stomach. Restless boredom made Lydia follow him into the three-aisle convenience store called Misty Mart. As if the two flags over the front door were not enough, the customer entrance signal played a tinny rendition of the first bars of "God Bless America."

  Lydia and Greg stood in line holding cans of Coke. They had to wait and listen to store manager Misty Court debating her daughter Kristy about their favorite TV show, one that featured a former child star.

  Misty was ringing up a pile of candies and fruit bars purchased by the woman ahead of them. While Misty and Kristy chattered on, the woman glanced back over her shoulder at Lydia, who caught a glimpse of violet eyes, sharp as an animal's, followed by a polite grin. The woman had lank, black hair without any gray, although she must have been in her fifties.

  "She ought to just go back to her family. It's where she belongs. And anyway, her family's got more money than she ever made starring on Seven's the Limit."

  "But I read, since she wrote that book about her life, you know what, her own mother's never spoken to her again?"

  "Oh, like that's a bad thing!"

  The girl, Kristy, giggled, the self-conscious, prolonged giggle of a teenager broadcasting how much she knew about the world. The word "thing" she had flattened to a nasal "thang." Lydia couldn't tell if it was the local accent, or if the girl was making fun of people who had an accent.

  "Shut up, you little monster," her mother told her and laughed, "or I'll get that bullwhip down off the wall."

  Lydia looked up and wasn't surprised at all to find that there was, in fact, a dusty, coiled bullwhip made from snakeskin hanging above the cash register.

  More giggling. Kristy Court was red in the face, sputtering words through the clear plastic braces on her teeth.

  "Like you know how to use one!"

  "I know things you don't know I know, little girl."

  Her mother vamped. This caused a new explosion of giggles. The violet-eyed woman who bought the candy and fruit bars chimed in this time, and warned them as she edged out the front door:

  "You two better behave or you'll scare off our new neighbors."

  Lydia wondered what had tipped the woman off. Clearly, she and Greg were from Seattle or Portland ("not from around here") but what made her think they were moving in? They weren't hauling anything. Their suitcases and laptops were stashed in the trunk of the car. Everything else they owned was in storage.

  Misty gave her daughter an affectionate nudge. The girl moved away from the counter and wandered aimlessly down the aisle where cosmetics and hair products were on display. As she walked she picked at her wispy perm with claw-like, manicured nails.

  "What you got, dear?" Misty asked Greg, who handed her a six-pack of Coke and then added the six-pack Lydia was carrying.

  "I bet you're the couple moving into Beverly's house," she said.

  "Um, yeah. That would be us," Greg said. "I'm Greg Hewitt and this is my wife, Lydia."

  "Welcome," Misty said, with a wink to Kristy who was peeking over the aisle to get a better look. "I'm Misty, and you can just ignore my rude daughter."

  "Mom!" Kristy wailed and ducked her head down.

  Misty told Greg: "I was sorry to hear about Beverly. Not that we were close, but she seemed like a good person."

  "Oh," he said. "We never met. Actually the house belongs to my wife."

  "Well, my condolences. We all liked Beverly. That was sad, her passing away when she was by herself."

  "We didn't know her," Lydia said.

  Then came the inevitable. Misty noticed Lydia's protruding belly.

  "Oh, honey! Congratulations! When are you due?"

  Lydia wanted to answer. She tried with all her might, but no words would come. She glared at the woman, at her matching plum lipstick and nails, her haystack of hair exactly like her daughter's except shot through with lowlights to balance the gray.

  "We're a little more than halfway there," Greg mumbled, covering for Lydia, blushing at her rudeness.

  Misty addressed Greg in a more sympathetic tone, as though they were talking about a disobedient child in her presence:

  "I was the same way, both times I was pregnant! Don't expect the laundry to get done and the dinner made, with those hormones going crazy. New mamas reserve the right to be a little bit bitchy."

  Misty winked at Greg. If Lydia had owned a gun, she would have killed the woman right there. She knew the feeling was insane and wrong, and she didn't care.

  Back in the car Greg sipped his drink. Lydia popped the top on a Coke and started slugging it down.

  "Isn't that a lot of caffeine for you?" Greg asked. "Lydia?"

  For an answer, she tilted the can and gulped until a trickle of the foamy drink ran down her chin. She wiped it away with the back of her hand.

  "What's wrong now?" He asked.

  Lydia shook her head and stared out the window. She didn't know what was wrong, or why she had taken an immediate dislike to Misty Court and her teenage daughter with the awful perm. But she didn't plan to shop at Misty Mart, no matter how far she had to drive to reach the next store.

  As they approached the turn-off to their new home, she saw the first road sign, hand-painted and nailed to a tree trunk. She made a contemptuous noise halfway between laughter and spitting.

  "Nice. They can't afford real street signs?"

  Greg took the next right turn, and they started up the driveway to the house.

  "Homemade signs are quaint," he said.

  "Sure. Maybe there's a class I can take. Quilting and sign making," she said.

  "Okay," he told her. "I know: everybody is stupid, and nobody knows how to dress or how to do their hair, or how to decorate their house or their yard. And they la
ugh at goofy things and have crazy superstitions. They go to church and name their kids after American Idol winners. Okay? But we're here, and we're not staying long. So how about making the best of it? How would that be, huh?"

  Before she could answer, he closed the driver's side door and began to survey the front lawn with his hands on his hips, taking in the quickly brightening and darkening grass, the Japanese maple, and the flowerbeds. She could see it, in his stance, in his gaze: He liked it here.

  The minute he had learned about the house in Skillute, Greg had started calculating the future, talking incessantly about selling the place and getting out of debt. This was his break. He was clearly planning to make the most of it. When they inherited a home they had never seen, when it just seemed to fall into their laps, Greg was excited by the possibility of starting over. Unlike her husband in more ways than she had dreamed of when they first married, Lydia's first thought was that a woman they didn't even know, who might be her mother, had died in the house they were about to occupy.

  "So you're sure it's okay for us to sell the furniture?" Lydia asked as soon as Greg opened the front door. The two of them peered into the musty beige and green living room.

  "According to the lawyers, it's all yours. No other claims, no relatives wanting mementos," he said. "In fact, this is good. Yeah. We can throw a yard sale. Serve donuts. Get to know the neighbors. That'll be fun, and we can generate a little buzz before we put the house on the market."

  Lydia shook her head slowly and grinned.

  "Look," Greg assured her. "We might have to make a few repairs, but this is win-win. We didn't invest anything, so it's pure profit even if we sell it for less than it's worth."

  "Greg," Lydia said. "Please do one thing for me: Stop looking on the bright side. Even one month in this place is going to be hell."

  She took a seat in the overstuffed corduroy recliner. She tugged the side handle and her feet came gliding up on the footrest.

  "Tired?" Greg said. "Take it easy. I'll unload the car. You look like you could fall asleep."

  Beneath the fringe of shaggy brown hair, Lydia's eyes had closed. Now the right one opened and glared at him.