No Doors, No Windows

by Joe Schreiber

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a manuscript.”

  “Yours?”

  Scott shook his head. “I wish. It’s actually my dad’s. I found it in the shed.”

  “The Black Wing,” she read. “Your dad was a writer?”

  “I never thought so, but …”

  “Any good?”

  “It is,” he said, “but it needs an ending.”

  “He never finished it?”

  Scott shook his head, got up, and began to make coffee. A moment later, Owen and Henry came downstairs, and Sonia cut them each a wedge of chocolate cake. Henry drank orange juice and continued to stare intently at the panels of the Daredevil comic that he’d brought down with him, while Owen and Sonia had an animated conversation about the proper method of making a margarita. Scott tried not to stare at her, but it was almost impossible, particularly when she looked directly at him and smiled, reached up to tuck her hair back behind one ear, or shifted sideways so her knee brushed his beneath the table.

  “Hey, bro,” Owen said, “don’t you have a plane to catch?”

  “I can always fly standby.”

  “You’ll end up paying more,” Sonia said. “When does your flight leave? Where are you headed?”

  “Seattle.”

  “The big city.”

  “Yeah, he’s leaving all us real people behind,” Owen said, brushing crumbs from his stubble. “Ask him how much he paid for those shoes. Go on, ask him. Cheap bastard still won’t spring for a rental car, expects me to drive him halfway across the state like a chauffeur.”

  “I’ll drive you,” Sonia said.

  “That’s silly.” Scott felt a surge of embarrassment baking his face like the blast of a sunlamp. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Are you crazy, man? Let her.” Owen was already lumbering away to find his tool belt, leaving the three of them in the kitchen. “Some people have to earn a living around here. Henry, get your stuff, let’s roll.” The boy was observing Scott carefully over his comic book, as if he feared his uncle might try to slip away without saying goodbye. In that instant, Scott was given a brief but utterly compelling glimpse of what life would be like if he could take Henry with him. There was plenty of room in his house and he’d let his nephew decorate his room any way he wanted, taking trips to Pike Place Market and Mount Rainier. On weekends, they would go to the mountains or make the ferry trip out to the islands in Puget Sound, scouting for whales.

  “Come here.” He lifted the boy from the chair and hugged him. “You and your dad are going to come out and visit me for Christmas, right?”

  The boy hugged back, hard, and nodded against his shoulder.

  “Take care of yourself,” Scott said.

  Take him. You could do that. Just take him and run.

  But Henry had already kissed and hugged and obediently released him, sensing with a child’s clarity that the deal was done. Scott looked up the hall. “Owen,” he called, “I’m leaving.”

  “See ya,” his brother’s voice hollered down. “Say hi to the beautiful people for us.”

  Sonia blinked, clearly puzzled by the briskness of his goodbye, but Scott expected nothing less. His family had always been bad at farewells. Even their mother, who had never forgotten to kiss their cheeks on the way to school, had ultimately found no better way of saying goodbye than dying.

  THEY DROVE TOWARD TOWN in her immaculately maintained Corolla, Sonia changing radio stations while she fingertipped the steering wheel with small and subtle movements, hardly seeming to consult the street. “So,” she said, “how long has it been since you were back?”

  “Fifteen years.”

  “That was for your mother’s funeral, wasn’t it?”

  Scott nodded, wondering at the implication that death was the only compelling reason that one might revisit the past. But Sonia seemed distracted, lost in her own thoughts. A fat squirrel shot out in front of the car and across the street, chasing a loose tangle of leaves. He caught a whiff of wood smoke drifting in the bright distance balanced with the scent of apples, smells and sights crisper than normal, and realized that he hadn’t taken his pills yet today, or yesterday for that matter.

  “What about you?” he asked. “How long have you been back?”

  “Almost two years now.”

  “Weren’t you going to law school?”

  “I dropped out of Loyola after my second term…” She reached for a Styrofoam cup of coffee in the cup holder, took a sip, and put it back. “It’s only temporary. Circumstances with my father …”

  “Right,” he said, and they both went quiet again.

  “But, hey, look at you.” She flicked her eyes up and down, from haircut to shoes, seeming to take his measure in a single glance. “You’ve done all right for yourself.”

  Scott felt the first pinpricks of sweat tickling his hairline. The car abruptly felt too small. He ought not to have accepted this ride from her; he had allowed himself to get caught up in the immediate and visceral thrill of seeing her again without considering the implications of being stuck in conversation for a ninety-minute drive. But there was no getting out of it now.

  “You always said you were going to be a writer,” she said. “Is that what you’re doing?”

  “I write greeting cards.”

  “Hallmark boy.” She nodded. “Now I get it.”

  “I still manage a little fiction on the side.” This was a flat-out lie, but he made it sound slightly better by adding, “Not that I’ve had much time to do it lately. Random House isn’t exactly knocking down my door.”

  “Hey,” Sonia said, “relax. It’s great that you’re getting paid to write anything. Who gets to do that?”

  “It’s not exactly the great American novel.”

  “Yeah, well”—she gave him a wry half smile—“pouring beers isn’t really practicing law either. But I guess nothing ever turns out quite the way you expect it, does it?”

  “Yeah, I guess not.”

  Another silence, this one heavier somehow, measured in miles, and Scott felt it now, the past riding between them like a hitchhiker they’d picked up along the way. It might have been that notion in the abstract—the almost palpable presence of the past—that triggered the next idea in his mind. Once acknowledged, it wouldn’t go away.

  “Do you mind if we take a detour before the airport?”

  She frowned. “What about your flight?”

  “We’ve still got time.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Scott nodded. “Turn here. Take a left on Broad, follow it down.”

  They drove half a mile, and he gave more directions, wondering now if Sonia realized where they were headed. If she did, she said nothing. Their route became a country road, climbing, dithering, and unmarked except for an occasional mailbox, up to an unassuming intersection marked only by a black smear of tire marks and the bright yellow sap of the broken tree.

  “Is this where your father …?” She let the question fade, unfinished.

  “Yeah.” He climbed out, trembling only a little, wishing now he’d remembered to take his pills but not wanting to pull them out in front of her. Under his boots, tiny fragments of grit spangled the roadside. This was all that was left of his father, a pair of black tire marks, crumbs of broken windshield glass, a demolished young pine—and then he remembered the manuscript, more marks left across a blank surface, more dead pulp. Looking at the angle of the swerve, Scott felt his eyes drawn back to the unmarked dirt road that joined the main highway here, and found himself wondering what a man like Frank Mast might have been doing up there.

  Whether he saw it then—a glint of old iron, buried a hundred yards back in the woods—or only thought he did when he later remembered that moment, he didn’t know. He walked back to the car.

  “Let’s go up that way,” he said, pointing up the dirt road.

  “Why?”

  “I just want to check it out.” He got in, still watching her. The moment felt odd
, a segment of the past spliced into the present. “You mind?”

  Shrugging, Sonia put the car in gear. The bare dirt surface bumped and scraped underneath them. It was a bad road and she drove slowly, mindful of the car’s suspension. The trees grew thick and low above the road, and pine boughs hissed off the roof like stiff brooms brushing metal. After a few minutes, Scott could see that the old gates really were there after all, still partially disguised by the piney overgrowth that surrounded them. They stood ajar, as if the last person to come along hadn’t had time to get out and close them behind him, and he stared at them as they passed through, turning his head to watch them go by.

  That was when he first saw the house.

  IT STOOD BY ITSELF, STARING BACK at them from a clearing in the trees. Parts of it looked three stories high, others four, and there was the feeling that if you walked its circumference, you’d find that the whole thing went much farther back than expected. Wings and cupolas sprouted not quite randomly from its sides, outbuildings, additions that might have been tacked on as afterthoughts. The result was shapeless and unfocused, a house that looked big enough to get lost in.

  Smooth where it should have been angular, his father had written, angular where it should’ve been smooth.

  “It’s real,” Scott said, more to himself than Sonia, stepping out of the car.

  “What?”

  “Round House. It’s exactly like he described it.” Taking a few steps toward the house, he glanced up, feeling a single fleck of rain strike his nose. Through the treetops, the sky had gone low and mottled, and he could smell the threat of a downpour rising up from the woods around them.

  He walked across the neglected lawn to the porch, just ahead of the rain. The old wood was silent under his feet. In front of him, the brittle scroll of an ancient advertising circular poked out of the mailbox, looking as if it would turn to dust if he touched it. He saw a faded business card wedged inside, a local real estate office. Plucking it out, he dropped it in his pocket, turned, and looked back at Sonia’s car. It was reassuring to see her there, only fifty yards from where he stood. Maybe it was just the clearing, or the sudden arrival of the autumn storm, but the distances out here felt magnified, even warped, as if the sheer size of the house itself created its own gravitational field. He couldn’t see her expression through the falling rain.

  He jogged back to the car and got in.

  “You’re soaking wet,” she said. “What were you looking at?”

  “This house. It’s the one my dad described in this manuscript I found. I thought he’d made it up, but it’s actually real.” He looked at her and saw color rising in her neck that hadn’t been there a moment earlier, flushed against the darkness of her hair. “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I just hope you’ve got dry clothes for your flight home.” She watched him dialing the number from the business card. “Who are you calling?”

  “The Realtor.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I’m interested in seeing what it looks like inside, that’s all.”

  “Don’t you still have a plane to catch?”

  He did. But at the moment he had forgotten all about it.

  MARQUETTE LUTHER, THE REAL ESTATE AGENT who came to open up the house for him, was an unflappable African American woman in her midforties with a black umbrella and sensible black shoes. She was not the kind of individual whom Scott typically associated with this part of New Hampshire, and if the house itself hadn’t been such a distraction, the inquisitive part of him would have labored to keep from asking how she’d ended up here.

  The rain had hammered the clearing and tapered off prior to her arrival, but the air remained absurdly frigid, trapped inside his clothes, right up next to his wet skin. The muscles in his jaw ached from trembling. Up on the porch, he and Sonia waited while Marquette bent her right leg at the knee and flicked a leaf from her heel.

  “We actually had to check our own listings for this one,” she said. “I didn’t even know it was out here. And I’ve been with the office for sixteen years.” She took a key out of her purse with a round paper tag attached to it and tried to fit it in the door, but it didn’t work. “That’s strange. This should be the right key.” She ducked back out of the shadow of the porch to check the label on the tag.

  Scott reached out and tried the door. It clicked and turned easily, without resistance. “Looks like it’s open.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Behind them, Sonia made a sound of amused incredulity and gave him an “after you” gesture. With a half-comic sense of a man going to meet his destiny, Scott stepped through the entryway.

  Part of him, maybe the majority of him, had expected to find it dirty and damp—cluttered, probably, with old newspapers and water damage, sheet-draped furniture, cobwebs, and whole layers of dust, maybe even a broken window or two. But the air was dry, and the vacant hardwood floors of the foyer and adjacent sitting room looked freshly swept. Past an open walk-in closet, an enormous metal radiator sat beneath one of the windows, coiled like a python.

  “My goodness, look at these floors,” Sonia said. “How old do you think they are?”

  Marquette checked her paperwork. “Built in the 1870s.”

  “Do you have any idea who the owner is?” Scott asked. He had started the other way and, realizing he didn’t know where he was heading, turned to look back at the Realtor.

  “It’s been empty for quite some time. I could certainly look into it.”

  “What did you call it when we were outside?” Sonia asked Scott. “Round House?”

  “That’s what my father called it, in his manuscript.” He nodded and pointed up. “See?”

  Marquette Luther studied the ceiling for a long moment and followed it down to the floor, then forward to the doorway, squatting down and running her fingers along the frame. “That’s very unusual,” she said. “The whole place kind of … curves around you, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Sonia said.

  “What?” Scott looked back at her. “You don’t like it?”

  “It reminds me of something I read somewhere about dreams. They say if you’re not sure whether or not you’re dreaming, you should look for a place where the walls come together. Apparently in dreams they never form a sharp angle.”

  “How interesting,” Marquette said, but her voice sounded hollow and strange, and Scott realized that Sonia’s comment had struck him the same way, the huge emptiness of the house sucking the familiarity out of it. For the first time, he felt as if maybe he shouldn’t have come here, shouldn’t have opened the door and allowed himself to go inside.

  “I guess that makes this a dream house, then,” he said, but Sonia didn’t say anything, and the real estate agent’s obligatory laugh was so dry that he wished he’d kept his mouth shut.

  Scott walked across the sitting area and opened the French doors to the formal dining room, the space largely empty except for a few haphazardly placed pieces of furniture. Although he had never set foot in the room, he felt as if he’d stood there before, right in that spot. In his father’s manuscript, this had been where Karl Faircloth first encountered the door to the long black hall that went nowhere. Scott paused and let his gaze settle on the oak door in the far right corner of the room, unremarkable except for its odd placement and the long brass knob, exactly as his father had described. He touched the handle—it was cold, as if all the coming blackness of winter were waiting to be released from the other side.

  He let out his breath, only then realizing how much air he’d been holding in, looking at the place where his father’s book and reality finally parted company, and his first conscious thought was Thank God, followed immediately by a sense of how silly he’d been. What did you expect?

  The space on the other side was just another closet. It was shallow and plain, not much bigger than the one they’d passed in the entryway, and it was certainly not a hidden wing. Two unpainted shelves, each slightly curved, lay bare
in front of him, and Scott found himself reaching in to tap the back wall. Two knocks and the whole thing would swing around, wasn’t that it? Or would there be a hidden lever, à la Scooby-Doo? He stood back with a peculiar combination of relief and disappointment, and that was when he noticed the scratch marks inside the door.

  They were narrow and deep, like the work of a chisel or file. The markings came in sets of three and four, sometimes five, as if some animal had been trapped inside or, he supposed, a person—they were about chest-level to him—or perhaps a child, though, of course, no child could’ve mustered such force.

  “Scott?” Sonia’s voice was distant, buzzing through the ductwork like the two-cans-and-a-string telephone game he’d played as a kid. “You have to come up and see this!”

  “Coming,” Scott said, and pushed the door firmly shut.

  “WHAT DO YOU THINK?” SONIA ASKED, gesturing into the open room at the end of the second-floor hallway. The hall was long and straight and would have been utterly unremarkable if not for the almost cavelike effect of the rounded ceiling and floor. The room at the end was somehow both bigger and smaller than it should have been. Scott stepped inside. After the rain, little drizzles of gold-orange and yellow afternoon light trickled down through the surrounding trees outside. The light ought to have revealed desiccated insect corpses and dust bunnies, but there was only freshly dusted spotless cedar, which he could feel bowing just slightly under his shoes. Built-in empty bookshelves lined the walls, floor to ceiling, separated by wide windows. A single glassed-in dormer projected from the sloping wall, surrounded by treetops and overlooking the lawn, big enough for a desk and chair. “It’s the perfect office. Think of the writing you could do here.”

  “You’re a writer?” Marquette asked.

  “Scott’s a novelist,” Sonia said. “They’re calling him the next Nicholas Sparks.”

  “Really?”

  “No.” Scott felt his face getting hot. “She’s joking.”

  “He’s going to finish his father’s novel,” Sonia said, seemingly oblivious to his stare. “His father passed away recently, and Scott found this unfinished manuscript. Now he’s going to complete it for him—right here in Round House. It will be published under both their names, a father-and-son collaboration, like a tribute to his father. Right, Scott?”