“Slow down,” Jeremy said. His mother’d said that to him when he’d had bad dreams as a child. Slow down. Tell me about it.
“I went to the house,” she said.
“The house?”
“It was right there.”
“Slow down.”
“Those scenes on the tapes, the ones you said.”
“What house.”
“You can see a house. It’s not there for long but you can see it, I saw it. It clicked right away. I—”
“Slow down.”
“When she’s getting up, in the one scene.” She extended her arms, mimicking the hooded figure’s rise to her feet. “In the other one, too. If you freeze the tape, there’s a house. I froze the tape. I grew up out there. I know that house.”
She drew soda up through the straw in huge gulps.
“I grew up out there,” she said again. She looked at Jeremy, making sure he was there to bear witness. “That place has been there since I was a kid.”
“Collins?” said Jeremy.
“The house,” said Sarah Jane, reaching back into her purse and retrieving the printout of the frame from when my hand slipped and the front porch came into view.
* * *
A farmhouse has a way of feeling both timeless and impermanent without ever committing to either side. Seen from the road, buttressed by its fields, it bequeaths order to the frame: those fields, now that a farmhouse sits squarely in their midst, are there for someone. They’re justified. Inside—in the narrow entry hall; in the kitchen opening onto the living room; upstairs—there’s a lived-in feel; the house is there for the fields outside its windows. Coffee cans on pantry shelves, clean dishtowels embroidered with roosters or the sun and smartly draped over the handle of the stove—when, here, did people not live like this?
But a farmhouse has no neighbors, not real ones, and if you try looking for them, it shrinks. Its architecture is functional, its staircase carpeted old pine, not oak or maple; its window frames were painted white once long ago and never touched up again. Walk twenty paces from its door and you’re waist-high in corn or knee-high in bean fields, already forgetting the feel of being behind a door, safely shielded from the sky.
Whether you’re inside or out walking rows, though, you’re invisible. If we talk about seeing the house from the road, “in passing” is implied. No one inventories the shelves or the drawers or pulls up the staircase carpet, worn down from years of use. The only people likely to take much note of a farmhouse are the ones who go there on purpose: to get something, or to bring news, or because they live there.
“No,” Jeremy said when Sarah Jane finished.
“Please,” she said. “I don’t want to go back there alone.”
“I’m not going. Why do you—” Jeremy started, cutting himself off before saying you two. Why do you two want to go out there.
“I want to know,” said Sarah Jane after a little silence, knowing Jeremy, even in defiance, was too polite to ask Know what? She reached into her purse and retrieved her printout, now half-crumpled in one corner.
Jeremy appraised it. “I never saw this one,” he said.
“It’s after the credits.” Specifically, it was after someone had turned on the floodlights in the driveway; the action washes out to a pure white throughout the scene, swallowed by an incoming tide of light and then reemerging. “She tries to get away, I thought. But it’s her.”
Jeremy took in the picture as best he could; the unhooded figure was in disarray, only half-clothed now. Looking at it made him feel ashamed of something, he wasn’t sure what.
“Her?”
“The woman who lives in the house now. Lisa. She said it wasn’t but I know it is.”
“This is something we should just leave alone,” said Jeremy, surprised to hear himself sounding so assertive. But it was true: this had all gone far enough for him.
“I have to go back,” said Sarah Jane, without enthusiasm, as if describing an unpleasant duty.
“OK,” said Jeremy, unsure how to understand the way it seemed as if she were asking his permission. Her visible distress made him uncomfortable; he wanted to do or say whatever he could to calm her down, but without having to learn much more about the source of her discomfort.
“I have to go back,” she said again as she began straightening up the front counter a little: just keeping her hands busy, easing unsurely back into the normal quiet of the day.
* * *
Ezra was there when Jeremy came in for the afternoon shift the next day: his car, an old Chevrolet Citation with black-orange rust moons pocking its rims, stood blue and alone in the parking lot, a little worse off for having survived another winter. Their paths didn’t cross often; Ezra mainly worked the evening rush on weekends. Still, they greeted each other with nods and grunts, like men who’d seen each other every morning at the grain elevator for years.
“Sarah Jane sick?” Jeremy asked with his back turned while hanging up his coat.
“I guess sick,” Ezra said. “She called me last night and asked if I could pick up her shift. Said the key was under the mat.”
“The mat at her house?”
“No, the one out front.” Jeremy raised his eyebrows. The mat out front would be swollen with rain and melting snow until at least May, but putting the key to the store there seemed crazy.
“Huh,” said Jeremy.
The store was clean and there weren’t any returns to file; there would be nothing to do until the after-work rush. They waited out the quiet until the rush did come, then worked briskly until it died down. Jeremy was talking to Bob Pietsch about smallmouth bass in the Dale Maffitt Reservoir this year when the phone rang. “You have to be a little patient,” Bob was saying when Ezra picked it up.
“I don’t like to go out this early,” said Jeremy. “Might as well go up north and do it on the ice. Save the local spots for summer.”
“Fished all winter down here growing up, though.”
“Sure,” said Jeremy.
“She asked if I could pick up the rest of her shifts this week,” Ezra said when he’d gotten off the phone. Through the window, you could see the blast of steam and exhaust from Bob’s pickup as he pulled out onto the road.
“Mm,” said Jeremy. “Flu?”
“She didn’t say. She just said she wasn’t coming in.”
“Well, it’s her store.”
“It’s her store,” Ezra agreed. Neither man could really imagine many situations that would cause a person to call off work for a whole week. Even out-of-town funerals only took a day or two. They finished out the shift without saying any more about it, and nodded goodbyes in the parking lot.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess,” Ezra said.
“Yeah, I’ll see you then,” said Jeremy, trying, as he turned the key in the ignition, to shake off the urge to drive out to Collins instead of heading home.
* * *
He drove past the highway on-ramp steadily. His imagination flared with the variables—smoke, fire, fumes—but he shook his head a couple of times to get his head clear, and it worked. You cultivate practical responses all your life precisely so that you’ll instinctively protect yourself if you should happen to meet a moment like this one, where, nagged by worry, you find yourself tempted to get on a dark highway at night and see who is or isn’t parked down a farmhouse driveway. You hold out for a better scenario: the next morning, say, when it’s light out, and the moon isn’t up. You hold out for the right time so as not to make things worse.
But the situation as it eventually revealed itself to him in the house did not align with his expectations, though it was elliptically consonant with what he’d pictured. Bracing yourself against the possibility of disaster came naturally to him; it seemed to run in the family, and in the families of most people he knew. Plan for colder winters, harder storms, road closures. In the unmanageable elements of the case before him, though, expectations had been lowered to the point of paranoia: he saw himself arr
iving at the property in Collins and walking unprotected into scenes of unspeakable devastation and loss, too late to help anyone, too much gone for any explanation-offering reassembly to ever be attempted.
As we know, the Collins house played a longer game. But the memory of his first vision proved hard to shake. And indeed, all the way down to the present day, Jeremy will sometimes find himself replaying the payoff he’d first imagined, that vivid, unrealized presentiment: of taking matters into his own hands and turning the CLOSED sign around before sundown. Driving to Collins. Heading down a gravel road, a cloud of dust rising from his back tires as he sped toward the titanic orange beacon of Lisa Sample’s house, now in flames, oil-black smoke ascending into the Iowa sky in a single furious spiraling column, the sound of the fire reaching him before he was physically near enough to hear it, the rumble and the roar.
8
The drive in from Collins took half an hour. She’d hoped to get to the store in time to open it herself; there’d be no chance of avoiding some kind of confrontation, she knew, but getting there first might establish a power dynamic, some system of domain: just being inside already when Jeremy reported for work, sitting behind the counter, scrolling through the overdues.
But she got caught behind a combine harvester on the surface streets out to 65 North, and it set her back a full fifteen minutes. Jeremy was already inside. She tried not to be nervous—they’d talked at least once a day on the phone—but there was no way he wasn’t going to ask, and she still hadn’t settled on an answer.
She fired the first volley as she came in through the door. “Everything all right?” she said.
Jeremy laughed. “Nobody’s been in yet,” he said. “Everything’s like usual. Are you in today?”
“I think so,” she said, her strategy presenting itself to her in the moment, naturally, like magic. “Haven’t been able to keep any food down. I’ll spare you the details. Just got a full breakfast down for the first time in days, anyway.”
Jeremy thought about his dad, about the partial conversations they’d been having at the dinner table the past two weeks, ever since Sarah Jane had stopped coming in; and thought also about the bigger picture he’d been trying to bring into focus, the story. What did his father think? His father thought the whole deal was a little weird, but probably nothing to worry about. “People can have things going on in their private lives,” he’d said one night over some pot roast. “You never really know. If it’s me, I just take the extra hours.”
“Gets pretty quiet when you’re putting in forty hours at Video Hut,” Jeremy’d said.
“I can imagine.” He’d helped himself to some more mashed potatoes. You think you’d get tired of them, but it takes longer than you’d think. “Did I mention how Bill Veatch is looking for help? Just if you wanted to get your hands a little dirtier, I guess. Needs somebody in receiving.”
“Full-time?”
“I think,” his father’d said. “Give him a call.”
But Jeremy wasn’t ready to call Bill Veatch yet. First he wanted to know why Sarah Jane wasn’t coming in to the store anymore; why she’d put him on opening duty almost daily for two straight weeks. Why Ezra had to pick up so many hours all of a sudden. Ezra didn’t usually get this much contact with the outside world; it made Jeremy feel obligated to protect him. On duty, they hardly ever exchanged more than a few sentences, but the governing silence between them was the regional grammar of comfort between like-minded men. They enjoyed each other’s company. Still, Jeremy thought kids like Ezra shouldn’t have to come all the way into town every day. It messed with the order of things.
“So just a flu bug or something?” he said, back in the present, in the incoming glare of the morning.
“I wonder,” she said, improvising now, enjoying it. “I remember my mom used to have all kinds of trouble after she started getting older.”
It was a powerful gambit. Talking about family health is a pastime almost as exalted as the noble art of who lives where now and how they got there. The cue was right there waiting for him to pick it up, if he wanted to: grandmothers, aunts, cousins. The path of no resistance was open. But he wanted to know, so he pressed forward.
“Have you been to a doctor?” he asked.
She was back in the racks pulling tapes; she hadn’t bothered to retrieve the outer sleeves from the aisles. Her fingers flipped at the corners of the clear cases like a chicken’s beak picking up seed. She was hunting down specific titles. It seemed pretty clear.
“I have an appointment,” she said.
“You want a bag for those?” Jeremy offered, reaching under the counter and rustling among the plastic Hy-Vee bags.
“I’ll just take them to the car,” she said, offhandedly, automatically but with a weirdly cheerful air; she had five tapes in all. Jeremy watched her head out to the parking lot; she popped the trunk and set them down inside, quite carefully, it seemed, as you might with something fragile.
“Been all holed up in the house, haven’t really seen anybody for a while,” she said when she came back in. “Do I look awful?”
“You look about the same to me,” said Jeremy, which wasn’t true at all.
“Well, it’s sweet of you to say that,” she said, reaching into her jeans for some Chap Stick, applying it to her lips like it was the most normal thing in the world, her lips in fact dry and cracked and peeling, her eyes weirdly awake to the fluorescent hum of the almost-empty store.
* * *
“Which ones did she take?” Stephanie asked on the phone.
“Miss Parsons, I don’t get into anybody’s business,” Jeremy said. Why had he called her, then?
“Why did you call me, then?” she said.
“Well, you asked how she was last time you were in.”
“It could have waited if that was all there was to it.”
“Well, I’m sorry, then,” said Jeremy.
“Don’t get mad,” she said. “I just don’t know why you won’t admit to being a little curious.”
“You already made me admit that,” he said.
Stephanie smiled. Jeremy’s shyness was the true vintage.
“Go see which tapes,” she said.
He didn’t feel like arguing; it’s easier to follow directions. He got up from the stool behind the counter and went back into the racks. The store was already locked; Sarah Jane had said she’d be back after lunch, but an hour later the phone rang. The doctor wanted her to get more rest. She was going home. “You want somebody to bring you some dinner?” he’d asked her.
“No, no,” she’d said.
“Looks like those two we saw, you and me,” Jeremy said now to Stephanie, “plus Iron Will, and one called Primal Fear. And a Star Trek movie.”
“Which Star Trek?”
He laughed. “I don’t know.” He walked with the mobile phone to his ear from the racks out into the store again and headed for the Sci-Fi section. He grabbed four of the Star Trek titles and headed back to the racks again.
“OK, we still have Generations,” he said. “Still have Insurrection. We’re missing First Contact, it looks like.”
“The case is in the store and the tape’s gone?” said Stephanie.
“Yeah.” He imagined her scribbling in her notebook full of lists and heavily underlined phrases in capital letters.
“We should get that one from Hollywood Video and watch it,” she said.
“I’m not doing this with you,” he said. “I’m just telling you because I knew you’d want to know.”
There was a pause. “Do you have a crush on me?” she said.
“Sure,” he said. “A little. I don’t know.”
She didn’t want to push him, in part because she sensed that pushing would be of no use, but she’d outgrown the patience for these slow, shy passes.
“Well, I’m going into Ames, and I’m going to Hollywood Video,” she said.
“All right,” he said. “Let me know if you find anything, I guess.” She wasn�
��t going to find anything. Sarah Jane had the only copy on which anybody might have found something. If Stephanie didn’t already know this, then she was just playing games.
“I’ll call you after I watch,” she said, and she did, that night, around 11:30; they talked for about fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, about Star Trek: First Contact, and also about recent trends in the weather.
* * *
Hanging from a nail at the end of the front porch was a hollowed-out gourd with a hole in it for birds. House wrens will set up shop in a gourd inside of half a day if you hang one up; they nest in winter and their young fledge in spring, and then the nest sits ready for another bird to come clear it out and start again.
“Wasps,” Lisa Sample said from her chair near the door when she saw Sarah Jane approaching the gourd. “They’ll come at you if you hang out over there too much.”
“Sorry?”
“Wasps. There used to be birds, but between nests some wasps set up in there. We had them when I lived in Madison. Look.” She pointed at the hole; it was partially obscured by a pale tan resin, leaving a half-moon-shaped opening. “Brood cells.”
Sarah Jane jutted her neck forward a little and narrowed her eyes, trying to get better focus without having to draw nearer; she noticed a few small yellow bodies lazily drifting in and out of the hole. It made the gourd feel heavier in her sight than it had when she’d been imagining robins or nuthatches. Birds nest lightly. She thought about so many wasps crowded into one place, a great throng displacing some small family of two or three birds. She saw the muddy netting of the nest half-blocking the hole, dusty runover from all the activity inside. And she noted, finally, a wet spot at the bottom, a darkening patch about as big as her hand. Honey? There is no wasp honey. But the gourd had been put there for birds.
“Madison?” she said.
“Just for a short while. It was nice, though,” said Lisa, behind her now, craning in, voice low. “I think they got one of the babies before the mama left. Gourd’ll rot through when it gets a little warmer now.”
“They eat birds?” said Sarah Jane. Her stomach heaved a little.
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