More shouts.
This was going to be so, so good. I knew it.
“I’ll pick you up in ten,” I said. “Be ready.”
46
Vail
Fell, New York
I was never leaving this house. I knew that now.
Not that I couldn’t—I could. I could leave Fell, too, if I wanted. But where would I go?
So I stayed. My sisters left to start their lives over, to at least try to find their happiness. When they left, I knew that I wouldn’t find my happiness by leaving. I’d find it by staying.
Besides, there was a lot of work to be done.
The house, for one. The dusty furniture, the old linoleum, the wallpaper. I did most of the work myself, only hiring someone when one person couldn’t do a job alone. I got books and magazines from the library and taught myself how to do most of the things I needed. I had time and patience. I also had a trust fund I had barely touched.
I painted the walls. I mowed the lawn. I raked the leaves. I got proper cable hooked up, and when the bill came, I paid it. I paid the phone bill, too.
On weekend mornings, I haunted garage sales, looking for furniture. I’d rather have someone else’s old furniture than ours.
My Jeep was a rental, so I returned it and bought a car from a used car lot on the edge of town. It cost eight hundred dollars and came with free rust on all the doors.
As the months went by, I watched the weather get cold, then wet, then hot. Then cold again. I relearned the sound of rain on the roof of this house, the creak of snow under my boots when I stepped outside to shovel after a snowfall. My tools began to pile up in the garage, so I installed a workbench and kept my rusty car in the driveway. I emptied my parents’ bedroom and threw out their bed. I cleaned the disused stove and actually used it. I raked more leaves.
In winter, the cold drafts in the house came from the old windows, not from ghosts. Damp spots came from leaky sinks, not from Sister dripping water on the floor. I sealed the windows and fixed the sinks. Nothing walked in the upstairs hallway. Nothing screamed. I scrubbed the wordsWAKE UPfrom the living room wall.
Sometimes, on rainy afternoons, I’d go to the attic and sort through Ben’s clothes and toys. I got rid of the puzzles with half the pieces missing and other broken toys. I donated the stuffed animals he’d barely used. When it got too hard, I’d come downstairs again. Ben was okay with that, I felt. He didn’t need me to hurry. He knew I was here for good and that I wasn’t going to leave him alone again.
One day, I put in a call to the city, complaining about the construction site across the road. I said that it was hazardous, especially the basement, which was full of water and had a terrible smell coming from it. I said that as a concerned neighbor, I thought something should be done.
A few weeks later, the city sent an inspector. He got out of his car wearing thick work boots, put on a hard hat, and went into the house. He came out thirty minutes later, walked across the street, and knocked on my door.
I let him in and gave him tea.
“I checked it out,” the inspector told me. “There’s no water in the basement. But it’s wet down there, and you’re right about the smell.”
“No water?” I asked, raising my eyebrows as if this surprised me.
He shook his head. “It was there recently, though, and all the way to the ceiling, based on the water marks. And the mud down there—my God. No wonder you complained. No kid in the neighborhood should come near that place.”
I didn’t tell him that since Terri Chatham’s family moved away, there were no children in the neighborhood anymore. “That’s interesting,” I said. “When I looked, it was full of water. What did you see in the basement?”
“Not much.” The inspector sipped his tea. “Just what I could see with my flashlight, because I didn’t go all the way to the bottom of the stairs. The steps are rotted, and the mud looked—well, they don’t pay me enough to replace my boots, so I wasn’t about to walk in it. It looked like if I sank down, I’d never get out.”
“A distressing thought,” I agreed.
“Whatever’s down there is definitely rotten,” he said.
I thought about Sister’s head rolling off her bony body and falling into the water, and I smiled.
The inspector didn’t notice. He was deep in thought as he scratched the back of his head. “The question is what to do. There’s a city bylaw about having contaminated soil on your property. I think if we invoke that one, we can get the owners to act. They live in Texas, apparently. They tried to move here, but I guess they didn’t like it, so they didn’t stay long. And they can’t sell the property as it is, obviously.”
I nodded. “Obviously.”Contaminated soil,I thought.
