12

Four Months, Two Weeks, Six Days

Getting rid of your things is difficult. Most of the furniture went to the Upright Citizen’s Brigade green room in LA. They also took the piano that came with the house. The kitchen stuff went to Goodwill. Your massive DVD collection went to our friend Johnny. The drums went to our friend Danny. Various friends took the T-shirts. The Phish posters went to Matt Marcus, who drove the BMW back to Houston, where Mike and I traded it in for a Subaru. We sold the two ridiculously large televisions and stereo equipment to friends of friends. Iris got your vintage Happy Meal toys, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Simpsons characters, and other plastic action figures from childhood. She also swiped a large rock from outside your house. She collects them.

The actual house is the last big thing to go, and it happened today. As we slept, the funds were transferred into our account via direct deposit—just like that. All your toil, sleepless nights, and parasitic stress compressed into a series of numbers on a screen, a screen that didn’t even belong to you. One time when I was guilt-tripping you about getting sober, you jokingly said, “Hey, if I die, you’ll be rich!” I told you it wasn’t funny. While we’re certainly not rich, we can now afford to look at houses in central Houston that are zoned to our first-choice elementary school. Ambivalent doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel.

My father-in-law, a real estate agent who lives in Long Beach, took care of the sale. He made the repairs, staged it nicely, and put it on the market. He handled the closing, while we remained back home in Houston. It’s a nice house in a desirable neighborhood, so it didn’t take long to sell. And now it’s gone. New residents—retirees—who likely don’t have a print hanging in their foyer of naked Kristen Stewarts floating around the cosmos on raw steaks.

I wonder if they know what happened in this house.

I remember when you started house hunting in 2011. We spent hours chatting about the process online. You’d send me listings, I’d scrutinize them, and we’d compare notes.

Me: WOW

that is gorgeous

i love that house

Harris: the problem with that one is no backyard really.

Me: less work for you

Harris: it was owned by a gay dude so it is beautiful

Me: there are still outdoor spaces

Harris: and this next one i truly love and there is this huge backyard where i could do whatever i want. put a pool in, whatever.

but its up a TON of stairs

but look at that insane view

Me: that is a shit ton of stairs

but very pretty

you have traditional taste

like mom

Harris: like in terms of what

what taste do u have?

i mean ignore the furniture

Me: contemporary gay

Harris: i love contemporary gay!

i love that first house

just wish it had more space

Me: the first house is right up my alley

i dont love the brown marble and marble in general on the 2nd one

but again, that’s a taste issue

Harris: i dont either

Me: like, that kitchen omg

Harris: that kitchen is like the kitchen we grew up in

Me: i know exactly!

i was thinking that

mom would love it

The one you eventually settled on sat at the foot of Griffith Park in Los Feliz. It resembled the brick, 1950s ranch-style home we grew up in, one block away from our neighborhood middle school. Three bedrooms, two and a half baths, one story—a modest abode, relatively speaking. Orangish-reddish brick. White trim. Traditional. It could have blended into any residential neighborhood in Houston. You were specifically looking for a house like this, something familiar and cozy in a place that didn’t always feel like those things.

The backyard was of paramount importance to you. It was your favorite spot. I can see you sitting out there on the patio at the round, metal table with the overflowing ashtrays, one knee folded up in the chair, smoking cigarette after cigarette, sending swarms of texts, recording beloved Vines.

We had a table like that in our backyard growing up. In high school, my friends and I would sit out there after Mom and Dad went to bed and chain-smoke our teenage lives away. Ironically, you weren’t much of a smoker back then, which is why your excessive smoking as an adult has always baffled me.

I recently found this picture you drew of us back in high school, depicting our morning car rides. We overlapped one year: you were a freshman; I was senior. In the drawing, Ani DiFranco (my permanent high-school music choice) is blaring through the speakers. The Tae Bo people are these old people who did Tai Chi on the lawn of this Hasidic synagogue that we drove by every morning. I’m smoking. You hated it when I smoked in the car and made the biggest fucking deal about how it was killing you and aggravating your allergies.

In February, when we were in LA packing up your house, Mom and I were surprised to find canvases, art supplies, an easel, and several finished paintings in your guest room. One of them sits in my closet now. I look at it daily. The background is a deep, dark blue with splotches of black. Several stars made of tin foil speckle the sky. A veiny pink and red heart with yellow-gold wings flies up to the heavens. White dots border the top and the sides of the flying heart, while red dots drip off the bottom. The lower portion of the painting depicts the ground, the earth. Black, barren trees sit on a black landscape. There is a large, hollow skull perched in the bottom left corner, also lined with dots. The earth is bleak; the sky is where the heart takes flight.

I had no idea you were painting.

Selling your house depletes me. Just one more piece of evidence that this is really happening.

In addition to selling your house, we’ve also listed ours in Houston. I can’t get out of here fast enough. It’s too small, there’s bad juju, and I’m still scarred from the mold fiasco that left us displaced last year for six weeks and cost $8,000 in repairs, none of which was covered by insurance nor recouped from the previous owners.

Mom’s voice echoes inside my head: “Life isn’t fair, Stephanie.”

Originally, Mike tried to sell the house for $150 and a two-hundred-word essay. The idea was that we’d get enough money from entry fees to cover the cost of the home, someone would get a charming house in a cool neighborhood for $150, and he’d get some decent publicity as a real estate agent. This was necessary because—head’s up—when your wife is consumed with crippling grief and either weeping, sleeping, or generally catatonic, you wind up with lots of extra shit on your plate. He had basically put his career on the back burner since February, and it was time to initiate some sort of resurrection.

Man, if I thought our story was sad…holy fuck. Want to feel better about your life? List your house for $150 and have people submit essays about why they need it. I had to stop reading them after a while. Also, the media attention was overwhelming and made my anxiety flare up. People were driving by at all hours of the day and night to check out the house, which isn’t exactly comforting with a baby inside. A couple of people even knocked on the front door and asked to take a look around. The story ran in every local publication, moved on to national headlines in the New York Times, NPR, and Businessweek, and eventually made its way over to Britain and parts of Europe. Another runaway train of a situation.

Even though we received nearly three thousand essays, only half of the applicants paid, so there wasn’t enough to cover the cost of the house, and we could’ve extended the deadline, but I got paranoid that we were breaking some law by running what could be considered an illegal raffle and didn’t want my husband to go to jail on top of all the other shit that was going on. So, at the end of June, we called it quits, and Mike listed the house the traditional way. Fortunately, it only took a day for someone to make an offer.

During the inspection, which takes place the day after we sell your house, the potential buyer is walking around the attic, and his foot falls through the ceiling. Literally. And the rotting drywall, on the way down, scratches that print that used to hang in your dining room of all the pop icons—one of the things that most reminds me of you. I spent so much time in your house over the years staring at it, trying to figure out the identity of each character. And now it’s permanently banged up by a piece of old, rotten drywall that fell from the ceiling in this cursed, piece of shit house. Just heap it on top of the giant pile that my soul is buried under.

Sometimes I think about you being buried in the ground. I think about what color your skin is, the texture. I see a sort of shade of gray. I wonder how your arms are positioned and what your face is doing. You had such a great face.