THE HOUSE IS mostly hidden by trees. The neighbors are happy for this fact, the ramshackle eyesore the place has become. But if it’s a sunny day, and you look to your left right after passing the old campaign signs for the school board, you can just barely see it—a shadowy glimpse through the leaves.
Four acres of farmland flank it on both sides, but our town is so well past those days that no one has any idea what might’ve once grown there. The folks in the new development across the street loathe the house, even though you practically have to strain your neck to really see the place. The old mailbox with the cover dangling off its hinge, an overgrown slope of lawn in front of it filled with weeds and garbage, the things they’ve heard that go on there now—people turn their heads. No one can do anything about it, though. Apparently, the house is still owned.
We hear the story from our parents, a cautionary tale. It’s told alongside other local legends such as the mother who locked her children in the basement then burned her house down. “She taught a bridge class once a week and served the most delicious macaroons and homemade strawberry wine,” our own mothers are quick to add in her defense. And then there were the four teenagers who careened off Bob-o-link Road in a homecoming convertible and smashed into an oak tree, their bodies flung about in impossible, Gumby-like positions. There are clear lessons to be learned from each of these stories: Don’t piss off your mother—it might be that one bad day too many, and she could have matches. Don’t drink and drive. It’s parenting through storytelling, and for the most part, it works.
But we don’t know what to do with this house’s tale, even though we’ve heard it many times and it grows more alive each time. The family’s name is never mentioned. They had a horse and a daughter who wished more than anything to ride it. The mother worked in the cafeteria at our elementary school a few years before we started going there. They say she always dressed up for holidays (a mermaid for Halloween serving up orange pudding with blackberries on top, an Indian squaw for Thanksgiving mixing the corn gravy). From what we’ve heard, the father didn’t do much of anything. He might’ve been perpetually looking for work or just taking care of that horse, a palomino a rich uncle had left him, his most treasured possession. The daughter wanted to ride the horse, but her father wouldn’t permit it. She was too young, he said, and besides, they didn’t own a proper saddle. We may not know her name, but we know what she did next.
One night she snuck down to the barn where they kept the horse. She brought a small footstool from the bathroom and attempted to climb onto the horse from behind, pulling herself up with the frightened thing’s tail. The palomino didn’t know her from a raccoon, as her father had never let her get near it, and when he felt someone come up from behind, he got nervous and kicked that girl in the head. She died with the half-round imprint of a horseshoe on her forehead that, we can only presume, had to be covered with makeup, if the family even had a viewing. We picture the little girl in a white dress with flowers by her side at her funeral. The barn later burned to the ground with the horse trapped inside. Then the parents disappeared.
WE CLIMB IN through a window on the back porch, careful not to scratch ourselves on the sharp edges of the frame. We find ourselves in the laundry room. The linoleum has curled in places, lifting itself away from the floor, and the middle of the floor is damp, sunken, quickly on its way to meet the basement. A stale pile of towels sits between the Maytag washer and dryer, with a few crusty socks sticking out like worms. A pink training bra is visible next to a black drain in the floor. Boxes of Tide are set up along a plank of white-painted wood, the labels discolored by the sun. The design of the insignia is different from the liquid detergent our mothers use. The lettering is bubbly and ecstatic, reminding us of Coke cans in ’80s movies. Someone suggests we move on; there’s nothing worth seeing here. A Mason jar shut tight with a lid and filled with loose change tips over as we leave. It rolls to the center of the room, then stops, letting the coins rest against the glass. It is mutually acknowledged that the house must hold a larger boon.
A narrow hallway leads to a living room, which one of us is quick to rename “the dying room,” as a musty smell of abandonment lies in each dark corner. The girl’s mother must’ve favored brown, orange, and all the hideous hues in between that now anxiously stand out in checks and circles on the couch and lazy-printed love seat. We sit down and sink into the cushions. They’ve become more decrepit with age, the stuffing inside eaten through by summer bugs that long ago must have claimed a free reign over the place. Yellowed newspapers litter the floor, hot-brown shag carpeting peeking through in patches like fresh mulch. We pick up copies of the The Washington Post, which all seem to span a four-month period in 1981.
A creased TV Guide on the coffee table that chronicles the week of May seventeenth of the same year confirms something we’ve heard before: the house died with the girl. This seems to have occurred at some point in the year that we turned three. The Goodbye Girl, a Saturday-afternoon matinee feature on Channel 20, is circled in red ink then crossed out in checklist fashion.
We break open a filing cabinet and take out papers typed in outdated fonts on stiff paper. There are bank statements, property deeds, report cards. We find out their last name, Innsbruck; her name, Jeannette. She got straight A’s (a B once in gym), was well liked by her teachers, and was absent only one day during the 1978–79 school year. After we’ve pored over the papers for more clues, we toss them to the floor with the newspapers, adding more years to the pile.
Someone hauls over a stack of records documenting a bad taste in early folk music and Christian rock. We erupt into vicious hysterics, laughing at the shaggy togetherness of the singers on the jacket covers. They’re draped over one another in long knitted shawls and bellbottoms appliquéd with floral garlands that snake up their legs. We hurl a couple of the records against the wood-paneled walls like Frisbees. They break into pieces of sharp black pie wedges and fall behind the couch to join layers of dust and the jagged curls of discarded fingernails. We glean a sense of mock ownership of the place from our ability to destroy the things inside it. We discuss the idea of heading upstairs. There’s got to be something more up there, some tragic token of the family’s demise.
Many of the steps are broken through. Someone scratches a bare ankle on a splintered piece of wood. It’s our first sign that others have been here before us. We grab the crooked banister for balance to negotiate the warped, wobbling steps, and the entire banister falls to the ground, landing on the hideous couch and catapulting to the floor dead horseflies upon which we’d been unknowingly sitting.
We see rectangular squares of discolored wallpaper where pictures once hung, holes that once held nails staggered along at eye level. When we reach the top of the stairs, we see the only picture that still remains and it’s perfectly aligned. The photograph shows the exterior of the house in a much earlier time, long before the Innsbrucks. A picnic table is populated with summer foods, a round glass pitcher filled with a dark, sustaining liquid. The porch is level and intact, with a row of old women sitting in rocking chairs, women whose eyes are darkened by the shadows of the trees before them, trees that haven’t yet taken over the front yard. They’re tamed and cut and seem to understand their primary purpose of providing cool blankets of shade. A new Model-T Ford is parked askew, half out of the picture’s frame. A young blond man has one boot propped on the thin bumper, smiling as if he’s the proud, lucky owner. A girl in a fringed dress with short-cut, sheer, flowing sleeves stands half hidden behind one of the Ionic columns. She’s smoking a cigarette. The profile of her nose is so well captured against the piece of late-afternoon sun that peeks behind her that it looks like a steep ski jump and is so distinct that it’s almost freakish. She also appears to be the only person unaware that a photograph is being taken.
The first bedroom is to the left of the staircase. A queen-size bed takes up most of the floor space. Old books thickened with dampness are interspersed with broken hairbrushes and the cord of an ancient electric heater in the middle of the mattress. The headboard is cracked in places and, like the rest of house, threatens collapse. We pick through the heap of junk on the floor and find the first thing we’ll take with us—an unused leather diary from 1975 still in its plastic wrapping, warped underneath despite.
The closet is filled with old clothes, nothing worth taking, all of it cataloging a utilitarian sense of fashion, unadorned and unaffected by changing styles. Animals have been here before us, which we can see from the droppings they’ve left inside shoes and crumbling into the floor in places we’ve just stepped. The bureau is empty, everything already on the floor. We pull out the drawers anyway and throw one against a long mirror that hangs precariously on the wall above the bed. It shatters into pieces, but the frame stays hung on the wall. Something has fallen loose from behind it, and we dig it out from the shards of reflective glass. It’s a Polaroid of a young, thin girl with long brown hair and dark circles under her eyes. She’s naked and standing in what we immediately recognize is the laundry room. It doesn’t look much better than it does now, although cheap lace curtains cover the window we’ve just climbed through. In the picture we also see a patch of lawn through the window and try to envision it extending through the jungle it’s now become. One of us pockets the photo, but we save our discussion of it for when we’ll light the joint one of us has stolen from an older brother. Right now there’s much more to see.
A bathroom separating the bedrooms is predictably foul. More dead flies line the windowsill. A yellowish stain covers the bottom of the old-fashioned bathtub, and black-and-dark-orange mildew spreads in the grout between the tiles and the curved mouth of the faucet. Someone opens the mirror and finds a box of Band-Aids with a bloody fingerprint on the paper lid. The toilet seat is up, and coarse, curly hairs are stuck to the brim. We notice a long needle on the edge but are afraid to pick it up and inspect it more closely. A Big Bird nightlight is plugged into a socket beneath the sink. Someone kicks it in a destructive reflex. Something about it resists the vandalism, though—Big Bird’s head bends back slightly, but his smile stays round and glowing even without the light.
The door to the other bedroom is closed, but sunlight peers out from the slit at the bottom and through a keyhole. We wonder who would’ve closed it and why, and we almost knock. We open the door despite a collective, unspoken feeling that directs us otherwise. It is, by far, the brightest room in the house and not nearly as cluttered. It’s the same size as the other rooms, but there seems to be more space to walk around, fewer dead things lying on the floor. This room has surfaces. A desk in the corner sits next to a window with a chair that looks like ones we’ve seen in storage at school. A collection of sun-faded stickers is grouped along the desk’s edge. Unicorns. Some have been scratched off, then reapplied. One is an oily sticker, with green and blue iridescent streaks that mix together when we press down on it. Another sticker shows a unicorn in mid-flight; a young maiden holds on to the fabled horn with one eye fixed on a terrible danger behind them. The wallpaper is also unicorns, so faded in fact that at first we think they’re only horses.
We move to the other side of the room, where a mattress with a brown stain in the middle lies half in, half out of the closet. We see a light-blue blanket, soft with edges of tattered faux satin. It’s twisted and curled around itself, as if it’s afraid to touch the brown spot underneath. We pull it off to reveal a child’s riding horse, except, of course, it’s not a horse but another unicorn. The horn is slightly bent, but its mane is still precious, the twisted threads of white yarn mixed with longer strands of crimped, sparkled silver. The painted wooden stick is stained at the middle, having been lovingly gripped. We prop it against the closet’s edge. The unicorn’s black beaded eyes are scratched, giving them the milky film of a silent, weathered observer.
In the closet next to the head of the mattress, we find plastic sheaths that look to us, at first, like children’s balloons long ago blown into the shapes of a giraffe, a brontosaurus, or some other impossible, long-necked creature. Small white globules of liquid sit in pouches at the end like dollops of spoiled cream. Someone says his brother has one under his bed next to a box of Kleenex and a pink tube of clear gel. It’s for sex, someone says harshly, the word’s finality leaving nothing left to speculation. We’ve never seen one of them like these, though—used. Unlike the needle in the bathroom, we have no problem picking up the slack skins, the condoms, which we pronounce with a quivery reverence, amazed that we now have an occasion to use the word. We also jump to the likely conclusion that someone has had sex in the dead girl’s bed, possibly the same person who pushes off in the bathroom. Except we don’t call her “the dead girl” anymore. We call her “Jeanette” and will continue to do so if we decide to pass the story along ourselves.
We light the joint. It’s our first one, and we don’t know what we’re doing. We cough, and our faces turn red and puffy. The smoke hangs in the air, dancing in the shafts of sunlight that have managed to break through the defensive line of trees. Rather than taking the edge off things, the pot singles out the cool, harsh reality here. The naked picture from the other room is out. It’s lying in the middle of the mattress on top of the blue blanket that covers the patch of brown. We pick it up, pretend to study it more closely, then place it back on the mattress. No one truly needs to see it again.
The story of the house needs revision. We’ve gone deeper into it than anyone else we know has, and it scares us. The responsibility is suffocating, but it also gives us a strange sense of power. No one we know has looked at the house, inside and out, and seen what we’ve seen. They treat it as a shell, a crack house, a fuck den. They don’t care what happened here.
We don’t discuss whom we should tell or whether anyone would care what we have to say. That poor family with the no-good father and the mother who went around town smelling of kitchen grease with her fake smiles and ghostly pale daughter. Weren’t they better off left on the floor with the newspapers anyway? Either that’s where they wanted to be left or where they wanted to be found. No one has the answers. Instead of deciding which, we talk about the barn, the horse, a brisk kick in the head.
We picture Jeanette creeping past her parents’ bedroom, grabbing the banister in the dissipating glow of the nightlight and feeling the rest of the way by memory. We see her take the long route to the barn to avoid the open window of her parents’ bedroom upstairs. She opens the barn door and sets down the stool. Or maybe the stool is already there, hidden by her the day before. It could’ve been planned. We wonder whether it’s a hot night, whether she can see her way by the light of the half moon through cracks in the barn’s wood. She stands, the stool’s legs wobbling beneath her. As she takes hold of the long, bristly tail, we have to ask: Does she think the horse will really fly?