Peter attempted to drive me to his house following the service, but I objected and he didn’t argue. He understood that his particular riches—a wife and three sweet little daughters—were more than I could bear. He dropped me, as requested, at my property’s entrance.
As I walked past weed-choked plantings and piles of rotting leaves, I felt as if entire seasons had come and gone in the past few hours. The house now appeared abandoned, stunned into a stillness so complete I doubted resurrection was possible. Even Rufus, a dog that barked with the slightest provocation, lay silent somewhere inside.
KATHERINE HAD BROUGHT ME HERE. To this coast, this small town, this house that loomed empty before me. She couldn’t have been twenty-five when I first saw her sitting at the back of a large stone barn in the hills of Pennsylvania. We were staying at Fox Hill, a Quaker retreat and learning community with spartan rooms, half dozen to a bath, and serious work requirements. I was nearing thirty, teaching science at a nearby high school, and spending the summer attending daily meeting, taking silent walks, and scrubbing mountains upon mountains of cookware.
I’d been there three weeks when Katherine appeared at morning meeting. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. It wasn’t that she was beautiful, though with her flawless olive skin and thick dark hair, she was. It wasn’t even that she wore makeup and black slacks with high-heeled pumps, all so out of place in that room full of plain faces and jeans and work boots that I suspected this was her first Quaker meeting. No, what focused my attention was how her eyes kept scanning the room, alive and curious, as if longing to drink it all in, this new place and people and style of worship. Then a remembering—of where she was and what was likely expected—and a downward tilt of her head, an effort to find stillness, to give this whole silence thing a shot.
She must have seen me staring, because afterward she trotted up as I was heading back to my room. She asked if I might have a free moment to talk about my faith, mentioning she was Catholic, there for only a week. We met that afternoon and walked for hours through the neighboring woods and small town. Katherine spoke of many things: her love of nursing; a large, combative family; a romantic breakup; the remarkable beauty of birch trees in falling light. She hoped for children and dogs someday. “Lots of them,” she said.
When we arrived back on campus, we stopped at the spot where we’d started. “Sorry,” she said, suddenly shy. “I’m kind of a talker.”
“I like that,” I said. And I did, the way her words found my empty spaces and began to fill them. “Sorry that I’m not much of one.”
“You’re not,” she said. “But it makes each of your words count more. You know what I mean?”
I nodded.
“Besides,” she said, letting her eyes rest on mine until she’d woken every cell in my body, “I can see you in there. That’s what matters.” She reached out and touched my wrist, the hair on my arm rising in a shiver.
We married a year later. One July morning, she turned to me in bed, the sun dancing over her cheeks and lips and dark-lashed eyes. “Come with me to the Northwest,” she said. Her tone was urgent, as if her ticket had already been purchased. “There’s this place I vacationed as a kid. Port Furlong. You’d love it. It has boats and music and old hippies jigging by a fountain. Islands we could get lost in.”
I kissed her lightly. “We’ll have to go sometime.”
She pushed away. “No, not sometime. Not visit. Let’s move there. Live there. Now. Let’s go now.”
“But your family. Mine.”
She threw herself back laughing. “Exactly,” she said. “Exactly.”
My wife longed for escape: from the East Coast, shattered romances, a painful teenage history. All the topographies of her life. She ached for the startle of something new. And no woman was ever more beautiful, more compelling, than Katherine on the brink of adventure.
“We’ll start our own family, our own traditions.” She flipped toward me again, worked a warm thigh between mine. “You’re my family now. My anchor, you know that? You’re my very own Zen retreat—all that quiet peacefulness of yours.”
A week later, I was at the desk in our home office when she stepped in to tell me she’d been researching Port Furlong. “The paper mill and hospital are the big employers in town,” she said. “Lots of listings for floor nurses. And guess what? There’s an opening at the high school for a biology teacher. Right now! Could the universe be any more obvious?”
I swiveled to face her. “Sounds promising. Any Quakers?”
“There’s a small meeting. Your kind.”
“Unprogrammed? Really?”
“Better believe it, baby.” She laughed, settling on my lap, wrapping her arms around my neck. “I’d never subject you to anything as entertaining as an actual service or a choir. God forbid.”
“Catholics?”
She pecked my cheek. “Catholics are everywhere.”
KATHERINE FOUND OUR HOME ON TAX SALE, a long-vacant Victorian on a few acres at the edge of town. Blackberries crept to its foundation, crawled up the walls, pressed against cracked windows. Though similar houses could be found a few miles away in Port Furlong’s core, this was the only one of its kind in the neighborhood.
Other grand homes had been planned on adjacent parcels, but the local economy collapsed in 1890 as ours was being built, and the projects were abandoned. Faced with economic ruin, the original owner left the second floor unfinished but completed the ground level in the highest style of the time: twelve-foot ceilings, crown moldings, ornate stained glass, and hand-tooled leather insets beneath walls of mullioned windows.
Our house sat, decade after decade, grand below, barren above, alone and commanding, overlooking the town. When developers returned to the area seventy years later, they surrounded our place with dozens of small ramblers on modest lots.
While such an ornate house might seem to conflict with the Quaker virtues of plainness and simplicity, the price was right, and we believed that our mission of restoration was virtuous. During those first years, Katherine and I spent every free moment working on the old place—stripping wallpaper, repairing water damage, sanding and patching and painting. Each night we’d wrap ourselves in each other’s arms and fantasize about a time when our children would romp happily through the house and fields.
For all our efforts, we avoided the unfinished upper level. Everything we needed was on the main floor—kitchen, dining and living rooms, a den, master suite, guest room and bath. We had little reason to think about the empty space above. Even the stairs to that level were hidden. Most of the home’s total volume existed unseen and unused behind what appeared to be nothing more than a closet door.
WHEN DANIEL WAS BORN THREE YEARS LATER, we had even less time to think of that unused space. He was an active, social child, and we struggled to find playmates in the area. The Geigers bought the place next door, and we rejoiced to discover they had a son, Jonah, the same age. If Lorrie hadn’t been expecting their second child, it would have been near perfect. As it was, Lorrie’s pregnancy was a painful reminder of Katherine’s new infertility. At the age of thirty, she had developed terrible fibroids and undergone a surgery. A “pelvic sweep,” the doctor had called it, as if it were nothing more than a little tidying up.
Jonah and Daniel played nearly every day, often spending entire afternoons together. The boys grew so close we came to think of Jonah as another son. As Daniel entered middle school, then high school, he grew increasingly beautiful and athletic and popular. Our house swelled with more boys and then some girls, coming and going with an easy freedom, playing games in the living room, drinking Cokes on the veranda. Sometimes they’d bring their dogs and play Frisbee in the back field, laughing at poor Rufus, who’d propel his dark bulk into the air at the wrong time, in the wrong place, twisting around up there, shocked every time at his miscalculation.
Katherine would often be with the group, bringing them food and drinks, cheering on their antics, but I preferred to give them space, content to hear their companionable shouting and laughing from my den.
ALL THAT WAS GONE NOW. The air inside my home had grown stagnant, and I couldn’t bring myself to go in. Instead I wandered around back where light from Lorrie’s house stopped me, forced me to picture the woman. She was likely in her bedroom, her small, muscular body stripping off that black dress, tossing it aside, relieved to be done with it.
I turned away, let my eyes rest on my home’s second level. Daniel and I had started construction up there the summer before his junior year. My son abandoned the project halfway through, and I refused to finish without him. When his mother left that fall, Daniel moved up anyway, settling into a doorless room with plasterboard for walls, using a bath with no walls at all, just an open frame with exposed wires and pipes, a freestanding toilet and sink and shower.
I spent my rejected energy stripping the last of Daniel’s belongings from his old room, slapping up a coat of paint, and reclaiming it as the office it had been before he was born. My son didn’t notice my attempts to induce guilt. He spent his last year upstairs, never once complaining of the cold and dark and draft, seemingly at peace in his unfinished space.
IT HAD TURNED DARK, and I finally entered the kitchen. The dog’s chair was empty. I headed toward the living room calling, “Rufus. Come on, boy.” As I passed the hall, my heart seized. The stairwell door was ajar. It had been closed when I left. I was certain of that. Daniel was the only one who ever forgot to shut it.
Strange how this alarmed me. I knew full well the house manufactured its own atmospherics. Pressures built in certain areas, seeped out of others. Walls and doors shifted, sometimes popping loudly, other times in stealth. Certain doors—though never this one before—opened on their own regardless of how thoroughly they’d been closed.
Yet I stood, staring at that open door, reassuring myself it was a matter of mechanics and temperature gradients and the moisture that accumulated in the bones of this old place. Hadn’t the house always been high-strung? Filled with ancient joists and secret hollows, it wailed and moaned during storms. When Daniel was five, he crawled into our bed one windy night and complained that the house was “singing way too loud.” His tone was of weary irritation, as if the house were a naughty sibling in need of scolding.
So no, there was nothing ghostly in this—this door opening on its own.
I was at the stairs, about to peek up, when Rufus nudged the back of my thigh with his blocky head. “Ah, there you are. Were you sleeping on my bed again?” He licked my hand, no doubt wanting dinner, and I closed the door, tested it, then went to feed the dog.
Later that night, I checked the door again. Though it resisted my pull, I carried in a dining-room chair and jammed it under the handle. I told myself there were rats on that second level, and I didn’t want them infesting my living space.
Roof rats had in fact rampaged when we first moved in. Katherine and I laid out poison and hauled away dozens of lifeless gray bodies. I still feel sick when I think of the carnage. But that was decades before. It was odd to be worrying about them now. Daniel had never complained of them, and I hadn’t heard a rodent up there in years.
It was just a feeling. A sense of something alive and lurking in the darkness overhead.