“I wouldn’t want to be responsible for you getting hurt. You could fall right through the floor, or a beam could drop on you. And there’s no telling what kind of vermin—”
“Nothing’s going to happen.” His tone was coaxing. “Give me five minutes. I just want a quick look.”
“I really shouldn’t be letting you do this.”
Sam flashed her a grin of renegade charm. “Women say that to me all the time.”
She tried to look stern, but a reluctant smile emerged.
I used to be like that, the ghost thought with surprise. Elusive memories flickered, of past flirtations and long-ago evenings spent on front porches. He had known how to charm women young and old, how to make them laugh. He had kissed girls with sweet tea on their breaths, their necks and shoulders dusted with scented powder.
The big-framed young man bounded to the front porch and shouldered the door open when it stuck. As he stepped into the entrance hall, he turned wary, as if he expected something to jump out at him. Each footstep broke through a scurf of dust, raising ashy plumes from the floor and making him sneeze.
Such a human sound. The ghost had forgotten about sneezing.
Sam’s gaze moved across the dilapidated walls. His eyes were blue-green even in the shadows, faint whisks of laugh lines at the outer corners. He wasn’t handsome, but he was good-looking, his features strong and blunt-edged. He’d been out in the sun a lot, the tan going several layers deep. Looking at him, the ghost could almost remember the feel of sunlight, the hot, slight weight of it on his skin.
The woman had crept to the front door, her hair surrounding her head in a silver nimbus as she peered inside the entranceway. She gripped one side of the door frame as if it was a support pole on a lurching subway train. “It’s so dark in there. I really don’t think—”
“I’m going to need more than five minutes,” Sam said, pulling a little flashlight from his key chain and clicking it on. “You might want to go out for coffee and come back in, say … half an hour?”
“And leave you here all alone?”
“I won’t cause any damage.”
The woman snorted. “I’m not worried about the house, Sam.”
“I’ve got my cell phone,” he said, patting his back pocket. “I’ll call if there’s a problem.” The smile lines at the corners of his eyes deepened. “You can come rescue me.”
She let out a dramatic sigh. “What exactly do you think you’re going to find in this wreckage?”
His gaze had already left hers, his attention recaptured by his surroundings. “A home, maybe.”
“This place was a home once,” she said. “But I can’t imagine it ever could be again.”
The ghost was relieved when the woman left, having been afraid that she might talk Sam into leaving.
Directing the flashlight in slow arcs, Sam began to explore in earnest, while the ghost followed him from room to room. Dust lay over fireplace mantels and broken furniture like gauze veils.
Seeing a torn section of shag carpeting, Sam lowered to his heels, pulled at the rug, and shone the light on the hardwood flooring beneath. “Mahogany?” he murmured, examining the dark, gluey surface. “Oak?”
Black walnut, the ghost thought, looking over his shoulder. Another discovery … he knew about flooring, how to sand and hand-scrape and tack-clean it, how to apply stain with wool fleece.
They proceeded to the kitchen, with its alcove designed for a cast iron stove, a few scales of broken tiles still clinging to the walls. Sam directed the beam of light to the high trussed ceilings, the cabinets hanging askew. He focused on an abandoned bird’s nest, let his gaze fall to the ancient splatters of droppings beneath, and shook his head. “I must be crazy,” he muttered.
Sam left the kitchen and went to the staircase, pausing to rub his thumb over the balustrade. A streak of scarred wood shone ruddily through the grime. Placing his feet carefully to avoid perforations of rot on the steps, he made his way to the second floor. At intervals he made a face and let out a puff of breath, as if at some noxious odor. “She’s right,” he said ruefully, as he reached the second-floor landing. “This place is nothing but a teardown.”
That sent a jolt of worry through the ghost. What would happen to him if someone razed the house to the ground? It might extinguish him for good. The ghost couldn’t conceive that he had been trapped alone here only to be snuffed out for no apparent reason. He circled around Sam, studying him, wanting to communicate and yet fearing that any attempt might send the man screaming from the place.
Sam walked right through him and went to the window overlooking the front drive. Ancient grime coated the glass, blunting the daylight in soft gloom. A sigh escaped him. “You’ve been waiting a long time, haven’t you?” Sam asked quietly.
The question startled the ghost. But as Sam continued, the ghost realized he was talking to the house. “I bet you were something to see, a hundred years ago. It would be a shame not to give you a chance. But damn, you’re going to take some serious cash. And it’s going to take just about everything I’ve got to get the vineyard going. Hell, I don’t know…”
As the ghost accompanied Sam around the rest of the house, he sensed the man’s growing attachment to the ramshackle building, his desire to make it whole and beautiful again. Only an idealist or a fool, Sam commented aloud, would take on such a project. Sam figured he was a little bit of both. The ghost agreed.
Eventually Sam heard the woman’s car horn, and he went outside. The ghost tried to accompany him, but he felt the same dizzying, shattering, flying-apart sensation that always happened when he tried to leave. He went to watch from a broken window as Sam opened the car’s passenger door.
Pausing for a last glance, Sam contemplated the house slumped in the meadow, its rickety lines softened by swaths of arrowgrass and clustered pickleweed, and the bristled tangles of chairmaker’s rush. The endless flat blue of False Bay retreated in the distance, shimmers of tidepools beginning at the edge of fecund brown silt.
Sam gave a short nod, as if he’d decided on his course.
And the ghost made yet another discovery: he was capable of hope.
* * *
Before Sam made an offer for the property, he brought someone else to look at it—a man who looked to be about his age, thirty or thereabouts. Maybe a little younger. His gaze was cold with a cynicism that should have taken lifetimes to acquire.
They had to be brothers—they had the same heavy brown-black hair and wide mouth, the same strapping build. But whereas Sam’s eyes were tropical blue-green, his brother’s were the color of glacial ice. His face was expressionless, save for the bitter set of his mouth within deeply carved brackets. And in contrast to Sam’s rough-cast good looks, the other man possessed a near prodigal handsomeness, his features bladelike and perfect. This was a man who liked to dress well and live well, who had money for expensive haircuts and foreign-made shoes.
The incongruous note in all that impeccable grooming was the fact that the man’s hands were work-roughened and capable. The ghost had seen hands like that before … maybe his own?… He looked down at his invisible self, wishing for a shape, a form. A voice. Why was he here with these two men, able only to observe, never to speak or interact? What was he supposed to learn?
In less than ten minutes, the ghost perceived that Alex, as Sam called him, knew a hell of a lot about construction. He started by circling the exterior, noting cracks in the substrate, gaps in the trim, the sagging front porch with its decaying joists and beams. Once inside, Alex went to the exact places that the ghost would have shown him to demonstrate the house’s condition—uneven sections of flooring, doors that wouldn’t close properly, blooms of mold where faulty plumbing had leaked.
“The inspector said the structural damage was repairable,” Sam commented.
“Who’d you get to do it?” Alex lowered to his haunches to examine the collapsed parlor fireplace, the fractures in the exposed chimney.
“Ben Rawley.” Sam looked
defensive as he saw Alex’s expression. “Yeah, I know he’s a little old—”
“He’s a fossil.”
“But he still knows his stuff. And he did it for free, as a favor.”
“I wouldn’t take his word. You need to get an engineer in here for a realistic assessment.” Alex had a distinctive way of talking, every syllable as measured and flat as unspooling contractor’s tape. “The only plus in this whole scenario is that with a structurally unsound house on the property, it’s worth less than vacant land. So you might be able to argue for a break on the price, considering the expense of demolition and haul-off.”
The ghost was wrenched with anxiety. Destroying the house might be the end of him. It might send him to oblivion.
“I’m not going to tear it down,” Sam said. “I’m going to save it.”
“Good luck.”
“I know.” Sam dragged a hand through his hair with a scrubbing motion, causing the short, dark strands to stand up in wild dishevelment. He let out a heavy sigh. “The land is perfect for the vineyard. I know I should settle for that, and count myself lucky, but this house … there’s something I just…” He shook his head, looking baffled and concerned and determined all at once.
Both the ghost and Sam expected Alex to mock him. Instead, Alex stood and wandered across the parlor, going to a boarded-up window. He pulled at the ancient sheet of plywood. It came off easily, offering only a creak of protest. Light flooded the room along with a rush of clean air, knee-high eddies of dust motes glinting in the newly admitted sun.
“I have a thing about lost causes too.” A faint, wry note edged Alex’s voice. “Not to mention Victorian houses.”
“Really?”
“Of course. High-maintenance, energy-inefficient design, toxic materials … what’s not to love?”
Sam smiled. “So if you were me, how would you go about this?”
“I’d run as fast as possible in the opposite direction. But since you’re obviously going to buy the place, don’t waste your time with a regulated lender. You’re going to need a hard-money guy. And the rates are going to suck.”
“Do you know anyone?”
“I might. Before we start talking about that, though, you need to face reality, Sam. You’re looking at 250k of repairs, minimum. And don’t expect to lean on me for free supplies and labor. Now that my Roche Harbor development is under way, I’m going ahead with the Dream Lake site. So even if I had the time or money, I don’t want any part of this place.”
“Believe me, Al, I never expect to lean on you for anything.” Sam’s voice turned arid: “I know better.”
Tension laced through the air, a mingling of affection and hostility that could only have come from a troubled family history. The ghost was perplexed by an unfamiliar sensation, a raw chill that would have caused him to shiver if he’d had a human form. It was a depth of despair that even the ghost, in his bleak solitude, had never experienced—and it radiated from Alex.
The ghost moved away instinctively, but there was no escaping the feeling. “Is that how it feels to be you?” he asked, pitying the man. He was startled to see Alex cast a glance over his shoulder as if in response to a sound. “Can you hear me?” the ghost continued in wonder, circling around him. “Did you just hear my voice?”
Alex made no response, only gave a brief shake of his head as if to clear away a daydream. “I’ll send an engineer over here,” he eventually said. “No charge. You’re going to be spending more than enough on this place. I don’t think you have a clue about what you’re getting into.”
* * *
Almost two years passed before the ghost saw Alex Nolan again. During that time, Sam had become the lens through which the ghost could view the outside world. Although he still couldn’t leave the house, there were visitors: Sam’s friends, his vineyard crew, subcontractors who worked on the electricity and plumbing.
Sam’s older brother, Mark, appeared every month or so to help with smaller weekend projects. One time they leveled a section of flooring, and another time they spent a day sandblasting and reglazing an antique clawfoot bathtub. The ghost enjoyed those visits immensely, listening to the brothers talk and exchange good-natured insults.
More and more, he was recalling things about his former life, gathering memories like scattered beads from the floor. He came to remember that he liked Big Band jazz and comic book heroes and airplanes. He had listened avidly to radio shows: Jack Benny, George and Gracie, Edgar Bergen. He hadn’t yet recovered enough of his past to have any sense of the whole, but he thought he would in time. Like those paintings in which points of color, when viewed from a distance, would form a complete image.
Mark was easygoing and dependable, the kind of man the ghost would have liked to have as a friend. Since he owned a coffee-roasting business, Mark always brought bags of whole beans and began each visit by brewing coffee—he drank it by the potful. As Mark meticulously ground the beans and measured them out, the ghost remembered coffee, its bittersweet, earthy scent, the way a spoonful of cane sugar and a dollop of cream turned it into liquid velvet.
The ghost gleaned from the Nolans’ conversations that their parents had both been alcoholics. The scars they had left on their children—three sons and a daughter named Victoria—were invisible but bone-deep. Now, even though their parents were long gone, the Nolans had little to do with one another. They were survivors of a family life that no one wanted to remember.
It was ironic that Alex, with his bulletproof reserve, was the only one of the four who had married so far. He and his wife, Darcy, lived near Roche Harbor. Victoria was a single mother, living in Seattle with her young daughter. As for Sam and Mark, they were determined bachelors. Sam was unequivocal in his opinion that no woman would ever be worth the risk of marriage. Whenever he sensed that a relationship was becoming too close, he ended it and never looked back.
After Sam confided to Mark about his latest breakup, with a woman who had wanted to move their relationship to the next level, Mark asked, “What’s the next level?”
“I don’t know. I broke up with her before I found out.” The two were sitting on the porch, applying paint remover to a row of salvaged antique balusters that would eventually be used for the front railings. “I’m a one-level guy,” Sam continued. “Sex, dinners out, the occasional impersonal gift, and no talking about the future, ever. It’s a relief, now that it’s over. She’s great, but I couldn’t handle all the emotion salad.”
“What’s emotion salad?” Mark asked, amused.
“You know that thing women do. The happy-crying thing. Or the sad-mad thing. I don’t get how anyone can have more than one feeling at a time. It’s like trying to watch a couple of TVs on different channels simultaneously.”
“I’ve seen you have more than one feeling at a time.”
“When?”
“At Alex’s wedding ceremony. When he and Darcy were exchanging vows. You were smiling, but your eyes got kind of watery.”
“Oh. At that point I was thinking about the scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when Jack Nicholson got the lobotomy and his friends smothered him with a pillow, out of mercy.”
“Most of the time I wouldn’t mind smothering Alex with a pillow,” Mark said.
Sam grinned, but sobered quickly as he continued. “Someone should put him out of his misery. That Darcy is a piece of work. Remember at the rehearsal dinner when she referred to Alex as her first husband?”
“He is her first husband.”
“Yeah, but calling him the ‘first’ implies there’s going to be a second. Husbands are like cars to Darcy—she’s going to keep trading up. And what I don’t get is that Alex knew it, but he went ahead and married her anyway. I mean, if you have to get married, at least pick someone nice.”
“Darcy’s not my type,” Mark said, “but a lot of guys would say she’s hot.”
“Not a good enough reason to marry someone.”
“In your opinion, Sam, is there any good
reason to get married?”
Sam shook his head. “I’d rather have a painful accident with a power tool.”
“Having seen the way you handle a compound miter saw,” Mark said, “I’d say that’s entirely likely.”
* * *
A few days later, Alex came to the house at Rainshadow Road for an unexpected visit. Since the ghost had last seen him, Alex had lost weight he hadn’t needed to lose, his big frame now rawboned. His cheekbones were as prominent as guard rails, the ice-colored eyes undermounted by deep shadows.
“Darcy wants to separate,” Alex said as Sam welcomed him inside.
Sam shot him a glance of concern. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“She wouldn’t tell you?”
“I didn’t ask.”
Sam’s eyes widened. “Jesus, Al. Don’t you want to know why your wife wants to leave you?”
“Not particularly.”
Sam’s tone turned gently arid. “Do you think that might be part of the problem? Like, maybe she needs a husband who’s interested in her feelings?”
“One of the reasons I liked Darcy in the first place is that she and I never had to have those conversations.” Alex shrugged and wandered into the parlor, his hands shoved deep in his pockets. He surveyed the door casing that Sam had been hammering into place. “You’re going to split the wood. You need to predrill the holes.”
Sam surveyed him for a moment. “Want to lend a hand?”
“Sure.” Alex went to the worktable in the center of the room and picked up a cordless power drill. He checked the settings and the tightness of the chuck, and pressed the trigger experimentally. A metallic squeal tore through the air.
“Bearings are dried up,” Sam said apologetically. “I’ve been meaning to repack them with grease, but I haven’t had time.”
“It’s better to replace them completely. I’ll take care of it later. Meantime, I’ve got a good drill in the car. Four-pole motor, four hundred fifty pounds of torque.”
“Sweet.”
In the way of men, they dealt with the issue of Alex’s broken marriage by not talking about it at all. Instead, they worked together in companionable silence. Alex installed the door casings with precision and care, measuring and marking, hand-chiseling a thin edge of the plastered wall to ensure that the vertical casing was perfectly plumb.