Chapter 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 words WAKE UP from 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.
“If the water problem comes back, that’s an issue.
” He had warmed up to his topic. “It sure is strange why there was so much water down there. But I’ve lived in Fell for five years, and I see a lot of strange things.
I’ll get an expert to come take a look, but I’m not hopeful we’ll get an explanation.
The best we can hope for is that the owners will tear down the remains of the house and fill in the basement. ”
I nodded. “That suits me just fine.”
He looked at me, obviously curious but not willing to ask. “No one has complained about that lot before.”
“That’s because this house was empty,” I told him. “But I live here now, and I’m staying.”
“By yourself? No wife, no kids?”
“I’m a bit of a loner, I guess.”
“To each his own. I guess you have plenty of room.” He stood up. “Have a nice afternoon, Mr. Esmie.”
I watched him cross the street and get back into his car. When he looked back and noticed me, I waved.
—
I didn’t spend all of my time on the house.
I was at the library in downtown Fell a lot, not just for renovating magazines but for everything else.
I checked out detective novels and history books.
I sat in the records room, reading old newspapers, learning about my town.
There was a job board on a wall near the checkout desk—a corkboard with index cards pinned to it advertising help needed.
From one of these, I called a landscaping company and picked up work.
I weeded, mowed, mulched, and shoveled. I didn’t care about the hard labor or the early hours.
The money was good, and it was mostly paid in cash.
“You’re big enough,” the foreman said to me on my first shift, “and you don’t look drunk. You got a driver’s license?”
“Yep.”
“Is it real?”
“Yep.”
“Then I don’t even care what your name is, honestly. I just care that the work gets done.”
Landscapers, it turns out, can gossip like nobody’s business. I learned about every house we worked—who was divorced, who was cheating, who was maybe going broke. I also learned how to keep an immaculate lawn, a talent I’d never had to have in my life of wandering.
I made a trip to city hall one day for land records.
It was late November, after the leaves had left the trees bare but before the first snow, when the sky was stark gray and the air biting cold.
I pulled the deed to our house and checked the property line.
I compared it to the map that Violet had stolen from the FCCE.
I had returned the map to the college myself, when I made a visit to the Local Literature room and slipped the map back where it belonged.
But I had photocopied the map at the library first.
I made pencil marks on my photocopy, noting exactly what we owned. Our property stretched behind the house into the trees where Dodie and I had walked, which was why no one had ever built back there. At the back edge of the trees was a lot the city had marked Undesignated.
The undesignated land matched up with the spot on Violet’s map, marked with small x’s, that was for graves unknown.
I put in a request to the city that the undesignated land be recognized as part of the Esmie property. If no one contested it, the land would be ours.
There were forms to fill out, of course, and bureaucracy to wait for. But I had nothing but patience and time.
No one cared about an empty plot of land, forty feet by forty feet, in backwoods Fell.
The Thornhills had gotten divorced—landscaping gossip said their marriage had been miserable for years, if not decades, since their son ran away—and neither of them lived in the house while their lawyers argued over who would get it.
The house the Chathams had rented hadn’t found another renter, so it sat empty.
The lot across the street had no one, of course.
I had most of the neighborhood to myself, at least for now.
The city didn’t care about the land, either, so eventually, with the help of some money to move things along, a line was redrawn on a piece of paper in the bowels of city hall. I now had ownership, with no interference from the city, of the Whitten family graveyard and my little brother’s grave.
When I got the notification in the mail, it was the first time I’d wept since Ben had disappeared from his spot beside me in my bed.
—
Dodie visited in the summer, bringing her boyfriend, Ethan.
Dodie had never had a steady boyfriend before—no man, including me, could tolerate her for very long—and I hadn’t known what to expect.
Ethan was quiet, kind of dorky, and he seemed to actually like my little sister.
(To each their own, as the inspector had said.) Dodie really liked him, and God knew I didn’t want her to move back in here with me, so I tolerated Ethan as much as I tolerated anyone, and I mostly left him alone.