CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
“Gabe...do you think I’m weird for liking abandoned places?” Holly asked.
“No,” he replied, looking back into the car as she drove them along the forest road. “Not at all. Why?”
“I guess it’s something that still kind of bothers me.
I feel like a lot of the people I shared it with reacted poorly to it.
Or, well, either poorly to it or they sort of pretended to be interested and I guess I mistook it for genuine interest and kept talking about it and they’d eventually say I was weird for wanting to talk about it so much. ”
“Oh. That’s why you’re a little paranoid about it.”
“Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I believe you, it’s just…”
“It’s just that I’m sure you believed other people, too.”
“Yeah.”
“I understand. I do actually think abandoned places are really cool, too. Honestly, my only hesitations when it comes to them are that they’re usually potentially dangerous, and there’s always the potential that we might get the cops called on us.
Which I have zero interest in involving myself with the police ever. ”
“Same, and you’re right.” She regained her smile. “I’m really glad. Chloe’s kind of into them, but she also likes being inside more than me, so it’s harder to talk her into checking out places like that. Obviously Liz is. I don’t know, there’s just something so inherently interesting.”
“Humans like to discover, I think is what it is. Abandonment implies a mystery. Why was it abandoned? What might have gone on there in the meantime? What might be left buried there? We also inherently seems to like mysteries. Plus, they just look fucking cool.”
“Oh my God, yes. They really do. Rusted siding and rotted wood and cracked windows. A forlorn couch sitting at the edge of a vacant lot scattered with trash and broken glass, maybe presided over by a by a faded basketball hoop without a net.”
“You should definitely write poetry, or something. That idea we were talking about, of going around town, taking pictures of abandoned places, you know, from a safe distance for deniability, and then writing about what you saw, what you experienced, what you felt.”
“I’ve been thinking about that...but I always come back to the fact that there probably isn’t any money in it,” she replied.
“So?”
Holly opened her mouth to respond, but nothing came out. She slowly closed it. They drove along through the misty forest for another few moments.
“I guess I never thought of it like that,” she murmured. “Wow, I’m so brainwashed that I actually thought something wasn’t worth doing unless it could earn me money somehow, even though I don’t really need the money right now.”
“Sucks, doesn’t it?” he muttered.
“Yeah. But so much less so now. Because I’ve got you, and the others, and this new life. And I should just do it, even if it doesn’t make a cent.”
“You absolutely should.”
When her smile returned, it came back stronger than before.
“I love you so much. You actually not just support what I want to do but want me to do the things I want to do. You and Ellen and Chloe have been so amazing, and Krystal and Liz are being amazing, too. I just...fuck, sometimes I wonder if I’m in a coma because my life suddenly not just turned around but became absolutely amazing.
Like I won the lottery of relationships, and then I did it again and again.
Everyone in our house is so cool and there’s no drama and everyone’s just happy or figuring out how to be happy… ”
She looked at him suddenly, then returned her attention to the road. According to the map app, they were almost there.
“What?” he asked.
“I just...did you, somehow, plan this? Like sometimes it feels too perfect. I mean, it’s not like I’d be upset if you did, I’d be impressed.”
“No, I completely, one hundred percent did not plan or engineer any of this. I got lucky, again and again. I got lucky reconnecting with Ellen. I got lucky that Ellen found Sadie. I got lucky that Sadie wanted to give us a place to live. I got lucky that this happened to be down the street from where you worked. I could go on.”
“I guess a domino effect really does happen sometimes. I mean, it feels like it happens all the time for bad things, but it must happen for good things, too.”
“I think it’s more that we were...malleable.
I think one of the really big secrets to success is that while you should have a plan, and you should be working towards it, you should also be willing to adjust on the fly and take chances.
Like you did, throwing in with us. And then like Chloe, doing the same thing.
Like I did, willing to trust Ellen and then Sadie.
I mean, this could have gone wrong. It still might, but now, if it does, we still have each other and having other people have your back makes life so much easier. ”
“It really does,” she murmured. “Ah, there it is.”
The trees at last fell away and the road they were driving along began running along a section of private property, fenced off by a mostly-intact chainlink. The property was mostly taken up by a small, stagnant pond and a two story, dilapidated house.
“Fixer-upper is certainly one way to describe it,” Gabe muttered as she pulled up to the gate. “But holy mother of God does that look incredible right now.”
“Yeah…” Holly whispered reverently.
After helping Emily feel better last night, it had indeed rained.
They’d wound down the party and Emily and Abby had gone home, Krystal and Liz had gone into the basement, and everyone else headed upstairs.
Gabe had an idea to make love with Holly, but he’d hardly laid down before passing out.
He woke up some strange time later, dawn still not quite there, and had heard the soft patter of rainfall and the distant call of thunder and had immediately drifted back off.
Consequently, they were now looking at an old, broken down house enshrouded by gray mist in the pale morning sunlight. It was a hauntingly beautiful sight and something about it spoke to him in a language he could not speak but understood on a primal level.
Ellen and Krystal had both been too worn out after yesterday to want to leave the house. Chloe was also feeling reclusive and Krystal ended up wanting Liz to stay with her in a sudden burst of neediness, so he and Holly had tackled this alone.
Holly killed the engine and got out slowly. He joined her.
For a long moment, they simply stared at the mist-wrapped building. It seemed somehow frozen in time, separate from the one-way stream of chronology. It seemed somehow at once both old and ancient.
Eventually, Holly raised her camera and snapped a picture. Then she moved a bit to the left and snapped another. Then she led Gabe up to the gate, where she used one of three keys given to them by the owners. She unlocked the gate and led Gabe inside.
If he had to guess, he’d say the house was built somewhere in the fifties, perhaps the sixties.
It would need a hell of a makeover. The paint had long since peeled off.
Most of the windows were either cracked badly or broken entirely.
The roof had partially collapsed in one area.
Surprisingly, the front door was still intact.
They took a moment to walk carefully around the outside of the house, seeing what there was to see. There wasn’t much. Empty room after empty room. The owners had inherited it already empty of furniture and had never even attempted to move any in.
Holly brought him back to the front door and unlocked it after snapping multiple pictures of the exterior.
“Wow,” she murmured softly as the door creaked open.
Beautiful desolation awaited them in the form of a vacant entryway paved with cracked, dirty linoleum, coated in almost utterly flayed pale blue wallpaper, sheathed in a thick layer of dust. Holly snapped another picture, and they entered the house.
They made slow, careful progress. From the inside, Gabe began to get a sense of why it was slated for rehabilitation as opposed to demolition.
The exterior belied the structural quality of the interior.
It would take work, for sure, a lot of work, but it didn’t seem insurmountable to resuscitate this house.
He followed Holly through vacant rooms and glorious decay.
They left shoeprints in the dust and felt like astronauts visiting the lunar surface.
A kind of childlike wonder settled over them as they moved through the house and then descended into the basement.
Gabe was shocked to find it finished. He had expected a dank, concrete hole, little more than a dark pit that looked like the set of a successfully terrifying horror film.
Holly shot more pictures and then they ascended up to the second story.
He found himself wondering at what lives might have been lived here.
What stories had been told. What experiences had.
Throughout it all, as Holly kept shooting pictures, he gained a dawning awareness that she wanted to tell him something.
For a moment, he wondered if he was slipping, because the faint hints he was picking up from her suggested something not so much simple as something hidden.
She looked at him, once, as they stepped into an old, large bathroom tiled in pale green, and he caught a flash of something immense beneath her surface, a shadow of titanic proportions.
How could he have missed that before now?
Because it wasn’t something that was dumped in her lap, something she had just decided or found out about today.
No, she wouldn’t be able to hide that so effectively.
So maybe...she wasn’t hiding it. Whatever it was, he said nothing, indicated nothing, just waited.
Kept following his wonderful, photographic lover as she lived her joy and worked her first job in this new profession.
They came to stand in the final room of the house, what might have been an office or a guest bedroom.
Sunlight, pale and gray, leaked in through a broken window.
Mist danced with an ethereal lethargy through the beams, and a shadow that gave him an immediate and primordial fright was thrown onto the floor.
He looked around, trying to determine what it was, and found the culprit: in the broken window, a huge spider had built a web.
“Jeez,” he muttered.
“It’s okay,” Holly said as she stepped closer and lined up a shot. “It’s an orb weaver. A big one, but they’re pretty much harmless. If it bit you, it would hurt, sting a little, itch for a while, but no more than that.”
“I’m just glad it’s over there,” Gabe murmured.
She spent what felt like a long time lining up that shot. When she took it, she slowly lowered her camera and kept staring at the spider in its web.
“Gabe?” she asked, without looking at him.
“Yes?”
“I don’t believe in God.” He waited, or rather, was unsure of how to respond. She looked at him finally. “You’re the first person I’ve told.”
Well, this explained the situation. It also felt like a potential minefield, although she didn’t seem particularly upset, or like she was trying to suppress being upset.
“How does that make you feel?” he asked.
She paused before answering, then began walking back towards the stairs. He followed.
“That’s just the thing...I’m not sure. I want to say I feel nothing about it, but that isn’t true. I think I feel something, but I keep thinking about it, and the thing that keeps coming back to me isn’t so much what I feel, but what I don’t feel.”
“What don’t you feel?” he asked as they came to the bottom of the stairs and headed back out.
She locked the front door back up and they headed for the car.
“I don’t feel shame. I don’t feel fear. I don’t feel angry.” She paused, locking the gate up. “Well, okay, I feel angry. But not at this, more at my parents, my family, and how they used religion to torment me. I don’t feel existential dread. I don’t feel happy, either.”
They got into the car and she put the key in the ignition, but didn’t turn it on. She stared through the windshield at the old house.
“Maybe I feel some relief,” she reflected.
“But what I really keep coming back to is that this wasn’t a decision so much as a conclusion.
I didn’t decide to not believe in God, it just made sense to me after I really thought about it and really listened to my heart.
You know how people always say listen to your heart?
But then other people say that’s stupid because the heart is kind of brainless, so you should listen to your brain.
But then if you listen to only your brain, you’ll be too cold and miss the forest for the trees. So I listened to both.”
“That’s pretty smart,” he murmured.
“Thank you. I hope it was. It feels like it was. I thought about it pretty long and hard, and it just doesn’t make sense that there could be a God.
Or, at least, a God that is all-powerful and all-knowing.
It just feels obvious that the universe just...
is. Shit just happens. I mean, there’s a lot more to my thoughts, but that’s what they boiled down to.
So then I listened to my heart, and I thought this was where I would have the problem.
“But I didn’t. I asked myself what I believed, and I realized I believe that there’s nothing.
Or, well, more accurately, I believe that even if there is a God, it doesn’t matter, because it has no actual, meaningful impact on our lives.
And what I did decide was that I shouldn’t need a religious shotgun wired to my forehead to be able to do right.
I should be able to choose to do right because it’s the right thing to do.
Not because some sky daddy is looking over my fucking shoulder, waiting with a belt every time I fuck up. ”
She fell silent again, her hands on the wheel, staring at them.
“What do you think?” she asked after a long pause.
“I think we’re on the same wavelength,” he replied. “And I think it’s really commendable that you did some genuine soul-searching. And that you were brave enough to adhere to the conclusions you reached. And I’m very happy you told me.”
She smiled and returned her gaze to his own.
“I love you. And I love Ellen and Chloe and Krystal and Liz all in different ways, but what you and I have...is different, is special in some way that is isn’t with anyone else.
And I never want that to come between any of us, but also don’t want to pretend it isn’t there. ”
“I don’t either,” he said, reaching out and putting his hand over hers.
Her smile grew brighter and she brought his hand up and kissed the back of it.
“Okay,” she said, “thank you for listening to me, and coming out with me. Let’s get back home so I can upload these.”
Gabe began to respond as she turned on the engine and began backing out, but his phone started ringing.
Chloe was calling.
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Gabe, I need your help right now!”