Read The Haunting of James Hastings Online
Authors: Christopher Ransom
Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Suspense
The Haunting of James Hastings (24 page)
‘Assholes,’ Annette said. ‘That was supposed to be cleaned up by now.’
‘Maintenance fallen off a bit, has it?’
Annette bumped us up another ten miles per hour. ‘Grounds-keeping is supposed to be on until August. Security until the end of the year. I’ll call the office tomorrow.’
Annette’s headache seemed to worsen. She kept squeezing her temples. I could see her right eye behind her glasses. It blinked in three-click syncopation, signaling a right turn that refused to come.
‘Another headache?’
‘I feel like I drank a bottle of ouzo.’
‘Did they begin after you fell down in the tub?’
Annette scowled. ‘I don’t know, all right?’
I figured Sheltering Palms had a hundred completed homes, but the low hills were littered with lumber and dumpsters on lots that had been flagged and graded, their foundations poured, the framing abandoned. We leveled out at the bottom of the main valley, which was sort of a bowl at the neighborhood’s center. A golden retriever with a ratty coat trotted along the sidewalk without looking at us, then veered over another dead lawn before disappearing between two houses. He was not wearing a collar, and somehow that bothered me more than the rest of the dereliction on display.
Oh, Henry.
‘We call this the pit,’ she said. ‘Not the best part of the neighborhood.’
The houses in ‘the pit’ were smaller, tasteful but bland, the trim and exterior features scrapped in an attempt to make some of these modern blights affordable for up-and-coming families. The Euvaldo Gomezes of the world. New money from India, maybe. I imagined a city council meeting with the Caucasian investors, rosy cheeked big-guts gathered around a table, pointing at blueprints and the glass-encased diorama.
Well, fine, fuck it, let them in. But for God’s sake put them all down in the gulch where we don’t have to look at them.
Well, fine, fuck it, let them in. But for God’s sake put them all down in the gulch where we don’t have to look at them.
More cars populated this section. Practical, no longer upscale models a year or two from becoming true eyesores, with chirping fan belts and blatting mufflers. A nineties Maxima here, an embarrassing, grape-colored fourth generation Camaro there. A couple of big contractor trucks that had once been shiny and tough but were now listing to one side, their battered tool boxes overflowing extension cords, paint-spattered ladders roped to the bed walls. The real standout was a beige van with a pine tree and elk mural just below the tinted dome window, the kind from behind which hitchhikers uselessly scream.
What we were dealing with was an enclave not merely on the way down but showing the first signs of infestation. Not the immigrant infestation, or the color infestation. The criminal infestation.
As in the four Middle Eastern men standing around the pimped-out Tahoe, the ones who perked up as we approached. They concealed something in a paper shopping bag and decided they were late for the early bird special down at the clubhouse, time to boogie. I looked over my shoulder as we passed. Two of them skipped up the walk and ducked inside the house. The other two hopped into the Tahoe, gunned it in reverse, then shot toward the entrance, as if we had rolled up on them with double-barrels propped on the sills. Breaking up the party like Annette was police. Like they would have been skeptical of any car, but were actually afraid of the lady in the green Mustang.
‘Fucking terrorists!’ Annette blurted, hands whitening around the steering wheel. I flinched, then flinched again as she called out over her shoulder. ‘Go back to Iran or I’ll blow your fucking house up!’
I threw myself against the door. ‘Jesus Christ!’
Her scowl dropped as if she just remembered I was in the car. She reset her shoulders and faced the windshield, everything calm again.
‘What the hell? You know those guys?’
‘Not personally.’ She nodded in acquiescence. ‘Okay, I shouldn’t have said that. They’re just - they’re not supposed to be here.’
‘Friends of the Ayatollah, you think?’ I bit my lip. ‘Should we call Homeland Security?’
‘It’s not funny, James. We’ve had problems. Those . . .
men
don’t live here. They’re ruining it for the rest of us. Why are you arguing with me? Do you want to go back? Just tell me—’
men
don’t live here. They’re ruining it for the rest of us. Why are you arguing with me? Do you want to go back? Just tell me—’
‘All right, all right,’ I said. ‘Forget it.’
I was either being exposed to a new, ugly side of her or she was just lashing out from the stress of returning home, to the site of her own tragedy. I was too tired to argue or sift through it right now. I prayed to Allah she had cold beer in the house.
Annette’s turn signal eye finally worked. We took a right, then another right, into a shallow cul-de-sac. The lone house standing at the end was an unimaginative interpretation of a Tuscan villa, big and yellow with a detached gatehouse, a courtyard and a swimming pool behind bars. Annette aimed her fazer, the garage door opened and she nosed our good steed in with practiced precision. A kid’s lime-green Haro Freestyler BMX bike was leaning against the back wall.
‘Yay, we’re home.’ Annette did a half-hearted little seal clap.
I had forgotten this was where Arthur had done it, in the garage. But I wasn’t looking for bloodstains. I was still looking at the bike. I had owned one just like it when I was twelve.
‘James?’ Annette was waiting at the door.
‘Whose bike is that?’ I said.
‘What? Oh, the neighbor kid left it on the lawn last fall. Arthur put it inside but his family moved away before we could return it.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘They didn’t leave a forwarding address. Maybe you can put it on eBay and find out if it’s worth anything.’
I nodded and followed her inside.
22
Annette gave me a brief tour of her mostly empty house. She still had her bed and a few other pieces of furniture, but it looked like moving day, the blinds dangling at bad angles, geometric dust stains and dead bugs on the beige carpet. The bathrooms were nice, with lots of colorful Mexican tile, but they smelled damp, swampy, like Florida. She opened windows as we went.
In the upstairs hallway she pointed to a closed door and said, ‘Arthur used this room from time to time. I haven’t gotten around to it yet. It’s important you don’t disturb his things, please.’
‘Okay.’ Thinking,
it’s her version of Stacey’s storage locker
.
it’s her version of Stacey’s storage locker
.
She tested the knob to reassure herself (yep, still locked). I wasn’t eager to see it, but I also wondered if she was trying to Bluebeard me by going out of her way to remind me it was off-limits.
I wanted to take a swim. As soon as I’d dropped my bags in the living room and looked through the sliding glass doors, I saw myself making a real summer of it, roasting in a floatation chair, the beer cooler next to the diving board, Annette making triangle sandwiches for lunch, me manning the grill as the sun went down, the two of us frolicking in a lawn chair before passing out by nine. But the kidney pool was algae-lined and scummy with leaves, so I spent most of the next day calling around for a pool cleaner (she had been ‘forced to lay Amani off six months ago’).
Goldilocks didn’t have so much as a bowl of porridge in the house. She said she would go to the store tomorrow and in the meantime we ordered a pizza, which took an hour and a half to arrive. She had no beer, only a bottle of white wine gone to vinegar. I pretended not to mind. The first floor had no furniture save for a couple of couches and the curtains, not even a television to pass the time.
‘I had to sell everything,’ she said, her shoulders slumping, voice cracking.
‘Hey.’ I went to her and held her. ‘I can help get us some new stuff. It’s okay.’
‘It’s not okay. I’m fucking broke!’ She began to cry.
After a while I released her. ‘How much?’
‘How much what?’
‘To stall the foreclosure.’
‘I can’t take your money.’
‘Think of it like I’m paying for a vacation. This is a rental property for me. I don’t want it hanging over us and you can pay me back when you sell it. I just want some peace and quiet for a week or two, all right? So, how much will it take for you to sleep well here?’
She deflected and I persisted. We arrived at a sum of seven thousand to make the oldest outstanding mortgage payment, cover a month’s worth of utilities, and give her enough walking around scratch that she wouldn’t have to feel like an urchin and beg me for five dollars every time she wanted to run back to the drugstore for a new comic book.
‘This doesn’t feel right, James.’
‘You’re helping me recuperate,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to worry about money now. I’ll get a job at the factory.’
‘What factory?’
‘That was a joke,’ I said.
She smiled thinly and then winced, holding her forehead. Her head was still aching. Coming back was hard for her. This was a swirl of grief and tension headaches.
‘Why don’t you take something for your head and go lie down,’ I said. ‘I’ll go get some regular groceries and stuff.’
‘You don’t know where anything is.’
‘I brought my laptop. I’ll order a TV.’
The Wi-Fi from someone’s house nearby still worked. Two days later the geeks delivered a thirty-six-inch plasma, a sound bar, Blu-ray player and a dozen or so new-release CDs and DVDs I chose without much consideration. Annette spent most of the first week making calls to the banks, her lawyer Dan and running paperwork back down the hill. I heard her talking sternly but quietly behind the den door, followed by apologies and possibly tears. After these calls, she would hug me and thank me and when I asked for details, why she was crying, she would brush it off. We would have sex again, right then, hot and fast in the afternoon, and later, slowly and carefully at night. I tried not to think about the circumstances that had brought us together, or the headaches, which arrived when she woke up and hung on through the afternoon, no matter how many Excedrin migraine capsules she swallowed.
‘I really think you should see a doctor,’ I kept telling her.
‘I don’t even have insurance,’ she would say. ‘There’s nothing they can do. It will pass. I’m fine, really.’
In the evenings we took walks around the neighborhood. She told me about people who used to live here, or had kept a second or third home here. The dentist who had lost his practice for selling pharmaceutical cocaine and happy gas along with the crowns and whitening jobs. The orthopedic surgeon who rebuilt Tom Brady’s knee. An Italian family we saw once, the five of them walking the dog, dressed in linen shirts and woven sandals as if preparing for the exodus. Their moving van arrived the next day. We watched TV late into the night, eating licorice and falling asleep on the couch. Sometimes I would look over at Annette and, though she was facing the screen, I was sure she was a million miles away, registering nothing of the repeat sitcom whittling away the hour.
‘Everything okay?’ I would ask.
And after a ten-second delay, she would answer: ‘What? Oh, you can change the channel if you want.’
I stopped asking what was wrong. Ostrich. I think they call it playing ostrich.
This wasn’t working, this little pretend vacation. A week into it and we were acting like a married couple with nothing left to say to each other. She got up to use the bathroom often and stayed in too long. A couple hours after going to bed, she would go downstairs in the middle of the night and open the refrigerator door, staring into it for minutes before closing it, and I would lie in bed knowing she wasn’t moving and knowing there was nothing much more than leftovers and milk inside. Then she would come back to bed and toss and turn for a while, her sleeplessness keeping me at bay. Something about all of it was bothering her. She was trying to make a decision. Was it about me? About us? The house? I had no idea.
I slept for twelve, fourteen hours at a go and took naps in the afternoon. Every morning I awoke with plans to do something, get organized, read the paper, mow the dead lawn. But I was disorganized, fuzzy-headed, unmotivated. She went through a manic cleaning phase for two days. I offered to help but Annette said no, not after loaning her seven thousand dollars.
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