The House

This was the time of year when the shadows leaned heavily against her whitewashed walls. They lounged in the scrubby bushes all afternoon, until the sun slipped farther down and they sought her solid form for comfort. It was the time of year when there were still shadows to lean. The house gazed out across the ocean, always grateful for her timeless view. Not many were graced with such an endless horizon of water, the coastline hugging at its edges.

She always looked forward to this time of year. The short beach below her clifftop perch was covered in children screaming and parents brushing sand off everything; ice cream cones dribbled down chins and kites soared high to wave their brightly colored tails at her. She tried to enjoy the summer sun that faded her paint a little more each year, though she knew it would end before long. Winter would always carry away the visitors from the battered coastline. The fog would always roll in, creeping cold slithering between her walls and trailing its fingers down her windows. Short days would always fill an endlessly long winter. An endlessly lonely coast.

But not today. Today, she was baked warm by the sun, and the seagulls that would be huddling behind her hiding from the wind in a few months were being chased by shrieking toddlers. She sighed, her timbers creaking as they stretched in the warmth. The water was clean, blue, and given to turning its waves with a frothy splash. It chased sandy toes and tossed up tendrils at the impromptu beach-goers in rolled-up pants.

 It could be hard to reconcile this bright laughing water with the dark tumult that the house knew. The sea had a jealous side to it. It wanted the people who played across the shore to play in the water as well. It did not understand why they only splashed in the shallows. So it laid traps to drag them down to play forever in its drowning depths.

He had not been dragged down by the ocean’s jealousy though. He had given himself to the water, so many years ago.

But she tried not to think about him on days as pleasant as this. The pine trees gossiped in the breeze and sand trickled down the walk. She laughed with the gulls in their swooping ride along the waves. The screeches echoed through her empty rooms; she didn’t mind the company.

The peace of the morning was shattered by steps on the back walkway, and a woman looking a little lost peered up at her. She was short, but proportionally so, and strong in the way young women were these days. She held a small ring of keys that the house immediately recognized as her own.

A new resident wasn’t something the house had been prepared for. It had been years since he had left her alone on the cliffs, and though someone had come to clean her out soon after, there had been no realtor to spruce up her garden. There had been no open house, no sign posted for the few stragglers who wandered up the winding driveway or the steep steps from the beach. There was simply this woman and a small pile of boxes. There would likely be more things arriving soon. The stiff breeze whipped her short dark hair about her face, but she did not seem to mind. After staring at her for several minutes, the woman walked resolutely up to the back door and struggled to find the right key.

The house was embarrassed to be entered in such a state. She knew she must look a disgrace, with sand built up against her on the beach side, the plants in the back heavily challenging the borders of the garden. This woman couldn’t be happy with her purchase. But when she stepped through the back door, she took a deep breath in and smiled. A glimmer of hope sparkled in the sunlight filtering through the front windows. Maybe this would be okay.

That night, for the first time since her last man had gone, the house stood tall and proud. She did not huddle into the night bearing down against the wind, but bared her fragile windows to its assault, proving her strength despite her age.

The Woman

It would be Camilla’s first time living alone, between college roommates and living with Andrew for the last four years. And it would truly be living alone. She had bought the house sight unseen, and surprisingly she didn’t regret it. The walls were a little worn down on the outside, likely sandblasted by the beach, and the roof sagged a bit. But from her highly inexperienced eye it looked fine. The garden could be tamed, and the paths just needed some sweeping. The inside was better than she had ever expected, not that she had expected much at all. Dusty, but no obvious signs of pests. The prospect of a project was more comforting to her than a perfect house would have been. And even without any furniture, the whole place felt cozy and lived-in.

Camilla put down her purse on the wood floors and parked the small suitcase she had managed to drag across the weedy stones. Her gaze never stopped moving. Every corner, every hole, every gouge in the floor; she saw it all. From her position in the doorway, the kitchen spread out to her right: compact, but enough for her and not as outdated as she had expected. What she thought must be the living room was to her left, with a fireplace on the far interior wall. She wouldn’t freeze after all. She took a step toward the short hall in the middle that led to the front of the house, but stopped and decided to bring in the rest of her things. She knew there would be nobody up here to steal it, but in the back of her mind, she felt like someone or something was watching her.

It was only a few, small boxes of her most important belongings. There was no use unpacking them since her furniture hadn’t arrived yet. That would all be coming in the morning with the professional movers. She carefully placed one box down away from the others and traced her fingers along its edge. Once they were all inside, she avoided looking at the lonely box, busying herself with turning on all the taps and testing all the lights and appliances. She wandered forward into the front room, hardly breaking stride when she opened the front door and stepped onto the front porch. At the view, she stopped and nodded to herself. This was why. She was alone. There was nobody here to lay blame or drown her in pity. There would be no more loud arguments or furtively avoided glances. She could finally heal. She could finally breathe. She could finally learn who she was on her own. She stared for a little while, listening to the waves crash against the cliffs below, until she shook her head to clear it and wandered back to test the front door key.

The afternoon sun fell as she made her way through all the rooms in the house. When her grumbling stomach overpowered her desire to continue opening windows and rifling through empty closets, she ordered pizza from the delivery place in the tiny beach town. As she sat in the middle of the empty living room floor, eating a slice of pineapple and sausage pizza straight from the box, she knew she would feel at home here. Maybe it was something about the warm yellow light from the incandescent bulbs, or the way the windows rattled in the stiff wind outside: gently, as if reminding her that she was safe.

The evening was full of planning and prepping, moving her boxes and mapping where to put the furniture when the movers arrived. After several hours, she had grown quiet, sat down in front of the dark fireplace, and just listened. There were so many sounds, something she would have bet against considering the seclusion of the place. There was nobody for nearly a mile in any direction. But the loneliness amplified everything. The noise was overpowering. The walls, solid though they looked, creaked and groaned with the howling wind. She could hear the pine trees rustling, and the waves hummed steadily below it all. And there were other noises too, creaks in the attic, but she wrote them off. She had never been in a place so aggressively quiet before. Even in its quietist, San Francisco had been bustling. She had never been somewhere so alone before either. It would take some getting used to, to be sure.

By the time she got herself settled for the night, the warm comfort of the early evening was gone. The cot she had brought to sleep on was less comfortable than it looked, and she huddled between the few blankets she had, trying not to look out the windows. The sun had abandoned her, and again the feeling of being watched seeped through the cracks under the doors and windows. There was something about this house. It was more of a home than she had ever known, but there was something else, something just below the surface, that she didn’t want to look directly at. It took her longer than usual to fall asleep.

The House

The morning brought more to learn about the woman. Movers brought in boxes and large, modern pieces of furniture. And the woman, called Camilla by the movers, spent the rest of the day unpacking and cleaning.

One box sat heavily at the base of the stairs for the entire first day, pushed only once to make room for the mattress to go up. The weight of it bore into the wood floorboards, and with each pass, Camilla’s path avoided the box more determinedly. Camilla charged head-on into making the house her home. She filled it with sturdy, earth-toned couches and bright curtains. The dust of neglect was vacuumed up and wiped away. She positioned the bookshelves in sunny corners for the dark, leafy plants perched proudly on top. Writing style guides and science fiction novels lined the shelves in alphabetical order. Each new item breathed life back into the house.

It could have been that box that started the trickle of memory, since he’d had one much the same left next to the fireplace. Or maybe it was simply the movement brought back to the bluff after such a long time in stillness. It mirrored his return so poignantly that the house echoed with his laughter.

She remembered so clearly. He had walked in on his first day back to find doors left open and a veritable sandbox built up in the front room. He had stopped dead in his tracks and fallen to his knees in peals of laughter. It was nearly a week before he even attempted to clean out the room. Instead, he had gone down to town and bought a child’s bucket and shovel and played in the sand, picking out the leaves and making castles. When he finally took back the floor space, he kept a small jar of the sand on his desk. The house never understood his nostalgia at the time. But she did now; it still lay buried at the base of the pine where he had tucked it. A year later, when those people had come and taken away the rest of his things, she had been grateful for the relic tucked so close-by.

Camilla was there for three weeks before she touched her box. She received a phone call, one that she took out to the garden, holding the phone gingerly between her fingers like a dead rat. The house kept away the gulls, and did her best to shush the pines’ gossip as the minutes turned into an hour. And when she finally came back inside, wiping her eyes and reaching for the tissue box, the house made sure that the kettle boiled quickly and the fire lit bright and warm. The box was dragged into the back room and the items inside were picked up and turned over; men’s shirts were pressed against her face, pictures were gazed at in tears, letters and poems were read and crumpled into a ball, only to be smoothed out, reread, and delicately placed back in the box. She took out an envelope of pictures, each a different grainy ultrasound, and stared at them for a long time; they were the last things that she put back.

The items in his box had been different: the clothing much smaller with bows and ribbons, the pictures of three instead of two, and the letters lopsided and written in crayon. But the pain had been much the same. He too had curled into a ball by the fire, his heart too heavy to lift even onto the couch.

But Camilla was still young. She must have come here to heal. Her hope could be seen in the haphazard array of vegetables bought that first week. The house plants, price tags still clinging to their pots, shined under dedicated attention. Pizza delivery was limited to every other week, and Camilla got up every morning to pick her way down the steep path to the beach.

The house did what it could for her that first month. She glowed in the new yellow paint, proudly attracting glances from the last of the beachgoers. She shooed the spiders to the attic and did her best to keep the locks turning smoothly and the windows clean. But the memories continued to ooze from her cracks. With every half-hearted glance at the door from Camilla, it was as if he were there again. Life that she had not thought she would feel again was tingling in every corner.

Theirs had been a silent relationship so far. Camilla went about her business, worked in the office upstairs and ate her dinner at the table. But one unseasonable warm day in October, she sat in her stiff chair by the front windows and, between sips of coffee, said,“Your windows could use a wash, I think.”

The floodgate was released, and the memories that had trickled like sand ripped through her like a tornado. Every step he had made, the places he had hovered over or nestled into, her memories were stirred up into a flurry.

“I feel like I just washed them, but they look grimy again. It must be the salt, or something.”

Twenty years he had lived in the house, and every second of it that she had stashed away, tucked in nooks and crannies that only she knew, was released in a gasp of recollection.

“Maybe I can do that once I finish the manual this evening. It should be cooler by then.”

The wind outside changed direction and the house creaked under the new pressure. The seagulls battled the gusts to get back to their nests in the cliffs.

“We have to keep you clean and tidy.”

The trash can lid in the kitchen clattered to the floor and Camilla jumped nearly out of her skin.

“What the hell was that?” She stood very still, listening for any more sounds, but nothing else stirred.

He had always hated the lid on his trash can. It was always getting in the way or falling into the can. It was a daily occurrence for him to get so frustrated that he knocked it off. The house had never understood why he had not just put it away or thrown it out.

Camilla got to her feet and crept slowly into the hall. She peered around the corner into the kitchen and frowned at the offending lid. “How the…” she looked around for some explanation, and sighed at the kitchen window, the blinds fluttering gently in the wind. She put the lid back on and closed the open window before going upstairs to get ready for work.

The house crackled with static energy. She could feel him again. He was back. There was no mistaking it. His footsteps, bare and nearly silent, padded down the stairs to the coffee maker. They hardly made a sound as he took his usual spot in the same chair that Camilla had just vacated. The curtains fluttered and he slowly nudged the window open.

The Woman

Upstairs, Camilla showered and dressed. As she brushed her teeth, she glanced into the mirror and caught sight of a blue shampoo bottle on the edge of her tub. She frowned and turned around, but the edge of the tub was bare. She spit and looked back at the reflection. No bottle. She shook her head, dropped her toothbrush back into the cup and went to work.

Her office was in the bedroom at the top of the stairs and her desk faced one of the windows opposite the door. The hair on her arms stood on end, and she couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. Every few minutes she turned her head to look at the empty stairwell behind her.

A breeze brushed by and she heard something move downstairs. She stood instantly and assured herself that she must have left a window open. But she still tried to be as quiet as possible when she edged down the stairs. She stepped into the front room and pinched the bridge of her nose. The curtains blew freely in a stiff wind. The chair she had only an hour ago been sitting in was littered with pine needles and sand. The window was wide open, a state she could not for the life of her remember leaving it in. Camilla slammed it closed and got out the vacuum to clean up the mess, determined not to allow the strangeness of the morning to get the best of her. After emptying out the vacuum canister into the trash and triple checking that the trash can lid was secure, she took a tour of the house.

She was alone. But she had known that all along.

Still, she breathed easier and went back to work, typing away until her computer screen caught the full glare of afternoon sun. Then she stretched and wandered down for a cup of coffee. She shoved down a queasy feeling of surprise when the pot was still hot after several hours, resolving to look at the settings later, and took her coffee to the front porch.

The Man

His childhood on the cliffs of the California coast was something Jackson had been revisiting in his mind over and over again lately. That place had been his sanctuary, his playground, and a source of boundless happiness in his youth. He had been a pirate with his own beach to take over, years before the town had cropped up in the ‘90s. He had known every cave and hideout in the cliff face, and when to head back before the tide came in. The house itself had been magical in a way that he had not known since, caring for him like any mother would do, like his own mother had not. It had shown him the lookout perch in the attic and the warm hidey-hole behind the furnace in the basement.

But when his family had moved in his teens, he had been so eager to grow up, so ready to face the world as a man, that he had forgotten the magic of that house. Jackson sometimes wondered, in those days immediately after the accident, what he would say to himself if he could go back in time. Would it be kinder to warn himself? To lose that innocence early, but maybe prevent the pain? Or would it be better to tell himself nothing, leaving young Jackson unaware of the clock ticking down?

It really didn’t matter, though, in the end. There was nothing that could have stopped it, nothing that could have saved everything he loved. Some days he couldn’t even remember what life was like before that moment, couldn’t see past it. His world had, in an instant, darkened to a point that he wasn’t sure he could ever adjust to light again.

So he moved back to his childhood home three years after the death of his wife and two-year-old daughter.

The logic of it failed him; he had no job or relations there anymore. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he needed to feel something again. He needed to know that the magic of his past was more than just a made-up memory.

The previous owner, one in a long line of transients since his parents sold the house, had left it abandoned. The real estate agent handed him the keys without question, happy to get rid of it. The woman anxiously avoided eye contact with Jackson.

It wasn’t the first time someone’s gaze had slid just out of reach. People were avoiding him more often since he had achieved his haggard look of frayed consciousness. It got him where he wanted faster. His hazel eyes tended not to focus on who he was speaking with, and he often looked past them entirely. His clothes, no matter the color, took on a graying quality and his unkempt reddish beard was clearly not grown out of intention.

It would be better up at the house. Unless it had changed drastically since he was a child, it was much more secluded than either his previous house or the apartment in LA he had been living in since the funeral. He needed the space of that coastline. He wanted the nostalgia of his youth, something to remember that didn’t hurt so badly.

He had high expectations when he crept his Corolla up the winding driveway. But when he parked a few yards from the back of the house, his shoulders sagged. On the surface, the house was nothing like he remembered. It was painted an obnoxious cerulean blue and sported peeling, white, wooden seagulls, wings stretched in a crucified flight across the outer walls. Forget-me-nots had long since wilted among overgrown ice plants and store-bought shells in the shoddy garden in the back. It was an old lady’s dream, a redecorated guest bathroom, kitschy in all the worst ways. There was none of the magic, none of the actual comfort.  But he tried to assure himself that he could paint, that he could weed the garden, that he could chip away everything that had been plastered over the house he knew was there. It would be a much better way to spend his time and he had the money.

He stepped out of the car and was pummeled by the salty ocean air kicking up in blustery gusts. Something in the smell or moisture of the air, wet and clean, sent him reeling back to his childhood. It was here. It was still the same, even under the new paint.

The wind was strong enough to send the back door of the house flying open. It really had been abandoned, the poor thing. He wondered briefly if it got lonely up there.

He wanted to see if the inside of the house was as different as the exterior, and forgot to close the car door in his hurry.

It was dark inside, despite the sun high in the sky, and something inside shifted with the wind. Curtains maybe? He stepped into the doorway, grabbing the door that tried to slam into him, caught by a rogue gust of wind.

Sand. The room was covered in sand.

He could picture where everything had gone in his childhood house, where the couch had faced the fireplace since they had not had television, and the small kitchen table in the corner by the fridge. He could picture the yellow curtains that his mother had hung on one of her good days, and ripped down on one of her bad.

But all he could actually see was sand, maybe an inch thick across the living room and kitchen.

For some reason, it fit so perfectly, as if the house knew he was coming back and wanted to surprise him with something straight out of his childhood. How had it remembered?

He took a step in, stumbling a bit, before falling to his knees in the sand. He scooped it up into his hands and laughed for the first time in three years.

This was why. The house would be able to help him.

“Thank you,” he told the house when he could catch his breath. Then he took off his shoes and began to play.

The House

The house could remember everything about Jackson and his two times living with her, but the memories came in flashes.

She remembered his childhood, hours spend in the attic or driving little cars across the bricks of the fireplace. She remembered the time he had brought buckets of sand into the living room when it was too cold to make castles outside. He had been so creative, even as a toddler.

But more often, it was memories from his second stay that came up, that left physical traces. Sometimes she could feel him sweeping off the porch, just like those Sunday afternoons he had spent cleaning, and other times he was just in his chair or cooking. Occasionally though, he came back to her in one of his dark moods; the kind she wished she could forget.

She did her best to stay calm, to focus on Camilla, and not get lost in the memories, but it was difficult. He had been so dear to her, so kind to her.

No. She had to stay focused.

She sensed that Camilla knew something had changed. In the first few weeks, the woman would freeze when the house got lost in a memory, as if she could also hear Jackson kicking sand off his shoes on the back porch or pacing the upstairs landing. He always did that when he wrote; it helped get his brain moving. It seemed to bother Camilla, or at least set her on edge. So the house did her best to keep the memories to a minimum when Camilla was home.

But as time went on, the woman seemed to get used to the occasional strange occurrences. She spoke to the house more and more, telling her about some work project or scolding her when the porch was covered in seagull droppings again. She would especially speak up when the house got lost in a memory, her hand placed on the beam, asking if everything was okay.

As October waned, the house watched Camilla try to etch out her new life on the cliffs. She spent the warmer mornings out in the garden, weeding out the wayward succulents and realigning the stones that marked the borders of the planter beds. She had even planted a few seeds despite the growing chill of fall and checked them devotedly every day for budding sprouts. The woman danced around the garden when the tiny green heads peeked up out of the gritty dirt, drawing attention from the gulls that soared above the beach. She admitted to the house later in one of her regular one-sided conversations, that it was her first time planting something, since she had always lived in the city. The woman dabbed her eyes and whispered something about bringing life into the world herself.  

She also cleaned frequently and spent hours reorganizing the furniture, as if she could never settle on one pattern. It was like watching him again. The house remembered the hours Jackson had spent yanking up dead flowers and shells from the dirt. She had relished the attention after so many years in less-than-caring ownership. He had brought in old, somewhat familiar plaid couches and put up yellow curtains in the windows, and then every few weeks he would move things around and stare at them from all directions.

The house was falling for this woman, just like she had fallen for Jackson. True, Camilla did not have the kind of childhood memories in the house that Jackson had, but there was something that drew the house in, something that made her want to gather up the woman and plant her permanently in the front yard with the pines. There was something so intimately familiar about her quiet voice and the way she hummed when she swept.

It was when the first fogs of November slithered in from the ocean that the house recognized what was so familiar about Camilla, and she wasn’t sure how she had missed it before then.

She lingered at the windows and stared out at the sea, something understandable at the beginning of her time there, but instead of shortening, Camilla’s distraction seemed to increase. When she was at her computer working, more time was spent reading articles about fertility or following a select few social media pages.

It had taken the house years to see the signs in Jackson. The slower mornings without a shower, the nights spent in front of the fire instead of in bed, and eventually the days without sleep spent staring at the blank document on his computer. By then, it had probably been too late for her to actually help. The darkness had crept up and settled too deep in his heart. But maybe with Camilla, the house could do something. She may have failed once, but she refused to lose this woman the same way.

The Woman

Her friend Alice was coming to visit her for the first time, the first time having any guest even, in early November. Alice had been her anchor before Camilla had decided to move, even helping her pack when the time came. But having her here, having someone from that past life here, would be a bit unnerving. Camilla had managed to create a life for herself away from the pain of San Francisco, and she had really grown to love it. She was afraid that any sort of disruption would collapse the veneer of stability.

There were also some things about the house that she wasn’t sure she could explain. It seemed to have a sort of magic to it. And things happened that Camilla was sure didn’t happen in other houses. Like when the attic creaked like someone was up there, or when windows opened on their own, or the steps she heard sometimes out on the porch, that she couldn’t so easily write off.      

They had scared her at first, especially when things moved that she didn’t remember touching. And she supposed she should be concerned, but nothing ever seemed harmful, and she managed to write it off to herself as simple quirks of the house—a benevolent haunting or something like that. It could even be comforting, when she didn’t try to figure out what made the noises she heard, like she had a roommate that didn’t pay rent.

But Alice was going to throw a monkey wrench in the whole setup. She was going to ask questions and tell Camilla that she needed to get out. She was going to dredge up all of the pain that Camilla had shoved down deep inside. There was something in the tone of Alice’s voice when she had called. Something Camilla suspected had to do with news about Andrew.

The days leading up to the visit dragged on, and Camilla’s anxiety blossomed. She tried to write since she was facing a deadline on her current project for work, but most days she just stared, unable to come up with any of the words that would describe the product she was writing about. She made more coffee than normal, hoping for some sort of artificial boost to her morale, but it availed little, and her fatigue grew. By the end of the week, she didn’t get up until late afternoon. She ordered take out, ignoring the food she had in the fridge to cook. She could feel herself falling back into the funk she had tried to leave in the city.

Two nights before Alice was to arrive, Camilla had fallen asleep on the front couch to a bad sitcom mumbling low in the background. A loud noise startled her awake. She sighed and rubbed her eyes but didn’t bother sitting up just yet.

“House,” she called out, assuming that her ghostly roommate was to blame for her disturbance. “Do you mind keeping it down? I was asleep.” Talking to the house was one of the better ways to dispel any fears.

But then something else crashed in the kitchen, louder this time. Camilla stood, unsteady and a little light-headed, and made her way back to the kitchen. It was much messier than she had expected. The trash can, which had been overflowing with pizza boxes and takeout containers, had been tossed across the narrow kitchen, its contents scattered. The dishwasher had been opened, and the bottom drawer was dislodged from its track, one corner dangling over the side.

This was by far the largest and most dramatic episode of events by the house. For the first time in a few weeks, the realization sunk in that she hadn’t done this and there was clearly nobody else in the house. She couldn’t write this off to her imagination or the wind, and something in the back of her mind registered that normal houses don’t act on their own.

It sent a chill down her spine.

“House…” she said in a low voice, like she was calming an animal or small child, “I don’t know what upset you, but I’m going to need you to not scare me like this. I’m going to clean this up now, and I would appreciate if you didn’t make such a mess next time. Maybe just throw the trash can lid and not the whole can?”

The house was dead silent, even the waves pausing their tumult for a moment, before the wind picked up outside and branches of the rose bushes near the window tapped a nervous rhythm on the glass. It sounded almost like an apology.

“I forgive you, but you are going to have to help me clean this up.” This was what made talking to the house feel so natural. It seemed almost alive, responding to her in ways that no other place ever had. It could be that she was going crazy, but that prospect didn’t bother her as much as it probably should have.

She spent the next hour cleaning and picking up trash, grumbling to herself at first but then getting into the swing of it. She eventually moved on to clean the rest of the house that was looking a little worse for wear. Her schedule was getting harder and harder to maintain lately, and she appreciated that the trash incident had forced her hand. It wouldn’t do to look like a slob to her friend.

But the next morning, Camilla got out of bed earlier than she had in a week and was cooking an egg when the phone lit up, Alice’s name flashing across the screen.

The House

Camilla did not react well to her friend canceling the visit. The house had been so encouraged by the progress that night. To see her slip even further down into the depths of morose chilled her beams.

The house did not know if another attempt like the trash can would work again. It had taken a lot out of her and Camilla had only been pushed because of the looming deadline of her friend arriving. There was nothing that the house could think of to do to help. She just hunched against the November winds and watched Camilla flip aimlessly through the channels on the television. The light from the screen flickered like lightning against the drawn curtains. The cacophony of half-heard phrases and cut-off commercial jingles couldn’t drown out the wheezing gale that had picked up from off the coast.

But the house had to do something. She hid the television remote and nudged open curtains to let in what sun made it through the haze of late fall. She even went so far as turn on the computer when Camilla passed her office in the morning, hoping that it would prompt some sort of activity. But Camilla was sinking further into depression every day. A shallow layer of dust and grime was beginning to build up all across the house. The cheerful house plants drooped thirstily from the shelves.

Camilla was slipping faster than Jackson had. But the house had to hope; she had to try.

Not that her attempts to help were met with much success. The house’s activity far surpassed Camilla’s. The woman haunted the echoing halls more than she really lived in them. She wore down the carpet in an all too familiar path. The early afternoon brought her from her room to the kitchen then to the couch, sometimes giving up on television in favor of watching the ravenous flames in the back living room, and then occasionally going back to the kitchen, and then slinking back to bed long into the night.

She still talked to the house, scolding when the remote went missing again, or muttering a thanks when the coffee or kettle was kept hot long after it was supposed to have cooled. It gave the house hope that maybe something was making a difference, that maybe Camilla knew someone was there looking out for her. That she was not alone.

Jackson had forgotten, somewhere along the way, that he was not alone.

The Man

He hadn’t expected that being at the house again would bring back memories of his mother. He took his old room at the top of the stairs, leaving his mother’s old master bedroom scattered with the things he couldn’t or didn’t want to find a place for in hope that he could forget her. But she still crept into his thoughts every so often.

When he had proposed to his wife, it was due in part to how she dealt with children. She was so much more of a caring mother figure than his own parent. And Jackson had wanted to make sure that if something ever happened to him, like had happened to his father, that his children would not be raised with the arms-length disdain like he had been.

His time back at the house had wedged a rock into his shoe, and his morning hours spent gardening his first year were also spent contemplating his mother’s detachment. She had been unceremoniously left alone by his father’s decision to get behind the wheel drunk, and the betrayal was something that Jackson thought he could understand, though he’d never had such an experience.

Her pain, though. That, he knew intimately.

But she had abused her gift, likely not seeing it as a gift at all. His mother’s anger at her late husband was smeared upon her living son. And maybe it was because Jackson lost his chance to raise his daughter, but he could not understand why she would disrespect what the universe had given her. He could respect her pain, but he could never forgive how she dealt with it.

He was here to heal, though, not to rehash the tortures of his past. So he tried his best to keep those thoughts and memories to a minimum, shoving the torments deep inside him, buried under his plans for renovations and his writing.

The house did a good job of keeping him busy, both physically and mentally. He spent long hours refinishing the wood floors and telling the walls around him about the new book he had an idea for. The house grew into more than just a building to him. It was alive in the way he remembered from his childhood, when stairs creaked if he was doing something wrong and windows muffled the sound of the wind at night when he was frightened. Now the house glowed in the attention he gave it. It was his way of repaying the old building for being there for him when he needed it, both as a boy and as a man.

Jackson made a point to venture out to his old, childhood haunts, hoping to bring up good memories. But they were just a bit different than he remembered from his youth.

The beach was still covered in the same pebbles and shells that he had gathered up into piles in the sand and buried as treasure in his pirate adventures. But there were tourists scattered throughout the area, drawn by gentle waves and the small town, something that had sprung up from nowhere since his youth. A makeshift boardwalk had been constructed and was filled with people eating ice cream or nachos on sunny days. The foggy days sent them home, and Jackson usually had the beach to himself then. But it was still too different to really enjoy.

He had to go searching during low tide to find the cave he had played in. It was much smaller than he remembered, and he nearly passed the hollow alcove on his search. But then he peered in, recognizing his own carvings in the crumbling sandstone. He crawled into the cave and sat in the damp sand, his eyes closed and his nose filled with the rich, salty spray and a touch of rotting seaweed. The nostalgia hit him like a brick wall, and the innocence of the childhood he remembered was crippling.

Ella would never have that. She would never clamber around in caves and make blanket forts to hide in. She would never…

No. He couldn’t go there every time. He needed to stop letting these thoughts float back to the surface. He collected his pain like a washed up fish and packed it down to rot somewhere deep inside him.

Eventually Jackson made his way to the attic, where the ghosts of his youth had collected rather than the angels. He couldn’t sit on the beam that he used to frequent in his mother’s fits, since he had at least 100 pounds on his childhood self and didn’t want to risk the old timbers. But he still could see out the slatted window to the sea, and it still brought him that same numbing peace. Here, he could forget. Here, he could ignore the anger that no longer came from below him in the house, but echoed up from the depths of his own mind.

The years went on, and when he had finished as many renovations as he could afford, he tried to fill his time with writing. The house wrapped around him in a comforting embrace, but the memories he had shoved deep inside had not dissolved. Instead, they seemed to ferment and grow in potency. The rotting pain could easily bubble up with a slight prod at the right line of thought. It had been easier to avoid when he had worked with his hands, but the garden only took a few hours each day, and the approaching winter of his fifth year left him with little to do but water and rake.

Spending long hours inside his own mind was more difficult than it had ever been before. Whenever he fished for a word or an image, he reeled in the sound of the police officer’s voice instead, or the feeling of the last time he had picked up his daughter; her weight amplified in the years since it had happened to the point that her body felt heavier than anything he could imagine.

Soon Jackson spent more and more time in the attic, staring out the window, or dragging his chair to the edge of the cliffs to be pummeled by the wind. He would watch the gulls fight for a clean gust to ride on, only to give up and drop reluctantly to the wet sand far below.

The House

The phone call came early on the 15th of December. Camilla stared at her cell for a long time before she picked it up. A storm was approaching, setting the waves to a choppy stir and sending the gulls to cower by her car and seek shelter. But the house’s attention was drawn inward. Camilla slowly sank to her knees as the caller spoke, the life draining from her face. She nodded, said a few hollow words of congratulations, and then hung up. She stayed there, bowed down in the face of whatever revelations had come with the call for nearly an hour.

When she finally rose to her feet, she stumbled to the bathroom and was sick, her coughs and retching echoing pitifully in the toilet bowl. When she had expelled what little food had survived the night’s digestion, Camilla dragged herself to the top of the stairs. She half leaned on the railing and stared at the journey down. Something about the way she stared brought back the memory of Jackson’s last night, when he had stood at the top of the stairs in his ratty robe and looked out the front windows at the cliffs. Camilla’s gaze may have been trained down at the carpet below, but the empty eyes were the same.

The house’s memory itched in the floorboards near where Camilla stood, and at first the house did not know why the woman turned her head and jumped as if someone had shocked her. But then the house was quick to shove the memory of Jackson back down. It would only make things worse to scare Camilla, who rubbed her eyes and reached out to the spot where the memory of Jackson had stood only a moment before.

The house thought at first that the moment at the top of the stairs might have been a blessing in disguise, since Camilla spent the next few hours at the computer looking things up. But when she moved on from looking into the history of the house and found herself back on the social media page she frequented in bad moods, the tone of the afternoon shifted back to the misery of the morning. Camilla spent the rest of the evening on the couch again, foregoing both lunch and dinner and draining the rest of a bottle of wine she found in the nearly-empty fridge.

The house watched Camilla continue her endless search for something to fill the screen and numb her mind. But her mind must have been turning as quickly as the channels, since she stood suddenly. Outside, the wind clawed at the windows, daring Camilla to face the weather outside, but there was a storm strong enough trapped within the walls.

This had been the point when the house had tried to step in last time, when he had yelled and thrown things across the room.

But Camilla just stood there. The remote was gripped like a dagger in her hand, but she made no move to attack. The house could feel her breaking, hollowing out and caving in, so much more a memory of a person than one herself. The house wondered what kind of anvil the phone call had dropped on Camilla’s chest. The phone itself had been tossed into the chair across from the couch, and it was where Camilla stared, smoke forming at the epicenter of her scorching gaze. But she never stepped over and picked it up. She just dropped back into the cushions and closed her eyes, changing the channel without looking.

The house tried to think of something to do, some way to help, but again, she came up blank. Regret flooded through her, pooling in the corners where she had stuffed the memories of Jackson.

He would come for her that night. She was sure of it.

Long after Camilla had fallen asleep, settling unconsciously on late-night infomercials, the house let the memories flow through her. The storm was picking up outside, just a halo of what it had been that night long ago but enough to bring his memory back to her halls. She heard his screams of anger and pain in the howling wind, calling like a wolf to a pack that would never return the call. It had ripped her to the stud when he had been in this dark place. Over and over, she had ached with him, but what could she have done? This was his battle to fight, at least she had thought at the time. Now…

Sometimes she remembered it just as it was: the anger and rain dashing against the windows as he careened around the living room. But other times, like tonight, her memory twisted and distorted, and she remembered him as a child. His slight, scruffy form turned against her on nights like this.

She remembered how every floorboard creaked, groaning and crying out for the house to hear him, for her to stop him somehow. So she jammed the lock as long as she could, but he made it through. The ocean had called to him so many times before, lured him with its false promises, but she knew it would not deliver as expected. The water was not his friend. There was nothing she could do once he left the stone walk and wound his way to the cliffs.

She was glad that she had never seen his body—though she imagined it tossed upon the rocks below like a discarded toy—or that too would haunt her.

The Man

Jackson wasn’t sure when he first started seeing them, whether it had been before or after his first night up pacing the halls. But the visions of his family waiting for him outside the front windows, or hovering just over the edge of the cliffs, or turning the corner just in front of him robbed him of any sleep he was scraping by with. He pleaded with them, begging them to come back to him, chasing them across the bluffs, only to stand tortuously at the edge crying out for them in the depths of night.

By January, he was averaging only twenty-four of sleep a week, usually in extended sessions on the couch, exhausted after nights of distress. He had lost the clean-cut sheen that his first few years in the house had regifted to him, and moved past grizzled inattentiveness to the homeless category of abandoned hygiene.

The house had fallen into disarray nearly as rapidly, the garden abandoned in favor of staring at the wall with his hair in his hands, trying to ignore the sound of his daughter’s laugh ringing in his ears. He stopped eating, but it didn’t prevent a mess from erupting in the kitchen; boxes and trash, even sand was scattered across the counters and tile floor. The smell of rotting seaweed had inexplicably settled into the carpet and the grout.

But somehow, every morning when he awoke there was one mess or another cleaned up and fresh coffee in the pot. He hardly noticed the strange activity in the wake of his own hallucinations, but in his more lucid moments, he tried to pick up his trash as thanks for the house’s attempts to help.

But he would always end up back in his own head, chasing the ghosts of his loved ones.

The storms were the worst. It was a bad winter and every week brought another tempestuous assailant to his house. The wind challenged him to act, to do something that would end his pain, and he would wail and throw things back at it, once cracking a window when a bookend hit his mark too hard. He had collapsed and sobbed at the sight of the spider-web fracture in the corner of the glass, since there was now more than one casualty to his pain. The house was usually indestructible; it was resilient and strong when he couldn’t be. It didn’t deserve this kind of abuse. He was quiet for a long time, deliberating. He couldn’t fight anymore: the words in his head, the visions of his wife and daughter, they ate through him with an acidic burn. He couldn’t take it anymore.

The last week in January brought another cold gust of wind with a storm trailing close behind. Jackson met it head-on. This was it, he thought. He stood for hours at the windows, waiting for the clouds to billow and bulge. He saw her, standing there, waiting for him as always, but this time the pain was less sharp.

“Soon,” he whispered.

The house grew dark, the lights dim and the fireplace sputtering and dying. Without the heater on, he was shivering, but it didn’t distract him.

When the first cracks of lightning snapped far off in the ocean and the rain was pelting, Jackson was outside. The rain cleansed him, washing away weeks of grime and years of pain. He walked slowly, slower than he had expected to, to the edge. Through the cacophony, he thought he heard something, like his name being called, but he didn’t turn around. His thoughts were clear for the first time in a long time, and all he could feel was the water on his face. He looked down at the crashing waves below, and they called to him, promising release.

The voice came louder this time, but he still didn’t look back. He wanted to let go. He needed to.

So he did.

The Woman

It wasn’t that he was getting married and expecting a child with someone else, since she had always expected him to move on faster than she had. But it was that he had done it so quickly. It had only been a year since they had ended their engagement, only a year since the beginnings of their child had been cut short, for the fourth time.

Camilla couldn’t tell if she was awake or asleep. She wanted a drink, or maybe a coffee—anything to drown her strangling thoughts—but the idea of getting off the couch physically hurt. She could hear the house creaking around her, the trees outside buffeting violently in the wind of the coming storm. Good. She hoped it blew down the fucking house. But then she flinched. Maybe not the house. It didn’t deserve to get caught up in the mess that was her life.

The creaking in the attic sounded eerily like someone pacing around, and there was something desperate about the way the walls leaned in the wind, the way the wind screamed at her. She tried to ignore the noise, tried to clear her mind of the constant questions that pecked at her mind and tapped against the windows outside. Why? Why would he call her and tell her? How? How the hell could he have found someone that fast? Who? Did she know this new woman? Did this woman know about her?

She wondered what he had told the woman about why his previous engagement had ended. Camilla imagined he had probably left out holding her, curled up on the bathroom floor, while her body killed their future, while it drowned their relationship in the blood that didn’t seem like it would ever stop.

Camilla stood, quickly enough that her head whirled.

She couldn’t do this.

There wasn’t even a point. She had probably been fired from the project at work anyway. Clearly she didn’t matter enough for her friends to show up. Why would she even keep fighting like this? Andrew had shut the last door to someone she had thought cared about her. She thought of him with this new woman, lying in the bed she had slept in not so very long ago. The thought made Camilla want to vomit, but there had been nothing in her stomach for at least a day.

She took a few steps toward the door. The air in the house was suddenly stifling. A smell like rotting seaweed choked her, and she needed to breathe.

The front door stuck something fierce, and she almost couldn’t open it, likely because of the wind and the cold, but she pushed through and continued down the path.

The wind was unlike anything she had encountered before, and she couldn’t recollect it having started raining. But the sky poured down on her, drenching her threadbare pajamas before the third stepping stone to the cliffs.

A branch from one of the pine trees broke off and struck her in its path toward the house. There would probably be a mark where the edge had whipped her face, but the cold slap in the face wasn’t jarring enough to clear Camilla’s fogged over mind.

She made her way to the edge of the cliffs. Something there tugged at her, some aching loneliness. For a moment, she thought she could see someone standing at the spot where she was headed, head bent down against the wind and a bathrobe flailing back toward the house, but she blinked and the image was gone.

Camilla got as close to the edge as she dared. But she still felt pulled out further by something other than the pummeling wind. The ocean below tossed and danced in the storm, beating against the rocks and throwing itself up into the air. It looked like she felt, and she understood the lonely water. She imagined that any ships that would wreck that night were casualties of its pain.

Camilla wondered how many casualties there were of her pain. But she was alone up here. There could only be one casualty, and something inside her, something fractured and bleeding, told her that she already was one, that it wouldn’t make a difference if she was truly dead or not.

She hardly felt the pelting rain. She wondered absently if drowning would hurt as much as her shattered heart already did, and took a half step toward the edge of the cliff. The tangible pain of the fall would at least be something she could explain. Then, she would have a reason that other people would understand, if anyone found her. It would be physical; it would be real.

She took another half step, but then hesitated. She thought she heard something behind her, like her name being called, and looked back. The house she had left dark in her wake sat, all the lights on, cutting through the rain and wind like a lighthouse. She would miss the house. It had been there for her. She tried to drag her eyes back to the edge of the cliff and the water below, but she found that she couldn’t. The house was beautiful, holding its own against the gale. The light was enchanting. It was always nice to be in the house on nights like this, when the wind and rain would beat down the windows. The house was always strong; impenetrable even. It took care of her.

Camilla’s heart lurched. The house would miss her. It would be left alone again, empty up at the tops of the cliffs. The thought of the house empty again made her stomach drop and she took a step back. The house would miss her.

She could suddenly feel the biting cold and the cut from the tree branch stung fiercely. She took a few more steps back from the edge, her eyes still trained on the blazing house behind her.

The house would miss her.

The door crashed open at the slightest touch, and Camilla clambered into the house, warm even though she had not turned on the heater all winter. She made her way to the inexplicably lit fireplace, reminding herself to worry about it later, and curled up on the floor in front of it.

The house would have missed her.

The House

The morning brought the first sunlight in weeks, but the house still shivered, though the storm had eased hours ago. She had come so close to losing it all.

Chatter from a few bickering seagulls on the back walk distracted the house, and she did not notice Camilla rise from the floor where she had slept and slip upstairs to get changed. The house shooed away the gulls, since their droppings were always such a pain to clean up, but their protests covered up the noise of Camilla heading back downstairs and pulling the broom from the hall closet. It wasn’t until Camilla eased open the back door that the house recognized she was no longer asleep.

Camilla picked her way around the knocked-over chairs and began sweeping sand off the sidewalk. She made her way slowly down the walk, reaching the front stepping stones. She paused, looking toward the base of the pine trees at something sticking out of the dirt. The house watched as she made her way over to a glass jar full of sand, uprooted by the storm, and picked it up. She read the label:

From my first day back in the house

August 15, 2009

J.M. Townsend

and then picked her way back to the house. Camilla put the jar in the kitchen window and went back out to sweep more.

The house could feel the sun on her east side, baking out the dampness and fear from the night before. But the true warmth radiated out from the inside. She watched Camilla patter around the rest of the day, picking up and dusting off her life. The house could almost pretend that spring was upon them, with the sky so bright and the waves back to their usual splash. She hoped Camilla would try again with the garden once spring actually came. Flowers would be a nice addition.

The house felt Jackson withdrawing slowly to the fringes of her memory. But she let him go. Camilla would keep her company from now on.