The house was of the type called a Victorian castle—bay windows like turrets, a curved, wraparound porch. It was in the Old North Denver section, one of the earliest, filled with quaint old houses and ancient brickwork. The neighborhood had been slightly run-down when they bought the house, but property values had soon skyrocketed with well-to-do young couples buying the properties as fix-ups.
They’d spent a great deal of time remodeling the place; replacing the kitchen tile, cleaning the fine old marble fireplace, rewiring several rooms. Reed had spent hours delineating the carved sunburst patterns at each corner of the house in bright yellow and orange. Over the past two years he had been stripping the six layers of paint from the ornate baseboards and door frames, and although the downstairs had been refinished and stained, the upstairs still had long strips of patchworked wood. Carol had reminded him every spring that it needed to be finished. He had never told her, but he had put the job off as long as possible because he felt uncomfortable while stripping the wood. Long, angular shadows would seem to appear suddenly in the wood, as if it were discolored, but then they’d vanish again, and he never did find any combination of lighting that could duplicate those shadows. And sometimes as he worked, there’d suddenly be some shape in the corner of his vision that would disappear as soon as he turned. The rooms seemed suddenly charged, as if by removing the old shielding of paint he were releasing energies centuries old.
He walked through the first floor in the dark, negotiating the furniture by memory. As in a dream, he could visualize each piece in silver gray, its exact size and placement, where he needed to step to get around it. He didn’t bother to turn on the lights; it was as if he couldn’t bear to turn on the lights.
He walked slowly up the staircase, the darkness so grainy, his arms outstretched as if he were pushing soft dirt aside in his ascent, turning now and then to a shad owed picture on the wall, pictures of Carol, Michael, Alicia, the four of them together. He knew them by heart, and could almost see them raised out of the ebony glass, coming to life.
He sat down on his bed, Carol’s bed—the one she’d picked out in the antique store in Georgetown—and stared out the bedroom window. The tree branches outside, illuminated by moonlight, the whiter light of the street lamp. Something he had to do.
He stroked the bedspread gently, and breathed in the house, the smell of bedroom, kitchen, the yard outside; imagined each room in detail, the look of it from the outside in summer, winter, fall, the weekend they painted the outside, the day she’d planted her first flower garden, the day Alicia had been big enough to try the tricycle Reed had saved for her since the day after her birth.
Reed opened the door of the bedside table and a pile of small packages tumbled off the bottom shelf. Each one marked “Things of Science.” He’d subscribed for the family, for Michael mostly, planning to study each experiment carefully before helping Michael through them. But there never seemed to be enough time to really look at the damn things, and they’d accumulated month by month until he had a full year’s worth and still hadn’t looked at the first one.
An old shoebox full of pictures sat on the top shelf. Reed pulled it out gingerly and laid it on the bed beside him, staring at it. At the top was a picture of Carol, weeding her flower garden with Josef resting beside her. She was looking over her left shoulder and frowning at the camera because she didn’t want him taking a picture of her rear end—she thought she was getting fat. Other color snaps clustered around her: Alicia walking for the first time, her fat little legs bowed; Michael working on his bike, his dinner plate balanced precariously on a bicycle tire; Alicia and Michael trying to give Ben a bath, Alicia with her face bearded in suds. He peeled the pictures away, one at a time, dropping them on the bedspread.
As he went further down into the pile, the pictures changed: smaller size, square instead of rectangular, wider borders around them, some of them with scalloped borders.
With trembling hands he pulled the small clump of yellowing, cracked photographs out of the bottom of the shoebox. A large man, overweight, his face almost completely whited out by the glare in the picture. All you could see was the thin, downturned line of a frown. Sitting in his favorite chair, his paper folded in his lap. The next picture was Reed’s mother. Reddish hair that looked a light brown in the black and white photograph. At one time she must have been beautiful; he could tell by her eyes, how large they seemed in her small face. Then his little sister, hiding behind Reed’s old teddy bear. Beautiful little thing. One small hand clamped over the bear’s mouth, as if she didn’t want Reed to hear what it was saying.
He had stopped to grab these pictures from his mother’s dresser the night he’d run away. The first time he’d ever stolen anything, though his father had accused him of thievery along with everything else. Remembering the scared, determined boy he’d been that night, Reed could scarcely believe he’d stopped to steal the pictures.
He stared at the three time-dimmed faces and put them back into the box. He’d find a lid for it, then find room in his suitcase for the entire lot. He’d call the airport tomorrow; he’d made his decision. The Badger House trash mound. Sifting through the layers of photographs had told him what he needed to do when he got to the Creeks. There should have been plenty of debris left even after the flood—the waters would have been boxed in by the cliff below the house. He could still excavate there.
The wind roared and pulled the shutter loose by the bedroom window, banging it on the side of the house. Suddenly excited, suddenly agitated, Reed jumped up and ran to the window.
The clothing hung up on the line in the yard below flapped wildly, twisting and turning on the line like emaciated children. One of Carol’s dresses, Michael’s pajamas, Alicia’s socks, underwear. They flapped and waved and twisted and wrung themselves ragged as the shutter beat and beat against the wall.
Carol’s dress tore loose from one clothespin, and Reed cried out. Then the other side spun loose, followed by Michael’s pajamas. They flew against the gray cedar fence, caught on the honeysuckle bush. A small sock flew up and over the yard, out into the street beyond.
Reed fell back into bed and began to cry. He felt ashamed. Because he felt relieved.
Carol was a long time coming to the phone. Reed could hear the kids in the background, her cousin’s and Alicia and Michael playing, but he couldn’t tell which was which. It made him uncomfortable, her taking so long. Several people were waiting to use the airport phones; one man was glancing down at his watch and then back to Reed irritably. Reed gazed out the wall-size window in front of him. That was his plane coming into the gate. For a moment the planes reminded him of giant, awkward sea gulls lifting out of the mist. Hundreds of them. Full of tiny insects and off to God knows where.
“Hello?”
Already she sounded distant. Suddenly he didn’t want to talk to her; he just wanted to get on that plane and go.
“Hello… Reed? Are you there?”
“Yeah. You’ll be glad to know I finally made up my mind.”
“You’re going back to Simpson Creeks, aren’t you?”
“Yes. How did you guess?”
“One, because you’ve been leaning in that direction the whole time. Two, because that’s what you need to do—with my blessing, I might add. And three, because I can hear the airport intercom in the background.”