Inside the house, I felt no fear; there was no trepidation anymore. I could sense the change; something had been freed. There was a new scent, a lack of pressure, a difference that was intangible but still able somehow to announce itself forcefully. I was surprised when Victor came loping out of the kitchen to greet me in the foyer. No longer in the basement kennel at the hotel, he was wagging his tail and seemed genuinely excited by my presence. There was none of the usual glowering reluctance emanating from him whenever I entered his line of vision. But I couldn’t concentrate on the dog for long, since the living room had changed miraculously. The green shag had returned to a flat beige sheet, and the curtains from 1976 that were hanging from a window (only days ago) had disappeared, and the furniture was arranged as it had been when I moved in. I closed my eyes and thought: thank you. There was a future (though not in this particular home—I was already planning on moving elsewhere) and I could think about the future because after becoming so used to things not working out I now, for one moment, believed things could change. And the transformation of the house validated this.
Victor’s licking of my hand caused me to reach for the cell phone in my pocket.
I dialed Marta.
(The following exchange was pieced together following a conversation I had with Marta Kauffman on Tuesday, November eighteenth.)
“Marta?”
“Hey—what’s up?” she said. “Are you back?”
“Yeah, I’m actually here at the house. I drove in from the airport to check it out.” I paused as I moved into the kitchen.
“Well, everything’s been pretty good—”
“What’s Victor doing here? I thought I told you not to—”
“Oh yeah,” Marta said. “We just brought him back this morning.”
“Why did you bring him back?”
“He was freaking out in the kennels, and the hotel told me we had to get him out of there. And since you told me the house would be finished by Sunday, we dropped him off a couple hours ago. Is he okay?”
“Yeah . . . he’s okay . . .”
At this point I had moved out of the kitchen and into the foyer.
I was standing at the bottom of the stairs, and then, with no hesitation, I started climbing them.
“Well, he was completely unhinged over here,” Marta said. “The cages were small, and he just wasn’t happy and of course Robby and Sarah started getting upset. But once we dropped him off at the house he seemed fine. He totally relaxed and—”
“How are the kids?” I asked, cutting her off, realizing how unimportant Victor seemed to me.
“Well, Sarah’s right here with me—”
“What about Robby?”
(Marta Kauffman later testified that I asked this with an “unnatural urgency.”)
“Robby went to the mall with some friends to see a movie.”
(“Who came back to the house when you dropped Victor off?” I do not recall asking this but according to Marta Kauffman’s deposition on November eighteenth, I had.)
“We all did.” Marta paused. “Robby needed to pick up some stuff.”
I do remember, however, that at this point I was heading toward Robby’s door.
“Pick up some stuff for what?” I asked.
“He said he was going to spend the night at a friend’s.”
“What friend?”
“Ashton, I think.” She paused. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure he said Ashton.”
(Before walking into the room I murmured something that neither I nor Marta Kauffman could recall on November eighteenth but was, according to the writer: “Why would Robby have to pick up stuff if Ashton lives next door?”)
“Bret, it’s no big deal. It was just some clothes. He was in his room for ten minutes. Nadine Allen’s picking them up from the mall, and he should be back at their place by four—”
“Can you give me his cell number?”
Marta sighed—which pissed me off, I recall that flicker of rage—and gave it to me.
“I’m coming right back to the hotel,” I said. “I’ll see you guys in about twenty minutes.”
“Do you want to talk to Sarah—”
After hanging up on Marta, I dialed Robby’s number.
I waited by his door. There was no answer.
But I wasn’t worried and I didn’t leave a message.
Why would I?
He was at the Fortinbras Mall with friends and they were watching a movie and he had diligently turned off the phone once it began (a scenario impossibly distant from what actually happened that day) and then I would see him back at the hotel, and even though we were not checking out of the Four Seasons and returning to the house (that was never going to be an option), Robby could still spend the night at the Allens’ (even though at that moment I had a shivery premonition about this being a school night) and Jayne would come back on Wednesday and our lives would move on as they were supposed to ever since I had accepted Jayne’s offer and moved to Midland County in July. I thought expectantly about the upcoming holidays even while I stared at the gnawed, cracked door in front of me.
(I don’t remember actually opening the door to Robby’s room but—for some reason—I do remember the first thing that came to my mind when I walked in. It was something Robby had told me when he was pointing out things in the night sky at that picnic in Horatio Park over the summer: the stars you see in the night sky actually do not exist.)
The room was still in the same state it was left in on Wednesday night when we fled the house. An unmade bed, the dead computer, an opened closet.
I moved slowly to the window and looked out onto Elsinore Lane.
Another quiet Sunday, and everything felt okay with the world.
(Is that a sentence you ever thought you would actually write?)
I stood in the room for a long time, taking inventory.
What I had not done: I had not turned around.
I had walked straight into the room. I had stood there. I had contemplated my son and his motives. I did not see what was behind me.
At first I didn’t understand. It took a moment to grasp.
When I turned around I saw scrawled across the giant photomural of the deserted skate park, in massive red lettering:
D I ss a pE AR
HE r e
I breathed in but did not start panicking immediately.
I wasn’t panicking because something on the floor caught my eye and momentarily replaced the panic with curiosity.
It was sitting next to the open door, off to the side.
As I neared it I thought I was looking at a large bowl made from chewed-up newspaper scraps (it was) that someone had placed two black rocks in.
I assumed it was an art project of some kind.
But the black stones were wet. They were glistening.
And as I stood above the bowl, looking down into it, I realized what it actually was.
It was a nest.
And in the nest the black oval objects were not stones.
I knew immediately what they were.
They were eggs.
There was another nest next to the closet door. (And another one was later found in the guest room.)
I flashed on something Miller had warned me about.
Miller had said that fumigation was necessary so nothing living would be left in the house once the cleansing began.
That was why the house had to be fumigated: the spirits, the demons, would try to find anything living to enter so they could “continue their existence.”
A question: What if a doll had hidden itself and waited?
What if the Terby had hidden itself in the house?