The House That Looked Back

Nora was seven the summer the house opened up for her.

They were driving home from Aunt Deb's on the county road, the long way, because her mother said the highway made her nervous after dark and it was almost dark. The air conditioning in the Buick only worked on the driver's side, so Nora had her window down and her chin on her arms, watching the fields go by in long gold stripes, and listening to the rhythmic hum of the tires on asphalt.

The house sat on a little rise, set back from the road. Two stories, gray where it had once been white, the porch sagging in the middle like a hammock. Every window on the front was either boarded or black. Nora loved it instantly, the way she loved anything old and forgotten. She watched it come, watched it pass, and when it slid out of her window she twisted around in her seat belt and got up on her knees to keep looking.

The back of the house was gone. It hadn't fallen down or burned. It was just open, like the dollhouse at the children's library, the one whose back swung away on hinges so you could reach in and move the little people around. She could see every room: a kitchen with a yellow table, a staircase with a runner down the middle, and upstairs, wallpaper with tiny blue flowers, a bed with a white quilt, a lamp with a fringed shade.

And a woman.

She stood in the upstairs room, near where the wall should have been, facing the road. Navy skirt, cream blouse, hands clasped loosely in front of her the way the ladies at church stood while they waited for the hymn to start. She didn't wave. She didn't move. She was too far away for Nora to be sure she was looking at the car, but Nora was sure anyway. You can always tell when someone's looking at you.

"Mom. Mom. That house doesn't have a back. There's a lady upstairs."

Her mother glanced in the rearview mirror, which meant she glanced at Nora, not the house. "Sit down, baby. That house has been empty since I was your age. There's no one there."

"I know what I saw."

"Houses don't just not have backs, Nora."

"I know what I saw."

There was a long silence, the kind that usually came right before Nora got in trouble. Then her mother sighed through her nose, put on the blinker for nobody, and swung a U-turn across both lanes. "Fine. We're going to look, and then I don't want to hear one more word about it."

She parked on the shoulder below the rise, and Nora pressed her face to the glass. The back of the house was there: gray siding peeling in long curls, two boarded windows downstairs, two black ones up, a back door with a busted screen. No yellow table, no blue flowers, no lady.

"See?" her mother said, not unkindly. "Just an old house."

Nora didn't say one more word about it. What she felt wasn't fear so much as a kind of grief, the particular letdown of the world going ordinary again right in front of you. 

***

Thirty-four years later, Nora was early for a job interview, which had never once happened to her before.

The interview was two counties over, at a regional hospital she'd never had reason to visit, and she'd left absurdly early because the GPS said ninety minutes and she didn't trust it. Then the GPS, out of what she could only assume was spite, routed her off the highway onto a county road she didn't recognize until she did.

The rise. The porch, finally folded in half. The siding gone nearly silver. She knew it, and she had fifty minutes to kill.

"Why not," she told herself, and put on her blinker.

The front door had swollen in its frame and hung a few inches open, like it had been interrupted mid-sentence. Nora put her shoulder into it and picked her way inside in her good shoes. Daylight came through the gaps in the boards in hard white stripes, and the air smelled like wet wood and mouse. The staircase was on her left, the runner long gone, leaving only a row of rusted tacks down the middle of each step. That gave her a small, cold jolt she decided not to examine.

She wandered past a couch that was mostly springs and wallpaper peeling in long tongues. She kept her phone out, half for the flashlight and half for the comfort, and she was almost enjoying herself when she passed an open doorway and saw a woman standing just inside.

Nora screamed, stumbled backward, caught her heel on a warped board, and went down hard on her ass. Somewhere between standing and the floor, her brain caught up: dark hair, startled face, phone held up like a weapon. A mirror, a big speckled freestanding mirror someone had left in an empty room, and she'd just been ambushed by herself.

She sat in the dust with her heart going like a paint shaker. "There's no one there," she said, and it came out in her mother's exact voice, which was somehow worse than the mirror. "You are forty-one years old. You have a mortgage."

She got up, brushed off her skirt, assessed the damage (pride: extensive; tailbone: TBD), and kept going, because if she left now the house would win.

That was when she started noticing the colors. A flash of cream at the edge of a doorway, there and gone, like a hem pulled out of sight. She followed it and found a cream-colored curtain in front of a broken window, breathing in and out with the breeze. Fine. Obviously. A smudge of navy at the end of the hall turned out to be an old wool coat on a hook, moth-eaten to lace. Fine. Old houses had old coats. Then a cream-colored teacup on the kitchen windowsill, clean and upside down, as if someone had washed it and set it out to dry. That one she had no excuse ready for, so she decided she hadn't seen it.

"Okay," she said. "Good tour. Ten out of ten, would trespass again."

She turned back toward the front of the house, and the staircase was on her right.

Nora stood there for a long moment. She had come in the front door and the stairs had been on the other side. She was sure of that the way she was sure of her own name. She walked the hall slowly, looking at each doorway as she passed it, and none of them were where she'd left them, and then she was in the foyer and the front door was shut.

It wasn't swollen shut. It sat flush in its frame like it had been hung yesterday. She pulled, she pushed, she braced a foot against the wall and hauled on the knob until her palm burned, and it didn't so much as creak. The back door was the same. The windows were nailed or painted or simply shut, and when she reached through the jagged hole behind the cream curtain, carefully, so carefully, her hand stopped. Not on glass. On nothing. On air that simply declined to let her through, smooth and cool and absolutely firm. Yet, the curtain moved through it easily.

No signal, of course. She dialed 911 anyway and held the phone to her ear. There was no ring, just a strange, faint static that sounded almost like the rhythmic hum of tires on asphalt. She hung up. The screen said 10:31. After several minutes, she looked again and it said 10:31. She stopped looking because she didn't like it.

She ran back to the front door, slammed her shoulder into it, then grabbed a broken chair from the living room and struck the wood above the lock. The chair splintered, leaving the door completely unharmed.

"OPEN!" The word tore out of her throat.

She dropped the chair and backed away, then screamed again, louder this time, hoping someone outside might hear.

No one answered.

For the next several minutes, Nora tried everything she could think of. She broke another window, only to discover the same invisible barrier behind the glass. She searched for a basement entrance, tested a loose board in the kitchen wall, and even tried prying the hinges from the front door with a piece of metal she'd found on the floor. The hinges wouldn't move. She beat on the door until her hands hurt. 

When she'd finished, she stood at the foot of the stairs and made herself think. People drove that road. If she got high enough, somebody would see her waving, and she would explain that she was an idiot who'd gotten herself stuck in a condemned house, and it would be humiliating, but it would be over.

She climbed the stairs over the row of rusted tacks. The upstairs hall was dim, but the room at the back was not.

Wallpaper with tiny blue flowers. A bed with a white quilt gone yellow. A lamp with a fringed shade on the nightstand. And where the back wall should have been, there was nothing at all: open air, the long slope of the rise, the fields, the county road laid out below her like a ribbon somebody had dropped. Light poured in, warm on her face. She could hear birds. She walked to the edge with her toes curling in her shoes and put her hand out into all that open air, and it stopped, same as the window.

So she waved. A pickup went by, then a minivan, then a semi that blew its own dust across the shoulder. She waved with both arms and yelled until her throat stung, and none of them so much as tapped their brakes. They were too far away, or she was. She couldn't tell anymore which was the problem.

Then a car came along from the east, slower than the others, and something in her went quiet.

An old Buick, maroon, the paint gone chalky on the hood. Her mother had driven one like it. Lots of people had. The driver's window was up and the back window was down, and there was a child in the back seat, too far away to make out a face. As the car passed below the rise, the child twisted around in her seat and got up on her knees to keep looking, and Nora felt it the way you always feel it when someone's looking at you.

She didn't wave. She found she didn't want to. She stood there and looked back until the Buick rounded the curve and was gone.

The drawer came open all at once. Vinyl seats, the smell of a hot car, her mother's eyes in the rearview mirror. Twisting around to keep looking at something she wasn't supposed to see.

Nora looked down.

She'd bought the outfit for the interview. Something professional, the girl at the store had said. Serious but approachable. A navy skirt. A cream blouse.

Her hands were clasped loosely in front of her.

She didn't remember clasping them.