Samuel wheeled the bike into the stand of oaks close to the road, and Lindsey followed. They had gone the week before to get haircuts at the same barber shop on Market Street, and though Lindsey’s hair was lighter and finer than Samuel’s, the barber had given them identical short, spiky cuts. Within a moment of removing their helmets their hair caught the large drops that filtered through the trees, and Lindsey’s mascara began to bleed. I watched as Samuel used his thumb to wipe the traces from Lindsey’s cheek. “Happy graduation,” he said in the darkness, and stooped to kiss her.
Since their first kiss in our kitchen two weeks after my death, I had known that he was – as my sister and I had giggled with our Barbies or while watching Bobby Sherman on TV – her one and only. Samuel had pressed himself into her need, and the cement between the two of them had begun to set immediately. They had gone to Temple together, side by side. He had hated it and she had pushed him through. She had loved it and this had allowed him to survive.
“Let’s try and find the densest part of this underbrush,” he said.
“What about the bike?”
“Hal will probably have to rescue us when the rain stops.”
“Shit!” Lindsey said.
Samuel laughed and grabbed her hand to start walking. The moment they did, they heard the first thunderclap and Lindsey jumped. He tightened his hold on her. The lightning was in the distance still, and the thunder would grow louder on its heels. She had never felt about it the way I did. It made her jumpy and nervous. She imagined trees split down the middle and houses on fire and dogs cowering in basements throughout the suburbs.
They walked through the underbrush, which was getting soaked despite the trees. Even though it was the middle of the afternoon, it was dark except for Samuel’s safety light. Still they felt the evidence of people. Their boots crunched down on top of tin cans and pushed up against empty bottles. And then, through the thick weeds and darkness both of them saw the broken window panes that ran along the top of an old Victorian house. Samuel shut off the safety light immediately.
“Do you think there’s someone inside?” Lindsey asked.
“It’s dark.”
“It’s spooky.”
They looked at each other, and my sister said what they both were thinking. “It’s dry!”
They held hands in the heavy rain and ran toward the house as fast as they could, trying not to trip or slide in the increasing mud.
As they drew closer, Samuel could make out the steep pitch of the roof and the small wooden cross work that hung down from the gables. Most of the windows on the bottom floor had been covered over with wood, but the front door swung back and forth on its hinges, banging against the plaster wall on the inside. Though part of him wanted to stand outside in the rain and stare up at the eaves and cornices, he rushed into the house with Lindsey. They stood a few feet inside the doorway, shivering and staring out into the pre-suburban forest that surrounded them. Quickly I scanned the rooms of the old house. They were alone. No scary monsters lurked in corners, no wandering men had taken root.
More and more of these undeveloped patches were disappearing, but they, more than anything, had marked my childhood. We lived in one of the first developments to be built on the converted farmland in the area – a development that became the model and inspiration for what now seemed a limitless number – but my imagination had always rested on the stretch of road that had not been filled in with the bright colors of shingles and drainpipes, paved driveways and super-size mailboxes. So too had Samuel’s.
“Wow!” Lindsey said. “How old do you think this is?”
Lindsey’s voice echoed off the walls as if they stood alone in a church.
“Let’s explore,” said Samuel.
The boarded-up windows on the first floor made it hard to see anything, but with the help of Samuel’s safety light they could pick out both a fireplace and the chair rail along the walls.
“Look at the floor,” Samuel said. He knelt down, taking her with him. “Do you see the tongue and groove work? These people had more money than their neighbors.”
Lindsey smiled. Just as Hal cared only for the inner workings of motorcycles, Samuel had become obsessed with carpentry.
He ran his fingers over the floor and had Lindsey do it too. “This is a gorgeous old wreck,” he said.
“Victorian?” Lindsey asked, making her best guess.
“It blows my mind to say this,” Samuel said, “but I think it’s gothic revival. I noticed cross-bracing on the gable trim, so that means it was after 1860.”
“Look,” said Lindsey.
In the center of the floor someone had once, long ago, set a fire.
“And that is a tragedy,” Samuel said.
“Why didn’t they use the fireplace? There’s one in every room.”
But Samuel was busy looking up through the hole the fire had burned into the ceiling, trying to make out the patterns of the woodwork along the window frames.
“Let’s go upstairs,” he said.
“I feel like I’m in a cave,” said Lindsey as they climbed the stairs. “It’s so quiet in here you can barely hear the rain.”
Samuel bounced the soft side of his fist off the plaster as he went. “You could wall someone into this place.”
And suddenly it was one of those awkward moments that they had learned to let pass and I lived to anticipate. It begged a central question. Where was I? Would I be mentioned? Brought up and discussed? Usually now the answer was a disappointing no. It was no longer a Susie-fest on Earth.
But something about the house and the night – markers like graduations and birthdays always meant that I was more alive, higher up in the register of thoughts – made Lindsey dwell on me more in that moment than she normally might. Still, she didn’t mention it. She remembered the heady feeling she had had in Mr. Harvey’s house and that she had often felt since – that I was with her somehow, in her thoughts and limbs – moving with her like a twin.
At the top of the stairs they found the entrance to the room they had stared up at.
“I want this house,” Samuel said.
“What?”
“This house needs me, I can feel it.”
“Maybe you should wait until the sun comes out to decide,” she said.
“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.
“Samuel Heckler,” my sister said, “fixer of broken things.”
“One to talk,” he said.
They stood for a moment in silence and smelled the damp air coming through the chimney and flooding the room. Even with the sound of rain, Lindsey still felt hidden away, tucked safely in an outside corner of the world with the one person she loved more than anyone else.
She took his hand, and I traveled with them up to the doorway of a small room at the very front. It jutted out over what would be the entrance hall of the floor below and was octagonal in shape.
“Oriels,” Samuel said. “The windows” – he turned to Lindsey – “when they’re built out like that, like a tiny room, that’s called an oriel.”
“Do they turn you on?” Lindsey asked, smiling.
I left them in the rain and darkness. I wondered if Lindsey noticed that when she and Samuel began to unzip their leathers the lightning stopped and the rumble in the throat of God – that scary thunder – ceased.
In his den, my father reached out to hold the snow globe in his hand. The cold glass against his fingers comforted him, and he shook it to watch the penguin disappear and then slowly be uncovered by the gently falling snow.
Hal had made it back from the graduation ceremonies on his motorcycle but instead of calming my father – providing some assurance that if one motorcycle could maneuver the storm and deliver its rider safe to his door, another one could too – it seemed to stack the probabilities in the reverse in his mind.