Familiar Spirit

Chapter One

The house was out of the way, on the west side of town, and much too large for one person, but Sarah wanted it.

It stood well back from the road on a huge corner lot, a weathered green frame house surrounded by trees. Even now, in mid-October, with the leaves beginning to fall, the house was nearly invisible from the street. Only the grey cement steps, a glimpse of the black tarpaper roof, and the bright red splotch of a crookedly leaning mailbox revealed the house to a passing observer.

The first sight of it made Sarah’s heart beat more quickly. She could live there, yes, she could. She responded to this solitary, unkempt house almost with recognition, a feeling more positive than any she’d had in a week of examining sterile apartments and dreary, refurbished duplexes. To have a whole house, all to herself . . . She followed the gleaming black Ferrari off the street and up a short concrete ramp, the merest fragment of a driveway, and parked behind the house.

Valerie, a thin, young redhead dressed in blue jeans, high leather boots and a dirty yellow sweater, climbed out of the Ferrari. Sarah switched off her engine, but didn’t get out of her car. Something about the other woman, something she couldn’t quite define, made her nervous. She wondered if she had made a mistake in coming here.

The house had been built on a slope, so that while the back door was only three wooden steps from the ground, an imposing flight of cement stairs rose more than ten feet to the sagging wooden porch and the front door. The lawn—if anything so wild and weedy could be called a lawn—rolled out before the house, down to the street below and vanished on either side into a little wilderness of bushes, trees and creeper vines. Behind the house there was only a small patch of bare ground, lightly sprinkled with gravel broken up by the occasional hardy plant, which provided space for cars to be parked. The back boundary was defined by a high wire fence.

Curious, nerves forgotten, Sarah got out of her car and nodded towards the fence. “What’s that?”

“Camp Mabry, National Guard,” the other woman said in a dull, uninflected voice. She gestured along the fence, westward. “All that down there is wilderness, government owned, no trespassing. You’ll hear them sometimes, on weekends, playing war games. Other than that, it’s very quiet here. Very quiet.”

Sarah nodded. The isolation pleased her. There were no near neighbors, the nearest house being on the other side of the four lanes of West 35th Street. Living here, she would never be bothered by the sound of neighbors quarrelling, never have to worry about keeping quiet herself, or suffer another’s fondness for high-volume disco. Here, she would have plenty of room, plenty of peace, plenty of the solitude she had always lacked.

I’ll be alone, she thought, and in that moment the idea of solitude became not a longed-for treat but a punishment. Why was she doing this, sentencing herself to loneliness? Did she have to look for the biggest, most isolated house she could find?

“Let’s go inside; you have to go inside.” Valerie had made another of her disturbing transfers from dullness into a feverish liveliness. Her voice had become shrill, and she was jigging slightly with impatience, or some other ill-repressed emotion. Sarah moved away, back towards her car, reluctant to follow this woman anywhere, fearful of some trap.

She looked back up at the house and felt it again, that basic attraction, the desire to live here. It was an old, worn house, old-fashioned and somehow rural in appearance. It reminded her of an old farmhouse near Bellville, where she had spent many happy weekends as a child. Well, why not? Why shouldn’t she be happy here?

She looked at Valerie’s tense, miserable face and wondered if it was pills, or an incipient nervous breakdown. Whatever it was, surely she didn’t have to be afraid of this poor thing, younger and frailer than she was herself. Sarah prided herself on her ability to cope.

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s go inside. I’d like to see it.”

Valerie moved away and bounded up the three wooden steps to the back door.

Sarah blinked, startled, and followed more slowly. Valerie’s movements had reminded her of some animal running free, and that type of grace was completely at odds with the neuroses she sensed in Valerie’s behavior.

The back door led onto an enclosed porch; there, a heavy wooden door with a window opened into the kitchen. Sarah realized that Valerie had opened both doors without using a key.

“Don’t you lock your house?”

Valerie shook her head. “Why bother? If anyone wants to get in, he’ll get in. Locks don’t work, they just fool you into thinking you’re safe. There’s a lock here, see, but it’s just a button—anyone could pick it. And there’s a skeleton key for the front door, if you want to use it.”

The bitter fatalism in Valerie’s voice made Sarah faintly queasy. She would have bolt locks put in, she decided, and a screen or burglar bars to protect the pane of glass in the center of the inner door.

“Did you get broken into, while you lived here?” she asked Valerie.

She was startled by Valerie’s laugh, which had more of pain than amusement in it. “Oh, God,” she said. “Don’t ask me that, don’t ask me! Just go—no, stay. Stay.” She shut her eyes and stood, swaying slightly, in the middle of the floor. Her messy hair was an aureole of pinkish light around her thin, bleached face. “I don’t care,” she muttered, scarcely moving her lips.

Sarah wished herself elsewhere. Seeking an escape from the embarrassment of Valerie, she looked around the kitchen. It was huge and dirty, with horrible splotchy linoleum which Sarah suspected had never looked clean. There was an old gas range, the burners encrusted with black accretions of grease, and a mammoth white refrigerator.

“The stove and the fridge both work O.K.,” Valerie said in a normal voice. She had opened her eyes. “The freezer door’s off, so you have to keep defrosting it, that’s all. Come on, I’ll show you the rest.”

Not wanting a repeat performance, Sarah resolved she would say nothing more to Valerie beyond what was strictly necessary. She followed her into the next room, which was long and bare with scratched, cream-colored walls, a wooden floor, and four or five windows which let in the leaf-dappled sunlight.

“This is the living room and dining room,” Valerie said flatly. She walked on, her boots clopping loudly and echoing in the empty house. Sarah lingered, looking around and envisioning her posters and prints on the walls, her own odds and ends of furniture filling the bareness and making it a home. One wall jutted out oddly, an unexpected corner breaking the room’s smooth geometry.

“There are two bedrooms,” Valerie said from another doorway, and Sarah joined her, glancing curiously at the front door as she passed. It had been painted a hideous burnt orange.

“You could use this as an office or a guest room,” Valerie said. “Or as your own bedroom, I guess. I never did anything with it, myself.”

Sarah looked around the large, square room, imagining bookshelves hiding the dirty walls, all her books neatly arrayed with her desk at the cosy center. There were four windows, the two on the east side latticed with leaves, the two in the south wall offering a view, only slightly obscured by branches, of the long, weedy front lawn and the street below. Sarah stood looking out, long enough to see several cars glide past. The street was far enough from the house that the sounds from it could be heard, but were not a noisy distraction. Living here, she thought, she would get to know this view well. She imagined herself waiting here, watching for some visitor to arrive, and when she turned away she felt a sense of dislocation at the sight of the bare room, shocked by the disappearance of the furniture she had felt behind her.

Valerie, too, had vanished, along with the imagined books and desk. Sarah walked through the far door into a short hallway. She glanced into the tiny bathroom. The floor was tiled in pink and brown, the fixtures and the wooden walls were white. It was no cleaner than the rest of the house—there were some spots and smears which looked unpleasantly like bloodstains. Sarah wrinkled her nose and moved on hastily. She’d give it a good cleaning. It was never a good idea to speculate on how or why something had gotten dirty.

The back bedroom was also empty, with the same cream-colored walls as the rest of the house, but the floor was covered by a stretch of hideous carpet. Whatever color it might have been originally had been altered by age and dirt to an extremely unpleasant pinkish-brown, and it gave off a faint but definite odor of mildew and ancient dust. The windows on the east wall must be invisible from the street, covered as they were by a tangle of bushes. Walking closer, Sarah saw that an accumulation of primal cobwebs filled the narrow space between the screens and the glass. The back windows were cleaner, and the view from them was unobstructed. Sarah looked out at the two parked cars, the fence, and the wilderness beyond before turning back into the room. First thing, she decided, she would get rid of that horrible carpet. Then she’d paint the walls pale blue, and the ceiling white. She wouldn’t need much furniture, just a bed and a chest of drawers. Then she smiled, amused at the way her imagination had taken over and was already settling her into this place.

Some small sound distracted her from her pleasant musings and she turned to see Valerie standing in the doorway staring at her with a ferocious intensity that made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle.

Valerie blinked, and seemed to return from some other place. “All right, you’re O.K.,” she said. “When do you want to move in?”

“I’m not sure,” Sarah said, lying coolly. “I’m not sure it’s right for me. I’d like some time to think about it. Can I call you?”

“No, you can’t.” The edge of hysteria was back in Valerie’s manner; in a moment, Sarah thought uneasily, Valerie would go white and rigid, her eyes would close, and she would sway in the breeze of her own madness. “Tell me now, you have to. Do you want it or not? Will you live here?”

She had known from the moment she set eyes on the house that she wanted to live here, but something, perhaps just her visceral response to Valerie, made Sarah hesitate and even doubt her own feelings. Why did she want this house, why should she? She could list the drawbacks of it as easily as she could list the positive aspects—perhaps they were the same. The size, the isolation . . . Was she about to rush into something she would later regret? Was it just her angry pride which made her want this house, to show the world—and Brian in particular—how happy she was to live all alone?

“Why are you moving?” Sarah asked, staring hard at Valerie. “If it’s such a good house, and the rent is so low, why are you moving now, six weeks into the semester?”

Valerie’s mouth quirked into a tight, unhappy smile. “Why are you?”

Of course. She’d walked right into that one, despite her best intentions. Sarah crushed the paranoid suspicion that Valerie somehow knew the answer already and was laughing at her. She drew a deep breath, determined not to reveal her distress, and said calmly, “I broke up with the man I was living with.”

It burned her throat like a lie. But it wasn’t a lie, not wholly. She made it sound like a matter of choice, her choice, and only that part was untrue. But she wouldn’t think about it now.

Valerie made a sound that might have been laughter. “All right. I don’t care. I . . . didn’t want to live here anymore. I’m living somewhere else now, somewhere much nicer. With someone who is very rich. He gives me lots of nice things.” She sounded anything but happy about it, and Sarah felt a twinge of pity for this stranger and her problems.

“Now tell me,” said Valerie. “If you won’t live here, then I have to find anyone else. I . . . I don’t want to waste any more time. You can see I’ve already moved out, and . . . the house shouldn’t be empty.”

It would be silly to say no to a perfect house just because the former tenant was a little crazy. And it would be cowardly to say no because she was afraid of the isolation and solitude—isolation and solitude were just what she wanted.

“I want the house,” Sarah said firmly.

Valerie smiled, and the feral, self-satisfied nature of the smile gave Sarah goosebumps, made her for one wild moment want to retract her agreement and run like hell.

“I’ve given Mrs. Owens your name,” Valerie said. “She’s the owner. There’s no lease, no deposit. She was grateful to me for finding someone to take my place. She’s very old, and she doesn’t like the bother of showing the house. She trusted me to find someone who wouldn’t be any trouble, someone who would pay the rent on time. You won’t be any trouble, will you?”

Now Sarah had a reason for her unease. How could Valerie have presumed to give Sarah’s name to the owner before Sarah agreed, before she had even seen the house? She could still back out—

Valerie dug into a pocket of her tight jeans and withdrew a scrap of paper. “This is Mrs. Owens’ address, where you’ll send the rent. Don’t go bothering her; she doesn’t like to be bothered. That’s one reason the rent’s so low. You’ll have to keep the lawn mowed and do any minor repairs yourself.” When Sarah did not move to take it, Valerie pushed the scrap of paper closer and flapped it impatiently in Sarah’s face. “Rent’s due the twenty-second of each month. Eighty-five dollars. Remember that.”

And when had Valerie had time to call Mrs. Owens?

Valerie cocked her head and smiled slowly, mockingly. “Of course . . . if you want to change your mind . . . if you think you’d be scared, living out here all by yourself . . .”

But Valerie was lying, of course. She was crazy. And what she said didn’t matter. This was Sarah’s house now, and she could just send Valerie away. Sarah plucked the piece of paper from Valerie’s hand, accepting the house, committing herself. “I’ll send Mrs. Owens the first month’s rent next week.”

“Good. Move in whenever you want, the sooner the better. He . . . Mrs. Owens doesn’t want the house standing empty for long.” Again Valerie dug into her jeans. “Here’s the key to the back door since you were worried about it.” She tossed a bit of light metal at Sarah, who managed to catch it in midair.

Halfway to the door, Valerie paused and looked back. The mad, sly smile was on her face again, and it still gave Sarah goosebumps. “Do you have a cat?”

Sarah frowned and shook her head. “No. Why?”

“You might want to get one. I think there’s a rat in the cellar.”

“Cellar?”

Valerie turned without answering and hurried away, almost running. She slammed the door so hard behind her that the house shook. Bemused, Sarah stood still in the empty house, listening for the sound of Valerie’s car. When she heard the Ferrari roar away, she moved again, walking into the kitchen and then making the same circle of the house that she had made first by following Valerie.

My house, she thought. My own. Home.

But the word home conjured another image. Against her will, she saw again the small, upstairs apartment she had shared with Brian for the past year and a half. One bedroom, one bathroom, a living room, and a kitchen barely large enough to turn around in, all made even smaller by the bulk of furniture, books and records, and a laissez-faire attitude towards housekeeping. It might have been comfortable for one, but it was not really large enough for two. Sarah and Brian had been forever bumping into each other. At first, they had found it romantic.

Although romantic wasn’t really the word for their relationship, Sarah thought. Necessary—that was more like it. Their constant companionship had been a necessity of life, like food or drink or sleep. They had been addicted to each other.

The realization of that had frightened Sarah. Sarah, who wasn’t afraid of flying, or of insects, or of going to the dentist, was afraid of what she felt for Brian. She’d had boyfriends before, but never had she felt this obsessive need which—it now appeared—was what everyone had meant all along by the word “love.”

And although this new life, this sense of being half of a greater whole, was nearly always pleasant and could be exhilarating, Sarah feared being trapped by it, becoming lost. When Brian proposed marriage, Sarah felt as if she’d been pushed out of an airplane: a giddy surge of pleasure, and then terror. She had seen herself taking the path she’d always sworn she would avoid, and turning into her mother, a hollow creature who hardly seemed to exist apart from her husband and children.

So she had put Brian off with excuses about being too young, and wanting to finish her degree, and how they should wait until they had both settled into careers. She had tried to tell him the truth—that she was frightened—but Brian, who seemed to know everything else important about her without the need for words, had not understood.

“But what’s wrong with being happy?” he had asked.

“Nothing. It’s not the being happy . . . it’s being dependent on you in order to be happy.”

“But, my love, I’m every bit as dependent on you.”

She had given up trying to explain. The difference between them, she thought, was not that he was less dependent or less vulnerable, but that he didn’t find those states of being threatening, and she did. From that moment, she began to work at keeping her separate identity. She made plans that didn’t include Brian, she met old friends for lunch, she spent long hours in the library instead of study­ing at home, she briefly took up a political cause, and she stopped rushing home to share every meal with Brian. She imagined she could win back her old independence without losing Brian. She should have known better.

Brian had seen Sarah’s campaign to save herself as a sign of loss of interest in him, as a lack of love, as a threat, and, finally, as a betrayal. And so, in the end, he had betrayed her: he had found someone else.

All along, Sarah admitted, she had been pulling away from him, seeking her own freedom, but she had imagined that they were engaged in a balancing act. When she pulled away, she expected him to pull back. The one thing she had not counted on was that he might stop pulling—that he would let her go.

It’s over, Sarah told herself. It doesn’t matter how it happened, or who was right or who wrong—it’s over, and time to stop brooding. But she could not get Brian out of her mind.

Sarah leaned back against the living room wall and closed her eyes. She might as well have a good old wallow while she was alone, she thought. Get it out of her system, for a time, at least, and maybe she wouldn’t break down in front of her friends again. She didn’t try to stop the tears as she remembered that terrible evening when Brian had told her he loved someone else.

“I didn’t mean for it to happen, Sarah,” he said. He sounded sincere; his broad, handsome face was more miserable than she had ever seen it. “But she needs me. Melanie needs me.”

“What about me? Don’t I count anymore? I need you, too.”

He almost smiled. “It’s funny that you’ve never said that before.”

“Did I have to? Is that what you need? Someone to feed your ego? Someone to go all helpless and cling to you, and worship you?”

Her fear of loss had come spilling out, sounding like anger, and Brian had turned her own bitter words against her: proof that she didn’t really need him, didn’t need anyone.

Oh, yes, Sarah thought. She had dug her own grave. She had opened the door and shown him the way out. It had been her own insistence on independence, her fear of showing any weakness that had led to this. If she had been able to give more, to let go a little—but, no, that wasn’t right, either. Did she really want a man who needed constant reassurance, who could only see his strength reflected in someone else’s weakness? If Brian couldn’t love her without pretense, for who she really was—

But Brian did love her—Sarah felt certain of that. Melanie was just a distraction. In time, Brian was bound to recognize his true feelings and come back to her. He had to. He couldn’t have loved her for so long, so intensely and then simply stopped. He had to come back to her, because she needed him. Despite all her precautions and her carefully developed other interests—she needed him. She couldn’t go on forever with this emptiness inside, this aching, lonely feeling as if some vital piece of her had been amputated. Sometimes she imagined that, when she thought about it hard enough, her need must be tugging at Brian physically, reminding him that they were still in some way attached, pulling him inexorably back to her . . .

Sarah tensed and her eyes snapped open, her wishful thoughts vanished like spray. She was not alone.

What had alerted her? What small sound? Sarah held very still and strained her ears to hear the echo of a footstep, the creak of a hinge, the heavy wooden slide of a window being opened, but there was nothing. Her imagination offered her the image of Valerie, returned for some insane, unknowable purpose, sneaking around outside the house, peering in at the windows. Sarah pushed herself away from the wall and went through the house, room by room, but found it as empty as ever.

She looked through each window as she passed, seeking some sign of a visitor, but saw nothing unusual. Her car still waited for her in the sunlight, parked alone on the flat, sandy ground. The doors were all still shut. Still Sarah could not relax. She could not shake off the feeling that someone was nearby, spying on her.

Back in the dining room, Sarah’s attention was drawn to the built-in cabinet in the east wall. Above were three shelves behind glass-fronted doors; below, two drawers and a second cabinet with plain wooden doors. Sarah opened one of the glass doors and looked inside at the deep shelves, wondering what they had been used for. A display of the best china? Idly curious, she pulled at one of the drawers. It moved sluggishly, and she pulled more firmly until it came open. Inside she found a few playing cards: Three of Spades, Queen of Hearts, Jack of Diamonds, Two of Clubs . . . and something, probably just another playing card, was stuck at the back of the drawer. Sarah could see a protruding white corner. Her fingers scrabbled at it uselessly until she realized that even if she did manage to catch hold and pull, it would probably tear. Finally she took the drawer out, struggling fiercely with it, shifting and tugging until it came free. The fragment she had been curious about proved to belong to a photograph stuck to the back of the drawer.

Carefully, Sarah peeled it away from the wood and examined it. It was an old snapshot, torn jaggedly in half. One figure remained: a dark, suited, unsmiling man in a hat. His features were shaded by the hat brim, and the photograph was not very clear, but Sarah had the impression of an extremely attractive man. That impression might have come from the figure’s stance, or the symmetry of his features, or merely the mystery and romance of an old photograph.

The blacks and whites of the snapshot were fading towards shades of brown. Sarah had no idea how old it might be—forty years, fifty, sixty? The man’s suit told her little—to her unpracticed eye it might have been fashionable in almost any decade before the Sixties. The stiff, high, white collar he wore suggested an era long past. She turned the photograph over, looking for some clue, but there was nothing written on the back, and so she turned it back again, looking at the picture. In the background was a tree, and the edge of a building. A hand—a woman’s?—rested on the man’s arm, but the rest of the person belonging to that hand had been ripped away. The man was alone now, paying no attention to the hand, staring into the camera, his face impassive and self-assured, giving away nothing.

Sarah stared back, wanting to question him, wondering who had torn the picture and why. A woman hopelessly in love with him? He would accept that as his due, she thought: he would be a man used to inspiring passion and devotion, always remaining aloof himself, always in control. As she stared at the small image it seemed to her that she could see his eyes gleaming in shadow, and that the thin, straight line of his lips was on the verge of moving; that he looked into her eyes and in a moment would smile at her.

Sarah looked up, frowning, blinking, feeling odd. The hand holding the photograph dropped to her side. How long had she been standing there, lost in featureless daydream? It was late in the day—the light from the leaf-shrouded windows seemed different, thinner, than it had when she had last noticed. She saw by her watch that it was nearly five o’clock.

She tucked the photograph away in her purse. Time to get moving: Pete and Beverly were expecting her for dinner. She walked slowly towards the back door, feeling as slow and confused as if she had been asleep all afternoon. On the back porch she paused, frowning. What was she forgetting? Was there something else she had to do? The house, around her, was silent, yet Sarah had the uncanny feeling that she was not alone. Someone was waiting for her, waiting for her to speak. She shrugged off the feeling as best she could, annoyed with herself for her befuddlement, and went out to her car.