Robert Silverberg - It Comes and Goes

I must have seen her fifty times during the ride back. Waving at me from the head of a country lane as the bus flashed by. Smiling at me from a bicycle going the other way. Riding in the back of a pickup truck bouncing along in front of us. Standing by the side of the road trying to get a hitch. Her image haunted me wherever I looked. I sat there shivering and sweating, seeing her beckoning in the doorway and watching that door closing and closing and closing again in my mind.

It was evening by the time the bus reached town. The wise thing would have been to take a shower and go to a meeting, but I went to the house instead, and there was someone standing outside, staring at the screen door.

I had never before encountered anyone else, in all my visits to the house.

He was about my age, a short guy with a good gut and touseled reddish hair just beginning to fade into gray. He looked vaguely familiar. I wondered if I had seen him at a meeting once or twice, perhaps. As I came by, he threw me an uneasy, guilty glance, as if he was up to something. His eyes were a pale blue, very bloodshot.

I went past him about ten paces, paused there, turned around.

“You waiting for someone?” I asked.

“I might be.”

“Someone who lives in there?”

“What’s that to you?”

“I was just wondering,” I said. “If you could tell me who lives in that house.”

He shrugged as if he hadn’t quite heard me. The blue eyes turned chilly. I wanted to pick him up and throw him into the next county. The way he was looking at me, he probably felt the same way about me.

I said, “A woman lives there, right?”

“Fuck off, will you?”

“A blonde woman?”

“Fuck off, I said.”

Neither of us moved.

“Sometimes I come by here and I see a blonde woman in the window, or standing in the doorway,” I went on. “I wonder if you’ve seen her sometimes too.”

He didn’t say anything. His eyes flickered almost involuntarily toward the house.

I followed the motion and there she was, visible through the window with the green shutters to the right of the door. She was wearing one of her misty wraps and her hair was shining like spun gold. She smiled. Gestured with a quick movement of her head.

Come on inside, why don’t you?

I almost did. Another five seconds, another three, and I would have trotted down that little narrow paved pathway as obediently as the dog who had had the newspaper in his mouth. But I didn’t. I was still afraid of what might lie beyond. I froze in my tracks; and then the redheaded man started to move. He went past me and up the path. Like a sleepwalker; like a zombie.

“Hey—wait—”

I caught him by the arm. He swung around, furious, and we struggled for a moment and then he broke loose and clamped both his hands on my shoulders and pushed me with tremendous force into the shrubbery. I tripped over one of the pieces of odd metal junk that were always lying around near the door and went sprawling on my face, and when I got myself disentangled it was just in time to see the redheaded man wrench the screen door open and run inside.

I heard the inner door slam.

And then the house disappeared.

It vanished like a pricked bubble, taking the shrubbery with it, the garbage cans and other junk as well, and I found myself kneeling on weeds in the midst of a vacant lot, trembling as if I had just had a stroke. After a moment or two I got shakily to my feet and walked over to the place where the house had been. Nothing. Nothing. No trace. Gone as though it had never been there at all.

A couple of days later I moved back to my old place. There didn’t seem much risk any more, and I missed the place, the town, the guys at the meetings. It’s been months now, and no house. I rarely skip a day, going by the lot, but it remains empty. The memory of it, of her , haunts me. I look for the house in other parts of town, even in other towns. I look for the redheaded man too, but I’ve never seen him. I described him once at a meeting and someone said, “Yeah, sounds like Ricky. He used to live around here.” Where was he now? Nobody had any idea. Neither do I.

Another time I got brave enough to ask some of them if they had ever heard about a little white house that, well, sort of comes and goes. “Comes and goes?” they said. “What the hell does that mean?” I let the question drop.

I have a feeling that it was all some kind of a test, and I may have flunked it. I don’t mean that I’ve missed out on a terrific woman. She was only the bait; I know better than to think that she was real or that she ever could have been available for me if she was. But that sense of a new start—of another life, however weird, beyond the horizon, forever lost to me now—that’s what I’m talking about. And the pain runs deep.

But there’s always a second chance, isn’t there? They tell you that in the Program, and I believe it. I have to. From time to time I’ve left notes in the empty lot:

WHEN YOU COME BACK NEXT TIME, DON’T LEAVE WITHOUT ME.

I’M READY NOW. I’M SURE OF IT.

Maybe they will. The house comes and goes, that I know. It’s gone now, but it’ll come again. I’m here. I’m watching. I’m waiting.