Alexandra Sokoloff - The Unseen

She became aware that she had reached the bottom of the staircase and was just standing, unfocused, at the foot of the stairs.

She looked around her, breathing in, letting her present surroundings chase away the memories of L.A.

The house was bright, airy, and empty, two stories of old Southern charm, with a wide wraparound porch, ten-foot ceilings, heart-of-pine floors (the realtor had said “heart pine”), a screened back porch, a walk-in pantry (with a window!), and curious small square doors in the walls of the master bedroom and hall and kitchen, which to Laurel’s utter amazement turned out to be functioning laundry chutes. The windows were hung on counterweights and had thick glass that rippled like water; the front and back yards overflowed with wisteria and honeysuckle. The quiet of it all still astonished her—not just of the house, but of the surrounding blocks and the whole town.

Laurel had been looking for a rental but she’d gotten lost on the way to an apartment appointment and found herself driving through a quaint and timeless neighborhood with gently curving streets and wide porches with white Southern rockers, a haphazard collection of bungalows and Victorians and barnlike Cape Cods. When she saw the OPEN HOUSE sign in front of a gingerbread house with eight-paned windows, she stopped on a whim. The house was captivating and the price so surreally low (compared to the still-stratospheric prices of Southern California) she’d found herself writing a down-payment check on the spot (stunning the chatty realtor into silence), and moving into the place two inspections and a scant two and a half weeks later. It was a huge and outrageous decision that she’d made in a matter of minutes, unlike her in every way.

But she was not herself; she had no sense of what “self” meant anymore. And buying meant it would be harder to ever go back.

She walked now like a white-robed ghost through the empty rooms—literally, empty: she’d spent her entire savings on the purchase, therefore furniture was not really an option. She maxed out a credit card on a bed, a kitchen table with chairs, and a very large desk for her upstairs study. The kitchen boasted a refrigerator, a stove, and an eating alcove. The rest of the house was entirely bare—but then, so was Laurel, so the emptiness suited her.

She moved across the empty hallway and turned the latch of the door.

She opened it and looked out, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz —and felt the familiar wave of unreality to see, instead of flat, sunny West Hollywood, the curved, tree-lined street, regal houses with their own wraparound porches with rockers and ceiling fans and hanging baskets of ferns, and yards with huge and lushly flowering trees. A car might pass once every ten minutes or so, and then the thick silence would descend again, laced with the subdued twittering of birds, the low hum of cicadas, wind chimes, an occasional faraway train whistle, even the tolling of church bells.

A white-and-orange kitty with luminous gold eyes sat on the porch, centered exactly halfway between the doormat and beginning of the stairs, and looked up at Laurel expectantly.

“Still here, hmm?” Laurel said to it wryly. “You’re a trouper.”

The cat waited beside the door while Laurel fetched the newspaper and then walked, flowingly, in front of her into the house, through the center hall, straight to the kitchen, where it sat beside the pantry door, waiting to be fed. The morning after Laurel had moved in she’d opened the front door and the cat had walked in as if it owned the place. The cat was light years ahead of Laurel in confidence, and she figured she could learn something from it, so they had been cohabitating ever since, the cat on one pillow of the new bed, and Laurel on the other. Laurel had yet to name it, but felt certain that the cat would let her know in its own time how it wished to be addressed.

She tried not to think what it meant to be so vulnerable that a strange cat could dictate her life.

She reached for the coffeepot that she’d programmed the night before, and her eyes fell on the window.

She looked out on her lovely, alien neighborhood and thought for the millionth time, What am I doing here? What have I done?

But it turned out to be the day that she found out.

Late, late, late.

Laurel gunned her Volvo out of the driveway and hit the road with a squeal of tires. The entire day? I slept the entire day?

But it happened alarmingly often these days. Avoidance. She’d been dreading the Psych department’s welcoming faculty cocktail party all week. For the whole first week of school she’d successfully avoided colleagues and gatherings; she couldn’t bear the thought of having to fend off personal questions. Now, of course, she realized the huge flaw in her plan. She would have to meet them all at once.

At least I made it through the first week, she thought wryly, as she drove across the railroad tracks out onto the highway.

She had a light teaching load for the first semester, just two lecture classes. The class sizes were amazingly small, and she could teach the Intro to Psychology and Intro to Personality courses in her sleep. Teaching was something she was good at, something safe and known, that kept her mind off Matt and the dream.

Yes, she’d survived the first week of classes well enough. After all, she had no reason to talk about her personal life with her students.

Tonight would be a different story. She’d have to say something. So after her coffee she’d simply crawled back into bed.

And slept the whole day.

Luckily the first clothes box she’d sliced open in a panic had had her favorite outfit practically on top. Luckily she lived only fifteen minutes from campus and traffic as she knew it was nonexistent.

“I’m not late, I’m fashionably late,” she mumbled, with a touch of hysteria, and pressed down her foot on the gas pedal to exit onto Main Street, toward downtown.

Duke University was the center of the city of Durham, a former tobacco town. Through no conscious plan of her own, Laurel had landed in one of the fastest-growing areas in the country. The area boasted three major universities and a burgeoning software park within a half-hour’s drive of each other, and development had exploded in the Triangle cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, all of which consistently made “Top Ten Places to Live” lists.

Durham—the whole Triangle area—was much smaller than Los Angeles, of course. Anywhere would be. The up side was that getting around town was as easy as teleporting. Locals complained about the traffic, but Laurel had no idea what they were talking about; she often drove on the streets feeling as if she’d woken up in some postapocalyptic movie in which all the people on Earth had been vaporized.

She drove too fast now on the surreally empty streets, as always marveling at the sheer number of trees. There were many things about North Carolina that Laurel knew she would never get used to, but above all were the trees.

The trees were everywhere . So dense they formed walls—walls lining the highways, walls obscuring the houses and the businesses, vast green walls preventing her from seeing any direction except in a straight line. She sometimes felt as if she had been dropped into an enormous hedge labyrinth. The trees made the nights darker than she’d ever experienced (although that meant you could actually see stars, which was thrilling), and made navigation around town practically impossible. In L.A. Laurel was used to triangulating off buildings. A tree looks like a tree, especially when surrounded by hundreds and thousands of other trees.

She’d spent her first few weeks in a perpetual state of lost, metaphorically and literally, until she’d broken down and bought a GPS for her car. The implacable digital voice was unnervingly like her mother’s. She hadn’t figured out how she felt about that, but on the other hand, also like her mother, the device was rarely wrong, and so far it had kept Laurel from driving off the map entirely.