David Gates - Preston Falls

She comes around the last corner and sees that at least the house is still standing. But what's all that blue plastic? He must be putting a new roof on, God knows why — and God knows where he's getting the money. His truck's not here, and if ever a house looked deserted. The maple trees are bare and the lawn is higher than your ankles, except where it's covered in dead leaves.

She pulls up onto the lank grass, superstitious about taking the place where he parks his truck, and climbs out. The late-afternoon sun is higher above the horizon up here, and it feels hot through the thinning air. Not warm. Hot. Sharp and stinging. One of the reasons she hates and fears Preston Falls: in this clean air you can really feel the damage they've done to the ozone, far worse than they're telling us. Instant sunburn. Up here she keeps slathering Mel and Roger with sunblock and making them wear hats outside. Willis disapproves.

But she's forgotten how quiet it is, A breeze sets leaves rattling in a narrow file, as if a swift ghost had rushed through on the way from one arbitrary point on the lawn to another and vanished. She walks through the grass and leaves to the kitchen door, looking for signs that any-

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one has walked this way lately. But she doubts even a man could see anything — even if he'd been a Boy Scout and read all of Shedock Holmes. The door's unlocked. There's a musty smell inside, together with a rotten whiff of stove gas. She calls Hello, then feels stupid: a house doesn't smell this way if people have been in it. But it's weird. Willis always locks up, though of course you can get in through any window. Which is in fact how he gets in, instead of going into the woodshed for the key. You'd have to know Willis to know how perfect that is.

He's left the boombox right out on the counter, and a stack of CDs. Which is weird, too: he usually hides stuff because the house was once broken into. But what she really doesn't like is this one little gray spider strand connecting the handle of the JOE mug with the countertop. She lays her fingertips on the rim, absurdly hoping to feel whether Willis is near or far. But no feeling of anything floods in on her. Of course. Because the whole idea is stupid.

She looks around. On the floor, Rathbone's food dish and water bowl, both empty. In the sink, a bowl with a spoon and a single Cheerio stuck to the inside. On the table, a Want Ad Digest folded open, with an ad circled in pen:

TRACTOR Ford 8N w land plow, disc harrow, snowplow, sickle bar, VGC, $2250 W/D.

The calendar says September: summery picture of a lake with these cliffs hanging over it and a red-and-white sailboat out in the middle, no sail up and nobody inside.

The furniture's still piled up in the dining room, and the living room's still empty. Her footsteps echo. Plastic still over the window, still the same hole in the ceiling. He hasn't gotten much accomplished in his two months. Though in fairness he is doing major stuff to the roof. She goes into the front hall, around the sofa and upstairs. She peeks into the kids' rooms at unwanted toys: a red-and-blue plastic three-wheeler and a broken space robot in Roger's room; in Mel's, jigsaw puzzles (Mount Fuji, a covered bridge) and games (Candyland, Don't Wake Daddy). And there sits the black-haired doll, Rosita or whatever her name was, that Mel used to tote around everywhere: legs spread, arms spread, back against the wall, eyes open, waiting for somebody to give a thought to her. Waiting for years. Jean actually feels herself getting teary. Oh please.

She goes into what Willis used to call, with that little sneering hesi-

PRESTON FALLS

tation, "the, ah, master bedroom." Bed's unmade — of course — and the floor littered with underwear, socks and t-shirts. Well, damned if she'll clean up his mess. Not that anyone's asking her to. The light's too spooky for her to linger, anyway: that slanting, end-of-day sunlight that makes things seem to glow from within. She opens the door to Willis's little study — God, there's a window broken in here and glass all over the floor. The lovely locals. And his computer's on, with his customized Screensaver crawling: I CAN'T GO ON I'LL GO ON. She looks around for the rock somebody must have thrown — nothing — then kneels and touches her wrist to the seat of his chair. Out of sheer stupidity. Could it be that locals broke that window downstairs, too, and this was some kind of hate campaign like what happens to black families? She wouldn't put it past these people. And she can actually sort of see it their way: city folks are driving up the price of homes so locals can't afford to live here anymore. In Wakefield, the next town over, teenagers used somebody's summer place for a drug party house all winter and did fifty thousand dollars' worth of damage; toward the end they were blamming the walls with shotguns.

But what actually happened here? Okay, he's working on his computer, somebody throws a rock, he runs down to investigate, gets in his truck — and then what? He just never comes back?

Meanwhile the red light on the answering machine's going crazy.

She presses Play. "Hi, how are you, how's the. house coming. ." Beeeep. "Hey. It's Marty. Listen. Couple things to go over, for when you come back. Nothing major Give me a call the next day or two? Four four two six? In case you've forgotten." Beeeep. "Hi, just thought I might catch you in. . " Beeeep. "Aahsk nawt why yaw brotha has nawt called you, aahsk why you have nawt called yaw brotha." Beeeep. "It's Marty. Listen, we do need to talk. Please get back to me? Four four two six?" Beeeep. "Hi, uh, listen, I'm a little concerned. ." Beeeep. "Willis, it's Marty. It's very urgent that you get back to me as soon as you can. We're assuming that you're coming back to work, since we haven't heard to the contrary, but we badly need to talk. So if you get this. . four four two six. Okay?" Beeeep. The red light stops flashing.

So he got none of these messages? Her first one was at least two weeks ago.

She looks through the stuff on his worktable. Receipt from the Quicklube in Chesterton, August 30. Old phone bills, electric bills, bill from Drew's Propane Service. No letters. Catalog from Renovator's Sup-

ply, folded open to a page of hinges. What's strange, though, his pictures aren't up anymore. Just nail holes. They're on the floor, stacked against the table leg. Here's the farmhouse he grew up in. His horrible father, whom she used to try to think of as his pathetic father. His grandparents, though she can never remember which grandparents. Mel and Roger on Block Island, when she was six and he was three: Mel scooping sand with a plastic bucket, Roger holding up her Little Mermaid inner tube around his waist, neither one looking at the other or at you. And Jean herself, just after they were married, sitting on a lawn chair in Sarasota, umbrella'd drink in her hand, with sunglasses and that floppy old straw hat. She looks like any carefree young woman.

She picks up the phone. "Hi," she says when Carol answers. "Well, I'm here. But there's no sign of him. No messages, I take it."

"No, not at all. Everything's fine." Which must mean the kids are right there.

"It's very weird up here," says Jean. "It just looks really deserted. And there's this window broken up in his study, and his computer's still on?"

"Really?" says Carol, in the sort of bright tone she'd use if Jean had said a deer was standing at the kitchen door. "Well, Roger's right here. We've got the goody bags almost finished, and of course Rathbone's lying here supervising, Oh-oh, somebody heard his name."

"I guess you can't really talk."

"You got it," says Carol.

"I have no idea what I should do," Jean says.

"Oh, I know just what you mean. So I imagine Roger wants to talk to you."

Jean hears Roger say, "No I don't."