“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.”
