The Dead Friends Society, page 11
Javier slowed the car down and pointed to a brick pillar at the end of the driveway. On top of the mailbox was a light sconce built to look like a New England lighthouse. Abbey wondered why anyone would do that this far from the ocean. Maybe the previous owners wanted to escape the endless woods, too. The top of the lighthouse had been smashed off. Abbey imagined a bunch of drunk teenagers driving by with baseball bats, hitting mailboxes. That was a thing people who lived out in the middle of nowhere did, right? Is that what she was going to end up doing for fun out here?
“Here we are.” Javier said. “Are you ready, punk?” Abbey slipped off her headphones, making an overly dramatic sigh, playing the part of the angsty teen for her old man. Javier reached over and tousled her hair, “Bob promised a diamond in the rough, so hold onto your butts.”
“I only have one butt, dad.” Abbey said in auto-response. They’d been doing this back-and-forth for longer than she could remember. It was something her dad said to her forever ago, a quote she didn’t understand until she finally saw that old movie, Jurassic Park. She’d called him a dork for letting her think he’d made it up this whole time. They still kept the back-and-forth going, though.
Javier turned down the drive. Unlike all the paved ones Abbey spied, this one was gravel. There was a small hill at the end, blocking the other side. Abbey was surprised to feel nervous, like she was about to show up to a blind date (not that Abbey really dated, blind or not), as they climbed the hill. And then the house came into view, and they both said “Holy shit” in perfect unison. Javier’s version sounded much more optimistic.
The house was enormous, a three-story behemoth with a wrap-around porch so wide and long Abbey could have sworn it alone was bigger than their current house. But it was also old. Like, super old. As the Volvo bounced up the drive, the details started to come into focus. The roof was missing a bunch of shingles. Wood was peeling off the sides like tree bark. The front steps were so warped they looked like an art project, as if someone tried to recreate ocean waves out of 2x4s.
“Are you serious, dad? It’s in worse shape than our house.”
“That’s why we can afford it,” Javier winked back.
A Mercedes Benz was already in the driveway and a man in a suit waited on the porch. Bob was some kind of friend-of-a-friend realtor who swore he’d be able to find them the perfect fixer upper they needed right now. Abbey didn’t think a house was what they needed, but her dad sure did, so here they were, past the smashed lighthouse, at the end of a long, unpaved driveway, staring at a busted-ass house. Surrounded by green and brown, green and brown; freakin’ endless.
Bob waved with a big, toothy grin and Abbey wondered if she’d seen him on a bus bench ad. He put on an expensive-looking face mask and yelled something about how the door was sticking, but Abbey couldn’t make it all out. Javier parked behind the Benz, grabbed one of their homemade facemasks from the center console, and jogged eagerly up to Bob, nearly tripping on the warped steps in the process.
Abbey lingered in the car. She thought her dad was crazy for trying to move on top of everything else 2020 had to offer, but at least it was a good distraction from all the chaos. She pulled out her phone and readied for a selfie, checking her hair and making minor adjustments. Then she dropped her smile and put on as bored a face as possible before taking the picture. It was a quirk she’d taken from her mom. Any time they took a selfie, they did it stone faced. They could be in the middle of a roller coaster ride, and they’d deadpan for the camera. It was their thing. Or, it had been their thing. Abbey guessed it was just her thing now.
She brushed the thought away, put her mask on, and sauntered up to the house. It seemed to be alive, if barely hanging on for dear life. Its sides weren’t as straight as they had once been. The huge wooden front door was decaying. It had an ornate, wrought-iron number one on it that served as both the address and a door knocker, but it was rusty, and Abbey wondered if it would fall off the hinge if she tried to use it. The windows were covered in a veil of dust so thick she couldn’t see inside.
The porch steps moaned and groaned as Abbey climbed them to find Bob and her dad struggling to open the door. Bob was apologizing, rambling about how his firm had just acquired the listing from the estate and no one had had a chance to stop by yet so they should be warned he had no idea what to expect inside.
“You said you wanted a fixer upper,” Bob laughed as he worked the front door open. The lock finally made a grinding sound as years of rust and grit broke free, and the bolt unlocked with a loud shunk. Bob swept the door open, and the men entered the dusty and dank foyer. She heard both say “Oh wow” and “Man oh man” and other things old dudes say when they’re afraid of silence. “Is it that bad?” Abbey asked.
Javier turned back, beaming. “Abs, you have got to see this.” Oh, God, now what? Abbey followed him inside. It took her eyes a minute to adjust to the darkness, but once she could see, she understood why her dad had been smiling so wide. The outside of the house looked like it was about to fall over, but the inside was shockingly well preserved. The foyer was massive, with the kind of sweeping staircase leading to a second floor that Abbey had only ever seen in movies. Standing at the door, to her right was a dining room, to her left a sprawling living room split in two parts. Whoever owned it before left behind a handful of random furniture pieces. The fabric on an old couch was dusty, but still salvageable, and Abbey briefly thought about asking if she could keep it in her room.
“I was expecting worse.” Javier said, always the optimist. As much as that optimism often frustrated Abbey, she also admired him for it.
“The bones are still in good shape, and that’s what really matters.” Bob said, sounding so much like a salesman, Abbey started to wonder if she knew him from TV ads rather than the bus bench. He took reference photos with his iPhone, and even he couldn’t hide his surprise to see the interior looking as good as it did. Bob turned to them and let out a way-too-chipper “Consider yourself blessed.”
Javier whispered to Abbey. “You hear that, Abs? We’re hashtag blessed.” She rolled her eyes as over the top as possible, even though she secretly loved his terrible dad jokes. He bowed before her and waved his arms. “Your castle awaits.” Abbey slipped her headphones back on and set off to explore.
“Hashtag you’re welcome,” Javier called after her as he took out his own phone and started snapping pictures. Abbey settled her eyes on the staircase. Her dad and Bob could check out the rest of the house, she only had one mission: find the best bedroom. As long as she could find her own little sanctuary, the rest of the house didn’t matter. She put a hand on the railing and laughed at the soft pillow of dust that billowed. She watched the particles twinkle like stars in the dim light as they drifted back to the floor. She took her fingers and scissor walked them up the railing, creating fingertip footprints in the dust that reminded her of walking through a fresh snowfall.
She reached the second floor and wiped the dust off her fingers. She poked her head into the first door at the top of the stairs. The bedroom was huge, clearly the master so there’s no way Javier would let her have it. An old bed frame had been left behind. It was missing the mattress, but the box spring remained, probably left behind by a lazy mover. The master had its own bathroom, filled with lime green tiles and out of date fixtures. Her dad would probably love it. He’d call it kitschy or something.
The next door was a laundry room that surprisingly had a washer and dryer in it, though Abbey doubted they still turned on, and if they did, she wouldn’t trust them. They’d probably make her clothes smell musty like the rest of the house. A little further down, the narrow hallway made an elbow turn and she found two doors opposite one another. The one on her right was another bathroom, which had the same ugly lime green tile in it. The door on her left was a bedroom. It was smaller than the master, but still plenty big enough for her. But save for a pair of light red curtains that still hung on some of the windows, it just didn’t feel like a room for her.
At the end of the hallway Abbey found the attic stairs. They called to her, beckoning. She stood at the bottom and gazed up. The wood on these stairs was a darker color than the rest of the house. The staircase was steep, with an oddly high ceiling that reminded Abbey of the entrance to a carnival funhouse she’d been too scared to enter. She was much younger then, and the staircase there led directly into the mouth of a giant clown. There was no screaming clown here, though, just a dull light at the top of the tunnel. Abbey turned up the volume on her music and took the first step.
Javier couldn’t believe their luck. Judging by the look on Bob’s face, the realtor couldn’t believe it either. Even the basement of the house was enormous, and they both had to use their phones as flashlights to look around. It was an unfinished cavern that spanned the entire width of the house. Javier joked that the basement alone was bigger than their entire house. Bob admitted it was bigger than his, too.
Javier started doing the math in his head, trying to figure out the price per square foot, when he noticed the basement door leading to an exterior stairwell. Where the door should have been was a thick sheet of plywood that had been nailed in its place. The realtor didn’t miss a beat. “Hey man, for the money you’d be saving on this place, you can afford all new doors.”
They headed back up to the kitchen, repeating like parrots how they both couldn’t believe the state of the place. Javier asked a few questions about the seller, and Bob said he’d accidentally forgotten the packet he’d gotten from the estate in their car. He’d give them a copy once they were back at the office. Javier sensed Bob was lying about the packet, but it didn’t matter. He’d do his own research later.
Whatever the origin of the sale, Javier knew it didn’t really matter. He needed something to focus on. He needed a project that would wholly consume him, force his mind off the hell he and Abbey had been through. He knew Abbey would give him a bit of shit moving all the way out here, but it was surprisingly still in their same school district, so she wouldn’t have to leave her friends behind. He guessed the first thing Abbey would ask for was a car, and as nervous as that made him, it would be a must have if they lived out here. He could give her his car, though, and get a new one himself. Volvo’s are very safe cars, right? Didn’t he deserve to treat himself to something newer and nicer? A BMW? Okay, maybe a Mazda.
Something about the living room caught Javier’s eye. It looked remarkably like the living room from Risky Business, and all Javier wanted to do was go recreate Tom Cruise’s iconic slide in from the other room. It’s what Abbey would lovingly call ‘a total dad move.’ He looked back to Bob, wanting to say something, but Bob was in the middle of looking up something on his phone. Fuck it, Javier thought, I’m gonna do it.
Javier pulled out his phone and opened his camera, switching it to video. He turned around, a smile growing on his face as he framed up his phone to look back out into the foyer. He carefully set the phone down on the windowsill, pressed record and jogged out of the room. Before he could get into place, his phone fell off the windowsill. He cursed out loud as he turned around, praying the screen wasn’t cracked, suddenly feeling stupid for the whole thing. ‘A totally dumb-dad move,’ as Abbey would have called it.
As Javier turned around, he saw something that made his brain skip like a scratched record. It looked, for just a second, like the phone was floating off the ground, as if it had tried to pick itself up off the floor but couldn’t. Javier approached it slowly, trying to rationalize it, trying to convince himself that he hadn’t seen what he thought he had.
Abbey stood in the middle of the attic bedroom, imagining how she’d make it her own. Whoever had taken all the furniture hadn’t bothered to take down the posters. The walls were lined with the faded faces of Kurt Cobain, Nine Inch Nails, and some band called Garbage. They were covered in dust, like everything else in the house, and barely hung to the small thumb tacks that held them in place. Abbey liked them. They felt cool. They felt vintage.
Something touched her shoulder and Abbey jumped in fright. She turned to find her dad, grinning ear to ear like a big ol’ doofus. She punched his shoulder for trying to scare her. He took it like a champ. “What do you think of it?” he asked, wincing a bit at the strength in Abbey’s small but furious fist.
Abbey knew that if she said no, he wouldn’t move them way the hell out there. He might be heartbroken, but Abbey knew her dad would house hunt for a year if that’s what she wanted. But she didn’t need to break his heart. She looked around the room, wanting to smile but refusing to give him the satisfaction. She just shrugged. “It’s alright.”
“But is it home? Could it be home?”
Abbey turned toward the stairs, teetering on the edge. The staircase seemed somehow longer than before, even darker, with the light fading away at the top steps. But Abbey liked that. It made the attic feel separate from the house below, like it was its own apartment atop it all. Her apartment. She liked that idea. She liked that idea a lot.
Bob stood in the foyer, by the front door, talking rapidly into his AirPods, telling the woman on the other end that he had a feeling the Moreno’s were going to buy and that she should start drafting up the papers. Normally he wouldn’t jump to conclusions. It’s not like they were close. They’d been connected through friends-of-friends who wanted to “help Javi and Abs out,” but he knew how badly Javier wanted to get out of their old house, to get away from the memories it held.
If Javier hadn’t been a friend of a friend, Bob might have tanked this sale intentionally. When the estate approached them, all they could offer were some exterior pictures and tax records. The woman who owned it had been paying the taxes for years, apparently out of the hope she’d one day have the stomach to return to it. She never did, though. Not that anyone could blame her, all things considered. Bob knew as soon as they publicly listed it, the place would be snapped up by some trendy developer who would demolish it and build something modern. Hell, they could subdivide the lot and fit a half-dozen other pre-fabs on this plot, but he hated those kinds of deals. Not because he was against flippers, people in suits just always haggled endlessly on the price, always trying to find the lowest floor they could pay. Bob knew Javier wouldn’t do that — assuming Javier was still interested after he learned about the house’s regrettable history.
Bob was swiping through the calendar on his phone trying to figure out how quickly they could close when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He swatted at it, trying to hit away whatever nasty bug landed on him, but when he looked there was nothing there. He went back to swiping on the phone, but not a moment later the phantom bug returned. He hated bugs. He hated houses in the woods.
But there was no bug.
Bob twisted and turned.
There weren’t any bugs in the house.
It was totally still, totally silent.
But he knew something had touched him. Something had been on his shoulder. Something had been close to him. Very close. A sudden cold tickled its way up his spine and he felt like he’d been shoved into a walk-in freezer. “Fuck this.” Bob said, stepping out of the house and onto the porch. The sun instantly started to warm him, and he felt very, very eager to make this deal and be done with Greywood House.
Javier and Abbey jogged down the stairs. He switched immediately back into sales mode. “I told you it was a diamond in the rough, didn’t I?” The father and daughter followed him onto the porch, chuckling about how rough it was on the outside but how oddly charming on the inside. Bob nodded in agreement as he put his hand on the front doorknob. He stared back into the house, his eyes darting around the cavernous foyer one last time to spot whatever had just touched him, but there were only cobwebs and shadows.
Bob took a deep breath, pulled the door shut, and launched into the one part of the pitch he’d been dreading. “The estate is selling as-is, so it is an insane deal, but there is one thing you should know about this house…”
Chapter 18
Drew couldn’t stop hearing the words. “The estate is selling as-is, the estate is selling as-is, the estate is selling as-is.” Rose, Eli, and Wes were buzzing around the first floor, moving from window to window as the girl, the dad, and the guy in the suit drove away, but Drew couldn’t feel her legs. She stood, frozen, staring at the front door. “The estate is selling as-is, the estate is selling as-is, the estate is selling as-is.”
Drew knew what the words meant but she couldn’t accept them. Her mom didn’t have an estate. That was a stupid thing for the guy in the suit to say, right? Only dead people had estates, right? And there’s no way her mom was dead. Not now. That wasn’t supposed to happen for a long, long time, when Drew was much, much older. Carol Denns was still out there, somewhere, just waiting for Drew to find her and reach out to her, to tell her everything she’d written in that damned note. A note that was now trapped under the floorboards of the attic. Trapped in this goddamn house, just like Drew. Forfuckingever.
The others were staring silently outside, watching the cars leave the driveway. First the Volvo, and then the Benz. As soon as the Benz disappeared over the small hill at the end of the drive, the sky went fast-forward. Eli spun from the windows, clapping his hands in excitement. Drew thought he’d never looked happier.
“Holy shit, did you guys see those fucking things?” Eli asked.
