THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

A bad writing day... Broody Salter & the rainy feeling of Benadryl hangovers.

There were reasons that Leona came to number 82—reasons that she told herself, and reasons that were true. Out front—a tangle of cords held down with duct tape connected a brood of trucks—beige vans, a pair of trailers parked diagonally across the lawn as if they’d just stopped by for a second (they’d been that way for months). A single miata, cornflower blue, with a sucked-dry coffee cup tossed on the passenger seat, stood parked halfway through a hedgerow like a sprawled cat. Leaning against the scowling grill of a Winnebago, a stranger taking a cigarette break threw her a look aggressive with boredom, furiously un-curious, the look, Leona thought, all un-beautiful girls must grow used to receiving.
She could say she came here to get away from it all: Mess of film and mess of lawn, the cluttering fawns of high school girls, the thinset line of her mother’s lips or the oblong fade of the bathtubs into which she so often seemed to be sinking. But these were not the reasons. It seemed to her that when people said to get away from it all they so often meant to fly towards another thing.
The door could be opened with a push—15-year-old chewing gum sealed the front lock. The dark line of an umbrella against the bleached slats of the front hall; small marks of fingers around the switches; the smell of laundry in the upstairs bedroom—these were the signs of some past occupants never seen. The current tenants were easier to track—a flannel shirt balled-up near the fireplace, a bowl of ash and then candles—seven of them—holding down the center of a room, and a sleeping bag, stained and filthy, hung half-way out a window to dry. Her finger gently running against the molding of a bedroom’s threshold door, Leona looked out over the old bag, nothing out past it but the ocean. Bright blue of dusk and the water empty; Just a darkness bright enough to seem lit from behind, a sheet of paper held against a flame.
The back wall of the house facing the ocean, was now gone, spilt down the cliffside, soft rubble streaming down the scrubbrush and purplish soil. You could sit out at the room’s edge and stare down—the drop, 15 feet and then a roll forever, down to the surf. This was the spot she had seen Alan occupy, a book in his hands, his eyes on the words. And the blanket hung to dry, the shards of ash in a hand-thrown pot—these things were Alan’s, for it was Alan who came so often to 82, who had gummed down the lock, who had swept out the fireplace and left a flannel shirt dark with soot. She had seen him over the candles, two or three of his friends flicking down the lighter over the bowl, taking breaths and laughing out. When she came here it was less out of a desire to leave what she knew than a desire to run into him, to ask the silly question, “What are you doing here?” called for in film scripts that require motives stabler than the romantic tug of an emptied house, facing the surf, its structure gone, the scent of its walls humid as bread gone bad.