American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,35

the wall where pictures once hung. It’s like she’s in a room of reverse shadows.

She walks through the hallway to the living room and kitchen in the back. Everything is done in Mid-Century Modern, with butcher-block countertops and huge, bulky sinks. The oven has only one dial, and she’s pretty sure that if she uses the microwave, which is the size of a couch, she’ll be sterile for the rest of her life.

So this was Momma’s kitchen, she thinks. Mona herself hasn’t had a real one in years. But she chose that, of course, preferring wandering purgatory over a real life, so burned was she by her last attempt. She is not sure she wants to try again here. Thinking about it makes her stomach hurt.

She walks through a set of French doors to the backyard. Unlike the front, it hasn’t been maintained at all. There’s no grass on the ground, but dull orange gravel, and ivy has taken over, strangling what might have once been a small tree and bowing down the back of the fence. Beyond the fence are pink crags striped with crimson. Mona tilts her head, thinking. They’re the same crags she saw in the background of the photo of afternoon cocktails, unchanged after decades.

There is a lump of ivy in the center of the yard. She walks to it and takes one huge vine and pulls. Whatever it’s attached to is heavy as hell, but there’s a squawk of iron on stone. She plants a foot on the lump, wraps the twist of ivy around her wrist, and tugs.

A significant strip tears away. Below it is a rust-covered wrought-iron table. The very iron table her mother and her friends sat around for cocktail hour, she thinks.

The sense of déjà vu increases. She turns around and looks at the back of the house, which is just as picturesque as the front, despite the messy backyard. Some of the clay hanging pots have even been left behind, though now of course they are empty. Once, though, they were probably bursting with geranium blooms or drapes of ice plants. She feels an intense happiness when she imagines this.

This house, though it is empty, feels perfect in some way. It’s all anyone could ever want. This is a place to raise children, to live a life. This is the kind of house you dream of living in as a kid.

But she glances to the side and sees the neighboring homes, and she thinks that the same could be said of them, and the ones across the street. There is something strangely perfect about this part of town. It is like she’s walking through old photographs or home movies, images layered with longing and nostalgia. Even if they are hollow or overgrown with ivy on the inside.

She walks back inside and resumes her tour. She has no idea what her mother did with all this room, nor can she imagine how she afforded such a big place. She must have been a pretty big wheel at Coburn, whatever it was they did there. Upstairs are smaller rooms, ones probably used as kids’ rooms by the family that rented this house in the interim. Which means that somewhere around here would be…

She opens one small door at the end of a hallway and is greeted by a tiny bathroom with one wooden wall of a much lighter color than the other four. It’s newer, she guesses, and unvarnished. Up against the wall is a white bathtub, and running down the center of it in a thin, long V is a stain of deep black with faint, spidery edges, and she notices the linoleum around the tub is bubbled and curling, like it’s been cooked.

This is where the lightning struck. It must’ve split the wall like an ax and come shrieking down on anyone who was in the tub. Much of the bathroom is still smoky and charred. The faucet is even fused shut, and its knobs droop a little, like a Dali painting.

Mona steps out of the room and shuts the door. She is relieved to have the sight hidden from her, for the ruined bathroom feels very out of place with the rest of the house. It’s as if it belonged to another house entirely, one dark and broken and empty, not at all part of this happy, rustic place.

Suddenly there is the peal of a high-pitched bell, and Mona gasps and jumps. She leans up against the wall to