This evening, though, it was Home Handyman that drew him back. He’d started weeks before with the older issues at the bottom of the pile and had steadily been working his way upward. While on the couch Iris yawned over a contemporary romance, he engrossed himself in articles on wood-stove safety, building a patio, and—something he was glad he’d never have to worry about—pumping out a flooded basement.

  The issue he’d just pulled out, from the top half of the pile, was less yellowed than the ones before. “Here’s a letter,” he announced, “from a man who’s had trouble removing a tree stump next to his house. Mr. Fixit says he’d better get rid of it fast, or it’ll attract termites.” Herb shook his head. “Christ, you can’t let down your guard for a second out here. And here’s one from a man who built a chimney but didn’t seal it properly.” He chuckled. “The damn fool! Filled his attic with smoke.” He eyed their fireplace speculatively, but it looked solid and substantial, the flames merry. He turned back to the magazine. The next page had the corner folded down. “Some guy asks about oil stains on a concrete floor. Mr. Fixit recommends a mixture of cream of tartar and something called ‘oxalic acid.’ How the hell are you supposed to find… Hey, listen to this, here’s another one from that same woman who wrote in before. ‘Dear Mr. Fixit: The advice you gave me previously, on getting rid of bulges under the linoleum in my bathroom by drilling up from the basement, was of little use, as we have no basement, and due to an incapacity my husband and I are unable to make our way beneath the house. The bulges—’ ”

  Iris looked up from her book. “Before it was just one bulge.”

  “Well, hon,” he said, thinking of her in the tub, “you know how it is with bulges.” He made sure he saw her smile before turning back to the column. “ ‘The bulges have grown larger, and there’s a definite odor coming from them. What should we do?’ Signed, ‘Still Anxious.’ ”

  “That poor woman!” said Iris. She stretched and settled back into the cushions. “You don’t suppose it could be radon, do you?”

  “No, he says they may have something called ‘wood bloat.’ ” Herb shuddered, savoring the phrase. “ ‘Forget about preserving the linoleum,’ he says. ‘Drill two holes deep into the center of the bulges and carefully pour in a solution of equal parts baking soda, mineral spirits, and vanilla extract. If that doesn’t do the trick, I’d advise you to seek professional help.’ ”

  “She should have done that in the first place,” said Iris. “I’d love to know how she made out.”

  “Me, too,” said Herb. “Let’s see if the story’s continued.”

  He flipped through the next few months of Home Handyman. There were leaky stovepipes, backed-up drains, and decaying roofs, but no mention of the bulges. From the couch came a soft bump as Iris lay back and let the book drop to the rug. Her eyes closed; her mouth went slack. Watching her stomach rise and fall in the firelight, he felt suddenly and peculiarly alone.

  From outside came the whisper of rain—normally a peaceful sound, but tonight a troubling one; he could picture the land around the house, and beneath it, becoming a place of marsh and stagnant water, where God knows what might grow. The important thing, he knew, was to keep the bottom of the house raised above the ground, or else dampness would rot the timbers. Surely the crawl space under his feet was ample protection from the wetness; still, he wished that the house had a basement.

  Softly, so as not to wake his wife, he tiptoed into the bathroom—still smelling pleasantly of paint and varnish—and stared pensively at the floor. For a moment, alarmed, he thought he noticed a hairline crack between two of the new tiles, where the floor was slightly uneven between the toilet and the shower stall; but the light was bad in here, and the crack had probably been there all along.

  By the time he returned to the front room, the fire was beginning to go out. He’d have liked to add more wood, but he didn’t want to risk waking Iris. Seating himself back on the rug with a pile of magazines beside him, he continued his search through the remaining issues of Home Handyman, right up until the point, more than three years in the past, when the issues stopped. He found no further updates from “Anxious”; he wasn’t sure whether he was disappointed or relieved. The latter, he supposed; things must have come out okay.

  The issues of Handyman were replaced by a pile, only slightly less yellowed and slightly less substantial, of Modern Health, with, predictably, its own advice column, this one conducted by a “Dr. Carewell.” Shingles on roofs were succeeded by shingles on faces and legs; cracked plaster and rotting baseboards gave way to hay fever and thinning hair.

  “I have an enormous bunion on my right foot,” one letter began, with a trace of pride. “I have a hernia that was left untreated,” said another. Readers complained of plantar warts, aching backs, and coughs that wouldn’t quit. It was like owning a home, Herb thought; you had to be constantly vigilant. Sooner or later, something always gave way and the rot seeped in. “Dear Dr. Carewell,” one letter began, where the page corner had been turned down, “My husband and I are both increasingly incapacitated by a rash that has left large rose-red blotches all over our bodies. Could it be some sort of fungus? There is no pain or itching, but odd little bumps have begun to appear in the center.” It was signed “Bedridden.”

  All this talk of breakdown and disease was depressing, and the mention of bed had made him tired. The fire had almost gone out. Glancing at the doctor’s reply—it was cheerily reassuring, something about plenty of exercise and good organic vegetables—he got slowly to his feet. From another room came the creak of wood as the old house settled in for the night.

  Iris snored softly on the couch. She looked so peaceful that he hated to wake her, but he knew she’d fall asleep again soon; the two of them always slept well, out here in the country. “Come on, hon,” he whispered. “Bedtime.” The sound of the rain no longer troubled him as he bent toward her, brushed back her hair, and tenderly planted a kiss on her cheek, rosy in the dying light.

  IMAGINING THINGS

  “When Dr. Blanke turned off the current, the woman said the strange presence had gone away.”

  — New York Times, October 3, 2006

  I once saw a scary movie on TV. Maybe you’ve seen it, too. It was about a babysitter who, one night, gets a series of threatening telephone calls from someone unknown. She’s in this big spooky house with a couple of little kids asleep upstairs. At first she thinks the calls are just a prank, but as they continue she becomes more and more frightened. Somewhere out there, she realizes, lurks a dangerous psycho. She phones the police and has them put a trace on the line. After she gets still another call from the psycho, the police phone her back. Quick, they tell her, get out! We’ve just discovered where the calls are coming from—right inside the house with you.

  My little brother and I were watching that movie in our basement, sprawled on the broken-down old couch, and we were so stunned we almost fell onto the floor. We had no idea, at the time, that the movie was based on a popular campfire tale that had been told to generations of Boy Scouts and summer campers. It caught us completely by surprise. The notion that the thing you feared most might be hiding inside your own house, practically beside you—well, neither one of us ever forgot it.

  Weezy—that’s my brother—was always more affected by things like that than I was. Mom once said he was more “sensitive.” I still remember that; I remember looking up the word in the dictionary and trying to figure out whether it meant she liked him more. His real name is Eugene, but when I was little I couldn’t pronounce that—it came out “Weezy”—and the name stuck. I guess that sort of thing happens in a lot of families.

  Sensitive or not, we both watched the same type of movies—the type where, if half the cast isn’t either dead or bloody by the end, you haven’t gotten your money’s worth. Probably the main reason Weezy watched those movies was because I did. He liked them well enough when I was sitting there on the couch next to him, but afterward, at bedtime, he’d regret it, like someone addicted to the very thing he was allergic to. In fact, Weezy had to sleep with a pink seashell night-light. I didn’t need one—night-lights were for babies—and I slept with my door closed, because the light spilling from Weezy’s bedroom would have kept me awake. Mom and Dad’s room was around the bend in the hall, so the light must not have bothered them.

  I was thirteen when they split up, which meant that Weezy was eleven. Dad moved to the city and hardly ever came to see us, and when he did he looked sheepish and uncomfortable. There’s no getting around it, it was a rotten thing he did, and all the explanations in the world don’t make it better. Mom had to pull Weezy and me out of school at the end of the term. We ended up in a different school district on the other side of town, in an apartment upstairs from a family called the Mundlers. (Weezy and I immediately dubbed them the Mumblers.) He and I had to share a room now, or as Mom put it, making it sound jolly, “bunk together.” At least we were spared the indignity of bunk beds; there’s only so much togetherness a guy can stand. Also, since he regarded me now as his protector, Weezy agreed to give up his night-light; I wouldn’t have put up with it.

  Mom had to go back to work. She hadn’t held a job since before I was born, and she was relieved to find one at a bank less than half an hour’s drive from where we lived. I’ve heard people joke about “banker’s hours,” meaning a short workday of nine to three, the time banks used to close; but that wasn’t true of our mother. She’d be out before eight in the morning and wouldn’t be home till after six—or later, if she’d been shopping for groceries. She was tired all the time, and out of patience.

  There’s a word for a change like the one we’d just gone through: “traumatic.” A father leaves, a family gets uprooted, and the kids are supposed to go wrong. The funny thing is, Weezy began going wrong before any of this happened. Even when all four of us were living in the old house and life seemed relatively secure, he had begun to have what my mother called “episodes.”

  For example, there was the episode at the zoo, when he wouldn’t go near a cage of monkeys and instead dashed behind my father and hid. He was young then, but not so young that this behavior didn’t draw puzzled stares from the people around us. He said the monkeys were whispering things to him—“bad things” was all he would tell us—and then, more mysterious still: “They keep saying they’ve been expecting me.”

  And there was the time he broke the tall mirror in the downstairs clothes closet—smashed it with his fist. Mom had to drive him to the doctor, and I think he got nine stitches in his hand. He claimed he’d seen someone in the mirror that wasn’t him.

  I knew my brother was odd. “He’s certainly an odd duck, isn’t he?” my father once said, and when I was with Weezy, I often found myself repeating that expression to myself: “an odd duck.” But some things didn’t become apparent till I actually began living in the same room with him. Like how little he seemed to sleep. We usually went to bed around the same time, but I would almost always drop off before he did, and if I’d wake in the middle of the night, he’d often be lying there with his eyes open. Once, or maybe more than once, I woke to hear him talking softly in his sleep. I couldn’t make out the words.

  “Weezy!” I said. “You’re having a nightmare. Wake up!”

  “I am awake,” he said.

  Mostly, he was fine. In school he got better grades than I did. His teachers described him as “impulsive,” “erratic,” “prone to fantasizing,” but they also found him “a delight” and “a real asset to the class,” which is more than they ever said about me.

  That’s why it was so shocking when he went after one of them with a microphone stand.

  It was in the new school district, our third year there. I didn’t hear about it till I got home, because I was in high school by then, and Weezy was still in middle school.

  Weezy had shown up for Tuesday afternoon chorus practice as usual, only to find that Mrs. Morton had been replaced that day by a substitute—some man from outside the district. No sooner had Weezy laid eyes on him than, in front of everyone, he ran to the heavy steel microphone stand, picked it up base and all, and swung it at the man’s head.

  He’d missed; it was way too heavy for him to control. I came home just in time to see Mom driving up with Weezy in the car, both of them looking stunned, neither looking at the other. He’d been expelled, would probably be sent to a special school, and would have to be monitored by youth counselors.

  We never found out what had set him off, and he never chose to explain it. There’d been nothing special about the new chorus master, certainly nothing threatening. From what I heard, he was just an ordinary man, not very tall, with glasses, dark hair, and a beard.

  I confess that, when I heard Mom talk about a “special school,” my heart leapt—just for a moment—at the thought that Weezy would be going away and I’d have our room to myself.

  That’s not how it worked out. He was transferred to a different school but got to live at home. In fact, for all his trouble with the authorities—his weekly appointments with a therapist at the county clinic, his prescription medications, and his official new status as a youthful offender—Weezy’s day-to-day existence didn’t seem to change much. He just seemed to have less homework. Thanks to the pills, he slept better at night, which meant I slept better as well.

  When, a year later, I found a minimum-wage weekend job checking inventory at J&G Industries, an easy couple of bus rides from where we lived, Weezy soon managed to get one, too, in the company mailroom; Mom had forced me to recommend him. It was, if anything, a cushier job than mine. I had to spend my Saturdays pushing a wagon through the aisles of a warehouse full of lawn-care products, insect spray, and fertilizer. Weezy worked in the adjoining building, sorting mail-in cards from potential customers. He didn’t even have to get his hands dirty.

  He held that job at J&G until the weekend before he was due to start high school—the local branch where I was about to be a senior. Maybe he was stressed out by the prospect of entering the normal world again, of returning to an ordinary school, not the one for “special needs” kids that he’d been attending. All I know is that Phil, one of the guys I worked with, hurried up to me in the warehouse that afternoon and told me there’d been some trouble with my brother and that I was to take him home.

  “He went after Mr. Healy with some bug spray,” Phil told me. “They’re not gonna press charges. No one was hurt.”

  Mr. Healy was Weezy’s boss. He wasn’t a bad guy, either—just a mild, inoffensive old man who, because of a breathing problem, barely raised his voice above a whisper. Later that day I heard my mother on the phone with him, apologizing over and over. It was still light, but Weezy had already gone to bed.

  “Do you think it has anything to do with Dad?” I asked her when she’d hung up. I’d been reading stuff on a family psychology website. “I mean, dealing with a male authority figure?”

  “I wish it did.” She looked grim. “More likely Eugene’s problem is organic—the chemistry of the brain. That’s what Dr. Shulman thinks.”

  I wondered uneasily, just for a moment, if the same chemicals that flowed through my brother’s brain might be seeping into my own.

  Sometime after midnight, I woke to find Weezy crouched at our bedroom window. It was late August, with a sliver of moon, and in its light I could see that he was staring intently at something outside. As a rule, he now slept soundly, but maybe he hadn’t taken his meds, or maybe he’d just gone to bed too early. And of course, it had been a pretty upsetting day.

  “Weezy,” I said, “what are you doing?”

  “C’mere.” His voice was hushed, frightened. I got out of bed and crossed the room. “Can you see it?” he said, not turning his head.

  I peered into the night. There isn’t much of a view—mainly the neighbors’ house and, between it and ours, a twisted old maple.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Something’s out there, clinging to the tree,” he said. “You don’t see it? You don’t hear it?”

  “No. What is it?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said, squinting as if to see better. “It’s big—like some kind of big dark furry caterpillar, covered all over with…” He searched for the word. “You know. Like our brushes.”

  I knew what he meant—the two matching hairbrushes Dad had given us one Christmas. They were labeled GENUINE BOAR’S BRISTLE, and I remember asking Dad what that meant. “Pig hair,” he’d replied, grinning.

  “Weezy,” I said gently, “there are definitely caterpillars in that tree. Little ones. Maybe gypsy moths from last spring.”

  He took no notice. “It’s whispering things.”

  “What’s it saying?”

  He paused, caught his breath.

  “It’s—it’s promising to come for me.” He turned. “You can’t hear it?”

  To humor him, I listened. I could hear the crickets, a soft breeze, nothing more. But moments later, I couldn’t be sure; it’s never hard to hear word sounds in the breeze. The tree was just a dark, shifting mass with an occasional flicker of moonlight on the leaves. Who knows what might have been hiding in it? Was that a dark face I saw? Who knows?

  The last time I’d been taken to the eye doctor, he had measured my vision for glasses. As I stared at the chart on the opposite wall, he would slip a lens into the mechanical device I was looking through and he would say, “Now, is it better this way—” He would slip in another lens. “Or this way—” He would remove the second lens. “Or hard to tell?” He would do it again. “Is it better this way? Or this way? Or hard to tell?”

  Tonight was a case of hard to tell.

  “Weezy, there’s nothing out there. It’s all in your mind.”

  “Honest?”

  “Believe me, you’re imagining things.”

  He gulped, seemed to relax a little. “So it’s just in my head?”

  “Trust me.”

  “Well… all right, then.” He stood up. “Don’t tell Mom, okay?”

 

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