House Hunting

It was the sixth farm, and the one with the most barns.

The viewing began with laughter, which should have been a good sign. But the laughter was silent and it came from me because Devon had tripped on his way up the steps of the main barn. Devon scowled without looking at me, as though he were scowling at an audience. He often made faces that suggested there was an audience around to appreciate them, which was ridiculous. It was hidden-camera syndrome, except it didn’t happen when he was dressed nicely or on a trip. He woke up with hidden-camera syndrome and went to sleep with it. He probably unconsciously arranged himself in sleep to best appear in any candids, in the impossible occasion one were to be taken.

The realtor did not notice at all. She navigated the pitted-rotting porch floor well. I was sure one of her heels would get caught in a hole or nudge a knot in the wood and she would go down. It would be like watching a building fall. Not sideways, but cut out at the lower levels, all upper levels collapsing gracefully and catastrophically atop the knees. If it happened, he shellacked hair would remain untouched. Her ironed suit would probably either retain its shape or, if it were disturbed, would spring back into shape the moment the disturbance was removed.

The realtor turned the doorknob. Apparenty the door was unlocked, or the lock was broken. This barn looked like the most fixer-upper barn we had seen in the last two days. “Well, come in. Watch the door frame,” she advised. She stepped daintily over it. Devon took a large step to keep from tripping again. The look on the realtor’s face said she had seen Devon’s cautious type before. “It requires some work. But you mentioned that you wouldn’t be put off by that.”

She was referring to Simon and I, though she was only half-correct. Simon wasn’t put off by work because he often managed to avoid it. Not in a malicious way, but his mental bandwidth didn’t allow for heavy workloads. Frequently, as now, Simon’s mind was a half-world away from his body. His eyes were caught on the hole in the ceiling, and the hole in the ceiling above that. There was a profound amount of light shining through it but not enough of him was present to register the damage he was doing his retinas. I was mostly unimpressed by ceiling of floor holes, but I admitted there was something entertaining about one hole existing right atop another. There had been some signs when we’d breached the driveway that the barn (and surrounding barns and sheds) would be damaged in some way. The first sign was the path to the driveway, which was crowded with spiky varieties of nature. The second sign was the something that scurried across the porch steps and into the weeds that grew as high as the cracked windows.

“The property has to be expensive. How much is it?” I asked. I pushed aside what looked like a blanket but could have been a clump of leaves so moldy and wet they had clumped together like a net. The floor beneath it was stained a colour like rust, so I reasoned it was not a blanket.

The realtor had a file with all of this information. She opened it often, probably for something to pay attention to that wasn’t Devon. I could not fault her for this. I also could not remember her name, but I doubted she remembered mine. “Two hundred and thirty thousand. But it’s seven-thousand square feet in the main barn alone, which excludes two other barns. And the rest of the property, of course.”

“Two thirty for the lot,” Devon said. “Two thirty to spend hours out of every month to mow the entire thing. I could pay someone to mow my own lawn at home for less than that.”

I sometimes wondered if it were possible to overcome Devon’s stupidity-barrier by speaking louder. It didn’t do any harm. It was like speaking to someone who didin’t speak the same language as me.

“But the land is invaluable,” the realtor said. Her eyebrows wanted to judge us, I could tell, but she was keeping them neutral. “Properly used, it could help you make back that money. And there are three of you for the upkeep.”

I pretended she’d stopped a sentence earlier. “Devon, catch that?” I said loudly. The barrier was wide and strong. “Invaluable land here.”

This got Simon’s attention faster than it got Devon’s. He’d been looking at a few feathers and pile of bird crap on the floor. It was hard to make out what was feathers and what was fluff from a dated couch pushed against one wall. The light was abundant but it was also dim. Perhaps it was the sepia quality of the light that made it difficult to tell every shape apart, even from a small distance.

“We would have to actually work the land,” Simon said slowly. His thoughts must have taken him very far, on a path as winding as a filament in a bulb. Getting back was taking considerable effort on his part. He put a hand on the doorframe to ground himself. “We don’t really have a background in farming, just-“

He didn’t pause because he’d lost his train of thought; it just ended there. The realtor looked between us to see who would pick up the verbal slack. I explained, “We know animals. Barns. Ranches. Simon went to veterinary school. The barns would more likely be used for animals, as well as the land.”

“That makes sense,” the realtor said. She liked this logic, I could tell. “The last family here also raised animals. They had two children. They must have grown up knowing quite a lot about animals. Do you know much about farming animals?”

Simon made a face at me from the hallway, just outside the door of the main room. He mouthed ‘kitchen’ at me. He was glowing, which meant that the kitchen probably had something roosting in it, or it looked like an abandoned apothecary’s shop. I was starting to feel two hundred and thirty thousand dollars lighter already.

“Only what I learned from my parents,” I told the realtor. Devon looked down at the floor and frowned, but not at what I’d said, just as the thing he was toeing with his boot. It looked like hair, like a lock of hair from a child or lover that someone might keep in a locket. It was perfect and red.

Devon prompted, “Tell her about your parents.”

I said, “She has better things to do.”

The realtor’s smile agreed with me. Six barns in probably had her never wanting to speak to us again. “Would you like a tour?” she asked.

A tour would likely bring us to sunset. We would be driving the corkscrew turns back to town in the dark. The sun was already low, bleeding across the hood of Devon’s Pontiac. It was a Pontiac from a commercial, all glowing and the colour of aggression. It could not convey Devon’s insecurities better if it had been designed to do so.

“Why not? Simon, come on.”

Simon came on. He slowed us down, running his hands over every surface. There was something to investigate in every room. A kitchen with the shelves of a non-functional fridge piled on the counters made Simon touch each shelf before we moved on. The realtor led us through a sitting room and a second living room and a dining room that had half of a table and one chair with a cushion ruined by rain and age. Simon vanished twice to look at bookshelves where the only books left were rotting, and a wall hanging across from a window, all the colour bleached out of it by multiple midday suns.

Devon made noises of approval or disapproval. He clearly disapproved of the entire property. The only thing he approved of was the thought of Simon and I rising to the task of fixing it up. I didn’t try to assign words to his noises; it just seemed pointless, like humanizing a creaking door.

“You said it wasn’t empty for long. Where did the previous owners even live?” I asked the realtor. On her other side, Simon looked at the cracks in the plaster of the hallway. He followed one crack to a damaged baseboard, and then a tiny boot beside the baseboard. His nose wrinkled as he poked it with one finger. The boot wouldn’t fit any baby I’d ever seen.

The realtor opened her file. I wondered how much of the answer she already knew and how much she actually needed to confront the file. “They stayed on the top floor. It was well-maintained, I understand. There was no central heating, so they kept the radiators on upstairs. They lived in the half without roof damage, naturally. Would you like to take a peek?”

“Naturally,” I said. Simon was easily delighted by the barn, because he hadn’t considered upkeep and that he might be involved in it. The delight was delightful, but my decision had ultimately been made by Devon, whose mouth and nose were twisted as if he’d smelled something awful.

Upstairs was full of rooms. Rooms everywhere. Doors as far as the eye could see. The corridor ended with a door. Each one was filled with either darkness or light, it was like looking into different versions of the afterlife. Everything smelled like wet oak leaves. The realtor looked into her files. It was safer here to do so than downstairs- the floor had not yet begun to waste away.  

“These four rooms are liveable,” the realtor said, gesturing. She stepped into one. “The master bedroom.” We followed her in and spread out quickly, like mice. The room was spacious, surprisingly so. I was amazed at how easily we all fit in there without encroaching on one another’s personal space. Our ideas of personal space were ambitious and grand and inarguable. It was all white-washed floors and walls, and a couple bureaus on either side of the bed covered with china dolls.

“Those must have belonged to the children,” the realtor said. All of our eyes must have been on the dolls. “Cute.”

Simon stepped closer to the dolls to inspect them, but not too close. Clearly he was feeling as dubious about them as the rest of us. His expression was dreamy, imagining moving his own lamp and books in this space once the dolls had been cleared away. He looked at his hand, where he held the microscopic boot, and then at the bare china foot of one of the dolls. Devon glared at the dolls and then the realtor for daring to impress Simon.

“What’s the square footage of these rooms by themselves?” I wondered.

The file opened. “A bit over thirteen hundred square feet. Perfect to stay in while you work on the house. And a viable option for renting out later. Or for moving more people in.” She said this last part with a look at Simon and I, as though one of us would be trying to cram one of our university or high school friends in here soon.

“People who aren’t us,” Devon said with the subtlety of a natural disaster.

Devon looked obviously at his watch and tapped his hands on his legs as I stepped a little closer to the dolls. They looked well looked after. I could not tell if this was a function of the children that had owned them, or if china dolls were simply resilient. There wasn’t much organic about them. The elements wouldn’t just weather away their painted smiles or glass eyes. They were probably the best-preserved things in the barn.

“Did the children not want to take their dolls with them?” I asked the realtor, because this many china dolls could not have been inexpensive. They were well-crafted, with sculpted curls and pleated skirts and shoes as shiny as their glass eyes. I would have been afraid to touch them as a child, in case I dirtied or dropped one. I began to count them, but the realtor interrupted my train of thought.

The file flipped open in my ears. She flicked paper. “The children were getting too old for it to be safe.”

“Pardon me?”

More paper sounds. “The children got too old to play with them and the dolls began to get aggressive. They were too difficult to remove so the family just moved instead. I’m sure if you don’t engage, they won’t be a problem. They mostly just don’t like to be abandoned.”

Simon’s dreamy expression had vanished. Devon made another noise that conveyed disapproval, but it was so surprised this time that I didn’t mind it. “The dolls got aggressive?” I repeated.

“They aren’t always like that,” she said.

“But they can be?”

The realtor closed her file. She sounded bewildered, as though she’d already answered my question and couldn’t understand why I was asking it a second time. “They’re just dolls. They don’t like to be forgotten, that’s all. They’re meant for play. You can play with them if you’d like, of course.”

Devon snorted. The snort turned into a laugh. “What’s the real reason they left them behind?” As soon as he said it, I felt stupid. I should have recognized the realtor’s humour. I delivered many of my own jokes as if they were fact. Simon bent down in front of one bureau. If one of the dolls had been holding a pin, he was within range for them to stick him in the eye with it. He inspected their motionless eyes. Each one was green or blue, as perfect as fairy tales.

“Don’t do anything with them,” I said. “We should contact the last family that lived here first, and see if they still want the dolls.”

Simon rolled his eyes.

“Do you think we could get the contact information of the last owners?” I said. “I wouldn’t feel right just moving these around or packing them away if someone still wants them.”

Nothing moved. Nothing moved at all on the bureaus but I swear something had changed. As if a different air had blown into the room. As if I’d become aware of some sort of creature nesting in the room without turning around to see it. No one touched a single surface, but something whispered, like the rustle of pleats moving against one another.

“Before that,” Devon said, “Do you think we could find where the realtor’s gone?”

Art by Matthias Haker

Text by Lucie MacAulay