"The Development" by Laurence Klavan

THE DEVELOPMENTBy Laurence KlavanThe first thing that happened was that Allison Crane's doorbell rang—actually, it didn't ring, it was about to ring but Allison answered the door before it could (it was almost as weird as, say, picking up a phone and someone's already on the other end, and you start pressing the buttons to dial before you hear the other person say, “Hey! Hey! Hold on! I'm here!”). Through the window, Allison had seen someone standing on her front step, about to ring. Actually, he wasn't about to ring, he was looking at the lawn, his back to her, and at the exact moment he turned to face her—presumably to ring—she opened up.She knew it wasn't the safest thing to do: he was a young man, in his late twenties, dressed somewhat shabbily in faded corduroys and a wrinkled sweater, and she was maybe ten years older and alone in the house, and while it was an expensive development, too expensive, God knew, no one was ever totally safe in this world, not with the economy the way it was, some people being pushed into doing desperate things (though the only change Allison had noticed in town was that tables with free food had been set up in the shopping center, which had surprised her when she drove past, especially when she saw Naomi on line: she was the cleaning woman Allison hadn't called recently, tightening her own belt).But the man had been slight, delicate even, so didn't look dangerous, with dark features and a pale complexion. He looked like that old actor whose name Allison couldn't remember who'd been famous in the fifties for his beauty and whose face had been crushed in a car crash, and Elizabeth Taylor had stayed with him and held his severed nose in place until help arrived or something (no, she'd pulled broken teeth from the back of his throat, where they'd been choking him, that was it; either way, she'd been brave) and he looked like that actor both when he was young and beautiful and after he'd been injured and seemed frail and flawed, like a person living in both his present and his past and always going back and forth between them, the way they say bi-lingual people's brains behave. In any case, she opened the door to him unafraid.“Yes? May I help you?” she said.He seemed revealed, caught, and a bit embarrassed. He stammered to answer the simple question, which, though benignly meant, was obviously to him accusatory.“I'm sorry. I was just looking around,” he said.Allison didn't know what to say to that, so became more wary than curious, the door held firmly in her hand. Before she could categorize him as creepy and close it—a decision quickly coming up—he blurted out, with a disarming smile that said he knew he must seem strange, and wished to put her mind at ease:“I was born in and grew up in this house.”“Oh!” The word popped out of her, covered in compassion, like a chocolate with an almond inside, that was how she described it to herself. She couldn't help it, he seemed so much younger suddenly, child-like even, and yet there was still an adult and wistful way to how he spoke: again, a blurred merging of his then and now. It made her move backward, open the door entirely and say,“Well then, why don't you come in?”“Thanks!” He acted as if she were offering him a magic entrance to somewhere enchanted: the actual world that used to exist; and his eyes grew wide at the opportunity.Allison felt privileged to provide him with this pleasure, she wasn't sure why: maybe it was the vulnerability that came off of him like cologne and made her feel protective. Still, she glanced around outside as he came in, to see if anyone observed. A passerby could either ruin her reputation or provide crucial evidence if it all went wrong. But the street was empty, and she shut the door.“Wow!”Twirling around, he was stunned by what he saw, which was funny, for the house was normal, not even nicely furnished; Allison knew she had no skill at “styling” her surroundings or herself; it was just something she didn't inherit and hadn't picked up, the way some people could swim one stroke and, strangely, not another. (She was handy, for example, could fix a fuse and not do this). It was clear that what amazed him were not his memories of the home but the new world that had been placed upon it: how the very “nowness” of her nondescript house both exposed and obliterated his past, put in stark relief the existence and the end of the early part of his life. He was getting younger by the instant—seemed almost infantile, with his mouth hanging open. Allison felt compelled to tell him, “My husband will be home soon,” just so he wouldn't get any ideas. It seemed unimaginable that he might, yet it was a tradition, like saying “Gesundheit” or something.After asking her permission to explore more inside, by pointing and raising his eyebrows and not actually speaking, permission which she granted him with a shrug and no noise of her own, he disappeared from sight for awhile and all that remained of him were his words, alternatively loud and soft, depending on where he was in the house, and always excited—Wow!” “Will you look at this!” “I can't believe it!”—the way the cat leaves his mouth behind or whatever in Alice in Wonderland.As Allison stood there and listened—half-heard, as a mother kind of keeps an ear out for her kid—she thought about the lie she had told and wondered when she could rectify it, because she wanted to. Her husband wasn't coming home soon; he wasn't coming home at all; he didn't live there any more.“Come here, come here—do you mind?—it's really—it's incredible.”Her visitor had returned and was taking her hand—initially touching her fingers and then shifting to grab her sleeve, to be less forward, she figured. He led her indeed like a child through the kitchen—which Allison now remembered she hadn't cleaned in a while; there were so many plastic bags lying around on surfaces when you really looked—and into the living room, where he could hardly contain his astonishment.“This is where our record player was!” he said. “Right here, where your computer is. We still had one then, isn't that weird!?”His excitement was if not infectious—because she didn't feel excited by what he said exactly (was still preoccupied with telling the truth about her marriage and wondering when she should)— at least made her look at the room with, as the cliché went, new eyes. She even made an effort to imagine the record player in the space he framed—she noticed now, with slightly trembling fingers—in the air.“That is incredible,” she said, only partly to be polite.There was a pause as they stood there, closer to each other than either probably intended, his pants brushing for a second the sides of her bare legs. Allison suddenly realized that she “saw” a separate house than the one before them, too, but it wasn't the one the man was seeing. It was the home that had been there until a few months earlier and for twelve years before that, one that looked almost exactly like the one in which they stood (only a few items had been removed and a few rearranged) and yet felt utterly other. As the man continued to verbally recreate his childhood residence with an air of incredulity, pulling her gently or not-so-gently to this corner or that to make his point, then leading her from the living room to the den and halfway up the stairs to gesture to the second floor landing— “And here, where you can see through the bathroom door, where you can see your bathrobe lying on the floor? That's where I could see my battleships in the tub!”—she didn't dwell on the rest of the mess he could also see through the half-closed door (the cosmetics strewn around the sink, the towels not picked up and, frankly, unwashed for too long), she marveled at the many identities that could be contained within the same shell, how many existences could reside under the same roof while everything on the surface stayed the same. Impressed by this insight, Allison stopped him before he could climb any higher—and he had started to, tugging her along—in order to share it with him before it faded away.“My husband,” she said, “won't be coming back. We were in the midst of getting a divorce when he went overseas. He was a pot-addicted foreign correspondent for a once-powerful, now nearly unread newspaper, and, crouching for too long in the back of a tank, trying to be a tough guy, he got one of those blood clots in your leg you get from being on a plane flight for too long, and it ended up in his heart, and it killed him. He's dead.”He stared at her, then stopped talking, seemed stunned into silence. Yet Allison could see that her confession had fallen flat. He only seemed to resent being interrupted, wished to continue to recount the contrasts between his old house and hers; he was that—charmingly, she had to admit—self-involved. This disappointed her, for she had said it to link up with him, to say that she, too, for the first time, comprehended the layers of life that were around them—for Allison rarely took note of anything, and that would explain her unkempt house (or was she just depressed about the divorce and the death, as that doctor had told her?). Before she could feel anything else and grow more enlightened, the front door opened, and both of them swiftly turned.A child of twelve stood in the vestibule, hair beneath a baseball cap, bookbag in hand. The stranger gasped and took a rough hold of Allison's shoulder, as if trying to steady himself. He looked at the child with an expression of awe twice as big as the one he wore when he spoke about his record player. This was obviously to him no resonant old space filled in by something new; this was a real old thing itself, unearthed from a time beneath our own. He seemed to think that he was witnessing what it was impossible to see.“It's me!” he said.Then the kid removed her cap, revealing a close-cropped yet still female hairstyle. She tossed it rudely on a table, and dumped her bag on the floor with a resounding, graceless and cutting-edge crash. She glanced suspiciously at the man and with annoyance at the woman.“Jesus Christ, Mom,” she said. “Who the hell is he?”The man regained consciousness about twenty minutes later. Allison had never seen someone swoon—and, in fact, he hadn't, not in the sense of pitching forward down the stairs and landing at the feet of her daughter, Carey. He had simply faltered, his eyelids fluttering, as if awakening instead of passing out, and suddenly gripped the banister with one and then two hands before he dropped to one knee and Allison braced him with a shoulder, shouting to her child with no concern for how grating she sounded,“Hey! Give me a hand here!”They laid him in the den on the couch from which she told the girl harshly to move the magazines and mail she felt guilty for not getting rid of before. The best they could do was get his top half on the sofa, while everything hips-down went on the rug. With his hands folded limply on his chest, his tearing eyes half-closed, his chapped and rounded lips apart, and strands of his straight dark hair bacon-ed on his sweaty brow, he looked like an aristocrat with the “vapors” or whatever they called it when someone in another century was too sensitive to live. Carey was now interested in him, but only in the most insensitive and prurient way.“Is this dude dead, too, like Dad?” she said.“No, for God's sake, don't be ridiculous. Can't you see he's breathing? He's just very emotional, that's all.” Allison knew she oughtn't to be so short with her daughter—Carey was in as much if not more pain than she and all the time—but the lumbering crassness of her acted-out unhappiness was so disturbing that Allison couldn't help but punish her for it. Why couldn't Carey simply cry like, well, this gentle and unconscious man who was lying in front of them, and not curse, be cruel and scare the cat—to Allison had no idea where, she hadn't seen old Stumpy for days.“Well, who the hell is he?”“Not the hell. Just who. And how would I know?”Allison was aware this answer was expedient and insufficient, indeed kind of cowardly, given that she was the authority figure and supposed to have the answers. Carey rubbed it in, too, knocking comically on the square lump inside the man's front pants pocket.“Anybody home?” she said. “Hello? Or should I just leave a message?”Allison sighed and did what she had not wanted to do: reach into the pocket and pull out the man's wallet, aware of its proximity to his penis, a fact not lost on her daughter, who was old—and, frankly, mean and miserable enough—to want to force her into it, each of them daily blaming the other for their abandonment by their husband and father and exacting punishments too perverse to ever be portrayed, say, on TV.“Got it!” Allison said, like a first-time fisherman, the wallet in her grip, and she had brushed the man's dick only once (though he had stirred in his half-sleep when it happened, and the cold compress they had placed on his forehead slid off, so that it was no secret and caused Carey to snort though also avoid her eyes when Allison turned furiously her way).“His name is Martin Owens,” Allison said, looking at the library card which a second later Carey had swiped from her hand to read for herself. There was no other identification and only one twenty dollar bill.“Well, I'm going to eat something,” Carey said, losing interest immediately (her generation wanted answers right away—with the click of a mouse!—and got less involved if there was more mystery, Allison thought, bitterly). “There better be some cake left! You better not have eaten it all, Mom!”Allison was about to give her a warning about watching her tone, but it was too late, the girl was gone, pounding the floor in construction boots she only wore because her mother hated them so much. Allison found herself whispering—almost just mouthing—the words to herself,“What is it with other people?”“I wish I knew.”She looked up, surprised. The answer had come from the man on the couch, beside whom she realized she was kneeling, like the grieving governess at the end of that old musical movie about the bald king of Siam who died and left her alone to remember his love (Allison often watched movies alone in the early hours but never saw their beginnings or ends and so was always slightly baffled by them; they were like her life in that way, she realized, unnerved).“Did I scare you?” The man—Martin; Martin Owens—was smiling weakly at her, seeming amused at himself for answering so unexpectedly. He was clearly strong enough to swing his legs up and onto the couch so that he could recline completely—and alert enough to notice the wallet that Allison was covering with both hands, like a child concealing from an inquisitive parent a frog or some other forest creature. (Not her child: Carey was always mean to animals, at least in front of  Allison, who liked not just cats but all of them.)“I'm sorry,” she said, handing the billfold back. He placed it on the outside of his pants, acknowledging that both knew it was almost empty and so not worth bothering about.“And Carey—my kid—I'd say I'm sorry, too, but—well, she's at that age.” She thought she'd get all the apologies out of the way at once.Martin nodded. “It was weird that I thought it was—not ”˜it' was, that she was—well, I wasn't thinking too clearly when I saw her.”“I identify with that. In a weird way, you're being here has focused me—for a few minutes, anyway.”“I'm glad something good has come out of it.”He sounded kind, saying that—though Allison wondered why he hadn't even mentioned what she'd said earlier about her husband, which was the reason for her daughter's bad attitude (it had often been bad, especially when her husband was away in some hotspot and so idealized by Carey in his absence, and Allison getting the brunt of the blame just for being home; but now it was only and always that way). She thought maybe Martin was uncomfortable that she'd been so intimate and was being discreet by not acknowledging it. But as he continued to talk it was still only about himself. She thought maybe she was being over-eager to ally herself with him, but she knew she wanted desperately to do it and more every minute, and there was no going back.“When I lived here,” he said, with a sigh that made him seem even more an exhausted prince, or—what did they call it?—a courtier, “I was unhappy.”He didn't seem to want to elaborate. Yet Allison knew what he meant: it was how she felt, too, alone now in the development or virtually alone, with Carey no company. She felt cast out, yet still in the same spot. It had been her husband's house; he had bought it, after all, thought he knew more about real estate, thought he was smarter than her, than she, whatever, about everything. (Though being ostracized by anybody there was idiotic: all her neighbors had their own “issues,” too.)“Then why did you come back?” she asked, getting even closer and placing one hand on the couch near his thigh.“I don't know. It was an impulse. I saw the exit sign on the highway, and I found myself driving in its direction, like a dog sniffing out a bomb from an airport bag. Maybe I was even hoping something would explode.”“But it hasn't—exploded or whatever you said—being here. It's not been what you were fearing. Everything is okay.”Allison knew she was taking a risk, asking him to admit this; it may have only been better for her since he'd arrived; he'd certainly said nothing along those lines and only nearly fallen on his face, after all.“Has it? But I've invaded your house.”A new confession, and un-coerced: “It's not really my house, not either of ours, Martin, any more. Is and isn't. I've put it up for sale. And the way things are going, I'm afraid no one will be able to meet my asking price.” She even told him how much it was, she couldn't help it. “I work at the insurance office in town twice a week. My husband left me nothing but his debts and a grudge against him.”“Is that right?”“Yes.”His eyes held a weird mixture of concern and no surprise, as if something unsettling had simply been confirmed. In her current state—which she knew could be called “needy” if you were being unkind or “open,” which she much preferred—Allison saw his expression as having gone beyond sympathy and arrived at empathy. Then he nodded, and she felt this, too, was mute confirmation that, like her, he was in transition: not sliding—as she had seen him immediately to be—between past and present but fading from the first to the second, “dissolving,” as they said about moments moving ahead in old films, on his way, in other words, from where he'd been to where she was.“Won't you stay for dinner?” she asked and, before he could answer, yelled coarsely to wherever her daughter was hiding from her,“Set another place! And don't give me any trouble! We're having company!”Allison was surprised to see that, instead of just being morbidly curious, Carey was actually hospitable to Martin that night. It was he who made the overture—though, as he had done everything else, he initiated activities with the girl to get something for himself: gathered around her Xbox to actually be entertained. Maybe he was good at video games because, being ever-youthful, his youth “carried over” into another generation, the way frequent flier miles did into the next tax year. In any case, Carey was pleasantly stunned by getting competition from their ancient guest and announced with amazement after a game, “Hey! You beat me!” though Allison could have done without her adding, “You fucker! You motherfucker!” yelled good-naturedly or not.For her part, Allison was pleased that Martin had enjoyed the meal, since he looked like he needed nourishment—even though she had had to scrap her plan of cooking as she had neglected to shop and there was nothing to defrost and had had to order pizza, which came a little colder than she'd wanted and without the anchovies he'd requested. Still, the wine, already open and a week old, put the adults in a relaxed mood after Carey went upstairs (and soon shouted down, “None of your business!” when Allison called up to ask if that was pot she smelled).There were no dishes to do, they'd become a paper plate family since her husband's death—another sign of her having the clinical blues, said that shrink, but what did he know?—and Martin was nice enough to throw them away along with the plastic forks and knives before joining her on the living room couch.“Does it still feel weird?” she asked, for he was looking around, seemingly still seeing what was and wasn't there.“Yes,” he said.“I figured.”“Well,” she said, trying not to slur her words and not succeeding, “you're lucky.”“Why?”“To live somewhere else.”He took this in, but—as was his wont—did not take her bait, pick up her clue, do whatever it was that meant he would tell her where he lived, which is what she wanted to know. It thwarted her journey to her next remark, which would have been to say, “I've never been there, what's it like?” and that would have led, or so she hoped, to at least an implied invitation for her to visit. All she got from him was more silence and a swinging foot—in a brown suede shoe which she noticed, for the first time, had a hole masked by a piece of tape almost indistinguishable from the original material. He made sure that you saw nothing, she suddenly thought, almost angrily, and the wine egged her on.Allison knew it was insane—that Martin Owens had never given an explanation of why he'd come and showed precious little interest in anything she'd offered him (he'd only had one piece of pie and she'd even reheated it; Carey and she could have eaten it cold, she didn't care). And yet she believed their suffering was the same and now wanted to go with him when he left—and not even close the door, give up the house to squatters and squirrels, for she believed she'd never sell it, and let her kid catch up with them, if Carey wanted to come so bad. That's what she thought, finishing the last of the Francis Ford Coppola from a paper cup, a bottle she'd bought because she was a movie fan and knew nothing about wine.The drunken desire made Allison unbutton her plaid lumberjack shirt—just the first two buttons, in case Carey came downstairs (though the girl had probably passed out after using that bong Allison found hardly even hidden in her underwear drawer beside her girl-looking-actor-boy magazines, and that she didn't throw away, dreading the fight that would follow and hoped stupidly would just—disintegrate or something). Allison revealed enough to show off the beginnings of her breasts which despite her recent (minor) weight gain were still her best features, and maybe a few extra pounds plumped them up even more, which might be a plus, depending on what Martin liked in women. (And if he didn't like breasts, well, there was nothing she could do about it: this was what she had. She'd thought the same thing when she was prepared to apologize for what was in the freezer, before she found out there was nothing: this is what we have for dinner!)But he did like them—or looked at them, anyway, didn't look away at least, and then let her take his hand and touch one with it, and then get close enough to let her whisper “Martin” into his ear and allow him to smell the perfume she'd secretly applied while they were waiting for the pizza, Chanel her husband had brought back from who knew where as another apology for again being absent, and which had been his last gift, she now realized, but she couldn't care now. And then Martin nodded, she was almost sure, when she suggested they go upstairs and allowed her to lead him, explaining away his passivity as inevitable, since he didn't know the way.When they reached her bedroom, Allison was almost too excited—it had been so long and sex with her husband had always only been on the fly, whenever he felt like showing up, his lovemaking like his doing laundry (which he always brought back in great big duffel bags), something to accomplish before going away. It made her feel like she was sleeping with someone new every time, because of her husband's changing beards and temporary tans, which varied depending on which war he had been embedded in (“embedded” an expression that seemed ironic when he joined her beneath the sheets, for she felt them nailed shut upon and suffocating her), a novelty which might have been arousing to other women but only made her feel more alone.Martin was a stranger, too, a virtual one (an expression also ironic, given his familiarity with online gaming), but she had convinced herself that they were close, linked by the house each would always have and never have again, and so she acted in bed as if they had for ages wanted to be more intimate and this was their opportunity, feeling no unease about asking what he wanted (which turned out to be nothing, or, more exactly, anything she was willing to give, since he was completely noncommittal, a quality which she could have interpreted as “indifferent” but saw instead as “available”) and asking him in return for he initiated nothing, then finally pulling him onto herself, for this was the position she preferred, and forcing him into and into her, as if he were a stuck drawer she was trying to yank free—and free was how she felt when she finished, orgasm an event she had mostly only experienced in solitude (though an observer might have felt she was still alone, only using Martin as a “marital aid,” multi-tasking, as it were, like a waitress at a lunch counter covering the station of a colleague who had called in sick). Yet afterwards Allison was happy and soon asleep, clutching him.(In the middle of the night, jarred awake by a dream in which she waved goodbye and then shot a Gatling gun at an unseen man in the Middle East, Allison glanced over and saw her old cat had come out of hiding and was curled, purring, on hibernating Martin's chest. Then she again fell asleep and forgot she'd ever seen it.)“I Googled him.”“What?”Allison was lying on her face, a pillow halfway around her head. Awakening, she had only heard the syllable “goo,” which sounded at once adult and infantile, another collusion between the grown-up and the growing. Given she”˜d thought Martin had embodied this idea originally, she assumed it was her guest—and now lover—who was speaking, though his voice was weirdly high. Allison squinted into sun kicking in a window, the curtain of which she realized she hadn't closed last night.“What?” She raised her head and looked into the blemished face of her daughter. Carey was eating a piece of pizza left over from dinner, dangling it courageously into her mouth without the net of a paper plate. Allison groggily realized she hadn't put any food away in her haste to make love to Martin—and simultaneously understood that she was now attired in just an OasisT-shirt, her bare ass completely visible to her child, who was seated sloppily in the space next to her in bed, wearing a boy's button-down shirt and filthy jeans, with her back against the wall, sitting where Martin would have been, had he been there.“I said I Googled him.”Allison tried to whip the sheet over her lower half and had to work hard at it, since Carey was keeping it down with those awful boots she never seemed to remove. At last, the girl lifted her feet from the sheet in a drawn-out, draw-bridge sort of way, and watched her mother escape beneath it, smiling ever-so-slightly at both the older woman's shame and shape.“What do you mean?”“It's a way online to find out information about—““I know what it is,” she said and knew Carey knew she knew, just longed for any opportunity to make her feel decrepit. She slowly became aware that Carey blithely knew something else: that she and Martin had slept together and knew something her mother didn't know: where Martin was, information which Carey now supplied, in order to fully and completely mortify her.“I gave him some breakfast, by the way,” Carey said. “Before he left.”Allison turned around and sat up, slowly, the T-shirt temporarily tangled, suddenly embarrassed by her bralessness, which seemed to expose her even more than nudity. She tried to keep shock from her voice but didn't come close. “He—““He had some of that awful bran cereal I told him you needed. But I really had to talk him into it. He was only being nice.” Seeing her mother's face, made more pale every minute by both the morning's news and lack of makeup, Carey become more compassionate, that is to say, utterly cruel.“Maybe he'll come back one day, Mom. He did say he wanted to play more Call to Duty.” Forcing her daughter to reluctantly rise, Allison got up and out of bed, frantically and ridiculously wrapping herself in the sheet and Victorian-style bedspread, so—with her uncombed dyed blonde hair piled high and peaking on her head like a nightcap—she looked like Ebeneezer Scrooge in that “Christmas Carol” cartoon where he was taunted by ghosts from the future, present, and past. This was, in a way, what she thought Martin might have been—though Carey had seen him, too, he'd been no hallucination. (Plus, by stripping the bed, Allison had made apparent the wet spot in the middle of the mattress at which Carey stared with not-quite total comprehension, still only being twelve in an admittedly depraved world.)“I have to get dressed,” Allison said, flailing, dizzied. “So get out.”“But, I told you, I Googled him.”“Good for you.”“Well, don't you even want to know what I—“Allison stopped, holding the bedspread in one hand, last night's underwear in the other. She couldn't keep from being curious, trying hard though she was. “All right. What?”“He's rich.”“What?” Allison was sorry she'd even asked, “Oh, give me a break. You saw his shoe.”“That's what it said.”“It's a very common name.”“It wasn't just his name. In the images gallery, he'd be at society parties or whatever, sipping tall drinks. I'd have known him anywhere, Mom. He was rich, and now he's gone.”Carey uttered the last remark in what Allison at first assumed was a new attempt at Schadenfreude and blame. But the more the words remained in the air, the more she realized they had been said in sorrow, like clouds that changed the more you stared at the sky. After stepping quickly into her panties, Allison awkwardly tried to embrace her daughter, but the girl was gone before she could get close. Still for them, she thought, it had been a good moment.Allison finished dressing, which meant completing the wardrobe she had worn last night, as if using laziness as an excuse to reenact an event in order to understand it. When she went to her dresser to get her hairbrush, she found a square piece of blue paper she had never seen before. It was a check written out to her by Martin for the amount she had said she dreamed of getting for her house, as well as a little more. Then she saw her own widening eyes and opening mouth in the wardrobe glass.Allison spent most of the day at the kitchen counter, holding and staring at the same cup of coffee. She felt so many ways about what had happened that she had to organize the time she allotted to each one: how many minutes to be angry, how many to be humiliated, etc.Mostly, as usual, she blamed herself: Of course, this was what Martin would have thought she wanted, who wouldn't? It was as if he had picked up a street prostitute and then understood that she wanted to get paid—what was he supposed to do, be appalled? Allison was so busy criticizing herself that she barely allowed herself to assess Martin's conduct—from the minute he arrived to the one in which he left, not even considering the minor fact that he must have carried the check loose in his back pants pocket or someplace, since his wallet was empty (and if she had, she might have remembered that she had heard a curious crinkle when she grabbed the waist of his corduroys to—desperately was how she would describe it now—pull them down).“What's for lunch?”Allison also didn't realize that, by ignoring Carey this morning, she didn't know that the girl had stayed home from school, taking advantage of her mother's absent-mindedness or else comically considering it a kind of holiday, since her mother had had company—and sex—for the first time in, well, forever. Allison barely remembered that she had a daughter until Carey passed through the kitchen, her boots banging like bullets and trailing mud on a floor no one had wet-mopped in the months since Naomi, the unemployed cleaning woman, had worked there, and asked again, impatiently,“What's-for-lunch?”Allison looked up, her fingers suddenly cold clinging to the clay coffee cup. Maybe, she thought, she would never tell the girl about the check she had stashed in her own underwear drawer as her daughter did her drug paraphernalia. And this epiphany led her to two new emotions, which were relief and then joy that everything for the two of them would now be taken care of, no matter what strange means and man had made it come to pass. Allison was even about to say, in a conciliatory and starting-over sort of way, “Let's go out to lunch,” as if their lives were Lifetime TV movies, but feeling newly empowered (as they called it in magazine articles she read at the dentist's), she instead started a fight with Carey about her being home.A few days later, Allison ran into Randy Meyers in the dairy aisle of the Buy ”˜n' Fly. He was her not-very-close neighbor, whom she mostly knew from after-school soccer games played in by both Carey and Randy's daughter, Brin, when Allison would wonder wistfully what it must be like to have such a bright, polite, and overall nice girl as a child. Randy told her right off the bat that he had gotten a top price for his house and was leaving the development.“Really?” Allison had said, shocked. “And what did you—how did this—““Well, I'm not exactly sure. You see, it was sort of sudden, and—“Allison looked closely at Randy, realizing that she hadn't ever really noticed him before, the slightly beefy, no-feminine-side style of man not entirely her type, especially if he was married, though her standards were becoming more—the word “fluid” came to mind, as she made herself stop staring at him and put a container of milk into her cart.“Sudden? What do you—““Well, there was this guy who came and—His name was Martin, Martin Owens—and he said he was born in and grew up in our house. And when he lived there, he was unhappy. I trusted him. It's difficult to explain, but—“But Randy did explain, after they had paid and moved to the pseudo-sophisticated “caf锝 the supermarket had just opened, where coffee had a burnt taste and a high price tag.“And I told him that I grew up here, too,” Randy said. “Not here, but the next town over. My parents' house was just like ours. That's why I bought it. They raised a lot more kids in theirs—I had two sisters, Ginny and Becky, Rebecca, we called her Becky, and me and my kid brother, Sam. Can you imagine that? In a house that size? And everyone was fed and went to school. I don't have to tell you, the developments were more fancy then, in better shape. The whole time, my father owned his own hardware store. He didn't switch jobs, or have to. That's what I—well, that's how I thought it would go with me. And it did, too, until, well, recently. Anyway, I don't want to talk your ear off.”Long story short—though Randy felt excited enough to keep it long—he had been laid off as a business writer and freelancing wasn't working out, was for the birds in fact, and Barbara, his wife, wanted him to stop trying to live his father's life and for them to move somewhere cheaper, to another suburb or maybe even the city, to accept reality and cut out this imitating-another-person-and-period crap.“And Martin seemed to understand that, and—““Let me guess,” Allison interrupted, her voice shaking. “He gave you a—“She scrambled in her bag to find and take out the stamped deposit slip she'd been issued days before at the bank—and by a teller, too, she hadn't trusted a machine with so much money, don't ask her why, it was a generational thing. Still, there was a limit to her self-exposure: Allison kept a thumb discreetly over the dollar amount, in case Martin had been less (or maybe more?) generous with Randy than with her.“Holy crap,” Randy said, and Allison winced at his uptightness even now, his inability to completely curse at something uncanny; it made her think he wouldn't be much, when the chips were down, in bed. (Or was she trying to soften the blow that he seemed utterly uninterested in her? Or was she obsessing over sex to avoid the incomprehensible event they were discussing, sex with Randy easier to reflect upon, or at least less real?)“Holy shit,” Allison corrected him. “And yet, you know, my check cleared. So it's cool.”“I can't believe it.” Randy put down the chocolate-covered donut he'd bought (which, weirdly had a lower calorie count than the blueberry muffin, appearances, as they had both discovered, being deceiving).“Neither can I.” And Allison found herself absently picking at the pastry without asking.She couldn't really tell what Randy's reaction was, she was too busy experiencing her own. They had, of course, been stirred from shame to pleasure before settling in an uneasy state between the two, as Martin had done between the old and the up-to-date, she remembered she had first imagined when she met him. Now added to her meal of emotions were three new ingredients: shock, anger, and jealousy; and they mixed around in Allison's stomach, joining the donut, until she felt sick.Martin hadn't just lied about growing up in Allison's house; he hadn't just paid her off and left after he had (in truth, agreed to have) sex with her. He had acted this oddly and altruistically with someone else, without even the assumption that he was being seduced in a venal cause and so sort of owed her something. In other words, it had all had nothing to do with her—and never had had, she had just refused to smell the coffee, which she couldn't help doing, in all ways, now.“I Googled him,” Allison said, pushing Carey as it were out of the picture, and then told Randy what little she (not Carey) had learned.“That is frickin' fishy,” Randy said, the food adjective making Allison finally and self-consciously stop “sharing” his snack, of which she had left only leprous remains.“But it's not,” she said. “Or—I shouldn't say that—it may not be. Deposit the check and see.”“I did,” Randy said. “And mine was good, too!”Yet Randy's fingers tapped on the table, as if writing out a revenge. His (again, essentially uninteresting) male attitudes allowed him only to plot a punishment for Martin, even though the stranger had done Randy no wrong, had in fact improved his life. The event was strange and inexplicable, involved a peculiar (and also male) person, and so must have been motivated by emotion and so was embarrassing and an offense to him. Since no court would convict—since no crime had been committed—Randy vowed vigilante justice.“The check being good is not the point,” he said.Meeting his eyes, Allison silently agreed to be his partner or at least sidekick in his quest. She was aware (and at least she was aware) that she was being pushed by the equally insane instincts of her sex: to make someone suffer for not paying enough attention to her, even if the attention she had been paid was mortifying and maybe even imaginary. If the two conspirators could have clinked their cheap porcelain coffee cups together without seeming like clowns, they would have.“Here's my cellphone number,” Randy said, and wrote it down.The next day, Allison called Randy to re-confirm how they planned to handle the Martin Owens affair—or incident, as she preferred they call it, not explaining why. (Randy's wife, Barbara, seemed suspicious when she answered and heard another woman's voice, but when Allison identified herself, she quickly understood that nothing untoward was going on between her and her husband, so quickly, in fact, that Allison was sort of offended and glanced down at the Fountains of Wayne sweatshirt she was wearing.) The two arranged to meet at a place with better coffee to outline what decades before might have been called Martin Owen's lynching.And soon their posse grew: other people carrying virtual ropes and rifles, riding imaginary mules, fell into line on the now pothole-ridden streets of the development. It turned out that others—in fact, all—of the residents had sold their homes at high prices to Martin, who had been born in and been unhappy in each one.Not all of the soon-to-be-ex-owners crowded into the painfully narrow aisles of the “Lean and Bean,” once they heard Allison and Randy were meeting there. But there was Tom Zweibel, whose Taiwanese-born wife had taken their son to visit her family overseas for the holidays and never returned. Between hiring a lawyer and a publicist to plant stories before legal proceedings began, little money remained for his mortgage. Martin had been willing—eager—to take the house off his hands, without haggling. (Tom was more than appreciative but also affronted that Martin had said so little—not a single word—when shown a photo of YinYin, who looked exactly like Lucy Liu, everybody always said.)And there were the Walters, nearly impoverished by medical bills after both contracted cancer they were convinced had been environmentally caused (though they were so far the only ones afflicted in the development) and, in Kemberly's case, “pre-existing conditions” had made obtaining enough insurance impossible. They were thrilled that Martin had arranged to re-acquire his old family house and, while they hardly expected him to split their specialists' bills, they would have welcomed a little interest in—even his once inquiring about—their health, instead of just staring at what he could still and still not see inside their place.They and the twelve other residents who came couldn't reconcile that Martin cared more about his memories than he did about them, that they couldn't compete with what he couldn't forget, and that by giving them so much he was saying they were worth little—less at any rate than the wooden staircases and plaster walls, cracking ceilings and creaking floors that they could no longer afford (and which they said no longer mattered because “it's people who count” and “we still have each other,” in tones that, Allison felt, revealed these things were both true and totally uncomforting).“What does he want by helping us?”“Who does he think he is?“He can't just—give us something—and get away with it!”They only had a vague sense of what they wanted to do, once they”˜d cashed Martin's checks—to thank, to punish, most of all, to know him. Sharing sourced reports and sheer heresay, they believed that Martin had hit every house but one—the Weirs, who were on a cross-country road trip with Tina's Alzheimer's-riddled  father, trying desperately to make him “remember something” about America, and whose cleaning woman had had no authority to sell their house (even though, someone said, Jack and Tina wanted to unload it once they inherited her father's place, where they would start living for free the day after his—and their—ordeal were over). The cleaning woman, whose name no one knew, spoke little English (she was some kind of Spanish—or Latino, that was it, how you said it now—no, Latina) and so Martin might not know the Weirs would not be back until summer and might return this week. That was the only hope they had.After the meeting, Allison got in her car, feeling dazed. She turned the ignition on after she'd already done so, hearing a choking sound she was sure came from herself. Then she drove as if floating in a dream, other cars moving by or coming toward her, like images of her unconscious invention.They made her wonder: why couldn't she just accept what had happened, be happy (as she had been when she knew less), stop trying to control events so they involved her and made sense, leave herself to put it plainly out of it? Why did it always have to be about her—or for Randy about Randy, or all the others who demanded everybody be made in their image (only God did that, right, when he made the world? But didn't he then give Adam and Eve the ability to make moral judgments after they ate the apple? And wasn't that to punish them, to grant them God-like powers, because these abilities were bad, a burden, God was saying his situation stunk and so he said: here, Adam and Eve, see how you like it? She couldn't remember all her Sunday school stuff and been bored by the Bible when she tried to re-read it after her husband's death).And his death, of course, was what now emerged from behind her thoughts of Martin, popped up, as if playing peek-a-boo. Why should she make sense of that misfortune any more than this good luck? Why take any of it, her widowhood and—whoo-hoo!—new windfall personally?Yet she did or had, knew now she felt doubly deserted by her husband's dying in the midst of their divorce, even though she no longer loved him, hadn't for years, and certainly felt no love from him for an even longer time. She told herself—as that doctor had, though she had not believed him (or even really understood) until now: she might never know why it happened. Her husband hadn't been thinking about her, he'd been thinking about himself, when he stepped into that tank with his bad circulation. But sometimes someone else's self-interest could cut your way: someone gave you something by giving something to himself. God—again—sometimes wrecked the world just to prove a point and too bad if you happened to be on Earth that afternoon. But if you were, say, named Noah, you lucked out, you got something good arbitrarily.Now Allison's car seemed out of her hands, piloted by someone else, pulled by a tow truck or that ninety-year-old strongman from late-night infomercials. Whoever it was knew better than she where she wanted to go. She had taken herself out of the equation and allowed herself to be led.Being uninhabited was like being on a world-sized Ouija board, the ones where spirits spurred you here and there. Allison always assumed those things were frauds, and you made the moves without being able to admit it. But today she didn't ask why, weeping, she pulled up outside the Junior High School right when classes were letting out, or why Carey was waiting there, crouched at a corner, not quite touching the curb, in a position that was half-expectant or at least not completely hopeless. It was as if she waited for her mother every day like that, and Allison had never known, never been allowed to know or, frankly, had never asked.When the girl got in, stunned, grateful, Carey pulled on her seatbelt without Allison insisting, in a way that said, let's not one of us get killed, too, okay, Mom, Jesus fucking Christ. And then her daughter looked away, to hide her own tears.Allison wasn't there when her neighbors staked out the Weirs' house from across the street, using small teams that “spelled” each other, aggrieved beneficiaries waiting to see when and if Martin “checked back,” like the salesman some had immediately assumed he was. She was told that, when the cleaning woman came to look in on the place and put food she'd made in the freezer—spaghetti and meatballs, despite her Latina heritage—the neighbors waved cheerily at her, assuming she'd never understand what was happening and none knowing enough words in any other language to tell her.Allison explained that she had to be at home, that she wanted to be with Carey (which she pretty much meant now, though the girl still insisted that she'd rather have the place to herself and be free to use her bong, phone her friends, dance around the house and play with herself in peace). But one day she dropped off coffee and snacks. It was Randy's shift, and the two exchanged secret smiles to acknowledge they together had started this ball rolling, looks that Allison interpreted as flirtatious, though she knew it was probably her imagination and wasn't at all interested in Randy, anyway. (Randy's wife, Barbara, waved to and hugged Allison so genuinely and benignly that it was, frankly, irritating.)Allison wasn't there when Martin did in fact show up—and innocently, standing on the stoop less like a salesman and more a suitor who wouldn't take no, unaware enough to change his shabby clothes to some more presentable or to appear less appallingly pale. She was told that Martin didn't see any of them, and the residents stood in plain sight across the street; but then he'd never seen them, wasn't that the point? His ringing the doorbell was their cue.Allison wasn't there when they sprang at him and when Martin ran, and when they chased him in car and on bike and foot, crying,“Come back!”“We don't want to hurt you!”“We only want to talk!”She didn't see how it ended—but then again, no one really did, not in any way they could agree upon. Some said Martin had darted into a backyard, eluding capture, stymieing those in cars, though probably not those on bikes and certainly not on foot. Others believed he had escaped into a better and faster car than any pursuing him, one with a chauffeur and parked nearby, though they could only guess at the kind of car and had to admit it was not his style; he had always arrived alone and without accomplice. And a few felt he had simply—disappeared—lost corporeal substance and vanished into vapor in the middle of it. That theory made Allison think about the end of an old Martin and Lewis movie she had—again, only partly—seen, one where Dean and Jerry were being chased in a haunted house until Jerry just poked his head out from around a corner and, alone, announced to her, the audience, “Well, that's the end!” as if there were no resolution, they'd given up on writing one. That felt hopeful to her, or at least let her figure out a finish for herself, one she liked or at least could live with. Anyway, maybe Martin had been made out of air the entire time, she thought; that's how it felt, anyway, as if he'd been a puff of smoke, as if he was his own whisper. Then she tried to just forget.But she couldn't—or didn't, anyway. Six months later, Allison came back to the development, long after everyone else was gone. She had something to tell Martin and no other way to reach him. Her research had gone beyond Googling into the more extensive Nexus-Lexus or whatever and even included hiring a private eye who had been less effective than he was expensive and drunk. She had found out only—and it was implied in blurry cellphone photos of Martin at some rooftop soiree (or maybe it was someone else)—that he had been indeed wealthy, and that was all. Allison had been okay with not knowing. But now she felt like filling in a few facts—it was only fair, given what was going on.She hadn't used any protection that night with Martin, been too drunk and desperate to be touched to think about it, and besides, she had had the hardest time becoming pregnant with Carey, she and her husband had done it dutifully over and over again, until it became the most robotic of chores, like paying a gas & electric bill—jiggle the address in the window, lick the envelope, strip the stamp so it's sticky, press it into place, then make sure it goes down and doesn't get stuck in the chute—and paying the bill for the same exact amount not once a month but every single night and sometimes twice a night for a year; and Martin had been so, well, she had hardly even known if he finished, that's how—feeble was a mean word—unemphatic he had been during it, and she'd assumed he hadn't, actually, for he was so quiet from start to stop, she was the one who made enough noise for two. But Allison was okay with it, a new beginning or whatever, and it was lucky their new apartment had an extra bedroom, and that they still had money left.Even Carey seemed to feel it was a good—or less-than-bad—thing, being old enough not to be competitive with a baby or maybe just grateful that her mother would be otherwise engaged, now that she had a new and boyish girlfriend, Viola, with whom she stayed behind closed doors in her room for hours (and Allison wasn't stupid, she just felt what the hell, at least Carey was home and wouldn't get pregnant; they couldn't both be at once, that wouldn't work).Anyway, that's why Allison was there, for she was now more a part of Martin's life and so she wanted to be informed about it, be briefed on it, or whatever.As she got closer to the development's gate, took a once-familiar route that she could now barely recall, she thought, forgivingly: so what if he had said he'd been born in every house? Maybe a piece of him had been, like, implanted in each place by whatever pain he had been caused there, that he was like the trees on every lawn, except invisible. If he had wanted to buy up pieces of his past, well, wasn't that what we all would do if we had a way?—what we did, placing old home movies on discs to keep them from crumbling into the same dust as us? She wanted to say this to him, as well as the other thing.When Allison walked through the gate, at which she noticed no guard was on duty, she checked her new red hairdo in her compact, to see how it was holding up (okay). Then, looking up, she heard an unfamiliar sound. It had been so quiet when she lived there, the quiet part of what they all paid for, when they could still afford to pay. It was an industrial dump-truck-type noise—no, it was a bulldozer—because she suddenly saw one driving right into one of the homes (it had been the Hilliards', that's whose) and knocking a complete side of it to the ground.Allison spun around and saw that a few of the homes were merely empty lots now, while the rest were still intact. Yet, as she passed the one that had been Randy Meyers', she realized that it was—well, exactly the same and not-the-same, had been reduced to rubble and then rebuilt, was entirely new but not in any other way changed.At last, she reached her own former house, and it was true of hers, too: it had been recreated but otherwise not altered or improved (and it could have been: the aluminum siding on the roof alone). Allison knocked at the door and felt silly, keeping up the courtesies. Then she went inside.Her old home held just husks: floors, stairs, and kitchen cabinets, no furniture, and no one.She knew now that Martin hadn't been picking up the pieces of his past simply to remove them, like a person with a stick in a public park, taking away the trash (a punishment for a petty crime). He had been collecting and reconstructing these pieces, in order to eliminate their memories of however he'd been hurt, then starting them again from scratch, in the same place. He was not interested in ever going forward—as Allison was, as he had made her do—at some point, the past had simply purchased him, as he had their homes. She was irrevocably linked to him, but it was as close as they'd ever come. And why—like the world before she'd been born—was a mystery.Before she left, Allison thought: should she leave the door open, in case he came back? It would be a hopeful thing to do, wouldn't it, like the Jews did on a holiday, when they set a place for a spirit? But couldn't a ghost just walk through a wall if he wanted? She didn't have the answer to that, either. There was so much more she didn't know. And this was how she went home, once again unseen by Martin, in tears—for him, not for herself: she was happy—and wondering.