C+C Forever

The hole in the living room floor seemed to be growing. Whenever she looked at it she thought she could see more of the cellar but wasn’t sure because the cellar was one of those Michigan basements that are half done and pretty much made of mud and rock, floor to ceiling, and so it all looked the same.

She wondered if she could mark the hole’s progress somehow. The living room didn’t have much in terms of usable landmarks. There were the four walls, a box of a room. One had an empty picture frame hung askew. Another was occupied by two small windows spaced maybe three feet apart. Another had a door leading to the kitchen. The last hid a staircase behind it, the opening to which was very small. Likely, a bed or any furniture, really, wouldn’t fit. She hadn’t yet been up to the second floor to determine, though.

There was a sofa. She was sitting on it, legs up and crossed, Indian style they used to call it in grade school. There was a crumpled ball of paper to her left, stage right to the hole in the floor. A piece of drywall had fallen onto the floor from the ceiling, stage left. Anything else in the room she deemed too microscopic to use.

She stood up and, placing one foot directly in front of the other, counted six lengths to the hole from the sofa. She started at the hole the next time and counted three lengths to the crumpled ball of paper. She walked around the hole and counted four lengths from the hole to the fallen piece of drywall. She went into the kitchen and looked around the cabinets and drawers. There were a lot of stray items like rubber bands, a three-quarters measuring cup, a fork with tines bent out of alignment, a phonebook, a refrigerator magnet that said ‘if it’s too hot…’ Under the sink she found a dusty can of paint amongst dusty containers of cleaning supplies. She popped the lid off with the fork she’d found and sloshed around the paint inside.

On the wall facing the sofa on the other side of the hole in the floor, she set the paint can down and dipped the fork in and began writing measurements she’d taken. But the fork was too fine an instrument and would take too long. Instead she used her index finger and with paint running over her wrist like an exposed vein tracing its way to her elbow, wrote the measurements. She wasn’t sure if she’d remembered them correctly but the paint was already up on the wall and so what’s done was done, she decided.

The hole in the floor seemed to almost lurch out at her feet as she walked around it to sit back on the sofa. She sat as she had before and looked at the wall and the hole and her two other markers. Check again in two hours, she told herself.

She walked over to one of the small windows and looked out into the gray day. The house she’d found was far enough out in the sticks that the next nearest one couldn’t be seen from any immediate vantage point. She’d pulled onto the gravel drive slowly even though she knew no one was there and parked the car around back, which was blocked from sight by other rusted out, windowless car-like things, and an old oak that towered over the whole property. One of the oak’s giant limbs, a tree in its own right, had cracked and hung down from the tree, resting inside the house’s second floor.

Nothing moved as the sun hung back behind the haze. It cast no shadows and the day was still and nothing swayed. Everywhere she looked was the same even if it wasn’t. Her grandmother had once told her that if you can’t mark change you might as well just sit down and wait. It didn’t really make sense, she thought. But then again her grandmother had said that while hooked up to machines in a hospital and died a few days later.

She walked from the window to the hole in the floor and counted to seven. She went to the wall and wrote the number down.

Laying down on the sofa she slid her phone from her jeans pocket and turned it on. She smelled the earth coming up from the hole in the floor and it reminded her of something she couldn’t put her finger on. The phone buzzed several times indicating messages. She read a text message that asked where she was. She opened her maps app and waited for it to find her. She set a drop pin and then copied it to the text message, pressed send and turned off the phone.

You’re really out here this time, Charlie said. He’d shown up while she was sleeping, the light outside the same as it had been when she’d closed her eyes. They now sat on either end of the sofa facing each other drinking the beer he’d brought. It took me hours to get here, he said. She looked down at the hole in the floor and wondered if she should measure to see if it had gotten any larger. You got a tree in your roof, he said.

I didn’t think you were going to tell me where you were, he said. I waited a long time for your response. Didn’t think, he said. Didn’t expect it. He tipped his bottle of beer all the way up, draining it. He eyed the hole in the floor. I turned my phone off, she said. There’s no electricity here and didn’t want it to die, she lied. I’m glad you turned it back on. It’s good to, he said, I’m glad to be here.

They laid down so each of their heads were propped up against the arms of the sofa and pressed their feet together in the air in front of them. They bicycled like that, trying to take sips from their bottles. They kept laughing and spilling down their chins, sometimes up their noses. Her foot slipped off his and she heeled him on the inside of one of his thighs. He got up to walk it off and nearly fell in the hole. He hobbled around it, shaking his leg out. He stopped in front of the wall with the measurements and looked at it as if for the first time. He looked at the bucket of paint, nudged it with his foot. He looked from her to the wall and dipped two fingers into the paint and wrote C+C Forever below her markings.

As he stood there looking at her and the paint dripping from his fingers she felt regret for having told him where she was. He went into the kitchen and she heard an abrupt hissing sound. Shit, she heard him say. When he came back into the living room the hand with the paint-covered fingers was wrapped up in his shirtfront. The water isn’t working, he said. He grabbed hold of the shirt wrapped around his fingers and pulled his hand through its bunches. They were discolored but no longer dripping. He let the shirt go and it slowly opened up. People would pay good money for a shirt with a spot like that, she said. Didn’t even have to go to fashion school to get this good, he said stretching the shirt out away from him to get a better look. They’ll write about you someday, she said.

Seems like we should live here forever, he said. How long will that be though? The light outside was fading and so it was inside. She looked at his face and the fuzz of darkness around it. What are we going to do when it gets too dark to see, she said.

He stumbled down the stairs like a bad dream. I found two candles, he said and lit them with a red Bic lighter. The room filled with shadows and he said, Let’s tell ghost stories. Ok, she said, let me tell you about my dad. He laughed. What a charmer you are, he said. Tell me about your worst hangover, she said.

She wasn’t sure if she was still upset with herself for telling him where she was. The feeling came and went like so many things. He was laying with his head in her lap, eyes closed but she knew he wasn’t sleeping. I still love him, she said. I know, he said. He opened his eyes and smiled. So do I. He’s ours. We’re his. We’ll never escape each other. Nothing will ever change. Unless one of us dies and then we’ll be even more beholden, he said. To what, she said.

They laid on the couch with her holding him from behind. His body rose and fell so slowly she thought time had stopped. And maybe it had. Maybe the house could do that. She really loved the house and wanted to fix it up and stay there and raise a family. But she wanted to do it alone. And she wanted to keep the hole in the floor and the tree in the roof. A true tree house for her babies.

When she woke the next morning the house was painted in pale blue. She could hear birds chirping upstairs and imagined them making breakfast for her. She slid out from between Charlie and the couch and stretched like a child next to the hole in the floor.

She stood at the window and looked out at the rusted skeletons and broken oak tree. He’d parked his car underneath it. One of the rear windows was busted out and he or someone had taped up a plastic bag to keep the weather out. She thought what a beautifully lonesome photograph it’d make sitting there like that. Morning, he said from the couch.

She walked from the window to the hole and counted six steps. She stared down into the hole and thought about her babies and their tree house. He came up beside her and draped his arm around her shoulders. Come on, he said, let’s split already.