As he emerges, he hears the wife saying, “I’m just surprised they left it this way.” She gestures to the floor, frowning. “But we can rip this up and put down some good carpeting.” She brushes a hand over a wall of aged corkboard, breaking off crumbs. “And this stuff has to go. We can put up new drywall and recessed lighting and make a really nice playroom.”
John’s jaw tightens, and he walks away from the voices. He comes to a halt by the electrical service panel and slowly unscrews its cover. It’s a 200-amp panel with no fewer than five GFCI breakers. Overkill, maybe, but he feels a prick of envy. He is ashamed to never have invested in GFCIs for his own house, despite the cautionary tales. He remembers clearly the chapter on electrical safety from his certification course, what happens when a loose current finds a ground fault in an unsuspecting human body. It would have been so easy to install circuit interrupters himself when Diana was out of the house, and yet something had made him forget. It is inexcusable for a professional to expose himself and his family to such a simple and unnecessary danger. Their home, after all his vain attentions, is nothing but a coiled snake, charged and capricious. As he thinks of this, a knot tightens in his gut, and his hands tremble as he screws the cover back onto the panel.
He takes measured steps around the perimeter of the basement and pauses beside the corkboard, littered with staples and ripped paper corners. Upon closer examination, he finds traces of scribbled crayon—the outlines of horses, rabbits, trees—like cave paintings. And, faintly, a ladder of penciled parallel lines rises from the floor, labeled with initials and dates: ’62, ’63, ’64. Looking at these hieroglyphics, John feels a squeeze in his chest, akin to the ache he’d once felt watching his daughter sleep in her crib.
He turns to Lori and the clients. The husband now stands with an arm around his wife’s waist, a bright wristwatch flashing at her belly. John finds himself transfixed by its luster, by the hallucinogenic circles of the wife’s dress, the miraculous swell beneath. They are the uncontested, oblivious owners of all of it. They lack even the awareness to doubt this.
“Are we all done?” the husband asks.
John coughs artificially. “Yup, that’s about it.” His own voice sounds muted to him, muffled by the basement walls.
“Everything looks all right?” the wife asks.
John meets her open, girlish gaze for a moment, the crystalline irises with nothing in them but confidence in the universe. He feels nearly dead in comparison, wearier by the moment, as if he were being depleted by her presence. It seems that there is a lack of air in this place, that the windows have been sealed shut for decades, since the long-ago children were last measured.
A slow moment elapses. In the space of this pause, John feels the breath of the past, the cumulative exhalations of the house and its lost inhabitants. They seem to gather in the basement’s webbed corners, fuzzed with dust and dead skin. It strikes him that this is a last capsule of memory, that when it is swept and painted, the raw floor carpeted and windows unstuck, no trace of life will remain. The history of the house will persist only in the memories of its former residents, those far-flung stewards of dwindling, inexact images.
These meditations visit John as he stands, breathing stale air, and fuse into a beam of insight. The house, in that moment, speaks to him. Suddenly, he sees this basement as an invaluable artifact. Perhaps another set of purchasers will understand, and preserve it.
He inhales purposefully. His eyes turn away from the clients and fix upon a clouded window, its smear of dull sunlight.
“Well, not everything,” he hears himself say. “You’ve got some pretty decrepit machinery here. The furnace is inefficient, water heater’s on its last legs, and the oil tank’s vintage Watergate.”
Lori jerks around to look at him.
“And I don’t feel good about the WDI situation.”
“WDI?”
“Wood-destroying insects. Termites, carpenter ants. I can’t get inside the walls to diagnose how much damage there might be, but I saw a few red flags. You can try preventative measures, of course, like a baiting system, but that’ll be a few thousand bucks and it’s basically a crapshoot. It might already be too late. The structure could already be compromised.”
The husband’s pale face flushes. “You didn’t say anything about red flags.”
John shrugs, drops his gaze to his clipboard. “I’m just mentioning it now as part of the wrap-up. There was wood dust on the porch. No visible mud tubes, but there are signs of chronic dampness near the foundation, under the azaleas. Very attractive for termites.”
“And the machinery,” the wife says calmly, “does it all have to be replaced?”
“Ma’am,” John hears himself say, “it would be irresponsible of me to recommend anything else.”
“Well, that’s something we can bring to the bargaining table,” Lori interjects. “You could ask for a credit to cover the costs.”
“But what about the insects? That sounds like a deal breaker to me,” the husband speaks in the deep voice of pragmatism.