Security Deposit

 

When I was a kid, we had an illustrated bible that featured a vertiginous scene of Korah being swallowed up by the earth. The spine of the book is probably broken over this page because I used to look at it so much. It represented the essence of fear to me, an inescapable danger that could thrust itself upon you from the most innocuous of places. I studied this picture to try to understand where this danger came from. I pored over the flailing limbs, the trailing robes and streaming, Samsonesque locks, the gnarled fingers clutching for purchase in the crumbling soil. I knew the story was, in some way, about punishment, but I didn’t know for what. So, it seemed to me like a fate that could befall anyone. One moment you’re walking along and the next, you’re falling into an endless darkness so vast and entire it’s textured and soundless. The worst part about this fate? No one knows what happened to you. On the surface, you’re just gone.

…

We often talk about the students who ‘slip through the cracks’. And, when we hear this phrase, I think we all envision someone being failed by the educational system. You see a student, struggling with material, with time management and then, for one reason or another, they throw in the towel. Maybe there’s a catalyst. Maybe a teacher is rude to them; maybe they fail an important test or maybe their ego has been dealt one too many blows and they decide they’d be better off out in the world where at least the blows pay off—if only in minimum wage.

We think of slipping through the cracks as being a result of frustration, but we overlook the fact that slipping through the cracks can be totally outside one’s control. I may have had every intention of succeeding. I may have been on the path to victory, but forces outside my control grew and grew and subsumed my efforts. This, too, is slipping through the cracks. According to literary terms it is also tragedy, which is defined as a situation in which “A noble character confronts an obstacle, but succumbs to it after a struggle.”  

A few days ago, the cracks were at my feet and now, one decision later, they have precipitously risen up around me; they are becoming walls. It is only from this precarious situation that I can understand how easy it is for others to slip through when the cracks position themselves under your feet and how difficult it is to conceive of the danger, when they are distant, benign and not the canyon I am struggling to stay out of.

…

I probably should’ve stayed home with my family, but it was a beautiful afternoon and I’d been inside all week working on the computer. I wanted to get some exercise and, besides, my wife and daughter had plans for a park outing with another mother/daughter duo. No one expected me to go. Why not cut out for a long afternoon bike ride?

The ride to Blue Lake from Arcata is like express forest bathing, something like a forest Slip’N’Slide. You climb over a ridge by the green waste center which is sweltering with woodsy dampness and gradually rise to a sunny crest before plunging back into a dim, redwood and Spanish moss grove that feels like a pond bottom. Climb out of this and you’re in pasture, a narrow but sunny valley. From here there’s another drop into a dim forest corner before climbing back out and into another bright pastoral vale. It does this about twice more before you ride over the Mad River into the village of Blue Lake.

There’s nothing to really do in Blue Lake, so I checked out the Little Free Library and compulsively organized the books when I didn’t find anything to take. Then I biked over to the convenience store to get some water since I’d forgotten to bring a drink.

My phone rang while on my way over. It took me a moment to realize it was ringing and I fumbled with it a little. By the time I’d gotten to it, the call had gone to voicemail. I checked it. My landlord sounding gloomy, but it was his phone voice, the voice of an older generation which, for some reason, does not like to emote over the phone. My dad is the same way. I called back. He told me he had something for me. When could I come? I told him I’d be back in about an hour, wondering what pack of batteries or replacement bulb or cleaning solution he’d picked up for me this time. I hung up, drank my water, stared at the mountains a moment, felt the sun shrink the skin on my forehead and warm the tips of my ears and then I turned the bike around and rode back, the same way, dipping in and out of the sun and forest pools.

I chastised myself a bit before I left. Making threats about what I would think of myself if I forgot to call the landlord when I got back. Lately, I’ve been forgetting little, unimportant, things like that. So, in order to remember, I kept dredging the memory up during the bike ride. “Call the landlord when you get home.”

I remembered and we met in the backyard. I was oiling my bike and he came striding across the lawn, head sort of down, like his pate, rather than his face wanted to talk to me. He held an envelope. And he seemed like he wasn’t altogether sure what he had come out for. He stretched out his envelope hand and I thought, what is he paying me for?

The landlord is an older guy. He occasionally has trouble getting around. We live side by side on a parcel of field just outside town. I’ve helped him with odd jobs around the house. He’s particular, though and each time I’ve helped him, he seems to hesitate before asking for help again. He explains that he wants to hire someone, but no one ever seems to be up to his standards. I’ve never seen a worker around for more than a single day. On nice days, I enjoy doing a little yard work, so I try to help. I always decline money but he’s always forced it on me, even for a short job. I guessed it made him feel better. I didn’t mind. But I couldn’t remember any recent work I’d done that he’d be paying me for now.

A gift probably. Since my daughter was born a few years ago, he’s bought her gifts for holidays, for her birthday. Little things we don’t need, but gestures. He’s shown that he cares about her and we appreciate it. He calls her ‘Sissy’.  

I was thinking about all this when he tells me he’s giving me 60 days to vacate.

He’s joking. Of course, he’s joking. I may have smiled.

No, no, 60 days, there have been breaches; he’s given it a lot of thought. 60 days.

A joke, right? We’ve been model tenants. Paid on time, usually early just so we wouldn’t forget. No noise, no late nights, no guests except our parents dropping by. He plays with our daughter. Calls her his friend. She’s two for God’s sake. We clean the fucking house, polish the goddamn doorknobs, do all we can to not upset him because he’s incredibly particular and he knows this.

I don’t mention any of this, but ask for clarification in a mild way. I’m still unable to think of this as real.

Again, let’s be clear, breaches were made. Peccadillos, yes, but breaches. We hung the coat rack without asking for instance.

This makes no sense. He must be drunk or something. The three things he’s brought up now all happened in previous years. Why now? Where was the tipping point?

He says the ‘renter safe’ faux wallpaper was an issue, but we put this stuff up before our daughter was born, so over two years ago. This makes no sense.

A verbal agreement, he stammers and, suddenly, I understand. When we moved in, he said he preferred one, but two would be fine, if we were quiet, gentle on the place. It had occurred to me that he might not be thrilled about us having kids, multiplying in there as it were. But the place was big enough and I figured his limitation had been about adults. I’d told him we were having another kid and, yeah, he hadn’t offered congratulations. In fact, he’d been almost uncharacteristically incredulous. It had been almost rude.

Verbal agreement, he mutters again and turns to go. Leaving me with 60 days.

Kicked out. Not me, not my wife, but my daughter. My little girl. The house she came home to from the hospital. Her home, she’s the one being kicked out. What kind of a start…

And it wasn’t the landlord, it was me! I failed. I failed. I FAILED. My little girl. When we sing “baa baa black sheep” we replace ‘the little boy’ with ‘the little girl who lives on Bay School Lane’. Her home has been fucking SUNG to her since she was an infant and now, because I failed to see how easily it could be taken away, she’s lost her home. Her room. Her living room playtime. Her bathtub splashings. Her kitchen highchair flung food. Her sleeping in bed with mom and dad. No, it’s not the landlord’s fault. It’s mine because I should’ve seen this threat. I should’ve mitigated it. I should’ve left before this happened. But, I was blindsided. The earth had opened beneath my feet. No one would know what had happened to me.

…

My wife drove up to find me standing in the backyard, holding the notice and she knew by my demeanor. She’d always had the inkling that something like this would happen. Now it feels like we’ve lived the last three years at the edge of a knife blade and I’m wondering if this has been true. Have we always had this Damaclean sword hanging over us?

We went into the kitchen and began the sort of talk that feels like pumping up a tire with a substantial hole. We berated the landlord for his heartlessness and then ourselves for the little signs of his unreliable nature we’d overlooked and then back to the landlord for not even giving any kind of warning and all the while my wife’s pregnant belly heaved in agitation and my daughter tried to play with us, but our frantic talking subsumed everything. Another aspect of falling through the cracks is that once you begin to fall, the flailing tends to precipitate you. In an hour, everyone was worn out and thoroughly miserable. My daughter was crying and irritable, dinner had been forgotten, the house seemed to have filled with an obscuring fog and we went through the bedtime routine like robots. I could find no purchase on the night and slid down into it, eventually to sleep.

I was ready to tell everyone, to sound the alarm. “Extra, Extra Crooked Landlord Throws Out Two-Year-Old and Six-Month-Pregnant Woman!” Also, did I mention I’m a teacher. It’s not like I’ve got some munificent roll of money I can throw at this problem. The more I considered telling people, I began to realize how ashamed I was. ‘Evicted’ they’d say. ‘Booted out’ they’d whisper. “They must’ve done something to deserve it.” I saw how people’s imaginations would run roughshod over the way we lived. They’d see tangled clotheslines, rusty bikes, loud fighting, my daughter running around with no clothes—I swear, it’s potty-training technique!—and just all kinds of general squalor. This for a family that hates to see dishes piled in the sink. This for a family that scrubs the kitchen floor by hand. Having a two-year-old is messy, but no one has done a better job cleaning up.

Let me get back to the narrative. There’s too much injustice and it keeps derailing my thoughts into these poorly punctuated chasms. This is the flailing part I warned you about.

So, I didn’t tell anyone, but my wife, in her pregnancy, couldn’t help herself. She called her mom. Her mom appalled, called everyone she knew. Who knew of an open place? Who had friends who could help move? Who know someone who rents? In a college town, she was a valuable resource, but, of course there’s a housing shortage here and a surplus of studio apartments and roommate situations. An influx of students who have to stay inside. You might not see them, but they’re there behind the blinds and the sagging low-income housing façades. Was there any room inside anywhere?

There is! Frank—a pseudonym—has a lead. “Leads,” my wife told me the next day. “We have leads!” and, already she’d begun to find hope in this hopeless situationand her enthusiasm was catching. So, Frank, a friend of the family, knows, G. a farmer who lives near us. He’s renting. What or where isn’t certain, but we can arrange a showing. He and Frank are friends. Furthermore, Frank stops to talk to R. one afternoon. R. knows G. very well and R. declares that we are good people and that he’ll talk to G. at once and put in a good word. These are reticent farmer types, so it’s difficult not to feel somewhat vindicated when even they are taking umbrage at your predicament. I imagine them leaning over fences and shaking their heads maybe even eyeing their pitchforks.  

Monday, two days in. The clock is ticking now. 58 Days left. We went to see G.’s place. The appointment was for 4:30. The weather had clouded and dampened. A light drizzle was falling like something squeezed from a rag. I don’t know whether I’d expected anything, but my wife wanted to. It was clear from her rushed demeanor, she meant to make this work. This place was our ‘in’. With R. and Frank’s recommendations, if we liked it, we could take it. A peaceful transition, almost unnoticed in the grand scheme. It was even in the same general area.

We drove up at 4:30. And G. came out in farmer’s coveralls, carrying a bunch of hay. Here we were, Joseph and Mary being shown the stables. The house wasn’t separate from the main house, but built into the back. G. opened the door and rather than hurrying out of the drizzle into the shelter it afforded, we gingerly moved into the cold and the heavy smell of mold and mildew. It was a basement smell, a smell of damp neglect. The carpets had cigarettes burns and were faded and shaggy, very little light reached into the rooms. The bathroom had a massive water stain that had spread across the floor. The bedrooms were odd, on the bottom and the living room and kitchen were upstairs. Everywhere, it was sad, like a place you’d find yourself in your early twenties after a long party, the last to leave, hungover on Sunday morning. It was the kind of place you’d never be able to clean. It would always feel soiled. My wife and I looked at each other, nodded tacitly and thanked G. No, we weren’t this desperate yet.

We drove home in silence, the mold still swirling in our sinuses. It’d been so long.

“I’d forgotten about this,” I said.

“You mean how dirty these places can be? I know,” my wife shook her head.

“It was different before having kids. We could’ve lived there. We probably would’ve lived there.”

“Imagine brining a newborn to that place,” my wife said, and she began to cry softly, as if in imagining it, she’d done it somehow. I stared ahead, unable to say anything.

The other potential option—the only potential option— was a bright, sunny apartment near downtown. It had a balcony that faced the mountains and a beautiful open floor plan. When we watched the video walk-through I found myself longing to carry boxes up its capacious front stairs, to wrestle with my daughter on its clean carpets. To sip coffee early in the morning on that east-facing balcony while the apartment woke up. A modern TV dad.

But the rental company was notorious for their negligence and their demand for co-signers, based as they were in a college town they assumed everyone had parents who were doing well enough to foot the bill. A closer look at the ad revealed that the occupant would have to make three times the rent. Three times! How could they ask this? Who makes this much other than people who don’t live h—ah, of course. If it wasn’t a co-signer, it was for people coming from out-of-town, incomes from Silicon Valley on sabbatical. It hadn’t been more than a few days and already all the weight of the renter’s situation was crashing down on me: very few options, dirty places, high rents, cosigners and price gouging.

As luck would have it, my last check showed a project I’d been delayed on being paid for. The sum had come all at once. It was enough. If they only asked for a single check stub, I could prove I made the astronomical sum required to live in an apartment in a small town, six hours from any major city.

We worked quickly to get all the required paperwork in and the $30 application fee and then began casually calling.

“Just wanted to make sure there was nothing else you needed…”

“I believe my wife’s application needs to be attached to mine somehow…”

“A convenient time to come and see…”

While we were working this angle the calls continued to come in from all the sources my wife’s mom had put on the housing hunt. Nothing. Nothing. No one renting. One place in McKinleyville, maybe one in Eureka. Sure we could do it, but, we’re looking into this place…

The next Thursday, twelve days in. 48 Days left. The rental agency called back and set up a showing with my wife for Friday. I called them back, after taking a glance at my schedule. Could we do it now? I’m not sure if this made me sound desperate or serious. These days, it’s a fine line. The rental company agreed and, in an hour I was making my way over to see the place through a mid-afternoon fog of rain. I’d put on new shoes, just in case I needed to appear more professional than I was.

From my car, I watched the agency representative open the door and go up the steps. I looked down at my new shoes for assurance, pulled on my hood and ran into the rain and into the apartment, up the carpeted stairs into an oasis, even in its empty state. A clean open floor plan, a living room that breakfast bared into a kitchen and stretched out a little beyond its bounds in a somewhat futurist balcony. Even in the rain, the place was streaming light. No yard, no sound of the ocean at night and neighbors who might not appreciate the newborn we’d be bringing home soon, but all of this seemed secondary to the idea that no one would suddenly take up the idea that we were unwanted tenants and kick us out. The rental company had an interest in keeping tenants who were clean and paid on time. Following the rules here would mean we could stay. Goodbye insecurity. Goodbye yawning gulf beneath my feet. I ran my hands over the mottled walls and felt solidity. I clapped my foot down on the wooden floor and found purchase. I asked the representative what the next step was.

“Well, if you want it, we can set up your payment today.”

I tried not to beam too brightly. I’d been under the impression that there were others in line. But, of course, that’s always the impression, right? I drove home through the rain muttering ‘thank God’ to myself. 

…

But in the days to follow, during the transition, I grew homesick. I woke up before dawn listening to the distant cyclic roar of the ocean and imagined it replaced with the roar passing trucks and loading dock shutters being pulled up. I woke up and looked out the frosted windows at the expanse of lawn and imagined it replaced with a view into someone else’s living room window or down into a cyclone-fenced courtyard. I went out to look at the mountains and imagined them replaced with a row of impassive homes. Meanwhile, my wife began to dismantle the house we’d brought our firstborn home to. She took down the nursery decorations she’d put up before the room had been inhabited. She packed away the extra pots and pans. We sold the washer and dryer to the bed of a Toyota pickup that carted them away for a few bills. We emptied the place of any signs we’d ever lived there. We took down the record of our existence while we still slept with the memories. My dreams turned threatening. I was stalked by nameless things that could find me no matter where I hid. I was irresponsible and very late for important engagements. I started waking up early and lying in bed, listening to the house that would soon stand empty again. Since I’d moved from my parents’ at 18, I’d never lived anywhere so long and now perhaps the cycle of moving would begin again. My wife kept telling me that our equanimity had been disturbed. What had we intended, to rent this place forever? There was a time when we’d hoped we could buy it, but we’d given up on that idea ages ago. And now, back to an apartment and a year lease and what beyond that? The rent for the new place wasn’t really tenable. It would be a small drain on our savings, but a drain nonetheless. The fund for our future would begin to slip away. I looked out the window and listened to the house and felt those days ticking past. Only the clock had been reset. One year to go. 363 Days. And the earth began to grumble, waiting to turn in its sleep and split open—hopefully somewhere far away from here.

Prologue

I’d thought the worst had been in the initial confrontation and relating the news of what had happened, but, as it turned out, the actual move was quite jarring. We spent two days, before and after work, throwing things into unlabeled and mismatched boxes: the toaster with a pair of socks, pictures with the bathroom stuff. Even when we’d emptied the house of all our smaller possessions, there was furniture. The bed and the crib had to be dismantled. The mattresses carted out. I couldn’t get the computer to fit back in the factory box and, in a fit of pique, broke the huge white box down and shoved it into the trash, spilling cardboard and Styrofoam everywhere. My wife and I were continually bumping into each other and muttering while crossing from room to room. She’d begin a sentence: “Could you take…” and it would disappear with her into the bathroom. I’d shout ‘what?’ but of course, the answer would but swallowed in the same manner, as she spoke into the shower she was scrubbing. I’d have to drop what I was doing and go into the bathroom. And, of course, by then, I’d be annoyed.

I was much worse at this because I talked constantly, saying things that didn’t need to be said aloud.

“How’d this drawer get crumbs in it?” I’d ask myself.

“What?” My wife would ask from the other room.

“Well, this drawer, it’s got—”

“I can’t hear you.”

“Nevermind!”

It was the antithesis of communication. Something that perhaps would be worthy of study given that we were unable to convey a single piece of valuable information to each other all weekend.

There was also the landlord, skulking through the clipped phrases of this unintelligible conversation. He kept rearing up whenever we’d begin to feel a kind of assurance that everything might work out.

“Look,” I’d yell. “There’s another stain on the linoleum. Think he’ll notice?”

“God. He’s going to make us replace the whole floor. You know how anal he is!”

“But I looked it up, linoleum yellows when it’s not exposed to the sun. He’s the one who had that rug there, remember?”

“What you do with the—”

“WhAT?”

Friday, we got it all out, ever last stick of furniture. It was piled like an avalanche in the new place, ruining any sense of refuge the place had ever offered. Our home was now empty—only the smell remained to connect us to it and our new apartment was a mess of bags and boxes that looked like it would take weeks to untangle.

I set up the crib in my daughter’s new room and my wife put up the decorations and books so at least my daughter’s corner of the world would look like it had been successfully transported.

She’d spent the afternoon with her grandparents while we’d been dragging bookshelves and couches around. She hadn’t eaten well; she hadn’t napped and now, coming into this utterly disorganized apartment for the first time—her new home—she was overwhelmed and cranky. I think she may have also picked up on our nervous energy. Even the new carpet cleaning solution smell in the air couldn’t cover the sweat of nervous exhaustion that has an awful sweetness to it, like old beer in the sun.

My wife’s parents stuck around trying to help, but there was no dent to be made in the mess and beginning any kind of task unraveled into hundreds of other tasks. I tried to throw something away, but I didn’t know where the trash was. I went looking for it and found it was overflowing. I didn’t know where to take it out and crammed the piece of trash into the already overflowing basket—which was in the wrong place—feeling like an utter failure.

It seemed like giving my daughter a quick bath might be a way to welcome her to the new place. My mother-in-law offered but within minutes some of the worst screams I’ve ever heard my daughter make were issuing from the bathroom. I tried to put things in the kitchen away, but all the cabinets were in the wrong places and I knew I was making a mess. I tried putting the peanut butter in three different places while my daughter howled down the hall. I wanted so badly to comfort her, but I knew I’d go in there probably still holding the peanut butter jar, smelling of exhaustion sweat and when you’re upset, this is the last person you’d want trying to offer solace. I stayed in the kitchen, making a mess.

After my in-laws left, we calmed our daughter down and she and I played a game on the floor of her room, feeding her stuffed animals different pretend foods, until she seemed to be getting tired. I put her in her crib and lay on the floor singing looking up at the ceiling, using the song to calm myself. I could hear my wife out in the kitchen, rearranging all the stuff I’d made a mess with. I took assurance in the idea that she’d know what to do with the peanut butter I’d left, in utter defeat, on the counter.

When my daughter fell asleep, I decided to take a shower. We didn’t have any shower curtains, but I noticed I could angle the spray to the inside corner and sort of hunch down there without making too much mess. I balled myself in a standing fetal-position and tried to relax, but I could see the water was still splashing off on the floor and I was making another mess so I gave up on the idea. In front of the mirror I noticed my face wasn’t so exhausted as agitated. The expression on it bothered me, so I strode out into the hallway.

For a moment, there was a sense of peace to be savored. My daughter was sleeping. Her white noise machine was cascading with the sound of rain. It was also raining outside and I could hear the real sound eclipsing the recorded one. It was nice to be dry and inside during the rain, even if everything was a mess. I turned and went back into the bathroom to finish drying when a walloping, caterwauling sound came braying out of a hidden amplifier. An alarm, am alarm buried somewhere within the confines of the apartment was squalling, louder than a car alarm, it was like a burglar alarm on a bank.

“!WHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!# XAH!< XAH!< XAH!<XAH!”

Those unearthly characters are the only way to do justice to this sound and its violence and it was issuing from just outside my daughter’s room!

But what was it? What had set it off? Was there some kind of burglar alarm that we’d tripped? Had the apartment only now because aware of our interloping presence and decided to take some kind of action? I stood there like a moron, frantic, yet having no idea where to begin looking or what action to take. My wife, who’d been in bed, was, once again, a little more decisive.

“It’s the fire alarm!” She hissed and started waving a towel at the flashing alarm directly over my head. I grabbed a towel and joined in. We waved and slapped at the alarm until it quieted, belted out a last XAH<! and then fell back to its former disanimation.

We waited breathlessly outside my daughter’s room. No cry? No calls for mom? Worried, we both peeked in. She was still asleep. Earthquakes would’ve been noisier than that thing and she’d slept through it. A testament either to how exhausted she was or, perhaps proof that everything would work out because in unexpected ways, we are all rewarded for our attempts to save ourselves, no matter how fruitless they may seem.

Saturday, I woke up exhausted after the rushed move. Not so physically drained, but just mentally tired of dodging emotional bullets. Today marked the end. The day we would cut ties with the old place and I didn’t know what to anticipate.

When we walked into the old place for the last time, I found that it already held very little meaning for me. I think this is the value of stuff. Condemn possessions all you want, but after moving around for years and constantly selling what few items we’d acquired at moving sales, I think both my wife and I were grateful to realize that our stuff—the stuff we’d had in storage for years, the carpet we brought back from Georgia, the books I mailed from my folks’, pictures for the wall, hell, refrigerator magnets,  had absorbed some of the blow of separation. The fact that we were able to reconstruct my daughter’s room with her crib, carpet, dressed and stuffed animals was amazing. In the old days, we wouldn’t have been left with anything.

Now, looking around the empty house that had once been filled with this stuff and associated memories, I saw nothing more than a job to do. Drawers needed to be cleaned, floors needed to be scrubbed. We had to try to get those stains out of the linoleum. I knew the landlord (who by this point, through repetition of his name, we’d taken to calling ‘him’ or ‘he’, depending on the syntax) would be merciless and any, I mean any little discoloration or scuff would only prove to him that we had indeed been horrible tenants and that he was justified in giving us the boot. My hope was that with a little elbow grease we could leave on reasonably good terms. That he’d see the place and think—"hmm, they cared about it after all.” Maybe that would give him something to think about before evicting the next well-meaning tenets. Not likely, but at least it’d make me feel a little better.

My wife is nearly a compulsive cleaner and there are certainly well-intentioned and clean people who would’ve found themselves with a much bigger job than we did that day. Still, when you’re cleaning for a single audience and one who you expect to give everything the white glove test, you can’t be too thorough. Cleaning didn’t really feel better, it was anxiety inducing. We’d find little, almost microscopic things and wonder, “will he take this into account?”. We tried to talk to ourselves about normal wear after three years, but it wasn’t convincing. It felt like each thing we couldn’t make sparkle like new indicated some kind of shortcoming in our characters—or at least I felt this way, I hope my wife didn’t.

There was also this dulled feeling of indignation. I’d been trying to forgive the bastard because I hate carrying a grudge, but when I saw my pregnant wife bent over the toilet bowl, scrubbing like her life depended on it, I couldn’t help but to want to just call ‘him’ up and say “You know what? You’re so damn particular, do it yourself. We shouldn’t even be doing this. We should be waking up on this Saturday morning, drinking coffee in the living room and going outside to enjoy this beautiful day, not stuck in here breathing bleach fumes.” But then I reminded myself that we’d soon be ending our relationship and this was the last obligation we had. Better see it through.

After a few hours of scrubbing, I was surprised to realize we were finished. We still had a mountain of stuff to unpack and my daughter had spent another afternoon with her grandparents. I wanted to get back to her and to our new house and leave this unpleasant memory behind. By this time, we were standing in an empty house, the same one I’d come to when we’d first came to look at it more than three years in the past. All the life that had taken place within its walls had gone somewhere for me. Maybe it had gone to the new place, maybe it had gone into something intangible, something in my memory, but it wasn’t here anymore. Not so for my wife. The last thing to do was to call the landlord and do the ‘walkthrough’ that he’d requested. I hadn’t seen him since the day, two weeks ago, he’d given us the boot. I didn’t want my wife to be there for this ‘walkthrough’—which, by the way, isn’t anything you’re legally required to do—because I didn’t know what he was going to try to drag our noses through before losing us as whipping boys.

I took out a last load of trash and came out to find my wife crying next to the car. To her, it was still the house she’d brought her baby home to. I got that. To her, it had been a nest. Even if the tree hadn’t been hers, the twigs, branches, moss and whatever else goes into those things had been hers, or had at least been meticulously arranged by her. Probably up until that moment, it hadn’t seemed like anything anyone even had the power to take away and here it was, already gone.

I tired to comfort her, but I felt awkward because I felt like ‘he’ was watching from the house next door. I tried not to look up at the cold, impassive windows of his place that seemed to record everything that happened. I tried to offer assurance, but I just wanted her to go. I wanted to get this over with.

She drove off and I called him to say I was ready. I went back into the house and inadvertently walked into my daughter’s room. The physical aspects of the place may have not meant much to me anymore, but the smell of her room. It was her smell, or maybe the smell of the room and imparted something to her. So many nights I’d stumbled in here out of a soundsleep to find my little girl standing at the railing of her crib, holding astuffed animal in each hand, reaching up. How many nights had I bounced on the yoga ball in here singing the same songs over and over in a breathy, whispery voice waiting to see her eyes close? How many mornings had I come in here and heard “dada?” as she peeked over the top of the railing? And how many times had I, after getting up to go pee, come in here just to look down at her because, in my sleep, I had missed this tiny little girl, or had worried that the blankets might have gone over her head? I smelled all of that and stepped out into the living room as the door opened.

“Hey Jonny,” the landlord began, cordial enough. He seemed relieved. I think seeing the empty place gave him hope. Perhaps he thought we were going to try to hunker down and challenge him on the eviction.

I returned his greeting in a perfunctory way. I wanted to make sure I didn’t start thanking him or something.

Before he’d come over, my wife and I had been so worried that we’d gone from room to room taking pictures, just to document how nice the place was, how clean, worried that he’d try to make us buy a new house because the linoleum was faded or the carpet hairs didn’t stand up straight. I was ready for him to pick apart everything we’d done, but he strode from room to room oozing appreciation.

“Ok, you cleaned this. Looks good. And this, well no big deal. And there’s this, oh good that’s been cleaned, too.”

I followed him around, unsure what the hell my role was supposed to be. Curator of the museum of my life? A sort of museum in reverse that shows the absence of artifacts? I dully explained how I’d removed our impression everywhere.

“Yeah, we scrubbed here pretty hard. Took each drawer out. Oven cleaner, lots of it.” Mostly, I just stood in the corners of rooms and watched him poke around, feeling like a kid whose work was being inspected.

A brief note about that:

When I was a kid, we had carpeted stairs. My job had been to vacuum them with a little handvac. My dad, if he was home, would always demonstrate how the grit that had been tracked in would get kicked to the cervices of the stairs and how it had to be picked out with your fingers. The vacuum cleaner couldn’t get it. Even after I’d begun to do this picking, somehow it always looked like I hadn’t. No matter what I did. It seemed there was always a little grit in the crevices. The job always looked unfinished. What bothered me more than anything was the expectation that my efforts would be incomplete. My dad always seemed to expect that I wouldn’t pick crevices at all. Any remaining grit was an indication of this oversight. It was Sisyphean. The job frequently had to be redone. I didn’t mind doing it again, so much as the implication that I’d done it half-assed the first time. When you’ve genuinely tried and had your effort dismissed, this has got to be the most aggravating feeling in the world.

I was prepared to feel it in this moment and then, suddenly, as if transported back to the moment when we’d moved in, I found myself standing outside, talking in a casual way. It was done. Here were the keys.

I guess he wanted to get rid of us as much as we’d wanted to get rid of him. I knew in the morning he’d come in and probably redo the entire job, but I didn’t much care. Let him do what we wanted. It was his house now. I walked down the street, away from the open rural area where we’d lived when our daughter was born, where she’d learned to crawl and walk, where she’d said her first words. Where we’d become a family.

The wind was coming off the ocean and, with no trees to stop it, it brought the brisk temperature of the ocean floor with it. The sun was powerless to stop it, but gradually, as I walked away and reentered the bounds of the town with the houses and trees and other wind-blocking impediments, the wind died down and the sun warmed my back, the trees, the sidewalks. In a yard, there were daffodils, in another wild sweet pea. The world beyond the windy confines of the old house was growing and I was happy to be rejoining it.

I stopped to delete the landlord’s number from my phone so, when he called a few days later to inform me he’d be keeping our security deposit because the place hadn’t been cleaned to his satisfaction after all, I didn’t even know who was talking. Much less did I care what he was saying.