Surreal Estate: A Short Story Read online

  Surreal Estate:

  A Short Story

  by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  Surreal Estate:

  A Short Story

  by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  Kiriki Press, P.O. Box 10858, Eugene, Oregon 97440 U.S.A.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters have been created for the sake of this story and are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 1993-2014 by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  "Surreal Estate" first appeared in Pulphouse the Hardback Magazine, Issue 12, Fall 1993

  Cover illustration © 2014 N.K. Hoffman

  eBook Design, Kiriki Press

  This eBook edition was produced by Kiriki Press

  Originally Printed in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Table of Contents

  Beginning

  About the Author

  Connect with the Author

  Other Nina Kiriki Hoffman Titles

  Surreal Estate

  Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  Wendy Renault was almost forty, and she had been living in apartments ever since she moved away from her parents at age nineteen. With her husband's life insurance money, she finally had a chance to buy a dream.

  Her dream home. A place where she could build her dream life, with her dream companion.

  But real-life details kept getting in the way.

  "Okay," said the whole house inspector, kneeling beside the house. He had a tobacco chaw tucked into his right cheek. He squinted up at her. Late afternoon sun shimmered in the beaded perspiration on his forehead. "This ain't a big thing, but you're gonna wanta put some caulking in around that hole drilled through the siding. Don't give pests any avenue into your structure here."

  Wendy scribbled on her steno pad, under the notes she had made about the v-shaped cracks in the foundation, the standing water under the house, and the untempered glass in the window next to the front door. She scratched at the sunburn she'd gotten the day before while strolling around the neighborhood to see if she might like living here, even though she and Malcolm had already pretty much fixed on this house. After closing her eyes for a second, she glanced anxiously at the siding. Inside she was wearing a big frown, though her face smiled. How many more pinholes could this guy punch in her dream? All the helium was escaping.

  "See where the mulch is mounded up here above the foundation line? An open invitation to pests," said the inspector. He spat nicotine on a weed. "You had the termite guys in here yet?"

  She shook her head, dreading it.

  "Tell ’em to check over here. Now, I'm not an expert on that stuff, I don't check for it. You might have your dampwood termites or worse, your subterranean termites, or your fungi, carpenter ants, wood-boring beetles…house could be riddled."

  She wished he wouldn't characterize all these pests as hers.

  "Another thing," he said, dusting off the knees of his pants as he rose.

  Wendy groaned inside. Then she wondered what these groans would do, bouncing around inside her with no outlet. Build up ricochet momentum and punch a hole in her?

  "You got your ghost turds. Mostly inside." He patted the wall.

  "What on Earth is a ghost turd?"

  "Evidence," he said. "Eck-toe-plas-mick evidence."

  "What?" asked Wendy, slightly panicked, keeping that inside too.

  "They're hard to examine, being kinda slippery," he said. "I did not discover if they was fresh or if the old lady is not much of a housekeeper and they've been around a while. But you got your ghost turds in a couple corners. Now I have not hit on a surefire method for exterminating ghosts. If there's much trouble, though, you give me a call. I got a couple guys I can refer you to."

  "Trouble?" said Wendy. She licked her upper lip.

  "Now some ghosts will respect your privacy and only haunt and such when you're out of the house, but others will make a nuisance of themselves, and you don't want that. Let me know how it goes. Here's my card. Call me if you have any questions."

  "But — ” she said.

  He smiled, spat some more juice, and nailed a dandelion. "I'll get that report to you by Friday, barring accidents. You want any of this work done, I can recommend independent contractors to you. Only if you want me to."

  "Thanks," she said, still smiling, and shook hands with him. She didn't wipe her hand off on her jeans until he had driven away in his truck.

  Malcolm was waiting in the hotel room for her, since she had left the locket there. It was so much easier for her to deal with real-life situations without him there to distract her that she had done it deliberately.

  She could tell he was going to kvetch. She sighed.

  He changed his mind. "So what happened?"

  "Fifteen more things wrong. Look at this list. You really, really want that place?"

  He looked surprised. "I thought you did."

  "Yesterday I did," she said, "enough to overlook that red plaid rug and those terrible fifties light fixtures. But today, what with the foundation cracks and the standing water and the pest super-highways…."

  Malcolm flickered a little, the way he did when he was feeling uncertain. "Wendy, the psychic climate in the house…."

  "Oh, yeah. That's another thing. He says there's a ghost there already."

  "What?" He solidified and stared at her.

  "Apparently ghosts leave debris the way termites do," she said, and grinned. After a moment she lost her grin. She looked around the floor, wondering if Malcolm had left any signs; but the carpet looked fairly clean except for a few cigarette burns near the bed.

  "I wish I had been there," he said wistfully.

  Of all his tactics, she hated wistful the most. He had never been wistful when he was alive, but it was something his mother had done quite well. The fact that he had adopted it since dying made her wonder what other unpleasant surprises might be in store in their relationship's future.

  "Shut up about it," she said.

  "Wendy!"

  "When you get the might-have-beens, you drive me crazy!"

  "When you get rude, you drive me — ” he began, then appeared to think better of it.

  "You want to spend the night in the car, parked someplace else?"

  He faded away, then reappeared, looking extra-solid. He frowned at her. "No. I hate it when you threaten me! That's no way to run a relationship."

  She was already cringing inside, because she knew he was right, but she didn't feel like apologizing. "Let's go to bed," she said gruffly.

  "I don't think we should let the sun set on this. Besides, you haven't had any dinner."

  "Quit being such a mommy." Her stomach was starting to relax as the tension drained out of her. Sometimes her moods would shift without her understanding why. Only since he died. Before he died, they could have kept the argument going all night, orchestrating dynamics from piano to fortissimo and back.

  "You have to eat." He shook his finger at her, looking stern, then put his hands behind his back.

  "Oh, yeah, rub my nose in it," she said, but she could feel the laughter bubbling up, inexplicably. "What are you doing?"

  "What could I be doing?" He gave her his heavenly angel smile, his hands still hidden.

  Her stomach growled and they bo
th stared at it.

  "What did I tell you?" he asked.

  "Okay, okay." She got the locket out of the secret compartment in her suitcase (it made him really nervous when she left it there — what if, he asked her, someone stole her luggage? Where would he be?) and fastened the chain around her neck, and they left together.

  #

  She got drive-through tacos. When he was with her, she ate in the car. Too many times they had started heated discussions in restaurants, and people had gotten upset with her for shouting at air.

  "Let's go to the house," he said.

  "Goofus! The little old lady still lives there. What's she going to think if she sees a car lurking out in front of the house? She'll call the police."

  "Park down the block. I want to investigate."

  "Suddenly you're a detective?"

  "Why not?"

  She shrugged, drove to the neighborhood where she might or might not live, depending, where Malcolm might or might not reside, depending, and parked half a block away from the house they had picked. The house was small and khaki green and had a "Sale Pending" sign in the kitchen window.

  "I do," Malcolm said, apropos of nothing. "I like this neighborhood. I know it seems like a suburban nightmare, just the kind of thing we sneered at in the sixties, but…."

  "Yeah, we're older now," said Wendy. "At least, some of us are." She slathered hot sauce on her soft flour taco and took a bite that dribbled taco juice down her chin.

  "My perspective has changed, or mellowed, or something. Hold the fort." He slid out through the door and strolled up the sidewalk toward the house.

  Wendy wiped her chin with a napkin and watched him. He paused in front of the house and glanced back at her, then walked up the path to the front door and vanished.

  She hoped this wasn't one of those times when he got visible. Every once in a while there was some sort of slip-up — or maybe it was supposed to happen; she and Malcolm weren't sure of the rules yet — where other people could see him. Sometimes, everybody else; sometimes only one other person. Wendy didn't know whether the house's owner would be susceptible. When she and Malcolm had gone through the house with the realtor, whom they had already established as Malcolm-oblivious, the little old lady had been out somewhere. This afternoon during the whole house inspection Wendy had finally met the owner, but Malcolm had been at the hotel.

  While they were driving away after their first visit to the house, the realtor explained that the owner hadn't wanted to part with the place, but her husband had died fairly recently and it was just too much for her to keep up alone, so she was moving to a retirement community. Wendy didn't say anything about her husband having died recently too. That wasn't how she liked to relate to people. It clarified for her the difference between generations, though: obviously this older woman had depended on her husband to take care of all kinds of things she didn't want to handle herself, whereas Wendy had tuned the car, Wendy had kept the checkbook, Malcolm had done the cooking — while he was alive. They were still trying to work out rules of matter manipulation to see if he could handle cooking now, but so far their experiments hadn't uncovered laws that would let him. He could move some things, but the ability came and went.

  If she had lost Malcolm completely, would she have had the strength to go out and buy a house, start a new phase in life? She wasn't sure. Some small part of her told her she might have locked herself up in the apartment with all the curtains closed, living on cheese and crackers and letting her awareness decay.

  It wasn't a side of herself she wanted to recognize. Good that it hadn't come to that.

  When she met the owner, Wendy liked her immediately. It seemed a shame to buy the house and take it away from her. It would be a mess if Wendy had to ask for a lot of repairs before she closed on the place.

  She had finished her tacos and Chico-fries (Tater Tots by any other name) and was feeling much more even-tempered (Malcolm had told her she got really jittery if she went too long without eating; since he didn't have a job anymore, he spent all his time observing her, and often told her things she wasn't interested in hearing, especially when they were true. It was an aspect of their new relationship she was just getting accustomed to) when a head and some shoulders stuck out through the wall of what she was already thinking of as Her House. The hair on the head was gray, not glossy black like Malcolm's. The face turned toward her, peering through the twilight. She covered her mouth with a paper napkin. Her throat was too tight for her to swallow the mouthful in her mouth.

  She was seeing a Ghost.

  He slipped out of the house and walked to the edge of the front lawn, staring at her with fierce eyes. She shrank back in her seat. She tried to swallow. Instead she coughed chewed Chico-fries into her napkin. The ghost shook his fist at her and yelled something, but she couldn't understand him.

  "Malcolm," she squeaked, just the way she had almost twenty years earlier when they went to one of the early showings of The Exorcist, and Linda Blair's head had turned all the way around. Back then, she had been able to bury her face in his shoulder, and feel his arm around her, even though she thought he was a — what was the word for nerd in those days? Square? She couldn't remember. It wasn't until ten years later that she had realized what a terrific human being he was and they had gotten married. But that friendly shoulder had helped plant the suspicion in her mind that he couldn't be all bad.

  Malcolm materialized beside her. "Drive," he said.

  She turned the key without depressing the clutch. What a racket! She couldn't seem to remember which foot did what, and her hands were shaking so badly she could hardly grip the steering wheel, but she managed to start the car and pull a wobbly U-turn. They rocketed up the street away from the house.

  "What happened?" she asked in a low voice when they were parked outside their hotel room.

  "I went…Wendy…I — ” He shook himself and said, "Buhuhuhuh." Then: "I went into the crawl space under the house, and there isn't any water there. I looked at the foundation. No cracks. It didn't make sense that the lady would keep the yard in such great shape and let the house fall apart. I went through the wood, and I didn't see a single termite. I checked the insulation in the roof, and it's not even asbestos, it's foam. The inspector was wrong about all those things, Wendy. The house is perfect.

  "So I figured, no problem. We'll move in. I wanted to find a good place for storing the locket. I walked into the family room, and old lady was sitting there reading a play, and he was looking over her shoulder. 'Anna,' he said, 'you can't do this to me. We swore we'd end our days in this house. I built it for you.' She just turned a page without paying any attention. 'Anna!' he yelled. Then he looked up and saw me. He screamed, 'Get out, you damned home wrecker!' His eyes started glowing red and he got bigger and, and, I don't know, I felt like I had a heart again and it was going to burst." He was quiet for a minute. "I was ready to run a sixty-yard dash in five seconds, but I didn't know which way to jump.

  "Then he went raging out of the house and I had time to get calm again. I thought, how awful for him that she doesn't even know he's there."

  She looked at him and he looked at her. She leaned closer. After dark, he got solid enough to hold her. He slipped his arm around her, easing closer than he would have been able to when he was alive; he could go through the seat back and still hold her tightly. It was something they had been practicing. "Then," murmured Malcolm, "I heard you squeak."

  #

  The realtor didn't want Wendy speaking with the owner directly. It was the part of the negotiation that bugged Wendy the most, yet she understood that realtors didn't want a buyer and a seller to work out their own deal and cut the realtors out of their percentage. After all, the realtor had taken Wendy to fifteen other houses. She was working for her money.

  Summer twilight was finally seeping into night. Wendy clutched Malcolm's locket in her hand and rang the doorbell.

  The old man's face, features twisted into a gargoyle's grimace of anger,
thrust out through the door. Wendy stepped back and fell off the edge of the stoop, but Malcolm steadied her from behind, his hands on her shoulders.

  The door opened, pulling back through the old man, and Anna Jericho, the owner, peered out through the screen door. "Hello?" she said.

  "Uh, hi," said Wendy, straightening and tugging the front of her dress down — her half-fall had hiked it up.

  "May I help you?" Anna said.

  "Well, uh — I'm the buyer, Mrs. Jericho. We met this morning.

  "I know that, dear."

  "And I just wanted to — to — ” Wendy glanced over her shoulder. The neighbors weren't all staring out their windows, but some were watching. "May I come in?"

  "All right." Anna unlatched the screen door and held it open.

  Her husband stood in the doorway, his hands up in fists before him. "You may NOT come in! No, keep your distance, you evil young woman!"

  Wendy took a deep breath and walked through him.

  Other than a faint fizzing on her skin, the experience left her none the worse. She thought she might even be making up the fizzing because she had expected to feel something. She glanced behind her, and found the old man staring at her in horror, clutching his chest and breathing loudly with his mouth open. Psychological, no doubt, since his heart and lungs weren't sustaining him any longer. She offered him a smile, but that just made him madder.

  "Come into the family room, dear," Anna said.

  They settled on the red sofa, which sat on the red plaid rug. "My husband was partial to red," said Anna.

  "I want to talk to you about him," Wendy said. "Are you sure you want to sell the house?"

  "Yes. It's just too much for me to keep up. The garden takes a lot of looking after…well, I have a good yardman for that, but he needs direction. And there's so much space without Lefteris to fill it, and so many things to keep clean, and I don't even want to own them anymore. I'm sure Lefteris would want me to take care of myself."

  "Well, I'm not," Wendy said. "He doesn't want you to sell the house. He says he built this house for you, and you swore you'd end your days here."