If You Were Here

trot out the tears without due cause. Yet my eyes stay dry for some reason, so I surreptitiously snake my left hand up to the thin, sensitive skin beneath my armpit and I give it a solid pinch to see if that prompts the waterworks.

It doesn’t.

Damn it.

“Mia, stop that. You’re going to leave a mark.” He pulls my left hand out of my cardigan. “We’ll find our house. But this isn’t it. There’s too much to do. I mean, maybe renovating this place wouldn’t be impossible, but it seems like an awful lot for a couple of first-time home buyers to take on. I don’t want to put that kind of financial or emotional stress on us. I mean, we are too important, and I worry that the strain might mess up what we have. Does that make sense?”

Numbly, I nod. He presents a cogent case for his findings. I can’t argue with his logic. . and yet I don’t understand how this can be. I’m supposed to live here. I feel like this place is my destiny, the manifestation of all my childhood dreams. When my sister and I were home at night while Mom worked her second job to give us a better life, this is where I’d imagine I’d be once it got better. The universe told me so; all the signs pointed to it. Then to be so close and have it not work out? I don’t get it. What are the odds another John Hughes movie house is going to open up in our budget (stretched though it may be) in the next couple of weeks? Walking away from this place feels wrong all the way down to my soul.

Liz concludes our tour, saying, “I guess that’s everything. Why don’t we head up the back stairs, since we forgot to look at them last time?”

Just as we’re about to ascend, we pass one more door. “What’s in here?” Mac asks.

Bitterly, I respond, “Probably just another utility room full of ‘fire hazards’ and ‘red flags’ and all the other scary words that mean we don’t get to buy Jake Ryan’s house.”

He pushes open a heavy steel door to reveal. . nothing. We’re enveloped in darkness. “Let me see if I can find a light.” Mac feels the walls until he finds a switch, flips it, and illuminates a vast expanse of cement walls and wire shelves. There’s an exhaust system similar to the one over by the defunct hot tub, and in the far corner, there’s a low door with a dial on it. On the opposite side, I spy another junction box with a bunch of thick blue wiring coming out of it.

“What a perfect area for dry storage,” Liz remarks.

I’m not so sure about that. “Maybe. But I don’t like how there aren’t any windows. I feel kind of claustrophobic in here. Plus the door’s so heavy that I’d worry about getting trapped.”

Confession time? Being trapped is a real concern, because I kind of get stuck a lot. It’s not because I’m fat — regardless of what that jerk Vienna says. I’m actually in fine shape, especially when you consider my deep and abiding love of butter. But I’m a bit of a disaster magnet. Things just seem to happen to me, like once when I was vacuuming in front of this huge antique mirror in the bedroom. Somehow the cord must have caught and the whole thing came crashing down on me. Luckily it didn’t shatter, but I spent half an hour screaming for Mac to get it off me, and he couldn’t hear me over the roar of my Dyson.⁶³

If a locked door’s going to break, I guarantee you I’m on the inside of it. One time Ann Marie and I were staying in her brother’s loft in New York and the bathroom doorknob fell off while I was in the shower. Fortunately Ann Marie is the unholy love child of MacGyver and Martha Stewart, so she not only had me out in ten seconds flat using nothing but items from the fridge and spice rack, but she also whipped up a miracle hair serum that kept me from getting the frizzies the whole time we were in town.

“Anyway, are we ready to go?” I don’t want to leave, but I don’t really have a choice.

I guess this isn’t, in fact, going to be my house. Mac and I are a solid partnership precisely because we listen to each other, so I’m not going to insist we buy this house just because I have some weird tie to a couple of movies made a quarter of a century ago. We function well as a couple because we make our decisions together. We’re a team. I mean, separately we’re both one hundred percent, but when we band together, we’re one thousand percent. That’s why we’ve come so far from our humble postgrad beginnings. If one of us makes our mind up based on rational thought and solid arguments, the other has to respect that.

Liz and I turn to leave but Mac just stands there. “Mac? Mac? Honey? Are you coming?”

“This room. .” he says in a voice full of awe and wonder. “Do you know what this room is? This is a panic room.”

“A what?” Liz asks.

“Like that Jodie Foster movie?” I add.

“Right, exactly.” He begins rubbing his hands together, almost as though in anticipation. “You see, over there, someone installed a ventilation system and a pumping system, and that over there is enough CAT5 fiber to support a government-grade surveillance system. There’s a ton of room to lay in supplies, and with a foundation like this, someone could easily survive any disaster, up to and including nuclear war. And over there? That’s a gun safe big enough to house an actual arsenal. You know what? I’d like to see ORNESTEGA try to breach this perimeter! Ha! This is. .” He trails off again as he takes in every bit of the room.

He touches the walls with quiet reverence, and it’s the first item he’s come into contact with in this place that hasn’t cracked, splintered, or crumbled. “This is. .”

“This is what, honey?” I prompt.

“This is. . our new home.”

Chapter Six. WE DON’T NEED NO STINKING SECOND OPINIONS

“Tell me again why we’re doing this ourselves.”

I can’t see Mac while he says this, save for the very top of his head, as he’s hidden behind a mountain of moving boxes and flanked by huge rolls of Bubble Wrap and both dogs. “Do you know how much it costs to hire someone to pack for us?” I ask rhetorically. “We’re totally capable of doing it ourselves. Plus I’m not forking out all that money for some company to come in here and parcel up all my free-range drawer pretzels.”

What I don’t mention is that every minute I spend packing is a minute I don’t have to be working on my new book. Let’s just say the writing isn’t going so well. For some reason, the only scenes I can imagine go like this:

Mose: What are your plans after the harvest?

Amos: First, of course, I’ll thank the Lord for being with us during the long, hard autumn days. I’ll praise Him for keeping our backs strong and our hearts full. I’ll extol the glories of His bounty and the virtue of His grace and mercy. I’ll pray that our work proves fruitful and that the grain elevator will give us a fair price for all our toiling so that our families may enjoy a warm hearth and a full belly all winter long.

Mose: Aye, the Lord is good indeed. But what of after we give thanks?

Amos: My beloved Miriam has her sights set on a trip to the wicked city. She showed me some glossy photographs of what she calls her “heart’s desire.”

Mose: Surely she doesn’t yearn to give in to carnal pleasures? Let her not be Eve to your Adam and lead you down the sinful path!

Amos: Oh, but no. I wish that it were me who captured her attention so. She seeks not the glory of God, but the opportunity to visit a special barn for pottery. My forbidden love cannot stop speaking of her lofty desire for oil-rubbed bronze fixtures and granite-topped vanities for her en suite bathroom and…

And it kind of rambles on like that for a while.

The thing is, I’m not even sure the Amish go indoors.

I should probably Google that sometime.

Anyway, Mac and I hired packing help for a previous move and… pack they did. Did they perform beautifully in protecting our delicate furniture and fragile mirrors and flat-screen televisions during the rigors of a crosstown trek? Yes. Did we lose a single lightbulb or a one-dollar wineglass over the course of the move? No. The problem was that their precision extended to each item they touched. The packing ladies gathered every single spilled Spree and Jolly Rancher still floating around my desk drawers from my ’07 Christmas stocking, each dried out rollerball pen,