The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai Page B

home.
    “It’s five weeks away,” Miriam said. “You have time to decide. Don’t say no just yet.”
    When they finally disbanded, Doug felt they should all put their hands in a heap and chant something, like a field hockey team. But he let it end with Miriam heading down the beach for pebbles and he and Leland trudging all the way back to town for coffee.
    “You jackass,” Leland said as they crossed the train tracks. “I can’t fucking believe you.”
    “What?”
    He shook his head in a rueful way that he must have stood in front of the mirror and practiced, a poet’s astonishment at the varied and exasperating world. “You rate a woman a six point five and go off about how crazy she is.”
    “Oh, she has her moments. I probably didn’t do her justice.”
    “That’s not what I meant. You’re in love with her.”
    Doug almost ran into the guardrail. So they were starting, the inevitable assumptions. He decided to wait long enough that his answer wouldn’t seem defensive, because it wasn’t, and he needed Leland to understand that.
    They were all the way across the street by the time he said, “I am sincerely not.”
    “I’m just saying, the only reason I can think to sell a lovely person like that so short is that maybe you’re fighting something.”
    “Or maybe she’s really crazy. You walk in when she’s working, and she looks like a homeless person. She’s got pencils behind both ears, and pins sticking from her mouth, hair frizzed out. Her pupils are fully dilated.”
    “Okay, sure. Sure. But let me ask you this: Why do you keep walking in when she’s working?”
    Doug considered punching Leland in the face, but decided against it.

26
    A s Zee sorted handouts before class, the talk grew shrill in the corner. “It was right there on the screen,” Meghan Dwyer said. A smart, sweet girl who could actually write. Everyone was turned toward her. “And I wouldn’t say it was underage stuff. But it was graphic. I know some people are picturing just, like, a topless woman leaning on a car. But this was, like—” she looked around, saw Zee immersed in her papers, and mouthed the words “— butt-fucking .”
    Zee wondered, in brief amazement, if it had allbeen true, if she’d simply set things in motion. But no, this was her own creation, her own monster. She had willed this into being.
    —
    Near the end of class, Dev Kapoor raised his hand, a look on his face like he was trying to fend off a headache. He said, “How come ghosts are always from the past? I mean, why are they never from the future?” The class snickered. Zee suspected his peers had a different impression of Dev than she’d gotten from his workmanlike papers.
    “Go on,” she said.
    “A ghost from the future would have a lot more at stake. Ghosts from the past are always in the Hamlet model, right? Like, remember me and avenge my death. But a ghost from the future is going to be desperate. If things don’t go right he won’t be born.”
    “Time doesn’t work that way,” Fran Leffler said, and then they all started in, telling him he’d watched too many movies.
    “Maybe I don’t mean a ghost. More like a spirit or a force. But anyway, my point is, a ghost from the future wouldn’t be scary, right?”
    Zee said, “So we’re afraid of the undead, but not the unborn.”
    Sarah Bonheur thrust her hand definitively into the air and didn’t wait to be called on. “ A Christmas Carol ,” she said. “By Charles Dickens. The ghost of Christmas Future is the scariest of all.”
    Dev said, “Oh. Right,” and collapsed back in his chair.
    But Antwon Haynes picked up the ball. “That’s an exception. Maybe it’s like what we’re afraid of isn’t death, but the past . No one walks by a crime scene the very next day and feels a ghost. It takes twenty years, right?”
    They were on to something, Zee thought. We aren’t haunted by the dead, but by the impossible reach of history. By how unknowable these others are to