Page 2 of Coram House

I get back in the car and drive.

The next couple hours are uneventful. No traffic, no blizzard. Just a road unfurling across hills with the occasional small town or lonely barn rising up on the side of the road. I keep an eye out for Camel’s Hump, amountain whose distinct shape was all over my internet searches about Vermont, but I don’t find it. I begin to understand how people enjoy driving.

As I top out on the next hill, I see the flash of the highway in the distance. Then a mint-green bridge carries me over a river and back into the present. A shopping plaza stuffed with giant budget stores—the siren song of stuff, cheap and plentiful. The pictures of Burlington looked charming enough. Lots of antique brick buildings with the wide expanses of Lake Champlain as a backdrop, but now I worry they were misleading. Maybe this is going to be six months of dumpy strip malls and Egg McMuffins. Even though I’d protested to Lola that Burlington was a city—the biggest city in Vermont!—I realize part of me has been expecting not the wilderness exactly, but at least something charming and Thoreau-adjacent.

I crest a hill crowned by a college campus. Historic buildings mix with a giant glass student center. In the rearview mirror, the distinct shape of Camel’s Hump appears as if carved on the horizon. It feels like an omen that my first glimpse of it should be unexpected and through a mirror, but what kind of omen, I’m not sure.

I miss the next turn and get lost in a maze of one-way streets until I finally end up on Archibald Street. Most buildings look like they could use a fresh coat of paint, but the neighborhood is busy. There’s a bakery with fogged-up windows, a corner store promising samosas, a mural of Muhammad Ali so big I could curl up inside his nostril. Then a tiny colonial graveyard tucked among a row of old Victorians, each house divided into many apartments, judging by the number of mailboxes.

My destination is the last house on the block, a rambling place painted acid-trip purple. I double-check the address, but my phone assures me I’ve arrived. I’m scrolling through my emails, trying to find the landlord’s number, when someone raps on the hood.

Outside, a white-haired man motions for me to roll down the window. “You must be Alex,” he says. “I’m Joe. I own the building. How was the drive?”

I scramble to get out while he launches into an explanation of snowplowing and parking. The sidewalk is dotted in patches of ice, but heseems more confident on his feet than I am, despite his age and unlaced snow boots.

“Well,” he says, holding out his arms to embrace that monstrous expanse of purple house, “this is it.”

I wrap my arms around myself, regretting I didn’t take the time to pull on my coat and hoping he’ll take the hint, but he seems to be waiting for me to respond.

“It’s very cheerful,” I say finally.

“Well, it’s gray around here six months of the year, so I thought, why not brighten up the neighborhood a bit.”

He delivers the line like he’s said it before.

“All right. Ready for the grand tour?”

He unlocks the front door and I follow him inside and up a steep set of stairs.

Joe’s tour covers the hot water heater, the fire escape, how to flip the breaker if the stove overloads the system.Old houseseems to be the explanation for everything. Finally, we stand in the kitchen, our boots melting onto the yellowed linoleum.

He nods at the doorway that leads into the living room. “I had an old table in the garage. Had my son clean it up and put it in there. Figured that would be better than a desk—more space and all—if you’re going to be writing a book in here.”

“Thanks,” I say. “That’s great.”

He pauses, waiting for me to go on, but I just smile politely. People are always curious when you say you’re a writer. Like it’s not a real job and you owe them a better explanation, but I’d long ago gotten over the impulse to fill the silence. Any silence. Besides, Alan Stedsan had instructed me to be cagey about our project.Don’t tell people what you’re working on, he’d said.Not until you have to.

“Anyways.”

Joe jangles a set of keys, then holds them out to me. The owl keychain looks at me with googly eyes.

“I usually swing by on Wednesdays,” he says. “To check up on things. But you have my number. Let me know if you need anything. And good luck with the history project.”

With that, he shuts the door behind him. Heavy footsteps thunk down the stairs and then the outside door slams shut.

I wander the rooms, taking inventory or maybe claiming them. The kitchen is clean and bare and smells of bleach and mildew. There’s an electric stove, a small fridge, and a window looking onto the asphalt lot behind the house. The living room is covered in gray carpet. The couch, with its wooden arms, reminds me of dorm furniture. Beside it stands a laminate coffee table and a small television. The promised table, which takes up most of the living room, is like something straight out of a farmhouse with its scarred pine top and turned legs. In Brooklyn, you’d pay thousands of dollars for that kind of perfectly distressed paint job. I run my finger over a line of tiny dents on the surface. Fork tines.

In the bedroom, the mattress is still wrapped in plastic. It’s the one thing I’d insisted on buying new after a decade terrified of bed bugs. The bedside lamp gives off a dim, yellow glow beneath a shade that’s far too large for its squat body. The one window looks out onto the street at a corner store and the cemetery. The mattress crinkles beneath me as I sit and take stock of the situation, searching for any hint of panic at my new reality.

I go through it like a checklist. Walked away from the apartment I’ve lived in for seven years, check. Gotten rid of most of my belongings, check. Moved to a town where I know no one. Agreed to ghostwrite a book with a complete stranger. Check, check, check.

But the panic isn’t there. I feel nothing but tired.

I’ll get my boxes out of the car, I decide. Find a pizza place that delivers. Buy a bottle of wine. Outside the window, a few white flakes drift from the sky. Then a few more. The promised storm, finally here.

The sky is inky black when I wake, the silence so deep, I think it must be the middle of the night. But no. My phone says it’s nearly six a.m. I untangle myself from the blankets and pad over icy floorboards to the window. The world is buried under a thick layer of snow. A plow scrapes somewhere in the distance, but the street below is untouched. The graveyard is painted in soft blue shadows.

My eyes feel like they’re full of sand, but I don’t go back to bed. Early morning has always been my favorite time. But I do need coffee.

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