Women Who Stay, 21

Chapter 1 ... Chapter 20

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Mark made us tea in the mansion's kitchen. The dark-wooded room felt like a time capsule to the '80s, vintage bordering on kitsch.

"Is this all original?"

"Recreation. About as close as I could get after the gut renovation."

"Tell me more about that," I urged him, wrapping my chilly hands around the warm porcelain mug.

He whistled. "Where to start? Well, the place was an active crime scene for the first few months I had ownership. And that wasn't because of what they found, not really, but what they had to get through to find it. You heard he was a hoarder, right?" I nodded. "That word hardly covers the state the house was in. Imagine, if you will, we're sitting here in this same kitchen twenty years ago.

"But we can't look one another in the eye. There's a pile of, oh, old magazines, and sets of china, and trivets and pot holders and lawn statuary, and all sorts of other junk stacked to the ceiling. And to get to the sink, which somehow still works only because Janie's proper about paying bills, we have to shuffle very carefully through a narrow passageway, carved through more boxes and bags and piles.

"Now imagine: this whole house is the same. This floor, and the two above it, are all the same. All warrens carved through mountains of crap. And I say crap quite literally because sometime in the late '80s a family of raccoons moved into the attic and never left. They nested and bred for nearly a decade, never evicted, shitting and pissing all over. When I first saw the place, the ceiling had caved in over multiple bedrooms. Soaked to the studs in excrement."

"No wonder Janie took the kids away so frequently," I said.

"Eh, I got the sense the magnitude of the problem grew once she moved out. Antonio had a whole six years without her to develop his hoard."

"That was around 1990, correct?"

"Far as I know. You see, when she came over, we didn't talk much about Antonio. Not like we are now. She'd get mad if I said his name, so I found myself avoiding it. Asking sideways questions about her years here."

"Oh, believe me, I know the feeling. So what did you talk about?"

"She loved seeing the progress I made." He gave a wry chuckle. "Loved even more telling me how she'd do it all differently. She had a real appreciation for vintage pieces. She was always telling me 'Oh, no, this armoire is all wrong. It's Pennsylvanian Dutch, and the bed set is Stickley. What an eyesore!'

"On the rare occasion I got something right in her eyes, I felt like it made her really happy. Don't know if she felt that, much. Maybe ever. But seeing her nod, firmly, just so --" he mimicked the action, "gave me a real sense of doing something right. For her, for the house, for myself."

"Do you feel happy here?" I asked.

"Oh, very. Some people get bad vibes -- still waiting on you to let me know when that hits you, by the way. I have a feeling it will. But I'm happy as a clam here. I think old houses, especially the haunted ones, just want to be loved. And I love this house. I love fixing the things Antonio broke. Living the life of a wealthy, gay man in peace here makes me feel like I'm closing a horrible circle.

"But I'll confess, I still don't like to use the pool. There, I do feel freaked."

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Read on to Chapter 22