BY Amorak Huey
The first visitor looking for you came the day after I moved in. When the doorbell rang, I
was in the middle of painting the second bedroom — it had been blue, I wanted some kind of
eggshell, something bland, better for a home office. A short man with a neatly trimmed white
beard, dressed like an old-fashioned train conductor, blue uniform, gold buttons, little hat, the
full-on costume, said, “Oh” when he saw me. “Oh,” again. Then, “I am looking for Mary, but I
suppose she doesn’t live here anymore,” a precise formality in his voice, slightly too loud,
enunciating carefully, like an actor from the early days of movies.
“No, I just moved in,” I said.
The people I bought the house from were Tom and Russell, and they’d lived here a
decade.
He looked at me longer than was comfortable, as if coming to some judgment. “I don’t
suppose you’ll see her,” he said. “On the chance that you do, tell her I was here.”
“Your name?” I asked.
“Ah, she knows it,” he said over his shoulder, reaching the sidewalk. In that moment, I
had the sense that I might see him again, but I never did.
I’d been in the house maybe three months when some guy started yelling your name from
the front yard in the middle of the night. Took me a while to wake up enough to open the
window.
He was bundled in an army coat and wool hat even though it was early fall. Big
disheveled beard, boots, holes in the knees of his jeans.
“Mary?” he said again, looking up at me. He was backlit by the streetlamp, his face dark.
I imagined loneliness in his eyes.
“No! Wrong house! Go away before I call the cops.”
The next morning, after tossing and turning for a few hours then finally giving up and
starting the coffee pot, I remembered I’d previously heard your name from the conductor.
The next time was a whole family. A year later? Dressed as if for a Florida vacation in
1965 or a day at the country club, all Easter egg colors and polo shirts. Mom, dad, three kids —
two girls and a boy, towheaded and kind of bratty-looking, including the parents.
As soon as I answered the door, the mom said, “Oh, wrong house, so sorry.”
I said, having caught the pattern by this point, “Are you looking for Mary?”
She looked startled. “Is ... is she here?”
“No,” I said, feeling defensive. “This is my house now.”
I watched through the window as they went back to their station wagon with the wood
panel sides, the kids bored and the parents whispering furiously to each other.
A county sheriff’s deputy. I didn’t talk to him or even see him, but when I came home
from the grocery story his card was tucked into the storm door. He could have been there for me,
but I couldn’t think of a reason why, unless something had happened nearby and he was
canvassing for witnesses. I didn’t call the number, and he never came back.
I kept his card for a long time, under a magnet on the fridge, in case it turned out to be
important.
The dog came a bunch of times over the course of a year or so. Technically, I don’t know
for certain it was looking for you.
The first time, it was whining at the back door until I shooed it away. A mutt, but with
Australian shepherd or some similar breed in there. Long hair and lean like that, its face brown
and black and white. Floppy, fuzzy ears, its coat clean and brushed. Someone clearly had been
taking care of it.
I would go weeks without seeing it, and then it would be back, walking in circles in the
yard. Some mornings I would see it sleeping under a bush, but it would wake, shake itself off,
and trot away as soon as I opened the door.
I tried leaving out a food bowl, but the kibble remained untouched. Eventually it stopped
showing up. I was unreasonably sad about that.
I’m leaving out so many here, but I should mention the small child. An urchin straight
from, like, the cast of Oliver Twist. In my mind, he was wearing a newsboy cap and the memory
is all black and white, but of course that can’t be right.
His knock at the door was so faint I didn’t know what it was at first. When I finally did
answer, he was standing there all smudge-cheeked with his hat in his hand (again, the hat can’t
be real, it’s something I’ve invented).
“Is she here?” he said, the smallest voice you’ve ever heard.
“Mary?” I said. “No, I’m afraid she hasn’t been here in a long, long time.”
I moved out of that house two years ago. To a whole different state, actually. Job thing,
no other reason. But I’m back in that town sometimes and I like to drive by the house. It took me a long time to sell, and the eventual buyers were house-flippers planning to reno the kitchen and
baths and turn it back around for a quick profit, so I don’t have any idea who lives there now.
Next time I’m in town, I’ll try to get up the nerve to go to the door and find out. You
must be really old by now. I imagine white hair, a soft belly under a floral dress, probably an
apron, a kindly smile, the smell of cinnamon: the grandmother from a greeting card. I could be
wrong. Sometimes in my dreams of you there’s a flash in your eyes hinting at something hidden
behind them and I wake with my heart pounding.
Whoever you are, I imagine you opening the door as if you’d known all along I’d be
popping by for a visit. “Come right in, my dear,” you’ll say, and I will.
Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress, 2021). Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He also is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024).