When I was young, my neighbors buried their house. I had been in the house before it was buried, because Tim Fisher and I had the same bus stop and we were kind of friends. We never had the same teachers, but we sat in seats on the bus across the aisle from each other and walked home together most days. Sometimes, he shared cookies his mom made, decadent saltine crackers soaked in butter and salt with chocolate on top and toffee bits sprinkled in. My mom never allowed treats like that in our house. I’m salivating thinking of them now.
Some days before the burial we’d stop in at the house, where he had video games I wasn’t normally allowed to play and other snacks like sodas I couldn’t always drink. We didn’t go crazy. I never even stayed for long, maybe an hour, because that was all I could spare before my mom would be home too. Sometimes Tim would ask me if I couldn’t stay longer, or if I could come over on the weekend instead so we could have more time for games. Once, he wanted to go outside with me and play catch with his dog. I told him I was afraid of the dog running away.
“He won’t run away even though we don’t have a fence,” Tim had said. “He’s good like that.” But that wasn’t the real problem, and Tim knew it, and I knew he knew it, and I didn’t even have the guts to tell him that. The real thing was my dad’s office window faced their backyard, and he would see what I’d been doing before Mom got home. The real thing was my parents didn’t want me over there, even though nobody had ever actually said so. I just knew I couldn’t ask them. In any case, we stayed in his house in the living room, played a video game for a little bit and then I went home like I usually did. We never did play with the dog outside. I can’t even remember the dog’s name.
I don’t know what set the Fisher family apart when they first moved in. They arrived later than many in the neighborhood, sometime the previous winter, so Tim was the new boy in school halfway through the year. That’s never easy. Tim’s father didn’t have a strange job. It was something suit-and-tie as far as I could tell, similar to many of the breadwinners of the neighborhood. His mother worked too; she was a hairdresser. Yet my father didn’t invite Mr. Fisher to golf with his business friends when he could help it; my mother didn’t include Mrs. Fisher in her and our other neighbor friend Renée’s Friday wine nights. If I asked to have Tim over, the answer was almost always no, even when Renée’s daughters were allowed. There were small differences I know bothered everyone, though as a child I couldn’t see why they mattered, and I hope I don’t think they matter now. So it just must have been something that set them apart at first that I couldn’t see which made everything afterward so harsh.
The school year ended, summer passed, and the Fishers’ house abruptly disappeared one day from their lot. Renee was the one who noticed; my mother got a call while I was eating a piece of toast.
“What do you mean, look out from the garage?” my mother was saying into the phone. “Hold on, I’m on the old landline.”
She put down the wired phone and I heard the garage opening a moment later. When she returned, she accidentally knocked the phone off the counter in her haste to get back. She hauled it up by the wire. “Renée, I’ll be right over.”
My mother hurried my breakfast and slipped my jacket and backpack on. It was the first day of a new school year, but the mornings were already beginning to cool. My mother marched me through dewy grass toward the Fishers’ yard, where of course the house was gone. I thought it looked the way a recently unsaddled horse might – relieved, unburdened.
Renée was there with her twin daughters, freckled girls who picked on one another when Renée wasn’t looking. “Rob left for work already, otherwise I’d send him in to investigate,” Renée said to my mother.
“What do you mean, in?” asked my mother. “Shouldn’t we just call the police?”
“Oh, that I already did,” said Renee. “I meant into that jungle they call a garden.”
My mother visibly relaxed at the news that the police were on their way. “Let me give my husband a ring. He can be here in five.”
But before she could even raise her phone to dial, I heard the creak of metal from between a clump of rosebushes, and from there flipped up a large metal hatch. There was a “Bye, Mom,” and a shouted “watch the hatch!” and then Tim was scrambling up and out, his backpack on, his mouth thin.
He approached us five. “Hi, Sean. Hi, Mrs. Thorne.” He was always so polite. He greeted Renée and her daughters the same way. “Why are you on our lawn?”
And then the police cars rounded the corner, lights flashing but not making a sound.
Before they moved underground, my mother often tried to avoid the Fishers but didn’t always succeed. Her feeling of social obligation sometimes got her in the end, especially when the Fishers were being what anyone else might see as kind. Once, Mrs. Fisher offered to my mother to cut my hair for free, the same day she was doing Tim’s.
I remember my mother was hesitant to accept. “We have a regular place, I wouldn’t want to disappoint them,” she had said, a weak attempt at graciousness that Tim’s mother all too easily overturned. Tim’s mom sat me and him next to each other in high chairs in her kitchen. The elegant sweep of the cape over me, and the snick of her scissors in my ear. When it was done, she held mirrors in front of both of us. I expected our haircuts to be exactly the same, but they weren’t.
My mother watched it done, and she chatted with Mrs. Fisher as she worked–about the weather, the neighborhood, their husbands, the challenges of raising kids. Tim and I were quiet. He didn’t fidget at all.
As we were leaving, my mom tried to pay Mrs. Fisher for the haircut anyway, which embarrassed me deeply. Mrs. Fisher waved it away. “It’s what neighbors do,” she said. My mother laughed and returned the cash to her purse, but she gripped my hand very tightly the whole way across our yard.
We had left their front door open, and when I looked back, I could see through into the kitchen. Mrs. Fisher was sweeping up all the hair, mine indistinguishable from Tim’s.
Aboveground, Mr. Fisher had a beautiful garden, the one Renee always said was a jungle. I saw him tending to it early in the mornings before school and every evening after he got home from work, even if it was dark out. There were large and fragrant roses, ranging from jewel tones to soft pastels. Forget-me-nots bloomed in a riotous layer beneath the rosebushes in the summer. They were choking some of the other plants and covering ground he was hoping to use for bulbs eventually, daffodils and hyacinths and tulips. I only know the names because Mr. Fisher once patiently explained them all to me. You have to plant daffodils in the fall if you want to see them in spring, he told me. They have to suffer the cold below to emerge when it’s time.
There was a vegetable garden, too, mostly roots. Carrots, beets, rutabagas, everything for a stew. Onions, garlic, shallots, alliums that made my eyes water. Watermelons that would swell into existence and just as soon disappear, turning up chopped up bloody on the Fishers’ kitchen counter in the weeks after. It wasn’t as contained as my parents and the other neighbors would’ve liked it to be; my mother once complained that gardening encouraged groundhogs and other burrowing vermin to wreck their own yards as well as theirs. The other neighbors mowed their lawns aggressively, and more than once I saw Renée call out to Mr. Fisher from atop her tractor mower, asking if he needed her to just carry on over the border between their properties and get it done for him. He used to laugh and wave her off.
Our own landscaping was lifeless compared to theirs. Pruned shrubs which reminded me of poodles trembling in the wake of a shave. No riotous flowers. Nothing I could eat, either, not even dandelions, since my mother had a gardener come by to pluck those away at the root. I didn’t know I could eat dandelions until Tim told me. But our landscaping looked a lot like Renée’s and everybody else’s, and that was the way my parents liked it.
After the house disappeared from above, I thought maybe the neighborhood would leave the Fishers alone for good, but the gossip only worsened. There were hushed conversations between my parents after they thought I had gone to bed. My mother and Renée sat with glasses of wine on the back patio and spoke, again, in hushed tones but this time punctuated by snorts of laughter. Though I hadn’t really been allowed to hang out at Tim’s house before, it had never been explicitly prohibited. Not until about two weeks after the house disappeared below the ground. In those couple of weeks, Tim had emerged every weekday and come to school on the bus with us as usual, but I hadn’t seen his parents even once. My mother told me she didn’t know if the house was structurally sound like this, so I wasn’t allowed over Tim’s house until she spoke to his mother about it. I just nodded.
Some weeks after the house had gone below Tim invited me to visit and play video games once again. I knew my mom was home that day, so I said no, but later. He didn’t smile like he used to, but he also said that would be okay. “The dog misses you,” he said. We didn’t have a pet of our own. I said I missed him too. I wish I could remember that sweet dog’s name.
A week after that, my mom left on a girls’ trip with Renée to the city, so when Tim asked again if I could visit the house, I agreed.
The first time I entered the buried house, all those years ago, I asked Tim if the hatch was heavy. He said no, there was a trick to it, and he showed me. It still made me feel strong to be able to open that door.
A ladder led down from the hatch into what was once the attic. Tim and I had played in there a couple of times one summer, but left because it got too hot, and most of the childhood debris and artifacts of his parents’ adulthood without him were still where they had always been. Instead of the fold-down ladder previously used to get to and from the attic, there was a set of stairs, built of hardware-store unfinished wood, but very sturdy. Tim said his mom had put them together mostly by herself, but he had helped.
We went down the normal stairs and into the foyer, which, though not grand, was once at least full of sunlight. It certainly wasn’t now. There were new blue-and-white striped curtains over the windows, so I couldn’t see what might lay beyond. Tim led us into the family room where his video games were. His dog was waiting for us on the couch there. We played like normal, and ate snacks in the kitchen like normal, and if it weren’t for the curtains, and the oppressive quiet, I would hardly have known how far away we were from normal. I asked Tim if we could go outside, by which I meant out what had once been the front or back doors, and he said we weren’t allowed to do that.
Tim’s parents weren’t home; I had asked and they were both still at work. When I asked if I could use the bathroom, he told me to use the upstairs one this time, since they hadn’t entirely reworked the plumbing of the downstairs one I usually used. So I went up.
The curtains over the window in that upstairs bathroom were of a fine and sheer lace, unfashionable according to my mom but still nice to me. I hesitated before them for only a second before pushing them aside.
I had expected reddish dirt to be pressed against the windows, packed the way it would have been if I were making mud pies in my own yard. But there wasn’t any dirt against the windows, aside from a few flecks – instead, I looked out onto the blackness of night. It was so obsidian-absolute I could see myself and the small bathroom reflected in the window. I checked the latch, which was too high for me to reach, and it seemed locked.
I put the toilet seat down so I could climb onto it and reach the latch, which turned with ease. I clambered back down and from there, pushed the window open.
An unexpected light breeze hit me from out of the void, smelling like a garden after rain. From atop the toilet again, I looked out the window, extending myself from it as far as I could go without falling. Below, faint light streamed from around kitchen curtains. Out there was only the darkness. I couldn’t tell if it was at all bounded by dirt walls or anything else. Around the base of the house was the beginnings of a garden of a different kind, blobby mushrooms and molds dotting the landscape, some glowing in faint blues and greens the further I squinted from the kitchen light. When I looked up, the darkness was complete enough that I couldn’t even see a dirt ceiling, though I knew it must be there somewhere.
When I went back downstairs, Tim had finished off all the chips and was laying on the carpet facing his dog. The dog was napping with abandon, his back legs one way and his paws the other. Tim was mimicking its ragdoll pose, holding himself still. I laid down on the carpet as well, and tried to arrange myself the same way.
“Tim,” I said. I was staring at the ceiling, where there was a light brown stain I’d never noticed before.
“Yeah?” he said. I couldn’t really see him from our poses on the carpet.
“Do you think you guys will come back up? Like when it’s warm again maybe?” It wasn’t the question I meant to ask, but it was what I ended up saying.
Tim’s dog snuffled in his sleep. When he shifted, his tail brushed my face. I was always surprised at how soft he was. Sometimes when I was over with Tim, I’d hug his dog and think about sinking into its fur until I was completely enveloped in it, and think more about how Tim could do that whenever he wanted. Sometimes, I very privately thought that Tim’s hair looked just as soft as the dog’s fur, and then I put that thought away. Sometimes, I held the dog a little too long and maybe Tim thought it was weird, but he never said anything about it, so I can’t be sure. Just sometimes, you know, you have trouble letting go.
“Maybe,” Tim said. “But I don’t really think so.”
We sat back up and played the game for a little while longer, and then I went home. If there was something else I could’ve or should’ve done then, I don’t want to know. What I had actually wanted to ask anyway was how, and why.
The clandestine trips to the buried house continued whenever I could get away. In fact, they were even more frequent than when the house had been aboveground. It felt safer to be with Tim in this other world, away from the sun and the prying eyes of neighbors, even if once there we couldn’t leave it.
I did miss helping his father out in the garden above, though. Once they made the move belowground, Tim’s father and mother completely abandoned their upkeep of their yard aside from making sure the hatch was accessible via a path to the street. Some of Tim’s father’s plants had grown wild and enormous in his absence, more of a jungle than ever; others had gone to seed and died. Renée grumbled about it to my mother more and more often over larger and larger glasses of wine. Sometimes, the twins and I made a game of counting their glasses. In the fall, we made piles of leaves for each glass, then fell into them. As fall turned to winter, we demanded cups of hot chocolate in the same volume, which were passed off to us as quickly as they could be made so my mother and Renée could get back to scheming.
Because I was sure it was scheming. They were trying to decide what could be done. The Fishers’ yard was now not just unruly, but a public eyesore. Surely, zoning laws were in place to prevent what they’d done with the house; it would only be a matter of reporting them. Our neighborhood didn’t have an HOA, a fact I heard them bemoaning, but there were workarounds.
My father was frustrated by what the Fishers had done, too, but mostly because it meant my mom was spending so much more time around Renée. That, and he now no longer saw Mr. or Mrs. Fisher coming and going from their house at all. He worked so hard, he said sometimes at dinner; and what was it the Fishers were doing these days?
I never did tell them that I saw the Fishers coming and going. Not above the ground, at any time of day, but in the house below. Out the front door and into the darkness. Into the garage shaking off red dirt. Mrs. Fisher was as kind as ever; Mr. Fisher was less talkative, and didn’t seem to have time for me and Tim. If I asked Tim where they’d been he always said he didn’t really know. He asked me if I knew where my own father went during the day, and I could honestly say I didn’t really know either. It was just his job. To which Tim would say, alright, then it’s the same.
One day, well into winter, Tim emerged from the hatch with his mother. She held his hand as they walked to the bus stop, where she met with myself and my own mother.
“Clare,” said Tim’s mom. “It’s been a while.”
“How have you been?” my mom asked. “How’s the house?” Her breath made clouds in the cold.
“It’s coming along,” Tim’s mom said. “Tim’s hair is getting a bit shaggy and I’m thinking about doing another haircut day. Would Sean like one as well?”
My mother stiffened. “Oh, I don’t want to impose again,” she said.
“It’s not an imposition,” Tim’s mom said. “You could come over and see what we’ve done with the place, if you’d like.”
I could see my mother processing, trying to figure out once again how to say no without saying no. I saw then that what she was feeling wasn’t just revulsion but fear, and how could either such base emotion not be exposed in this cold?
Before my mother could answer, Renée ran up with the twins, the bus arrived, and we all bundled onto it. I don’t know what the parents said once we were gone.
The winter went on and my hair grew longer and I never did get that haircut at Tim’s house, even though I was over there more often than my mother ever knew. I spent cold afternoon hours in the warmth of that cave-like living room, the stain in the ceiling growing larger, the dog growing softer and shaggier with us.
Then there was a week where Tim couldn’t have me over at all, and then one night there was a knock very late on the front door. I wasn’t supposed to be awake, but I watched from upstairs as my mother answered the door in her bathrobe to find Tim on the front steps. He asked if he could see me, and she said I was asleep and it could wait until tomorrow.
“It actually can’t wait until tomorrow,” Tim said. “I’ve just got something to tell him.”
“Tim,” my mother snapped. “Don’t you know when enough is enough?”
She told him to go home and closed that door and went back upstairs. I heard her murmuring to my father, and I was frozen there on the landing, wondering what I could possibly do. I thought about my mother’s revulsion and fear and realized despite everything that it was in me too, and as much as I might want to, as easy as it would be to go down the steps and fling open my door I wasn’t going to do that. Not tonight. Maybe in the morning it would be easier.
Except in the morning, Tim didn’t show up at the bus stop, and I spent all day chewing a pencil through class thinking about what I could’ve done. When I got home, instead of heading for my own house, I pushed through the tall dead grass of Tim’s yard and made it to the hatch. I tried to open it the way he showed me, but it wouldn’t move no matter how hard I pulled. It was locked. And I never saw Tim again.
Years on, my parents still live in the house in which I grew up. It looks just about the same as it did then. The roof needs retiling; the shutters have been repainted a darker green; the maple trees unbroken by storms and time are now taller. The lot next door, the one that used to belong to the Fishers, now has a different house above the ground. They too have a garden, though much tamer than Mr. Fisher’s private jungle. Its tallest plants are gathered around a particular patch of lawn. From the street you can’t see a thing, but from my parents’ bedroom window it’s easy to spot a small raised hill in an otherwise very flat neighborhood — the tumulus over the old hatch.
I told my husband about all this for the first time not too long ago. We were staying the night in my childhood bedroom, and I couldn’t sleep. With moonlight over his face, he said only that I might have been in love with Tim. And he was sorry. He touched my cheek where the moonlight sliced me too, then turned over and went still.
That same night, I dreamed I had been able to open the hatch all those years ago. In the dream, not a single light was on in the house, and it felt utterly empty of life. I checked Tim’s room, his parents’ bedroom, the living room and the garage, but there was no one and nothing around. In the kitchen there were a few hair clippings on the floor that Tim’s mother must have missed, and I picked them up and put them in my pocket.
In a fit of desperation, I fled out the front door after turning on the light in the foyer, making it into the darkness only as far as the light would go. I trampled his father’s mushroom garden and wished they’d form a glowing path to follow, but they were brown, inert, dim. I called Tim’s name into the dark, and that was all. There was nothing else to do.
I don’t know if the hatch was locked because they had retreated below for good or if they had moved away from our neighborhood entirely, with the door sealed behind them, and now roam the surface once again like the rest of us. If they stayed below, which I think they did, I picture them driving off into that dark unknown and finding other families who buried their homes to protect themselves from people like my parents and Renée. Every time I visit my parents, I resist the urge to exhume their home. I can’t do it yet, but I want to. I will. I’m still trying to excavate my own memories, to uncover Tim’s dog’s name, to find some clue, dusted by time, to how I could ever have let myself get left behind.
Annie Nazzaro is a writer from New Jersey now based in Chicago. She has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. When she’s not writing, she can be found at home playing video games or out at pub trivia with friends.