In a Hicktown

Her "new" house

“A snowy day in the month of May,” she muttered to herself. “How cliché.”





Her golden Corolla rolled into the small town she would now call home, at a very slow pace. She did not have snow tires for the freak blizzard conditions that greeted her. “Yuck,” she snarled, pushing her multi-colored brown based hair out of her face, fingers brushing against a long scar tucked against her hairline. “This is not what I had in mind, but that’s my fault, just buying something without looking at it first. Grandpa, if you were here, you could help me figure this one out.” She stopped her car in the middle of the street at that thought and laughed. “Hell, Grandpa, if you were here, you’d kick my ass back to New York. You’d be no help to me here. No one will be. I am truly on my own.”





Tears threatened her eyes, she blinked them away quickly. Looking around, she found her bearings and followed the street signs over a small bridge until she got to Seventh. She looked at her directions which told her to go past this last vestige of civilization and further onto a gravel road that looked like it went nowhere. Taking a deep breath, she pressed her gas pedal slowly so as not to skid the car and went for it.





She ended up at her new home fifteen minutes later. She was out in the country, about six minutes from town on better roads. She had been told there was a good gravel road under all the snow, and that a plow and grader took good care of it all year round. At least that was what the real estate person said. He had also said that the house was in livable condition and he would have it ready for her to move into when she got there. Stopping in her recently plowed driveway, she got out of her car, looked around. It was a large two story colonial type house, there were pillars holding up the porch and the porch was intact. The windows were intact and the doors were on their hinges. She went up the porch, holding her hands to her sides, peeked into the windows.  The real estate agent lied.





She went to the door, resigned to sleeping in the town for the night, dreading the questions small town folk were supposed to pester her with. The door opened for her but squeaked on the hinges. The house was very quiet. She imagined it to be like a being who was very wary of her and was not sure if she would pass its muster. Looking around, she was sure that the house was not going to pass her muster. She shut the door, looked at the floors. There was carpeting, old and stained, in the large living room and the hardwood in the kitchen and dining room needed fifty years sanded off it. The stair case had broken railings and there were random holes punched in the walls on the way up, as if someone had gone up the stairs in a fit of rage, taking it out on the timber and faded china blue wallpaper. She walked past the living room, saw a door under the staircase that reminded her of Harry Potter’s bedroom. She shuddered and walked further. There was a study or library just past the living room, a bathroom and then the kitchen. If you walked through the kitchen you ended up in the dining room then back at the front door and the stairs.





“Not much imagination here when you were built,” she said aloud, but softly. “Lots of wide open space with no one to fill it. Wonder why so much space was needed for just a few rooms.”





She went up the stairs, testing each step as she went up, very aware that should she fall down through one of the chances of getting help and medical attention were zero. The upstairs was just as utilitarian as the downstairs. There were five bedrooms, two on each side of the hall and one “master” bedroom at the very end of the hall. Each bedroom was about the size of a decent dorm room and the master was a grand twelve by twelve space. There was no bathroom upstairs, only the one bathroom downstairs with no tub, and a spigot out of the wall with a showerhead for a shower. She went back to the staircase with the missing railings and holey walls and sighed. She wanted a change. She got one. Gone were the massive balconies covered with flower boxes the hired men tended. Gone were the acres of lavish garden and orchard, gone were the armies of maids ruthlessly supervised by her housekeeper, the formidable Mrs. Pratt. Gone were the deadlines, the meetings, the need to make up stories to keep the her demanding audience satisfied. Gone was Alyssa O’Conner, recently orphaned director of triple X rated adult movies, survivor of a brutal mugging on her native New York streets.  Alyssa  Gallagher, owner of a run own house with a rundown barn in the middle of wheat fields plagued with freak blizzards was here to stay. Alyssa didn’t know if she was happy with it. But what else was new? She wasn’t happy with her life in general so what did it matter?








Rather than dwell on her life of crisis, she drew on her old habits of organization and ambition, puny as they had gotten, to decide what she was going to do next. It was first priority to find out if she could sleep overnight here in this mausoleum of a house or if she had to go back to the town before dark so she would have some place to sleep with heat, water and electricity. She needed food and she needed paper and pencil to start making a list. Suddenly the whole thing became just too much for her and she sat at the head of the staircase. What was it about this house? Why did she really move all the way across the country from a city she loved and a business that made her a very wealthy woman in a very short amount of time? Why?





Finally she stood. Her battered face showed plainly for just a moment from a shaft of light that shown though the dirt encrusted windows. She was a train wreck and the life she loved had betrayed her. She was not the woman she had grown up to be. She didn’t know who she was. She gazed behind her to the tiny bedrooms and laugh of a master bedroom. She would find out, she promised herself. She didn’t know what she would find, but she would find something.





“Food, water, sleep. That’s all I want,” she said aloud, starting down the stairs, being careful not to touch the staircase with its bird droppings and filth strewn liberally on it. She went to her car, slipping on the snow, and pulled out a suitcase and three bags of groceries. She put the groceries on the counter and dumped the suitcase at the bottom of the staircase. She went to the trunk, pulled out a large box, unopened, and after leaving that in the living room, she pulled out her gym bag with all her toiletries and another large bundle in a cloth laundry bag and hauled that up to the house as well. She went back, took her purse, Blackberry and its charger and closed up the car, locked it, then looked around. Who the hell was going to steal it? She was the first person to make tracks in the new snow, and it was nearly two in the afternoon for goodness sake. Defiantly she unlocked the car and went to the house for the final time. If anyone stole the thing, they were worse off then she and she didn’t care one way or the other right now if anyone took her car. She wasn’t going anywhere.





She went to the kitchen and looked around closely. There was a stove from the forties, a refrigerator from the seventies and a microwave from the nineties. There was an old radiant heater that suddenly clunked and started to work. Well, at least she would have some heat somewhere. She looked at the setting. The frugal real estate person had turned it on the lowest possible setting to keep the pipes from freezing but not enough for comfort. She turned the setting way up then put her hand on the metal, trying to draw the warmth into her body that had not felt warmth since before she was in the hospital.





“Knock that off, Lissa, you know that won’t do you any good. Focus.” Pushing the hospital thought away, she shook her head and started in on her groceries. She poured a can of chicken soup into a pack and go container and popped that into the microwave, which mercifully worked. She took a bag of apples and cherries, put them in wooden fruit bowl that was the only thing from her old house she brought with her, an heirloom, and set it on the counter. She put milk, eggs, bread, butter and frozen pizza in their places in the fridge and freezer. She folded the paper bag and went to the living room where she thought she had seen a fireplace.





There was wood already by the surprisingly nice and elegant fireplace. She would have to investigate where more wood was. Ignoring the stained carpet, she knelt on the heart and laid a fire, smiling at the memory of her private school chums in shock that she knew how to start a fire with wood and matches. She was ten, her life was golden and she was the light in her parent’s life. Her smile faded. How time can betray you, she thought bitterly. She lit the match and lit the paper bag in several places, as if trying to light the pain that memory caused on fire as well. Breathing deeply of the musty old-house air, she moved to the center of the room, looked around.





A decrepit piano hunkered alone in a corner of the room, an old fashioned rectangle that fit next to the wall. Accustomed to gleaming baby-grands in foyers of marble tile, she made a mental note to get the oppressive thing out of the house first thing. The windows in the entire building were going to have to be changed out to strong insulated windows that wouldn’t let the heat out in the winter and would help keep the house cool in the summer.  She had researched the land on the plane and decided that she would have a HEPPA air filtration system as well, to keep the fertilizer and dust out of the house so she had good breathing air at some point. The room was quite large, larger than many living rooms, and she imagined in it’s heyday, the house could entertain thirty people without blinking. Obviously the most important rooms were the living room where the hostess could entertain and the dining room where the guests could eat. Both were conveniently by the kitchen, possibly explaining the nearly circular floor plan.








Wrapping her coat securely around her, she went out the back door, by the stove, into the enclosed back porch. The plastic wrapped around it might not have been there for all the good it did keeping the wind and snow out. Ripped and gone entirely in some places, it was in as bad a shape as the rest of the house. The porch had a water tight roof however, and this protected a very large supply of firewood. Her concerns about heat were over the moment.


She took a large load in with her, then went back for two more, overflowing the wood box. She took the chicken soup from the microwave, buttered bread and took her simple dinner to the fire. She opened up the long box and put a camp cot together with the ease of someone experienced in outdoor living. She scrounged in the cloth laundry bag and took out a memory foam mattress rolled up, brown flannel sheets and an electric blanket and a thick down comforter. She made her bed, pulling a pillow from the nearly empty cloth bag and set it at the head.





The last thing in the bag was a teddy bear given to her by a nurse’s son while she was in the hospital. He was a dark haired and dark eyed boy with impossibly long lashes. He solemnly gave her the cuddly pink bear and told her he hoped that she would get better very soon. She couldn’t get over the fact that a small innocent could bear to look at her tortured face when she couldn’t even look in the mirror, yet he had and then he had given her a hug and kissed her cheek very gently, avoiding the bruises she still felt though they had long since faded.  It was the most precious thing that anyone had done for her.





Humbled to her knees, Alyssa chose not to overdose on the pills she had a friend bring her earlier that day, a plan that the wise nurse had suspected and sent the only practical antidote to suicide that she had: tender and innocent love. “How did you know,” Alyssa asked her once. The nurse only smiled and took her blood pressure, commenting on the weather and driving conditions. They never mentioned it again but Alyssa never forgot the favor that nurse had done her, quietly and without calling down psychiatrists with their tests and medications, giving her a choice other than killing herself to get through the next ten minutes. Shortly after that, Alyssa was discharged from the hospital to make a life of her own again. So she bought a house in the middle of nowhere and couldn’t for the life of her find any practical reason why except that a small boy with a pink teddy bear thought she was worth being alive.








She put wood on the fire and turned on her laptop. She hooked her cell phone to the computer and moved to the window where she already learned she had the best access, no small feat in this rural community where you had to put an extra antenna on your car to better your chances of cell reception. She checked her email, which showed nothing new. She hadn’t expected anything. She checked her bank balance, made arrangements for paying three bills. She looked up the address of the department of licensing to get a new driver’s license and what requirements she needed to do that. Out of habit she opened up the folder where she put her brainstorms for different movies, then closed it quickly and turned the laptop off. She didn’t need to go there, that was what had gotten her in trouble to begin with. Strange, she hadn’t felt the need to write in months. She put the laptop on newspaper as a buffer between it and the rug and stoked the fire. She was not ready to deal with that file folder on her lap top. Instead she cleared her meager mess from dinner and put the plastic container in the sink.





She sat on her cot, listening to the wind start to whip around the house, listening to it wail. She was glad for the fire, glad for something that was real to ground her. She was safe here, she thought. No one was going to find her. She had changed her name, took her grandmother’s maiden name for her own instead of her movie maker father’s stage name she had carried most of her life. There were no expectations of her here. There was nothing that anyone could say to make her feel bad about herself. There was no one to please and there was no one to care. There was no one to make fun of her face, lining up on the streets with camera’s to take pictures and print it in the tabloids, “Porn Princess Surgery Gone Wild!” or other clever sayings. She was away from the world that she loved, the world that nearly killed her.





She fell asleep listening to the wind, the fire crackling telling her all would be well.