and for a long moment I was certain it was a person standing there in the dark.
Tall, still, up against the far wall of that basement, the shape of a woman, and my phone light shook in my hand. I near went back up those stairs and out to the truck. But I made myself go down the rest of the way and put the light full on it, and it was not a person. It was a carving. A statue of a woman, life-size, cut from wood, so real that in the dark it had a heartbeat.
She was standing with her hands folded, a little smile, hair pinned up the old-fashioned way. Whoever made her had spent years on her. You could see it in the face, the way you only get a face that right by knowing it by heart. And carved into the base, down at her feet, were the words that finally told me what I had walked into.
Lorna. So the house is never empty. So I am never alone.
I bought this house at a tax auction here in Youngstown, sight unseen, cash on the barrel, figuring to flip it and make good money. The basement was padlocked from the outside, and I had told myself somebody was keeping something in or keeping people out, the way your mind runs. It was neither. A man had locked his wife safe in the dark, and then lost the house out from under her.
It took me some asking to find him. His name is Harlan, and he is eighty-two, and he is in a rented room across town. Lorna was his wife of forty-five years, and when she passed, Harlan, who had carved duck decoys and mantel clocks his whole life, went down in that basement and carved her, full size, so he would not come home to an empty house. Her long sickness had eaten up their savings, and then the taxes came due, and Harlan lost the house. He had to leave her behind in the basement because a man of eighty-two cannot move a life-size oak woman by himself, and he had padlocked the door so no stranger would touch her, and he had been grieving her twice ever since.
I did not flip that house right away. First I rented a truck and got two of my nephews, and we brought Lorna up out of that basement into the daylight, careful as if she could bruise, and we drove her across town to Harlans rented room. When he opened the door and saw her, that old man put both hands over his mouth and could not speak.
She is in the corner of his little room now, by the window, where the morning gets her face. Harlan set a chair beside her. He talks to her, his daughter told me, the way he always did. Some folks would call that sad. I do not. I think a love that carves a whole woman out of oak so a house is never empty is about the finest thing a person can do, and I just happened to buy the house that was keeping her.