The Miscalculation
1976 - 2007
Four
SO MUCH OF THIS STORY is the setting, and it’s important to understand where and what exactly happened to that setting to fully appreciate what had happened, and what was happening, to Taylor.
The little house by the big front yard had been in the family since the Hansons first settled on the farmland in the 1700s. When someone in the family recounted the story of how the Hanson Farms were once filled with thriving cash crops, they often over-emphasized the jade green of the grass, the gentle slope of the front yard, the hearty chickens that came from what was now a decidedly gnarly wooded area. It should be noted, too, that there was a significant effort made to omit any mention of the people who worked on the farm back then, and the inhumane circumstances that kept them there.
Walker had heard the story hundreds of times growing up; family members older than sin who decorated their houses with ceramic avian figurines and elaborate gold-flecked wallpaper would always tell it at holiday functions when there were enough children to sit around their feet and listen wide-eyed and hungry. When he was very young, Walker spent years dreaming about that little house by the big front yard: farming it, tending it, growing tobacco the size giants on it. The more he saw faded sepia toned photographs, the more he imagined one day he’d be that man in the overalls on the tractor.
By the time the estate was signed over to his name a decade later, the situation had changed.
It had been a combination wedding and parting gift from his own father, a burly, leather-faced, angry man who’d worked too many days in his life and failed to love anything except the tobacco he raised. Walker did not mourn his father’s death as the rest of his family had. His sorrow was the quiet, undetectable type, the kind that often left other’s wondering if you had any sort of soul at all.
After he had buried Abraham on that breezy November afternoon, Walker made love to Diana for the first time on the floor of his father’s empty living room.
He’d held his breath at first. A silhouette of her body was perceptible only by the low glimmer from the oil lamp. Minutes before she had lain across the wool blanket and pulled him down next to her. The space had become foreign in those moments, the familiar artifacts removed. There was only the flickering lamp, the splintering floor, the nettling blanket. There was only skin left chapped and dry with the mid-November chill.
It was necessary that he run fingers run along her bone structure, the skin, the lips, if for no other reason than to know the shape of her face. If only to be closer to her, to feel that life underneath. But in times like those when all she was to him was impenetrable flesh on a graying floor, he was restricted to visual worship alone.
She was art, not woman, and he studied her so.
For years before he had been curiously longing to touch a much less risqué part of her; he would have been pleased with an elbow or a foot. Maybe even a finger or two. In the few nights leading up to the funeral, Walker had dreamt of that elbow specifically, casually lying beside him on a queen-sized bed, provocatively eyeing him from beneath the sheets while he constructed some subtle way to get close to her skin. And now she was there, they were there, the newlyweds with cheap gold rings around their fingers. He had wanted to experience every painful, erotic inch of her body in slow motion. But the breast had hit him first.
He had been tracing the movement of her tongue against her teeth and the way her unimpressively thin lips curved around the sighs that she exhaled just before she'd torn off her shirt and the alarm in his head had flashed. Originally, he imagined that her unveiling, that their consummation, would have been a gradual process involving a calendar full of pre-planned moments, of teasers with knees and backs that could only exacerbate the pure hunger he had for her flesh. She had held out so long before their marriage, he thought he’d have to wait forever. He had planned on disposable conversations, a litany of questions posed make her think that he was interested in her and not that curve in her collarbone and the way it caught various degrees of darkness. He had not, on the contrary, planned to take her on the naked floors of the house his dead father had built only hours after putting him six feet under.
But this was all trivial because her shirt had been tossed into the corner and her breasts were hovering dangerously close to his face.
Her touch, the trajectory of her body would spark an atomic fusion of embryonic proportions, one that would create the first child she does not want. Walker, however, was not concerned with such sensitive probabilities. As he tugged on the tongue of her belt, the stubborn lips of her zipper, with every metal tooth that pried open, he began to come apart. The heart-racing present took precedence, notch by notch. His existence lay in the inaudible promise made from those metallic teeth. There were only bare chests, uneven breath, and the snag in the blanket as he pushed himself into her.
There was only touch.
With every thrust, he buried himself between the folds of her skin, the sprits of sweat between her thighs. With every inch he disappeared.
When it is over, he would live for that touch, the tangible reassurance that he existed and that it was good. When it is over, he will have forgotten about the elbow and the teeth and the tongue; he will no longer be concerned with the inherited house or the wife or the life growing within. Walker will do nothing about the gestating child, the name Diana will not give it, or the self-inflicted procedure that will terminate it. He will not question what he sees; he will not stop her from taking the shovel and the shoebox to the maple tree, elbow deep in dirt. He will not stop her from burying the first Hanson child just as he will not stop her from driving the second away.
There would only be touch.
As his entire existence dissolved to that of tangible reality, Walker Hanson simply performed as he had been fated to do, as they all would eventually, to find a way to hide that deepening emptiness that would plague them for so long.
The sins of the fathers were destined to be repeated.
Afterward, when she was breathing heavily and a bead of sweat slipped down the side of his face, he turned away from Diana and wept for the only time with the fury of a man who had finally lost everything.
The following year, Walker erected a tree house in the front yard. They’d had no children at the time to fill the house, and Diana refused to believe that it was Walker’s memorial, that rickety shack, but he had insisted. He couldn’t let the site go unmarked, his child forgotten.
Taylor HAD SUSPECTED for quite some time that the house was haunted – not in that menacing ghost sort of way, but in that inexplicable-sounds-in-the-middle-of-the-night and you-just-know-because-you-feel-it sort of way. This kind of logic had fared him well in the past when it came to other speculative matters such as bullshitting and multiple-choice test-taking, so he assumed it applied in this situation too.
Stuck in the middle of what used to be a thriving tobacco farm, the Hanson house was the ideal setting for other-wordly visitors. Taylor knew for a fact that ghosts and other such enigmatic presences lingered on these types of properties, and on several occasions he had sworn, sworn to the point of feeling the skin on the back of his neck crawl and shivering and telling his mother – who always waved off the possibility – that they were being haunted by a friendly and potentially bored ghost. Diana’s dismissal of Taylor’s theories was nothing new, and this conversation about the ghosts that either were or were not snooping around had been going on for what Diana felt like was a little too long. The fact that Taylor wouldn’t let it go, either, was another issue entirely.
The exchange between Taylor and Diana went a little something like:
“Did you guys hear the ghost again last night?”
“It’s an old house, Taylor. Old houses make sounds.”
“Yeah, ‘cause they’re haunted!” His first defense was to pull out the black and white composition notebook where he kept a record of all the strange noises around the house. The list itself left much to be desired, and whenever he brought it out as evidentiary support, Diana was forced to turn her head and pretend that her oldest son was not really serious.
“The only thing that’s haunting this house is your grandmother,” Walker would often reply.
Berta had recently taken up residence in the guest bedroom, but within a matter of days, she had managed to wreck what little routine and peace there was in the Hanson house. Most mornings had become a balancing act between hospitality and decency. Having decided that the manner in which her body was aging was a metamorphosis, not atrophy, Berta had fallen into the habit of lurking around with an open bathrobe and a flask of bourbon not too far away. No one was willing to tell her she should wrap it up. Taylor, who had recently mummified a chicken in science class, was fascinated by the way in which the human body deteriorated even while the person in that body was still very much alive and could not tear his eyes away from his grandmother’s frame.
“Haven’t you heard the tapping on the wall in the middle of the night? It’s a really deliberate tapping, you know, like somebody is trying to send us all a message or two? I swear to God there’s something there! Dad, didn’t you say a few days ago that you’d heard something in the garage? I bet it was Donovan.”
“Heavens, Walker, he’s gone and named the thing.”
“I can hear you,” Taylor would interrupt. “I’m standing right here.”
To which Diana would face her son and simply say, “I’m worried about you.”
It was clear they were evading the question. What was unclear was why. Taylor realized early on that whenever a half-assed cover-up attempt was in the midst, there was certainly truth in the matter and that truth, he knew, that truth was that their house was haunted by not just one friendly ghost, but a host of them that lived in various parts of the house and he, Taylor Hanson, age 12, would find them. What he would do after he made contact with the ghosts, he was unsure, but he fancied himself quite talented at winging it.
And so Preteen Basement Ghost Hunters was born.
“You’re calling it what?”
“Preteen Basement Ghost Hunters. I think it’s a perfectly fine name. What’s wrong with the name?”
Taylor’s friend William glanced at a poorly constructed card and then back at Taylor. “I mean, it’s just so straight-forward.”
Within a matter of days, Taylor designed and printed grainy, low-budget business cards on his father’s perforated fax paper. Upon handling the flimsy card, William grew visibly concerned for the future of the company.
“This is a joke, you have to at least get decent looking business cards. No one’s going to take you seriously with these things. My dad’s got a laminating machine in his office. We can break in and use that and his heavy-duty copier.”
“Do you think 500 cards will be enough?”
By the end of the week, Preteen Basement Ghost Hunters employed four neighborhood boys. Among them, they had the necessary sleeping bags, lanterns, disposable cameras, comic books and enough beef jerky to supply a small army of skinny boys for several weeks. William’s mother had recently discovered the Sam’s Club in the next town over and had instantly grown addicted to the pleasure of saving money by purchasing all things in mass quantity: toilet paper, hand soap, panty hose, mini toastable pizzas folded into the shape of pillows. Margaret was the only one of her friends with the coveted Sam’s Club membership, and so she took it upon herself to arrange field trips with the mothers of all her son’s friends. Diana never bought anything at Sam’s, arguing that buying in such excess was wasteful and indulgent, but that never stopped her from eating anything out of Margaret’s bag on the ride home.
For the inaugural hunt, the boys set up their sleeping bags in a circle by the washer/dryer combo. In the center rested the radio, tape recorder, thermometer, and beef jerky in a red cooler that would have been used for picnics if the Hansons were into that sort of thing – and they were definitely not into that sort of thing. Their disposable cameras hung from homemade lanyards around their neck.
When Taylor turned off the lights, they sat quietly, back to back, waiting for signs of a haunting. After several minutes, however, William began to grow impatient.
“How will we know, exactly?” he asked. “This is something we should have covered in the meeting before hand, Taylor, how will we know?”
William was always a little jumpy, a fact that made Taylor and his mother quite uncomfortable. But for all his neurotic flaws, William had the Hunters’ best interest at hand.
“You’ll just know, okay?” Taylor said. “It’s been five minutes, man, this could take hours. Days. Months.”
William wasn’t satisfied with that answer, and rustled his things in the darkness. “Should we say something to them, the ghosts?”
“I mean… you can say hi if you want.”
“Will you guys just shut up?” Christopher, who was between them, snapped.
“Look,” Taylor said. “We’re all a little cranky and a little tired. Just hang in there. We might not see anything tonight, but that doesn’t mean that nothing’s here, okay? Be patient and eat some beef jerky.”
They were silent for the rest of the evening. Taylor had managed to stay awake all night, snapping photos and eagerly checking the thermometer, but by sunrise it was clear that no ghosts had come to visit and in the absence of action, everyone else had passed out. William was sucking his thumb.
“Team,” Taylor said, kicking William gently so he’d wake up, “We need a new approach.”
William wiped his thumb on his shirt and blushed. “Uh, yeah that’s an understatement.”
“I don’t need your lip, William,” Taylor snapped. “It’s pretty clear the ghosts in my basement are being stubborn. They know we’re looking for them and hey don’t want to be found just yet—“
“Yeah, question,” Christopher raised his hand, “Yeah, what are we doing with the ghosts, exactly, when we find them?”
“We’ll wing it,” Taylor shrugged, “We’re not about trapping or eradicating ghosts, here, we just want to find them and see what they’re up to. And anyway, I think we need to expand. We’ve got these business cards, we’ve passed them out. I think it may be time to do some pro-bono work, you know? Prove our worth.”
So the boys suited up in cargo pants and black t-shirts with their backpacks, fanny packs, a pair of night-vision goggles, and the red cooler and marched half a mile down Old Highway 86 to the lot next door. Months earlier, William’s parents had purchased the lot and for arguably too long, the house had been under construction. Taylor was convinced that at night it was a superbly creepy and ghost-attracting lot, what with the tobacco crops and the unused farm equipment that surrounded it. William’s mother had agreed to pay them with pizza and praise, despite Taylor’s insistence that they were doing this one for free.
They set up camp in what would eventually be the living room, though at the moment it was just a hardwood floor and some erect two-by-fours. The first night in William’s lot was balmy, and the boys lay awake covered in a dewy sweat while they tinkered with radio buttons and stared at one another through night vision goggles.
“You look like a zombie,” Christopher told William. “An alien zombie with giant nostrils.”
“Shut up, my nostrils are not big.”
“They’re so big you could practically stuff them with ping pong balls – Taylor, check this out!”
It was clear after several evenings of similar charades – comparing body parts and pissing their names on the bare floors and scaring one another with weakly narrated ghost stories – the boys’ faith that ghosts existed, let alone that they were going to find any, was quickly waning.
After two weeks of eating beef jerky and exhausting the conversation on how Mary Alice Tudor’s boobs were coming in before any of the other girls’ in their class, Taylor’s friends called it quits, packed up their sleeping bags and went home. William had stayed one extra night out of pity more than faith that Taylor actually knew what he was doing, but he too was gone by morning. He’d at least apologized profusely that they never actually caught any ghosts, but by that point it was too late. Preteen Basement Ghost Hunters had to officially shut its doors. Ashamed, really, more than anything else, Taylor packed away his business cards and spent the next few days locked away in his room wondering where he went wrong.
Back to spending nights in his bed, Taylor decided that he was too old to have an imagination and his summers should be spent playing soccer like the other boys his age and not chasing afterlives that didn’t exist, he was awoken by the sound of bare feet pacing along the hardwood floors of the hallway outside. Zac had not seemed to notice the sound, as he remained unconscious and snoring in the bottom bunk. Cautiously, Taylor got up to investigate, but found it empty; the sound, however, persisted, and Taylor found himself following it down the stairs and into the living room where they stopped abruptly in front of the window that looked out to the front yard.
The following morning, Diana sat by the kitchen table and cried for seemed like hours. It was clear that some sort of argument had taken place, though about what Taylor was uncertain. Taylor stood at a safe distance and watched with voracious curiosity.
“How about you and Zac stay away from the tree house today, okay son?” Walker had suggested. “Your mother just needs to pull herself together a bit.”
Taylor nodded, unable to look away from his mother. For someone so often incapable of emotion, she appeared utterly inconsolable. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing you need to worry about, Taylor,” Walker answered. “Oh, hey, how’d that ghost-hunt thing go?”
“Defunct,” he’d responded slowly, unsure why his father was lying to him and what the ghost the night before was trying to tell him. “Turns out we were looking in all the wrong places.”
After the summer of 1999, when it was determined that there were certainly bad spirits of some sort lingering in that house, Taylor Hanson first learned that he would die at an early age.