The House of Prosperity By Nicholas Zielinski

It didn’t look like a haunted house. The photo attached to the listing was perfectly normal. It depicted a cream-colored split-level house in the suburbs with navy blue trim and a bright red door. The house had a name, which isn’t so unusual—some landlords give their buildings names for marketing reasons. In this case, the building was called “The House of Prosperity,” and the sales copy guaranteed whoever lived there would prosper, though it didn’t provide a precise definition for the word “prosper,” which I found extremely irritating.

This is because I’m a neurotic. I call myself a neurotic because it sounds more self-deprecating than saying I’m a depressive. Depressive invites pity. Neurotic invites knowing smiles, because it sounds more like a personality quirk than a mental illness. And my strain of neuroticism was particularly active when The House of Prosperity’s listing crossed my desk. I was having the worst sales year of my real estate career, which triggered the worst depressive episode I’d experienced in decades. I thought that solving my financial problems would also solve my emotional problems, which is why, when I finished reading The House of Prosperity’s listing, I thought, Maybe I should move there myself. Though I still had some reservations, because I wanted to prosper financially, and the type of prosperity the listing offered was not defined, which was frustrating.

Within a few hours, my frustration metastasized into serious intrigue, and I had free time in the afternoon, so I booked a viewing at The House of Prosperity under the guise of an interested leasing agent, rather than a potential tenant, because building managers are more honest with agents than they are with tenants.

On the way there, I avoided taking Robertson Boulevard, even though it was the fastest route between my office and The House of Prosperity. I’d recently spent a fortune on bus shelter ads along Robertson—all of which featured my picture. And I looked like a moron in that picture. Just a big, toothy, salesman grin blasting out of a gray suit and matching tie, like a Jewish Steve Harvey without the moustache. It wasn’t the real me. It looked like an older, fatter, greedier version of me I’d grown to despise, because the image reminded me of my own incompetence. The copy was boring and the picture was insincere. The worst part was, at one point, I thought those ads were incredible. I thought they would communicate a sophisticated and trustworthy image to the public, but the message I received when I drove past them now was, Fat Idiot Sells Houses. Based on the number of leads those ads generated, the buying public got the same message.

Avoiding Robertson forced me to drive on side-streets, where I bobbed and weaved between women in pastel-colored jogging outfits, who acted like they’d never seen a real estate agent speeding through their neighborhood in a leased Cadillac before. The Cadillac was another thing I invested in because I thought it would help my business, but it didn’t help at all. It wasn’t until I was trapped in a three-year lease that I found out no one wealthy enough to buy property in Los Angeles was impressed by a Cadillac. The car, the ads, these were just two entries in a long list of strategies I employed to help my business, none of which succeeded, due to my terrible instincts.

When I arrived at the house, the building manager was sitting on a miniature park bench next to the front door. He said his name was James, and he looked like he was in his late fifties, but dressed like he’d arrived in a time machine from the nineteen sixties—bowling shirt, flatcap, pleated pants and huarache sandals with brass buckles. He had an insincerely calm demeanor, and deep circles of gray flesh beneath his eyes, which made him look like he’d seen the horrors of war and used a calm affectation to mask his PTSD. He took his time showing me the place, which was pre-furnished with the most non-descript, pre-fabricated, Target-tier, mid-century modern pieces imaginable. Everything was square. The chairs, the tables, even the couch was as square as a six-piece sectional could possibly be, as if whoever decorated the house wanted it to scream, “Perfectly normal! Nothing weird to see here!”

But there were plenty of weird things to see.

Upstairs, one of the bedrooms had been converted into a library, with four shelves full of handmade books on one side and a crafting bench on the other. The library’s bookshelves were made of plywood stained a dark walnut color, and every book on the shelf looked like it was made by hand, messily bound and unevenly sized. On top of the crafting bench was a heap of paper, ink, and gold tape. I was told that the new tenant wouldn’t be allowed to touch it under any circumstances, which wouldn’t be a problem if I chose to move in.

Across the hall was another room which was sealed and barricaded with a padlock and an iron bar. This room was another place the future tenant wasn’t allowed to enter, according to James. I asked him why, but the answer was unsatisfying. Some muffled reply about storage. I didn’t press the issue, because it was a three-bedroom house, and I was just one person. The place was renting for such a low price that I didn’t feel deprived by losing a bedroom, especially one as gloomy as that.

Downstairs, in the living room, James asked if I had any questions, so I said, “In the listing you claim that anyone who lives here will ‘prosper.’ What do you mean by that?”

“I mean exactly what it says. People who live here prosper. That’s the pattern I’ve observed, over time.” He furrowed his brow in concentration and counted to six on his fingers. “We’ve had six tenants who’ve lived here since the pandemic. All of them have prospered, in different ways, while they lived here, after they got used to the house rules.” His eyes narrowed, and he looked me up-and-down, as if he was inspecting me, before saying, “I have two versions of the house rules. Would you like to see the one for people who believe in ghosts, or the one for people who don’t?”

I didn’t answer immediately, because I was searching his face to see whether he was joking or not. After a moment, I decided he was serious, so I answered seriously.

“Give me the one for people who don’t.”

He spent a few minutes rifling through a briefcase stuffed with papers, then handed me the list. It was a ragged, inkjet-printed document written in sans-serif type with three numbered items:

(1) Place a medium-sized bowl of strawberries on the kitchen table every morning.

(2) Read a picture book aloud, and describe the pictures, outside of the sealed bedroom every night.

(3) If you ever hear someone say “Marco,” you must answer “Polo” until the other person stops saying “Marco.”

“What’s the point of these?”

He folded his arms and eyed me defensively. “Through a process of trial and error, I’ve found that faithful adherence to these rules allows a person to prosper while they live in this house. And that’s all I have to say about the topic. Unless you believe in ghosts.”

I had to think for a moment, because I wasn’t sure if I did or not. “I don’t.”

“Then don’t try to make sense of the rules. Just assure your clients they will have a nice, easy, prosperous life in this house, as long as they follow the rules with perfect obedience.”

I pressed him about the rules a bit more, but he refused to elaborate, which was annoying. I left the place feeling unsatisfied, as if I lost a game of tug-of-war, because I wasn’t used to getting so much pushback from building managers when I asked them basic questions about their property. Most of the time, building managers are eager enough to rent the place they’ll answer any question I ask. But James lacked that sense of urgency, which gave him all the negotiating power.

Outside of the house’s bothersome quirks, the weird rooms on the second floor, the annoying house rules, and James’s coy demeanor, the house passed the vibe test, which is an informal way of saying it didn’t feel off. It felt like a nice place to live, and it was close to my office, which was a bonus, given my twice-daily, hour-long, ten-mile commute through Los Angeles traffic.

The next day, I rented The House of Prosperity, and called it a business investment.

            I couldn’t afford to take moving day off. So, I hauled my possessions into the house, without unpacking any boxes, and drove to work.

My day was filled with appointments. None of them went well, and I didn’t understand why until my last appointment. During this appointment, I discovered that my terrible social instincts were to blame for the sour faces and disagreeable attitudes I’d been receiving from my clients throughout the day. I made this discovery when my final client was riding shotgun in my Cadillac, and I told her the city of Beverly Hills used to be one, gigantic bean farm. Then the client said, “Fascinating” in a tone that sounded sincere, which made me think she was interested in history, so I started monologuing about Hammel and Dinker, the farmers-turned-developers who created Beverly Hills. After a few minutes, the client withdrew. She stopped pretending to be interested in my historical digression, so I changed the subject to something more general, but my attempt to re-ignite the conversation fell flat. That sent me into a doom spiral. I was sure she hated me, at that point. She looked like she wanted to be anywhere except my Cadillac, and the tension was so high that I cut the viewing short, and told her I had to go home to feed my dog, which was a lie. I didn’t have a dog. I just needed to escape the interaction before I blew my brains out.

It took me an hour to drive from my appointment to The House of Prosperity. After I arrived, I sat at the kitchen table, pulled out a legal pad, and tried to think of conversation topics I could deploy in future situations where I’m trapped with a client who doesn’t enjoy long monologues about my interests. And the topics were terrible. Dogs versus cats, favorite restaurants, New York versus LA. I was getting bored just looking at the list I’d written, but then again, my idea of excitement is opening a box of wine and letting the palliative drone of Ken Burns’s narration transport me to the Civil War.

I could have come up with better ideas if I’d had more time. But there were only five items on my list when, from somewhere in the house, I heard someone say, “Maaarcooooooo.”

When I heard the voice, my muscles clenched, involuntarily. I sat there, breathing loudly, wondering whether I’d actually heard something, or just imagined it. The house rules made it clear that I’d experience something like this eventually, but I didn’t let myself speculate on the question of how or why this might happen. I didn’t let myself wonder whether the voice would come from a stereo, a neighbor, or a ghost, as James obliquely suggested, because I came there to improve my business, not mount an investigation into the house rules.

Then I heard the voice a second time.

“Maaaaarcooooo,” said the voice.

“Polo,” I meekly replied.

After a few seconds, the voice called again, and it sounded far away. So I replied again. And the exchange continued for several minutes. Each time I replied, the voice would wait a few seconds, or a few minutes, before they’d say Marco again, giving the game an unpredictable rhythm. In this way, the game deviated from the games of Marco Polo I played as a child.

When I was a child, we played Marco Polo in complete darkness. Robbed of our vision, we’d split ourselves into two groups. One kid would play the role of Marco, and the rest of us would play the role of Polo. The one who played Marco would shout “Marco!” And the rest of us would reply, “Polo!” Marco would then use their sense of hearing to identify where, in the dark, the Polos were located. Every time the Polos spoke, the Marco would come closer, then say “Marco” again, listen for a reply, and repeat the cycle until one of the Polos got tagged, at which point the tagged Polo would become the new Marco.

But the game I played in The House of Prosperity was different. The voice didn’t seem to know where I was, or care, even though I’d shouted “Polo” scores of times, and never moved from my position. Sometimes, the voice sounded far away, and sometimes it sounded close. There was no sense of linear progression, no sense of impending closure, no sense that my opponent was interested in tagging me. It was just a drawn-out exchange of words that seemed like it was meant to prevent me from working, rather than play a serious game of Marco Polo. When the game started, I was terrified. And when it ended, I was still terrified, but also thrumming with dissatisfaction from the game’s unresolved conclusion.

Twenty minutes after the final “Marco,” I sensed the game was over. Then I stood up, walked to the freezer, and poured myself a glass of whiskey to calm my nerves. It was late at night, so the kitchen window was dark. The only sounds in the room were my footsteps and a persistent knock against the window caused by a leafless tree-branch, swaying in the wind, that looked like a gnarled claw from a fossilized vulture. When I drank the whiskey, I did it while standing up, with my back to the kitchen table, and my face pointing to the kitchen window.

I have a phobia of swallowing insects, which is why I held the whiskey glass at eye level, while inspecting the whiskey for floating bugs. In the glass’s reflection, I saw something behind me, standing on the kitchen table.

It was a little girl in a black dress.

I dropped the glass and screamed while glass fragments and whiskey exploded on the kitchen counter. I felt my muscles clench, and the room get hotter as I stood still, staring straight ahead, unwilling to look behind me, lest I see her again, and be forced to confront something I was unwilling to face. This wasn’t part of the deal, I thought—I didn’t sign up for this. James suggested there were ghosts associated with this house, but he didn’t say I’d see one, so I hoped it would never happen, because if it could happen, he would have warned me about it. At least that’s what I assumed. And I clung to that assumption, even after I saw her reflected in the glass. Part of me believed the experience didn’t really happen, that my restless nerves misidentified the reflection, causing me to confuse a stack of moving boxes for a little girl.

I wasn’t ready to look at the table. I wasn’t ready to face what I thought I’d seen. I needed time to gather strength, to calm down, to relax before returning my gaze to the table and confronting reality. For several minutes, I stood there with eyes closed and willed my heartbeat to slow down until I felt ready to turn around. Then I opened my eyes, and slowly turned, prepared to reckon with whatever I’d seen. Thankfully, when I turned, I saw no little girl standing on the table, nor any sign that she was ever there.

As I stood in the kitchen, dazed and sweating through my shirt, I heard an unmistakable sound. Echoing through the room, from some distant part of the house, I heard the sound of a young girl’s laugh.

That night I didn’t sleep, even though I desperately needed rest. While I laid in bed, I remembered something I’d read about insomnia. If an insomniac closes their eyes, and pretends to sleep, the body will initiate its resting phase, allowing the insomniac to reap the benefits of sleep without losing consciousness. So that’s what I did. I pretended to sleep for seven hours, and tried my best to avoid thinking about the reflection I’d seen in the whiskey glass.

And when I ‘awoke’, I was exhausted.

In the morning, I arranged a bowl of strawberries on the table, as the house rules prescribed, and rushed out the door without letting my eyes linger on too many reflective surfaces. When I left The House of Prosperity I felt almost as energetic as a background actor on The Walking Dead. Luckily, I’d pre-booked my appointments for the day, so I didn’t have to devote any attention to marketing, which is a cognitively demanding task, and I couldn’t use my brain after losing so much sleep.

But this turned out to be a good thing. Because I came to work tired, which meant I was quiet, which is unusual, and my clients responded well to my new attitude, which is even more unusual. Something about my quiet manner caused them to open up in ways I wasn’t used to. I didn’t feel an impulse to be entertaining, because I was too braindead to think of things to say, which, I suspect, relaxed my clients, and took the pressure out of our appointments, because they felt like they weren’t being sold anything. I imagine the experience, for them, felt like more like an organic meeting with a social acquaintance than one man’s desperate attempt to extract money from a relationship.

The downside? I didn’t close any deals, which meant I made no money. If “prosperity” means functional brain-death, then it took a single day for The House of Prosperity to fulfill its promise.

After work, I went home and unpacked the boxes I brought with me when I moved in. As I loaded my dishware into the cabinets, I looked at the kitchen table and saw the bowl of strawberries I left there. The bowl was in the same place, but the strawberries inside looked different. They’d lost their color. When I left, they were bright red with green stems. But when I came back, their stems were black, and their bodies were a hideous shade of gray, like they’d been transformed into stone. Naturally, I felt an urge to inspect them. So, I approached the table, treading cautiously, becoming more confused with each step I took toward the bowl, and wondering whether I’d really looked at the strawberries before I’d placed them there. Could it be that my restless state caused me to place a bowl of dead strawberries on the table without noticing?

I leaned over the bowl, and took a close look at the berries. They were sitting in a vessel made of glass, on a table made of lacquered oak, and the strawberries themselves looked grainy, like I wasn’t viewing strawberries at all, but photographs of strawberries shot on black and white film. I reached out to touch them, expecting my finger to touch something solid, but when my finger touched the strawberry at the top of the pile, it encountered no resistance. When I touched the strawberry, it crumbled into weightless dust which crumbled down the pile of strawberries beneath it, distorting their shapes as well. Then I withdrew my index finger and looked at my fingerprint, which was coated in a dusty substance. It wasn’t until I held my finger to my nose and smelled the substance that I knew what it was. Somehow, while I was at work, the strawberries had transformed into a pile of strawberry-shaped ashes.

My heart leaped at the implications. If the entity which spoke to me the previous night was responsible for removing the vitality from these berries, then surely it could do the same to me. What if, some future night, it decided I was no longer worthy of the color behind my cheeks? Would I suffer the same fate as these desiccated strawberries? I wondered if this had happened to others before me. Perhaps there were dried-out bodies hidden behind the sealed room on the second floor, and that’s what James meant by “prosperity,” some nihilistic conception of death-by-cremation as the ultimate source of happiness.

I shuddered at the thought. But later I talked myself out of it. Truly, I reasoned, there was no good cause to assume I’d meet the same fate as these strawberries, even in the most extreme circumstances. That would be like watching someone eat a sandwich and assuming that, because they ate a sandwich, they might also eat a person—sandwich eating cannibals probably exist, but I suspect they are extremely rare. Up to that point, the entity, the ghost, with whom I shared this house hadn’t harmed me in any way, or threatened to do so, and if it had harmed other tenants in the past, I probably would have heard about it on the news, or on some video compilation called Tier Ranking Bizarre Deaths (Part 1).

It was late, and I was tired. I wanted to go to sleep, but the house rules demanded I read a picture book outside the sealed room every night, and I didn’t want to break the rules, and run afoul of this life-draining ghost. So, I walked upstairs, into the library, and hoped I would find something readable among the handmade books on the shelves. But when I stood before the shelves, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. Every book had a strip of gold-colored tape on its binding. And these strips of gold tape matched the spool of gold tape sitting on the crafting bench beside me, suggesting the books were crafted and bound inside The House of Prosperity. To read someone’s handmade book is an intimate thing, like searching the deepest chambers of an author’s heart. And I was afraid of learning too much about the people associated with this house, because knowledge leads to intimacy, and intimacy leads to involvement in other people’s affairs. I didn’t have time to manage my own affairs, let alone involve myself in other people’s.

Had I slept the previous night, I may have had enough energy to leave the house, and buy a new book, rather than draw an unsettling book from the house’s library. But I was exhausted. My need for sleep outweighed my fear of learning too much about the house, and the people associated with it. That’s why I grabbed a book off the shelf, and hoped my mental defenses were strong enough to withstand whatever intimate disclosures I might encounter upon reading one of these books.

My mental defenses received their first test when I saw the book’s cover. The title was written in felt marker, and calligraphic strokes flowed between every letter. It was called, The Story of Mary’s Life, By Mary, Her Own Self.

The cover depicted a girl in a black dress sitting on a swing with a dog standing on its hind legs in the background, bouncing a ball in the air with its nose, like a seal. The art was cute, but disturbing, because, even though it was drawn in a cartoonish, unrealistic style, the girl on the swing looked like the girl I’d seen reflected in the glass two nights prior.

I didn’t want to know more about her than I needed to. Intimacy is frightening, even with a corporeal being, let alone a ghost. Then again, I thought, my instincts are historically unreliable. And the illustrations were sort of funny looking. They belied a sentimental and lighthearted sensibility, implicitly promising a happy story about a girl and her ball-bouncing dog, which is less frightening than many other things.

I found a chair in the library, and set it up outside the sealed room before sitting down to read the book.

The plot was simple. It told the story of a girl named Mary who lived with her father in Los Angeles. As a baby, Mary discovered a passion for drawing, and when she turned four, she decided to become an artist, then dedicated the rest of her life to perfecting her drawing skills, which her father encouraged. Every day, Mary would practice drawing, in order to become a great artist, like her hero, Rebecca Sugar, creator of the television cartoon Stephen Universe. And then, at eleven years old, Mary caught the COVID-19 virus and became very ill, dying at the age of twelve.

After she died, Mary went to heaven, which looked like a big forest with a pool in the middle, and everyone there was having fun, except her, because she never got good at drawing, while she was alive, and that made her sad. So, Mary went looking for God, and found him on the top of a mountain. She asked God to send her back home, so she could get better at drawing, and eat her favorite food, and play her favorite game, because she missed those things more than she enjoyed being in heaven. Then God sent her back to earth. But when she came back, her father was too scared to play with her, and whenever she drew him pictures, the pictures made him cry, even though they were happy pictures. So she started writing stories to go with the pictures, in order to explain how happy she was, and how much she loved her father, even though she wasn’t alive anymore. But no matter how happy the stories were, they still made her father sad.

After a while, her father moved out of the house, but he didn’t sell it, because he wanted to make sure that Mary had everything she needed to become a great artist. That’s why her father started renting the house to new tenants, and made up the house rules, to show Mary’s art to people who don’t get sad when they see it.

Because of this, Mary gets to show her work to all kinds of people. Sometimes people like her art, and sometimes they don’t.

But Mary is happy when people don’t like her art, because every failure is a chance to get better, and you have to fail before you become a great artist.

“And that’s the moral of the story,” was the book’s final line.

As I closed the book, my hands were trembling.

Reading a book apparently written by a ghost is tremendously unnerving, even if they’re trying to be light and cheerful, as Mary seemed to be. I was so distressed, while I read the book, that I struggled to read the words aloud. Amplifying my distress was the section that dealt with heaven, where I saw illustrations of God as a giant node of electricity, with filaments of energy extending in every direction, like an eerie supernova drawn in a cartoon-inflected style. Reading about the death and rebirth of a child, her subsequent abandonment by her father, and my role in the tragedy filled me with conflicting emotions. There was fear, sadness, awe, plus a kind of sympathetic longing for a life that I’d never lived, a life I’d seen in the book. A domestic harmony rubbed out of existence by disease and heartbreak.

I stood up from the chair feeling numb, like all the blood had been drained from my body, and my head was swimming with unprocessed emotions. I walked across the hall in a stupor, and entered the library, impassively searching for the space on the bookshelf from which I’d drawn the book. Then I felt a pair of words thunder through my soul. The experience felt as if someone crawled inside me, bypassing my senses, and spoke the words directly into the center of my body. The tone was gentle, but the voice was loud.

“Thank you,” said the voice.

Though I’d grown accustomed to weirdness in this house, the experience of hearing the voice still frightened me. I jumped at the sound of it, though calling it a sound is imprecise, and calling it a thought is equally inexact. This was another kind of communication. One that chilled the center of my being when it happened, like a wave of icy water sloshing out of my heart and coursing through my chest.

When I regained my bearings, I lightly, gracefully, and carefully replaced the book on the shelf before descending the stairs as quietly as I could, hoping, by excessive caution, to avoid interacting with Mary. Because her voice’s tone was gentle, but it was far from comforting.

The previous night had taught me not to dwell on my interactions with her, because that led to sleeplessness. I couldn’t afford another day of exhaustion, so I banished all thoughts of Mary from my head as I descended the stairs, undressed, climbed into bed, and shut my eyes. Then I prayed, as hard as I could, for a dreamless rest.

A few hours later I awoke with a burst of energy. It was my first night of decent sleep since I’d moved in, and I needed it, because I didn’t have any appointments booked that day, which meant I’d have to devote the day to marketing. And I despised marketing, because marketing forced me to contemplate my image, and I hated contemplating my image, so I drove to the office with the radio on full blast, distracting myself from the dread I always felt on marketing days.

When I came home, I went straight to the refrigerator. When I opened the door, I was greeted by an odd sight. All my food was gone, and in its place was a flat plane of ash. The ash was spread over the top shelf, from corner to corner. And in the center, someone had drawn a frowny face with their finger.

The sight was so unexpected that my brain needed an extra beat to understand what I’d seen. But then it hit me. In my rush to leave the house that morning, I’d forgotten to lay a bowl of strawberries on the kitchen table. And I think this bothered Mary. At least that’s what I inferred from the frowny face. I assumed she’d transformed my food into ashes as an act of vengeance. And that might have made me anxious, except something about her finger-painted frowny face diffused my anxiety.

It had so much character. The mouth was very long, like an upside-down U, which exaggerated the frown to comic proportions. And its V-slanted eyebrows made the frowny face look so melodramatically angry that I had to smile. The act was unpleasant, but the execution was charismatic.

I was charmed. But the charm didn’t quell my hunger.

As quickly as I could manage, I drove to the grocery store in order to feed myself and restock the fridge. On the way home, I stopped at a high-end grocery store, much fancier than the one I usually patronize, and bought the best strawberries I could find, in the largest quantity I could afford, in order to surprise Mary with a level of strawberry quality she wasn’t used to. I bought some flowers, too, because I thought she’d like them.

On the way home, I drove down Robertson Boulevard, and I passed the bus shelter ads I hated so much, those monuments to my personal failure. And when I saw the first ad, on the corner of Robertson and Pico, I giggled. Unexpectedly, when I saw the ad, I didn’t feel ashamed. Instead, I felt amused. Suddenly, the picture looked ridiculous to me, like one of those insulting portraits illustrated by caricature artists, rather than a cruel reminder of my own incompetence.

As I continued down the street, I wondered why my reaction to the picture had changed so much in the past few days. Those ads haunted me, tortured me, disgusted me only three days prior, yet now I felt differently, and I didn’t understand why.

Then I remembered the way I felt after reading Mary’s book. After I read it, something cracked inside of me. Some trap loosed its grip on my heart. I wasn’t conscious of this change at the time. It happened on a subterranean level of my mind, after I learned about the role I played in Mary’s development.

Discovering I played a role in Mary’s quest for happiness gave me a purpose unbound from success in real estate. I believe this catalyzed a shift in my thinking. And there was magic in that shift, there was magic in caring about her, about participating in her success, which forced me to divert attention away from myself. Before learning about Mary, I was trapped inside an invisible cage and drinking a poison I didn’t know I was ingesting, the poison of self-obsession, a poison which magnified every personal failure into an apocalyptic event.

Living at The House of Prosperity didn’t help my business. It didn’t make me rich. But it did show me another kind of prosperity.

One that felt like love.

When I arrived at home, I was hungry, and tired. So, I stocked my newly purchased food in the refrigerator, being careful not to upset the plane of ash on the top shelf, because I was sentimentally attached to the frowny face with the exaggerated mouth. Despite my hunger, I didn’t eat immediately. Instead, I did something else. I stood in the middle of the kitchen, and turned around, so my body faced the staircase, then cupped my hands around my mouth, took a deep breath, and shouted a word I hadn’t shouted for thirty years.

In a gentle voice, I shouted, “Marcooooo.”

And listened for Mary’s reply.