The Last House on the Left

Eventually the house was going to fall into the sea—just pitch right over and tumble down the bluff. That was why it was cheap. Why they could afford it.

Their realtor said it was nothing to be concerned about. That was years away, he said. It probably wouldn’t happen at all.

“Yeah,” he said, rolling his head in a way that caused his neck to emit a series of soft pops. Their realtor looked like he spent a lot of time in the gym. “Sure. Coastal erosion. Yeah. Maybe. There’s probably some of that. I’ve got a geology report or something. I’ll send it to you.”

This neighborhood was briefly famous a few years ago. One of those big Pacific storms surprised everybody by undercutting the cliff. An apartment building had been condemned overnight, the residents not even allowed to return for their possessions. Over the next few weeks it dropped, piece by piece, into the ocean. She remembered some of the news footage, the half-eaten apartments full of furniture, open to the elements like a life-sized doll house, all of their secrets exposed to the yawning void. The house sat a few hundred yards back from the site of that disaster on a road that terminated abruptly at the cliff. Two hastily-erected bollards prevented the unwary from driving off into space.

Rachel imagined giving people directions. It’s the last house on the left. You can’t miss it.

“When?” she asked. Her husband Sam was staring out through the sliding glass doors, out toward the ocean churning away in the middle distance.

The realtor raised his eyebrows quizzically.

“When are you going to send us the report?”

“Right, right, right,” he said in a staccato patter.

He reached into his suit jacket and pulled out his phone. He had a slow, exaggerated way of moving, as if every muscle was straining in opposition to all of the others. He was almost quivering with the effort, the desperate, ketogenic struggle of sending an email. At any moment, she thought, he would break into the body-builder’s parody of a smile—eyes fixed and bulging, lips stretched back from ferocious, glistening teeth.

She glanced over at Sam. This was the reason they had chosen him. Or rather, the reason Rachel had chosen him—the body-building realtor, his enormous chest and biceps, his odd, inappropriately tight and shiny suits. It had seemed so important at the time to have something to unite them. A joke they could share with a glance, the way they used to.

Sam was staring out the glass doors that let out into the back yard, at the long expanse of ground leading to the edge of the crumbling bluff, the restless ocean beyond. The sun was setting, slumping down on the horizon as if exhausted after a long, bad day of work. A smear of orange light lay on the sea, reaching toward them like a beckoning hand. The realtor had planned this, she idly thought—the sunset visit, the calm spring weather, the temporarily concealed hunger of the sea.

“And boom, done,” the realtor said, slowly, tightly putting his phone away. He leaned an arm against the wall in a rigid imitation of nonchalance. “Done,” he said again.

Rachel waited for her own phone to ping, for the erosion report to arrive, born on the magical wings of technology and the electromagnetic spectrum. It remained silent, and Sam stood looking out the window.

“How long?” Rachel asked, after the silence had stretched and stretched and stretched.

The realtor glanced over at Sam, as if looking for male support.

“Before it falls into the sea,” Rachel said.

Sam was still gazing out over the ocean, at the retreating light of the day, the oranges and reds becoming rusty, turning gray.

“Look at those views,” the realtor said. Rachel did, imagining herself and Sam together, years or months or hours from now, standing close together but not close enough to touch, the sound of the hungry waves barely audible below.