A House With Good Bones

In the morning, Sam awakens to a man walking into the house. Assuming he is an intruder, she leaps from the sofa and threatens to shoot him, though she does not own a gun. Edith runs downstairs and explains that he is Phil Pressley, her handyman. He is also the grandson of Mr. Pressley, the conspiracy theorist who lives across the street. Sam apologizes to him. She and Edith tell Phil about the ladybug incident, and he offers to check the windows and siding.

That evening, Edith and Sam attend a cookout at a neighbor’s house. Edith deflects compliments about the rose garden, claiming that she has not touched them since Gran Mae died and Phil does all the work keeping them alive. Sam speaks with Phil, who reveals that he is a trained master gardener. However, when Sam compliments him on the roses, he claims that Edith manages them herself. Sam is confused but does not follow up because Gran Mae’s old rival, Gail, arrives.

Gail is in her mid-sixties and dressed in the flowing skirts and big jewelry that Sam associates with “aging hippies.” Gail tells Sam about the colony of vultures living on her property, including a vulture named Hermes, who has one wing and lives in Gail’s house. When Sam mentions the vulture on the mailbox, Gail says she is not surprised because “they like to keep an eye on that house” (76). Later, Sam overhears Gail telling Edith she is worried and offering to let Edith stay with her for a while. Phil approaches Sam again and they lightly flirt while discussing insects. Edith looks apprehensive as she enters Gran Mae’s house after the cookout.

Late in the night, Sam awakens on the sofa and feels something touching her head. Something “cool and slick and very thin and scratchy like a twig” (82) touches her arm and moves up into her hair, “sliding through like the teeth of a comb” (83). A voice whispers, “the roses say to say your prayers” (83). She realizes she cannot move and concludes that she must be experiencing sleep paralysis, in which she is still mostly asleep and hallucinating. When she can move, she sits and finds the room empty. Convinced that none of it was real, she goes back to sleep.

The epigraph reads, “Angel of Sleep: Flawless yellow blossoms are blushed with red at the tips, on matte green stems. A vigorous grandiflora rose […]” (85).

In the morning, Sam decides to cut roses for a vase in the kitchen, hoping to cheer up her mother. She cuts her fingers on the thorns but continues. When Edith sees the roses, however, she gasps and drops the coffee pot, which shatters and cuts her feet. Edith asks if Sam cut the roses, as if someone else might have. Sam apologizes for frightening her, but Edith assures her it was a sweet gesture. They clean up the broken glass. When Sam takes the glass to the trash, she sees two more vultures watching from the neighbor’s roof.

Edith drives into town, and Sam visits Gail, who introduces her to Hermes the vulture. Sam admits she is worried about her mother and asks if Gail has noticed any odd behavior. Gail responds cryptically, suggesting that there is evil nearby. She says that “some things run in families [...] and other things skip generations” (96), implying that Edith may or may not have inherited what is happening to her.

Back at Gran Mae’s house, Sam naps on the sofa, again waking to the sensation of something touching her. She freezes as something bends over her, running claws through her hair. Again, a voice tells her “the roses say […] say your prayers” (98), then something stings her ear. She sits up and finds rose petals on her chest and the floor of the living room, trailing from the doors to the back yard. Her ear is also bleeding.

She hears Phil outside, working on the roof, and concludes that he must be playing a trick on her. When she storms out to confront him, however, he is confused, and she realizes she is jumping to conclusions. Embarrassed, she goes back inside and researches sleep paralysis on the internet. Edith returns, and they talk about Gail. Edith is quick to state that Gran Mae’s garden was prettier and tidier than Gail’s. Sam recalls Gran Mae calling her a “little piggy” because of her weight and messy room, but Edith reminds her that Gran Mae was a hospice nurse, and nurses are often impatient with messiness. Sam steers the conversation to the wholesome 1950s TV shows that Gran Mae watched, like Leave It to Beaver and My Three Sons.

The epigraph reads, “Loving Family: Porcelain-white double blooms on long, sturdy stems. Flowers large, with clean petals. Moderate fragrance with licorice notes. Excellent cut flower […]” (107).

Sam wakes in the morning to Gran Mae’s voice calling her a little piggy. Feeling guilty, she cleans the mess in her room. On the way downstairs, she pauses to inspect a photo from her high school graduation on the wall. In the photo, Sam stands in the backyard framed by rose bushes, wearing her graduation gown. In the shadow of the rose bush just behind her, down among the roots, is a strange shape that “looked exactly like a human hand [...] A long white wrist vanishing into shadow” (111). She tells herself it is a trick of the light, but takes a picture of the photo with her phone. She tries to zoom in on the photo, but the Wi-Fi signal in the house is unreliable. Sam takes her laptop to the coffee shop in town and inspects the image, zooming in and using light filters until she is certain that the object is really a hand, “a child’s hand, based on the proportions” (114).

Trying to convince herself she is hallucinating, Sam takes the image to Phil, who is working on repair projects at Gran Mae’s house. Phil also sees the hand, confirming that Sam is not imagining things, though he suggests someone is playing a trick on her. Acknowledging the unlikely possibility that someone took the photo from the wall and altered it, Sam goes to the attic to search for a larger copy of the photo. To her horror, the creepy white hand is also in the larger photo, proving it unlikely that someone is playing a trick on her.

Downstairs, Edith asks why she was in the attic, and Sam lies that she wants to research Elgar Mills and was looking for the photo of him. To support this lie, Sam researches him on the internet, discovering articles calling him the “Mad Wizard of Boone” (120). As Sam reads the articles aloud to Edith, the art print above the fireplace suddenly falls, shattering the frame. Sam is frightened, but Edith stays strangely calm. She says, as if reassuring someone else in the room, that the stories about Elgar were just gossip.

That afternoon, Edith leaves for another work trip, though she seems afraid to leave Sam alone. On her own, Sam goes to the rose garden and digs around the roots, looking for the white hand from the photo. She wonders if her grandmother was a secret serial killer, then tells herself she is being ridiculous. She concludes the hand must have been a discarded doll part. From the roof, three vultures watch her dig. When she finds nothing in the dirt, she consoles herself that serial killers do not live in quiet suburbs where everything is “nice and normal” (125). Later, in her mother’s bathroom, Sam finds notes Edith left for herself on the mirror. One reads, “[S]he loves Sam, she won’t hurt her” (127).

Sam reads more notes left in Edith’s bathroom. One reminds Edith to pray aloud and tell her mother she loves her every night, and another reassures Edith that “it’s real you’re not imagining things” (128). Now convinced that something—either hallucinations or early-onset dementia—is wrong with her mother, Sam is afraid but has no one to talk to because of the late hour.

She goes to sleep in her own room. In the middle of the night, she gets up to go to the bathroom and sees something moving in the bathroom sink. It looks like a white hand reaching out for her, trying “to latch onto [her] face with its dirty nails” (130). She screams, and when she turns on a light the hand is gone. Instead, ladybugs crawl out of the sink drain and climb onto her hand. Again, she vacuums up the ladybugs and dumps them into the garden. Going back to sleep, she recalls the voice telling her to pray. Though she does not believe in God, she prays before she climbs back into bed and feels better.