If only it were only a ghost story. If that had been the case, then I could tell the story of the gray cat, Daisy, who had been left behind by the family who'd sold us the house. I could mention that she was old, that she had lived her whole life with this family and began hiding from us beneath the bathroom floorboards the minute we took possession of the house – dying within forty-eight hours of starvation, of cold, of lack of love – the day after we finally lured her out from there with a can of tuna. I could tell the story of the gray blur that even I—I, who have never believed in ghosts – am certain I saw running just past my feet in that house for years thereafter. I could talk about the stone in the back yard that marks her grave, just four feet away from where we found what remained of buried coal from the house's early furnace.

I could tell the story, instead, of the footsteps that Steven and I later laughed about both having heard in what would later become our tenant, Kyle's, room—but months before Kyle ever moved in. Steven would soon begin calling that the Mixer Room. He had Googled our address and found that an Elizabeth Mixer had died in the house – in, he imagined somehow, that very room above where we slept. The similarities between our names was not at all lost on me. Elizabeth Weaver and Elizabeth Mixer. One who weaves, one who mixes. And now our stories were blended somehow, blurred.

And then there was the fact that it was a Friday the 13th when, left here to take care of the house without Steven, I'd discovered the bedbug infestation. That would be getting ahead of the story, I know, but isn't that all I wanted, all of those terrible months? To accelerate past all of those events – the tenants, the divorce proceedings, all of that which had nothing to do with hauntings or ghosts or footsteps?

Long before that – before the infestation, before the divorce, before everything – there had been the night when the stereo seemed to have suddenly turned on by itself – and not only louder than any volume that had ever been set on it but also in the very middle of a CD that had been left inside, unheard in our joyless house, for over a month. I'd heard the song before, but I wouldn't know the lyrics until curiosity later found me looking them up. I'm coming over, the singer warned, and When I get older,/ climbing up on the back porch fence – My eyes skipped down several lines: And my shivering voice is singing/through a crack in the window.../ See me standing on a makeshift road/ with the dust storm blowing/ in a long black shadow.

But lest this whole story sound like nonsense, I'll say again that to this day, I don't believe in ghosts; I only believe in omens.

And so I could tell you, instead, about the odd series of bad smells in the house, something that seemed to be coming from above the bathroom, some kind of sour odor like rotting food. We made jokes about “eau de dead-rat-in-the-wall” but never did find “the body” or the flies or anything else that would explain the source, until one day it simply never came back, as if it had never been.

Above that room, after all, had only been the former owner's master bedroom—the ten-foot ceilings and moldings and old-fashioned fireplace of which had largely lost their charm to the sickly mint-green color everything had been painted, earning it the nickname, even to this day and several paint jobs later (though all of them including some amount of green), of the “green room.”

But get to the point, Steven would be saying to me by now, at this moment in the story; he'd always hated this about me. And his saying this, exactly, is the point—exactly the truth that all of this was pointing toward: we were no longer home.

Why can you never just come out with it, Steven would say finally—until all speaking between us, finally, had ended.