Open House

by Alan Ginsberg-Cobden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The rule at an open house is that everybody signs in.

It's a safety thing, mostly. A woman alone for three hours on a Sunday afternoon in a stranger's empty house, with the front door unlocked and a sign on the lawn that says COME IN, wants a list of names. Nobody has ever done anything to me. But a colleague of mine in Wyckoff went down to look at a sump pump with a man who'd said he was a buyer, and came back up with a broken wrist and no purse. So I keep the clipboard on the kitchen island, next to the cookies, and I smile and say, "Would you mind?" And they always sign.

Sometimes they sign Mickey Mouse. Teenagers do that, and couples who are only looking and don't want me calling on Monday. That's fine. I'm not the police.

The clipboard is also for the seller. Most sellers want to know how many came through. Carol Pruitt wanted names.

"Every one," she told me at the listing appointment, sitting at that same island with her palm flat on the granite, like she was taking its pulse. "I want to see who's been in my house."

I said of course. I'd have said yes to anything Carol asked. So would most of Glen Rock.

Twenty-four years ago, on a school night in October, Carol's daughter Jenna walked out of this house and never came back. She was sixteen. My daughter is sixteen now. Jenna was my best friend. Her school picture from that September went up on every telephone pole from Ridgewood to Saddle Brook: Jenna in a black turtleneck, chin up, trying to look like a poet. The police brought her stepfather, Gary, in for questioning three times. They never charged him. They never found a shoe, a backpack, anything. Carol divorced him the following year, he moved to Florida, and last March he died there. I heard it from my mother, who heard it at the ShopRite.

And Carol kept the phone.

It's a beige wall phone by the refrigerator, with a coiled cord long enough to reach the back door, and it has had the same number since 1989. For ten years the Record ran a piece every October about the mother who kept the line open in case her daughter called. Carol never changed the number. She never let the cord get tangled, either. People mentioned that.

"It stays connected till closing," she told me. "I know nobody has a landline anymore. Humor me. And I'll come by at four-thirty on the Sunday for the sheet."

So: center-hall colonial, four bedrooms, two and a half baths, original oak floors under the wall-to-wall I'd made her pull up, listed at $889,000. Carol was moving in with her sister in Delaware. Twenty-four years, she said, was long enough to wait in one place.

She asked for me by name. "You were her favorite," she said, and touched my wrist. "She'd have wanted it to be you."

I took the listing. I'm a realtor, and it's a good listing. And I have spent twenty-four years owing Carol Pruitt something I could never pay.

---

The Sunday was cold and bright, the kind of October day that sells houses. I had the heat at seventy, a pumpkin-spice candle going in the front hall, and two dozen chocolate chip cookies from the bakery, fanned on a plate the way you're taught.

They came through steadily. A young couple with a baby in a carrier who asked about the school district and the radon number. A contractor type who rapped on walls with his knuckles and asked if the attic fan worked. Two women from down the block who hadn't come to buy and didn't pretend to. Everybody signed.

Around two-thirty a woman came in alone.

Forty, maybe. Jeans, a navy peacoat, a Mets cap pulled low, sunglasses she didn't take off. Not unusual. People come to open houses in sunglasses all the time; there's a certain kind of buyer who doesn't want to be recognized poking around a neighbor's closets. She took a feature sheet and smiled at me without showing teeth.

"Feel free to look around," I said. "Upstairs has all four bedrooms. The back one gets the morning light."

"I bet it does," she said.

She went up the stairs fast at the bottom, a long step, the way you do when you're forty and showing off a little. I lost track of her then, because the couple with the baby came back down to ask whether the basement had ever taken water. It had, during Ida, and I told them so. You disclose in New Jersey. You disclose or you get sued.

When I came back to the kitchen the woman in the Mets cap was standing by the refrigerator, looking at the beige phone.

"The seller is keeping that until closing," I said. "It's a long story."

She looked at it a while longer. Then she said, "I bet," for the second time, and went out the back door onto the deck, and by the time I thought to look, the deck was empty.

I did not think about her again for an hour and a half.

---

At five past four I locked the front door, blew out the candle, and picked up the clipboard to count.

Fourteen groups. Good number for October. I ran my finger down the names to make sure I could read them before I took a picture for Carol, and on line nine my finger stopped.

Jenna Kostelnik.

Kostelnik was her father's name. She'd kept it when Carol married Gary, and Gary had hated that.

Next to it, in the phone number column, was the number of the beige phone on the wall six feet from where I stood.

A name is just a name. Kids in this town still know the story; some idiot from the high school could've written it as a joke. I told myself that for maybe three seconds.

Then I looked at the J.

Jenna made her capital J with a little hook at the bottom, curled back up like a fishhook. She'd done it since fourth grade. She did it on every note she folded into my locker and on the inside cover of my yearbook, J for Jenna with that hook, and I'd tried to copy it in seventh grade and she'd made fun of me for a week.

The J on line nine had the hook.

I sat down on one of the island stools, because my knees told me to.

The Mets cap. I bet it does. The long step at the bottom of the stairs.

She hadn't been showing off. She'd stepped over the third stair.

The third stair in this house squeals like a hurt animal. Every kid who ever slept over knew it. At one in the morning, sneaking out to sit on the roof of the garage with a stolen Zima, you went up and down on the outside edge and you skipped the third stair, or Gary woke up.

I went up. I put my whole weight on the third stair on purpose, and it squealed, and in the empty house it sounded like somebody had stepped on a cat.

The back bedroom was beige. Carol had it painted in August, before the photographer came; I'd recommended it. Beige sells. Underneath it, I knew, was a purple Jenna had picked out of a Benjamin Moore fan deck when we were twelve, a color called something like Midnight Plum, and two coats of primer hadn't quite killed it. If you looked at the corners you could still see it, like a bruise coming up.

The window over the garage roof was unlocked.

I'd checked every lock in the house at noon. I always do. I stood there with my hand on the latch and looked down at the shingles where we used to sit, knees up, passing the bottle back and forth, watching the lights go off one by one along the street until only Gary's TV was left, blue in the den window.

She'd stood here. An hour and a half ago. She'd stood here and opened it and looked down, and I'd been in the kitchen telling a couple about radon.

I locked it. I went back down to the kitchen, stepping over the third stair without thinking, and sat on the stool again, and I didn't call anybody, because there was nobody I could call.

---

I need to tell you about the last time I saw Jenna, because nobody else knows it.

It was a little after one in the morning, the Tuesday night going into Wednesday. I was seventeen. Something hit my bedroom window, then again: gravel from my mother's planter. I looked down and Jenna was standing in our driveway with a backpack, and even under the streetlight I could see her lip was split.

"Don't ask," she said, when I got down there in my sweatshirt. "Please, Lainey. Just drive."

I had my probationary license and the keys to my mother's Corolla on a hook by the door. We went down Route 17 to Route 3 and through the Lincoln Tunnel, and the whole way Jenna didn't say a word, and I didn't ask, because she'd said please and Jenna never said please. At the Port Authority she bought a bus ticket with cash she'd been saving from babysitting, three hundred and forty dollars in a tampon box. I don't know where the bus went. She wouldn't let me look.

At the gate she held my face in both her hands.

"Swear," she said. "You don't tell anybody. You don't tell my mom. It'll kill her."

I swore.

Then I drove home, and I put the keys back on the hook, and at seven-fifteen I went to school. On Thursday the police came to homeroom and asked who'd seen Jenna last. I didn't raise my hand.

I watched them bring Gary in. I'm not going to pretend that part kept me up. I'd seen Jenna's lip. Whatever happened to Gary, I figured he'd earned it.

Carol was different. I watched Carol on News 12, holding up the turtleneck picture. I watched her tape posters to poles in the rain. I watched her at our kitchen table with my mother, asking me over and over, Did she say anything, honey, anything at all, and I said no, Mrs. Pruitt, and went upstairs and threw up. That part I've paid for every October since. That part is why I said yes to the listing.

I had promised. I was seventeen, and I kept a promise, and a mother kept a phone line open for twenty-four years because of it.

My cell buzzed on the island.

Unknown number. I let it buzz twice. On the third I picked up.

"Hi, Lainey," she said.

---

Nobody has called me Lainey since 2002.

"Where are you?" It came out a whisper. I was alone in the house and I whispered.

"Close." Her voice was lower, rougher at the edges, but under it was the girl who'd made fun of my Js. "Your face is on a sign in my front yard. You look like your mom."

"You were here. You were standing right in front of me."

"You were looking at my sunglasses. You told me about the morning light in my own room." A small breath that wasn't quite anything. "Then you told those poor kids about the basement." Another breath that might have been a laugh. "It still takes water, huh."

"Jenna." I didn't know what I was going to say until I said it. "Gary's dead."

"I know. That's why I came. I wanted to see the house once before it's somebody else's. I wanted to stand in my room." A pause. "They painted it beige."

"Your mother—" My throat closed. I made it open. "Jen, she kept the phone. The whole time. She kept the same number. It was in the paper every year. She never let the cord tangle. I watched her for twenty-four years, I let her—"

"I know about the phone."

"Then call her. Come back. She's going to be here at four-thirty for the sign-in sheet, you could—"

"Lainey." Very gently, the way you'd talk to a child. "Do you remember what I said at the bus? Exactly what I said?"

"You said don't tell your mom. You said it would kill her."

"I said that because you were seventeen, and if I'd told you the truth you'd have marched up to my front door and told her yourself. You were like that." She waited. "I told her in August. Before school started. I sat in that kitchen, probably right about where you're sitting now, and I told her what Gary was doing."

I didn't say anything. The refrigerator hummed.

"She slapped me," Jenna said. "Not hard. She said if I ever said that again under her roof I could go live with my father in Scranton, who didn't want me. Then she drove to the Willowbrook Mall and bought me three turtlenecks." Something in her voice slipped and caught. "Black, gray, and navy. She said they were very sophisticated."

I thought of the poster. Every pole from Ridgewood to Saddle Brook. Jenna, chin up, in a black turtleneck, trying to look like a poet.

"So, no," Jenna said. "It wasn't going to kill her."

---

I heard Carol's Buick in the driveway at four twenty-eight. She was always early.

"I'm going to call the house at five," Jenna said quickly. "On that phone. If she picks up, I'll talk to her. I swear I will. I'll say all of it again, and she can say whatever she's going to say."

"And if she doesn't?"

"Give her the sheet anyway. Don't tell her I was there. Don't explain the J. Let her find it." A breath. "I want her to know I stood in her kitchen."

The line went dead. The front door opened.

---

Carol came in rubbing her hands from the cold, a small woman in a camel coat, seventy now, and she smiled at me and said, "Well? Anybody interesting?"

I handed her the clipboard.

I didn't say anything. I'd promised, again. I watched her put on her reading glasses and run a finger down the names, lips moving a little, the way she must have read every sign-in sheet I'd sent her since the listing went live in August.

Her finger stopped on line nine.

She didn't gasp. She didn't sit down. I'd been braced for her to cry out, or to grab my arm, or to say Lauren, is this a joke. She did none of that. She stood very still, and the color went out of her face from the forehead down, like water draining from a sink.

"Who let her in," she said.

Not Is she alive. Not Where is she. Who let her in.

"It was an open house, Carol," I said. "Everybody comes in."

She took off the reading glasses, folded them, and put them in her coat pocket. She looked at me for a long moment, and I understood, for the first time in my life, that she had always wondered about me. That this was why she'd asked for me by name.

"You were always her favorite," Carol said. "I thought if she ever came back, she'd come to you."

The clock on the microwave said 4:59. Then it said 5:00.

The beige phone rang.

It's an old phone, with a real bell inside it, and in the empty house it was very loud. Carol's head turned toward it. Her hand came up, a little, from her side, the hand that had kept that cord untangled for twenty-four years.

It rang again.

She didn't move. I didn't move. I counted. Somewhere around six I realized I was holding my breath, and somewhere around nine I realized that I was not going to pick it up for her, and that she knew it.

It rang eleven times. Then it stopped.

The quiet afterward was enormous.

Carol let out a breath and smoothed the front of her coat. "Robocalls," she said. "That's all it ever is anymore." She slid the sign-in sheet out from under the clip, folded it twice, and put it in her purse. "I'll have the phone disconnected tomorrow. There's no point now, is there."

I picked up the cookie plate and my bag and the lockbox key. My phone buzzed against my hip: a text from my daughter, Abby, asking if I could get her at Maddie's at six.

I left Carol standing in her kitchen beside the dead phone, and I drove to Maddie's, and I was early.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Alanō Ginsberg-Cobden per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Alan Ginsberg-Cobden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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