Evermore House

I’m always trying to see the woman. If I time it right, she’ll appear, rendered in stained glass at the back of someone’s house. Everything must align. The angle of the sun, so I can see her glowing as if lit from within. The leaves of the tree in front of the house must be in some state of disarray, either coming or going or gone. And I have to get my place in line just right, so I can sit and stare at her for the twenty seconds it takes the light to change from red to green. 

Some days I remember slowing down, the other cars honking, to see her. That was if I didn’t catch the stoplight. Some days I would turn off the radio to sit in silence, taking her in. Does it sound sort of sad? It was. It was a period of my life I think back on as dark gray, a time of sustained unhappiness. I didn’t like commuting. I didn’t like my job. I looked for a stained glass woman at a stop light. 

The house was humble, considering the treasure inside. Two stories, white, set back from the street on the corner of Clinton and Cesar Chavez. A deep porch with Roman Doric columns wrapped around the front. A dark wooden door set with glass marked the entrance, flanked by long thin windows on either side and a transom window above. The windows made it so that I could see through to the back of the house to the woman. She wore a yellow-green dress. I could just see her face, dark brown hair piled on her head, a rosy red mouth. Her expression was cool, impassive. She looked directly out the window at me, sitting in my little silver car. Then she was gone. 

“It’s so weird. It really seems like a black hole,” the research librarian tells me, tapping the tip of one long nail against her cheek. I sigh, the blank “No Results Found” on her screen glaring like a taunt. We had walked through the archives together, trying everything we could think of—separate entrance addresses, old addresses, a subdivided lot—but so far, the roots of the house remained a mystery. 

“Maybe they moved it?” the librarian suggests, and I frown in frustration. We bat around a few theories, thinking about the many ways the stories behind whole buildings can be eaten by time. She promises to keep looking, and then says sorry, gently, as I leave the historical society empty-handed. 

I had envisioned some old-timey rich guy owning the house, installing the stained glass for a wife who thought the provincial Portland of the early 1900s lacked culture. Or an eccentric old lady artist made them, the beguiling gaze of the woman a call to arms for female empowerment. I don’t know. A story better than “No Results Found” on a screen in the hushed interior of the historical society. 

All I know for certain is that the house the glass lives in is actually a guesthouse, where you can rent a room and stay the night. The name of the house? Evermore. I savor it while I search. They claim that the house was built in 1909 on what used to be an orchard, but the only piece of hard evidence about the house I can confirm is the year it was built. I never hear back from the guesthouse owner, so even the fruit trees are in question. 

I pull out of traffic one day and park along Cesar Chavez, waiting for the flow of cars to stop long enough for me to cross the street. Standing on the sidewalk outside the house, I feel oddly nervous, as if I’m going to meet someone or about to head into an audition. The walkway is covered in wet leaves, the porch steps creak under my feet as I get up to the door. From here, the sound of traffic becomes a gentle hush, hush, hush as tires roll over the slick road. It’s easy to see into the interior of the house. Evermore isn’t staffed around the clock, so I’m there alone. No one’s inside. Except, of course, for the lady I loved so much. 

Maybe I stood there for thirty seconds, maybe an hour. I craned my neck to see further in and realized that the stained glass was set next to a staircase, and on the far side was another woman. I was never able to see the other, wreathed in autumnal colors, from the car. She was almost obscured by the colorwork of the glass, long strands of golden fabric and leaves woven around her dress, her face turned slightly to the side. I could see that the woman I had glimpsed from the car had a spray of bright flowers next to her face. Now that I was up close, though, I was starting to realize that they didn’t look antique, not the way I’d imagined them. They looked a little as if they’d been sprayed directly on the glass, each individual pane holding a variety of colors. Cheap work, tacky even. 

I left the porch slowly and got back into my car, pulling out into the traffic stopped at the light. I looked over my shoulder one more time. She was still there, the same enigmatic expression glowing faintly through the windows on the porch. But now I felt nothing, no spark of life at the hint of mystery her face held. It wasn’t that she had changed, but rather that I had. My life wasn’t what it once was; now I live in color. Whatever it was I needed from the windows had been satisfied. When I turned back to face the traffic before me, I pressed hard on the gas, speeding through the green light.

Lauren Hobson lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in Riverteeth, Entropy, and elsewhere, and she holds an MFA from Portland State University. If she isn't reading or writing, she's probably outside with her dog.