“Where are we supposed to live, Brandy?  The wedding is in three months, and there is no way we can both fit in your apartment.  We could always move into mine, but I figure my two roommates roaming around in their underwear guzzling old beer might turn your stomach.”

She glared at him.  He just didn’t understand.  She lived in a brand new apartment building for a reason.  It had no history.  That was important to her, and it was also a part of her he still hadn’t accepted fully.  She fiddled with the ring on her left hand.  Maybe this wedding wasn’t such a good idea.  Maybe she should put it off until Mike could at least say why it was that things bothered her so much.  He wouldn’t even say the word.

“Mike,” she tried to make her tone of voice less sharp.  “I understand that you want the beautiful house with the white picket fence and all, but I can’t deal with the history.  I don’t want a repeat of what happened at the last house.”

“I know you had a rough time at the other house.  It was only a ten-year-old house.  How could I have known it had so much history?  It still surprises me how sensitive you are.”  

“Do you have any idea how traumatizing it was to touch the door to that house, and see some drunk beating the hell out of his wife?”

“Brandy-“ she cut him off.

“Mike, I’m psychic.  You can say the word.  You can call me Cleo for heaven sake, just stop pussy footing around the subject.”

“I don’t do that!”

“Yes you do!  Doesn’t it bother you to drag me to these places knowing that what I see can affect me badly?”

“Look, I saw this place yesterday.  I’m totally in love with it.  It’s a fixer upper, but it was something special in it’s day.  We’ll make it special again.”

“It’s over a hundred years old!  Do you have any idea how many awful things can happen in a house in that much time?”

“Okay, okay.  If you‘ll just look at this last house, I’ll leave you alone.  If you don’t love it like I do, or you see some chick go nuts, and shave the family cat or something then we’ll build like you want.  Just this one house, please.”  His huge eyes were pleading, and the thick curl of his lashes whipped up and down as he batted his beautiful hazel eyes at her.  He knew she couldn’t turn those eyes down.

“Fine, but this is the last one.”
 

The house stood in the middle of nothing.  There was no town, no real road to speak of, and no other people for miles.  She liked that.  She had always been private, and apartment living had only made her covet her privacy more.  She just prayed that nothing profoundly terrible had gone on in the house.  If something had, then she would see it, feel it the moment she stepped onto the immense porch.

“The real estate lady said that the original color was yellow.  It looks like it might have had white trim once too.  I thought we could kind of redo it like it might have been when it was built.”

“When was it built?”

“I’m not sure; neither was she.  She guessed it was a little after the civil war.”

“Is she going to be here?  The agent, I mean?”

“No.  I think you kind of freaked her out in the last house when you started screaming for Martin to stop.  She asked me afterward how you knew the guy who lived there before was named Martin.”

Brandy ignored that.  She didn’t particularly care for the real estate agent Mike had picked.  She was artificial enough to be preserved forty years after her death!  There was that much plastic!  She also seemed to like Mike a little too much for Brandy’s liking.  Brandy understood that many people took an immediate disliking to her because she was just a little off, a bit strange.  That was fine.  She was odd.  She was neurotic, and standoffish, and she didn’t like people much.  But the woman had no right to stare Mike down like the dessert menu at Denny’s!  It just wasn’t professional.  

Mike saw through all the weird part of Brandy though, even if he was still uncomfortable with her “Gift” as he commonly called it.  It wasn’t a gift.  It was a curse.  She couldn’t even go to a public bathroom without getting flashes of heartbroken women locking themselves in the stalls.  It was always objects and not people that set off her “Gift”.  She considered this a lucky break.  She wouldn’t have been able to stand it if even human contact had been tainted for her.

“Brandy, you’re stalling!”

Brandy pulled herself from her musings, and stared up at the huge old house.

“You say it had a room I could use as a studio, huh?”

"Yeah, it’s huge, and there’s lots of natural light.  I think it was used as an art studio before because you can still see paint drops on the floors in there.  I don’t think the hardwood floors have ever been refinished.  I don’t think anyone but the people who built it took good care of it.  It’s been in the Collins family for a long time.  It’s gone from one generation to the next with no one really appreciating the craftsmanship, or the… personality.  It’s just fallen into worse and worse disrepair.  It hasn’t even had people living in it for years.  Maybe that will help.  Maybe you won’t see anything, you know.”

Brandy wasn’t even on the porch yet, and she could feel one single emotion radiating from the house.  Joy.  There had been lots of joy in this house.  She smiled, and looked at Mike.

“You might have picked a winner.”  He smiled back, and rested his hand on the small of her back.  She loved it when he did that.

 She stepped onto the porch, and was immediately taken back at least a hundred years.  She was hit with a thick nervousness.  It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was so strong it left her breathless.  There was a white swing hanging from the ceiling with a couple sitting in it.  They didn’t look like they knew each other well, but there was a small flowery looking gold band on the woman’s ring finger.  The tableau had to have been from the eighteen hundreds.  The couple was dressed in old timey garb.  Abruptly the vision let go.  She stared at the same spot on the porch.  The metal hooks for the swing could still be seen, rusted but obvious, in the ceiling.

“I think there needs to be a swing there.”  She pointed to the spot, and Mike nodded enthusiastically.

“Definitely!”

As they entered the building, the emotions swarming in it became more powerful.  All of the emotions were there, good and bad, but the joy prevailed.  She could see the shadow of the same couple from the porch.  The man had dark features, and long dark hair.  There was something arresting about his face.  The intensity of the emotion on his face was almost too much for Brandy to take even if it was a good emotion.  That man loved that woman.  He loved her very much.  Curious, she looked to the woman.  She too had long dark hair, but hers was as curly as his was straight.  She had that same ardor about her face.  That same soul saturating kind of love. 

With a strange smile on her face, Brandy went to a room off the foyer.  She could see the man again.  He seemed to be poring over papers, but there was a joyous playfulness bubbling up in him.  Brandy could feel it strongly- as if it were hers. Suddenly, a small child leapt up from behind the man’s chair with his hands bared like claws, and a soft childish mock fierce look on his little face.  The man grabbed him up, tickling him, and laughing.  A sharp, almost painful stab of searing, passionate love ran through her.  The woman was walking through her.  She’d been watching her husband and child from the doorway.  Brandy stepped out of the room, and looked to Mike with tearful eyes.  She could say nothing.

“Oh no!  Brandy, did you see something bad?  We can leave right now if you need to!”

She simply shook her head, and continued into the house.  Many of the rooms were the same.  Finally they came to the master bedroom.  Brandy stood in the hall outside of the room, idly watching Mike run through it with a child’s excitement as he babbled about the huge closets.  Without warning, she was terrified.  She could see the man, again.   The stark terror on his face took her aback.  The door to the master bedroom was now shut, and she could hear the screams of pain though the door.  A wretched heart rending cry resounded through the home.  The man cried out quietly and jiggled the knob, but the door was locked.  Sliding down to his knees, he wept.  His fear, his pain, his anticipation almost brought her to the ground with him.  Then, there was silence.  Brandy studied his features.  His eyes were wide, frightened.  She registered somewhere, in the back of her mind, that he looked to be Native American.  The sound of a baby crying broke the silence.  The man lunged from his knees, banging the door with his shoulder.  “Kira!” he yelled.  Kira, are you all right?”  There was no answer that Brandy could discern, but the man toppled into the room as a woman opened the door and ushered the man in.  Ignoring the feeling that she was intruding on a very private, very beautiful moment, Brandy followed him in.  The woman from before, the man’s wife, rested on the bed with a tired smile on her face.  A tiny pink infant squirmed at her breast.  There it was again, Brandy marveled.  The joy.  Walking to a wall in the room, she ran her hand over it.  Mike was staring at her.

“Everything in this house is steeped in it.” She was half talking to herself.  “The walls, the floors, and ceiling, even the beams that hold this place up were put together with joy, with love.  The house was built with love.”

“What do you say, hon?  Are we going to add a little more love?  Some of our own?”

“Yes, we owe it to them to bring love back to their house.”

“Them?”

“Yeah, them,” she smiled at his perplexed expression.  “I’ll fill you in later.”
 

Epilogue

Brandy, now Mrs. Mike Bannister, tugged at the hideous seventies inspired wallpaper.  There was no way she could paint in a room that looked like a seventies version of a bordello.  As the paper finally came loose, Brandy was entranced by what was behind it.  It looked to be a beautifully painted mural.  She ran her hand over the faded image.  So much love went into this house.  Brandy had the absurd wish to hug the wall.  Instead, she pulled at another strip of wallpaper.  It came away with ease this time, and beneath it, in light flowing faded black paint, were the words, “Kira loves Buck.”