Sara Laughs's state of neglect

Sara Laughs’s state of neglect develops during Michael Noonan’s prolonged absence after Johanna’s death. Bill Dean continues to maintain the lodge, but routine care cannot make it feel inhabited: moss, pine needles, fallen branches, thickening bushes, and sunflowers pushing through the stoop register the difference between a property looked after and a home lived in. The neglected house becomes both a measure of Michael’s withdrawal and a setting where the boundary between dream and physical evidence begins to blur.

Caretaking Without Occupation

For years, Bill performs the seasonal work required to keep Sara Laughs usable. Each spring he removes the storm shutters, checks that the pump is running, and anchors the swimming float about fifty yards from the small beach after Memorial Day. In fall, he replaces the shutters and drains the pipes; he also checks the generator and keeps the maintenance tags current. The tasks are specific and recurring, a calendar of attention that preserves the property even while its owner stays away.

The maintenance is not merely occasional. Bill has the chimney cleaned in early summer 1996, despite there having been no fire in the fireplace for two years or more. Michael pays him quarterly, as caretakers customarily are paid in that part of the region. Bill cashes the checks without asking why Michael no longer uses the place. That silence leaves Michael without an explanation even for himself: he has visited only two or three times since Johanna died, and has not stayed overnight once.

The property’s condition therefore resists a simple description as abandonment. Its systems are tended, its caretaker remains responsible, and Michael continues to pay for its upkeep. Yet the routine is maintenance in the absence of ordinary domestic life. The lodge can be kept functioning without being made welcoming; care preserves the building while failing to restore the relationship that once made it a home.

The Dream’s Uncanny Inventory

In Michael’s recurring dream, he walks rather than drives along a dark lane, eventually reaching the driveway marked by a small wooden sign reading SARA LAUGHS. At its head he stops instead of going down. The lodge below is an irregular, fourteen-room structure of logs and additions, but the dream does not present it simply as a ruin. Michael compares its stubborn, aging character to a brave dowager pressing on despite arthritic hips and gimpy knees, giving the house a bodily quality: old, strained, and still enduring.

The building’s history is layered into its shape. Its central section dates to around 1900; wings were added in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1960s. It had been a hunting lodge and, briefly in the early 1970s, a home for a small commune of transcendental hippies. The Hingermans owned it from the late 1940s until 1984, first Darren and Marie, then Marie alone after Darren died in 1971. The tiny satellite dish on the central roofpeak is the visible addition from Michael and Johanna’s ownership, an idea of Johanna’s that she had little chance to enjoy.

The dream’s approach reveals neglect in small, cumulative signs. Brown pine needles cover the driveway, fallen branches lie across it, and bushes reach toward one another over the narrowing route. The branches would scrape a car driven down the lane. Moss grows on the house’s logs, while three large sunflowers emerge through the boards of the driveway-side stoop. Michael’s description stops short of calling the place neglected: its stronger impression is that it has been forgotten. Beyond it, Dark Score Lake glimmers after sunset, and the loons’ cries sharpen the dream’s atmosphere of loss. The house is not only deteriorating; it appears to stand outside the life that has moved on without it.

Photographs and Physical Confirmation

When Michael asks Bill for photographs, Bill sends a small package from the general delivery address at TR-90, containing twenty pictures taken with a disposable camera. Most show the same subtle signs of disuse, including moss on the house and fallen branches and drifts of pine needles on the driveway. Bill photographs the property from the top of the drive, looking down toward the sprawling lodge. He does not clear away the evidence first: Michael had asked to see it “warts and all,” and Bill gives him what he requested.

The bushes have thickened since Michael and Johanna spent significant time at the lake. They have not quite run wild, but some of their longer branches seem to yearn toward each other across the asphalt like separated lovers. The image makes the overgrown approach echo the absence at the heart of the house: a route once used by a couple now narrows while they are apart, one of them permanently.

What Michael returns to most often in the pictures is not the moss or the branches, but the stoop. The three sunflowers growing through its boards are precisely the detail from his dream. The photographs also resemble other aspects of the dream, but Michael can account for those as coincidence or as his imagination making practical use of what it knows. He cannot explain the sunflowers any more than he can explain the cut on the back of his hand. Bill’s note on the back of one photograph calls the flowers “way early” and the people who grew them “trespassing,” but the picture shows the count that matters to Michael: three, neither two nor four. A detail first encountered in a dream has appeared in an image of the real, neglected property.

Departure and the Decision to Stay

On July 3, 1998, Michael prepares to leave his Derry house for Sara Laughs, placing two suitcases and his Powerbook in his Chevrolet. Before driving away, he goes back inside. The house feels empty and forlorn to him, like a faithful lover who has been dropped and cannot understand why. Its furniture is uncovered and the power remains on, yet the rooms seem deserted; even rooms too full of furniture to echo seem to do so, and dusty light lies everywhere. This departure gives the neglected lodge a counterpoint: the house he is leaving is still furnished, but its emotional abandonment has already begun.

In his study, Michael takes a ream of paper from a drawer and then returns for a photograph of Johanna in her swimsuit. He slides it partway into the paper, like a bookmark. If he begins writing again and the work proceeds, he expects to encounter Johanna around page two hundred and fifty. The image and the paper travel with him, joining the possibility of renewed work to the memory of his wife. He locks the house and drives away; he never returns to it.

Sara Laughs is being repaired before his arrival. Bill hires Kenny Auster to shingle the roof and Timmy Larribee to scrape the old log house down; a plumber checks the pipes, and Michael approves the replacement of older plumbing and the well pump. The work makes tangible how much more extensive the maintenance has become than Bill first expected. Yet Michael is not drawn to visit merely to inspect the repairs. Though he is tempted to see the work, a powerful feeling—never fully articulated—tells him that he is not supposed to come that way: his next arrival should be to unpack and stay.

That distinction gives the state of neglect its decisive meaning. Bill’s seasonal labor keeps the lodge from becoming wholly unusable, while the photographs preserve the visual evidence of what care alone cannot prevent. Michael’s eventual return is not framed as a brief inspection or another isolated visit, but as an attempt to occupy the place again. The house’s overgrowth and its repairs thus mark two simultaneous conditions: the consequences of absence, and the preparation for a life that may no longer leave Sara Laughs empty.