We didn’t need direction: I shot off one way, Callista the other, Thad up the stairs, our feet pounding against carpet and tiles and hardwood floors from different parts of the house. Finding a TV was not hard at all in that well-furnished place, but finding a TV with a VCR proved to be far more difficult. I dove in to an office with eerily empty bookshelves and a desk with fake flowers in pots, and checked the TV on the wall to find that it only played DVDs. I bumped into Callista as she came out of another room. “There’s a whole entertainment room but no stupid VCR,” she told me. Who even used VHS tapes anymore? Finding a cart and buggy might have been easier. In the end, Thad called out from upstairs, and Callista and I stepped on each other’s feet in our haste to get to him. He’d gone into the green bedroom and found that the small television had both DVD and VHS players embedded in its front. Callista pushed the tape in without hesitation, flipping the TV on and finding the correct channel.
