Authors: Kate Rockland
She stepped off the train now in Chester and looked around. Small antique stores stood next door to quaint coffee shops, and a few people braved the wind and wet to sit outside, the steam from their mugs rising into the gray air. A toboggan sled was propped against the door to one store; a price tag written in black scroll on white paper dangling from it read
$250
. Whoa. Expensive.
The townspeople wore dark Hunter rain boots, North Face jackets, sensible yet expensive clothing. A woman in her sixties with white hair done up in a bun walked a brown Labrador through town, laughing as the dog strained against the leash. A man with muddy boots propped up on an iron chair outside the café petted the dog as he galloped by. The man looked so much like her father, his build, the mud on his shoes, that Shoshana had to slow down her pace to catch her breath. This happened to her several times a month, and the kickback from remembering he was dead always left her feeling empty.
But today she had a purpose. A destination. “Well, here we go, Sinatra,” she said to the dog, who peeked his head out of the bag to sniff the air. His tongue stuck out crookedly from his mouth. As she walked, he tasted the air. She took out a crumpled map the lawyer had provided for her, with Mimi’s house marked with a red
X.
She reached inside her jacket pocket and turned down the volume on her iPod and leaned into the sound like it was a warm wind. Strains of Rusted Root’s “Ecstasy” were muted and she smiled, imagining Emily’s face if she knew Shoshana’s music choice: “You’ve been listening to the same hippie bands since high school!” Then Emily would force her to download Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Rancid, 7 Seconds, Lifetime, or Anti-Flag: loud, fast punk music Shoshana hated but her little sister loved.
As the town receded behind her and gave way to dirt roads and forest, the map folded in her hand, Shoshana realized she felt kind of shocked—still unable to process the fact that she’d just inherited fifteen acres and a house. A tiny, run-down house. After living since college crammed into her little Hoboken apartment with four roommates, she wasn’t sure she wanted to move to Chester, where she’d be all alone, and a good hour from Manhattan’s hustle and bustle. Her mother and sister were only about an hour away, but still … it seemed spooky, like she’d turn into a crazy cat lady who dies and then her cats eat her face.
She slid her finger over the map, passing streets with tree names: Hickory, Cherry, Oak … until she got to Apple. She wore several strands of colorful beaded necklaces and they clicked and clacked against one another as she walked uphill. She found the sign to Apple Road, which had been flattened by a large tree or struck by lightning—it was dangling from its metal post and its letters were so faded she had to brush off some dust and leaves to read it.
As she felt the muscles in her calves working away, and the ground retreating behind her up the hill, she came to two stone pillars and paused in front, a little out of breath. Different-shaped rocks were stacked from large to small, like a cairn that hikers leave along the trail. Thick ivy snaked through its foundation and up through the tops, where someone had mounted two metal, intertwined hearts, now rusty.
A squirrel sat perched on top of one pillar, his gray fur quivering as he worked a nut from its shell, his small paws so much like hands. “Hello,” Shoshana said to him. She was amazed how quiet it was here, how her ears seemed to somehow
expand,
to hear a bird tweeting in a bush behind her, or the slow drone of a prop plane buzzing overhead. She was so used to constant noise that the silence had a living, breathing presence. She put her finger to her neck and felt her pulse slow down after her walk.
She walked up the drive; it had probably once been filled with pebbles, as there were still a few white rocks scattered that crunched underneath her sneakers, but mainly the little road leading up to the house was distinct from the grass surrounding it only by the pillars and a slight indentation in the shoots of very green grass, like it had been trampled upon by many feet over the years.
She heard loud buzzing, and passed overgrown rosebushes, fat and busy bumblebees swarming around, their wings vibrating. Their life cycle was six weeks only. What would she do with her life if she only had six weeks to live it? Probably lie in bed and read. And eat chocolate, of course.
Sticks littered the ground. It had been raining often lately, and branches had been allowed to fall around the property without being collected. Small pools of water evaporated in the weak sun. Two giant willow trees covered most of the front of the farmhouse, but Shoshana caught her breath as she rounded the drive and the house came into focus before her. It was more beautiful than she remembered, and it was all … hers.
The scene was from a fairy tale, a long stretch of ground inside a tunnel of lush trees. The structure was simple in its beauty: a white farmhouse with black shutters. All the sleepovers here with Emily when they were children, Shoshana terrifying her little sister with stories about a witch who lived in the attic and would visit them as soon as they fell asleep, whispering spells into their ears. She laughed now, remembering.
The house looked like it belonged in New England, with its black shutters, white wood detail, peaked roof, and small, falling-apart widow’s walk off one of the top-floor bedrooms. The house was the shape of the letter
L.
The willow trees were in full bloom, their hunched branches reminding Shoshana of Aunt Mimi’s curved spine. Shoshana felt a pang of pity for this kind woman who’d had no children and had felt Shoshana deserved her house.
On the ground were scattered hundreds of spindly pea-soup-green seed stalks. As the wind picked up, the willow trees gently swayed, caressing the front of the house. Surrounding the front door were bunches of snapdragons in an array of colors: purple, deep blues, and yellows. She trailed her hand through them, basking in their softness. Sinatra gave a little “Yep!” and she carefully lowered him to the ground and he sprang forth, sniffing and quivering with excitement, looking for a place to pee.
She inhaled deeply, and was suddenly struck with remorse that she had not asked her mother and Emily to come along with her. Shoshana dug around in her purse until she found the key Mimi’s lawyer had mailed to her. It was in a beat-up envelope and its tape stuck to her fingers a little. It was old-fashioned, large, and heavy, and was made of a kind of metal she couldn’t place. Its top was adorned with roses. Her hand trembled as she opened the front door, pushing on a rusty pineapple-shaped knocker.
She stepped into the front room of the house, which Mimi had made into a living room, and was hit with a not-unpleasant musky smell of wood chips. White sheets hung on the small oil paintings on the walls, as well as the couches and armchairs. She walked slowly into the room and placed her hand on the large, curved banister leading to the second floor. Through the arched doorway she could see the kitchen, with its fifties-style red and white tiles and once-bright white cupboards, now faded to pearl. The knobs were crystal and sparkled in the late afternoon light. Something about their smoothness made Shoshana want to cup her hand over them.
She saw her father leaning over the stove, stirring something (his famous spaghetti?) with a long wooden spoon, tomato sauce stuck in his beard, her mother wearing a peach-colored wrap dress and a sparkly butterfly clip in her hair, Shoshana playing hide-and-seek with Emily on the first floor, as the adults talked loudly in the kitchen, the sounds of Aunt Mimi’s laughter filling the house and her mother asking when the sauce would be done. “You can’t rush perfection, Pam,” Bob said. Emily had been two, three, and Shoshana remembered the rough texture of the fabric under her fingers as she hid behind Aunt Mimi’s robin’s-egg-blue couch, Emily’s legs crisscrossed on the Oriental rug as she counted to ten. That same rug was now faded from a deep red into a sort of sunset-orange, and it appeared to have gone into disrepair, with several little critter-made holes in it. Mimi had only been dead a month, but it looked like the place had been coming apart at the seams long before that. Shoshana felt another deep pang that she hadn’t made more of an effort to come visit.
At her father’s funeral, Mimi had bent over the grave crying. After the ceremony, Shoshana was collecting rocks to place next to the marker that would later become the gravestone and she saw Mimi and her mother standing close together. She overheard Mimi’s gravelly voice: “I loved him like a son.”
Birds twittering outside shook Shoshana out of her reverie. She ran her hands over the banister, the wood delightfully smooth and sandy, perhaps one of the few modern additions Mimi had made, and walked through the living room into the kitchen, where the image of her father stayed strong behind her eyelids. He was like a postcard she could take out and view any moment she wanted. She leaned over the deep white farm sink surrounded by a white porcelain counter to peer outside into the backyard, which stretched on in green splendor. It was hard to see past just a few feet, however, as large rosebushes spindled and twisted and grew against the house wildly. Shoshana wondered how Mimi had even gotten past them to walk around her property, then realized with sadness she might not have been feeling well enough to do so for quite some time. Spiderwebs covered part of the window and she made a mental note to buy cleaning products and paper towels. On the doorframe leading outside were markings. She stepped closer to peer at them. Drawn with silver pencil were indentations of her father’s growth chart. She had to move closer to see the writing, which was faint and slightly smudged. She ran her finger over the dates, 1960, 1962, 1968. She thought of the love behind those numbers, how much Mimi had cared about her father, to keep track of his growth. She smiled.
Maybe that is all any of us can ask for out of life; to be deeply loved.
Someone, perhaps the estate lawyer, had made a small attempt at tidying up, as the old-fashioned-looking refrigerator was clean and empty. Shoshana was grateful for that; dealing with rotting food would have been pretty gross at this point, and from what she could see of the house, she was going to have a lot of cleaning on her hands already.
She sighed, pushing a heavy lock of auburn hair out of her eyes. The question hummed in the air around her, filling the nooks and spaces, the breath she took in. Why had Aunt Mimi left her this house? It was beautiful, and the idea of owning the fifteen acres of land thrilled her to no end thanks to
The Secret Garden
being her favorite book growing up.
But she was only twenty-six. She had no children to fill these rooms, no husband to make the many repairs that needed doing. Part of her felt she should just sell the house and split the proceeds with Emily, but she kept coming back to the fact that Mimi had left it to her in a will, for goodness’ sake. Pam said the will had been made out twenty years ago, when Shoshana was only
six years old
. What had Mimi seen in the child version of her? She and Emily had both loved Aunt Mimi, and Em had said she was fine with having been left a lump sum of money, not the house: “You visited her way more than I did.” But the feeling persisted, the unknowing.
“You were just your sweet self at six,” Pam had said a few nights ago, when Shoshana had called her with the startling news she’d received from the estate lawyer just that afternoon. “Aunt Mimi was quite smitten with you. I used to take you there for sleepovers and she’d let you try on all her wigs and dresses. Because she raised your father, she felt more like a grandmother to you girls than a great-aunt. Later, she started to slip and became more withdrawn, stopped having people living in the house with her, and I’d visit her on my own from time to time. But she always asked about you and Emily.”
Suddenly a man’s wrinkled and weathered face appeared in the window. Shoshana let out a bloodcurdling scream. He emitted a choked sound, jumping backward, startled. Shoshana heard a thump as he crumpled onto the front stoop.
“Oh!” she heard herself cry out, and before she could think it through she ran through the kitchen, back into the living room, and flung open the front door, the leaves and dust again filling the air and making her blink. A very tiny, skinny old man was sitting on her front stoop, shaking his head a little. A black-and-white sheepdog ran around him in circles, barking. Sinatra came over to see what the fuss was about and the two dogs sniffed each other’s butts in a friendly way. The man, stooped with age, wore a full suit, gray with tiny white stripes, that looked Italian, or at least expensive. He had a mustard-yellow silk handkerchief in the pocket, which lent him old-fashioned charm.
“Are you okay?” she asked, bending down to grasp his elbow. His skin felt paper-thin, his bones razor-sharp. “I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you, I just was so lost in thought in there and I totally freaked and thought you were … well, never mind.” She’d been about to say she thought he looked like the scarecrow from
The Wizard of Oz,
his face was so leathery.
To her surprise, he laughed. “Scared the ’ell out of me, that’s fer sure,” he said in a thick Irish brogue, standing and brushing off his suit. “Pipe down, Patrick O’Leary!” he shouted to the dog, who wagged his tail even harder, barking excitedly in circles. “Damn mutt,” he said, patting him on the head. The man was ancient-looking and shorter than her. He had a full head of neat, snow-white hair that looked freshly combed, a pencil-thin mustache she ordinarily wouldn’t have thought handsome but suited him, and the bluest eyes she’d ever seen. He had deep rivers of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, as if he laughed hard and often, and she could see more tough skin where his neck met his crisp, sky-blue, expensive-looking button-down shirt. The back of his neck was a bright red.
Shoshana apologized once again for startling him. He was so thin, just a bag of bones, really.
“’Tis all right. Nothing my friend Jack Daniel here can’t cure,” he said jocularly, and somehow as if by magic produced from the depths of his jacket a silver flask with the initials
JM
etched across. She realized his voice was cheerfully slurred. He stood tilted to one side, like he had a wooden leg. The dog sat at his feet obediently and watched him. Shoshana could swear it looked like he was happy for his master and might want a sip himself. The man screwed off the top, threw his head back, and took a swig. It was an act that clashed with the posh look he was sporting. Not that the rich didn’t imbibe, they certainly did their share, but somehow Shoshana got the feeling this man was an alcoholic, and yet his dress suggested that he’d once been very successful and hardworking, at
something.