Dream House (17 page)

Cassie was silent. Then she said, “Ginny . . . every goddamn Christmas, Mom and Fran find something to fight about. They fight about everything. They
always
ruin Christmas! Mom's just making a
scene,
like she always does at Christmas. Try not to let it get to you.”

Ginny's anger soared. She pictured Cassie in a room with a crackling fire, her cheeks sunburned from a day of skiing, in her parka with the rabbit fur-trimmed hood. Clearly, she had no intention of coming home. Ginny would need to try another tactic. “No, Cassie.
It's your fault. It's
you
this time. She's talking about not even having Christmas because of you! You have to come home! It's not fair! Come home!”

The sound of her voice commanding Cassie was so alien to Ginny that she began to cry. When Cassie didn't respond right away, she panicked and hung up.

Ginny's stomach still hurt when she went to bed. She couldn't find the sweet spot on her pillow and tossed for a long time.

In the morning, she awoke damp with sweat. The house banged with commotion and a plaintive wail, “Noooo . . .” pierced the air. She looked at the time—ten o'clock! She climbed out of bed and opened her door slowly, just in time to hear her mother sob from downstairs, “All her life, she's only thought of herself. Never Sid. She just wanted to hurt him. Sid . . . oh, no one knows how much I loved him, and now he's lost to me . . .” Her father's low, consolatory tones wove through her mother's mournful cries.

Ginny struggled to make sense of her mother's words. Could Sid be dead? she wondered. Did Fran kill him last night after Ginny and her mother left Lily House? The fighting had certainly felt deadly.

Clutching her nightgown, she stepped to the hall window to look out at the yard. She didn't see a single ornament or cookie. What had happened to them? Had her father picked them up after she'd gone to bed? Had the geese eaten the cookies? She shuddered, thinking about all the things that could have happened while she was asleep. When she heard the teakettle whistle from the kitchen, she braced herself and went downstairs.

At least the piano room had been transformed into the dining room: signs of Christmas! In the middle of the expanse of Oriental rug, her father was on his knees, vacuuming up every last muffin crumb, sucking up the evidence of business that had worn out its
welcome. Everything that was her father's: light stands, typewriter table, camera equipment, now hugged the edges of the room. Files, the desk blotter, scissors, and the ugly green metal tape dispenser were gone; in their places, a red linen runner and a gleaming silver bowl of nuts of all kinds: walnuts, filberts, Brazils. A pair of brass candlesticks with green candles stood on top of the piano, and a small pinecone wreath hung in front of the portrait of Governor Brickman. The folded mahogany dining room table stood in the doorway of the darkroom, awaiting its call like a star in the wings.

Her mother came into the room and said, “Oh, hi, Gin,” without a smile. Her eyes were watery, and she didn't remark on how unusually late Ginny had slept. She pointed to the floor under the piano bench.

“Ron, you missed some.”

It was the kindest thing she'd said to him in days. She turned to Ginny. “Feel like polishing some silver? Daddy and I have to go over to the hospital in a little while. Fran's
sick.
”

Ginny stared hard at her mother, trying to read her. Surely, she wouldn't be thinking about crumbs and silverware if Sid had died, but what was wrong with Fran? She wasn't sick yesterday. She took the jar of polish from her mother. She could think of nothing more comforting, more
normal,
than polishing silver. In the kitchen, she sat at the table filled with silverware and the rarely used silver bowls and poked her rag into the polish, pulling out a pink licorice-smelling glob. She worked the paste into the intricate pattern on the dinner forks. Rubbing away the tarnish was like waking the silverware from a long sleep.

As her parents came in and out of the kitchen, gathering the holiday table settings from the cupboards' deepest recesses, Ginny studied their somber faces for clues. Her mother said something to her father in the piano room, too quietly for Ginny to hear the words.

But as they moved back toward the kitchen her mother mumbled miserably, “. . . everything is always everyone else's fault with her. She just damn well better pull through.”

Ginny felt hollow. No one had even asked her if she'd had breakfast, and it was almost noon. When she finished the silver, she took it to the table in the piano room and next to each plate placed a little fork, big fork, knife, and spoon. She gazed at the sparkling, luxuriant table, asserting itself in the little room like a peacock in the barnyard.

So far, her mother hadn't cancelled Christmas, and there was still time to decorate the tree before dinner, when Cassie came home. Ginny pulled on her boots under her nightgown so she could go out to the yard and check on the ornaments. Just as she opened the front door, the phone rang, sounding artificially loud. She stepped outside and shut the door hard behind her. In the trampled snow, she found strands of silver tinsel, an elf's hat, and the glass angel that had always sat at the top of their tree. The angel's wings were still intact, but a piece of her halo had broken off.

The front door banged open. Ginny turned to see her father helping her mother down the steps, even though they weren't icy. At the bottom, they paused and squinted at her as if they were having trouble seeing in the bright snow-light.

“I found the angel,” Ginny said, holding it up. “Where're you going?”

Her father was looking at the ground, one arm still around her mother.

“To the hospital,” her mother said. “Fran. Well, she's . . . well, Fran died. Unexpectedly.”

“
Died?
” Ginny exclaimed. Her teeth chattered; all at once she realized how cold she was, standing in the snow with no coat. “How could she just
die
! She wasn't even
sick
yesterday!”

Her mother hesitated in a way that made Ginny think she was
hiding something and then, looking at the ground she said, “Well, no, she wasn't sick, but . . . well, terrible things happen and . . .”

Ginny gasped. “Did
Sid
kill her?”

Her mother's mouth dropped open. “Ginny,” she said, her voice wobbling. “Of course not. What a terrible thing to say. Why would you . . . ?”

Gina's cheeks burned. How could her mother accuse
her
of being terrible after everything
she
had said to Fran yesterday? She could see her mother begin to move toward the car, but she wasn't going to let her get away without some answers. “Then how did she die?”

Her father stared at the ground, but her mother turned to her. “Fran did it to herself, Ginny.” She pulled away from Ginny's father and started down the path ahead of him.

Ginny watched their car roll slowly down the driveway as her head filled with all the gruesome ways a person could kill herself. She dropped to the snow, stretched out on her back, and tried to swish out an angel.
Did it to herself.
She cranked her arms up and down but no angel appeared; the snow was too crusty, unyielding.

Back inside, Ginny's legs shook as she stood on the chair to perch the glass angel on top of the bare Christmas tree. When she climbed off the chair and looked up at the tree, she burst into tears. Maybe the angel was still mostly whole, but Ginny felt broken into a million pieces.

She went into the piano room—yesterday the studio, now the dining room again. She stood at the head of the table looking past Great Aunt Louise's candlesticks, the footed silver salt and pepper shakers, the blue and white plates from China, and the crystal goblets she wasn't allowed to carry. She looked past the vase of white
chrysanthemums and out of the window. The window, like an eye, was the only thing that stayed the same within these four walls that had so many faces; its view to the driveway's end, where it intersected with the roadways to the rest of the world, would always be the most important feature of the piano room. Her eyes followed the snowbank down the driveway, past the elm tree and her melting fort-ruin, past the playing dogs to where it touched the road. Waiting, hoping with dark fear in her heart, for a car to turn in. For Cassie.

A landscape seen through a window is essentially a backdrop, parallel to the wall, unless we step close to the window and thus leave the room visually to enter the outside space.

Rudolf Arnheim,
The Dynamics of Architectural Form

Chapter 7

“What's on the agenda today? How about some breakfast?” Lester asked the next morning, when Gina walked into the kitchen. He was dressed in a pale blue plaid shirt and khakis, sitting at the counter cutting a cantaloupe. The room smelled of toast and vibrated with sunniness—yellow walls, yellow cabinets, yellow-and-white curtains. Blue Willow china lined the shelves over the table, and a blue glass vase on the counter was crowded with yellow snapdragons. If the room hadn't reminded her of Monet's Giverny kitchen, Gina would have found the Bridges' paint colors oppressive.

“Oh, no thanks, Lester; too early for me—West Coast time.”

Lester eyed her as she slung her purse over her shoulder. “Have I scared you away already?” He reached in his pocket and pulled out his keys. “Why don't you take my car? I'm going to stay put.”

Gina thanked him. She was anxious to get out of Lily House before her history with it hijacked her, so had planned to take a walk. But she'd be grateful for the car's air conditioning. On her way to the door, she passed Annie in the dining room with a feather duster.

“This is my job,” Annie laughed. “I pick things up, dust under them and put them back. Three or four times a week. Did you know the feather duster was invented in 1870? You'd think that in a hundred and thirty-five years, we'd have moved beyond feather dusters, but no.”

Gina laughed. “Have you liked it here, Annie? Being the caretakers and everything?”

“It's glorious!” Annie said. “An honor, really.”

Gina found Annie's enthusiasm hard to believe—their confinement to the lesser rooms of the house, the lack of privacy with tourists coming through.

“I love seeing all the curious folks. A group's coming this afternoon,” Annie said. “First one in a week and a half. It's been so hot, I think people are mostly going to the beaches.”

The day was as warm and humid as the one before, as though night had never divided them. Gina felt calmer in the car but had no idea where she was going; it crossed her mind that she should go to the beach, too. She wound along Pickering Road, an old typewriter on the floor of Lester's Toyota sliding with the curves. When she came to the turnoff for her family's house, there was no one behind her so she stopped and looked up the dirt driveway. She started to turn in, but at the last minute lost her nerve.

She turned onto Halsey Road without a destination. Nothing's changed, she thought, as she surveyed the little houses built too close to the road; she was unsure if this was a comfort or a disappointment. She slowed as she approached the shingled cottage of her childhood friend, Sandy Finch, which, with the exception of the satellite dish, appeared unaltered. Still mint green and the same—well, not the same of course—blue plastic above-ground pool in the yard. Gina
was about to move on when Sandy's front door opened and a woman stepped out and glanced at her, holding her gaze just long enough that her features matched an imprint on Gina's memory.
Sandy!
She pumped the gas pedal hard and nearly miscalculated the road's curve.

She could have just as easily slammed on the brakes. But spotting her best friend from junior high whom she hadn't glimpsed since she was fourteen felt like seeing a ghost. She and Sandy had been best friends until a week before Gina left for boarding school, when Sandy's father took the pipe out of his mouth just long enough to say, “Whit's Point schools not good enough foah ya?” Gina had felt cast out, criticized for something she'd barely understood. Things between her and Sandy were never the same.

From the road, Sandy did look great: still voluptuous and crowned by a luxuriant mane of red hair. Gina tilted the mirror briefly to see herself, to check out what Sandy had glimpsed of her and decided with some relief that especially from a distance, she probably hadn't changed much either.

Now, each time Gina passed someone mowing the lawn or stooped over gardening, she morphed them into someone she'd sat next to in the Whit's Point Elementary lunchroom: Robert with the drowned-up-at-the-lake sister; Bonnie in trouble for passing mean notes about their teacher; Natalie crying because MaryAnn told her she smelled. She passed the Baptist church, behind which she'd made out with Teddy Stretch, and then the freshly mown cemetery where she'd smoked her first joint. When she'd gone off to boarding school, it seemed like she might as well have died, as far as her Whit's Point friends were concerned. But that was okay with her. She'd moved on; rivers flowed in one direction—away from their source.

At Route 126, she turned left and drove as far as the lumberyard where her parents had bought two-by-fours just before their accident. When she was in Whit's Point with Cassie, she'd wanted to retrace
her parents' drive, but Cassie had been horrified and Gina, too, had finally decided it would be too painful.