Dream House (18 page)

Now, she followed the route that anyone in her family could've driven in their sleep. Her parents were excellent drivers and loved their station wagon, but this April they forwent their usual spring drive to Florida in favor of staying home to repair the porch. Lulled by a few days of warm weather, they'd set out for the lumberyard under darkening skies.

Freezing rain, a winding road, a truck—the circumstances of the accident had been thoroughly vetted and couldn't have been more straightforward. But now that Gina's mind was stuck in rewind, it raced backward one-two-three years and paused at her father's heart attack. Her parents had had friends for lunch, and afterward, as the friends drove down the driveway, her father said, “I didn't want to spoil lunch, Ellie, but I've been having chest pains for the past hour.” He was admitted to the hospital for a triple bypass.

Later that same day, Gina's mother had said to her on the phone, “It's just terrible. I've never slept in the house alone.” Gina had been offended that her mother's biggest concern seemed to be about her own comfort. But she also heard something in her ferociously independent mother's voice that she'd never heard before: helplessness.

Her father had sailed through surgery and recuperation. Always meek, he became more decisive and direct after the bypass, as though repairing his arteries also cleared the avenues for certain ego-boosting fluids. Or, maybe he seized on his close shave with death as an opportunity to live life differently. Her mother, on the other hand, had a hard time recovering; as Ron's outlook became crisper, hers wilted. Worry crept into her joints, and reminders of Ron's and her own mortality refused to go away, collecting like plaque in her mind. She complained of a kind of diffuse weakness and brain-fog that her doctor couldn't diagnose. She became restless and enlisted Ron in running errands
with her—errands that often had already been done. The control she'd always enjoyed over her husband and the household wavered; maybe, Gina thought, this had felt like life itself slipping away. She declared to her daughters the imminence of her death.

This was nothing new, her threatening to die. But they'd always taken it seriously, because how could they be sure she didn't mean it? “Now that she has an idea of what it would be like to be alone, it's as though she's determined to die before Dad does,” Gina observed to Paul once. She'd felt wicked.

In the year before the accident, despite receiving a clean bill of health from her doctor, Gina's mother began to think even beyond her death into Ron's life as a widower, a territory over which control was impossible. Fear and paranoia surged. “He never tells me where he's going,” her mother complained, as if Gina's father were carrying on a secret life. “Who even knows where he is?” she'd say, even as Gina watched her father out the window, loading the wheelbarrow.

On the phone one day, Gina's father told her, “Your mother thinks she's going to die, and I'm going to remarry, and someone will get hold of the damn Washington letters.”

And here is where fate might have looked kindly upon her mother. “Let's go get the lumber for the fence,” Gina imagined Eleanor saying the day of the accident. Ah, how her mother loved the car—the escape and the sublime security of it! In the car, she could travel with Ron away from the troubling new patterns of home life into a changing landscape, with a shared destination, everyone present and accounted for. The car had always assured the sameness of their path of travel through life. But with Ron's horizon extending after his bypass and Eleanor's—or at least her perception of it—shrinking, their paths, then, would inevitably diverge. The body had its own destiny, but the car was still in their control, the wheel steering them into the future. Her father would have said, “Now? We haven't even drunk our tea.” Her mother:
“C'mon, we'll beat the weather.”

There were only the smallest of variables between a car and an accident: a few seconds of misjudgment or distraction, a blind spot in a mirror, blinding light, blinding darkness. Rain, which in tiny increments turned to ice—tiny increments between life and death, increments that ensured Ronald and Eleanor's destination would be, for all eternity, the same.

A deafening screech, the blare of a horn. Gina slammed on her brakes, narrowly avoiding a Honda trying to make a left turn in front of her in the intersection. After she'd presented the best apologetic face she could, the Honda continued its turn. Shaken, she took a deep breath and riveted her attention on the road.

She reached the site of the accident, just past the first sign for the outlet malls, and pulled over. Carefully avoiding the poison ivy, she scrambled down the embankment to the woods of birch and maple and reached to touch the sturdy trunk of the maple closest to the road. Had the car struck this tree, or the one next to it? Gina felt a certain irony, standing in these sun-dappled woods; her mother had been a passionate student of trees, often startling her family during car trips with a command for Ron to pull over so she could get a closer look at a ginkgo or catalpa. Now, the green woods that had always beckoned with their natural innocence took on a sinister glow.

“Everything okay?”

Gina looked up and waved off the concerned passerby hanging out the window of a pickup. She climbed back to the shoulder, legs shaking.

Back in the car, she cranked up the air conditioning, hoping that regulating her microclimate would somehow normalize her thoughts. She slowed as she approached the Old Seeley Farm, noticing that the famously old elm trees that once lined the road had been cut down. A sign at the end of the driveway read “Yankee Properties, LLC.” The
eighteenth-century farmhouse was crawling with carpenters. But the huge gambrel-roof barn was gone. She pulled over and walked partway up the edge of the property, which had been substantially bulldozed. At the back of the property next to the woods stood a large, new, shingled house crowded with dormers and wrapped with a porch. It was overweight and overwrought for this quiet, country road. A second, nearly identical house was in construction much too close to it, and clearly there would be a few more clones crowding the property before the year was over. “They've just ruined it!” she could imagine her mother declaring.

She turned onto Pickering Road and slowed again as she approached her old driveway, craning to see if there were any cars parked at the house. When she was satisfied there were none, she drove up to the house under the spreading maples she had helped to plant when she was twelve. A huge green debris box—always the first sign of impending construction—sat menacingly in the driveway.

She parked out of sight behind the house and walked to the middle of the front yard, scanning the breadth of the property, dotted with old crab apple, birch, and cherry trees, lilacs and wild rose bushes. The next hill over was crowned with a ridge of houses that faced Pickering Road; when she was growing up, their backs, with their stingy little windows, were turned to the exquisite water view, and owners had let the grass in their yards grow into hay. In the last decade though, French doors and decks had been added to nearly every house, with stairs that spilled onto mowed lawns stretching to the cove's shore. It was as if the enjoyment of natural beauty had finally become fashionable—or perhaps affordable.

For a moment, her attention was snatched by the cove, and she quickly refocused, reminding herself that the house was why she'd come to Maine. Modest but tall, it appeared precariously perched on the hillcrest, with no porch roofs or overhangs, only a few lilac and
forsythia bushes to help ground its clapboard walls in the earth that sloped away from it. Cupping her hand against her eye, she framed the structure like a camera, moving her lens over the symmetrically placed windows—one with a shutter missing—and the large, central dormer over the front door. In her lifetime, the house had always been painted white with black shutters.

“The house is worthless,” Gina's mother had been fond of saying, as though she were talking about her old potato peeler, not the house she'd presided over for nearly fifty years. The sum of its parts read as an endless list of repairs to her mother and father, merely renters, never owners. They had been grudgingly reimbursed by Mr. Hickle for their improvements, but only for the house's most basic needs—a new roof, a new coat of paint—never for their small repairs and remodels. They had neither the means nor the courage to make big changes to a building that was not their own. “Some day, Hickle's relatives will inherit this heap and make something of it,” Gina could remember her father saying about the landlord, as he wrestled with a broken window sash.

But the house had always been
something,
she thought; it was almost iconic with its boxy shape and steeply pitched gables. As she walked the perimeter, it emanated emptiness like a shell on the sand. Its skin was thick and pasty where years of white paint had built up, worn to the wood in others. A trickle of brown stained the clapboards where window trim had rotted and bled. Storm windows had been removed and stacked neatly beside the house. The porch at the back door still looked fresh from the coat of paint her parents had put on a year ago, but the planters there that her mother had lovingly cultivated held only the brown stubs of geraniums. The clothesline that had once run from the shed to the pear tree dangled from its pulley on the wall. In the yard, grass grew thick and high. Lilacs and rhododendrons burst with summer fullness, but it seemed that not even
their vitality could nourish the house back to life.

Gina filled with anxious anticipation; she needed to get inside the house before she was discovered there! By now, the house key she'd thrown into the cove in April would be two feet deep in the mud. But on the plane, she'd schemed: she would break in the way she had as a teenager when she'd locked herself out.

She glanced down the driveway to be sure no one was coming, then walked around to the shed off the kitchen. Below the shed's small window, she placed one of the planter boxes from the porch and stood on it, making it barely possible to swing one foot up onto the windowsill, then the other. Once there, she was able to grab just enough of the shed roof to haul herself up onto it. Her forearms burned against the rough asphalt shingles. She scrambled up the shallow sloped roof toward her mother's bedroom window, which she knew had usually been unlocked, and reached to push up the sash. Locked tight! For a moment, she sat on the roof, soaked in sweat, arms raw, staring down at the cove in utter defeat. How rash it had been to throw away that key! But she'd come too far to give up; she couldn't just walk away.

She climbed off the shed roof and once again checked the driveway to be sure she was alone, then dashed to the garage to look for something that would break a window. She found the shovel she'd hoped to use to bury the bottle-headed skunk. In April, she'd forgotten the skunk; from the airport, she'd called to ask their neighbor Jake to dispose of it. Now, she imagined him heaving it into the pile at the dump the way he hefted his lobster traps overboard.

Shovel in hand, Gina circled the house feeling almost delirious from the heat and the headiness of her intention, her heart pounding out its disapproval of the trespassing that would soon become vandalism. She checked the windows to be certain they were all locked and considered which to break. As she came around to the front yard,
car tires crunched on the driveway, and she leapt up the front steps to squat out of sight between the bushes flanking the porch. Luckily, the car was only using the driveway to turn around.

Reality smacked her. What was she
doing
! Perhaps she really
had
lost her mind. As her courage dropped away, she reached absentmindedly for the front doorknob and turned it. The door was unlocked. When she pushed it open, the wall of heat hit her first, then the suffocating mustiness.

She stepped inside and gazed up the stair, struck for the first time that there were not just one, but two fundamental rules of feng shui broken by this house: a stair leading directly from the front door, causing good ch'i to flow away, and a bathroom opposite the door—a position that would promote bad health and poverty.

She turned into the living room: a floor and four walls, scarred and dirty, three windows. During the move out when she'd been confined here with Cassie, she'd been unable to see the room through the mess and her fog of emotion. But now, with perfect clarity, her mind's eye furnished the room as it had been when it had
lived,
with a mix of inherited antiques and Miesian-inspired modern pieces: a couch, linen and comfy, an efficient white leatherette swivel chair. A coffee table composed of a clear, acrylic
u
and an old varnished drawing board accommodating precisely two stacks of
Newsweeks
and
Down Easts.
Lamps made from antique glass lanterns, clean-lined ceramics, and paintings of pleasant domestic scenes and waterscapes. Visitors had always said the crowded living room had a year-round warmth; to Gina, its temperature had been as volatile as the seasons.

She pictured her mother now at the round table near the window, watering her potted lilies. A sudden pattering of life filled the house. Not human noises, but those of something small and frantic. She moved cautiously toward the sound, through to the kitchen where a barn swallow was hurtling against the closed window, then diving
wildly around the room. Finally, it dropped to the corner of the floor and cocked one eye at her.

She opened the kitchen windows. “Go on out, little bird!” She moved toward the swallow, hoping to shoo it outside. But it rose and fluttered out of the room and disappeared up the stairwell. She followed the bird's soft thumping into Cassie's room. The bird was in the attic now, but the ladder to the opening was gone.