Dream House (2 page)

Gina took her laptop into the bathroom, where she knew the connection was better, closed the toilet lid, and sat down to check her email. She was relieved to see that most of her architecture clients still seemed to be respecting her absences of the past week; there were a few easy questions from contractors and employees, and one message from her ever-eager client, Jeff Stone:
Know you're tied up. When you get a chance, give a call. Thanks much.

She answered a note from her husband, Paul, who wrote before
leaving for his book group that all was fine at home with their children, ten-year-old Esther and six-year-old Ben. Gina had called Paul at work three times from Logan Airport, getting his voicemail every time. It had been wrenching to leave her family, and she was especially worried about Esther, who'd missed two days of school after her parents' accident, crying almost continuously. Paul, Esther, and Ben would fly out on Friday for the funeral on Saturday. Six days! It would be the longest she'd ever been away from them. She looked at her watch; the babysitter would be helping the kids get ready for bed now. She wrote Paul a quick report on her trip, closed her laptop, and went back to Cassie's room.

“The sheets for Dad's bed are in the bottom drawer in your room,” Cassie told her.

Your
room, Gina thought with dread, crossing the hall. Since she'd left home, she'd always stayed in Cassie's room when visiting. Her own was connected by a door to her parents' room—a war zone. Her father had moved into it fifteen years ago when he was exiled from the marital bed. His twin bed was, as usual, meticulously made, not a wrinkle in the cotton bedspread. His hearing aid lay on the bedside table. Three pairs of shoes were lined up at the foot of his bureau, all of them leaning to the outside.

She took the sheets from the drawer and pressed them to her face, seeking reassurance in the fresh crispness of cotton dried outdoors.

Cassie appeared in the doorway wearing a too-small Andrews Academy T-shirt that Gina knew had been sitting in Cassie's bureau for at least thirty years. “G'night,” she said, embracing Gina in a strong, protective hug.

“G'night,” Gina murmured into her sister's neck.

Cassie went back to her room, and Gina slid between the cold sheets, turned out the light, and lay listening. Somewhere near her head, a loose cable outside slapped the clapboards. Now and then a
gust whooshed the rain against the house, and the window rattled. Then, for a few moments when the rain seemed to cease, she thought she could hear the house breathing; she listened reluctantly, the way one listens to the dying.

She folded the pillow over her head, and after a long time, dozed off for what seemed like only seconds before a bumping noise woke her. She got up, went into the hall, and pushed up the window. Heavy drops of rain splatted her when she stuck out her head, though the frigid air smelled more like snow. Looking down, she followed the dark legs of a ladder, rising from the driveway up the wall.

“Cassie!” she yelled at her sister, hunched at the top of the ladder in their father's big yellow slicker. “What're you doing?”

“The goddamn shutter's banging! One of the hooks is busted!”

“It's four a.m.!”

“
Someone's
gotta fix it!”

Gina pushed the window down, remembering how exhausting Cassie could be. She brought big energy and superlatives to every situation: fabulous! devastating! mind-blowing! Cassie didn't just work, she
busted her butt.
She owned a catering business in Rhode Island and was known for her three-alarm chili-mint-kumquat and tequila salad that was
awesome!
In addition, for years, she'd put her energy to work helping her parents with the house and then, with the same good-humored vigor, complaining about it to Gina.

Gina went back to bed feeling guilty about Cassie's hard work, and guilty about her own infrequent visits here. Guilt had always created tension between the sisters; still, Gina wondered not for the first time, if there could be anyone closer to a woman than her sister, with their shared nature
and
nurture. The shock of the accident seemed to have melted through layers of time and the small things that had come between them, exposing their sisterhood at its most potent. She and
Cassie had spoken every day since the accident: planning the funeral, working on acceptance, or else giving in to their unacceptance. If it weren't for their talks, Gina wouldn't have been able to face the daily routines in San Francisco that had seemed painfully distant from the tragedy.

Since stepping inside the front door, though, nothing felt real. Instead of the deep tête-a-têtes they'd had on the phone, she and Cassie had been speaking in clipped code, as if in these rooms, there wasn't enough air even for complete sentences, let alone their pain.

The power of this house! Her parents' death had not rendered its rooms impotent; being here still made Gina feel diminished and flighty—birdlike. “The house should be the church of childhood,” she'd once read somewhere, and she'd thought,
ha
!

The rain had stopped. In the bright morning light, the house vibrated with a mocking cheerfulness. Gina carried her toiletries to the only bathroom, where Cassie had started to clean out the medicine cabinet and drawers; into a box she'd dumped dozens of Howard Johnson's and Quality Inn soap bars, boxes of Band-Aids, nail clippers, and a cupful of unused dental floss. Gina plucked her parents' toothbrushes from the holder and threw them into the wastebasket along with her father's dental bridge, several long-expired medications, lipsticks, and ancient bottles of foundation.

She picked up a ceramic ashtray painted with the Italian words
casa senza donna, barca senza timone
that had sat on the chest of drawers forever. While brushing her teeth as a little girl, she'd said the words in her head having no idea what they meant, but enjoying their musical sound. When she finally learned their meaning—“a house without a woman, a boat without a rudder”—she realized the ashtray's longevity
was due not to its usefulness, since no one had smoked in the house for years, but to its message. At different times, the proverb had mystified and infuriated Gina; her mother had indeed been at the helm of their household, but she'd steered like a mad captain!

Gina dropped the ashtray into the wastebasket and turned on the shower. Because there was no functioning outlet in the bathroom, Cassie had plugged her hair dryer into an extension cord that ran from a bedroom; now, the fact that the cord didn't allow Gina to fully close the door made her crabby.

She was drying off from her shower when the bathroom door popped open.

“Oh!” Cassie said. “Sorry!” The extension cord squeaked as she tried to pull the door shut.

Gina clutched the towel to her, feeling as she had as an adolescent, making futile attempts at privacy in the house's one bathroom.

She dressed in Cassie's room and headed downstairs past the large eighteenth-century portraits of Mr. And Mrs. Eugene Banton, who seemed to ask her with a thin-lipped grimness whether the aristocratic likes of them could expect a more dignified future beyond this humble home. The portraits, of Gina's maternal great-great aunt and uncle, were among the heirlooms passed down by the Banton family—“Pronounced the French way,” her mother always instructed, “not to rhyme with
Scranton.”
One of several dignitaries who adorned Gina's family tree, Sidney Banton, had been George Washington's private secretary. In 1785 he'd built a home in Whit's Point, “Lily House.”

A mile down Pickering Road from Lily House, Gina and Cassie had grown up in this rental with only a sampling of the family valuables: Chippendale chairs, swords, and Sidney Banton's writing desk. The elegant antiques lent an unsettling incongruity to the shabby-around-the-edges house but didn't alter her family's unfussy
country lifestyle a bit; their free-range pet rabbit, Honey Bun, had chewed the bindings off more than a few eighteenth-century volumes as well as the fringes of two Oriental rugs.

“We're going to auction you off,” Gina told the Banton portraits. “I don't care who you're related to. You're ugly.”

When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she kept walking out the front door into the cold morning. She stood on the lawn and raised her arms to the heavens, grateful for the sunlight and other things, like the ground, that were true and important everywhere and to everyone, no matter what.

The skunk! she remembered. She ran to the back of the house and into the garage, a balloon-frame structure that for at least ten years had looked like it might collapse any moment. She grabbed a shovel. The skunk's grave would be where they'd always buried their pets—in the back field, still visible from the kitchen window.

Carrying the bundled skunk to the field, she worried about the risk of her shovel turning up a bone or two from Missy or Painter, their springer spaniels, or Honey Bun.

She set down the skunk and picked up the shovel, bringing the blade down. As it hit the earth with a loud thump, she staggered backwards a little.

“The ground's still frozen!” Cassie shouted.

Gina looked up to see Cassie, standing in the shed doorway. “It's
April
,” Gina yelled back, as if the seasonal thaw had irresponsibly missed its deadline. She trudged to the garage with the skunk.

Back in the house, she went straight to her laptop and discovered that York County Solid Waste Disposal had a website with a paragraph on the disposal of dead animals.

Line a garbage can with two heavy-duty trash bags. Wearing gloves and using a shovel, place the carcass in the bags. Tie off each bag and dispose
only at dead animal composting area. $200 fine for disposal of carcass in any other recycling area. Dead animals may be dropped off on Tuesdays and Saturdays only.

Gina went back to the garage, stood over the bundled skunk and said, “Tomorrow,” as if the skunk should know she had a plan.

“So here's the list,” Cassie said when Gina walked back into the kitchen.

Pencils behind both ears, she was standing in front of the open closet jammed with tableware spanning their mother's entire socioeconomic history—Rose Medallion, Limoges, Dansk, Corning Ware. The dishes were packed so tightly and with such strict order that moving anything had always felt like a test.

“First, we should throw out as much crap as we can,” Cassie said. “Second, figure out what should go to the auction guy. Third, call in the consignment lady and then Goodwill. Oh!” Cassie was suddenly a fountain of tears.

“Cassie?”

“I'm so sorry!”

“About what?”

“That I'm making us sell everything.”

“It's fine; we've been through this. I'm okay with it.”

Cassie was broke. Her husband, Wes, had lost his software engineering job out on route 128 two years ago, and they had three teenagers and two maxed-out credit cards. Gina and Cassie had agreed to assign a value to each of the house's furnishings so that if there was something Gina wanted, she would buy it from the estate. Everything else they'd try to sell.

“I just wouldn't be able to stand it if you got mad at me,” Cassie
said. “All that fighting that Mom and Aunt Fran did when they were dividing up the Banton
things
!”

“We're not going to fight,” Gina said. “We aren't fighters.”

The memory of her mother and aunt poked Gina with two cold, witchy fingers. She shivered and pulled her phone from her pocket, hoping she might be able to catch Paul between his patients. Again, she got his voicemail.

“Jeez, Gina,” Cassie said when Gina hung up without leaving a message. “That's the third time you've tried Paul today. Are you that worried about Esther? Her dad's there.”

Gina bristled. She missed her kids painfully and perhaps unreasonably, too. Secretly, sometimes she was seized by the fear that if she turned her attention from them, they could be swept off the earth. “It's not the same with Paul,” she told Cassie. “You know a mother empathizes with her kids in a way no one else can.”

Cassie rolled her eyes. “Well, not
all
mothers,” she said. They exchanged a grim look, a kind of emotional osmosis that came with their history—our
sistory
they called it.

They got to work on
#1 Throw out all the crap
, beginning in the kitchen with corks, jars, and twist ties, mounds of hoarded plastic cutlery and stacks of plastic cups from Barnacle Bob's—her parents' favorite fish 'n' chips place. Then, with an unspoken understanding, they separated and began eviscerating the house room by room, stuffing thirty-gallon garbage bags to be taken to Goodwill or the dump.

Upstairs, Gina pulled from a blanket chest a sack of hems that their tiny mother had cut from her skirts. She was about to shove it into a garbage bag when she felt something hard; she fished around and pulled out a slender cardboard box, secured with a rubber band.
Inside was a scrap of burgundy-colored velvet labeled, “A piece of Gen. Washington's cloak” and a tightly folded piece of paper with a large tag attached that said, “Lady Martha Washington's hair.” Carefully, she peeled back the delicate ancient paper to have a look. The tiny nest of dark strands gripped her with a fascination that years of her mother's reciting the family history had failed to inspire.