Dream House (24 page)

“Yes,” Gina agreed, remembering how her mother had lit up when they were out on the water. “She would be.”

Gina was exhausted. She and Kit had been navigating the gaps, calibrating the reach of their conversation—pulling back, casting out, retreating, like yo-yos. She needed to go. She stood to scan the harbor, a wash of blues, grays, and greens, flecked with gulls. It was an uncomplicated, soothing scene, but she was rattled.

Kit took a slug from his drink and stood. “Before you leave, go below and check it out!”

Reluctant but curious, Gina climbed through the companionway into the cabin, taking in its familiar smell—a mingling of bilge water, wet wood, and canvas. The seat cushions where her family had been rocked to sleep at night were still covered with the blue denim her mother had sewn; two toothbrushes sat in the metal holder her mother had fastened to the galley wall. Gina's fondest memories of family life were from summer cruises down-east on
Homeward,
her mother at the tiller navigating swells with a broad smile, at night, the four of them snug in the cabin.

Kit climbed down behind her just as the wake of a motorboat hit
Homeward.
The boat rocked and Gina lurched sideways, nearly losing her balance. She felt Kit's hands take a firm hold on her waist. “Whoa, where're your sea legs?” He laughed and, when the rocking stopped, pulled his hands away.

Gina turned. Her eyes met Kit's, slate-gray with an intensity mitigated by the fine smile lines that fanned from their corners. A familiar sense of him—his gentle touch and salty smell, his protectiveness—flooded her, and she thought of all the small, private spaces, like this one, that she and Kit had shared as kids. Snow caves, rowboats, forts, and beds when they were young enough for sleepovers—they'd huddled to commiserate about the bruises of their complicated childhoods. How could she have known then how rare such resonance and loyal companionship were? Standing with Kit in the cabin, she felt closer than she ever had to the parts of her past that had seemed safe and good.

All this pumped through her mind in the few seconds it took for her to become flustered and say, “It's so cool that you live here.” She felt lightheaded, dumb.

Kit smiled, leaned toward her, and reached out his hand. She experienced a visceral memory of pulling away from him, but now she didn't recognize the part of herself that had once needed to and, in fact, was worried about the part that might not want to. But Kit's hand continued to reach beyond her to take hold of something on the shelf.

“One of your father's logbooks,” he said, handing it to her. “I guess I've been saving it for you.”

Gina looked down at the small black notebook labeled “1977–1979” with her father's perfect printing. “Thank you,” she said, hoping he hadn't read the range of emotion that had hijacked her.

Kit turned and she followed him back on deck. “So if you're not
lookin' into the house, what're you up to here?” he asked.

A soft breeze touched Gina's cheek. “I'm . . . it's hard to . . .” she fumbled. “I've been feeling out of sorts . . . The thing is, if I can just make this house in California happen, I'll feel better. At the same time, I don't think I can make the house happen until I feel better. And I still can't let go of the old house here.”

Kit shook his head and chuckled. “Still tortured! You haven't changed a bit. I mean have you had some untortured years since I saw you last?”

Kit's words jabbed. But he couldn't know just how tortured she'd been feeling recently, and she saw in his eyes that his remark had more to do with the hurt she'd inflicted on him years ago.

Was there a point in addressing her regrets now? She thought of her missed opportunity with Annie yesterday. “I was really confused back then,” she said. “I had a lot going on and . . . You were always so kind.” She felt her cheeks flush. Her words hardly seemed adequate, but they were something, at least.

When Kit smiled, a shyness softening his lined face, she felt rewarded. “Well, we were both lonely, huh?” he said, as if addressing her implied apology. “Our parents believed us kids were immune to their crap. Eleanor really got to you, and when my dad left my mom, it was just the beginning of trouble for me.” He stood. “Anyway, about the house—you'll figure it out, right? That's why you've come out here. And then you'll feel better!”

An outboard motor started up at the float, enveloping them in a cloud of gasoline fumes. Gina looked at her watch. “Yes. I just need to get down to it!”

She put out her hand, but Kit surprised her with a hug. “Hey—come look for me next time you're at the dock,” he said. “Oof! You're stiff as a two-by-four. I can tell you're needin' a good row!”

The feeling of Kit's arms around her awakened a slumbering sadness that threatened to draw her too deeply into her younger self. She pulled back from their embrace. “Yes. I think I do need a row!”

Kit pointed behind her at a float crowded with skiffs and inflatable rubber dinghys. “You can take out my boat, even if I'm not around,” he said. “It's the shell secured with a red line over there. The oars are in the clubhouse with my name on them.”

“Thanks a lot,” she said, smiling. “That would be really great.”

But in a quick couple of days, she thought with some relief, she'd be gone.

The Plan is the generator. Without the plan, you have lack of order, and willfulness. The Plan holds in itself the essence of sensation.

Le Corbusier,
Towards a New Architecture

Chapter 10

As she walked up the ramp and down the dock, Gina pulsed with all that Kit had stirred up. Crossing the street in front of Tobey's, she forgot to look and had to make a dash for the sidewalk to avoid a car.

By the time she reached Lily House, she understood that Kit was right: she hadn't yet found what she'd come to Whit's Point for and had to return to the old house. She marched down Pickering Road and stood again in the front yard.

Nothing had changed since yesterday, not the stifling heat that by now had burned the blue out of the sky, nor the white husk of a house, nothing except the cove, which held an hour's less water than it had at the same time yesterday. From the yard, she sized up the house, trying to imagine what she would do to it if it were her architectural project. But no matter how she pushed and pulled its walls in her mind, appending the old house with new rooms or windows, a coherent vision of an improved house didn't come to her. It was what it was—unmalleable, complete. And yet it left her feeling incomplete.

The house looked back at her, as confounding and impenetrable as her mother. But it was a
house
—wood, glass, lines and angles—
and she was an architect; she had the tools to get inside and
know
this entity.

All at once it struck her: she would make drawings of the house. Usually, drawings marked a beginning of something new. She'd ask her client, “What do you want?” and turn the answer into a plan, the plan into a house. Now, she would work backward—more like an archaeologist than an architect—and with her drawings deconstruct the house wall by wall in hopes of discovering what she wanted from it.

Propelled by this mission, she mostly ran the quarter-mile to and from Annie and Lester's to fetch paper, clipboard, her tape measure and camera. When she got back to the house, she had to sit under the birch tree to catch her breath and cool off.

On the pad of paper, she sketched the footprint of the house on which she would put her exterior measurements. She stood and walked the house's perimeter, hooking the measuring tape on each corner and dragging it along the wall. She placed each ground-floor window on the plan, noting its distance from the ends of the wall. Then she added the front and back doors, the porches and steps leading from them, and the shed off the kitchen.

As she measured, she felt drawn to the house in a new way, not unlike what she'd felt with Kit in
Homeward
's cabin: an appreciation that came from not only a shared history but also a more focused and seasoned perspective.

She finished the plan of the exterior walls and collapsed under the tree again to gaze at what she'd drawn. For every wiggly line that represented a wall of the house, there were four more parallel to it that merely served the purpose of noting dimensions. There was no hierarchy in this kind of sketch, just a mess of lines and numbers that were legible mostly only to the measurer. Yet there was strict, underlying precision in the apparent disarray, which later would translate into a plan that documented the
house to within a quarter of an inch. This preliminary work had always suited Gina: the part of her that liked to scrawl with pen and paper, the part of her that wanted to create order by revealing a house's factual image. A house's history could be uncovered in these lines, and its future would rest on their foundation. Now, she experienced something different as she recorded this house: the lines and numbers were alive on the paper, a breathing reality that revived her family's past.

The front door was still unlocked. She glanced down the driveway before pushing it open. Willing herself through the house's stuffy rooms, she quickly sketched the floor plan: living room, kitchen, piano room, and darkroom, grouped around the steep stair. Then she went upstairs, where the walls of the four bedrooms aligned with those below. “We're all on top of each other!” her mother often complained, and indeed they were; the “foursquare” house, popular everywhere in America at the turn of the century, defined family life with its compact, centralized plan. It was the floor plan of choice for Gina's clients who strove for togetherness; her wealthier clients, however, chose houses with wings where they could flee from their children and their caregivers, their housekeepers, and cooks.

Now, Gina set out to assign dimensions to her lines, at times on her hands and knees reaching inside closets with her measuring tape, once feeling a splinter pierce her palm. It was an intimate exercise, and although she went about it with a mechanical efficiency, emotion welled up in her; she was as close as she could be to the wood bones and plaster skin of the organism that had been her family. She became acutely aware of how her mother saturated every inch of the house, imagining her poking the nose of the vacuum cleaner under beds and into closets, mopping the kitchen floor, brushing paint on the old radiators. Gina would never again touch her mother, and the darker corners of her mother's mind would remain a mystery. But
with her tools, as Gina probed and recorded every bump and recess that her mother had inhabited, she felt somehow closer to her.

Finished measuring, she walked through the rooms of the house one last time, letting her eyes rest idly on their barren landscape. There were footprints left by objects that had defined each room: the faded rectangle where a tiny Dutch painting of a fishing boat had hung, the hook for her father's hat, the dent left by the living room doorknob where it had repeatedly punched the wall, the ghosts of rugs where the floor had been painted around them. In the kitchen, two holes marked where the birdcage had hung next to the window; cup and utensil hooks still remained in the kitchen cabinets. There were no architectural details in these rooms, only the simplest flat baseboards, window and door trim. Probably only one other person had drawn this house—its builder. Who had he been? she wondered. Perhaps it was the fate of a rental to never be fully known.

As she closed the front door, she heard the stirrings of the trapped bird from the attic and scolded herself for not remembering to bring Annie and Lester's ladder.

She returned to Lily House wilted, blisters from her flip-flops burning between her toes. Dirt clung to her damp skin, and her palm throbbed from the splinter, long and lodged deep. A note sat on the island in the kitchen.

Gina, I'm heading to a symphony conference in Portland and won't be home till after dinner. Lester's helping a friend set up his computer, then going to a book sale at the church. He said he'd be back before one so if he's not, call the Coast Guard! Leftover lasagna in the fridge for you 2 tonight. A.

Gina looked at the clock: twelve forty-five. Why would Annie worry about Lester? He seemed very capable.

She changed out of her filthy clothes, washed her hands and face, and removed the splinter. On her phone, she saw that Paul had called without leaving a message. She left him a perfunctory voicemail saying all was well, then went into the sunroom. The drawing she'd faxed to Allison Brink was waiting for her in the fax machine with Allison's notes of approval, questions about details, and a shy-looking arrow pointing to the space between the kitchen island and dining room. Here, Allison had drawn a dashed line in the exact place where Gina had taken out the wall.

She'd added a note:

I love having this wall gone, but could we design a really neat moveable screen here, so that when I entertain, I can have privacy from the housekeeper and kids in the kitchen? Also, the kids' father says he really wants to build the playhouse before summer's over
—
any progress on that?

Cranky, Gina tapped out an email to Allison on her phone:

Allison, You named this your “great room” not your “sometimes a great room.” You're lonely and longing for your children's company
—
why predict that you'll want to shut them out once you've let them in?