Dream House (38 page)

Her anxiety still reverberating, Gina felt the sting of Cassie's lumping her in with the “psycho” Bantons, and it reminded her too much of their mother's dismissal of Fran's misery. “Cassie, at the house, I had a panic attack.”

“Who wouldn't have, running into Sid? Why'd you go to Whit's Point alone, anyway? Why didn't you tell me?”

Gina ignored her questions, determined to make her listen. “I mean a full-blown I'm-gonna-die panic attack, Cassie. I had one earlier this summer, too, but never told anyone. Except my doctor.”

“Gina, you're stressed out and—”

“I want you to listen!” Gina said. She described everything she'd felt and all that Sid had done to help her, sparing no detail.

Cassie was silent for a few moments. Finally, when she said sadly, “Oh, Gina,” Gina knew she'd gotten through to her big-hearted sister.

Then, she told her about finding the Washington letters.

Cassie gasped. When Gina finished telling about hiding the letters, they both fell silent. Gina imagined that Cassie, too, was trying to make sense of the events leading up to the canceled Christmas.

Finally, Cassie said, “If Mom and Fran hadn't always been at war with each other, you wouldn't have felt you had to hide the package. And if Mom had gotten the letters . . . ugh! So many
ifs
! Do you realize how close we came to losing them? I can't believe it, Gina. Imagine what they must be worth! I'm dying to see them!”

“Is there any chance you could come up here tomorrow?”

“
Tomorrow
?” Cassie sighed. “Oh, Gina. I wish you'd told me you were coming; we could've had a birthday party! Let's see. Umm . . .
So I have to be at a job in Brockton in the afternoon, but if I came up really early, yeah. I could, I guess—I could get there between eight-thirty and nine. Where should we meet?”

“At our house.”

“You think that's a good idea?”

“Yes, I do.”

When she and Cassie had hung up, Gina searched for Sid's phone number in Cassie's old email, took a deep breath, and called him. Sid didn't answer, so she left a message that she had something important to discuss and asked him to meet her at the house at nine-thirty the next morning.

In the morning, Gina sat on the front steps of the old house waiting for Cassie. Lester had been kept at the hospital overnight; he'd had a slight fever in the afternoon. But this morning it was gone, and Lester's doctor felt confident that he'd be able to come home at the end of the day. Gina decided to delay her trip to meet Paul and the kids until tomorrow so she could help Annie bring Lester back to Lily House and get him settled.

Now, she was restless with anticipation. Sid had left her a message after dinner agreeing to meet her at the house, and she was hoping that Cassie would get there before him so she'd have time to warn her Sid was coming.

But Cassie didn't pull in until nine-thirty. “The traffic on 128 was horrible!” she complained when she opened the car door. As she was getting out, Sid's van turned into the driveway.

Gina gave her a big hug. “Sid's meeting us,” she said quickly, still in their embrace. “I asked him to come so we could talk about what to do with the letters.”

Cassie pulled back and turned to see the car coming up the hill,
her mouth gaping in disbelief. “Oh Gina, I just
can't.
It's just too much. You should've warned me.”

“I was afraid you wouldn't come,” Gina said. “I promise it'll be okay. It will be. You'll see.” She smiled and waved at Sid. “I haven't told him I found the letters yet. But he's had a whole career of selling this kind of stuff, and he'll know exactly what we should do with them.”

“Why do you think you can trust him?”

“Cassie! Why should he trust
us
? We're the ones who made the letters disappear.”

Cassie shuddered. “God. Okay,” she said, gritting her teeth as Sid's car door slammed. “But I'm not going to talk to him about our house.”

“Okay. You're allowed.”

Sid came around the corner wearing black shorts and a sky-blue polo shirt. “Well. It's both Gilbert girls. What's the occasion—are we going to have a passing-of-property ceremony?”

Cassie wagged her fingers hello at Sid, and when he wagged his back in imitation, Gina wondered how she was going to get through the next hour with them. She led them into the living room where the letters, rewrapped in the original Christmas paper, were sitting in the middle of the floor. “Sit here,” she ordered, pointing to the floor.

“Christmas in August!” Sid chuckled, and Gina suddenly realized the full burden of Christmas associations that she might be loading on him. Might he even remember the wrapping paper? “Is it for me or Cassie?” he asked.

“Both.” Gina told Sid to open the package. He started peeling off the Christmas paper, and when he realized what was inside, he let out a big laugh.

“What the hell . . . where have you been keeping these all this time?” He handed a few of the envelopes to Cassie, who carefully
extracted the letters and opened them on the floor in front of her. For the first time in a long time, she seemed speechless; Gina hoped it was because she was engrossed and not that she was furious with her.

“Before you look at them,” Gina said, “come with me, and I'll show you where they were.”

Cassie and Sid followed her upstairs, and when Cassie saw the hole in the wall of her old room, she gasped, “Gina!” and cast a worried look at Sid.

“I'll pay to get it fixed,” Gina said quickly.

Sid laughed. “No need. It's not a problem,” he said. “Really. And anyway, are you
kidding
? Look what you found in there!”

Relieved, Gina recounted the story of how the letters traveled from Lily House in her bag to the hiding place in Cassie's wall.

“Mother told me she'd given them to Ellie,” Sid said. “I didn't even know Mother had them. She must've found them somewhere in Lily House and never told anyone. I couldn't figure out why they never surfaced and figured Ellie was hiding them.”

Back downstairs, the three of them sat silently on the floor while reading the letters.

“Wow,” Sid finally said. “They're really something, aren't they? Do you know the story?”

Gina shook her head. “Only the gist.”

“They were never supposed to have seen the light of day because they would've been such bad PR for Jefferson. The way it got started was, Jefferson had written to this libertarian friend in Italy, calling Washington ‘Anglican' and ‘monarchical' and a bunch of other unflattering stuff. The letter was published overseas and then re-translated and published in the States by Noah Webster—the dictionary guy. So then Washington got pissed off, and he and Jefferson shared a few nasty rounds of correspondence, which of course our very own Sidney Banton was the messenger for. Apparently, a couple of people
at Mount Vernon read the letters, and after a few drinks Banton gossiped about their content. Jefferson's political enemies would've had a field day if they'd been made public—dissing the first president was totally uncool—and then suddenly the letters were nowhere to be found. Banton denied their existence. Banton's biographer said publicly that he believed Jefferson had asked Banton to destroy them. But privately he thought Washington had brought the letters to Lily House when he visited Banton here in 1789 and that Banton had hidden them. Jefferson rewarded Banton for the rest of his life for keeping the letters private—writing recommendations for him and eventually hiring him as a consul general.”

The living room was silent except for peeping crickets and the occasional swish of a car on Pickering Road. Cassie pinned her stare on the letters as if they might float away.

“Whaddya think, girls, should we hide them away for another two hundred years?”

Cassie's head jerked up, her eyes flashing with panic.

“Kidding!” Sid laughed and patted Cassie on the back; she smiled wanly.

Gina was counting on Sid to be the authority on what should be done with the letters and hoped she wasn't wrong to trust him. Especially because Cassie was now giving her a
look.

“I suppose I should be jumping up and down about these,” Sid said. “But all I can think about is all the anger and betrayal they represent—the secrecy around two fighting presidents . . . then the secrecy between two fighting sisters. These damn letters held our family and Lily House hostage.”

Sid sighed and rested his face in his hands for a moment. The barren little room that moments before had tingled with excitement turned desolate. Gina stood and walked to the window. Black clouds towered over the cove; behind her, she could hear Cassie sniffling.

“I believe in new beginnings, though,” Sid said. “I've had a few already. The booze didn't manage to kill me and neither did
the plague,
which is nothing short of a miracle. You kind of look at life differently when you've been given the chance even to just keep going. It turns out no matter how damaged you are it's possible to find love that's not treacherous. That's what matters, right?”

Gina turned just as Cassie let out a sloppy sob. She watched Sid stroke her sister's back and thought, this is what a miracle is: a sea change happening here, in this family, in this house.

By the time Cassie had to leave for Brockton, they had a plan for the letters. Sid knew whom to contact to ensure they would be bought by a private collector who'd be obligated to donate them to the Library of Congress within a few years' time.

“I'm driving these to the bank vault this morning,” he said.

Gina had brought the lock of Martha Washington's hair and the piece of Washington's cloak, and she and Cassie agreed to add them to the collection of letters. “No more disappearing acts for these things,” she said.

In the driveway, the cousins did the unimaginable and hugged goodbye; Gina felt the possibility of family where there had been none. The new one, free of the possessions and history that had joined and then divided them, would be brought together by an appreciation for what they'd lost and could find again on their own terms.

Cassie and Gina climbed into Cassie's car. Sid cast a stormy look at Gina through the window. “You're headed back to San Fran this morning, right?” he said.

“No, no. I decided to stay till tomorrow to help out Annie and Lester.”

“Oh.” Sid looked at his feet. “I thought you'd be leaving today.
Well. I'm really sorry.” He turned and gestured at the house. “About all this. I hope you'll understand.”

“Of course I do,” Gina said, wondering why, after today's reconciliation, he'd still be worried. “I
do
understand.”

Sid looked thoroughly unconvinced. “Well, I don't know.” He looked from Cassie to Gina. “But you're all the family I've got. So let's not be strangers, okay?”

At the bottom of the driveway, just as Cassie turned onto Pickering Road and burst into tears, Gina glanced back up at the house. Sid was standing on the slope of the front yard, hands on his hips, gazing up at the house. Or perhaps it was the house who stared down at him, asking
him
now, “What will become of me?”

Things are either devolving toward, or evolving from, nothingness . . . While the universe destructs it also constructs. New things emerge out of nothingness . . . And nothingness itself—instead of being empty space . . . is alive with possibility.

Leonard Koren,
Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers

Chapter 17

Cassie pulled in at Lily House to drop off Gina. “We have to celebrate,” she said. “Paul told me on the sly he was coming out here and invited me and Wes to meet you guys at the end of the week at Hermit Island. Is that okay? I'll bring fabulous food. I have some amazing new summer salad recipes I'm doing with tomatoes and corn.”

“Great! But we'll accept you without food, too, you know. We'll celebrate, yes!”

“I don't mean celebrate just the letters, though. It's something else. I've always felt . . . like there was this part of me that stayed hard—like in some avocados, or those peaches that never ripen right. And right now, I feel all soft, like a juicy, sweet honeydew. You know what I mean?”

Gina laughed. “I know exactly what you mean.” She leaned to hug Cassie. “I love you, Cass; thanks for being such an awesome big . . . honeydew.”

When Cassie had gone, Gina walked into the house, and Annie gave her the good news that Lester would be ready to come home at
six o'clock. By two, she and Gina were finished with the house chores and grocery shopping. Annie needed a nap.

Gina badly needed a nap, too, but what she
craved,
she realized, was a row. She left Lily House and walked to the town dock to look for Kit.
Homeward
was not on her mooring. She sat at the top of the ramp to wait for him, leaning against the dock railing with two teenaged girls in bikini tops and tiny shorts who were sharing a cigarette. Three boys in swim trunks were horsing around, pushing each other off the float into the water. Half an hour passed. Boats came and went from the float, picking up or dropping off passengers who talked of more thunderstorms.