Dream House (39 page)

After a few more minutes, Gina decided to take Kit up on his offer that she could use his boat anytime and fetched the oars from the clubhouse.

In the two-person shell, she felt in charge of the oars, as though no time had passed since her last row with Kit, the summer she was seventeen. The boat glided with neat precision as she threaded her way through the yachts in the harbor. She read their names to herself as she passed:
Take Flight, Tinkerbell, Southerly
—names that, unlike
Homeward,
seemed to promise escape.

Her eyes swept the scenery, and she silently named the points of land and the islands, the two rivers and small coves that sneaked inland. Unlike San Francisco, where the earth came to a sudden, plunging end, here the horizontal landscape made its slow reach toward the ocean, low hills rolling into fields that stretched out to marshes and rocks, and more rocks, smaller and smaller until, in some places, pebbles yielded a crescent of sand—a gift to the people who celebrated this union of sea and earth. The intimate landscape fostered a relationship with the water that was more like poetry than sport.

She reached the outer edge of the harbor, where, on the afternoon of the funeral, she and Cassie had taken a friend's boat out to scatter
Eleanor and Ron's ashes. The April air had been bitter; Gina remembered wondering what could possibly prepare a person to toss the flaky remains of another person into the sea. But, as she watched them dance and dissipate on the rippling sea, she knew for certain it was exactly the right thing.

The Isles of Maine appeared, dark humps on the horizon. She passed Miller's Island, shrouded with dozens of black cormorants, and thought of the day she and Kit had pulled his shell up on the island's shore, how he'd said he savored his time alone and how alone it had made her feel. For her, too, solitude had had its rich reward, making her more aware of the exquisite comfort of nature. But feeling isolated even in the presence of those who loved her, as she had that summer and again in recent months, had made
alone
unbearably lonely.

In just a few days, with each new and old door she'd opened—to Annie and Lester, to Sid and Kit—that loneliness had backed away another step. Even now, separated from her family and slipping into the blank, gray expanse of ocean while a storm was brewing, she felt sheltered.

She understood how Kit could make a boat his home. When summers rolled around and the breeze came up, he would move
Homeward,
finding other ports to explore before returning to his mooring. His home was always with him though the ocean was bigger than anything; his world was not so small, after all. By drawing the house, she, too, had taken this home inside her and would carry it everywhere.

Gina looked up at the darkening sky: it was time to turn inland. As the boat skimmed the gray surface, the resistance against her oars seemed to nearly vanish. Thunder rolled through the sky, and the blackest clouds were nearly over her. Sweat trickled down her cheek as she picked up her pace.

When she reached the inner harbor, the sky roared with startling fury. Gina scanned the shoreline for her parents' house, picking her way along the hills until she recognized the neighboring houses. But something looked different; she couldn't find the house. Had the trees grown up in front of it? Again, she identified each house until she came to the spot where the house should have been, but it wasn't visible. It must have been behind the grove of birch trees on the island.

It was nearly high tide—the cove would be full. She decided to row into it one last time. She maneuvered through the harbor, surrounded by a flotilla of pleasure boats beelining for their moorings. Despite the imminent rain, the offshore air blew hot again, and she was soaked from the exercise.

Slipping now between the inner islands, she realized she'd passed the last opportunity to spot the house before she rounded the point into the cove. A gust of wind curved the tops of tall pine trees and sent halyards clanging against masts. A flock of terns rose abruptly from the rocks. Lightning cracked the dome of the foamy, black sky, and rain poured down as she entered the cove. She turned, wiped her eyes, and scanned the surrounding hills. What was she seeing? It wasn't right. When thunder exploded, she thought it could be the sound of her heart bursting. She pumped the oars without turning again. Was she dreaming? Would she awaken and find herself tangled in a mess of sheets?

When she reached her parents' dock, she barely found the strength to pull herself out of the boat. Head down in the rain, she made the slippery climb up the hill, her fingers touching the grass to keep from falling. Before she'd even reached the top, she could smell what was coming. There was a certain odor that rose from the new ruins of a house; it was released when the bowels of the house
were exposed: earth and rotting wood, microbes and fungi fed by dampness, fuel. Now, she also recognized the distinctive scent of her parents' cellar—a fusion of kerosene, paint, and turpentine.

She stood in the rain, legs shaking. The debris boxes hunkered in the driveway, overflowing with the bones and tissue of the house. Piles of doors and windows lay neatly beside the stack of storm windows. She fixed her eyes on the only part of the house that still projected from the ground—the ragged bricks rimming the hole that had been the cellar. The deep, mud-filled rectangle appeared small and too crude to have been the foundation for any house. But she was grateful for it now, as it was the only room that could not be carried off.

She waited for the shock; strangely, it didn't come. Perhaps the strenuous row had left her too enervated to respond with anything but a languid sadness. She hadn't allowed herself to predict this outcome, though she herself had recommended the demolition of several houses too dilapidated or unworthy of their sites to save. When a house design required vast remodeling, it was almost always more economical to start over, building from the ground up. To the client, demolition had been nothing more than the necessary first phase of construction. A house that had taken months to build and had been lived in for generations could be taken down in a few hours. She was humbled now to think that although she'd felt remorse for sentencing a house to such an abrupt end, she'd never stood in the shoes of the people who might drive by one day to see the house they'd made their home replaced by another.

This was what Sid had meant this morning when he said he was sorry about the house; had she not delayed her departure, she would've been spared. News of this death, too, would've come in a phone call. She was glad to be here to witness the physicality of dying
that she'd been robbed of when her parents had died suddenly, leaving her with only death's finality. In her head, where houses marched through like soldiers for inspection, she'd known the house's time had come; now in her heart she felt it, too. Stripped of the physical evidence of her family and relieved of its responsibility to shelter, it had ceased being a home. On its long journey it ended as it had begun: as simply a
house.
The truth was, she'd never envisioned a new life for this house, just as Sid hadn't for his new family. Its life had belonged to her family—the Gilberts—even though its wood and plaster had belonged to someone else.

A four-foot circle of purple irises stood on the edge of the yard, its geometry now oddly conspicuous on the deconstructed site. She picked the irises—all of them—and threw them one by one into the cellar, assigning a family name to each, starting with her parents and ending with Ben, the youngest grandchild. Some of the flowers disappeared into puddles, but she was captivated by the way the others transformed the house-ruin with their delicate color.

The house was gone, and with it its power, both wondrous and terrible. There were no more questions to be asked of it; memories and secrets trapped within its walls had been freed.

She stood and looked out over the hill at the cove. The house existed only on paper now, but this place her mother had chosen—its exquisite composition of landforms and water, sensuous contours of hills and shoreline, play of shadow and light—had provided the unfailing comfort to her children that she could not, and it would go on living, unaltered by the changes in the lives it touched.

Now it was Sid's turn to build a life here, and it was right. He would nurture this place with his deepest appreciation and spirit of renewal. Perhaps in this world there were no owners or renters, only borrowers choosing a bit of ground to call home during their short
stay on earth. We must choose carefully, Gina thought; when we set our walls down to enclose something ordinary or extraordinary, we must be passionate about what we capture, inside and out.

The rain moved away, taking with it the white noise and watery lens that had blurred her senses. The bright world looked new, full of color and contrast. Gina studied what she could see now that this place had no structure. From the front yard, she could see the apple trees in the backyard; from the backyard, she saw past the birch tree, across the hills all the way to Kit's old house. She'd grown accustomed to looking at the world from the perspectives dictated by the house: separated and obscured by walls, framed by windows. Now, the cove and harbor were visible from the entire hilltop, and the landscape ran together—north, south, east and west.

Into this opening came an answer to her uncertainty about
home.
Not to her mind's eye, in lines or planes or in a misty-edged snapshot of a house, but as an essence.

She welcomed the dry breeze that aroused a tingle of anticipation. Tonight, Lester would come home to resume his life with Annie. Tomorrow, Gina would join her family in their tent. Before Ben and Esther went to sleep, she would kiss them and feel her time with them not dwindling but instead, stretching out like an uncharted ocean. When she returned to San Francisco, she would roll the Banton doorknocker over in her hands, excited to imagine its next home. In the coolness of their tall Victorian bedroom, when the windows had gone black with night, she would look between them at the photograph of the cove—the window that was always open, always light.

Thank You

To all the writers who have moved and inspired me. Novels have always seemed like miracles to me, and if I'd really understood how hard it is to write one, I never would have tried.

I am enormously grateful to Jay Schaefer, who edited with equal parts patience and passion, for his deep understanding of this work, his gentle and respectful nudging to make it better, and brilliant literary contributions.

To Lisa McGuinness, Rose Wright, Andy Carpenter and Andy Ross for everything they've done to bring this book to light.

To the amazing women and dear friends who read and provided their wise insights and decade-long encouragement: Anita Amirrezvani, Isabelle Beekman, Carolyn Cooke, Sylvia Dworkin, Jeanne Felton, Katherine Forrest, Laurie Fox, Peggy Greenough and her book group, Nancy Hardin, Anne Hogeland, Tess Uriza Holthe, Marion Irwin, Cary Nowell, Jamie Raab, Suzanne Schutte, Jessica Straus, Elise Trumbull, Lorna Walker, Janet Warren and Molly Wheelwright.

To Rennie McQuilkin, who showed me that writing was not only a useful way to work out teen angst, but also something that could be meaningful to others—or not...but in any case, it doesn't matter; we write because we can't not write.

To Kris Picklesimer, whose deep compassion coaxed words out of hiding when nothing else seemed possible.

To my parents, Alice and Douglas, who taught me to regard the world each day with curiosity and astonishment, and my sisters, Beverley Daniel and Gay Armsden, for sharing with me that wonder and the shelter of their enduring love.

Deepest thanks to my husband, Lewis Butler, whose love, friendship, support, and unfaltering
joie de vivre
have made my writing life possible, and to our children, Elena and Tobias Butler, who brought me home when they were born.