Dream House (5 page)

Gina folded the pillow over her head. When Cassie said something, she peeled it away. “What?”

“You haven't cried the whole time we've been here.”

Gina had felt the tears, swelling inside her. What Cassie didn't know—because Gina hadn't yet found the words for it—was that even before their abrupt and monumental loss, something else had been stealing from her, something more insidious and stealthy. “I can't,” she said. “Not yet.”

“You still always sleep with a pillow wrapped around your head?”

“Yup.”

“I'm sorry you ended up with the bedroom next to Mom's.”

“It's not your fault.”

A house: a shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive. A receptacle for light and sun. A certain number of cells appropriated to cooking, work, and personal life.

A room: a surface over which one can walk at ease, a bed on which to stretch yourself, a chair in which to rest or work, a work-table, receptacles in which each thing can be put at once in its right place.

The number of rooms: one for cooking and one for eating. One for work, one to wash yourself in and one for sleep. Such are the standards of the dwelling. Then why do we have the enormous and useless roofs on pretty suburban villas? Why the scanty windows with their little panes; why large houses with so many rooms locked up? Why the mirrored wardrobes . . . the elaborate bookcases . . . the consoles, the china cabinets . . . ?

Le Corbusier,
Towards A New Architecture

Chapter 3

The morning after the funeral, Paul, Esther, and Ben piled into Cassie's car so that she could drop them at the airport on her way back to Providence, where she had an evening event to cater. Watching her family drive out the driveway, Gina felt a frantic urge to run after them and jump in the car. But there was still much to do, and she owed it to Cassie to stay a couple more days.

The auction man arrived at ten-thirty to pick up the house's more valuable furnishings. “There're some real treasures here,” he said. “You might be surprised by what they fetch.” Sliding open the drawer of a Banton family desk, he asked, “Have you gotten everything out of these drawers? Oh, wow! Look at these!” He plucked out several small,
worn frames. “Sixth plate daguerreotypes. Signed ‘New York, 1841.' Wonderful!”

Yesterday, Gina had seen the daguerreotypes but hadn't even taken them out to look at them. They'd been tucked in that drawer for as long as she could remember and had become fixtures over time, like faucets and hairbrushes. What excited
her
were the piece of George Washington's cloak and the lock of Martha's hair, now tucked in her carry-on bag. She and Cassie had decided not to even mention this fresh discovery to the auctioneer until they'd researched the best thing to do with them. Since Cassie's house had been broken into recently, she insisted that Gina take them with her to San Francisco.

Neighbors and friends had picked up most of the rest of the furniture and now that the auction items were cleared out, the house was nearly empty. Even the ship's and lighthouse clocks had been packed away, their voices silenced. Without Cassie's big personality to fill up the rooms, Gina experienced the echo of death even more acutely.

She went upstairs and sat on the toilet lid, looking for solace in her email. She opened the last of five from her clients, Mitzi and Jeff Stone, whose two voicemails she'd neglected to answer. She'd brought their drawings with her, expecting they'd want to talk and finally made a date with them for a Skype conference the next morning. She spent most of the afternoon answering the string of emails from clients and contractors that felt like a lifeline.

At five o'clock, she loaded up her parents' car with more boxes and bags and headed out Halsey Road to Goodwill. She made her drop, trying not to think about her mother's tiny cardigans and tiny shoes and the hardly-worn wool trousers of her father's that were stuffed beneath the knot of the black plastic bags. It seemed indecorous that owing to size and convenience, trash bags had become the default carry-all—for life, for death, and everything in between, like garbage.

When the car was empty, Gina turned around and drove back into the center of Whit's Point to pick up some groceries at Tobey's Market, the only commercial establishment in town and whose sign boasted “The Oldest Family-Owned Store in America.” She pulled into the parking lot, filling with apprehension. She could run into
anyone
!

She dashed into the store, wishing she had her sunglasses to hide behind. It was dinnertime, and the place was nearly empty. In summer, tanned yachters from boats moored in the harbor perused the sparsely stocked shelves, sporting Patagonia miracle fabrics, traditional red shorts and Topsiders. But April was slow for Maine merchants. A couple of older local men in khakis and wool L.L. Bean jackets lingered at the register, complaining about the shrinking of Wheat Thins over the years and the “useless and ugly” crosswalk that had just been painted between Tobey's and the post office. “If you can't cross the street in Whit's Point without a bunch of damn lines to tell you how to do it, you should stay at home,” one of them said, and the other said, “Ayuh.” Gina was relieved that she recognized only the cashier in the store, who was one Tobey or another.

Everything inside the store had changed except the most complete inventory of Campbell's soups in America, the anemic iceberg lettuce that dominated a paltry selection of California produce, and the creaky wood floor. Rubbery-looking croissants and a self-service coffee bar—complete with soymilk—had replaced the display of Devil Dogs, Yodels, and Ring Dings; there were handmade wreaths, straw baskets, and homemade preserves for sale. What was once the quintessential country mom-and-pop grocery had become a caricature of a quintessential country mom-and-pop grocery.

She carried her omelet ingredients to the register and handed her money to . . .
Robbie
Tobey, she remembered now, who had been a year ahead of her in school and had smashed up his father's truck out on
Halsey Road when he was sixteen. “Thanks,” he said, without looking at her.

Walking back to the car, a man approaching her stopped abruptly. “Gina?”

“Kit!” She leaned forward with the impulse to hug her childhood friend but caught herself and drew back, offering him her hand. Kit shook his head with a smile.

“Grease,” he laughed, holding up his hands. “I've been workin'.”

Kit's aged face and baldness were a surprise, but it was his familiar, piercing gaze that put Gina momentarily at a loss, taking her back twenty-eight years, when she had last seen him.

Kit's brow creased. “Well, wow. I was really shocked about the accident. I didn't even know. I was out of town for two weeks and just got back yesterday.”

“Yeah,” Gina said. Emotion welled up in her, and she looked at her feet. Kit lifted his hand as if he might reach out to comfort her, a possibility that only flustered her more.

“Well, anyways, you're lookin' good, despite everything.”

When she still couldn't respond, he asked, “So, do you have the house now?”

Again, he'd caught her off guard. “Oh, no, Mom and Dad didn't own the house. They rented it; remember? For fifty years, actually. Cassie and I've been packing it up. The landlord's putting it on the market soon.”

“You kiddin' me? They
rented
all those years? I guess I forgot that. What an amazin' piece of property! That
view
! You lookin' into it? What's he wanna get for it?”

“$998,000. And the place is falling apart.”

“Sheesh! Crazy!” Kit shook his head. “Hey—have you got a few minutes? I wanna show you somethin' I know would interest you, down at the dock.”

Gina's heart raced the way it had at the funeral yesterday. It had been overwhelming, catching up with so many people on decades of life, meted out in little morsels. With Kit . . . she didn't have the wherewithal to be anything but superficial, but he was her oldest friend.

She glanced at her car, calculating how quickly she'd be able to get to it. “Oh, I wish . . . I can't though. I've got a dinner thing.” She was sure Kit could see the lie; she felt awful. But her body was telling her,
bolt
.

“No problem. Well, I gotta get some grub here before they close up. Come find me at the dock sometime if you're around.”

Gina said she would, and Kit turned and walked away, a hint of hurt in his posture that she remembered well.

When she walked into the kitchen with her groceries, Gina startled a mouse who scampered into an impossibly small slot between the stove and the wall. She imagined her mother, reaching for a pot from the pot rack that was no longer there. She grabbed her phone, put in her earbuds, and played the last chapter of an audiobook while she cooked. When the novel ended, she moved on to an episode of
This American Life
that she'd downloaded. She maneuvered the few utensils and dishes they hadn't given away, her hands robotically moving in front of her while her mind was basted with clever talk. She listened as she ate her omelet, and while washing the dishes, she switched to her playlist, singing along with Judy Collins's “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” and Bob Dylan's “Not Dark Yet.” She sang out loud and hard—“behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain”—someone else's poetry, true, but the words spoke for her. No more muted feelings—tonight, if she couldn't cry, she would at least sing down the house.

She dried her hands and walked through the living room, where she imagined her mother again, this time on the couch that had been taken away, holding a G and T, her legs curled under her. She was everywhere, the breath and heartbeat of the house. “Let me in,” she seemed to say now.

In the bathroom, Gina answered more emails as Blind Faith's tender “Can't Find My Way Home” poured into her head, nearly swallowing her up. She went into Cassie's room at eleven, took out her headphones, undressed, and reached in her suitcase for her sleep shirt. As she pulled it out, the folded paper that held Martha Washington's hair came with it and fluttered to the floor. Her heart pumped—the first president's wife's hair! In her carelessness, it could have disappeared, like those restaurant receipts and used bus tickets left in her purse until they turned to pulp.

She searched her belongings for something to put the hair in for the journey home and came up with a container of spare contact lenses. She shook out the lenses, slipped the wrapped hair inside the box, and shoved it into her toiletry kit.

When she finally crawled into bed and turned out the lights, she was still uneasy. Her head was so noisy that she reached to take out the earbuds that were no longer there. All at once, words spoken during the past few days rushed in: dangling conversations with old family friends at the funeral, Kit's questions, Annie's invitation to stay at Lily House. To everyone's request wanting to help, to cook, to comfort, she'd smiled gratefully and said she was, “All set thank you.” Having kept herself unknown to people in Whit's Point for so long, she felt undeserving of their kindness.

Death was everywhere in the dark tonight. It filled the place next to her where Cassie had slept and when it pressed its cold feet against her shins, Gina turned on the light and bolted out of bed. Grabbing
the box of Martha Washington's hair, she ran downstairs to the shed. Martha's remains would have to spend the night on the shelf, next to the bag of birdseed. She locked the kitchen door tight.

Back in bed, she lay awake, wired and vigilant, not a drowsy bone in her body. She wasn't Gina Gilbert—mother, wife and architect; she was Ginny Gilbert—colt-limbs curled, lonely, scared.

By ten o'clock the next morning, Gina had labeled all the boxes of her father's photographs for Cassie to move to her garage, given the stove and refrigerator to Jake, the neighbor—tokens of appreciation for three years of mooching off his WiFi connection—and fastidiously scrubbed the bathroom in preparation for her Skype meeting with Jeff and Mitzi Stone. She left notes for Cassie, locked the windows, emptied the garbage, and turned off the furnace. She returned Martha's hair to her toiletry kit. Finally, she took a screwdriver, removed the old brass Banton doorknocker from the front door and put it in her suitcase. She'd always liked how the claw clutching a ball had nested in her palm.

Her suitcase was packed and stood by the front door. There was no way she'd spend another sleepless night in the house; after her Skype meeting with the Stones, she'd drive Paul's rental car to Logan Airport and stay at a hotel before catching her noon flight tomorrow.

She carried a box of books to the bathroom and spread the Stones' drawings on top of it. At ten o'clock, she sat on the toilet lid and tilted her laptop screen so that Jeff and Mitzi hopefully wouldn't see the tank.

When they were connected, Jeff's face appeared against their kitchen cabinets; next to him, Mitzi had her cell phone pressed to her ear.

“How are you holding up?” Jeff asked, gesturing to Mitzi to get off the phone.

“Ma, I'll call you back,” Mitzi said. “I'm just starting a meeting with my architect. Okay. I will, I will. I love you, too.”