Dream House (8 page)

Yet as soon as she put hand to paper, her creative impulse froze. She couldn't see the house. While her projects for clients zipped along, her own unimagined, undrawn house weighed on her. She hated that Esther and Ben would be missing another summer here, where they could be outdoors all day.

Standing in the heat now, the image that did come to Gina was of Ben and Esther in Maine, running down the hill to pick blackberries, barn swallows circling overhead.

Here, hawks, or some other birds of prey—Gina had not yet learned to identify them—surveyed the field below. Paul strode away from Gina, leaning to pick up some tiny piece of litter. When he reached the lilacs they'd planted near a stand of eucalyptus, he gave them the once over, turning a leaf in his hands. “Oh, no,” he said, “looks like we're losing them.”

Gina ran to inspect the bruised leaves. “I can't believe it! We killed them! It's way too hot and dry here.”

When they'd gone to the nursery in early spring, the grass a lush green, the earth rich and fragrant, she'd spotted the lilacs and couldn't help imagining the purple flowering bushes that had grown to tree size around the house in Maine. It was wrong to plant them in this parched place; early June and already the grass was straw-colored, and the dusty earth rose in clouds behind their shoes.

Paul stretched out his arms and smiled. “Maybe someday we could put in a pool. It would be great here.”

“Yes,” Gina said, trying to picture a turquoise oval sparkling in the sun. Instead, she saw the cove in Maine, breaching the dock at high tide.

Paul fetched the cooler from the car, and they sat down on the scratchy grass in front of the house and looked out over their property, as they had so many times before. The insistent banging of a lone
hammer could be heard, coming from the “good side of the hill” (as the real estate agent had put it) where a thirty-thousand-square-foot Mediterranean Revival villa was under construction.

“I'm so ready to be doing this house!” Paul said. “Aren't you?”

“Uh-huh,” Gina said.

“We just need a little something on paper that we can discuss.”

“I know.”

“Gina . . .”

She looked up at him. Goose bumps broke out on her arms.

“Are you cold?” Paul said. He stroked her arm. “The lilacs will come back. If they can make it through those brutal New England winters, they can make it here.”

She wouldn't correct him, but he had it backward. Months of cold earth around their roots were exactly what lilacs needed to produce abundant blossoms later; this was part of their magic. The lilacs were
dead
.

Paul opened their cooler and handed a sandwich to Gina; they ate silently until several wasps, hungry for ham, drove them to the car.

They decided to take the coastal road home. Feeling out of sorts, Gina asked Paul to drive. In half an hour, they were back under the blanket of fog; just as the ocean came into view, the sun burned through, restoring the blue to the water. Gina squinted into the light, so white and penetrating it nearly shrieked, lending super-realist clarity to the textures of the landscape.

“It's gorgeous, isn't it?” Paul said.

Reflexively, Gina agreed because she and Paul had always agreed about what was beautiful in life. Now, she realized how foreign the Pacific still was to her. In fourteen years, she'd never navigated its windswept waters—she, who'd bailed and rigged and tacked since she
was nine. Only occasionally did she swim in it; it was an exquisite temptress, too cold to touch. She knew that Paul, too, missed the time they'd spent when they were first together back east, bodysurfing at the beach and swimming in Walden Pond. The night they met, they ditched a sweltering party in Cambridge to drive to the pond for a swim. Gina had pulled her swimsuit from her glove compartment saying, “You never know when you might need one,” and Paul had laughed, delighted. They'd treaded water and talked for nearly an hour; at one point, she remembered discussing the physics of levers and jaws, subject matter where their two professions—architecture and medicine—intersected. Walden Pond had been a black, still clearing in the forest with no sign of life except the racket of peeping. The immediate connection she and Paul had felt with each other had been breathtaking.

Those years, that intimacy, felt too distant to her now. Recently, she suspected that Paul probably barely recognized the confident, spirited Gina he'd married. Challenges had always made her energy rise, her eyes shine brighter. “I'm movin' to crazy California!” she crowed from Paul's '64 Mustang as they crossed into Kansas, heading away from the East Coast for good. Her entrepreneurial zeal had saved her from continuing to draw elevator cores for a corporate firm, and within a year she'd hung out her “Gina Gilbert, Architect” shingle. Moments after delivering Esther, she'd cried, “Let's have another one right away!” Paul was cautious and made moves slowly; her vigor had always been enough for both of them. Now, she feared her malaise was threatening the balance they'd come to rely on.

The car hugged a sharp curve, and she felt the cliff's plunge in her stomach. This famous winding road had never before made her uncomfortable, but now she saw how close to the cliff's precipice the passenger was, how blind the curves were. Anything could happen: a bicyclist, a deer, a car from the opposite direction swinging too wide.
The road might not be swept away today in a mudslide because it wasn't the rainy season, but at any moment an earthquake could send it tumbling into the sea.

Paul swerved around a bicyclist, and Gina felt her lunch rise in her throat. “Paul, pull over!” she rasped.

He stopped the car in a turnout. Gina got out and stood shivering in the bracing wind.

She stared up at the restless, gray expanse of sky where gulls drew invisible lines, then down at the restless, empty gray expanse of ocean; sky and water together were like an impossible jigsaw puzzle in which every piece looked the same.

The nausea receded, Gina returned to the car, and they began the descent into the valley of dripping redwoods and eucalyptus. When they left the trees and turned onto the straight lane of freeway, she was relieved.

“Sweetie, I'm excited about the house,” Paul said after a while. “But I don't want you to feel pressured about the plans for it. Give yourself a break; you've been through a lot.”

Gina was silent for a few moments. Finally, she said, “Nothing feels right.”

They'd reached the Golden Gate Bridge where people on the walkway clowned for cameras; others clutched their jackets closed against the wind. Tourists, everywhere. She felt like one, too.

“You're not yourself now. It takes time,” Paul said.

Gina let her head fall back on the seat. Why did people say that, she wondered, as if it were the flu? Since her parents' accident, everything had changed somehow. And yet, certainly not the day-to-day. She'd only seen her parents one or two weeks a year during the past decade. Still, the
idea
of her parents at the house in Maine, drinking Lipton tea at the kitchen table or touching up the paint on the
porch, animated by the occasional phone call with her and the kids, had admittedly provided more comfort than the
reality
of being with them. This is the way it is, she'd always told herself about their family dynamic, which even Paul conceded was dysfunctional. But buried in that resignation was a kernel of hope: as long as her parents were there, there was the possibility her relationship with them could change. Now, it was frozen stuck;
the way it was
felt like a kind of failure, a colossal waste of human potential for growth and acceptance.

Paul was right; it took time to mourn. But it wasn't only loss she felt. Her parents' death was a period at the end of a long, difficult sentence whose words had conveyed more urgency and pain to Gina the more she'd aged. In the past few months, it seemed to have shaken the very foundation of her courage and contentment. She felt unmoored—like a tent with one of its stakes pulled out of the ground, flapping and folding in the wind.

They rode in a humming silence punctuated by the thumping of the bridge's expansion joints and Stella's panting. When they arrived at his office, Paul pulled over, kissed Gina on the cheek, and got out of the car.

Gina climbed into the driver's seat and just as she pulled away from the curb, her phone rang. It was Cassie.

“Cass,” she said when she answered, “I'm driving, can I . . .”

“I'm sorry!” Cassie interrupted “But you've gotta hear this. Sid just called and left a message that he bought the house.
Our
house. He wants to discuss his plans for it.”

“
Our
house?” Gina ran a yellow light and noticed a cop parked at the intersection.

“Cassie, it's illegal to talk on my cell while driving. Wait—hold
on.” She laid her phone on the seat next to her and pressed “speaker.”

“It's so awful! Just spiteful!” Cassie's agitation filled the car, making it hard for Gina to breathe.

“You know, Sid's bought and sold, like, three houses in Whit's Point in the last ten years. He's just buying ours to flip it, too,” Gina said, thinking this might somehow reassure Cassie.

“Oh, how horrible! What will he
do
to it? I just
can't
talk to him.”

“Then I guess I'll have to.”

“No!” Cassie practically shouted. “You can't. He wants something from us—besides the house, I mean. He thinks we have something, and he'd probably do anything to get it.”

Gina's mind was not on her driving; she needed to say goodbye. “Let me think about it, okay? Email me his number. You and I will talk.”

They hung up. Gina's head felt foamy with confusion. As usual, she'd been so intent on calming down Cassie that she couldn't register how
she
felt about Sid's buying the house. Cassie's distrust of their cousin was over-the-top, she knew, but Gina wasn't eager to talk to him, either. She'd associated him with inexorable family hostility for so long that she imagined any contact with him could suck her into a vortex of pain. She was sure he felt the same way about her and Cassie—he'd long ago distanced himself from them. He hadn't even shown up at her parents' funeral.

But what could she really know about Sid? She'd been Esther's age when she last saw him. Why was he coming back into their lives now?

A book is a home for a story

A rose is a house for a smell

My head is a house for a secret

A secret I never shall tell!

Mary Ann Hoberman,
A House Is a House For Me

Just when it seemed her mother's birthday was doomed, Ginny's father was struck with the idea of a family trip to the Museum of Fine Arts. Eleanor had frowned at his other ideas of how to spend the day: lunch at Howard Johnson's or a drive to the mountains.

“Okay, the museum—that's good,” she had said, and Ginny, her father, and maybe even the timbers of the house, having been in suspense all morning, sighed with relief.

The Gilberts wound out Pickering Road, mounded on both sides with colorful leaves.

As they approached Lily House, Eleanor said, “Slow down, Ron.
Look!
They finished the roof job. The color of those new roof shingles is all wrong.”

Ginny turned to look. Everyone in the car expected Eleanor to remark about something or other every time she drove by Lily House. Wasn't the field behind it getting high or the barn needing some
paint? From her mother's vigilance Ginny gleaned that Lily House was her mother's
real
house, the one she would move into if Fran weren't living there. Because her mother and Fran didn't get along, Ginny had only been inside Lily House a handful of times.

“Stop!” Eleanor now commanded. “It's
Sid
—in the driveway. Let's see if he wants to go to the museum.”

“Oh, honey, you don't really want—”

“Certainly I do! Pull in.”

Ginny slumped in her seat. Cassie had left for her first year of boarding school six weeks ago, and Ginny missed her almost unbearably; it didn't seem fair to have your sister leave home when you were only nine. They were going to pick her up at school to go with them to the museum, and Ginny had been looking forward to having her to herself in the backseat. Plus, for some reason, Cassie hated Sid, and she'd be mad he was coming.