The Good House: A Novel (36 page)

Tess seemed content to stay and chat with some of her old friends. She had let Grady out of his backpack and he was running around, chasing another small boy and giggling. I was exhausted and, well, Peter’s pill was wearing off. I needed another, or, even better, a nice glass of wine. Just a glass. I told Tess that I had to get home to take care of some business. “Why don’t you have one of your friends drop you off at my place later to get your car?” I said.

“No, I need to get home and make dinner,” she replied, and after saying good-bye to our friends, we loaded little Grady back into the car.

Half an hour later, I was standing in my driveway, waving Tess and Grady off, and before they were out of sight, I had already popped one of Peter’s pills. Why not a pill
and
a glass of wine? It was a night to celebrate. Why not feel really good?

It was fortunate that I had taken the pill, because within the hour, Frank arrived to tell me the news about Peter. When I heard the pickup in my driveway, I assumed he was there to apologize. Peter’s pill and the little bit of wine had softened me and I smiled as he approached and even hugged him. “Thank God, Jake’s safe,” I said.

“Let’s go inside, Hil,” Frank replied.

Manny had called Frank as soon as he was onshore and told him how they had plucked Peter’s body from the sea. Frank wanted to tell me before I heard it on the news.

“He must’ve gone out for a swim and got caught in the riptide there. That’s a wicked ripper up on North Beach,” Frank said, though we both knew that Peter, a Wendover native, would know how to escape the strongest current by going with the flow; by ignoring the urge to struggle and panic.

“Have they been able to revive him?” I cried. “Is he okay?”

“No, Hil, the medical examiner says he’d been dead for more than a day.”

“Well, that medical examiner is wrong. Peter was here last night. With me.”

“When?”

“He came by, I don’t know, it must have been midnight. Maybe even later. He just wanted to see how I was doing.” I left out the part about the basement and the drinking.

“No, Hildy, his car’s been parked down at the parkin’ lot at North Beach since yesterday mornin’. Sleepy told me he would’ve ticketed it, even though he knew it was Newbold’s, but he was too busy searchin’ for Jake. He couldn’t figure out why Peter had decided to park it there. He must’ve driven past it half a dozen times yesterday. It was still there this mornin’. Still there, you know, after they found him.”

“But that’s impossible. Maybe he was driving somebody else’s car last night. Or … something.”

Frank was looking at me carefully then. Neither of us knew what to say.

“He was here,” I said, crying softly.

Frank pulled me close and I wrapped my arms around him.

“His clothes were in his car, Hildy. They were the same clothes he had on when he left here yesterday mornin’. People noticed his car there startin’ yesterday, just a little while after he left here. He must’ve gone straight to the beach. He went swimmin’ in his boxers. He probably just didn’t know the current there as well as he did on his own beach. There’s already some rumors goin’ around that it was a suicide, but I’ve been settin’ people straight. That tide’s wicked fierce down there at North Beach. You could be an Olympic swimmer and not be able to pull yourself out of that mess.”

“He was here last night,” I said.

“You’re stressed out, Hildy. I think you might’ve dreamed you saw him.”

There had been a Dr. Will at Hazelden when I was there. Yes, that’s right, we called the doctors by their first names, but we had to put the title “Dr.” in front of them, you know, because of their egos, and Dr. Will was in charge of “alcohol education.” He told us that blackouts weren’t normal, that craving alcohol at a specific time each day indicated a person was an alcoholic, and a number of other “facts” that I found quite irksome, as they were all things that I had experienced, though I was not an alcoholic. The brainwashing that goes on at those places. He had also talked about some kind of alcoholic psychosis. Apparently, some alcoholics start hallucinating in the later stages of the “disease,” and I had been rather pleased to learn about this, as I’d never had any kind of thing like that. Now, standing there with Frankie, I couldn’t help but recall the doctor’s words. Had I imagined that Peter had been with me downstairs? It wasn’t a dream—I had carried the chairs up from the cellar as soon as Tess drove off. But had Peter been there at all?

Frank stayed with me that night. I couldn’t bear to be alone. We didn’t really talk about it, we just sat and drank wine—not too much, but not too little, either—and we occasionally thought aloud about what we might have done differently had we known that Peter might have been planning something drastic.

“He didn’t
plan
it,” I kept telling Frank, and myself, whenever our musings veered in that direction. “It was an accident.”

“Well, it was painless, that’s for sure,” Frank had reasoned, topping off his wine. “Water’s still too cold for swimmin’. He would’ve gotten confused quick in the freezin’ water. Your mind goes first; all the blood rushes to your core, to protect all the organs, you know.…”

“Yes,” I said as he passed me the wine. “He just went swimming and the cold confused him.” Then I said, “Do you think that was his … ghost I saw here. Last night?”

“Nah, Hildy, c’mon. A ghost? You had a dream.”

“My aunt used to tell me she was visited by … you know … spirits. Of people who had just passed.”

“Yer crazy aunt Peg?” Frank said. “C’mon, Hildy, stop thinkin’ about it.”

Frank stayed in Emily’s room that night and then he stayed away for a while. I had just enough pills left to help me sober up over the next few days—to wean me back to my more moderate drinking levels, to the way I was before I had quit drinking. It was healthier, I realized, to drink moderately than to quit altogether and then end up going on a binge the way I had. The key was moderation.

But it was hard to look at Frank in the sober light of day, and I guess he found it hard to look at me, because, like I said, he stayed away for a while. I had thanked him for all he had done with my car, but he knew I was hurt. Hurt that he had thought I could have killed Jake. Hurt that he had called me a drunk and a lush. The things he had said to me. And he didn’t apologize, which he really should have, now that it was obvious how off base his accusations had been.

But we’re at an age now where we have to let things slide a little. We had grown used to each other’s company over the past year. So, we kept our distance, then, one afternoon in late June, I ran into him in the Crossing and asked him what he had been up to.

Same old.

I told him he could come for supper if he wanted.

He did.

It was just supper, though. It was impossible for me to imagine, now, how I had ever been intimate with Frankie Getchell. I considered not having anything to drink that first night, but that would have felt like a concession. An admission that he was correct about my drinking. I could control how much I drank. Easily. And I was going to prove it to Frank. I would continue to enjoy my daily wine, but I was going to be more careful. Moderation. Moderation was the key. Frankie never said anything about my drinking again. Sometimes I sensed that he was watching how much I drank, but that was probably my imagination. Rehab ruins your drinking forever, I swear. Even if you’re not an alcoholic, you’ll question your drinking habits for the rest of your life.

Elise Newbold tried to pull the Wind Point Road listing from me soon after Peter’s burial—she had always wanted to list with Wendy, but we had a contract, so she really couldn’t, and I did end up selling the house only a few weeks later.

I sold it to a couple from New York. They had been coming up on weekends to look at homes in the area. The husband was a film actor. They had three young children. When I drove them out to Wind Point Road, I asked them what had brought them to Wendover. The wife said she had always wanted to live in a small New England town. She had moved frequently as a child and wanted her kids to grow up in a regular town, rather than in New York or Hollywood.

“We want the kids to grow up in a real community where they can set down roots,” she said, as if you can just set down roots anywhere. She asked how long I had lived in the area.

“All my life,” I said. “My parents grew up in Wendover, too, and all my ancestors are from this area. My eighth-great-grandmother was Sarah Good—one of the witches tried in Salem.”

“You’re kidding. That’s wild!” the actor exclaimed.

“So she must have been called Goody Good,” said the wife, laughing. “The poor woman. No wonder she ended up being a witch.”

“Yes.” I laughed with her.

When we pulled up to the house, the husband and wife marveled at its beauty. “Right on the beach. Look, kids,” the actor said, and we all climbed out of the car. The kids stayed on the beach while the parents followed me to the front door.

“I love old houses,” the wife said when we walked inside. “You can just feel the history of this place.”

“Yes, it’s really quite charming,” I agreed, trying to ignore the echoes of childrens’ laughter that bounced off the bare walls, the games of hide-and-seek that gamboled all around us as we moved from one cold, empty room to the next. I had hosted a little party of one the night before, and well, sometimes, just a couple of times over the past couple of weeks, I imagined that I heard and saw things when I was hungover. Sometimes, things that weren’t there. It was my nerves.

“Is the house … haunted?” the wife asked breathlessly.

They hadn’t heard about Peter’s suicide and I was under no obligation to tell them. This was just a question a lot of people ask about such an old house, this business about it being haunted, and sometimes it’s hard to gauge how the buyer would like you to answer. Some people won’t consider living in a house that’s said to be haunted. Others really hope that there will be some wonderfully annoying ghost in the house that they can tell their dinner guests about. But I was startled by the wife’s question because there was so much noise in that house, the joyous calling of Allie and Peter, and just a moment before, for a split second, as I glanced out a bedroom window, I had seen another sort of ghost. She was standing on the beach, looking out at the sea with a German shepherd at her side. My heart raced at the sight of her and I spun around to see if my clients could see her as well. The actor was checking the ceiling for signs of water damage; the wife was peering inside a closet. When I looked out the window again, I realized that what I had seen was a pile of driftwood.

*   *   *

I saw Rebecca only once after Peter died. She stopped in at my office one afternoon for a chat. She looked different. There was a calmness. There was no pacing about, no looking out to see if Peter was walking past, no glancing up at the ceiling to see if he was there. She was quite composed. She had found a new therapist by then, a woman this time, and she had been encouraged by this woman to tell Brian about her affair with Peter. It was to help her with her grief, Rebecca had told me. To help with her healing. I don’t see how this helped Rebecca in the long run, because Brian served her with divorce papers the day after she told him, and the last I heard, Rebecca had moved to her mother’s house in Virginia. But she and Brian were quiet, the scandal never broke about her affair with Peter Newbold, and, of course, I never talked about it with anybody but Frank. Peter’s death was determined to be an accident by the medical examiner, and Sam and Elise were able to collect Peter’s life insurance, which I have heard was quite substantial.

“I just want to make sure that Elise and Sam are going to be taken care of,” he had said in my kitchen that morning, just before he walked off the edge of the town,
our
town, into the sea.

First, do no harm.
Isn’t that it?
First, do no harm to others.
Isn’t that the doctor’s oath?

I’ve never forgiven Rebecca, I doubt I ever will. I blame her for Peter’s death. Peter, who had never hurt a soul in his life; who had spent his last hours making arrangements for his family, for Rebecca, even for me, with the sedatives, and the kind words that crazy morning. Like any good doctor, closing out his cases before retiring, Peter was making sure that everyone would be taken care of after he was gone.

No, I’ll never forgive Rebecca, but Frank seems to bear her no grudge. When he talks about her, which is rarely, it’s as if he’s referring to a sort of natural and unavoidable disaster, like a destructive storm that blew through our town and left nothing but wreckage in its wake.

“That was the winter of Rebecca,” he’ll say, in reference to something that happened during that time. “That was during Rebecca.”

Cassie Dwight has kept in touch with Rebecca. She tells me that she writes to her on occasion and always includes photos of Jake—at his new house in Newton, at his new school. She sent me a picture, too, recently, in a lovely little mother-of-pearl frame. I keep it on my bedside table. In the photograph, Jake is cuddling his big orange cat and he’s smiling.

The other day, a young woman named Elizabeth admired the photo of Jake and asked me if he was my son. I admit I was a little flattered that Elizabeth thought I might be young enough to have a ten-year-old, although, to be honest, Elizabeth is coming off crystal meth, has only a few teeth, and doesn’t always have the most accurate perspective. Still, I felt good. I told her a little bit about Jake and about my own daughters and little Grady.

Elizabeth is in the room two doors down from mine. I’m back at Hazelden. I checked myself in at the end of August. Nothing happened, really. I didn’t get caught driving drunk. I didn’t drop Grady or embarrass my children or anything. I didn’t come back because of the things Frankie had said to me about my drinking, or after Tess made me feel so awful during our search for Jake. My memories of these little deaths, these little crucifixions, along with so many others over the course of my drinking life, were so powerful and utterly fraught with shame and misery that they sent me down to my cellar more hastily each night after Frank left my house. Where else could I have gone, honestly? What else could I have done?