Authors: Leah Stewart
Eloise still had a key. Her rolling suitcase rattled over the front walk. She yanked it up the steps, bump, bump, bump, as reluctant as she was. The front door was ornate and beautiful and totally useless for keeping out the cold. Her mother talked every winter about
having something done
and then forgot her plans as soon as it was warm. Inside it was so quiet, Eloise closed the door as gently as she could, trying not to disturb. All the
lights were off, all the blinds down. She started to call out, then thought better of it. She stood for what felt like a long time in the entryway, gazing up the grand staircase into the dimness of the second floor.
Even after all these years living elsewhere she knew where to step so the stairs wouldn’t creak. Her mother’s door was closed. Eloise knocked, heard a rustling from inside, and opened the door. Her mother lay on the bed, on her back, an arm thrown over her eyes though the room was dark. “Mom?” Eloise said from the doorway.
The arm came slowly away. Her mother blinked at her. “Eloise?”
“I’m here.”
“Oh, thank God,” her mother said. She didn’t sit up. “Thank God.” She pressed both her hands to her face. “The children need you.”
“They need you, too,” Eloise said, but her mother didn’t respond. Eloise could sense, trembling just on the edge of the moment, how good a tearful rage would feel. But none of this was her mother’s fault, was it? For once her mother had good cause to come undone. “Where are they?” Eloise asked.
“They’re upstairs. I don’t know what they’re doing. They pretty much stay up there all the time.”
“Even Claire?”
“She should be sleeping,” Francine said. “Theo said she’d put her down.”
Eloise said nothing.
“What?” her mother said. “She knows the routine. I don’t. I don’t know the routine.”
Eloise sighed. “I’ll go see them.” She moved to leave, her hand still on the doorknob.
“Why did she leave her children with me anyway?” Francine asked, her voice full of fretful complaint.
“She thought you would like it,” Eloise said. “She thought you’d be insulted if they went to Danny’s sister every time.”
“Oh,” Francine said, and then she began to cry.
Eloise listened to her mother’s weeping for a moment, wondering with detachment if the sound of it would make her cry. Then she closed the door.
Theo met her at the top of the stairs, her finger to her lips. Claire was in her arms, abandoned to sleep, her baby cheek plumping against Theo’s bony shoulder, her lips impossibly pink. At eleven, Theo was just over five feet, possibly as tall as she would ever get, certainly tall enough to be a grown woman holding a two-year-old. And yet with the weight of the sleeping child in her arms she looked so small. Eloise reached out automatically to take the baby. She wanted to hold that warm, heavy body, to let that plump cheek rest on her shoulder, to feel weighted by her, like a house given sandbags in a hurricane. But Theo stepped back and shook her head. “I’ll put her down,” she mouthed and then slipped through the half-open door into a darkened bedroom. Eloise just stood there and waited, like Theo was the one in charge. After a moment the girl emerged empty-handed and pulled the door gently closed. “Josh is asleep, too,” she whispered. She beckoned Eloise into an unused guest bedroom and carefully shut that door behind them. It was dark in here as well. Neither of them moved to turn on the light. Eloise reached out to hug Theo, but the child was already turning away, climbing onto one of the high twin beds, where she sat with her legs dangling, looking at her aunt with an air of patient expectation.
Theo was bright and capable, but also prone to dreaminess, or
moodiness, depending on who was doing the describing.
Thoughtful,
Eloise would have said.
Interior
. The changeling, Rachel had called her, because Theo was so unlike her easygoing, one-day-at-a-time parents. She was always a little bit mystical, always only half there. Eloise identified with her, thought of this child as more
hers
than the sweet, obedient Josh or the big-eyed Claire with her solemn, unnerving appraisals. Eloise sat beside her on the bed, not touching her. Something about Theo’s bearing seemed to request distance. “How are Josh and Claire?” Eloise asked, because it seemed easier than asking how Theo herself was.
“Josh is having a hard time,” Theo said. “He can’t stop crying, except when he’s asleep. Claire doesn’t really understand. She’s lucky.” She moved her eyes to her own lap. “Have you cried?”
Eloise bit her lip. “No.”
“Me neither.” Theo frowned, and the lines that appeared in her forehead seemed too deep for a child her age. After a moment she said, “Is there something wrong with us?”
“I don’t know,” Eloise said. In the silence that followed she had a sharp, painful vision of Rachel jumping on this very bed, singing, “You can’t catch me! You can’t catch me!” while Eloise stood on the ground, in tears, watching her sister bounce higher and higher.
“What will happen now?” Theo asked.
I don’t know,
Eloise wanted to say again, but perhaps she should be sparing the child such honesty. “We’ll have some kind of funeral.”
“I mean after that,” Theo said. “Will we go back to our house? Will we live here with Francine?”
“Oh,” Eloise said. How was it possible that this question had failed to occur to her? “What did Francine say?”
Theo shook her head. “I haven’t asked her.”
“Right,” Eloise said. She stared at the wall, on which there was a framed painting of a sailboat she seemed somehow to have never noticed before. What would happen now? Danny’s sister had three children of her own. His parents lived in a one-bedroom condo. Her mother was the logical choice for guardian, except for the fact of her personality, and now that Eloise thought about it, Rachel had mentioned, just last year, that she and Danny had finally made a will. “You’re leaving the children to me, right?” Eloise had asked, half-joking, and Rachel had said, “Actually, yes. Is that okay?”
“Of course,” Eloise had said. “Absolutely. But it’s not like we’ll ever have to worry about it.”
“Let’s hope not,” Rachel had said.
“You know,” Eloise said now, “I think I’m your guardian.”
Theo let out a breath. “Oh, good,” she said.
“But what should we do?” Eloise asked. Theo cocked her head, the considering expression on her face so adult it was impossible not to talk to her like she was one. “What do you want to do? You could come back to Boston with me. I’ll have to get a new place. Mine’s too small. And then we’ll have to figure out school. I don’t know anything about that. What time does school end for the day? I wonder. Sometimes I’m at work late. Do you want to come back with me? What about your friends?”
“I think maybe we should stay here,” Theo said. “For now anyway. So everything doesn’t change at once.”
“So you’ll stay here,” Eloise said. “For now anyway. Maybe just for a while. With Francine. But I wonder if she can handle that.”
“She doesn’t have to,” Theo said. “I’ll help. I can take care of myself. I can take care of Josh and Claire.”
“I just started at Harvard,” Eloise said. “I can’t get time off yet, I don’t think.”
Theo nodded as though such concerns were commonplace to her.
“I really like my job,” Eloise said. “I was lucky to get it.”
“Aunt Eloise,” Theo said. “I’m not asking you to move back here.”
Of course she wasn’t. But that was the logical choice, wasn’t it? The big house, the schools they already attended, their extracurricular activities, their relatives, their friends. If Eloise took them back to Boston, she would be all they had. And she wasn’t nearly enough. Eloise took a ragged breath. “I want my sister,” she said.
“I know,” Theo said. Her mouth was trembling.
Eloise tried to say something else, but the sorrow that seized her overrode her ability to speak. She sobbed like a heartbroken child, only dimly aware of the agonized sounds she made. Theo’s arms went around her neck. Theo was almost as tall as she was, but Eloise pulled the child into her lap, and then, as if Eloise’s tears had given her permission, Theo, too, began to cry. They stayed like that a long time, locked in a grief nobody else could witness, because the two of them—now they were the responsible ones.
2010
T
he house was on Clifton Avenue near the intersection with Lafayette
. It, and the houses around it, had been built by men of note and wealth in the nineteenth century, when Cincinnati, Queen of the West, City of the Seven Hills, was as grand as its nicknames, when it meant something to be a river town. From the street the lawn sloped up to the house, so that the eye rose to it and then kept rising, drawn upward by decorative bricks to the gable with the half-moon window, the two high chimneys on either side. To the guests arriving for a party on a bright evening in late June, the house gave the impression of turning its face up to meet the sun. Even the people who’d been there before were struck again by the old-fashioned loveliness of the place. The way the arches of the porte cochere conjured images of the elegant necks of horses, the skirts of ladies alighting from carriages. The way the columned, semicircular portico and the bay windows above it resembled the top tiers of a wedding cake. As they grew close they noted the wrought-iron grille on the front door, the leaded-glass windows, and then inside they marveled at the chandelier in the entryway, the elaborately carved woodwork,
the tiles around the fireplace with their raised seashells, the walls of the living room, upholstered in a faded pink damask with a pattern in gold.
Standing in the living room with a sweating gin and tonic in her hand, Eloise accepted compliments on these marvels, answered questions or directed the asker to Theo, who knew much more about the house than she did, and tried to resist saying anything she was thinking. Like for instance that she took little pride in the house, which she’d done nothing to earn, unless having lived there as a child counted as a kind of work. She couldn’t have afforded it even at Cincinnati prices, and certainly not in any city where she would actually have liked to live. She didn’t say, either, that she hated that stupid fabric on the wall, that to her its Victorian qualities were stultifying rather than charming, and made her feel like she’d been squeezed into a corset and offered a fainting couch. That fabric would be long gone if the house were actually hers rather than just hers to maintain. She understood the desire to make a romance of history, to see the work of long-dead artisans as proof of humanity’s capacity for beauty, as a graceful intrusion of the past upon the present, like a benevolent ghost drifting through the attic in a long white gown. You could touch the glinting gold thread and imagine the weaver who’d made it, the lady of the house who’d chosen it, the workers who’d tacked it to the walls and filled in cotton batting, the partygoers of a hundred and more years ago who’d gathered before it like you and your friends gathered now, and you could think of how the past and the present telescoped and yet stayed firmly apart, of how we imagine and yet fail to understand other lives in ways that are both beautiful and sad, of the awesome brevity of a human life. Or, if you were Eloise,
you could look at the fabric, at the room, at the house and for that matter the city, and see reminder upon reminder of all that had been lost.
Eloise had lived in the house from birth to eighteen, and then again from twenty-eight to—when? There was still a blank for that answer, like the one left for the death year on the gravestone of a person still alive. She was forty-five now, and still there, complaining about the dust and the creaky floors and the way the cold blew through the rope windows, original to the house and, like the front door, both too beautiful and too expensive to replace. When the children were younger she used to joke that once she’d been a prisoner in the house, and now she was the warden. But in truth
prisoner
was still how she felt—not all the time, but on her bad days. Among the things Eloise didn’t say was that as soon as she could get Francine to—finally, finally—sign the house over, she planned to put it on the market and start wishing hard.
“I can’t imagine what it was like to grow up in a house like this,” said Marisa Li-Silva, who was the girlfriend of Eloise’s young colleague Noah Garcia, the one Eloise frequently worried would leave their department for a job on one of the coasts. He was standing there, too, reading the label on his local microbrew. He’d been to the house once before and was leaving the exclaiming to Marisa.
“I didn’t really know any better,” Eloise said.
“I mean, that chandelier!” Marisa said.
“I know,” Eloise said. “It’s sparkly.”
“You must have had a point when you realized that this wasn’t, you know, typical,” Marisa said. She was very pretty, and dressed like she expected the paparazzi, and Eloise felt a two-pronged
pang of sympathy: for Theo, because Eloise suspected she had a crush on Noah, and for herself, because Marisa lived in L.A. and might compel Noah to move back there.
“I guess,” Eloise said. “I mean I had plenty of friends who didn’t live in houses like this. Though this is an old city, by American standards, and so most of the houses are old. Hardwood floors, stained-glass windows, fireplaces, plaster walls. For newer houses you have to go to the suburbs. That’s where you have to go if you want to be able to pull a nail out of your wall without leaving a two-inch hole.”
“But this isn’t just old, it’s a mansion,” Marisa said.
Noah glanced up from his beer to say, “Imagine what this place would cost in L.A.”
Marisa said, without looking at him, “It’s not like we could afford it here either,” and Noah said, “We could afford a lot more here than we could in L.A.”
“You know what I do remember?” Eloise said, as if stepping between them. “I remember seeing some old movie—something black and white, with the actress making a dramatic entrance down a grand staircase—and thinking, That looks like my house. I think that’s what made me realize the house was a mansion. Not life but the movies. After that my sister and I dressed up and took turns being the beautiful lady on the stairs and being the admirer below.”