Connie placed her empty mug on the floor and reached for the telephone.
It rang four times, and as Connie was about to hang up, the receiver rose with a clatter and a breathless voice said, “Hello?”
“Mom?” said Connie. “Hi! Liz left a note that you had called. I hope it’s not too late.” Her eyes lit up with a rising warmth of affection for this odd woman with whom life had yoked her together. Over the past year or so, Connie had invented more reasons to telephone, leaving messages peppered with questions; the ostensible need for answers carried a built-in need to call back. Her garden usually provided a good excuse.
“Oh, Connie!” Grace cried with relief. “Yes! Yes, I did call. No, this is perfect. Good. How are you, my darling?”
“Great!” she said, bursting. “I’m great, I guess. Kind of drained, obviously. I mean, today was a pretty big day.”
“Was it?” Grace said, the sound of her rummaging through a box of something noisy chinking down the telephone line.
“Well, yeah,” Connie said, her smile slipping a little. “My qualifying exam?” she prodded. The rummaging sound continued. “I left you messages about it. That huge exam that I had to take to be advanced to candidacy?” Still Grace said nothing, the air coming in short bursts through her nostrils as she toted the unseen box across the kitchen of her adobe house.
“The thing I have been preparing for an
entire year
to take?” Connie said, anger and hurt pinching her face. Her brows crumpled together over
her nose. Without realizing it she got to her feet, as if standing would bring the point home to Grace more clearly. “It was today, Grace,” she said, her voice devolving into the same stern, disappointed chill that it used to have when Connie was a teenager. She pressed her lips together, suppressing the urge to cry, to yell, or do anything else that would suggest that she needed to
center
herself.
“Indeed,” said Grace indifferently, shuffling the phone from one ear to the other. “Now listen, my darling. I have a very important favor to ask you.”
Marblehead, Massachusetts
Early June
1991
“I
STILL CAN’T BELIEVE SHE DID IT,” SPAT
C
ONNIE
. S
HE ROLLED THE
window down on her side of the car and chucked out a withered apple core that had been sitting on the dashboard.
“I still can’t believe you’re letting it get to you this much,” said Liz mildly, peering at the map accordioned across her lap. “You should veer right up here.”
“How could I have let her talk me into this?” Connie growled, the right front wheel well of her rust-speckled Volvo sedan quaking in protest as she turned.
Liz inhaled an exasperated sniff of air through her nose before saying, “You know, you didn’t have to agree to it. You’re trying to put all thison Grace, but I don’t see her twisting your arm—”
“Always,” continued Connie before Liz was finished. “It’s always like this! She has some disaster, and no matter what I happen to be doing, I have
to drop everything and pick up the pieces. You’d think after twenty-five years of self-actualization she’d be able to manage her own
mess.
” Connie downshifted as the Volvo hurtled into a laneless rotary, Nahant peninsula spiraling out into the sea on their right as they trundled northward, the car swaying slightly under the weight of Connie’s plants and belongings. In the backseat, wedged between two jars overflowing with rosemary and mint, Arlo sat, swaying with the motion of the car. A thick rope of drool swung from his mouth.
“So I suppose it’s Grace’s fault that you said yes,” said Liz, voice pointed. “Really, Connie, this is your doing as well.”
“How exactly is this my doing?” Connie demanded, brushing a loose floss of hair off her brow with the back of one wrist. “I was perfectly happy! I was just
doing
my
work
. Look at Arlo. I think he’s going to be sick.”
“Then why did you let her talk you into it?” Liz pointed out.
Connie sighed. Liz was right, of course. In fact she had been right for the past six weeks, which made it all the more difficult for Connie to maintain her self-righteous anger.
“Just because you’re right doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it,” Connie grumbled.
“Well, if I were you, I’d take a more pragmatic approach,” Liz said. “You’ve agreed to do it, so the only thing you can do at this point is adjust your attitude. Watch out for this guy—I don’t think he’s yielding.” A pickup truck peeled out of a side street, screeching onto the seawall drive just in front of them. The car rocked as Connie stamped on the brake.
They drove on for a moment in silence. The white-gray sea rolled away to the horizon, dotted in the distance by six or eight tiny sails. Liz cranked her window down a crack and turned her face into the breeze. The briny smell of seawater crept into the car, freshening and cooling the air. They passed a boatyard crowded with masts and boat hulls propped up by rusted scaffolds. Next to the boatyard, at the base of a rotting wooden dock, stood a heap of wire mesh lobster traps clotted with seaweed. As she watched, a fat
seagull flapped leisurely down to perch atop the stacked traps, folding his wings along his back and gazing out across the shimmering water.
“You could be looking at this a whole other way,” Liz ventured, turning the map over in her lap.
“Oh?” asked Connie. “And what way is that?”
Liz leaned her head back against the headrest and smiled.
“It’s pretty here,” she said.
A
FTER A HALF HOUR OF GOOD-NATURED SQUABBLING ABOUT THE PROPER
orientation of the map and the incomprehensible layouts of New England towns, which follow no sort of logic, they drove the Volvo around a curve and down a narrow lane shaded with weeping willows. The lane was lined with small, boxy houses, their windows punched at uneven intervals, their wooden cladding bleached pale gray by decades of sun and salt water. Connie squinted to see the numbers nailed to each slowly passing door.
“What number are we looking for again?” she asked.
“Milk Street. Number three,” said Liz, peering through the passenger window. Next to one of the houses leaned a shed festooned with stained lobster trap buoys hung up to dry. Another was almost completely obscured by a sailboat parked on wooden pilings in a driveway choked with weeds. Liz could just make out the lettering on the stern of the forgotten sailboat:
Won derment, Marblehead, Mass.
“Wonderment,” whispered Liz.
“These houses are ancient,” remarked Connie. “Pre-Revolution, maybe.”
Liz spread the map across the Volvo dashboard and inspected it. “The map does say this is ‘Old Town.’”
“I believe it,” said Connie dryly. “There’s seventeen. So it must be on this side of the street.”
Connie slowed the car down, gradually rolling to a halt near the dead end of the street. The lane petered out a few yards away, disappearing into a graveled trail that wound into a sparse wood.
“It should be right here,” she said, looking out the window at a thicket abutting the stand of trees, obscured by a dense wall of brambles.
In the backseat, Arlo started wiggling and released an excited bark.
“What’s his deal?” asked Liz, turning back to the little animal and scratching his neck. He lapped at her wrist.
“Maybe he’s just excited that the car has finally stopped. At least he didn’t get sick.” Connie paused. “I don’t know, Liz. I don’t think there’s anything here. Are you sure this is Milk Street?”
“You have to go to the bathroom, little guy?” Liz cooed to the dog, whose entire hind section was vibrating with excitement. “I think he needs to be let out. Let’s take him over to those trees to do his thing and then we’ll take another look at the map.”
The air smelled moist and fresh, like new earth, but with a hint of brine—nothing at all like Cambridge. Connie stretched her arms overhead, feeling her spine pop in two places, and then rubbed her neck with one hand while opening the back door for the dog.
“C’mon out, mutt,” she said, but before the words were completely out of her mouth the animal had vanished, reappearing an instant later directly in front of the bramble thicket. He barked, tail cutting half-moons in the air behind him.
The two women started toward the wood at the end of the lane, expecting the dog to follow them when he lost interest in whatever vermin he had spotted in the thicket.
“So whose house is this supposed to be again?” asked Liz, picking idly at a hangnail.
“Granna’s,” said Connie. “My mother’s mother.”
“But you said you’d never been here before,” Liz said.
Connie shrugged. “I haven’t. My mom and Granna—Sophia was her name—didn’t get along, as you can imagine. All Grace’s hippie stuff. And
Granna was apparently very old-style New England. Stiff, restrained. So they were only sporadically in touch, I guess. And then she died when I was really little.”
“Sophia,” Liz mused. “That’s a Greek root, you know. It means ‘wisdom.’ Did you ever meet her?”
“Mom says that I did. She came to our house in Concord pretty often, but it always drove Mom crazy. Apparently Granna didn’t approve of Mom’s raising me in ‘such an environment.’” Connie waved her fingers in mock quotes on either side of her head.
“Sounds like you would have gotten along with her pretty well, actually. At least you and she would have agreed about Grace. Do you remember any of this?” Liz asked.
“Not really,” said Connie. “I think I maybe remember when she died. Mom being sad. Her holding me and saying something about ‘universal life energy,’ and me asking if that meant ‘heaven,’ and her saying ‘yes.’ I must have been about three or four.”
“But if she died over twenty years ago, what’s been happening with the house this whole time?”
Connie rolled her eyes before she could stop herself. “Well, apparently it has just been
sitting
here. How typical is that? Mom never even told me.” She shook her head.
“So why would she ask you to deal with the house now?” asked Liz. “And, more importantly,” she said, joking, “why have we been paying to live in the dorm all this time if there was an empty house less than an hour away that might as well belong to you?”
Connie laughed. “I think the answer to that question will be apparent when we find the house. Mom says it’s a total dump. And as for why she’s asked me to deal with it now, it would seem that my very responsible and attentive mother has neglected to pay the property taxes on the house since Granna died.” Liz gasped in disbelief. “Oh, yes,” Connie continued before she could say anything. “It’s been adding up, but until recently the rate was so low that the town didn’t really care. Then last year they changed the law.
And this spring the town sent her notice that the house will be seized in six months if she doesn’t make restitution.”
“Wow,” said Liz. “How much?”
“I don’t know the exact figure,” Connie said, tugging on the end of her braid. “Grace was being pretty coy. I’m supposed to sort through all the junk that’s in there, throw everything out, and arrange to have the house sold, if anyone cares to buy it. And whatever proceeds it can get will be used to pay off the town.”
Liz whistled. “At least it’s just for the summer. Then you can come back to Cambridge and have all this out of the way.”
By this time they had reached the wood, and the women stopped at the base of the trail where the gravel thinned to beaten earth. Connie gazed down at the wild angelica plant bursting forth in the clearing between trees. The fragile white flower clusters nodded in the early summer air, weedy and lush, and insects hummed unseen in the hollows under the trees. Connie stared at the flowers dappled by the sunlight, her eyes widening. As she watched the flashes of light play upon the surface of the petals, her mind loosened, grew soft, moving into a daydream, and she thought that she perceived the image of an older man, dressed in muddy work clothes, stooped under the weight of a canvas bag stuffed with firewood and kindling, trudging through the shadows.
Lemuel?
a voice called out, audible only in Connie’s mind.
Comin’, Sophier!
The image called back before it pulled apart, the details of the daydream dissolving out of her reach. She was brought back to herself by the sound of Liz asking a question.
The image had felt startlingly immediate, tangible. She reached a hand up to massage her temple, which ached gently where it had been fine a moment ago. Liz was watching her, waiting for her to respond to something she had just said, but Connie had no idea what it was. “I’m sorry,” she said, confused. “I zoned out for a second.”
“I said, where’s Arlo?” repeated Liz.
The pain in Connie’s head had begun to clear. She looked around, but the dog had not followed them. “That’s odd,” Connie said.
She started back down the gravel path to the lane. When she emerged from the wood she discovered the dog sitting at attention, still facing the dense thicket across from the car.
“Hey, mutt,” she said, squatting next to the animal. “What are you watching?” He gazed up at her, wagging, and then looked back into the thicket. “Is it a squirrel?” Connie turned her face toward the spot in the dense thornbushes where the dog was gazing and gasped. To her astonishment, under the tightly wound bramble branches was the outline of a rotted iron gate.
B
Y THE TIME THAT
L
IZ ARRIVED
, C
ONNIE HAD ALREADY PULLED ASIDE A
significant heap of dead vines and weeds. As soon as a gap opened between two of the gate’s rusted bars, Arlo wriggled his way through and disappeared into the shadows. Liz jogged to a stop behind her friend, out of breath with what she had seen.
“Connie!” Liz puffed. “I think that we might have found the house!”
“Yeah! Arlo spotted the gate,” she grunted, hauling aside another armload of undergrowth.
“No, look,” Liz said, tapping Connie on the shoulder. Connie stood, wiping her dirty hands on the seat of her jeans. Liz pointed up.
Connie stepped back into the lane, tightening the flannel shirt that was knotted around her waist, and craned her neck. Following Liz’s extended finger, she traced a towering elder tree draped with vines upward, upward, upward, and then at the very top of the thicket, Connie made out the unmistakable outline of a cedar-shingled rooftop emerging from underneath the leaves and branches. In the center of the outline she could just glimpse the hulking rubble of a brick chimney. She caught her breath.
“I can’t believe it,” she whispered.
“I told you this was Milk Street,” said Liz, poking her. Connie arched one eyebrow at Liz.
“There is almost no way to tell that there is a house in there,” Connie
remarked, running a soiled hand through her hair as she surveyed the thicket. Now that she knew what to look for, she imagined that she could make out the faint tracery of the iron fence underlying the dense shrubbery. Rising farther from the riot of leaves, she thought she might also see the blurred shape of windowsills.
“Well, you said that no one has been here since Sophia died,” Liz said.
“Yeah, but this looks like it has been abandoned a lot longer than twenty years,” said Connie.
The two friends stood in silence, arms folded, gazing at the house clad in its layers of vegetation and neglect. Finally Liz broke the quiet.
“Here,” she said, “let me help you clear off the gate.”
The vines and ivy gave way easily, and within half an hour they had made a soft pile of branches and roots to one side of the gate. As they worked, they heard periodic rustling and barking from inside the garden.
“At least Arlo’s having a good time,” Connie muttered, brushing her hair aside and leaving a streak of mud on her forehead.
“I think we almost have it,” said Liz.
After a few more minutes spent yanking on the last stubborn vines, Connie sat back on her heels and regarded the revealed gate. Its iron was so pitted with rust and age that she feared it might dissolve at her touch. Gently she reached forward and lifted the latch that held the gate to the fence. It whined with the sound of metal long frozen in place, but yielded. Slowly, carefully, she pushed the gate in until it was open about two feet wide, creating a doorway in the dense hedge. “Well?” she said, turning back to Liz. Liz shrugged.