Dream House Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Catherine Armsden.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-9905370-6-9

  Interior design by Rose Wright.

  Jacket design by Andy Carpenter and Rose Wright.

  This book has been set in Berkeley Oldstyle Book.

  Published by Bonhomie Press, an imprint of Yellow Pear Press, LLC.

  www.yellowpearpress.com

  10987654321

  For my sisters, Gay and Beverley and for Lewis, Elena and Tobias Butler

  Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts—serious, sad thoughts—and not to dreams.

  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

  On a mean Maine day in April, the house could only stand and wait. Sleet shushed against its walls; bare branches scoured its windows. Only two hours earlier, the day had been mild, bathed in a harsh white light unabated by leaves that would come in May. The promise of spring had seduced crocuses out of the earth and gardeners pushing wheelbarrows from their sheds. After lunch, a vicious storm barreled in, whipping the village of Whit’s Point as if in punishment.

  In the cellar of the house, the furnace groaned to keep up with the dropping temperature. Rooms were warm despite the inhospitable weather and still breathing with the evidence of their inhabitants, who’d left the house in some haste, expecting to be back within the hour. The bathroom light had been left on, a wet towel forgotten on the bed. The smoky aroma of bacon filled the kitchen where a slice of bread and a stick of butter sat out on the table. Tea bags slumped in two cups of cold water. The sink faucet, which lately required extra attention, dripped water into the bowl beneath it.

  The only sign that leaving had been intentional was the blaring TV—a precaution taken to keep unheard-of burglars at bay. To a robber, the house might have seemed an unworthy target: small and stylistically unremarkable, a typical early nineteenth-century box with a steep, gabled roof and clapboards badly in need of paint. Four rooms were downstairs, four rooms up, a single bathroom, and a pieced-together kitchen. In the comfortable, slightly crowded rooms, unfussy antiques mingled with simple, modern furniture. Several small oil paintings of landscapes and people doing quiet, ordinary things adorned the walls. Wool rugs and linen slipcovers in soft shades of green, tan, and amber showed the weariness common in houses of country retirees; certain stains persisted until they finally went unnoticed. Despite its humble first impression, to those not in a robber’s rush the house might have revealed an undeniable elegance, a hint of something more. If one were to open the antique mahogany box on the living room table, one could behold unexpected treasures—bits of history that auction houses might have taken an interest in. And there were the very old and crazed oil portraits, their size and their subjects’ patrician noses too imposing for any room except the tall, narrow stair hall.

  Two hours had passed. Still, the inhabitants had not returned. The ship’s clock in the living room chimed on the hour; a second later, the lighthouse clock in the kitchen tooted in imitation of one famous lighthouse or another. TV soaps came on, their depiction of humanity mirroring the weather’s rage. With no one home to switch them off, accusations and proclamations disturbed the house’s coziness—though this was nothing new to these rooms.

  Another hour, then another. On the table, the bread hardened; the butter softened and turned a deeper shade of yellow. The bowl beneath the leaky faucet was nearly full. Dampness from the wet bathroom towel penetrated the blanket and then the bedsheets. By five-thirty, a layer of ice made the front steps dangerous. Rooms darkened. The automatic timer under the living room table turned another notch and a lamp snapped on. Without the usual evening thermostat adjustment, the furnace lost its battle with the plunging temperature, and the air inside dipped to sixty-five degrees.

  On TV, it was time to assess the day. Later there would be broadcasts from the Middle East and the White House, but first, local news and weather: school closings and an approval for an expansion of the outlet mall, an award for a courageous firefighter.

  Another gust—the house shuddered; storm windows rattled. The news moved on, as did the storm. Robbed of its inhabitants, the house could only stand and wait.

  Two days passed before a friend trusted with a house key came in and turned off the TV. She emptied the garbage, washed the dishes, and threw out the butter. She cranked tight the kitchen faucet and clicked off the bathroom light. After some hesitation, she watered the geraniums wintering in the kitchen window, and the potted cyclamen and chrysanthemums. She looked around to be sure everything was in order. On her way out, she turned the thermostat down to fifty-four. She locked the door and checked it twice.

  A few evenings later, she drove by and peered up the driveway. She thought she saw a faint light coming from the house. “Only your imagination, Annie,” she told herself. In fact, every day at five thirty, the timer beneath the table would set the lamp ablaze. As if the house were reminding the world: I am still here. As if it had a life of its own.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Thank You

  Now I don’t yet know why houses have so much grief concealed in them if they try to be anything at all and try to live as themselves. But they do. Like people in this I suppose.

  Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography

  Chapter 1

  On a rainy Sunday night one week after her parents’ car skated off the road into the woods, Gina Gilbert pounded and kicked the old front door that had swelled against the jamb until it suddenly gave way, pitching her, soggy and luggage-laden, into the tiny entry hall of her childhood home.

  Her sister, Cassie, stepped inside behind her. The chime of the ship’s clock greeted them, followed by the sad moan of the lighthouse clock.

  “Cape Ann,” Cassie said. “Ten o’clock.”

  “It smells horrible in here,” Gina said.

  The fat, blue ceramic lamp on the living room table was already on, its wide shade standing sentry over a collection of framed family photographs. Gina squinted to shut out the room. The cold, early darkness and crowded, closed-up rooms were the lesser reasons she’d come back here only in the summers since moving to California thirteen years ago. Tonight, the sepia-toned lamplight was not just forlorn but tinged with death. Gina’s legs threatened to fold under her. “Cass,” she said, “I think I’m going to bed.”

  Cassie touched her arm. “It’s still early. We’ll be okay. We’re here together. Besides, I made us some applesauce cake.”

  Gina draped her wet coat on top of Cassie’s on the newel post and followed her sister through the living room to the kitchen.

  “It smells even worse in here,” Cassie said. “Skunky and like something is rotting.” She pulle
d the string that switched on the ceiling light. The hodge-podge kitchen, which doubled as the laundry room, filled with a harsh glow.

  “Oh, God. Look.” Gina pointed to mice droppings on the floor. “They’ve moved in already.”

  Finding the garbage can empty, they checked the cupboards for spoiled food without uncovering the source of the odor. Cassie sliced up the applesauce cake and handed a piece to Gina on a napkin. She ate dutifully. “Yum,” she said.

  “I actually made the applesauce for it—from Macintosh apples,” Cassie said. “Comfort food.”

  Cassie’s momentary perkiness faltered in recognition of this current absurdity; she looked as pale and defeated as Gina felt. The sisters shared a crooked smile, small features, and delicate skin that tanned easily. At five-foot-two, Cassie was four inches shorter than Gina, but her broad-shouldered athleticism buttressed her role as older sister, which, at fifty, she still took very seriously.

  When the teakettle whistled, Cassie pulled two herbal teabags from her purse and Gina understood they’d be sitting down together at the old pine table in the foul air. There they ping-ponged practicalities: bills, insurance, pensions, auction, flowers, canceling this, ordering that, boxes, trucks. Gina had traveled all day from San Francisco and as soon as Cassie had her in the car at Logan Airport she’d hit her with the news that Mr. Hickle, their parents’ landlord of fifty years, had called to tell them they had to be out of the house by the end of the month. The prospect of moving out on top of getting through the funeral nearly suffocated Gina.

  Now, the stench in the room began to work on the food in her stomach. “Something died,” she said.

  Cassie looked at her blankly. Gina stood, opened the door to the small shed built off the kitchen, and gasped. A dead skunk lay just past the threshold, feet splayed out, a clear plastic cranberry juice bottle stuck on its head.

  Behind her, Cassie barked, “Shut the door!”

  “It’s dead.”

  For the first time all day, Gina felt alive. She insisted on taking care of the skunk herself, finding some rubber gloves under the sink and a pair of tin snips to cut the bottle off the skunk. She wrapped the animal in two old swimming towels from the shed and then walked through the rain to the garage, where she laid it on the floor. Should she bury it? she wondered. Did the town dump even take dead animals?

  Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice was her mother’s favorite. Gina imagined the skunk rummaging in her parents’ recycling box that only got emptied every couple of weeks and then blundering around the shed terrified, possibly for days. Feeling a fresh surge of anger about human carelessness, she trudged back to the house.

  Upstairs, Cassie was sitting on her childhood bed, her face glowing in the light from her computer. “Jake’s Wi-Fi password still works,” she said, referring to the next-door neighbor.

  Gina took her laptop into the bathroom, where she knew the connection was better, closed the toilet lid, and sat down to check her email. She was relieved to see that most of her architecture clients still seemed to be respecting her absences of the past week; there were a few easy questions from contractors and employees, and one message from her ever-eager client, Jeff Stone: Know you’re tied up. When you get a chance, give a call. Thanks much.

  She answered a note from her husband, Paul, who wrote before leaving for his book group that all was fine at home with their children, ten-year-old Esther and six-year-old Ben. Gina had called Paul at work three times from Logan Airport, getting his voicemail every time. It had been wrenching to leave her family, and she was especially worried about Esther, who’d missed two days of school after her parents’ accident, crying almost continuously. Paul, Esther, and Ben would fly out on Friday for the funeral on Saturday. Six days! It would be the longest she’d ever been away from them. She looked at her watch; the babysitter would be helping the kids get ready for bed now. She wrote Paul a quick report on her trip, closed her laptop, and went back to Cassie’s room.

  “The sheets for Dad’s bed are in the bottom drawer in your room,” Cassie told her.

  Your room, Gina thought with dread, crossing the hall. Since she’d left home, she’d always stayed in Cassie’s room when visiting. Her own was connected by a door to her parents’ room—a war zone. Her father had moved into it fifteen years ago when he was exiled from the marital bed. His twin bed was, as usual, meticulously made, not a wrinkle in the cotton bedspread. His hearing aid lay on the bedside table. Three pairs of shoes were lined up at the foot of his bureau, all of them leaning to the outside.

  She took the sheets from the drawer and pressed them to her face, seeking reassurance in the fresh crispness of cotton dried outdoors.

  Cassie appeared in the doorway wearing a too-small Andrews Academy T-shirt that Gina knew had been sitting in Cassie’s bureau for at least thirty years. “G’night,” she said, embracing Gina in a strong, protective hug.

  “G’night,” Gina murmured into her sister’s neck.

  Cassie went back to her room, and Gina slid between the cold sheets, turned out the light, and lay listening. Somewhere near her head, a loose cable outside slapped the clapboards. Now and then a gust whooshed the rain against the house, and the window rattled. Then, for a few moments when the rain seemed to cease, she thought she could hear the house breathing; she listened reluctantly, the way one listens to the dying.

  She folded the pillow over her head, and after a long time, dozed off for what seemed like only seconds before a bumping noise woke her. She got up, went into the hall, and pushed up the window. Heavy drops of rain splatted her when she stuck out her head, though the frigid air smelled more like snow. Looking down, she followed the dark legs of a ladder, rising from the driveway up the wall.

  “Cassie!” she yelled at her sister, hunched at the top of the ladder in their father’s big yellow slicker. “What’re you doing?”

  “The goddamn shutter’s banging! One of the hooks is busted!”

  “It’s four a.m.!”

  “Someone’s gotta fix it!”

  Gina pushed the window down, remembering how exhausting Cassie could be. She brought big energy and superlatives to every situation: fabulous! devastating! mind-blowing! Cassie didn’t just work, she busted her butt. She owned a catering business in Rhode Island and was known for her three-alarm chili-mint-kumquat and tequila salad that was awesome! In addition, for years, she’d put her energy to work helping her parents with the house and then, with the same good-humored vigor, complaining about it to Gina.

  Gina went back to bed feeling guilty about Cassie’s hard work, and guilty about her own infrequent visits here. Guilt had always created tension between the sisters; still, Gina wondered not for the first time, if there could be anyone closer to a woman than her sister, with their shared nature and nurture. The shock of the accident seemed to have melted through layers of time and the small things that had come between them, exposing their sisterhood at its most potent. She and Cassie had spoken every day since the accident: planning the funeral, working on acceptance, or else giving in to their unacceptance. If it weren’t for their talks, Gina wouldn’t have been able to face the daily routines in San Francisco that had seemed painfully distant from the tragedy.

  Since stepping inside the front door, though, nothing felt real. Instead of the deep tête-a-têtes they’d had on the phone, she and Cassie had been speaking in clipped code, as if in these rooms, there wasn’t enough air even for complete sentences, let alone their pain.

  The power of this house! Her parents’ death had not rendered its rooms impotent; being here still made Gina feel diminished and flighty—birdlike. “The house should be the church of childhood,” she’d once read somewhere, and she’d thought, ha!

  The rain had stopped. In the bright morning light, the house vibrated with a mocking cheerfulness. Gina carried her toiletries to the only bathroom, where Cassie had started to clean out the medicine cabinet and drawers; into a box she’d dumped dozens of Howard Johnson’s and Quality Inn soap bars,
boxes of Band-Aids, nail clippers, and a cupful of unused dental floss. Gina plucked her parents’ toothbrushes from the holder and threw them into the wastebasket along with her father’s dental bridge, several long-expired medications, lipsticks, and ancient bottles of foundation.

  She picked up a ceramic ashtray painted with the Italian words casa senza donna, barca senza timone that had sat on the chest of drawers forever. While brushing her teeth as a little girl, she’d said the words in her head having no idea what they meant, but enjoying their musical sound. When she finally learned their meaning—“a house without a woman, a boat without a rudder”—she realized the ashtray’s longevity was due not to its usefulness, since no one had smoked in the house for years, but to its message. At different times, the proverb had mystified and infuriated Gina; her mother had indeed been at the helm of their household, but she’d steered like a mad captain!

  Gina dropped the ashtray into the wastebasket and turned on the shower. Because there was no functioning outlet in the bathroom, Cassie had plugged her hair dryer into an extension cord that ran from a bedroom; now, the fact that the cord didn’t allow Gina to fully close the door made her crabby.

  She was drying off from her shower when the bathroom door popped open.

  “Oh!” Cassie said. “Sorry!” The extension cord squeaked as she tried to pull the door shut.

  Gina clutched the towel to her, feeling as she had as an adolescent, making futile attempts at privacy in the house’s one bathroom.

  She dressed in Cassie’s room and headed downstairs past the large eighteenth-century portraits of Mr. And Mrs. Eugene Banton, who seemed to ask her with a thin-lipped grimness whether the aristocratic likes of them could expect a more dignified future beyond this humble home. The portraits, of Gina’s maternal great-great aunt and uncle, were among the heirlooms passed down by the Banton family—“Pronounced the French way,” her mother always instructed, “not to rhyme with Scranton.” One of several dignitaries who adorned Gina’s family tree, Sidney Banton, had been George Washington’s private secretary. In 1785 he’d built a home in Whit’s Point, “Lily House.”