Dream House Read online

  A mile down Pickering Road from Lily House, Gina and Cassie had grown up in this rental with only a sampling of the family valuables: Chippendale chairs, swords, and Sidney Banton’s writing desk. The elegant antiques lent an unsettling incongruity to the shabby-around-the-edges house but didn’t alter her family’s unfussy country lifestyle a bit; their free-range pet rabbit, Honey Bun, had chewed the bindings off more than a few eighteenth-century volumes as well as the fringes of two Oriental rugs.

  “We’re going to auction you off,” Gina told the Banton portraits. “I don’t care who you’re related to. You’re ugly.”

  When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she kept walking out the front door into the cold morning. She stood on the lawn and raised her arms to the heavens, grateful for the sunlight and other things, like the ground, that were true and important everywhere and to everyone, no matter what.

  The skunk! she remembered. She ran to the back of the house and into the garage, a balloon-frame structure that for at least ten years had looked like it might collapse any moment. She grabbed a shovel. The skunk’s grave would be where they’d always buried their pets—in the back field, still visible from the kitchen window.

  Carrying the bundled skunk to the field, she worried about the risk of her shovel turning up a bone or two from Missy or Painter, their springer spaniels, or Honey Bun.

  She set down the skunk and picked up the shovel, bringing the blade down. As it hit the earth with a loud thump, she staggered backwards a little.

  “The ground’s still frozen!” Cassie shouted.

  Gina looked up to see Cassie, standing in the shed doorway. “It’s April,” Gina yelled back, as if the seasonal thaw had irresponsibly missed its deadline. She trudged to the garage with the skunk.

  Back in the house, she went straight to her laptop and discovered that York County Solid Waste Disposal had a website with a paragraph on the disposal of dead animals.

  Line a garbage can with two heavy-duty trash bags. Wearing gloves and using a shovel, place the carcass in the bags. Tie off each bag and dispose only at dead animal composting area. $200 fine for disposal of carcass in any other recycling area. Dead animals may be dropped off on Tuesdays and Saturdays only.

  Gina went back to the garage, stood over the bundled skunk and said, “Tomorrow,” as if the skunk should know she had a plan.

  “So here’s the list,” Cassie said when Gina walked back into the kitchen.

  Pencils behind both ears, she was standing in front of the open closet jammed with tableware spanning their mother’s entire socioeconomic history—Rose Medallion, Limoges, Dansk, Corning Ware. The dishes were packed so tightly and with such strict order that moving anything had always felt like a test.

  “First, we should throw out as much crap as we can,” Cassie said. “Second, figure out what should go to the auction guy. Third, call in the consignment lady and then Goodwill. Oh!” Cassie was suddenly a fountain of tears.

  “Cassie?”

  “I’m so sorry!”

  “About what?”

  “That I’m making us sell everything.”

  “It’s fine; we’ve been through this. I’m okay with it.”

  Cassie was broke. Her husband, Wes, had lost his software engineering job out on route 128 two years ago, and they had three teenagers and two maxed-out credit cards. Gina and Cassie had agreed to assign a value to each of the house’s furnishings so that if there was something Gina wanted, she would buy it from the estate. Everything else they’d try to sell.

  “I just wouldn’t be able to stand it if you got mad at me,” Cassie said. “All that fighting that Mom and Aunt Fran did when they were dividing up the Banton things!”

  “We’re not going to fight,” Gina said. “We aren’t fighters.”

  The memory of her mother and aunt poked Gina with two cold, witchy fingers. She shivered and pulled her phone from her pocket, hoping she might be able to catch Paul between his patients. Again, she got his voicemail.

  “Jeez, Gina,” Cassie said when Gina hung up without leaving a message. “That’s the third time you’ve tried Paul today. Are you that worried about Esther? Her dad’s there.”

  Gina bristled. She missed her kids painfully and perhaps unreasonably, too. Secretly, sometimes she was seized by the fear that if she turned her attention from them, they could be swept off the earth. “It’s not the same with Paul,” she told Cassie. “You know a mother empathizes with her kids in a way no one else can.”

  Cassie rolled her eyes. “Well, not all mothers,” she said. They exchanged a grim look, a kind of emotional osmosis that came with their history—our sistory they called it.

  They got to work on #1 Throw out all the crap, beginning in the kitchen with corks, jars, and twist ties, mounds of hoarded plastic cutlery and stacks of plastic cups from Barnacle Bob’s—her parents’ favorite fish ’n’ chips place. Then, with an unspoken understanding, they separated and began eviscerating the house room by room, stuffing thirty-gallon garbage bags to be taken to Goodwill or the dump.

  Upstairs, Gina pulled from a blanket chest a sack of hems that their tiny mother had cut from her skirts. She was about to shove it into a garbage bag when she felt something hard; she fished around and pulled out a slender cardboard box, secured with a rubber band. Inside was a scrap of burgundy-colored velvet labeled, “A piece of Gen. Washington’s cloak” and a tightly folded piece of paper with a large tag attached that said, “Lady Martha Washington’s hair.” Carefully, she peeled back the delicate ancient paper to have a look. The tiny nest of dark strands gripped her with a fascination that years of her mother’s reciting the family history had failed to inspire.

  “Cassie! Come here!”

  Cassie bounded up the stairs, and when Gina held out her findings, she drew a deep breath. For a few moments, they beheld their treasure with silent reverence.

  “God!” Cassie finally burst out. “Was Mom hoarding these? Why didn’t she sell them! She thought it was so important that we got to spoon our sugar from Sidney Banton’s silver bowl every morning, and meanwhile, she and Dad could hardly pay the coal bill.”

  Cassie’s tirade so soon after the accident made Gina squirm; though as usual, she completely agreed. Cassie stood and gestured to the leather bound books—several bearing presidential signatures—that they’d cleared from the bookshelf. “And the things here aren’t even the half of it. Do you remember all the beautiful stuff at Lily House?”

  “Only vaguely,” Gina said. She hadn’t been in Lily House since Fran had lived there. When Fran died in the 1970s, the house was sold with all its furnishings to the New England Historical Society. Her parents’ best friends, Annie and Lester Bridges, had been Lily House’s caretakers for years.

  “Annie and Lester really want us to come by,” Cassie said. “I’d like to see them, but . . . you realize that everything in that house should be ours, and going there . . . It’s like salt in the wounds. I know I shouldn’t be thinking this way, but it’s just . . .” Cassie gazed, glassy-eyed, out the window. “Wes didn’t get that job he was so hopeful about last month.”

  Gina stroked her sister’s muscular back. She knew Cassie hated to talk about money; they’d been taught not to. “I know,” she said. “Something will change.”

  Make a place in the house...which is kept locked and secure; a place which is virtually impossible to discover...a place where the archives of the house or other more potent secrets might be kept.

  Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language

  Chapter 2

  By the end of Tuesday, Gina’s parents’ fifteen-year-old VW station wagon was fully packed for the dump. Gina loaded the skunk between the centerboard from a long-gone family boat and several faded bolts of paisley cloth, vintage 1970. She had just put the key in the ignition when Cassie popped out of the house and said, “Damn, the skunk!”

  “Tuesday’s dead animal day,” Gina said.

  “Yeah, but I just remembered the dump closes at th
ree-thirty on Tuesdays.”

  Gina dropped her forehead to the steering wheel. She’d slept only five hours last night and was vibrating with fatigue and frustration. After a few moments, she climbed out of the car and gazed up at the promising blue sky. The weather had no rules, she thought; there could be a sudden thaw, and she would be able to bury the skunk.

  Back in the house, Gina stood above the two-foot-by-two-foot opening in the attic and lowered down boxes covered with dust and bits of tar from a sloppy roofing job to Cassie. At least thirty of the boxes were filled with photographs and negatives from their father’s commercial photography business that he’d operated from home; others held the artifacts of their childhood. Cassie and Gina carried them down to the living room, leaving a trail of black behind them.

  “Check this out,” Cassie said, pulling something framed from a box. She turned it for Gina to see. “My junior year French award. And...” She reached her other hand into the box. “Ta-da! The Miss Andrews Academy Award.”

  “Pretty hot stuff,” Gina said.

  Cassie laid the documents back in the box. “Yeah, well, I remember Mom told me back then not to have them out for people to see because it was too braggy.”

  “I’m sure. But she bragged about us to other people.”

  “Only when we weren’t around to enjoy it. Remember how she’d say, ‘Don’t let it go to your head’? Have you ever, even once, said that to one of your kids? She called it ‘being modest’, but I think she was just jealous.”

  Cassie’s insight was knife-sharp. Their mother was impossible—not just volatile, but childish and manipulative. Gina had always been reluctant to share achievements with her. Now she wondered: how could a mother feel competitive with her children? She’d always hoped that Esther and Ben would surpass her in feeling fulfilled in life.

  “Not to mention,” Cassie said with a snicker, “she hated that boys liked us.”

  A foghorn blew. “Nubble Light, five o’clock,” Cassie said. “Time to drink.”

  She went into the kitchen and called, “Damn! I wanted to pick up some wine.” Gina heard the jangle of bottle openers that hung on the door of the tiny liquor cabinet in the bottom of what had once been the water heater closet. “Vodka, gin, scotch, and vermouth. How about a martini?”

  “Sounds good,” Gina answered, though she didn’t like martinis. She was beginning to feel as if her older sister was the host and keynote speaker of a days-long event at which Gina was a guest.

  Gina stood and shifted to the living room window that framed the cove and harbor. The window! She’d forgotten, during these brooding, interior days, the escape it offered. Their mother had dreamed of replacing the one double-hung sash with glass doors. But Gina had always thought the narrow window made the experience of viewing the waterscape more intimate and poignant because, when standing at it, there was only room for one. The tide was high, and in the late afternoon light, the cove was a gloomy gray. Trees on the shoreline hadn’t yet leafed out, but already someone was sailing a small boat from the harbor. Gina wished she were that sailor, but she was lost on a sea of boxes in a house that seemed far from home.

  With Cassie still distracted in the kitchen, she decided to take her phone into the piano room to sneak in a call to Paul.

  “I have a call to make before my next appointment, so I can’t really talk,” Paul said, when she reached him. “We’re all fine. Esther’s quiet but seems engaged with school again. Check in later if you want to talk to her. You okay?”

  Gina reported that she was and said goodbye, missing her kids even more than before the call.

  In the kitchen, Cassie gave Gina’s arm a playful pinch. “You’re such a helicopter mom! You have to stop this before your kids are teenagers. All the attention you give them might backfire.”

  Cassie had hit a nerve—Paul, too, often accused her of hovering over the kids. “Do you eavesdrop on your kids, too?” she said, regretting that she’d taken Cassie’s bait. She opened the refrigerator and looked at the date on a bottle of green olives. “The olives expired a year and a half ago.”

  “Olives never go bad,” Cassie said.

  Gina chose to believe her about the olives. But while Cassie finished making the martinis, she plucked old jars of mayonnaise, mustard, jelly, pickles, ketchup, marmalade, salad dressing, chutney, and capers out of the refrigerator door and set them in the sink. “Do we have to recycle all these, or are we exempt, under the circumstances?”

  “Save the skunks,” Cassie said, pointing to the garbage can.

  She handed Gina the martini and they returned to the living room where Cassie took stock. “Well? There are the portraits and the Civil War weapons, books, and some good silver here that would be more valuable melted down. Not all that much.”

  Silently, they continued sorting through boxes; for Gina, the martini created a pleasant haze between her and their situation.

  When the landline rang, it startled them both. Cassie jumped up to get it.

  “Annie!” she said into the phone, “Yes, we’re buried. Okay, sure, thank you—we’d love to. See you soon.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to go to Lily House,” Gina said, thinking, I certainly don’t.

  Cassie slugged the last of her drink. “I’ve had a martini. Things look different.”

  Gina and Cassie drove past the stone wall built by the Historical Society to buffer Lily House from the road. At the end of it, a modest sign hung from a post.

  Lily House

  Home of Sidney Banton

  Built 1785

  Open to the Public

  (By appointment only)

  In her mind, Gina saw her mother shake her head at the sign with disapproval.

  Cassie sighed as she pulled into Lily House’s driveway. Though it was more than a hundred years older than the rental, it was evident that the generous-sized Georgian colonial, with its bright yellow clapboards, black shutters, and welcoming wide porch, had been much better cared for.

  As the sisters climbed the porch steps, Cassie asked, “When was the last time you were here?”

  Gina tried to answer but her breath caught in her throat.

  “Cassie! Gina!” Annie beamed when she opened the door. “Lester? They’ve come!”

  Annie wrapped an arm around Cassie and then Gina, reeling each of them in for a hug. Gina felt small and limp next to her. At five-foot-nine, Annie was eleven inches taller than Gina’s mother, and Gina always imagined those inches balanced the power in their friendship. When Annie pulled back from them, she wiped tears from her eyes. “Oh, you girls,” she said.

  Lester appeared at the end of the hall with a broad smile. “Well, well! Cassie and Ginny! How wonderful!” He made his way toward them on one metal crutch, his companion since childhood polio.

  “Gina,” Annie corrected Lester. “She hasn’t been Ginny in years.”

  Cassie grabbed Gina’s wrist and squeezed. “Wow, it’s exactly as I remember it!” she exclaimed, stepping into the living room ahead of Annie and Lester.

  The darkness that had enveloped Gina all week suddenly deepened. The last time she’d been in Lily House was thirty-five years ago, the day her Aunt Fran committed suicide here. That the arrangement of furnishings had been frozen in time by the Historical Society seemed macabre. She tried to maintain the slight blur from the martini to keep her mind skittering along the surface of things.

  But Cassie’s big eyes widened. “Wow!” she exclaimed. “I think I remember every single thing in here. The Shaker chairs . . . the gorgeous tea set? It was Martha Washington’s.” She ran a finger along the belly of the teapot. “And the lolling chair that George Washington sat in when he came here,” she said, her hand brushing the velvet seat. “We never got to sit in it because it was always ‘Fran’s chair.’”

  “Welcome to your family museum!” Lester said. “We’d love to entertain you here in the living room but it’s off-limits, of course—no sitting allowed.”

  They followed
him into what Gina remembered her mother calling the “piano room,” though now it was clear to her that it had been built as a library. “This is Annie’s and my living room.”

  “So which rooms can you and Lester actually use?” Gina asked.

  Lester explained they used the piano room, the large kitchen, and as their dining room, the sunroom. They slept in the “summer ell,” an addition off the kitchen that originally had been built for summer guests but had since been winterized.

  “How about a glass of wine?” Annie offered. Gina was about to say, no, thank you, but Cassie said, “We’d kill for a glass of wine!”

  Cassie winked at Gina, and Gina resigned herself to whatever Cassie had in mind. At least she’d always liked Annie and Lester. When she was young, she’d recognized them as unusual: a mother with a profession playing violin in the Maine Symphony, a father who worked as a high school guidance counselor. Both tall, they filled a room, and in their frequent visits to her family’s house, Gina felt their physical presence like old, comfortable furniture as much as family friends. She’d memorized Annie’s big, arty necklaces and her perfume, Lester’s tweedy sweaters and his penny loafers—exotic, because her father had never owned a pair—and their party drinks: Annie—gin and tonic, Lester—Michelob beer. They’d loved her father’s puns and her mother’s cheese soufflé. Their two sons, now in Alaska and Boston, were quite a bit older than Gina and hadn’t been around much when she was growing up.

  “Dearies, how’s everything going over there?” Annie asked when she returned with the wine. “You poor things. Is everything set for the funeral? What can we do to help?”

  “It’s an unholy mess!” Cassie said. She described the house cleaning in detail, including the adventures with the dead skunk, but not, Gina noted, the discovery of Martha Washington’s hair or George’s cloak piece. While Cassie chattered, uneasiness rolled through Gina as she imagined memories, nested wasp-like in these walls, ready to swarm.