Dream House Read online

  “Gina?”

  Annie stood over her with a wine bottle. Gina looked at her wine goblet and seeing it was empty said, “No, thank you.” Annie refilled Cassie’s glass.

  “There’s something different about this room,” Gina said.

  “Wow, the architect speaks!” Lester laughed. “You don’t miss a trick. We moved the piano some. In the summer, the sun coming in that window was murder on the instrument.”

  Below the bookshelves, under the piano, were panels that Gina knew were actually secret cabinets where toys had always been kept. She thought about those toys now: wooden animals, small sailboat models, an old doll with one arm missing; her fingers itched to touch them. She stood, realizing the alcohol had gone to her head. “Would it be okay if I ...” she laughed. “I just can’t resist.” She ducked under the piano and slid on her knees to the wall where the panels were. She knew just how to press them to make them slide open.

  “What the heck, Gina?” Cassie said. “Oh, are you looking for the toys?”

  Gina opened each of the three doors and peeked inside: empty. “They’re not there,” she said, feeling ridiculous.

  “Your ancestor Banton was a secretive guy,” Lester said. “That’s not the only hiding place he had.”

  Cassie gasped and jumped from her chair. “Did you find the Washington letters?” she shouted.

  Mortified, Gina crawled out from under the piano, bumping her head as she tried to stand. Did Annie and Lester know about the Washington letters? she wondered. Their mother had always told them they were a secret. As George Washington’s private secretary, Sidney Banton had supposedly hidden some important letters of the first president’s in Lily House.

  “No, no,” Annie said. “Good heavens! You’ll be the first to know if we find the Washington letters.”

  Cassie’s flushed face sagged with disappointment. As if possessed, she walked the perimeter of the room, pressing on the panels of the wainscoting.

  “Over here,” Lester said, squeezing behind the piano bench. “Take a look.” Placing both palms on one of the wall panels, he easily slid it to the side, revealing a cavity about eighteen inches wide.

  Cassie and Gina peered into the compartment. “This must’ve been where Sidney Banton hid all the important stuff he had of George Washington’s,” Cassie said when Lester had closed the panel. “How come Mom never told us about it?”

  “She said she didn’t know it was there,” Lester explained. “I think it must’ve been because the piano was up against it all those years. The Historical Society people knew about it, though.”

  “And Sid dropped in maybe six months ago, and he knew about it,” Annie added.

  “Sid Banton?” Cassie said. “What was he doing here?”

  Sid, Fran’s son, was Gina and Cassie’s only cousin, eight years Gina’s senior.

  “He’s thinking of moving back to Whit’s Point. I would imagine he was interested in checking in on the house where he grew up.”

  Gina detected sarcasm in Lester’s remark, and no wonder. She and Cassie must have seemed more than a little drunk—off the wall. In the awkward silence that followed, the angry voices of Gina’s mother, Sid, and Fran pushed into Gina’s head; she nearly turned to see if they’d come into the room.

  “Fran and Sid must’ve taken everything in that hiding place,” Cassie said, as if she, too, had heard ghosts. “Including the Washington letters.”

  Lester smiled. “Well, now that’s funny, because Sid thinks you two must have those letters,” he said.

  “What?” Cassie’s face looked ready to pop. “He’s so full of it! The Bantons were all liars and loose cannons!”

  Gina touched Cassie’s arm to stop her from unleashing more. She felt the constriction of memories, of night pressing in, of wishing and wanting for things that couldn’t be had.

  “Will you stay and have some leftover chicken?” Annie asked.

  Gina raced Cassie to answer. “Thank you, Annie, but we’ve got a lot to do at the house before the funeral and should get going.”

  As the four of them walked to the front door, Cassie’s eyes swept over the room and she sighed. “Mom always wanted to live here,” she said.

  “Oh no,” Annie said. “I don’t think that’s true. Not always.”

  Lester opened the door, and Cassie and Gina stepped out. “Listen, you two,” Annie said, “I want you to come back, anytime. Don’t be strangers.”

  In the driveway, Gina took the car keys from Cassie and had the thought that this was another last: the last time she’d be at Lily House. Like all the other lasts this week, she put it in a box that would sit until she dared to open it.

  When they got back to the house, Gina put some water on to boil for pasta, and they went back to work, numbly sorting through the things from the attic.

  “Did you see Sid’s stuff?” Cassie pointed at a box, and Gina reached over and pulled out a model airplane labeled “WW2 P 51.” Underneath it were more boy toys—a book about military uniforms, a filthy baseball, and a photograph of their mother beaming at a young Sid, holding the tiller of their O Boat. In his smiling boyish face, she saw the flash of hurt she remembered about him, the long dark eyebrows so arched they could suspend a bridge. She held up the picture for Cassie to see.

  “Mom was obsessed with him,” Cassie sneered.

  Gina knew that after a couple of drinks, Cassie wouldn’t be able to let the subject of Sid drop; she couldn’t stand him. Their mother had adored Sid as a little boy. He was two when she became pregnant with Cassie, and she was so sure she was carrying a boy that she’d never picked out a girl’s name. She let this bit of information slip in front of Cassie when she was thirteen, establishing a life-long resentment.

  “Sid lived with us for a while, you know,” Cassie said. “But Mom never told us why. She taught him to sail, not me, because he was a boy.”

  “Cass, he looks like he was about nine. She taught him and not you because you were, like, six.”

  “Right. Do you suppose he’ll show up at the funeral?”

  Gina shrugged. “Probably. They were his only aunt and uncle.”

  Cassie groaned, and Gina filled with dread too; she had her own awful memory of Sid. She was ten when she last saw him at Fran’s funeral, where he was cloaked in black and Banton enmity. “You must speak to Sid,” her mother had coached her, squeezing her hand. But after everything that had happened, Gina couldn’t bear to even look at him.

  “I can’t believe he had the gall to tell Annie and Lester he thinks we have the Washington letters,” Cassie said. “It can’t be a coincidence that he got into the antiques business in New York—he probably funded it by selling family stuff from Lily House.”

  The thought that family fighting over things like the Washington letters could go on for another generation made Gina’s stomach hurt. “You never know,” she said. “Maybe Mom’s the one who was lying about who had what.”

  “Well we know she wasn’t above lying,” Cassie said.

  Gina felt suddenly that her time with Cassie at the house, taxed enough by grim circumstances, was churning into a downward spiral. She resolved not to entertain any more negative commentary about their mother or any other family member.

  Reaching into a bag full of Christmas tree ornaments, she pulled out a box containing an angel made of glass with a delicate halo and lacy wire wings. Every year, the girls had taken turns climbing up to place her at the top of the tree. Gina was about to remark on its loveliness when Cassie crowed, “Look! It’s the angel with nine lives! Veteran of Christmas wars! God! Mom found a way to ruin every Christmas! She just had to have a fight with somebody. Fran. Or Dad. Or me. Whoever.” She began to laugh. A soft, gurgling laugh that slowly swelled to a whoop.

  Her laughter seemed impetuous and was so forceful, Gina felt an almost physical sensation of being pushed away. “Cassie, you’re drunk!”

  Cassie slapped Gina’s knee. “Imagine just canceling Christmas on your kids! It’s so
awful it’s hilarious!” She laughed harder, rocking back and forth on the rug, tears streaking her cheeks. “Was that the last time you were at Lily House? The year of the Christmas-that-never-was? Or did you forget—remember your wall-of-forgetting?”

  Gina felt the strength drain out of her. Cassie was right—that was the last time Gina had been at Lily House. But it was Cassie who seemed to have forgotten—maybe because she’d been away, happily skiing with a friend—that the canceled Christmas had come on the heels of Fran’s suicide.

  Cassie was still tittering. “Stop!” Gina yelled. “Please stop!” She flushed with heat as if she were wrapped in plastic. “We need some fresh air in here!” She lurched to the window and flung up the sash. “Shit!”

  “The storm windows are still on,” Cassie said. She slumped onto the couch. “I’m sorry. It’s because of all the work fixing the shed roof. I was up here fifteen weekends this year, and we only got the ones upstairs off. I’m sorry.”

  “Stop apologizing!” Gina snapped. “It doesn’t matter—it’s not our house!”

  “Oh,” Cassie said, “It’s just that . . . you’re hardly ever here and now there’ll be no reason for you to come east.” To Gina, Cassie looked a lot like their mother right now, her body sunken into the couch cushions, tears that turned her big eyes into glittery martyr jewels.

  “Don’t be silly! I’ll come to see you in Providence.”

  “It’s just not the same. Here . . . now . . . without the house.”

  “Cass, stop! What’re you saying? You’ve always griped about coming to Maine. And anyway, we were miserable here. Admit it. You’re as finished with the house as I am.” Her eyes stung with the uncertainty of this stern pronouncement.

  The ship’s clock chimed, followed by the groan of a lighthouse and for the first time, Cassie didn’t announce which one. She stood and slinked into the kitchen.

  With a shaking hand, Gina carefully laid the glass angel in its wooden box. When she heard Cassie draining the pasta, she joined her, and they sat down and plowed through their dinner, topping it off with Fig Newtons. After they’d washed the dishes, Cassie fell asleep on the living room couch. At nine thirty, Gina, hardly able to keep her eyes open, dragged herself upstairs to bed.

  As on previous nights, she felt utterly alone in her father’s bed. She pictured Esther and Ben, reassuring herself that somewhere, she still belonged to someone, and reached for her phone on the nightstand. She had to tell Esther that she’d never again leave her in her time of need, if she could possibly help it.

  “Aw, I forgot she was going to have dinner at Julia’s,” Paul said, when Gina asked to speak to Esther. “How’d the rest of the day go?”

  Gina described their visit with Annie and Lester, but her conversations with Cassie felt too convoluted to talk about. “I wanted to prepare Esther for the funeral,” she said. “I’m afraid she’ll feel . . . I just . . . I hate not being there with her now.”

  “You can’t be in two places at the same time,” Paul said. “Esther knows that. And I’m here.” He took a breath. “Gina . . .”

  In his protracted pause, Gina heard everything he wanted to say: you worry too much . . . you don’t have to be the perfect mom . . . it’s okay for them to grapple. Things he’d told her over and over again, but she didn’t buy.

  “You need to worry about yourself,” he said now. “Right? If you’re very anxious, how about taking the Xanax I gave you?”

  She was too exhausted to call him on his paternal tone. “No,” she said. “Whatever. Just tell Esther she can get ahold of me anytime if she wants.”

  After they’d hung up, Gina thought about how attending to her children always made her feel strong. Now, feeling small and vulnerable in her childhood room, she realized that comforting her children soothed the confused and inconsolable child within herself. Was there something wrong with that? With her? Maybe Paul was right: she needed to find a different way to ease her anxiety

  She lay awake for an hour, listening as Cassie locked the front door and thumped upstairs to bed. When the house was silent, she tossed in her father’s exile bed for a few more minutes until she could stand it no more. There was no way self-comforting was going to happen in this bed, in this room, in this house!

  She jumped out of bed, shivering with a violence a blanket wouldn’t fix, and crept into Cassie’s room. “Can I sleep with you?” she asked.

  Cassie slid over in the double bed, and Gina climbed in beside her as she had so many times before.

  “You’re shaking,” Cassie said. “Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t want to sleep in there?” She caressed Gina’s shoulder, and they were both quiet for a while. Finally, Cassie said, “I’m sorry about earlier. You know, it’s different for me, being in this house. I couldn’t have spent so much time here if I hadn’t had a couple of blowouts with Mom. It’s why I can laugh about it all and you can’t.”

  Gina rolled onto her side, her back to Cassie. Since they were very young, the sisters had bonded over struggles with their mother; now, the distinction Cassie had made caused Gina to feel even more isolated. The defenses she’d been keeping up for days were weakening. But she wouldn’t let them; there was still too much to get through. When Cassie hugged Gina close and cried, her warm, minty breath puffing into Gina’s back, Gina sensed that although her sister claimed to have “let it go,” her shuddering was not just about the sudden death of their parents—though that would be enough—but also a mourning for what had come before, here in the house.

  In the sagging bed, Gina was alone on an island in the dark, dreary night with the one person who understood.

  Cassie stopped crying and rolled over. Soon, her icy cold feet found their way to Gina’s calves, as they always had when they slept together as girls.

  Gina folded the pillow over her head. When Cassie said something, she peeled it away. “What?”

  “You haven’t cried the whole time we’ve been here.”

  Gina had felt the tears, swelling inside her. What Cassie didn’t know—because Gina hadn’t yet found the words for it—was that even before their abrupt and monumental loss, something else had been stealing from her, something more insidious and stealthy. “I can’t,” she said. “Not yet.”

  “You still always sleep with a pillow wrapped around your head?”

  “Yup.”

  “I’m sorry you ended up with the bedroom next to Mom’s.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  A house: a shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive. A receptacle for light and sun. A certain number of cells appropriated to cooking, work, and personal life.

  A room: a surface over which one can walk at ease, a bed on which to stretch yourself, a chair in which to rest or work, a work-table, receptacles in which each thing can be put at once in its right place.

  The number of rooms: one for cooking and one for eating. One for work, one to wash yourself in and one for sleep. Such are the standards of the dwelling. Then why do we have the enormous and useless roofs on pretty suburban villas? Why the scanty windows with their little panes; why large houses with so many rooms locked up? Why the mirrored wardrobes . . . the elaborate bookcases . . . the consoles, the china cabinets . . . ?

  Le Corbusier, Towards A New Architecture

  Chapter 3

  The morning after the funeral, Paul, Esther, and Ben piled into Cassie’s car so that she could drop them at the airport on her way back to Providence, where she had an evening event to cater. Watching her family drive out the driveway, Gina felt a frantic urge to run after them and jump in the car. But there was still much to do, and she owed it to Cassie to stay a couple more days.

  The auction man arrived at ten-thirty to pick up the house’s more valuable furnishings. “There’re some real treasures here,” he said. “You might be surprised by what they fetch.” Sliding open the drawer of a Banton family desk, he asked, “Have you gotten everything out of these drawers? Oh, wow! Look at these!�
� He plucked out several small, worn frames. “Sixth plate daguerreotypes. Signed ‘New York, 1841.’ Wonderful!”

  Yesterday, Gina had seen the daguerreotypes but hadn’t even taken them out to look at them. They’d been tucked in that drawer for as long as she could remember and had become fixtures over time, like faucets and hairbrushes. What excited her were the piece of George Washington’s cloak and the lock of Martha’s hair, now tucked in her carry-on bag. She and Cassie had decided not to even mention this fresh discovery to the auctioneer until they’d researched the best thing to do with them. Since Cassie’s house had been broken into recently, she insisted that Gina take them with her to San Francisco.

  Neighbors and friends had picked up most of the rest of the furniture and now that the auction items were cleared out, the house was nearly empty. Even the ship’s and lighthouse clocks had been packed away, their voices silenced. Without Cassie’s big personality to fill up the rooms, Gina experienced the echo of death even more acutely.

  She went upstairs and sat on the toilet lid, looking for solace in her email. She opened the last of five from her clients, Mitzi and Jeff Stone, whose two voicemails she’d neglected to answer. She’d brought their drawings with her, expecting they’d want to talk and finally made a date with them for a Skype conference the next morning. She spent most of the afternoon answering the string of emails from clients and contractors that felt like a lifeline.

  At five o’clock, she loaded up her parents’ car with more boxes and bags and headed out Halsey Road to Goodwill. She made her drop, trying not to think about her mother’s tiny cardigans and tiny shoes and the hardly-worn wool trousers of her father’s that were stuffed beneath the knot of the black plastic bags. It seemed indecorous that owing to size and convenience, trash bags had become the default carry-all—for life, for death, and everything in between, like garbage.