Monarch Manor

by Maureen Leurck

  “There she is,” Eleanor said from behind her. Amelia followed her older sister west, toward the lake, where Jane stood. In front of her was a row of hedges that seemed to be in one solid line, a wall of greenery, but as they got closer Amelia realized there was a slight gap in them, a secret passageway.

  The sisters looked at one another, faces beaming with glee. Eleanor grabbed Jane’s hand and held out her other for Amelia. Together, they walked toward the hedges. It was a small circle, surrounded by tall arborvitae. A private hideout, where no one would ever find them.

  Jane broke away from her sisters and squealed in delight as she ran a hand lightly along one of the green walls. “Is this where the fairies live?” Jane asked in a breathy voice as she slowly twirled in a circle, her blue-and-white gingham dress floating around her legs like the sail of a sailboat blowing in the breeze.

  Her shoes sinking slightly in the soft grass of the clearing, Eleanor walked over to her youngest sister, knelt down, and held her hands. “Yes.” She leaned forward and kissed Jane on her round cheek.

  Amelia saw a flash of something gray out of the corner of her eye, near the opening of the arbors. She took a step toward the movement and pointed. “Bunnies! Baby bunnies!” At the noise, the tiny rabbit scampered back into a concealed nest.

  The sisters ran toward the nest, which was covered in a thatch of grass and leaves. Eleanor reached for the leaves, even as Amelia protested, and carefully peeled back the cover. Inside were six bunnies, huddled together into one mass of gray fur and soft ears, eyes closed. At the light, they squeezed tighter together, relying on one another for protection and comfort.

  “Are they boys or girls?” Jane said as she crouched in the grass, her hands sinking into the dirt.

  Amelia looked down at the tiny babies and from side to side to her sisters, kept safe in their secret garden, and said, “Sisters. They’re all sisters.”

  Eleanor nodded. “Yes. And they only have each other . . . and us.” She smiled at Amelia and took her hand and squeezed it.

  “This is my favorite place in the whole world,” Jane said as she stood up and ran her pointer finger along some striped grass near the hedges.

  Amelia wasn’t sure if she meant the secret garden or Monarch Manor as a whole, yet she said, “Mine, too. I never want to leave.”

  * * *

  Many years later, as Amelia rocked on the veranda on the day of the wedding, she whispered those same words to herself: “I never want to leave.” And yet she knew she would have to say good-bye long before she was ready.

  CHAPTER 10

  ERIN

  When I was eighteen, my grandmother once told me that her house was her favorite place in the world. “Everything I want is here, just the way I want it.” At the time, I remember thinking that it was sad, that she should want to explore the world, try new places. Yet as I got older, and after Luke and I bought our house, I understood. I realized how lucky I was to live in a house and love it so much that I would choose it over anywhere else. And so, on the day of the estate sale at my grandmother’s house, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of invasion as people walked through, browsing the items. After all, this was her sanctuary; this was her safe harbor. And these people walked through it with muddy shoes and a critical eye, licking their lips as they searched for a bargain.

  “How much for this piece? I know it says three dollars, but I only have two dollars.” A brunette with hair draped over her shoulder and a knowing smile held out eight quarters. In her other hand she held a license plate frame that read VIVA LAS VEGAS. A name tag on her shirt read SHANNON and it shifted as she thrust the money closer to my face.

  “Done,” I said as I grabbed the quarters from her hand before she could reconsider. A look of disappointment crossed her face, as though she was locked and loaded for a fight to the license plate death.

  I walked outside and saw a couple staring at a rake in the front yard. “I just don’t know,” the wife said as she watched her husband take it for a test drive against the leaves. “We only have that one maple tree, and we already have two rakes.... I’m not sure there’s room in the garage for a third.”

  “Then don’t buy it,” my mother muttered under her breath as she stood off to the side, on the sidewalk in front of my grandmother’s house. She grunted when she saw me. “Jesus, this is a lot of conversation for five bucks.” She threw up her hands when the couple walked away, the rake unsold and lying on the grass. “Thanks for coming!” she called. “I hope neither of your two existing rakes break.”

  “Stop.” I elbowed her in the arm, and her skin moved back and forth easily. “Remember what . . .” I trailed off as I tried to remember the name of the perky blond woman with short feathered hair who had arrived that morning from the estate sale company. “Camille,” I finally said, “told us? ‘It might not seem like we’re making any money, but we’re going to get everything taken care of, easy peasy lemon squeezy.’ ”

  I cocked my head to the side. “Except lemons aren’t that easy to squeeze.”

  “Yeah, but don’t tell Camille that.” My mother turned and looked back at the house, shaking her head. People had started lining up at 6:30 am even though the sale didn’t start until eight. We knew this because when we arrived at 7:00 twenty people stared at us, whispering about their thirty minutes already spent in line.

  “Garbage pickers,” my mother had whispered as she saw the crowd assemble that morning. Several were already trying to crane their necks to peer into the windows. “Can they really be that excited for a few old Barry Manilow albums? Weirdos.”

  When I had tried to protest and say that maybe they were just normal people, looking for a deal, she pointedly turned around and looked at me. “Just like Grandma, huh?”

  Two hours later and most of the Precious Moments figurines had been sold, to people with eager hands who carefully watched us wrap them in newspaper before placing them in a plastic grocery bag, and all of the bedroom furniture was gone as well. The curio cabinet was next, and it was only when someone bought the freestanding dishwasher that I saw my mother’s face flash with any sign that these had once been the things that surrounded her as a child.

  “Fond memories of washing dishes?” I asked her as we stood guard over the table of Christmas records, including one with the carols sung entirely by cats. (Camille said that theft was a huge problem at any estate sale and we had to be vigilant in watching the crowd, although I couldn’t imagine the cats’ Christmas hits would be a hot shoplifted item.)

  “The day my father brought that thing home, you would have thought it was the Hope Diamond, the way my mother reacted. ‘Can we afford this? It’s too much! I can’t accept it!’ ” She smiled, her brown eyes catching the sunlight that streamed through the picture window in the parlor, as my grandmother called it. “I had never seen her so tickled by any gift he gave her before, or would give her again.”

  She crossed her arms and glanced at the space where it once was in the kitchen. Next to the end of the cream Formica countertop, on the linoleum floor, was a small square less faded than the rest of the room. “Never mind that we had to walk sideways around it to get through the kitchen.”

  I nodded. “I get it. To go from hand-washing to a dishwasher would feel like a miracle.” Just last year, Luke had bought a Roomba and it made me feel like I was Queen Elizabeth. Charlotte tried to ride it like a horse the following week, and it started smoking and never worked the same after.

  An hour earlier, Luke and the kids had met us so the twins could see their great-grandmother’s house one final time before we had dinner, but within the span of fifteen minutes Will tried to co-opt the drink coasters to build a tower and Charlotte cried when she saw my grandfather’s creepy ventriloquist dummy. Luke had quickly carted them off, muttering about finding a lakefront park and an ice-cream shop.

  An hour later and the sale was over. All that remained of my grandmother’s things was an odds-and-ends collection of ashtrays and lanyards from
Branson, Missouri, and a few plastic necklaces, in addition to a stack of old books. Camille scooped all of it up into a cardboard box, to be donated to the local Salvation Army. At the last moment, I grabbed the books out of the box and put them in my car.

  My mother and I took one last look around the house, emptier than we had ever seen it—and so much bigger than it ever appeared before—before we shut the door and locked it behind us.

  I didn’t ask her if it was hard to see it empty, how she felt about seeing it all gone. Even if she felt some sense of loss, she likely wouldn’t have told me anyway. She was never one to dwell on negative feelings, as she preferred the “if you pretend it’s not happening, maybe it will go away” approach for all things, big and small. When I told her we were worried that something larger was going on with Will, she thought we were crazy and told us to give him more time to reach his milestones. Even when I told her what the doctor said, she showed no signs that she fully grasped what it meant. I often wondered if it was her way of coping or if she really didn’t understand what we dealt with every day.

  Sometimes I wished I could be like her, that I could keep my eyes focused on the present, and not what had happened in the past. If I could, then I wouldn’t feel the burden of finding out what happened to Amelia and John, of thinking about all that we had gone through with Will. I imagined I would feel much lighter, sleep sounder, if I didn’t feel as though I constantly had to try to find the meaning of our struggles.

  * * *

  “Before we all head home, do you guys want to see something neat? Like, really, really neat?” I said as we picked over a plate of fries at Champs, a sports bar in downtown Lake Geneva. Will didn’t turn to look and Charlotte’s head bobbed slightly, her eyes glazed over. They were both flushed from spending two hours outside, in a park and on the lakeshore in nearby Fontana, across the lake.

  Luke eyed me with suspicion, but I just told him to follow my directions once we got to the car.

  * * *

  It looked even more magnificent, and even more decrepit, the second time I saw Monarch Manor. I noticed the roof wasn’t just in disrepair, it was caving in, pieces falling inside, disappearing into the dark void at the center of the structure. Yet I saw that the shingles that remained glinted with a mother-of-pearl stillness as they overlapped in the fish-scale pattern. It looked like small hands folded over one another, keeping the secrets of the former inhabitants safe, until they disintegrated into dust, no longer tasked with the charge.

  “It looks like a haunted house,” Charlotte said as she climbed out of our minivan and hopped off the running board.

  “Should we go inside to be sure?” Luke said with a grin, and made a motion to grab her arm. “I’m sure the ghosts won’t mind.”

  “No way!” She stepped back, pressing herself against the car. “They’ll eat my face and steal my body.”

  I looked at Luke. “Maybe no more scary cartoons? Just a thought.” I turned back to the house. “Well?”

  He took a step forward, his mouth bending into a small, bemused smile. “Well, it’s . . . a craphole just like you said. And yes, probably haunted.”

  I folded my arms over my chest as I walked toward it, my eyes scanning the rotting wood and the peeling paint. “It’s amazing.” I stopped and looked out over the lake, at the crumbling pier that still jutted into the water. “Amelia and John were here, right where I’m standing.” I bent down and put my fingertips on the yellowing grass and chickweed on what I imagined was once a magnificent green lawn, dotted with ladies carrying parasols and butterflies flitting in the breeze. I could picture children playing on the once-grand veranda, their knees skinned and palms sporting a dusting of dirt. Out on the water, pristine white sailboats formed a regatta, the children pointing at them and rooting for their favorite one.

  I pictured Amelia on the steps, with John in her lap, as they watched the boats. The summer air caused the backs of his legs to stick against her skirt, and she brushed his hair from his sweaty head, so the lake breeze could touch his skin and cool him. I wondered if she ever knew how lucky she was to have this place, to have this sanctuary.

  Still crouching down, I turned to Luke, my voice swelling. “They were here.”

  He studied my expression for a moment before he relaxed his arms and walked over. He nodded. “What a view,” he said after taking in the scene again. “I can see why they built it right here. You can see almost the entire lakeshore.”

  Will gave a screech from inside the running car, where he was strapped into a five-point harness, watching a Pixar movie from the flip-down TV screen. He started thrashing his arms in frustration. Luke turned and walked to the car, leaning inside. I saw him hit the Chapter Forward button twice before Will stopped flailing, his body calm once again. Almost all of our DVDs had been “well loved” to the point of freezing and skipping, something that drove Will nuts. Which I totally understood. It would have driven me nuts, too.

  “Mom, is that Geneva Lake down there?” Charlotte called, brave enough again to step toward the house.

  I held out my hand. “C’mon.”

  “O-kay,” she said slowly as Luke stayed with Will in the car while we walked toward the water. Her eyes shifted to the crumbling house every few seconds, as though she wanted to make sure all the ghosts stayed put. (And her face stayed on her head.)

  When we reached the water’s edge, the lake sparkled in front of us, a deep navy blue. Choppy waves splashed against the edge, where a beautiful rock wall once stood but was now a mess of tumbled boulders and moss-covered edges. I stopped just before the pier, as I didn’t dare set foot on the rickety wood. But that, too, I could picture as it once was. The wood was a gleaming white, polished every day by deckhands. The children would run down from the kitchen with stale bread to entice the sunfish to come to the surface. When the sunlight would hit the water just right, their silvery bodies could be seen in between the strands of seaweed sprouting from the rocky bottom. Maybe John had a favorite fish, one he fed each day, his secret summer pet.

  “The water looks really dark here, Mommy,” Charlotte said as she leaned forward and tried to peer down. “I can’t see the bottom, even.”

  “It does look really deep. I wonder how far it goes down.” As I said the words, my heart beat quicker as I thought of Amelia and John, surrounded by all that dark water. Were they at the bottom somewhere, their bodies resting together forever, a permanent part of the lake?

  Charlotte shivered as a breeze came across the water and whipped against our bare arms. As we turned to walk back to the car, I looked up again at Monarch Manor, wondering which broken window had been Amelia’s bedroom, wishing I could reach through time and hold her hand.

  * * *

  After the twins were in bed that night, I sat awake in my bedroom. On my phone I had tapped Monarch Manor into the search bar, again scanning all of the available photos online and rereading every blurb about the house. I knew it all by heart at that point, but it was comforting to read the words again and see the same pictures. Like the house was frozen in time and wasn’t the pile of debris on the lakeshore that I had seen that afternoon.

  I wondered if it was the same for Will. When he insisted on reading the same books over and over or eating his food off of the same plate, did he feel that same sense of comfort? In that a lot of things didn’t make sense to him, but he could control this one small thing, this one tiny corner of his universe? In the same way, the yacht accident and Amelia and John’s fate was a glaring question to me, yet I could reread the blurbs online about the mansion’s construction and the tea parties and feel some sense of accomplishment.

  I set my phone down next to a sleeping Luke and looked over at the stack of unsold books I had grabbed from the estate sale. They were haphazardly set on my dresser, a collection of rough-hewn covers in light blue and red. I walked over and picked up the first one: A Tale of Two Cities, a likely leftover from when my mother was in high school. I opened the inside cover and saw the s
tamp for the library of Wilmot Union High School, where my mother had gone to school.

  “Hopefully the overdue fines aren’t still collecting,” I said with a laugh. I grabbed another book, an old Bible, and flipped through the pages like an accordion, the paper crinkling and the spine giving a satisfying crack after years of hibernation. I was about to set it back when I saw a small card resting at the bottom, underneath a physics textbook.

  I bent down and fished it out with two fingers. It was a funeral prayer card, for Emily, my great-grandmother. It read: BORN ON OCTOBER 25, 1918, DIED ON APRIL 1, 1988, with a caption under a picture of Saint Theresa the Little Flower on the front. On the back was a short blurb:

  EMILY KOEHLER,

  BELOVED DAUGHTER, AUNT, SISTER, MOTHER, AND WIFE,

  WAS PRECEDED IN DEATH BY: BELOVED SON, EMIL;

  HER GRANDPARENTS CASSANDRA, THEODORE,

  CONRAD, AND MARY;

  MOTHER AND FATHER, ELEANOR AND GEORGE;

  SISTER, LOUISA;

  AUNT AND UNCLE JANE AND EDWARD; AND OTHERS.

  Two things immediately occurred to me: It confirmed that John and my great-grandmother Emily were first cousins. And, more important, John and Amelia weren’t listed in the deceased relatives. “What the . . .” I whispered as I turned the card over, certain I had missed something. I couldn’t imagine why they weren’t mentioned. Even if they had survived the accident, surely Amelia would have died by 1988. They must have been intentionally left off.

  I texted my mom a picture of the prayer card, noting the confirmed family connection and the glaring omission. She immediately texted back: Looks like you have a family mystery to solve, Watson.