Monarch Manor

by Maureen Leurck

  “Yes, of course,” Matthew said evenly. He stood up straighter and took a sip of his drink. “Except she has one small flaw.” He turned to Amelia, and her heart began to beat so quickly she was sure he could see the movement from the outside of her dress.

  Oh, Matthew. What are you going to say?

  Don’t say it. You shouldn’t say it.

  Nothing good can come from you saying it.

  Except, more than anything, her heart wanted him to say it. To tell her that he loved her, that he had always loved her, and that things, for the first time in so very long, might be beautiful again. It was the part of her heart that she kept hidden away, behind the lock and key of her reality, the small piece of her that was unchanged from her childhood. From the Before.

  But Before didn’t exist anymore. Or, at least, she didn’t have the luxury of revisiting it. She had to focus on John and what his future would be, not her own. He was all that mattered.

  Yet before Matthew could say anything—the words her heart wanted to hear or otherwise—a familiar cry turned the guests’ heads. At attention, Amelia scanned the party to where she heard the sound, on the south edge of the lawn, closer to the pier. She saw his figure in the crowd, crumpled into a ball.

  She thrust her drink at Matthew so hard that the liquid spilled down his front, and raced toward John, bumping into drunken guests on the way, not caring when Charles Hutchinson fell over at the slightest touch.

  “Madwoman!” he called out, slurring his words, as his wife unsuccessfully tried to help him stand.

  By the time Amelia reached John, his cries had turned into screams, as he looked down and saw the blood pouring from his kneecap. The nanny was huddled at his side, trying to cover his mouth and muffle his noises.

  “Stop that!” Amelia said, and swatted her hand away. She pulled John toward her, into her lap, not caring about the grass staining her pale silk dress. She began to rock him, pressing his body against hers, his head tucked under her chin. When he was just a toddler and he would become inconsolable because he was startled by something that he could not hear coming, she would do the same, letting him feel her breathing in and out and the beating of her heart. With him at that age, she wasn’t able to offer any soothing words, since he wasn’t proficient in sign language yet, but he could feel her body and feel that he was safe.

  She knew every guest was staring at her, and could hear their whispers and a few loudly proclaiming that this was why children shouldn’t be allowed at wedding receptions, but she kept rocking, holding on tight to his head, until she felt his body relax. When he did, she opened her eyes, her gaze focused on him. She motioned for the nanny to put her hand over the wound on his kneecap, so she could sign and tell him everything would be fine, but the nanny balked, shaking her head.

  Amelia shot her a look of fury before touching the blood running down his leg, putting her palm over his scrape. With her other hand, she lifted his chin to her eyes.

  It’s just fine, she said silently. Everything will be fine. It’s just a cut.

  She scooped him under his arms and stood up, blood staining the front of her dress. He collapsed into her like a baby, his head on her shoulder. Her eyes quickly scanned the crowd, who watched her with looks of disdain mixed with mild concern. In the back, she saw Margaret’s lips pursed and arms folded over her chest as she stood next to Mrs. Hutchinson, still mopping off her husband from his drunken fall. The look in her mother-in-law’s eyes made her blood turn to ice. She had seen it before, and it reminded her of all that Margaret had planned for them after the wedding.

  She took a step toward the house, chin held high, and looked over her shoulder at the nanny. “You are relieved of your duties,” she said before she walked toward the house, slowly enough so that the guests knew she wasn’t escaping, but quickly enough for them to not be able to stop her.

  She caught a few of their words and what they said about her and her son, and for once, she was thankful that John could not hear.

  CHAPTER 18

  ERIN

  The air in my grandmother’s empty house swirled with dust, even though my mother and I had hired a professional crew to come in the day before, to clean it prior to its going on the real estate market. As I looked around in the thick air, the house suddenly felt abandoned, hurt.

  I felt guilt wash over me, like we were doing something wrong by putting it up for sale. I turned to my mom, who had a wistful look on her lined face.

  “Any chance you and Dad want to keep it as a summer place?” I said lightly.

  She laughed. “Oh, honey, no. We can barely keep up with what we have now. I’m still trying to convince your father to buy that RV I’ve always wanted so we can spend our summers driving cross-country. I need another house in Wisconsin like I need a hole in the head.”

  A year earlier, she had mentioned to my father that she would love to sell their house and buy an RV to travel around the country. Katie and I had laughed, but my father just shook his head, like he was almost resigned to his fate. Much like the time when my mother decided to paint their bedroom fluorescent purple.

  “More houses, more problems.” My mother laughed.

  I nodded and walked over to the built-in shelves in the living room that had once been dangerously overflowing with the Precious Moments figurines. Without the statues, the shelves were straight instead of bowed in the middle with the weight of all that porcelain.

  “Too bad we can’t keep it as a vacation rental. Powers Lake is very fancy now, you know,” I said. When I had visited with Katie years ago, Powers Lake was the rustic cousin to the more glamorous Geneva Lake. The lakefront was mostly dotted with modest ranch houses and a few diners, dive bars, and convenience stores. In recent years, it became a secret getaway, a place to tear down and build enormous lakefront houses at a fraction of the cost of Lake Geneva. And in doing so, it became exclusive. Even though my grandmother’s house wasn’t on the lake, it surely would fetch a nice dollar for its proximity to the water.

  “It goes on the market on Monday,” my mom said, closing the door on the thought.

  I nodded, and she put an arm around my shoulders as we walked toward the door. “How’s school? When are you meeting with everyone?” she said.

  “Wednesday.” I walked slowly, out of sync with her, so it was a continuous jostle as I kept my eyes carefully trained out the window on the twins, outside in the expansive front yard. “Truth is, I’m not sure what I hope they will say. Obviously, that they have a perfect solution and have total faith that he will meet all his goals.” My shoulders shook with a laugh that didn’t reach my face. Will had been increasingly agitated with school with each passing day, to the point where he was coming home and melting down almost immediately after he crossed the threshold, as though he could finally exhale, in his own Will way. So I had e-mailed Miss Ball and asked for a team meeting. Yet the conversation with Traci was never far from my mind, and the questions of what exactly I should be hoping for were always pulling at my thoughts.

  My mom nodded and tightened her arm around me. “And if you don’t get those perfect answers?”

  I inhaled slowly and shook my head.

  “You know. You will figure it out. You always do. Even as a kid, you were always able to find your way to doing the right thing. Remember your gut feeling about the zoo field trip in fifth grade?”

  I nodded. I had been looking forward to that trip for weeks. Then, on the morning of the trip, I woke up with an unshakable dread and begged my mom to let me stay home. She finally agreed after an hour of tears, and then we got word that the bus had been involved in an accident. No one was seriously hurt, but we always took my feelings as a sort of premonition that something would go awry. I tried to parlay that into a few faux sick days in high school, but she always called my bluff.

  “I hope so, Mom. But . . . this is on a much bigger level than a minor car accident.” I wished I could believe that things would all work out. It was so much easier with decisions t
hat just affected me, not when it felt as though each decision we made was part of a larger ripple effect, one that could potentially set Will back.

  My mother stopped before she got to the front door, and stared at the empty corner where the knight had once stood. A nice couple from Burlington had seen the ad on craigslist, driven to Powers Lake in their blue pickup truck, shrieked in delight when they saw it, and carefully loaded it into the bed of the truck. “Good riddance,” my mother had said when it disappeared down Bloomfield Road.

  Yet a look of sad nostalgia swept across her face as her eyes lingered for a moment on the empty space, but before I could say anything, she walked out the front door. Outside in the yard, Will and Charlotte walked around, collecting crab apples in a plastic bucket I had found in the back of my car from the last time we went to the park. Will had no sense of personal belongings, so it was always better to bring our own toys to the sandbox than be continuously apologizing to other kids when he took their stuff. It was a closed-ended task: defined beginning, middle, and end. Spot an apple, pick it up, walk over to the bucket, and drop it in. Repeat. Easy for him to understand. Calming. It made sense.

  I stood on the front stoop and watched them, the sun peeking through the trees that lined the property, the smell of the lake permeating through the yard, with just the faintest smells of ripe apples from the tree. Charlotte’s braids bounced around her shoulders, falling in her face before she impatiently brushed them away as she bent down. Will was more structured in his movements: bent over from the waist, pick it up, turn precisely toward the bucket, walk in a straight, undeterred line.

  “Any word from Gerry?” my mother said as she watched the twins with a smile.

  “Not yet. Although he did send me a very excited e-mail filled with exclamation points last night, saying that he was conferring with a colleague in Milwaukee. I think this is the most exciting thing that’s happened to him in . . . ever,” I said.

  My mother turned and looked at my grandmother’s house, her childhood home. “I bet. Think about loving something that no one else does. Things that you find fascinating and beautiful, and people don’t see it that way. And then when someone shows interest in your beautiful things? Well, shit, I imagine that would be a pretty exciting day.” Her gaze stayed on the house, on the place that once held all those strange, varied collections that my grandmother loved.

  Things that no one else in her life appreciated the way she did.

  I smiled and nodded, thinking of Will and his applesauce packets. I had bought the correct ones the week before and excitedly shown him. He had given me the briefest of smiles, a quick moment of connection between us, to show his appreciation. It was something so small, so insignificant to other people, but I knew it was important. I had shown him that I loved something as much as he did. That I loved him enough to honor his preferences.

  Charlotte dropped an apple in the bucket and wiped her palm on her jeans. “Mom, I’m bored.”

  “Kids, I want to show you something. C’mere,” my mom said. She pointed in the direction of the lake. “Want to see some fish?”

  Charlotte skipped ahead, holding my mom’s hand, as we crossed the street to the shared pier. I followed behind, slowly walking with Will, pausing every few steps when he wanted to examine something in the grass. The afternoon air had warmed thanks to the cloudless sky, and I pushed up my long sleeves. It was the time of year when the temperature shift from morning to afternoon spanned thirty degrees and it seemed like no matter what we wore, we were either shivering or sweating.

  That morning, when we had left our house early, the kids off from school thanks to a teacher institute day, I had bundled them with blankets in the backseat and cranked on the heat. Right before we left the house, I paused at our old manual thermostat. We hadn’t turned it on yet for the season, something that always required a few prayers and some sacrifices to the furnace gods. The unit was from 1966, something our furnace repair guy loved to remind us about. The last time he came out to service it, he asked if he could take a picture with it to prove to his coworkers that it really did exist. After the mailbox full of bills the day before, I didn’t need “furnace repair” to add to the list, so I didn’t turn it on. And with the afternoon temperature near seventy, my furnace anxiety would be put off for another day.

  Ahead of Will and me at the pier, Charlotte dropped my mother’s hand and ran down to the end. I held my breath as her little legs pranced too close to the edge of the still-Astroturf-covered surface. She stopped and put her hands on her thighs, peering down into the water.

  “Grandma! I think I see one!” she said.

  My mom plopped down on the pier next to her, crossing her legs. She put an arm around Charlotte’s shoulders and pointed at something down in the water, their voices low. Will stopped when he saw the water.

  “Do you want to sit here?” I offered a rickety-looking wooden bench still in the grass from years ago, perched just before the pier began.

  I led him to the bench, praying it wouldn’t collapse under us, and pulled Will next to me. He shrugged my arm off his shoulders but didn’t move away. I looked out over the water, at the lake I loved so many years before.

  “Wa-ter,” I said to Will over and over, as I stared at the deep blue lake. It was empty, with only a few red-and-white No Wake buoys bobbing up and down. Almost all of the other piers had been taken out of the water, in anticipation of the upcoming winter freeze. The lake was a deep blue and choppy with the fall breeze blowing across the water. Just to the east, about ten piers (or, what would have been ten if they were all still standing) away, was the boarded-up restaurant formerly known as Harbor Lights. I remembered it from the summer when Katie and I were here.

  One afternoon, when it had rained all morning, my grandmother gave her permission for Katie and me to walk down to Harbor Lights and play the video games. We ran the whole way there, the rain soaking through our jean shorts and flip-flops. Inside the restaurant, there were only four people at the bar, and they looked like they had been there for a while; the drinks in front of them certainly weren’t their first. The bartender slowly looked us up and down before he pointed us to the back room, where there was a dusty Pac-Man game and a broken Caterpillar game with a cracked white rollerball joystick.

  We had shrugged and emptied our pockets, playing Pac-Man and ordering too-sweet Cokes all afternoon, eventually sitting at the bar and laughing with the other patrons.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but that afternoon was one of the most perfect I would ever have. It was a time before real life kicked in. It was before the time of mortgages, and savings accounts, and therapy appointments. Before the time when I would feel as though I was failing at everything I tried to do—and, likely, at the things I had yet to even attempt.

  Charlotte walked over and brought me out of my dark thoughts. She sat down next to Will and pointed across the lake.

  “See, Will? It’s a lake. It’s water. Wa-ter.” She must have heard me say it to him. She tapped his forearm and said it again, “Wa-ter.” I held my breath, waiting for him to screech or knock her arm away, but he stared at his arm, where she lightly tapped again. He slowly looked up and looked out at the water. A crooked finger made its way to his arm, and he tapped twice. No sound came from his mouth, but he understood.

  I drew a ragged breath in, my chest constricting, as I saw him tap again.

  “That’s right! Good job,” she said with a smile. “Mommy, did you see that?”

  “I did, honey. I—” My voice broke like the limb of an old locust tree during a windstorm, swept away by the lake breeze.

  Charlotte smiled and hopped off the bench, skipping back to where my mom perched on the end of the pier. It was the smallest of steps, almost indiscernible to the naked eye, but it meant everything to me. She reached him. She could reach him. It would be people like her who would change his life, help him to see the beauty in the world.

  We needed to find a way to capture that magic, fi
nd the scenarios where he would feel comfortable, and extend a hand. And I finally realized that it might look very different from what I had first thought.

  CHAPTER 19

  AMELIA

  After John had fallen, Amelia took him to Alfred, who threw his hands up in mock exaggeration and clutched his chest when he saw the smear of blood on John’s kneecap. He soaked a towel in some warm water and pressed it to John’s cut, smiling at him before tousling his hair and making a funny face. John smiled, his tearstained cheeks lifting as he sputtered between a laugh and a cry.

  “I should get more of these cloths ready for when our prestigious guests begin to fall all over the lawn as well,” he said to Amelia with a wink.

  She heard them all outside, from her spot in the service kitchen, their raucous cheers as they drained glasses of champagne and brandy, one right after the other. The party was so loud that she didn’t hear Margaret walking down the hallway and into the kitchen.

  “Mr. Hutchinson is recovering from his injuries. He was quite upset, as I hope you realize.” Margaret stood with her arms clasped in front of her, as though she believed she was holding back her anger in the most proper way.

  “I think Charles should be more concerned with navigating the bumpy terrain of the lawn after six cocktails. I’m quite sure those don’t help his balance,” Amelia said. She placed a hand on John’s shoulder as his head snapped back and forth between them.

  Margaret’s eyes flashed and she pursed her lips for a moment, before a small smile escaped her face. “John has embarrassed us once again. You will not bring him to things like this again. People like Charles are too important to our family.”

  Our family. That implied she was part of it. When, really, she had never been a part of it, and Margaret had seen to that. From the first moment that she came home with Henry, Margaret made it very clear that there were two sides: hers and everyone else’s. It was the smallest possible circle of trust, inhabited only by her husband, son, and best friend, Georgina. Amelia was already an outsider, by the simple fact that she was not born a Cartwright.