The House on Harbor Hill

by Shelly Stratton

  Sincerely,

  Delilah Grey of Harbor Hill

  CHAPTER 2

  Delilah placed a brown, wrinkled hand over her heart as she watched the men load the suede love seat onto the back of the truck. Instead of feeling her breast under her palm, she felt the soft give of baggy cotton, then her bare chest, as she tried to soothe the ache swelling there, the ache she felt at saying good-bye yet again.

  Though this phantom pain probably would never go away, her breasts had disappeared years ago. They hadn’t been there since she’d had her double mastectomy in 2009. Delilah didn’t wear the prosthetic breasts the doctor had given her after her surgery. They sat abandoned in a box, sealed in the original plastic wrapping, somewhere on a shelf in her walk-in closet. They would remain there because she did not—and would never—care for such things. People mattered; fake breasts did not.

  She continued to watch the two movers slowly walk up the metal ramp as they carried the love seat, one shouting directions she couldn’t hear clearly from behind the second-floor bedroom window. Sweat stains were along their backs and armpits, darkening their tan shirts with Vs. Their pants sank low on their hips, as young men’s pants often did nowadays, each revealing two to three inches of boxer briefs. After they loaded the sofa onto the truck, they both trudged down the ramp and walked toward a stack of cardboard boxes in the driveway with large labels on them. KITCHEN one box said in big black letters. BEDROOM said another.

  Keeping a watchful eye on the movers was a redhead who stood off to the side with her freckled arms crossed over her chest. As if she felt Delilah’s eyes on her, she turned and looked toward the bedroom window. She and Delilah momentarily locked gazes. The young woman waved, and Delilah raised her hand from her chest and waved back.

  Delilah remembered when she’d first seen Claudia standing on her front porch. It had been raining that night all those many months ago, much as it had rained the night decades before when Delilah had first arrived at Harbor Hill hand in hand with her future husband. But unlike Delilah, who had sauntered up the stairs to her new home, Claudia seemed to hesitate to even ring the doorbell. The poor girl hadn’t had a coat or umbrella. She had been soaked from the downpour—from her long, stringy hair to her mud-stained canvas shoes.

  Claudia had shouted over the sound of thunder in the distance, above the sound of pelting rain as her thin shoulders had trembled, either from the cold or the fear of lightning. “I’m . . . I’m sorry, ma’am, to just show up like this, but I got your note! I had nowhere else to go!”

  That night, Delilah had seen the same desperation in Claudia’s eyes that she saw in all their eyes—that she had seen reflected in her own eyes decades ago. But that’s why she had chosen her, wasn’t it? It was why she had sent her the note that she had sent to many others, always ending with the same words: Please accept my invitation for help of any kind. My door is always open. She’d done it because of that frightened animal look and because Claudia seemed to believe there was no one in the world to whom she could turn for help.

  Seeing her there, Delilah had wordlessly pushed the door open and ushered Claudia inside her home.

  But now the aura of desperation was gone. Standing in the driveway, Claudia looked confident, content. She seemed renewed. She wasn’t that scared little animal anymore, frantically burrowing into a hole. She was finally ready to leave her four-thousand-square-foot nest on Harbor Hill.

  Tears started to well in Delilah’s eyes.

  “It’s always sad to see them go, ain’t it?”

  Delilah jumped at the sound of the voice behind her, though she shouldn’t have. It was a familiar voice—one that had spoken to her for the past several decades. But she didn’t remember hearing it quite so clearly before. It was like the voice had been using a tin can and waxed yarn to reach her and suddenly decided to upgrade to an Apple iPhone.

  “So, so sad,” the voice continued.

  She sniffed, blinked back her tears, and looked over her shoulder, though she knew no one would be waiting for her there. Her eyes settled on her ornate oak four-poster bed, where her brown and black tabby lounged, grooming himself with one leg stuck straight up into the air.

  “Did you say something, Bruce?” she asked, raising her gray brows.

  At her question, Bruce stopped licking the long hairs on his tummy and narrowed his yellow eyes at her.

  “Of course he didn’t say anything, you silly girl,” the voice drawled. “He’s a cat! He didn’t say it—I did.”

  Delilah walked toward the bed and sat down, exhaling as she landed on the mattress. Bruce hopped to his feet and sauntered toward her, his small paws leaving light indentations in the plush velvet duvet. He then climbed onto her ample lap and began to purr as she stroked him.

  When she’d brought Bruce home from the local animal shelter six years ago, he had been a scruffy little thing—a mass of dandelion-like fur and oversized ears. Now he was an overweight prima donna who had a penchant for fresh tuna and had declared eminent domain over her bedroom. The bed, carpet, chaise lounge, and every other cloth-covered surface seemed to have a permanent coat of Bruce’s cat hair.

  “You’re one persistent little man,” she said as she rubbed Bruce’s back, feeling his rib cage vibrate beneath her palm as he purred contentedly. “Can’t stand for your mama not to pay attention to you, can you?”

  “Can you blame him? Who would want to compete with all the other strays you drag in off the street?”

  Delilah’s hand stilled.

  “Delilah and her strays,” the voice continued merrily in a singsong voice. “If it’s mangy, dirty, and from the dregs of humanity, she’ll offer you a couch, a shower, and a glass of lemonade. Won’t you, Dee?”

  Bruce raised his head and turned to gaze at her. He nudged her wrist with his brow, urging her to pet him again. She obeyed and resumed stroking the cat’s back.

  The voice released a deep, throaty chuckle. “You can drag home your tired, your poor, your beaten, and your broken, but it still doesn’t change anything, you bitch,” the voice said with an icy coldness.

  The ghostly voice would usually start off enticing; it had an almost saccharine sweetness that would lull her into thinking it wasn’t that bad. So what if she’d had a voice whispering in her ear for the past forty and some odd years? It was so charming, so kind. Who wouldn’t want its company? And then the voice would grow needlepoint teeth and claws, and she couldn’t get away from it fast enough.

  “Good morning, beautiful,” it would whisper to her when she stood in front of the bathroom mirror in the morning, brushing her teeth. Then she would pause to spit the minty froth into the sink, and it would shout, “Didn’t you hear me talking to you, you lying cunt?”

  “Isn’t it a lovely day today?” it would ask cheerfully as she worked in her garden, patting soil into a clay pot filled with geranium seeds. “Not that you deserve it, bitch.”

  She had tried to get rid of the voice over the years. She had been blessed by her minister and read the Bible until her vision blurred, seeking guidance from the holy word for some recipe that would make the voice go away.

  Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.—Book of James, chapter 4, verse 7.

  She had gone to a mystic healer who’d waved burning sage over her and around the rooms of Harbor Hill while mumbling some mumbo jumbo.

  The old woman had promised she wouldn’t be haunted anymore just before tucking the two hundred dollars Delilah had given her into her bosom.

  Delilah had even confided in a doctor, telling him how the voice tried to instigate fights with her, though she refused to take the bait.

  “Really?” the doctor had asked, furrowing his dark, batwing-like brows as he scribbled on a notepad. “Does the voice tell you to do things, Delilah?”

  She had frowned at his question and the presumption he had taken at calling her by her first name. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean does the voice tel
l you to hurt yourself or hurt others?” the doctor had asked, nibbling on the tip of a pen already covered with gnaw marks. He studied her like she was one of the pages in the many journals on his mahogany office shelf.

  “He’s told me to go swimming in the Chesapeake Bay and just stay there, if that’s what you mean,” she answered dryly.

  “He?”

  “Yep.”

  “And who is he, Delilah?”

  She had fallen silent. The tick of the doctor’s wall clock and the noise of a garbage truck passing by the building several floors below had been the only sound in the room as they had stared at one another and the doctor had waited for her answer.

  “You’ve got ink all over your face,” Delilah had said as she pointed at the doctor, breaking their silence and reaching into her purse to withdraw a Kleenex.

  “Oh, oh!” the doctor had said, sitting forward in his chair as he futilely wiped at the large glob of blue ink on his chin. He’d reluctantly accepted the tissue she’d handed him.

  Soon after, the doctor had suggested more intensive therapy sessions and a multitude of pills to deal with her “hallucinations.” They would then see how she responded to the treatment and “take it from there.”

  But Delilah didn’t come back to therapy or take any fool pills. How could she trust the word of a man who couldn’t even keep ink off his face?

  The voice wasn’t a hallucination. The voice was real—as real as the sky above and the ground below. And it wouldn’t go away, not with therapy or pills or mystic hullabaloo or intervention from God himself.

  She would just have to ignore it, to treat the voice like it was an annoying child acting out, clamoring for attention—treat it like the nuisance that it was. It would shout a few more times and then disappear. She planned to take the same approach today.

  “It doesn’t mean a thang,” the voice continued to sing with a Tom Jones–like bravado as Delilah gazed out the windowpanes, still stroking Bruce. “Doesn’t mean a thang! It doesn’t change what you did. You hear me, Dee?” it barked.

  She flinched and reflexively squeezed the hunk of fur in her hand. Bruce let out a yelp, then nipped her, leaving twin-sized punctures on her knuckles.

  “Oww! Damn it!” she shouted, tossing Bruce to the floor and clutching her hand to her chest.

  Bruce’s ears went flat as he squinted at her. Each gave the other a reproachful look before Bruce fled from the bedroom with his tail whipping behind him.

  Delilah stared down at her hand, where two trickles of blood slid over the wrinkled skin and landed on her lap before fading into the yellow-and-blue flower pattern of her sundress.

  “That won’t come out,” she murmured, remembering a similar stain from many, many years ago.

  At the sound of a metal door being shut, Delilah tore her gaze away from the blood. She looked up and out the window.

  The two movers walked back down the ramp, laughing and shouting to one another. They then raised the ramp before shoving it into a slot beneath the moving truck. Claudia walked toward a man who stood off to the side. He was also wearing a sweat-stained T-shirt and sagging jeans like the movers, but he held a pair of garden shears in his hand.

  It was Aidan, the landscaper and resident handyman for Harbor Hill. Aidan had called the expansive cottage his home when he was a teenager, when he and his mother, Rosario, had moved here after living out of their car for months. He had returned four years ago to help Delilah maintain the property.

  And to hide, Delilah thought. Because Harbor Hill not only seemed to serve as a place for sustenance and healing, but also as a place where one went to bury things, and poor Aidan had more pain, scars, and loss to bury than most.

  CHAPTER 3

  Claudia spread her arms, wide and welcoming, and walked toward where Aidan stood in the driveway, and he wasn’t sure how to respond. Should he hug her back? Should he kiss her? Should the kiss be chaste or something heated, like the ones they usually shared? What was a proper way to say goodbye to a woman you’ve slept with more than a dozen times but to whom you’ve never said, “I love you,” let alone “Wanna grab some breakfast in the morning?”

  But then Aidan reminded himself this was during the day, not at night. He wasn’t slinking out of her bedroom at 2:00 a.m., careful not to wake Delilah, who was fast asleep three doors down the hall. Instead, he and Claudia were standing near her moving truck, and two twenty-something men—one with dreads and another with a faux hawk—were standing only a few feet away, loudly regaling each other with stories about last night’s basketball game.

  So when Claudia wrapped her arms around him, Aidan responded in kind, keeping the gesture innocuous—simply a hug between friends. Because even though they had been fuck buddies, that still made them buddies. But he wasn’t prepared when Claudia whispered, “Thank you for everything, Aidan,” before brushing her lips across the beard stubble on his cheek.

  “Thank you for what?” he asked, squinting down at her when she released him and took a step back.

  “You know what,” she said with a knowing smirk and a wink before walking backward toward her car, which was parked next to the moving truck. She then gave him a wave, tossed her reddish-orange locks over her shoulder, and turned away.

  He continued to stare at her in confusion, even as he watched her open the door to her Honda Civic.

  It was Delilah whom the women usually thanked—not Aidan. She was their Mother Teresa, Florence Nightingale, and Princess Di all rolled into one. She was the one who deserved to be canonized for what she did for these poor, wayward women. He was just the asshole who helped them carry in their bags, pruned the tree branches outside their windows, and screwed them occasionally.

  Though he guessed what he did offer them was his own brand of “help.” He didn’t know how many times he had heard the sundry women confess how ugly they felt, how useless they believed themselves to be, and how no one in the world could possibly love them, let alone want them.

  Aidan had “helped” Hannah, a twenty-something ex-waitress who had stayed with Delilah two years ago. Hannah’s boyfriend had once told her she was a “big fat blob,” after she had gained weight after her mother’s death from lung cancer. “It was depression, I think,” Hannah had confessed to Aidan. “Instead of drinking, I’d just stuff my face with Snoballs and Twinkies. I couldn’t stop. I put on forty pounds. He told me I was just gross . . . that I was disgusting.”

  He had also “helped” Wendy, a former heroin addict from Texas who had briefly stayed with Delilah back in January. Wendy had told him that she knew she wasn’t pretty and had never been that hot to begin with “and the drugs messed me up awful bad. Ruined what little I had.” She had pulled down the sleeves of her wool sweater to cover the needle tracks on her arms as she said it. “Any decent guy would take one look at me and go runnin’. I wouldn’t blame him.”

  Aidan made them feel beautiful and desirable, and he didn’t have to ply them with drinks or compliments. He simply listened to them. He’d smile and nod his head at the right moments and let them unload whatever burdens they wanted—an endless stream of worries, doubts, past trespasses, recriminations, heartaches, and disappointments. He noticed that they rarely, if ever, asked him about himself. They never asked him about his past or what sad or traumatic events had brought a man like him—a high-powered attorney from Chicago—to Harbor Hill, of all places. But that was fine with Aidan. He accepted the confessions; he wasn’t the one doing the confessing. He was the receptacle for all their pain; he felt no need to share his own. The only time he would ever speak was when they talked about their dreams and their aspirations for themselves. Getting that GED ten years after dropping out of high school, letting go of that nasty drug habit, regaining custody of your kids . . . nothing was beyond reach, according to Aidan—whether he secretly believed it or not.

  “Just take it one day at a time,” he would say.

  Aidan made them feel seen and acknowledged, something his mother had never f
elt. They weren’t one of millions of faceless women on street corners and waiting in line with bowed heads and sunken shoulders, with slack faces and nondescript clothes, looking like shell-shocked refugees. They were special in every sense of the word. It wasn’t long before he would hear that soft knock at his bedroom door and see that tentative smile before they asked to come in.

  Some, the more broken ones who were looking for love not just friendship or physical companionship, he would turn away. He was here to offer a brief respite, not to break a heart. But the others—the ones who were willing to take only what he could give—he would wave inside his bedroom, and he would spend the night with them.

  Aidan wished he had been so attentive, so benevolent and understanding with his own wife, Trish. How many times had she prattled on about her volunteer work at the local library or homeless shelter and his eyes had glazed over with boredom? How many times had she raved about her latest find at the local organic grocer—holding out the grapes, squash, or carrots for him to examine—and he had glanced up from his BlackBerry, done a quick nod, then resumed whatever text or e-mail he was typing.

  “Oh, my God, Aidan!” Trish had squealed when she was six months pregnant. She had rushed into his home office. “You won’t believe what I found today: the absolute perfect mobile to go over the baby’s crib. Look, it has these little sheep made of the softest cashgora! It’s so adorable, honey. You have to feel it,” she said as she grabbed his hand, pulling it from the laptop where he had been typing notes for the latest court brief. “See! Isn’t it soft?”

  “Jesus, babe! Can’t you see I’m busy?” he had shouted, yanking his hand back. “I’ve got more important things to do than feel fucking miniature sheep!”