by Bill Clegg
Except for two trips to the bathroom, Lupita sat on the stairs for the rest of the day. She knew she could not return to school and she had nowhere else to go. As she’d done many times before, she prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe, whom she’d been named after, to stop Mary, Kit, and Wanda from terrorizing her. To take her father’s anger away. To somehow make it so that she could live with her mother and sister, in the city or in Wells, it didn’t matter. She promised she’d be good and never run away from school again, or think bad thoughts, or make more mean drawings. She repeated her proposal, over and over, still holding her legs and shivering, clutching her knees as tightly as she could to her chest.
When Father Tesoro found her a few hours later he called Lupita’s father. She’s still asleep, she heard him say over the phone in the rectory kitchen, perfectly fine, perfectly safe, he reassured, though he added that he couldn’t imagine how or why she was in the church on a Wednesday afternoon. In what she would later suspect was an effort to forestall Joe Lopez’s wrath, Father Tesoro was careful to describe how when he first saw Lupita on the stairs he didn’t want to disturb her. She looked like an angel. Her head was resting against the white wood spindles of the banister, her hands folded tightly in prayer.
Father Tesoro’s efforts were useless. In the car, her father slapped her hard across the side of her head and squeezed her shoulder as he hollered about how much she’d embarrassed him and that it was lucky no one in the Goss family was around to see him leave work in the middle of the day. She knew not to explain why she’d run from school, that any words she spoke would result in more slaps, more hollering. She resolved to keep quiet during the car ride, through dinner, and until the weekend when her mother and sister came up from New York. Even then she would only say that she’d left her notebook at church on Sunday and thought she could retrieve it at lunch without anyone getting upset.
* * *
The older girl in the back of her minivan is still sleeping after her parents and sisters have handed their bags to the hotel porter. Her father leans in and whispers, Wake up, Sleeping Beauty. Wake up. He tugs her ankle and whistles a soft sound that Lupita imagines he’s whistled a thousand times to his daughters. Through the rearview mirror, she can see how the girl does not stir, oblivious to the landslide of luck and love that has no doubt shaped every waking and sleeping minute of her life. Lupita taps the horn to jolt her awake and looks away when the girl begins to grumble and whine her way back to consciousness. It reminds her how Ada would shake her awake in the mornings, back when they shared a bedroom in Florida, before they moved to New York and Wells. Like their father did, but more gently, Ada would pinch Lupita’s arm to get her out of bed before school. ¡Apúrate! ¡Corre!, she’d shout. Lupita hated how Ada, once they’d moved to Florida, had started to act as an extension of her parents, her father especially. ¡Lupe!, she’d insist, shaking her shoulders, squeezing her skin tighter between her fingers.
The hairs on Lupita’s arms tingle as she taps the horn one more time, a little louder and longer than before. In the rearview mirror she catches a flash of long black hair in motion, moving toward the door. She does not watch but imagines the girl reluctantly taking her father’s hand as she steps away from the minivan and into the lobby of the most expensive hotel on the island.
Her phone buzzes from the dashboard. It shimmies in its holder as Unknown Caller blinks from the screen just as it has the four or five times since Lupita hung up on the woman earlier. She tries to ignore the call by waving to the dark-haired family from LA before she drives back to the airport, but only the mother acknowledges her with a polite smile.
The phone stills and its screen dims as Lupita turns from the long winding hotel driveway onto the main road. A few minutes later she hears a short vibration and an electronic ping to signal that a voicemail has been left. She slows the minivan with the crawling traffic and watches the afternoon sun break through the clouds over Kealia Beach. The weak, late-day rays reach her face through the windshield and when the cars in front of her come to a complete stop she brakes to a halt and closes her eyes. She drifts to a half-sleep, and right away, Ada. She’s muttering something, but too quietly to hear. One of her calloused hands lies across Lupita’s forehead, the other strokes her cheek, her fingers soft on her temples. Ada’s lush black hair—usually knotted into a tight bun at the back of her head or hidden behind a scarf—is now loose and falling above her, like dark curtains.
When the truck behind her honks in rapid-fire bursts, Lupita opens her eyes and sees the traffic up ahead has moved on. She waves a quick sorry with her left hand, presses the gas gently, and the minivan rolls forward. Above her, clouds float into and away from each other. The late day light breaks through and moves in beams and panels across the sky. It dazzles and vanishes, then reappears, flares bright, goes dark again—on and on, like code, as if the sun itself is speaking to her.
Jackie
Dana, Jackie whispers with a trace of wonder, watching her legs scissor in quick strides toward her front door. Her old friend is dressed like a man, tailored and lean, more handsome than pretty, looking flustered and out of her element. Her movements seem jagged. It strikes Jackie that Dana might be ill, that in fact this is the reason for her visit. She’s known a few women her age who’ve already died from or are currently battling cancer—she herself had to have a lumpectomy and radiation a year after Floyd died—so the news of people being sick no longer shocks her. Still, the idea of Dana weakened by disease is an unexpected one. It’s as if without ever being conscious of it, Jackie had all along believed she was immortal.
Dana was always thin. Even as a little girl she was at least two sizes smaller, but still taller, than Jackie. As they got older and hit puberty, her breasts never developed so much that she needed a bra. She was all angles and lines, and from childhood through high school was inclined more toward slacks and jerseys than the pastel sweaters and dresses the girls Jackie grew up with wore. More than once, after Dana cut her hair very short in the sixth grade, Jackie had witnessed strangers—a waitress at the diner in Millerton, a summer tourist asking for directions on Undermountain Road—refer to Dana as “he” or “him” or “son.” It never seemed to bother Dana; in fact Jackie can still dimly remember how those incidents seemed to spark in her a quiet, sneaky pride. Like she’d pulled one over on these idiotic people and she and Jackie were the only ones in on the joke.
From the living room window, Jackie looks closer for signs of decay but Dana’s torso is hidden by a dark green turtleneck sweater and gray fitted blazer. The boxy briefcase she holds to her chest like a swaddled child, albeit someone else’s, looks for a moment like more than she can manage. And yet. The closer Dana comes to the house the stronger she appears. Her posture, even with the unwieldy briefcase, is long and straight and elegant. The result of personal trainers and massage therapists and the best doctors, Jackie allows herself to imagine. When they were teenagers there was a steady referencing of tutors and instructors in the city, even a dietician who told Dana never to eat a meal larger than her fist which, to Jackie, sounded like starving.
Less than thirty feet from the house now, it is clear that Dana is not sick, just much older than the last time she’d seen her. An instant resentment sparks, as if Dana had purposefully tricked her into an involuntary upset that tipped dangerously near concern, something she hadn’t felt for her since high school. The little charge of anger is ridiculous, she knows this, but it doesn’t budge so much as give way to an older, darker, more familiar energy. She submits to that current and with it the memory of the green barn returns—Floyd, his back to her, looking away, about to lie to her for the first time.
Jackie violently twists the cord that raises and lowers the window blinds around her hand until her right thumb and palm are crisscrossed with taut white lines, the thin flesh in between red and swollen. When Dana passes the lamppost, roughly the halfway point between her car and the house, Jackie untangles her hand and shuffles, as quickly
as her slippers will allow, from the living room window to the foyer where she bolts the door. She tugs the handle on the Dutch door, once and quickly, to make sure the bolt is secure. She then rushes to her bedroom where she peeks through the gap between the shade and the window molding.
When Dana last walked down her sidewalk, it was a scorching hot, windless afternoon. Fans were blowing in every room and Jackie’s halter-top clung like a second skin to her back and to her breasts, still heavy with milk for Amy and so sensitive that it was excruciating to take showers. It was the sixth of July and Floyd had come back to the house just once since the morning after their horrific July Fourth picnic at Hatch Pond and then only to get tools he needed for work and a change of clothes. Jackie had locked herself in the bedroom and refused to speak to him despite his yelling for her to come out. He’d become so frustrated that he kicked a hole in the bottom of the bedroom door. Dana showed up the next day. She was in a bright white v-neck T-shirt, cutoff jeans and leather sandals. Her attempt at a hippie look was sabotaged by her long shiny brown hair, perfectly styled under a wide green and gold silk scarf pulled across her forehead and tied to one side.
On that day, just as she’d done today, Jackie bolted the front door and hid in the bedroom. Dana had knocked, but didn’t speak a word, not at first. She’d circled the house, tried to peer through the metal screens and drawn shades of every window, and eventually broke her silence with one word, repeated and pleading, spoken not shouted, and barely audible underneath the drone of fans: Jackie.
And here she is again, two years shy of seventy, her hair silver and short, not quite a pixie cut—something more whimsical and tussled—but Jackie has no doubt that this, as with every other detail of her appearance, had been calculated and arranged with meticulous care.
Dana slows before approaching the front step. She crosses her arms and looks up toward the top of the house and then to each side. Jackie follows her gaze and feels at the same time ashamed and proud of her one-story ranch. It’s not much, she’s said to her children many times, but she owns it outright and she’s lived there for half a century; raised two children under its roof. Jackie can’t help but retreat into her defensive litany, a version of which, in the last years, has also served as her argument to her daughter Amy against moving to Noble Horizons, the assisted living facility where most area folks end up if they live past seventy and have a house to sell to pay for it. Jackie visits there a few times a week to see friends who’ve made the move. Most live in apartments or freestanding houses on the property, but over time everyone ends up in a hospital-like room in the gray, five-story residence staffed with nurses and rehab specialists. Jackie never understood why anyone would make a building that was little more than a pit stop before death look so much like a tombstone. It seemed cruel. Even the flower beds that flanked each side of its entrance depressed her. The women at Noble, the ones who were still able to, planted annuals there every spring; gaudy reds and purples and blues as unconvincing in their forced cheer as the geraniums she saw planted or left in plastic pots all over Wells Cemetery when she visited Floyd’s grave.
Dana continues to scan the front and sides of the house as if for some secret panel that will let her inside. Her face, so close now, looks less familiar than it did from far away. After she steps up to the door she is obscured by one of the two large forsythia bushes that grow on either side. There is no knock or pounding, no pleas this time, just the sound of the screened door squeaking open and thwacking shut followed by the scuff of footsteps. Dana reappears, heading back down the walk, and from behind, Jackie recognizes her old gait—feet splayed just slightly outward creating an almost bouncy, slightly off-kilter stride. Jackie used to tease her about it when they were girls. Less bouncy now, it still brings to mind a duck’s brisk waddle. What a ridiculous woman, she thinks lazily as Dana arrives at the still idling car where her wavy-haired driver stands at the open door. Jackie notices that the briefcase is missing. She looks to see if Dana has handed it to the driver, but he doesn’t seem to be holding anything. Once Dana is seated and he’s shut the door behind her, the young man returns to his seat and backs the car out of the driveway onto Hospital Hill Road. As it rolls toward Lower Main Street and vanishes behind the holly that borders the front lawn, Jackie feels, for the second time in a matter of minutes, an unwanted softness toward her old friend. But as she had before, she murders that softness with memory—the green barn, a yellow car, the sound of fireworks—and before long, Dana is gone.
Dana
This is not the house she knew. While it still stands exactly where it always has—between the steep pine woods and the top of the short, wide lawn that slopes to the river’s edge—there is something different about Edgeweather. Something missing or altered, something significant, but from the lowered car window it’s nothing Dana can identify.
As she scans the surfaces of the house—the copper drains, the mullioned windows, the vast expanse of old brick—she considers the possibility that it is simply the decades that have passed since she was last here that have made the house seem so unfamiliar. The main entrance, with its old oak door, shallow portico, and white columns, had since college reminded Dana of the boys’ dorms at Penn where she and her friends from Bryn Mawr snuck in on weekends. But it now seems more like the front door to an abandoned asylum.
Here?, Philip asks as he slows the car near the bottom of the portico stairs. Dana is still staring up at the house, surprised to see that much of the glass above and alongside the door has splintered, the paint on the sills fissured and split. Philip tentatively asks where they are. Edgeweather, she says, more to herself than in response to the question, imagining what her great-great-grandfather would think to see the place looking so shabby and neglected. George Willing had built the house for his bride, Olivia, just after they married. From their portrait, which hung above the dining room fireplace, Dana had decided when she was twelve that the couple were horribly mismatched—an intelligent beauty from a lesser family and a wimpy rich kid. They had a son not long after they married and then the young husband left to fight in the Civil War. He died at the Battle of Hoke’s Run, in Virginia. Of course he did, Dana thought when she first heard the story. Despite learning in high school that Hoke’s Run was considered by historians more of a tactical blunder that led to terrible defeats weeks later, she’d heard her mother tell people that George Willing had died in the first battle of the Civil War. A battle the Union won, she’d noted in the same proud tone she used when describing the house’s grandeur—the six columns that lined the river side of the house, the too-large ballroom, the ceiling which was the house’s greatest extravagance, a loose replica of one designed by Robert Adam that George’s mother had seen in an English country house and described to her son as the most beautiful in the world. It was an enormous production of meticulous plasterwork, detailed with ribbons, urns, and rosettes decorating ovals and octagons painted in pastel pink and green and blue. Many of the ovals and roundels framed paintings—all classical depictions of wedding celebrations.
The ballroom furniture and mirrors were either original Chippendale pieces designed by Adam or the closest possible approximation. The four large oval mirrors had been salvaged from a destroyed castle in Wales and repaired in London before being carried by boat to Connecticut. These were apparently a point of dispute between the architect and George, who insisted they appear at each end of the ballroom, on either side of the great fireplaces. George, of course, won. But to Dana’s eye, the house lost. Highly ornamented with carved swags and festoons, the mirrors had always struck Dana, like the rest of the room where they hung and indeed the whole house, as gilded evidence of an insecure husband’s fears of inadequacy. Even its name, Edgeweather, seemed off to her—a straining, willful amalgam of the names of more celebrated houses.
And still it stands, she thinks, looking at it now, both annoyed and relieved. Filled with most of the same furniture and decorations, covered in sheets, in rooms darkened by cl
osed interior shutters and drawn curtains. All of it, along with the house in Palm Beach, the apartment in New York and nearly two centuries of cautiously invested family windfalls, became Dana’s when her mother died in the mid-eighties. She sold everything but Edgeweather, which she had not visited since she was thirty-six years old. Real estate agents and even the wife of a famous Wall Street billionaire had reached out to Dana to see if she were interested in selling. As easy as it was to get rid of everything else, it had surprised her to realize that she couldn’t let go of the old house. It still did.
Edgeweather’s only resident now was a local named Kenny who occupied the apartment where the Lopezes had once lived. He kept the pipes from freezing in the winter, the lawn mowed in the summer, and hauled away the giant pines when they collapsed across the driveway. Or at least this is what his emails, that Marcella printed up and placed on Dana’s desk once a month, described. Eyeing the roofline where it meets the top of the nearest column, it occurs to Dana that Kenny could have made everything up and for all she knew turned the place into a casino, which, as she imagines the locals getting drunk and spinning roulette wheels in the ridiculous ballroom, only the smallest, pettiest part of her is bothered by. The part that hates being taken for a fool, or worse, being left out. But mainly the idea amuses her, especially when she imagines how her mother would react. The possibilities so engross Dana that when Philip turns the car engine off and politely excuses himself to find somewhere to go to the bathroom, she does not notice. When he returns, she snaps out of her trance and tells him to drive the car around to the side of the house that faces the river. He hesitates. Don’t worry about the lawn, she says and as the words leave her an old caution enters, slows her breath. Joe Lopez, whose dominion included the grounds around the house, spent many hours seeding, mowing, and weeding the lawn. Dana had seen him explode more than a few times when service trucks backed up onto the grass or when Lupita played there. She once saw him yank her so hard by the arm it looked like it would come right off of her body. Lupita had been holding one of Dana’s bicycles in the middle of the back lawn, eyes closed and counting because Jackie and Dana had told her that once she reached one hundred she should come find them. They never planned on being found. The point was to ditch Lupita, run to Jackie’s, and play in her bedroom where she could not find them. Dana remembers telling herself, and Jackie, that her mother was strict about her not playing with the children of people who worked for them. And she was. But she also remembers calling out to Lupita to ask her to play hide and seek, rolling the bicycle toward her and instructing her to hold on to it while they hid. What surprises her now is that there had been so little motive involved, the cruel impulse so fleeting and arbitrary, so strangely impersonal. She can’t remember if she felt guilty or upset when she watched Joe Lopez drag his daughter back to the garage, but she remembers being struck by how totally compliant Lupita was, how silent.