The Good House: A Novel

by Leary, Ann

  There had been a Dr. Will at Hazelden when I was there. Yes, that’s right, we called the doctors by their first names, but we had to put the title “Dr.” in front of them, you know, because of their egos, and Dr. Will was in charge of “alcohol education.” He told us that blackouts weren’t normal, that craving alcohol at a specific time each day indicated a person was an alcoholic, and a number of other “facts” that I found quite irksome, as they were all things that I had experienced, though I was not an alcoholic. The brainwashing that goes on at those places. He had also talked about some kind of alcoholic psychosis. Apparently, some alcoholics start hallucinating in the later stages of the “disease,” and I had been rather pleased to learn about this, as I’d never had any kind of thing like that. Now, standing there with Frankie, I couldn’t help but recall the doctor’s words. Had I imagined that Peter had been with me downstairs? It wasn’t a dream—I had carried the chairs up from the cellar as soon as Tess drove off. But had Peter been there at all?

  Frank stayed with me that night. I couldn’t bear to be alone. We didn’t really talk about it, we just sat and drank wine—not too much, but not too little, either—and we occasionally thought aloud about what we might have done differently had we known that Peter might have been planning something drastic.

  “He didn’t plan it,” I kept telling Frank, and myself, whenever our musings veered in that direction. “It was an accident.”

  “Well, it was painless, that’s for sure,” Frank had reasoned, topping off his wine. “Water’s still too cold for swimmin’. He would’ve gotten confused quick in the freezin’ water. Your mind goes first; all the blood rushes to your core, to protect all the organs, you know.…”

  “Yes,” I said as he passed me the wine. “He just went swimming and the cold confused him.” Then I said, “Do you think that was his … ghost I saw here. Last night?”

  “Nah, Hildy, c’mon. A ghost? You had a dream.”

  “My aunt used to tell me she was visited by … you know … spirits. Of people who had just passed.”

  “Yer crazy aunt Peg?” Frank said. “C’mon, Hildy, stop thinkin’ about it.”

  Frank stayed in Emily’s room that night and then he stayed away for a while. I had just enough pills left to help me sober up over the next few days—to wean me back to my more moderate drinking levels, to the way I was before I had quit drinking. It was healthier, I realized, to drink moderately than to quit altogether and then end up going on a binge the way I had. The key was moderation.

  But it was hard to look at Frank in the sober light of day, and I guess he found it hard to look at me, because, like I said, he stayed away for a while. I had thanked him for all he had done with my car, but he knew I was hurt. Hurt that he had thought I could have killed Jake. Hurt that he had called me a drunk and a lush. The things he had said to me. And he didn’t apologize, which he really should have, now that it was obvious how off base his accusations had been.

  But we’re at an age now where we have to let things slide a little. We had grown used to each other’s company over the past year. So, we kept our distance, then, one afternoon in late June, I ran into him in the Crossing and asked him what he had been up to.

  Same old.

  I told him he could come for supper if he wanted.

  He did.

  It was just supper, though. It was impossible for me to imagine, now, how I had ever been intimate with Frankie Getchell. I considered not having anything to drink that first night, but that would have felt like a concession. An admission that he was correct about my drinking. I could control how much I drank. Easily. And I was going to prove it to Frank. I would continue to enjoy my daily wine, but I was going to be more careful. Moderation. Moderation was the key. Frankie never said anything about my drinking again. Sometimes I sensed that he was watching how much I drank, but that was probably my imagination. Rehab ruins your drinking forever, I swear. Even if you’re not an alcoholic, you’ll question your drinking habits for the rest of your life.

  Elise Newbold tried to pull the Wind Point Road listing from me soon after Peter’s burial—she had always wanted to list with Wendy, but we had a contract, so she really couldn’t, and I did end up selling the house only a few weeks later.

  I sold it to a couple from New York. They had been coming up on weekends to look at homes in the area. The husband was a film actor. They had three young children. When I drove them out to Wind Point Road, I asked them what had brought them to Wendover. The wife said she had always wanted to live in a small New England town. She had moved frequently as a child and wanted her kids to grow up in a regular town, rather than in New York or Hollywood.

  “We want the kids to grow up in a real community where they can set down roots,” she said, as if you can just set down roots anywhere. She asked how long I had lived in the area.

  “All my life,” I said. “My parents grew up in Wendover, too, and all my ancestors are from this area. My eighth-great-grandmother was Sarah Good—one of the witches tried in Salem.”

  “You’re kidding. That’s wild!” the actor exclaimed.

  “So she must have been called Goody Good,” said the wife, laughing. “The poor woman. No wonder she ended up being a witch.”

  “Yes.” I laughed with her.

  When we pulled up to the house, the husband and wife marveled at its beauty. “Right on the beach. Look, kids,” the actor said, and we all climbed out of the car. The kids stayed on the beach while the parents followed me to the front door.

  “I love old houses,” the wife said when we walked inside. “You can just feel the history of this place.”

  “Yes, it’s really quite charming,” I agreed, trying to ignore the echoes of childrens’ laughter that bounced off the bare walls, the games of hide-and-seek that gamboled all around us as we moved from one cold, empty room to the next. I had hosted a little party of one the night before, and well, sometimes, just a couple of times over the past couple of weeks, I imagined that I heard and saw things when I was hungover. Sometimes, things that weren’t there. It was my nerves.

  “Is the house … haunted?” the wife asked breathlessly.

  They hadn’t heard about Peter’s suicide and I was under no obligation to tell them. This was just a question a lot of people ask about such an old house, this business about it being haunted, and sometimes it’s hard to gauge how the buyer would like you to answer. Some people won’t consider living in a house that’s said to be haunted. Others really hope that there will be some wonderfully annoying ghost in the house that they can tell their dinner guests about. But I was startled by the wife’s question because there was so much noise in that house, the joyous calling of Allie and Peter, and just a moment before, for a split second, as I glanced out a bedroom window, I had seen another sort of ghost. She was standing on the beach, looking out at the sea with a German shepherd at her side. My heart raced at the sight of her and I spun around to see if my clients could see her as well. The actor was checking the ceiling for signs of water damage; the wife was peering inside a closet. When I looked out the window again, I realized that what I had seen was a pile of driftwood.

  * * *

  I saw Rebecca only once after Peter died. She stopped in at my office one afternoon for a chat. She looked different. There was a calmness. There was no pacing about, no looking out to see if Peter was walking past, no glancing up at the ceiling to see if he was there. She was quite composed. She had found a new therapist by then, a woman this time, and she had been encouraged by this woman to tell Brian about her affair with Peter. It was to help her with her grief, Rebecca had told me. To help with her healing. I don’t see how this helped Rebecca in the long run, because Brian served her with divorce papers the day after she told him, and the last I heard, Rebecca had moved to her mother’s house in Virginia. But she and Brian were quiet, the scandal never broke about her affair with Peter Newbold, and, of course, I never talked about it with anybody but Frank. Peter’s death was determined
to be an accident by the medical examiner, and Sam and Elise were able to collect Peter’s life insurance, which I have heard was quite substantial.

  “I just want to make sure that Elise and Sam are going to be taken care of,” he had said in my kitchen that morning, just before he walked off the edge of the town, our town, into the sea.

  First, do no harm. Isn’t that it? First, do no harm to others. Isn’t that the doctor’s oath?

  I’ve never forgiven Rebecca, I doubt I ever will. I blame her for Peter’s death. Peter, who had never hurt a soul in his life; who had spent his last hours making arrangements for his family, for Rebecca, even for me, with the sedatives, and the kind words that crazy morning. Like any good doctor, closing out his cases before retiring, Peter was making sure that everyone would be taken care of after he was gone.

  No, I’ll never forgive Rebecca, but Frank seems to bear her no grudge. When he talks about her, which is rarely, it’s as if he’s referring to a sort of natural and unavoidable disaster, like a destructive storm that blew through our town and left nothing but wreckage in its wake.

  “That was the winter of Rebecca,” he’ll say, in reference to something that happened during that time. “That was during Rebecca.”

  Cassie Dwight has kept in touch with Rebecca. She tells me that she writes to her on occasion and always includes photos of Jake—at his new house in Newton, at his new school. She sent me a picture, too, recently, in a lovely little mother-of-pearl frame. I keep it on my bedside table. In the photograph, Jake is cuddling his big orange cat and he’s smiling.

  The other day, a young woman named Elizabeth admired the photo of Jake and asked me if he was my son. I admit I was a little flattered that Elizabeth thought I might be young enough to have a ten-year-old, although, to be honest, Elizabeth is coming off crystal meth, has only a few teeth, and doesn’t always have the most accurate perspective. Still, I felt good. I told her a little bit about Jake and about my own daughters and little Grady.

  Elizabeth is in the room two doors down from mine. I’m back at Hazelden. I checked myself in at the end of August. Nothing happened, really. I didn’t get caught driving drunk. I didn’t drop Grady or embarrass my children or anything. I didn’t come back because of the things Frankie had said to me about my drinking, or after Tess made me feel so awful during our search for Jake. My memories of these little deaths, these little crucifixions, along with so many others over the course of my drinking life, were so powerful and utterly fraught with shame and misery that they sent me down to my cellar more hastily each night after Frank left my house. Where else could I have gone, honestly? What else could I have done?

  But I did end up coming back to Hazelden. I sold the Grey’s Point property three months after Peter died and then I made the call. The counselor who answered the phone, a recovering drunk named Fran, remembered me.

  “What happened, Hildy?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m just ready to come back, that’s all.”

  But something had happened. It was just a little thing; just the littlest thing really, when you look at my whole story.

  It was the night before the Grey’s Point closing. Frankie had shown up at my house unannounced. I was having a little wine on my patio and I made some kind of snide remark about his appearance. He often shows up at my house straight from a job, covered with dirt and paint, and it annoys me.

  “You could make an effort,” I had said. Frankie told me he wanted me to go somewhere with him in the truck. He wanted to show me something.

  “Bring the wine,” he said when he saw me hesitate.

  “I don’t need to bring the wine,” I said. It bothered me that he seemed to think that I needed it.

  I stepped into an old pair of sandals. It was another hot night and I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt instead of my usual skirt and blouse. I thought Frankie was going to show me a house he wanted to buy.

  That was Frankie’s new thing—real estate. By the way, it was Frankie who had been the anonymous buyer of the Dwights’ house, not the Clarksons. He bought it to fix it up and resell at a profit, he told me. I found out about it not long after the Dwights moved. Now he was letting Skully White stay there. Skully was too old to haul garbage and Frank was letting him stay in the house and do some work on it to pay his rent. I figured that Frank was finally seeing the wisdom of investing some of his earnings, rather than letting it all sit in some bank (or in some mattress—who knew what Frankie did with all his cash), so I was more than happy to go look at a property with him.

  He drove me down to Getchell’s Cove. It was that time in the evening, in the summer, when the water is as still as glass and the sun has begun to set below the horizon, leaving just an aura of pinks and pale blues to light the sky in a sort of splendid tribute to the dying day. Frankie parked the truck, and when we got out, I saw it. It was a Widgeon, just like Sarah Good, my old sailboat, with a freshly painted red hull resting on the sand. The sails, new and brilliantly white against the darkening sky, had been rigged, and now they flapped lazily in the warm breeze. I wandered over and looked at the old worn wooden tiller and the sun-bleached wooden seats.

  It was Sarah Good. You could still see the spot in the hull where Frankie had patched it all those years ago.

  “Where did you find her?” I had asked finally. It was hard to get the words out. It was hard to take it all in.

  “It’s been in my shed for years. Your dad must have gotten sick of havin’ it in his backyard and he hauled it off to the dump. I found it there, one day, years ago. Brought it home. Fixed it up, eventually.”

  “So you salvaged her because you knew I might want her back someday?” I asked. We were pushing her along the sand toward the water now.

  “No, you know I hate seein’ stuff get thrown away, Hil. I didn’t have any plans for it. I just couldn’t see leavin’ it there, a perfectly good thing.”

  I’m not a nostalgic person. I don’t like the kind of sentiment people attach to things. I really don’t care about history and old things the way a lot of people do, so I don’t know why my legs went all rubbery on me when we slid her into the surf. It was just an old boat, but when I climbed aboard, I had to face the bow so that Frankie wouldn’t see my tears, and I barked something to him about hurrying up.

  “We’re gonna lose the light,” I had grumbled at him.

  “There’s plenty of light,” Frank laughed. “We’ve got time.” He pushed us off with a few running strides, then he leapt aboard, too, and I leaned back against his thighs and we set sail.

  Frankie had been right to salvage the old boat. He was right; she was perfectly good. Why did tears spring to my eyes when he said those words—perfectly good? I guess that’s when I first had the idea to come back here. But I didn’t say anything to Frank about it. I just pressed my wet cheek into his thigh for a moment, and when I felt his rough palm against my forehead, I tilted my head up so that I could press my lips into his, and then I turned my face back against his thigh, still embarrassed about the crazy tears, but I was smiling too.

  Frank trimmed the sails until the little old boat leaned herself into a headwind and then she really took flight. It was the golden hour. We sailed straight ahead, out of the cove, out into the quiet waters beyond. We sailed until we could see the lights coming on in the houses of Wendover, all along the waterfront and up on the rise. When Frankie finally brought her about, we found ourselves in irons in the still water, our sails luffing, but we just waited. We knew it would come. A fresh westerly breeze was all we needed, and it did come, all at once, filling our sails with a sudden exhilarating gust and pushing us back over the shadowy currents, over the black kelpy shallows, over the rows of frothy white surf until we rested our bow, finally, on the rocky familiar shore of Getchell’s Cove.

  Acknowledgments

  I wish to thank my agent and friend Maria Massie, who read this novel in various stages and offered encouragement as well as invaluable criticism along the way.

/>   I am also deeply grateful to my editor, the lovely and brilliant Brenda Copeland, as well as the other great people at St. Martin’s Press: Laura Chasen, Sally Richardson, George Witte, Meg Drislane, Carol Edwards, Steve Snider, Stephanie Hargadon, and Laura Clark.

  Many thanks to the following friends and family members—they know why: David Albert, Candace Bushnell, Jen Carolan, Marcia DeSanctis, Alice Hoffman, Judy Howe, Heather King, Julie Klam, Meg Seminara, Jane Risley, Carla and Antonio Sersale, Sherrie Westin, and Laura Zigman.

  And, of course, my everlasting love and gratitude to my dear, dear family: Devin, Jack, and Denis Leary.

  Also by Ann Leary

  Outtakes from a Marriage: A Novel

  An Innocent, a Broad

  About the Author

  Ann Leary is the author of the memoir An Innocent, A Broad and the novel Outtakes from a Marriage. She has written fiction and nonfiction for various magazines and literary publications and is a co-host of the NPR weekly radio show Hash Hags. Ann competes in equestrian sports and is a volunteer EMT. She and her family share their small farm in Connecticut with four dogs, three horses, and an angry cat named Sneakers.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE GOOD HOUSE. Copyright © 2012 by Ann Leary. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  “I Knew a Woman,” copyright © 1954 by Theodore Roethke, from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke by Theodore Roethke. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc., for permission.

  Cover design by Steve Snider