Miranda started crying then. She didn’t know how to end the tears or the conversation, but Dix didn’t seem to mind. He just stayed on the phone with her. She listened to his strong, steady breaths in her ear and slowed her own breathing until it matched his. Only then did she feel ready to face what was ahead.
Miranda had referred to the extensively restored and renovated Colonial home set on three acres of manicured grounds as “home” for all of her life. Yet, when she pulled into the curved driveway lined with mature maple trees and stopped in front of the white clapboard edifice on a hot summer afternoon, it felt like she was visiting someplace she hardly knew. As if she were once again being dragged along to another cocktail party with her parents. She sat in her car and counted the months since she’d been there. It had been more than a year. Her twenty-third birthday had come and gone in that time, unnoticed, unmarked by herself or her mother. As she gazed out her windshield at the imposing structure in front of her, she realized that she’d expected it to look haunted and decayed, with broken windows and pieces of siding hanging off. Like she felt. But it looked only a little empty, a bit tired. Also like she felt. The housekeeper and groundskeeper had done their jobs. She wondered if, like her, they’d half expected her father to magically return, roaring orders. Or at least for her mother to appear, issuing directions.
Miranda got out of the car. The door clicked into the silence of the neighborhood. She unlocked the house, smelled potpourri and cleaning fluids. But even those false, sweet scents couldn’t completely cover the musty note of disuse. The housekeeper was thorough. The house was immaculate. All the food had been discarded other than spices and canned goods. The beds made taut. The bathrooms tidy and impersonal. No dust anywhere. The curtains hung stiffly. It felt like a hotel.
Miranda wandered through the still house and into her bedroom. One stuffed animal, a bear her father had given her, sat propped up against the pillows on her bed. Her bookshelf held a toy horse, a few yearbooks, a couple of photo albums, and some books typical of teenage girls—Sylvia Plath, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Virginia Woolf, her first sociology textbook. A few out-of-date clothes hung in the closet. She hadn’t realized just how long she’d been away. Exeter Academy and then Vassar College. Summer programs and internships. The house in the mountains. Her childhood mementoes had been long packed away and stored in the attic. Most of her clothes were at the log home. She was not much of a collector. A few pieces of inexpensive jewelry were all she typically brought back from her travels. Everything she saw in her bedroom belonged to a much younger version of herself, a self she could barely remember.
She walked down the hall to her brother’s room. It held even fewer remnants of him. A lacrosse stick from his years at Lawrenceville. A few sport jackets. Some Harvard memorabilia. A similar collection of yearbooks, high school novels, and a few CDs.
Was this all she had to show for her life so far? Was this all he had left to show for his?
Their bedrooms were like movie sets, she thought. His death had been like a movie set, too. The car a shiny silver Audi, a gift from her parents for getting into NYU Law, twisted and entangled with the shiny silver guardrail on the Merritt Parkway. Scott and his friend Danny twisted and entangled with the car, inside. Both drunk from partying too hard in Danny’s family’s private box at a Bruce Springsteen concert in Madison Square Garden. Both dead instantly, no one else involved—at least there was that to be thankful for. Maybe Scott had swerved to avoid a deer or raccoon or something. Or maybe he had simply fallen asleep at the wheel. Maybe they were just blasting the stereo too loud, still rocking out to The Boss. But Scott had been driving, he had been drinking, and he had killed himself and one of his best friends. Danny’s parents had been friends, too. Or at least they had mingled in the same circle. That didn’t last. Thankfully, as she’d heard her father say under his breath a few times, they didn’t bring a lawsuit. They were a big family of Irish Catholics, her mother had pointed out several times, as if this explained something. They had a couple of other sons, she’d said, as if this lessened their suffering. Or at least made it less intense than hers.
Which maybe it did, Miranda thought. If only I had another brother. Or even better, a sister. A couple of sisters. Someone, anyone, to share this with. Someone to help me with all of this. Someone I didn’t have to pay to help me.
Miranda turned away from her brother’s room and stood in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom. It was a space she was, always had been, reluctant to enter. Not sacred so much as taboo. The expansive bed with the matching bedside tables. Her mother’s robe hanging off the back of the door to the bathroom. She’d spent a lot of nights alone here, Miranda knew. Miranda’s father tended to stay at their apartment in the city during the week. He’d come back for a kid’s event or adult party, but otherwise complained about the commute, an hour on the best of days, often longer. He would tell his wife to come in for dinner and a show instead. Miranda recalled her mother getting dressed up from time to time for a trip to New York, and the relative novelty of getting to eat dinner in front of the TV with her brother and the babysitter. Then, several years ago, her father gave up the apartment. Looking back, it seemed sudden. For the first time Miranda wondered if her father had lovers—a mistress, a girlfriend. If that’s why her mother drank. Or if her father took a mistress because her mother drank. Or if they both just used each other’s bad habits as excuses to indulge their own.
These kinds of thoughts, she noted, were new to her. Seeing her parents not just as parents but as people with complex, messy, inexplicable lives of their own, full of errors of judgment and will. She sighed. She realized her childhood was not only over but nowhere to be found.
She moved to the study, a tidy space downstairs between the kitchen and living room, decorated in the masculine tropes of dark woods and leather furniture. There she found several boxes of mail. Mazie, the housekeeper, had kept up with the household bills. That had always been part of her job. She’d also often gone grocery shopping, picked up the dry cleaning, done other small errands. Miranda didn’t know why her mother never seemed to have time for these little chores herself, but years ago there had been committees and boards and volunteer work. Then it became habit. Why take on what Mazie did so well?
Mazie had organized everything into four boxes. Magazines in one. Town and Country. Vanity Fair. The New Yorker. The magazines were her mother’s. Things she flipped through over her first drink of the day and then fanned out on the coffee table. Miranda picked up one, ran her fingers over the cool, slick pages, and let it slip from her hand. These would all stop soon enough because there was no one to renew the subscriptions. Another box held letters, mostly the square envelopes of cards and personal notes. She plucked a few at random and slid her finger under the seals on the thick flaps of expensive paper. A condolence card from someone whose name she didn’t recognize. An invitation to a garden club event. A request for a donation for a new arts center. A solicitation from a cable company. A notice from the school board. A form letter from a doctor’s office notifying her mother that it was time to schedule a mammogram. Miranda wondered why Mazie hadn’t forwarded all this stuff to them. Her mother must have told her not to, that she’d be down to take care of it. Mazie had learned over the years to do as she was told, to not ask twice. She would not have taken initiative on her own. There was also a box of junk mail. Of course, Mazie wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to throw even this stuff away.
The last box was larger, full of oversize manila envelopes. In the upper left corner, each envelope had a unique combination of three or four last names printed in some conservative typeface above a New York, New York, return address. Miranda’s throat tightened around the question of what those dozen envelopes might portend. Finance. Legal stuff. Business. Her father’s business. Things that needed attending to. The stuff Richard Stone was referring to. Things far beyond her interest or experience. She’d need her mother’s help understanding it all. She was afraid she
wouldn’t get it. She knew she wouldn’t get it. Even the earlier version of her mother would probably not have been able to help her. She had managed their domestic and social lives. Miranda’s father managed the rest. As Miranda had heard him say at many cocktail parties as he clapped his wife a little too hard on the back, sloshing her drink, barking out a practiced guffaw, oblivious to her wince: “I make the money. She spends it.”
It was late afternoon. Long shadows came in the kitchen windows. Miranda’s stomach growled. She was suddenly overpowered with the desire to leave. To flee. This was no longer home. Maybe it never had been. She had planned to stay at least two weeks, to head into the city to see Richard Stone at his offices. Maybe make a few such trips. Maybe even look up an old friend. Instead, she left the magazines and junk behind, put the other two boxes into the backseat of her car, turned the hallway light on, locked the door, and drove back the way she’d come.
Darkness was descending as she left the highway more than three hours later and headed onto the twisted two-lane road. It was a darkness made of more than just the absence of the sun; it seemed to emanate from the surroundings themselves. The densely branched, heavily needled evergreens, steep slides of charcoal rocks, inky shadows, and tree-clad mountainsides came right down to the edges of the pavement. A vague glow illuminated a closed gas station with rusted pumps. She caught a glimpse of a heathered sign for an attraction that had gone out of business decades ago. A tar-shingled house with dimly lit windows had a thin stream of smoke coming from the chimney, even though it was summer. A spotlight showed a yard filled with junk advertised as antiques. A farmhouse-turned-bar had a few people smoking on the porch, the embers of their cigarettes heating up to red as they inhaled. Miranda knew there was a frame out in front of that place, filled with firewood. She’d seen a man there, bent over a pile of bucked-up logs alongside the building, slowly splitting the wood into manageable sizes. Manageable for tourists. Three dollars a bundle. A fistful of small bills for a long day’s hard work. Miranda wondered why her father ever thought to buy a house here.
“Just four hours from home. Easy highway drive. Stunning mountains. Great hiking. Wonderful fly-fishing. Good deer hunting,” she’d overheard him tell people.
Only he didn’t do those things. Had never done those things. He had hiking boots that he wore around the property and into town, not into the mountains. Took a fly-fishing lesson once, then left the rod in the garage. They ate venison and trout, but these were bought from others, not acquired by his own hook or gun. He had camping gear, which her brother had used a few times with friends, but just on their own property, down by the river so they could smoke pot away from her parents. Alcohol was approved; marijuana was not. As far as Miranda could tell, mostly what her father had done when he was in the mountains was golf, read the paper, work at spreadsheets on his computer, and sip bourbon. The same things he did back in Connecticut.
As she drove, Miranda remembered coming to these mountains for the first time when she was in grade school. Back then it was for summer camp, her memories a blur of other children, endless mostly competitive activities, and the overarching wish that she could just be alone. When she tried, wandering away from the hoots and howls, bathing suits and archery, campfires and cabins, into the cool woods nearby, she got in trouble and a counselor would yank her back with a firm grip on her arm as if she was about to fall off the edge of something. Then, after she stopped going to camp, sometime in her middle school years, her father bought land and began the protracted process of building their own “cabin.” The project ballooned into a three-thousand-square-foot, traditionally built log home with every modern convenience and significant nods to the great camp style. Real logs. Hand hewn. Notched. Chinked with old-fashioned oakum.
Her father got no pleasure from the process, she recalled, continually damning the architect, the contractor, the site, the blackflies and mosquitoes, the schedule, the delays, the very land itself. But he stubbornly persevered, apparently determined to win against them all. Then, finally, it was done, their grand camp miraculously rising in stately fashion from two acres of cleared land hemmed in by the forest, with a garage and workshop adjacent and a path to a traditional lean-to down by the stream.
For Miranda, the house was a kind of living, intimidating thing. She would place her palms on the logs, feel the warmth emanating from them, and imagine they had somehow stored the heat of the men’s hands who had worked on them. She appreciated that the home was handmade, but she did not like its imposition into a landscape she was falling in love with. She began to spend hours hiking whatever sloppy, root-riddled path she could find. She never tired of the deep comfort of the black mud and dark trees. She loved the subtle surprise of a clump of bright mushrooms, a patch of dogtooth violets, the scramble of a deer fleeing, the grock of a raven, or the wail of a distant loon. She marveled at the quantity of hidden ponds and quiet streams, the salamanders and frogs that reemerged from the silent winter into the damp spring, the gift of an unexpected vantage point at the crest of a tree-crowded hillside suddenly unveiling a new vista. She even admired the blackflies because, she reasoned, they kept other people away. Well, they kept summer people, tourists, people from the tristate area away. The locals and year-round residents just swatted at the bugs and waited for the clouds of irritants to dissipate.
Even though she had been on these roads many times, Miranda drove carefully. She knew the dangers: sharp turns, leaping deer, drunk teenagers. She came into the small town nearest what she now thought of as her true home. Passed the Fishing Hole diner. The golf course and club. The outfitter and guide shop. The craft store that sold delicate watercolor landscapes set in rugged frames and rough furniture finely crafted from birch trees. The gift shop that sold linens and trinkets printed and shaped in the guise of moose and bears but made in China. She found her own driveway in the deepening dark and listened as her tires rolled up the half mile of gravel—a driveway that would be impossible without Dix, or someone like him, to handle the winter plowing and the spring repair. It occurred to Miranda that the driveway had been the most important part of the property to her father. He valued it because it created privacy. Privacy from exactly what he never said. Privacy was simply a thing in and of itself to be coveted. Like success.
Whatever that was, she thought, with a bitterness that was new to her.
The house glowed gently from a lamp lit somewhere deep within the rooms. She grabbed the boxes of mail, closed the car door with her hip, and tiptoed to the back door—she didn’t want to wake her mother. She fumbled with the door, her arms overladen, and managed to squeeze in without dropping anything. She flinched as the screen door banged behind her. She slipped into the kitchen, where the light above the stove was on—as she’d left it. She set the boxes on the counter and listened. Nothing. She figured her mother must be asleep. Miranda went back to the car two more times to get her things, each time quieter and more careful than the last. She listened again. Still silent. She flicked on a light and filled a kettle with water. She returned to the counter. Something different, out of place, in the living room beyond caught her eye. What she saw took her breath away.
There was a person on the sofa, at once strange and familiar. Her expression was blank and ghostly; her hair was sticking out in all directions like an unpruned shrub; her cheeks were hollow in the dim light. She was wearing a faded robe that hung limply from wasted shoulders, slippers broken down in the heels on her feet. It was her mother. Yes, just her mother. Terrifying in that moment of unrecognition.
My God, Miranda thought. Has it gotten this bad? Has she gotten this bad?
“Mummy?” she said, trying to keep the fear from her voice. “Are you OK?”
Her mother’s eyes shifted in Miranda’s direction but remained empty. Slowly, dim recognition began to fill them. Her mouth turned up in an expression that might be a smile but appeared more as a grimace.
“Miranda,” she whispered. As if the young woman in front of her
were an alien or a marvel, not simply her daughter.
“Mummy, I was in Connecticut. I was at our house. Remember? Remember our house in Connecticut?”
Her mother nodded, slowly, almost imperceptibly.
“I brought back some things. Some important things.”
Her mother’s head continued to bob. Encouraged, Miranda brought a stack of letters and cards over to the sofa and set them in her lap.
“Look. Cards and letters from friends, Mummy. From your friends. Remember all the friends you used to have? Down in Connecticut?”
Her mother looked from the mail to her daughter, her expression blank.
“Mum, there’s a bunch of other stuff here, too. Stuff we need to go through. Stuff we need to figure out. Financial stuff. Legal stuff. I’m going to need your help.”
Miranda was desperate to connect with the woman at her side. She scanned her face for comprehension of any kind. Her mother stared at Miranda for a few moments, then stood and allowed the envelopes to fall from her lap like dead leaves from a tree. She clutched her robe under her chin with one hand and shuffled away, back to her bedroom, without a word. The kettle screamed from the stove.
The next morning, Miranda called Richard Stone and left a noncommittal message with his secretary, saying she wouldn’t be able to make their meeting, but she’d be in touch. Then she began to open the large manila envelopes she’d left on the table the previous night, prying open the flaps cautiously, as if there was danger inside. She found statements with long columns of numbers, various investment accounts, letters from lawyers about actions and cases and depositions, requests for signatures, direction, next steps. She had no idea what to do with any of it, about any of it. She tried calling a few of the numbers on the cover letters. She got voice mailboxes. She stumbled out some staccato story about trying to take care of her deceased father’s affairs. She finally reached a woman who told her they could only speak to the surviving spouse. Miranda looked out the window as the woman spoke and saw the surviving spouse in question. In a sudden frenzy of ill-advised activity, still in her bathrobe, holding a mug of coffee in one hand and a pruning shears in the other, the surviving spouse was ineffectively hacking at a shrub, her face screwed up in frustration, tears glistening on her cheeks. Miranda hung up the phone and started crying, too.
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