“She could have put it up for adoption,” Duma pointed out with a sideways glance toward Marika that made me wonder if they were thinking of adopting.
“But she didn’t,” I said. “She had the baby in the middle of an ice storm. The midwife wasn’t able to come because the roads were impassable. All through the night she could hear the apple branches breaking and falling on her roof. She thought the whole house would come crashing down around her. She thought she would break in two . . .”
I could almost feel the cold and the terror and the aloneness. I felt the ice under the girl’s bare feet as she walked through the storm-wrecked world to her lover’s house and laid the baby on his doorstep wrapped in a pale pink blanket, the same color as the apple blossoms she’d worn in her hair when he crowned her queen and carried her away. She’d embroidered the blanket with apple blossoms so he would remember. She wore a nightgown with the same pattern embroidered on the hem, which trailed over the ice as she walked out onto the frozen pond. When the ice cracked beneath her she thought it was her heart breaking . . .
I looked up at the end of the story to see all the faces at the table staring at me in the flickering candlelight. The candles had all burned down. How long had I been speaking?
“Wow,” Duma said. “That crazy old man’s right. You are quite the storyteller.”
“Of silly melodramatic legends,” I said, getting up to clear the dishes. “Your art department would have to put a woman in a white nightgown fleeing from a looming castle on the cover.”
“The Apple Blossom Ghost, you could call it,” Jess said. “That was good, though, about the blanket embroidered with apple blossoms. I don’t remember Monty mentioning that.”
“I’m sure he did,” I said, shouldering my way through the swinging door into the kitchen with a stack of plates. Duma and Abe brought some too, but they went back to the table while Yuriko and I washed up and started the coffee. I could hear Ansel asking Jess to “tell me about this book you’re working on” as the door swung open.
“You go back too,” I told Yuriko. “I asked Ansel earlier about publishers for your chapbook. He knows someone who’d be perfect for you.”
“That’s sweet of you, Clare,” she said, drying a plate with a dish towel. “You’re always looking out for other people. I hope you’ll look out for yourself up there.”
“It’s not the wilds of Alaska,” I said. “Remember I come from there. Or do you really think I’m going to be attacked by a vengeance-seeking ghost?”
“Why would anyone seek vengeance on you?” she asked with only a hint of a smile. “I just wondered if it will be good for you to be so . . . isolated. I wish you could have stayed here where you have friends. If Jess had only taken the job at Brooklyn College . . . but I suppose that he thought teaching would interfere with his writing.”
“Yes,” I said, scrubbing at a bit of dried kale on the rim of a plate. “I think he does. That was kind of you, though, to think of Jess. I haven’t had a chance to thank you—”
“Oh, it was all Abe. He spoke to the department chair and they would have been thrilled to have Jess. But of course it was three classes—more than Jess would want to do. We just thought . . . well, I don’t know what we would do without our salaries and health insurance benefits. But then we’re poets and Jess will write a big book that makes you both rich. It just would have been nice.” She smiled. “I would have had company at all those boring faculty parties.”
“It would have been nice,” I said, handing a plate of fruit to Yuriko. “Would you take this out? I’m going to pour the coffee. This damned Italian espresso machine is so temperamental it might scald you.”
Yuriko squeezed my arm before leaving with the fruit plate. I watched her rearranging a slice of melon as she backed through the door. Then I turned and rinsed the last plate, letting the cold water run over my wrists to calm myself down. Jess hadn’t told me about the job—a job with insurance benefits and a fifteen-minute commute from our beautiful apartment filled with all our smart, witty friends and our enviable Bend Becker dining room table . . .
The plate slipped from my soapy hands and fell into the sink. I heard a crack and cursed, but when I fished it out of the sink I saw it was unbroken. I took a deep breath and put my hands back under the cold water to make them stop shaking. Jess knew how I felt about honesty. He knew I considered an omission as good as a lie. My parents hadn’t told me I was adopted until I was twelve. When they told me I felt as if my entire life had been a lie. Didn’t this omission make our entire marriage a lie?
When my hands were so numb they no longer shook, I dried them and arranged the little blue and yellow espresso cups we’d bought on our trip to Italy (during the year that Jess had thought his second novel might take place in Rome) on a tray, filling each one with a perfect dollop of black aromatic coffee from the temperamental La Spaziale espresso machine Jess had bought for two thousand dollars because he couldn’t write without a “decent” cup of coffee. (Another reason I’d been suspicious of the tattooed barista: why did he have to spend all that time in a coffeehouse with a two thousand dollar coffee machine at home?)
As I came back into the dining room I was afraid they’d all look up at me and see the hurt and shame on my face but they were all staring at something on the table. Only Jess looked up and he was too excited to notice my expression.
“Clare! Do you think Hopper and Benny will want their money back? Bend Becker’s work isn’t indestructible after all.”
I looked down to see what he meant. Running from one end of the table to the other was a narrow but deep crack that I could have sworn hadn’t been there when I set the table.
Chapter Four
Copper and Penny didn’t want their money back. “Dude,” Copper said when I showed him the crack, “that’s what Bend’s all about. Imperfection. History. He makes one table that’s got glass rings, spilled wine, and a bullet hole all embedded in the finish. Like, shit happens.”
Really? I wanted to say to his pudding-bland face. What shit’s happened in your life other than your parents giving you a million dollar apartment in the trendiest neighborhood in Brooklyn as a graduation present?
But I was glad of the check. Even though we’d sold the loft for way more than we’d paid for it, we were so over-mortgaged that most of what was left would go to paying off bills and credit card debts. Copper’s check would pay for the moving van and the first three months of rent on a storage unit in Poughkeepsie. We’d decided to store most of our stuff because the caretaker’s cottage was furnished.
“It makes it more of a fresh start,” Jess said. “When I sell the book we’ll buy our own place.”
We packed the stuff into a rented U-Haul van in a torrential downpour the weekend after Labor Day. “Have you ever noticed that it always rains when you move?” I asked.
“Not before I met you,” he said without smiling.
Our sex idyll had come to an abrupt end when I questioned him about the teaching job. “If you’d wanted a nine-to-fiver with a steady paycheck and benefits you should have married that guy you were dating before me—Dusty? Wasn’t it? Didn’t he become a fireman or something?”
“Dunstan,” I corrected. “And he’s a policeman.”
He’d shrugged and then retreated into a stony silence for the rest of the packing, becoming even more ruthless in the winnowing of our possessions. Each item he rejected seemed to be a piece of our past he was throwing out—the thrift shop mugs we’d bought on a camping trip to Vermont, a Bailey College sweatshirt I’d borrowed from him our first night together and worn ever since (“It was mine in the first place,” he’d said when I complained about him throwing it out), all the birthday and anniversary and Valentine’s Day cards I’d given him over the last thirteen years. As with his library, he threw out all but the “classics” and I was beginning to think that I wouldn’t make the cut.
Because Jess’s Saab was a manual, which I didn’t know how to drive, I got stuck
driving the U-Haul, following Jess on winding back roads as far as Poughkeepsie. “The main road is safer in this weather,” I’d pointed out.
“Isn’t the whole point of this move to take the road less traveled?” he’d asked, slamming the Saab’s door.
Despite the rain he drove fast on the slick, winding roads, taking every curve like an angry flip-off to me trying to keep up.
Fine, I thought, gripping the steering wheel so hard my knuckles turned white. Let him be angry. I was angry too. I’d been the one supporting us for the last three years since the advance money and home equity had run out. I’d had no problem putting aside my writing when I took the publishing job (who could write when you were faced day in, day out with thousands of would-be writers trying to hawk their manuscripts?). Why couldn’t it be his turn to take the practical job so I could write?
Or have a baby, I thought, fishtailing around a tight curve.
Not that we could ever even talk about that. We hadn’t talked about having children since spring of our senior year, when I’d gotten pregnant.
“It will be the end of both our writing careers,” he’d said then. “Every decision we make will have to be about what’s good for the kid, not what’s good for the writing. We’ll take awful jobs or write crap to pay the bills. Look around at the writers who have made it. How many have kids?”
There were plenty I could point to, but most were either men or had someone to support them, or ended up being crap parents. There was Muriel Spark, who’d had a baby around my age, but she’d left him with her parents to raise. There was Shirley Jackson, who delighted in having four children and whose work Jess admired, but I didn’t think a woman who had grown enormously fat and died of a heart attack at forty-eight was the best example to offer.
In the end I hadn’t had to make the choice; I miscarried.
“See,” Jess had said, “even your body knew it wasn’t the right time.”
But it had never been the right time again. Now I was thirty-five. Sure, I still had time—but not endless time. And Jess hadn’t shown any sign of changing his attitude toward children. If I really wanted to have a baby maybe I’d need to do it without Jess.
The thought nearly sent me off the road. This would be the time to make a break. There’d be no assets to split up. We’d paid off our debts and split the meager profits from the apartment into our two separate accounts (Jess had never wanted a joint account). I could leave Jess in Monty’s caretaker’s cottage and go back to the city. Marika would let me sleep on her couch until I found a place and she’d help me look for an editorial job. Better to do it now while I was still young enough to start over and have a baby than to wait another decade for Jess to finish his second novel and be ready. Because, really, would he ever be ready?
I spent the rest of the drive planning my new life. I could get a cat (Jess was allergic), a television (Jess thought watching television was a waste of time), and hang out with friends from work without Jess’s voice in my head judging them as vacuous and shallow. There were a lot of people who would welcome me back into the fold if only to finally tell me what they really thought about Jess.
I might even start writing. I had been thinking about writing something about the apple blossom girl ever since Monty had told the story. In fact, I was sure now that I’d started a story about it back in college. I could write that. Nothing would make Jess sorrier to have lost me than if I published a successful book.
And if I hadn’t met someone in five years I’d adopt—another option Jess had rejected.
“You always say how you grew up feeling like an outsider,” he’d once said when I brought it up, turning all my confidences back on me. “Would you want that for our child?”
By the time we reached the U-Haul drop-off and storage unit I had planned out my novel and named my future Siamese cats. Franny and Zooey—names Jess would abhor. My anger had not so much dissipated as frozen into an icy shaft at my core. I had to peel my fingers off the steering wheel. We unpacked in silence. I made sure my stuff was all together near the front and asked for two keys at the desk. I put the deposit for the storage unit on my credit card and I took the key so I could come back and get my stuff when I needed it. We didn’t talk on the rest of the drive. I considered asking him to drop me off at the train station in Rhinecliff but I was afraid that once I broke the dam of silence Jess’s voice would flood over me. I was afraid he’d try to talk me out of it. Or maybe I was afraid he wouldn’t. Better to call a taxi after we got there.
When we turned onto River Road I felt a momentary pang. Even in the rain River Road was beautiful, the ancient sycamores forming a canopy, fog lying along the old stone walls and apple trees like a sheen of ice—
Which reminded me of the apple blossom girl story again.
Had Jess not thought for one minute that I might not want to live next to a house where a baby had died?
I refrained from pointing out the gate and Jess nearly went past it, swerving at the last minute and missing the mailboxes by inches. He revved angrily, scraping the undercarriage of the Saab on the rutted driveway. I registered every dent and ping with satisfaction. Let him see how long he lasted up here with this impractical car. City boy. Dunstan Corbett had driven a pickup. Maybe I’d look him up on Facebook.
I looked toward the house but it was shrouded in fog, as if it had closed its doors to visitors today and was making clear we were only welcome in the servants’ quarters of the estate. At the turn to the caretaker’s cottage someone had posted a hand-painted plywood sign that read: “Rivendell this way.”
“Great,” Jess muttered. “LO-TOR fans.”
“I like Tolkien,” I informed him.
He turned to gape at me, and so didn’t see the deer standing in the middle of the road. I screamed and he slammed on the brakes, swiveling the Saab sharply to the right toward a stone wall. We screeched to a halt millimeters from the wall, the engine dying. When he tried to start it the car made a grinding sound.
“Don’t bother,” I said. “We’re here.”
I pointed past the stone wall to a brown single-storied house. I think when Jess had heard “caretaker’s cottage” he’d pictured a thatched cottage like the one on his copy of Sons and Lovers, not a sixties-era modular home with aluminum siding. I almost felt sorry for him, but then I remembered that he’d scoffed at my request to see the house—and that we could have stayed in Brooklyn if he’d taken the teaching job.
I got out of the car, stepping into three inches of water. The house was poorly situated in a shallow depression. I could hear rushing water as soon as I got out. I recalled the ornamental pond in the garden and realized that the stream that flowed out of it ran right beside the cottage. It would flood easily and be prone to mildew and mold. And mice, I thought, catching a shadowy movement in the overgrown grass as I walked up the slick, mossy path to the front door. Jess would be sorry he didn’t have a cat.
I was almost disappointed not to unleash a deluge when I opened the front door. The interior was dry and smelled of onions and cumin—the previous caretaker must have liked Indian takeout. I heard Jess behind me flick on a wall switch but the room remained dark, as murky on this rainy afternoon as if it had been night already.
“The electricity is probably down,” I said. “I wonder if there’s a generator—or candles and a woodstove at least.”
I felt my way forward gingerly and bumped into a table. Someone had put out a battery-operated lantern. I switched it on and found an assortment of candles, flashlights, and matches in the bluish glow. And a note. Jess snatched it up before I could read it and snorted.
“His highness says we should let him know when we get in. In person. He switches off his cell phone while writing—”
“I’ll go,” I said before Jess could launch into a tirade against “the great writer.” I’d have to point out that he always turned off his phone when he wrote and I didn’t want to argue. The cold shaft of ice was already splintering inside of me. It wa
s one thing to leave Jess and another to leave him in this miserable place.
I put up my hood and pulled on a pair of rubber boots that were standing by the door. They fit perfectly and reminded me of the ones Katrine had worn. Maybe I’d keep them.
“Clare—” Jess began as I opened the door. I didn’t turn around. If he said he was sorry now the ice would crack inside me and I was pretty sure it was the only thing holding me up.
“I’ll be back soon,” I said. “See if you can get a fire started in the stove.” And then I left, letting the screen door bang shut behind me.
The rain came down harder the minute I stepped away from shelter. It wasn’t so bad under the trees, but when I struck out across the open field it came down in unrelenting sheets. I looked up only long enough to sight the house—still shrouded in fog but identifiable by a cluster of blurry lights on the hill (Monty would have a generator)—and then I pulled my hood over my head and took off in that direction. I only knew I had passed from open field into the gardens by the texture of the ground beneath my feet—from stubby hay to once-manicured grass. The hay held off the water better; the grass was sodden. My boots sank inches into the mud.
It was typical of Monty not to consider the inconvenience of asking one of us to slog through the rain and mud to “check in” when he could have just turned on his goddamned cell phone and called us. But no, mustn’t disturb the muse. Let Clare slog through the mud instead and drown out here in the rain—
The ground gave way beneath my feet and I slid in mud so slick it felt like ice. When I put my hand down to brace myself I felt that it was ice. The rain had turned to sleet—a freak hail storm—and I had wandered off course into a bog.
I looked up and saw that I was standing at the edge of the pond. Tall reeds and cattails rimmed the dark, rain-dimpled surface. Across the water stood a figure, watching me.
The ice on the ground seemed to have crept up my arm into my heart. I was sure I hadn’t seen anyone when I started across the field. Where had she come from?
The Widow's House Page 4