She stands aside so the couple can walk in first. The wife is small and plump, with delicate features and glasses. She has her phone in her hand and has already taken several pictures of the outside. The husband is tall and lanky, with a brown beard. He strides ahead of them into the living room.
His wife shakes the rainwater off her jacket and smooths her windblown hair. “Is it always this wet?”
Her mother’s often-repeated answer to this question springs automatically to Samara’s lips. “Perfect weather for drinking a cup of coffee by the fire—” She gestures toward the limestone fireplace.
“Is it gas?”
“No, woodburning.”
The husband takes a small tape measure from his pocket and measures the mantel.
“I’ve sold several houses from this era,” Samara says. “This one is the best maintained I’ve seen.” She rests her hand on top of the mantel, its varnished wood cool and smooth to the touch. “It has a lot of soul, I think.” She’s not sure what this means, but feels it’s true.
The wife eyes the yellow-and-gray stones critically. “We’d have to tear this out…There’s no place to put the TV.”
Samara turns away so she doesn’t show her irritation. “I think the previous owners had a television here.” She points to the far wall. “And a sofa there.” She walks down the center of the room. She can’t help but add: “I did see a mantel exactly like this one in Architectural Digest last month…”
She ought to say, Of course it might suit your family better to change the layout of the room. That’s what her mother would say if she were here. But her mother’s voice, speaking up inside her head, says something else: If you don’t want them to buy this house, don’t sell it to them. Show them the bungalow on Starker Drive instead.
Samara leads the couple down the hallway. “There’s an amazing chrome vanity in the master bathroom. And the tile’s in great shape.” She reaches into the room and turns on the light.
“Oh my god,” the wife exclaims. “It’s the color of Pepto-Bismol.”
“It’s a decent size,” the husband says. “Imagine it with white subway tile.”
If her mother were here she would nudge her, and communicate with her upturned eyebrows that Samara should agree. That would look great, she ought to say. And, You have great taste. But again Ashmina surprises her:
You don’t like these people, do you, Sammy?
No, I don’t.
Why?
They have no imagination.
Is that the worst thing?
Samara thinks for a minute. Yes, it is.
The woman has turned to look at her with a strange expression.
“Let’s see the lower floor,” Samara says, quickly, and turns off the bathroom light. “By the way, there’s a house on Starker Drive you might be interested in. A craftsman. Late thirties.”
The husband waves his hand dismissively. “We’ve already rehabbed a bungalow. We want something different.”
She shows them the rest of the house, but she keeps her comments short. She doesn’t point out the things she loves: the telephone nook in the hallway, the built-in shoe racks in the downstairs closets, the storage cupboard under the stairs that smells like a Christmas tree.
She leaves them alone in the garage for a few minutes to talk, and as she walks back through the house, she’s struck again with how similar it is to her parents’, and also how different. Without all the junk, you can see the home’s architectural lines. The symmetry of dividing an oblong dining room and square living room with a wide stone mantel. The good sense of a kitchen turned toward the morning sunlight, and away from the noise of the road. Without any furniture or lamps or overstuffed pillows or potted spider plants or stacks of hardback thrillers, you can appreciate the intention of the house. Its spirit, even. What it is, and what it wants to be.
She pauses in the master bedroom. The room still smells faintly like orange-scented cleaner. She thinks of Shawn’s warm hands on her hips as he pressed her against the closet wall. He thought she should buy this house herself. Was that such a crazy idea?
She waits for her mother’s voice to tell her, Of course it is. You’re not supposed to live in Clearing, Sammy. You’re meant to be doing something else. But instead Ashmina says, What you said about a house having a soul, do you think that’s true?
When the man and woman come inside they say they’re ready to write an offer. Samara’s surprised. “I thought you didn’t like it.”
“The interior doesn’t matter,” the husband says. “The square footage is good, and it’s in the right school district.”
The number they have in mind is only five thousand under the asking price. She ought to be thrilled. She’s both buyer and seller’s agent, and will get the full six percent commission. But she moves slowly as she walks to her car to get the paperwork she needs. The wind has picked up and blows yellow leaves in circles around the front yard. Shifting white clouds compete with the sun in the sky. The bungalow, her mother’s voice says in her ear.
When she comes back inside, she asks them, “Are you sure you don’t want to see the bungalow first?”
“No, this is the house.” The woman nods at her husband, and they smile. They’re so sure of themselves. So satisfied. Her mother’s right; she does dislike them. They’re going to take a hammer to the pink tile and wallboard over the telephone nook. They’re going to throw the bathroom’s sparkling melamine handles into the dumpster. When they’re done, it will look like every other house. Generic. Easy.
She lays the forms on the kitchen counter and they scratch their signatures at the bottom of each page. She can see the spot on the carpet where Mrs. Kells’s piano used to stand, and she pictures her there, now, her fingers swinging through the air in time to the ticking metronome. Through the sliding glass doors the sun flickers, and the trees wave in the wind. She remembers her mother standing outside identical doors in her parents’ house. She wore a dress printed with sunflowers and held a pair of grill tongs in her hand. She swayed to some music and beckoned to Samara through the glass. “Leave your book, Sammy,” she said. “Come outside into the fresh air.”
* * *
—
In her bedroom Cass types on her laptop and Leah rocks in her baby swing, its white noise turned up loud. The pendulum of the swing creaks back and forth, back and forth. Wind buffets the house; the sun appears in the window, and then disappears again. Cass is getting somewhere with her idea, her theory of the multiverse. She’s been able to shepherd her thoughts onto the page, to begin to shape them into something another person, another reader, will understand. When she doubts her ability to accomplish something so big, so potentially groundbreaking, she imagines what Robby will say, how he will question her the next time she sees him. How he will urge her on.
Then the floor shakes like it does sometimes, a small tremor from deep inside the mountain. Cass has a metallic taste in her mouth she remembers from pregnancy. A noise comes from down the hallway. A humming. She listens, her hands poised over the laptop keys. It must have been the wind. But there it is again—a musical sound. It makes her think of the songs her dad would murmur to himself when he was down in the basement fixing something. “Tuesday Afternoon” and “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”
“What’s making that sound, teacup?” She picks the baby up from the swing, and Leah reaches for her ponytail.
“Ouch.” She frees the strands of hair Leah has balled up in her fist. “Who could it be, who could it be?” Cass sings.
At the top of the stairs she stops. The noise comes from down the hallway, from the nursery. But that can’t be. She and Leah are the only ones in the house, except for Bear.
The baby monitor. It must be picking up a signal from someone’s radio, or another monitor nearby. It’s on her desk. Little green bars light up its screen. She switches it off, but the
sound continues, faintly. Is she imagining it now? Leah kicks her feet against her hip and gurgles. Cass strains to hear.
Still there.
A thread of fear tugs her body taut as she goes back to her bedroom and calls the dog. She points at his bed in the corner. “Bear, stay. Stay with the baby.” She puts Leah back into her swing, straps her in, and returns to the top of the stairs. She listens. The wind is stronger now. The snap of hail hits the windows. But over the sound of the wind, over the hail—someone humming a melody.
At the end of the hallway, the door to the nursery is partly open. She takes a few steps and there’s no mistaking it.
Tuesday afternoon…
Something calls to me,
The trees are drawing me near
For a second she has the fantastical thought that her dad has arrived on a surprise visit, has let himself into the house, and is now sitting in the nursery singing to himself.
But it’s not a man’s voice. It’s a woman’s. Whose?
She steps closer. She peeks through the crack in the door—
The woman sitting in the rocker isn’t real. Cass knows that.
Because the woman is her.
The woman reads some loose printed pages with one hand, and with the other she rubs her stomach, her T-shirt pulled taut over her pregnant belly. Hail strikes the window behind her. Tunktunktunk.
Cass doesn’t move, she doesn’t call out. She just stands entranced. She notices things. First, the woman’s dark eyes and thin nose. The crooked part in her hair. The way she tips her feet onto her heels when she pushes the rocker back.
The picture Cass has of herself—it doesn’t match the woman in the rocker at all. When she thinks of herself the picture is colorless, all light eyes and skin and hair. Washed-out. Static. An overdeveloped driver’s license photo that lives permanently in her mind. But this other Cass is a polychromatic wonder. Full of agile, assured movement, even in a routine pose. Full of grace.
Graceful isn’t a word she would use to describe herself. Or assured. Not since Leah was born anyway. She recognizes very little of herself in the woman, except for the way she hugs her round belly. It wasn’t so long ago Cass rubbed her stomach just like that, when Leah was inside.
Leah! Her cries come from the bedroom. And now Bear noses the backs of Cass’s knees. She turns, just for a second, to brush him off, and when she looks again—the woman’s gone.
Cass blinks, and opens the door wide. The rocker is empty and still.
Leah’s cries grow louder, and she runs to the bedroom, afraid of…she hardly knows what. But the baby’s fine. Her binky’s fallen out of her mouth, that’s all.
Cass returns to the nursery. Still empty. The hail stops. She shakes her head. Having a baby has broken her mind. But she feels fine. Better than she has since Leah was born. Her head is clearer, and quicker, ever since she went to see Robby at the hospital. Then something dawns on her. The woman in the rocker was pregnant. But there’s no way. Is there?
Wait. Maybe.
She thinks back over the last few weeks. She and Amar have only been together a handful of times since Leah was born. Two times, three? The night before he left, for sure. She does the math in her head.
Oh, hell.
TWENTY-SIX
RAINDROPS SPLATTER AGAINST Ginny’s windshield. She waits for the rain to slow, and gets ready to make a run for Edith’s yellow bungalow. She canceled her last three clinic appointments for the day, something she’s never done in her twelve years working at University Hospital, because she couldn’t wait until five-thirty. The last two days are a blur of time spent together, on Edith’s couch and in her tub and in her bed. When they had to be at work, they stole minutes of conversation in between cases, in the elevator or the hospital cafeteria or the hallway between the surgical floor and the OR.
Tonight Ginny has borrowed a colleague’s cabin, and they’re going to have a whole night together, uninterrupted. But before she can get out, the passenger door swings open and Edith climbs in. Her face shines with rain.
“What’s wrong?” Ginny asks.
“I need to talk to you.” Edith pushes her hair away from her face and wipes her wet hands on her jeans.
“Grab your stuff and we’ll talk on the way—”
“I’m not sure I want to go.”
“The cabin’s near Sparrow Lake. Have you been?”
“When we were on the phone last night, your husband came in the room. You had your hand over the phone, but I could still hear his voice.”
Ginny’s quiet for a minute. “You know I’m married.”
“We’re going to hurt them, Ginny.” Edith looks her in the eye, and it’s awful.
The rain streams down the windows in waves.
“Mark and I depend on each other,” Ginny says. “That’s not the same as love.” She thinks of the two happy women she saw in her kitchen, her twin and Edith. The way they laughed together. “I didn’t know that.”
“That’s incredibly sad.”
“What I’m saying is I didn’t know any better. Now I do.”
“That’s good. For you.” There’s an edge to Edith’s voice. “But I don’t think you’ve really considered how I fit into this scenario. And I’m not sure you know how.”
Ginny doesn’t say anything. She feels weighed down in her seat.
Edith’s voice softens. “I wish you knew how.”
“I’ll learn,” Ginny says, and Edith shakes her head and smiles.
“We can talk later,” Edith says. “But for now I’m going back inside.” She pulls up the hood of her jacket and Ginny feels a sense of panic. If she and Edith don’t go to the cabin, she’ll have to go home. Noah’s staying over at a friend’s tonight, so it will just be her and Mark sitting together at the kitchen table for dinner, the rest of the house quiet and still.
She grabs Edith’s arm. “I can’t go back to the way things were.” She thinks again of her twin and Edith standing nose to nose in her kitchen, their happy faces. “We’re going to be together. Somehow. I know it.”
But Ginny’s conviction wavers once Edith’s gone. She starts her car and pulls away. The wind has picked up. Hail starts to fall hard against her car roof. She’s forced to slow down, inch along the road. She doesn’t want to think about the things Edith said, but she can’t stop thinking about them.
The hail abruptly stops as she turns into her neighborhood. The cul-de-sac glitters with pieces of ice. Her neighbor—why can she never remember her name?—is on her front porch with her shaggy black dog. She looks at the sky, and walks slowly into the road. Her dog tugs her toward some bushes.
Ginny parks, and gets out of her car. Three turkeys scuttle out of the bushes; the dog lunges at them and her neighbor falls to the ground.
Ginny runs over. “Are you okay?”
Her neighbor doesn’t get up; she holds her arm like she’s hurt it. The dog has chased the turkeys into the forest, his leash trailing behind him. Ginny calls after him, “Bear, come back.” Her voice cracks and she looks like she’s close to tears. “Bear!”
Ginny holds out her hand to help her up, and the woman gets to her feet with some effort because of her large pregnant belly. She calls again for her dog, her hands on her stomach. Her jacket is torn at her elbow.
Ginny walks her to her own front porch. “Stay here. I’ll find him.” She pulls up the hood of her jacket and hurries into the forest. The smell of pine needles and wet earth fills her nose. She climbs around blackberry bushes, squints in between moss-covered tree trunks. She can see the back of her house from here and the dark hole Mark dug in the backyard. A square of gray cement sits at its bottom, sparkling with hail. She doesn’t want to look at it, but it’s hard not to.
She calls the dog again. “Bear?” There’s no sound but the crunch of her boots against the ground. She
walks sideways, around the back of the Mehtas’ house, and finally sees him in their backyard, rolling in a pile of yellow leaves.
She climbs down, holding on to tree trunks as she moves around brambles and old logs. She grabs the dog’s leash and pulls him back to her front porch.
Her neighbor scolds the dog and then rubs his head.
“Your arm is hurt,” Ginny says. “Come on. Let’s take a look.” She waves her inside.
She leaves the dog in the garage and grabs a first-aid kit from the laundry room cabinet. She pulls out two chairs. “Forgive me,” Ginny says, “Mark told me your name, but I’ve forgotten it.”
“Cass.”
“Okay, Cass, let’s take a look at your arm.”
Cass takes off her oversized rain jacket slowly—it’s torn at her right elbow—and winces. She’s got a bloody scrape along her forearm.
Ginny opens the first-aid kit and finds the antiseptic. She takes Cass’s hand, which is cool to the touch, and turns her arm over and cleans it.
Cass squeezes her eyes shut and rubs her stomach. “Do you think he’s all right in there?”
“You’re having a boy?”
“Yeah.”
“I think he’s most likely fine.” Ginny rubs Neosporin on the scrape and wraps it with a bandage.
“I can’t feel him, though.” Cass frowns and pokes gently at her side. “He usually kicks a lot—”
“Wait a few minutes. He’s probably just sleeping.”
“Okay,” Cass says, but her face is still worried. “My husband’s away until the week I’m due,” she says. “I don’t know what we were thinking. We thought it would be okay. It’s not.” Tears appear in her eyes.
“Is this your first?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” She laughs and wipes her eyes. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”
Ginny remembers this feeling. On the day her C-section was scheduled she sat in the passenger seat of her car with her hands on her abdomen, her heart thumping in her chest. She wasn’t scared of the surgery. It followed specific steps that she understood, had done herself in medical school. No, she was scared of what came after. The part where she became a mother.
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