by T. Greenwood
“Upside down?”
She nodded.
“Done,” I said. I would do anything for her. This was the truth. I would turn the world upside down for her.
* * *
It was getting dark by the time we drove off the ferry, and I could see Avery was struggling to stay awake, despite the excitement. I reached behind me and squeezed the small knob of her knee, more to comfort myself than to comfort her.
I followed a small line of cars off the boat. Some passengers would stay on to the next, even more remote, island in this bay. According to Pilar, Bluffs Island was the second least inhabited of this archipelago. Most residents were lobstermen and lobster-women. With a few eccentrics thrown in, she’d promised.
Just when I thought Avery had fallen asleep, as my headlights bobbed and dipped along the winding road that led away from the docks, I heard her small voice from the backseat. “Will there be other kids there?”
I glanced up to try to see her in the rearview mirror, but the headlights of the car behind us blinded me. My heart started to race. Don’t be ridiculous, I thought. It’s just someone else who lives here. Calm down.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Pilar said she doesn’t really know her neighbors yet.”
“Will there be a playground?” she asked.
Avery was a true city kid. Even with my parents living in New Hampshire, her frame of reference involved city blocks, conveniences, and concrete. The idea of a place without parks, without bodegas, without sidewalks, without people was likely incomprehensible to her.
“There will be plenty of places to play,” I said, smiling for her benefit although she couldn’t see my face. But I wondered. It was already November; would we be housebound for the next four months? I hadn’t thought to ask if it snowed here (though I knew it must). Did the ocean freeze over? I had taken Avery to see Frozen, and I suspected the house, the island, might exist in her imagination like Elsa’s castle of ice.
“Can we go sledding like at Poppy’s house?” she asked. Last winter my father had bought two aluminum flying saucers and taken Avery sledding for the first time.
“If there’s snow, we will definitely go sledding,” I said.
I could hear the sleep in her voice, the way it took over. She was fighting and losing against it.
“And my room will be purple?” she asked.
“With stars on the floor.”
Then there was silence. When she was a baby, I coveted this peace. The only time I could paint when she was an infant was when she was sleeping. But now, the silence, the quiet rasps of her ragged breath, made me anxious. When the headlights that had been shining through the rear window disappeared as the car behind me turned off one of the narrow roads that branched off this main one, I felt completely alone.
Pilar had said the house was easy to find. That I wouldn’t even need a map.
“Just take the main road from the ferry until it stops. It curves around the island and dead ends at the driveway. There’s a giant rock at the entrance, a rope tied between two tall pine trees. Just undo the rope and drive on in.” And suddenly, as if this were a dream somehow becoming manifest in real life, there were the rock, the pines, the rope. I stopped the car but left it running, threw open the door to the cold night air, got out, and untied the rope from one tree. I glanced down the empty road behind us and took a deep breath.
I went back to the car and glanced in the backseat at Avery. Her head lolled to the side, her curls spilling across her face. “We’re here,” I said softly, but she didn’t stir.
I got back in the car, shut the door as softly as I could, and pulled up the long dirt drive to the house.
* * *
It was a beautiful disaster. Crumbling, listing to the side, beaten and battered and worn, yes, but magnificent.
Like something from a Wyeth painting.
I willed my mind to remember it this way, the way I saw it now before it became familiar, before I grew blind to its beauty. In that brief moment, I had already thought of the exact colors I would need on my palette. The brushes I would use in order to capture the grayed cedar shakes, the peeling paint on the porch banisters. The ivy that wound around the porch railings and encircled the chimney.
“Wake up,” I said to Avery softly. I got out of the car, leaving my headlights on to illuminate the walkway. “Av,” I repeated, louder.
“Mama,” she whined.
“Look, Av.”
I opened the car’s back door, unfastened her from her car seat and hoisted her onto my hip, noting she seemed to have grown in the last few hours. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and squinted at the sight before us.
“It’s like that painting, Mama,” she said. “The one at Daddy’s house.”
The Wyeth. I smiled.
“Are you ready for an adventure?” I asked.
“I’m ready, Mama.”
I set Avery down. “Stay on the porch,” I said and headed around the side of the house, searching for the electrical panel. Shivering, my fingers numb, I clicked each of the breakers on, and as I did, the sconces on either side of the front door clicked on. I joined Avery on the porch and dug through my purse for my phone. I opened a new text, entered in Pilar, my mom, and then Gus and quickly typed a group message: Got here, safe and sound. Will call tomorrow. It’s beautiful. XO. The signal was a bit weak, but the text sent. And before I could even use the key to unlock the front door, both Pilar and my mom wrote back. Pilar: Love you, honey. Mom: Call me in the morning.
I wiggled the knob, which stuck a little, and pushed the door hard with my hip. Inside, the house smelled like mildew, like the murky pond near my parents’ house. I fumbled around, looking for a light switch, and finally found it awkwardly placed on the opposite wall. A bare bulb overhead illuminated the foyer.
“Holy shit,” I said.
The floral wallpaper was peeling like sunburned skin, the floor was covered with mounds of sawdust (likely made by termites or carpenter ants), and the stairwell was missing both banister and balusters.
“Don’t go up the stairs,” I cautioned Avery, thinking about how accident-prone she was and the very real fact that the closest hospital was at least an hour-and-a-half ferry ride away.
I moved slowly from the foyer into the kitchen, clicking on lights, trying not to trip over the boxes that littered the floor, which seemed precarious. It was soft in some spots and just off-kilter enough to make me wonder if the whole thing might be trying to shrug me off.
The kitchen looked like it had never been renovated, the knotty pine cabinets with hammered iron cabinet hinges and drawer pulls likely original. The only “update” appeared to be a 1970s-era refrigerator, which hummed loudly. The linoleum on the floor was filthy and curling away from the walls.
“I should put our food away,” I said. “Want to help?”
We carried the bags of groceries into the kitchen and I set them down on the counter. I put the few perishables in the refrigerator, leaving them in the Styrofoam cooler until the fridge got cold. The kitchen would be the first thing I’d need to tackle. I was too afraid to even open the cupboards.
“I’m thirsty, Mama,” she said.
I’d bought some juice boxes, knowing there likely weren’t any dishes or glasses in the cupboards. Somewhere in the trunk of the car was a box holding a complete set of four dishes, bowls, cups, and silverware. But for now, I poked the straw into the apple juice box and handed it to her.
“This place is dirty, Mama,” she said.
I nodded and started to feel tears welling up in my eyes. Pilar had warned me, but I still had somehow vastly underestimated the amount of work that would be required to make this house into some sort of home. I’d dreamed we’d do some cleaning up: wiping down counters, mopping floors, making beds, and that within a couple of days, I’d be set up in my studio painting. That Avery would be at my feet happily playing with her dolls or coloring in her coloring books. That it would be clean and bright.
The
reality was this house was falling down. Smelly. I turned the faucet, heard the pipes groan in protest, and (as promised) the noxious scent of rotten eggs filled the air. I turned the handle to the left and noticed there was a fairly bad drip. I cranked the handle harder, thinking maybe I just hadn’t turned it off all the way, but the handle came off in my hand.
Trying not to cry, I picked up Avery and said, “Let’s go find your room.”
I lifted her onto my hip and made my way up the broken stairs, every step as cautious as if I were walking through a land mine–riddled field. At the top of the stairs, there was a long hallway with doors to four bedrooms, most of them small and dormered with slanted ceilings. Some had beds in them. Others were empty.
Finally, I found a small room with a twin bed and child-size bureau.
“Is this my room?” Avery asked, already delighted. Her expectations, like mine, lowering with every second.
“Yes, it is,” I said. I knew if I cracked, if I wavered, she’d be onto me.
“I love it,” she said. “Even if it smells bad.”
“I’m going to sleep in here with you tonight, okay?” I asked.
“Okay. Just this one night,” she said seriously.
I went to the car and grabbed the bag of old sheets my mother had given me and Avery’s little backpack, which was stuffed with her blanket and plush animals. I had her brush her teeth and slipped her nightie over her head. When she was ready, we lay down together. She fell immediately to sleep, and I curled around her. I pressed my cheek against her back, listened to her breaths, to her heart, to her sighs, and wished myself into my own fitful slumber. But just as I was drifting off, my phone buzzed next to me, pulling me out of that deep, dark cocoon of sleep.
I reached over like a drunk to the phone on the floor next to the bed.
Heat spread through my body, electric. It couldn’t be. He didn’t have my cell number. We were safe here. I blinked hard, my eyes struggling to focus.
It was just a text from Gus: Sending kisses for my girl. And for just one delirious moment, I thought he meant me.
The Box
A very woke me up crying.
“I’m wet, Mama,” she wailed. She was standing next to the bed in the dim light of dawn, her nightgown soaked. I slowly felt the cold dampness of the sheets against my legs and sighed.
“Crap,” I grumbled.
I climbed out of bed and went to her. She raised her arms up, and I peeled her wet nightgown off. Shivering, she stood there naked while I searched for something to put on her. Finally I peeled off the sweatshirt I was wearing, which was, thankfully, still dry, and pulled it over her head.
Avery hadn’t wet the bed in over a year. She was one of those kids who refused the potty until one day she suddenly gave up the diaper. She’d been the same with her bottle, then her pacifier.
She was crying loudly now.
“It’s okay,” I said, though it really wasn’t. Her little pink rolling suitcase with all of her clothes was still in the car. I glanced at my phone and saw it was only six o’clock. It would be cold outside.
“I’m wet,” she wailed.
“I know, cutes,” I muttered.
The house was cold, freezing. Pilar had said to set the thermostat at sixty-five, and the furnace should just kick on, but when I put my hand near the vent, it was bone cold. I could see Avery’s breath as she shuddered and exhaled one last whimper and sigh.
I stripped the wet sheets off, pulled the blanket from the foot of the bed, wrapped it around her, and ushered her to the next room over, where at least the mattress was dry.
“Stay here, baby,” I said. “I’m going to see if I can get the heater going.”
She curled up into a little ball on the bare mattress, clutching her threadbare donkey (Donk, she called him) to her chest.
I grabbed a sweater from my suitcase and pulled it over my head. I pulled on a second pair of socks. The wood floor was like an ice rink.
The house looked different in the dim light of day, less ominous. Now it simply felt run-down and shabby. Run-down and shabby I could deal with, had dealt with my whole adult life. Gus and I had lived in places a lot worse than this. And we’d been happy. And while Gus wasn’t here, he was here, cracking jokes and making light of everything that scared me. Remember that place we lived after graduation? The time we used the garbage disposal and our salad wound up in the bathwater? At least there aren’t any crack addicts living in the hallways. Bright side, Wynnie, bright side!
I remembered to be cautious on the stairs—no small feat given the missing railing. The last thing I needed to do was plummet to my death, leaving my four-year-old child alone. I’d need to teach her how to call 911, I thought.
I made my way through the cold house, located the door to the basement. She said the cellar was partially finished on one side; that’s where I would find a washer and dryer, she promised, the hot water heater, and the furnace. I groped around in the darkness for the cord that would bring light and pulled.
“Finished” was a very optimistic word for this. It was like some sort of underground hovel. The “walls” were made of brick on one side and earth on the other. The floor, as far as I could tell, was some strange, crumbling hybrid of cement and dirt. It smelled like earth and, again, the pungent scent of sulfur was ubiquitous.
I quickly found the utility room where the furnace sat, or rather slept. Like the vents it serviced, it was still and quiet. Cold to the touch. Defiant. I had definitely clicked the thermostat upstairs to “on,” so I had no idea what could be wrong. I looked, hopefully, for some sort of switch.
Nothing.
I turned around, as though the answer might be somewhere else in that room. In the exposed galvanized pipes that ran across the ceiling in a complicated network. In the hot water heater I prayed would not defy me (I wanted nothing more than to give Avery a nice warm bath after this).
I wondered if maybe there was some sort of master switch somewhere that would just turn everything on. I knew it was magical thinking at this point, but I was desperate. Gus and I had lived in one apartment where there was a light switch that controlled the electricity for an entire side of the house. Anything was possible. I glanced quickly at each of the walls: nothing. And so I moved to a small tower of boxes, which obscured the back wall.
The boxes were mostly empty, but some were filled with old magazines, miscellaneous papers, dusty books, and newspaper-swaddled breakables. It was as if someone had never finished unpacking, or maybe had just begun. I moved the boxes away, still looking for that mysterious switch, and a recessed area in the earthen wall was revealed. It was about one foot by one foot, a strange little cubbyhole, just big enough for the shoebox sitting there.
I brushed a thick layer of dust and dirt from the top. The box was sealed shut. On the lid, written in careful script, it said Epitaphs and Prophecies.
How strange. I picked up the box and shook it. Something rolled around inside.
Curiosity, as it was wont to do, got the better of me, and I picked at the packing tape, which crisscrossed over the lid. It took me several minutes to wriggle it free and to get the lid off.
Film canisters.
Roll after roll of 35 mm film. I hadn’t seen these in ages, since I was in college. I’d taken photography for one semester in art school before focusing on painting. I’d always been inept at processing and printing film; it took a patience I didn’t have. I liked the immediacy of paint on canvas. The certainty of it, the control. Photography seemed like such a crapshoot. So many factors at play. And even if you were to take a brilliant photo, a simple, careless error (an open door, a sliver of light) could destroy it.
I plucked one of the canisters from the box and studied it. There was no film sticking out, nothing to thread through the spools of a camera. Which meant it was used up. Spent. Undeveloped. I grabbed another and another; every one of them. There must have been fifty rolls of film in the box. Damn. Who takes fifty rolls of film and doesn’t
get them developed?
There were either twenty-four or thirty-six exposures on each roll. I quickly calculated this meant there were likely close to fifteen hundred pictures trapped inside those canisters.
A gust of cold air came from somewhere, and I shivered, remembering why I was down here. The dead furnace.
“Mama?” Avery’s voice brought me back to reality.
“I’m down here, honey,” I said. “I’ll be right up.”
I grabbed the box of film and took one last glance at the useless furnace before I made my way back through the dingy basement to the stairwell. Avery was waiting at the top, swimming inside my sweatshirt.
“Hey, baby girl,” I said. “I thought I told you to stay in bed. Those stairs are really dangerous.”
“I peed again,” she said.
I sighed. How many beds were left? I hoped there was some vinegar, some bleach, something in the kitchen cabinets. And I forgot all about my discovery as I pulled off my now-wet sweatshirt from Avery and replaced it with the sweater I was wearing.
* * *
The sun came up bright and luminous, and by eight o’clock I could see why Pilar had fallen in love with this house. Every room was filled with gorgeous light. My amber spot in the duplex living room seemed pathetic compared with the honey-dipped floors here.
The east-facing windows also faced the ocean, and the view from the kitchen table was nothing short of spectacular. I unloaded the small stash of kitchen stuff from the car and made French toast stuffed with cream cheese and raspberry jam, Avery’s favorite. She sat on my lap, and we drank from apple juice boxes, looking out at the rocky shore below us.
“Can we go swimming today?” she asked.
“It’s too cold for swimming, but we can go down to the beach later if you want,” I said.
My brain was buzzing with all of the things I needed to do to make the house habitable. First on the list was getting the furnace working. The warm glow of the sun was nice, but by the time the sun went down, it would be freezing cold again.
The hot water, thankfully, worked, and after I washed the dishes and ran the soiled sheets and blankets through the washing machine, I called Pilar about the furnace.