by Jonathan Dee
“See you tonight,” he said, and hugged her.
Haley made it through the day, helping with the menial tasks that kept the empty mansion running, and then at four fifteen her mother turned to her and smiled and said, “You want to knock off early today?”
“No,” Haley said.
Karen’s smile flattened. “I mean, I have to stay and lock up, but you can call it a day if you want.”
“I’ve decided I’m not going.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m going to stay here in the house for a while.”
Her mom misunderstood, of course. “Is something going on between you and your father? You have to tell me what it is. Of course it’s okay with me if you stay at my place, but I’ll need to talk to him—”
“No,” Haley said, “I don’t want to go to your place either.”
Karen stared at her. “So where do you want to go?” she said slowly.
“Nowhere. I want to stay right here. Plenty of room.”
She felt quite calm but her mother’s strangely cautious reaction reflected that she must not have appeared that way. “Here in this house?” Karen asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It’s hard to explain. I just—”
“For how long?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But you mean like overnight?”
“Yes. I have some stuff in the car.”
In the cubicle, they were close enough to lean forward and touch each other’s knees, but they didn’t.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Karen said.
“This place is so fucked up, Mom,” Haley said. “It’s the nicest house in town and nobody’s allowed to live in it. Nobody owns it but you have to pay to get in. The people who built it were monsters, but everybody still kisses their ass even though they’re dead. It’s so fucked up that I just can’t get over how fucked up it is. It seems like a crime for it to just sit here unoccupied. Some other family lives in our old house now. Why is this any different? They don’t get to decide that no one else can sleep here after they’re dead. They don’t get to decide that! Thinking about it just makes me crazy all of a sudden. So I thought I’d sleep here for a while, just to prove a point. Maybe until school starts in a couple of weeks. Maybe longer. What difference would that make to anybody?”
“So it’s a political thing,” her mother said disdainfully. “Like a protest?”
“Maybe, yeah.”
“To get what? To demand what?”
Haley didn’t have a ready answer. Her mother seemed unnerved.
“Well, it’s obviously out of the question. It’s against the law, for one thing. And for another, it’ll get me fired. Maybe that’s what you want?”
“No.”
They stared at each other. Haley could feel the tension building, not in an abstract way either, and she knew a moment before it happened that her mother would reach out and try to grab her by the wrist, as if she were a child.
“Stand up,” Karen said. “Stand up! Stop this right now! Get out of this house!”
“You know you can’t make me,” Haley said reasonably. “Definitely not like that.”
Real panic was starting to show in her mother’s eyes. She stood up and left the cubicle. Haley heard the echo of her footsteps in the great room, then she heard her on her cell phone.
“It’s me,” she said. “No, everything is not okay. Did you put your daughter up to this? Do you even have any idea what’s going on? She’s lost her mind, that’s what. You need to get over here. I mean now. Yes, to Caldwell House, god damn it. I don’t give a shit if you’re on a site. This is an emergency.”
She stopped talking but didn’t reenter the room where Haley sat; Haley could hear her pacing around the kitchen. Twenty minutes later the front door opened and she heard the familiar low tones of her parents’ angry voices.
She walked out to meet them; she didn’t like the idea of the three of them crowding into her mother’s cubicle. It seemed like that kind of proximity might lead to something physical. Better to be out here, where there was some space. It both was and wasn’t odd to see them together again, uncomfortable and faking unity, in the grand entrance hall of a huge house where they didn’t seem to belong. “So, Haley, explain to me what this is about?” her father said. “You don’t want to come home?”
She faltered—he looked so hurt, where her mother had just looked so furious—but she was trying to ride on instinct alone for the moment. “I just want to sleep here, in the house,” she said, “and it seems wrong to me that I can’t.”
“Why do you want to stay here? It’s creepy. There’s probably no wi-fi, have you thought about that?”
“There is, actually,” Haley said, a little insulted, though in fact she had thought about that.
“Okay, there is.” He tried to smile, and then his expression collapsed. “Haley, honey, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry that your home is gone. It broke my heart to sell the house, because I wanted that to be your home forever, even after we’re gone. But I had no choice. That’s my failure. Mine, not your mother’s or anybody else’s. I know you can’t like where we’re living right now very much. It isn’t fair to you.”
“It’s not about that,” Haley said. She wiped her eyes. “It’s not about you, about either of you, I swear.”
“Then what’s it about?”
“It’s about this place. Just the—the fact of it. I’m sorry I can’t explain it any better than that. Maybe I have to do it to find out why I want to do it.”
He looked around the darkening entrance hall and comically rolled his eyes. “I don’t see what there is particularly to love about this place.”
“I don’t love it,” Haley said. “If anything I kind of hate it.”
Mark laughed a little. There followed a silence in which the triangle the family formed was undisturbed. “That’s it?” Karen said, to Mark.
“That’s what?”
“That’s all you’re going to do?”
“Well,” Mark said, “do you want me to physically overpower her?”
“Yes! She’s your child!”
“Well, I’m not going to do that,” Mark said.
Haley felt a thrill run through her as she saw that an old dynamic was coming to her rescue; he would come up with some rationale for not doing what Karen was asking him to do, just because of the way she was asking him to do it.
“There’s something she needs to get out of her system,” he said, “so let’s just let her do that, okay? She’s right, it doesn’t hurt anybody. And who’s she going to get in trouble with? Don’t you run this place?”
“Daddy,” Haley said. “I have a bag and a backpack in my car. Would you please carry it in for me?” She was pretty sure that if she went to the parking lot herself, her mother would lock her out of the house.
Mark shook his head in wonder and went out to her car. Haley and her mother stared at each other.
“Have you told anybody what you’re doing, besides us?” Karen said.
“No. I swear.”
“One night. Do not touch anything. I guess you and I could use a night apart at this point anyway. Maybe I can use it to figure out why you hate me so much.”
She left, without locking up as she normally would have; a few minutes later Haley’s father dropped her bags in the foyer and he left too. Neither of them had touched her; they seemed afraid to. Haley took her clothes upstairs to her room. She planned to put them in Katarina’s dresser, but the drawers were swollen shut.
She experimented with the wi-fi, carrying her laptop from room to room, and discovered that while there were a few dead spots upstairs, like the old servants’ quarters, the signal was mostly pretty strong. And while there were no working light fixtures anywhere except in the little suite of cubicles behind the kitchen, the electrical outlets worked both upstairs and down, presumably for the convenience of the housecleaning staff. So
Haley was able to spend most of her time on the second floor. She felt more comfortable there, less vulnerable maybe, even though it was a long walk down to the office any time she needed to use the bathroom or wanted running water for any other reason.
Was it wrong that she liked so much space, liked having it to herself? If what she was doing was a protest, maybe she should have invited other people to join her. Even like-minded people whom she didn’t know. There was something attractive about that scenario, but still she didn’t put it out there, via social media or any other way—didn’t communicate at all with anyone except her dad, who texted her to ask if she was okay, if she was warm enough, if she needed anything, and then texted her to say good night, just as he would have done if Haley had been in her bedroom at her mom’s. That progressive-dinner crowd—they were really just vandals, which she didn’t mean in a bad way, but they were restless and physical and if she invited them in then this whole thing, whatever it was, would surely turn into something different. Strangers would have been even worse. It was enough, she told herself, that someone was living here now, instead of no one. It wasn’t about numbers. One living person was as much of a defiance as ten or twenty would have been.
Still, she wanted to talk to someone, and so before it got too late she dialed her Aunt Candace. They hadn’t spoken in a while; Candace hadn’t even heard about Haley’s getting fired from her restaurant job. So she had to tell that whole story first. Hearing an adult laugh at it allowed Haley to see it as a little funny for the first time herself. Candace was living across the state line in Copake now, really not that far away at all, but they hadn’t seen each other in a long time.
“So what’s going on?” Candace said, and Haley explained where she was calling from.
“Huh,” Candace said, and then was silent.
“Say something,” Haley said. “Do you think I’m crazy?”
“Of course you’re crazy,” Candace said, but nicely, teasingly. “What are your mom and dad saying?”
“They think it’s because of the divorce. They think it’s about them.”
“Well, sure, they’d think that. So what is it about?”
“Everybody keeps asking me that. I should have a better answer by now. Do you know anything about the actual Caldwells, who built this place? They were literally evil. But, what, because you have money, you get to tell me where I can go even after you die? You know what I’m doing here? Sleeping. That’s it. That’s my big protest. I’m sleeping. Everybody can just get over it.”
“Easy,” Candace said.
“Sorry. Was I yelling? I’m sorry.” Haley stared out the window at the moonlit garden.
“Honey,” her aunt said, “is there anything you want me to do for you?”
Haley smiled. “Wanna come have the worst sleepover ever?”
“Yeah, tempting, but no. They’d probably shoot me on sight if I came back to Howland anyway. But here’s what I will do, I’ll call your dad. Mellow him out a little. Tell him that you’re not crazy.”
“Okay,” Haley said.
“And please don’t let things get out of control, okay? Call me if you think things are getting out of control.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” Candace said.
In the morning her mother arrived for work as usual. Haley saw her from behind the bedroom door, but if Karen so much as glanced upstairs, Haley didn’t catch it. She changed her clothes and brushed her hair and went downstairs to sit at her station in the cubicle.
“Are you all right?” Karen said evenly.
“I’m fine. What needs doing?”
Her mother stared at her. “We need to order more brochures,” she said. “You want to take care of that for me?”
“Sure,” Haley said. And the air between them was pretty friendly after that; but gradually Haley realized that this was because her mother took Haley’s coming to work as usual as a sort of passive or face-saving apology, which Karen had tacitly accepted. Sure enough, at the end of the day Karen turned to her and said brightly, with a sigh, “Ready to go?”
“No,” Haley said. “I’m not ready to go.”
Karen’s face fell and then slowly its expression hardened. “What are you up to, do you think?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“How do you see this ending, exactly?”
“I don’t know.”
Her mother nodded, looking down into her lap. “Go upstairs and get your things right now,” she said. “Enough is enough. That is an order.”
“No,” Haley said.
“Van Aswegen pops in unannounced once a week or so, you know. Do you want me to lose my job? What do you think will become of us if that happens?”
Haley, though weakened a bit by this, said nothing.
“Well, you know what? Here’s the upside to divorce, I guess. Today is Thursday and it’s still your week with your father and so technically this insanity is his problem.” She grabbed her purse and walked out. Haley heard the echo of the massive front door clicking shut behind her.
But later, after the grounds were closed, Haley looked out of the servants’-quarters window, from which most of the parking lot was visible, and her mother’s car was still there. She couldn’t see well enough to be able to tell if anyone was inside it. The next morning, when Haley woke, the car was in the same space. Though that didn’t necessarily rule out that her mother had gone home and come back again.
Friday Karen placed a sign on the steps outside the front door saying the entire house was closed for maintenance. Saturday passed uneventfully—it was raining, so the grounds were empty—until about three in the afternoon, when Haley heard the electronic sound of someone deactivating the security system to let themselves in. Haley peeked downstairs from behind the balustrade and saw a middle-aged woman carrying an upright vacuum cleaner. A few minutes later, from the direction of the dining room, she heard it roar, loud when it was on the hardwood, muffled when dragged onto one of the carpets.
She was screwed. She could probably make a run for it herself, but there was no way she could have gotten all her stuff down the staircase and out the front door without being seen. She listened to the vacuum—the slight change in pitch as it went back and forth, the silent interludes when it was necessary to switch outlets—and gradually relaxed into the drone of it, to the point where, when she heard the woman struggling to haul the machine up the grand staircase, her breathing barely sped up at all. The woman appeared in the doorway of the master bedroom and saw Haley sitting yoga-style on the bed.
“Hi,” Haley said, and the woman screamed. Maybe she believes in ghosts, Haley thought, as she listened to the footsteps pound back down the stairs and out the door. The vacuum cleaner stood upright outside the bedroom door where it had been dropped.
It wasn’t more than twenty minutes before a police car rolled into the parking lot. Haley retreated and sat on the bed, scared now. What am I doing? she thought. She heard a loud knock on the door. “It’s open,” she tried to yell, but her mouth was too dry. Then, unexpectedly, the sound of the keypad. She heard low voices coming up the stairs and knew what had happened. In a few moments the large silhouette of the town cop filled the bedroom doorway; over his shoulder appeared the face of Haley’s mother.
“May I ask what you’re doing here?” the cop said, very gently. Around his waist was a belt holding a holstered gun and a number of other tools or accoutrements Haley couldn’t identify. She was too frightened to speak. The nameplate over the cop’s shirt pocket said Pratt.
“She’s been staying here,” Karen said rapidly. “She works here, with me, I’m her mother. And I’m in charge of this place, and I said it was okay.”
“You’re in charge of this place?” Pratt said skeptically, without turning around.
“In the day-to-day sense, yes,” Karen said, “so it’s okay, I said it was okay.”
“Why isn’t she at home with you?”
Mother’s and daugh
ter’s eyes met over the trooper’s shoulder, as if they were asking each other for suggestions. “I told you,” Karen said, “she works here. She has my permission.”
“Well, that’s nice, but permission isn’t yours to give just because you work here too. Are these your clothes?” he asked Haley. “Did you spend the night here?”
“Yes, of course they’re her clothes, who else’s would they be?” Karen said. “Listen, you can release her into my custody or whatever it’s called, right? Haley, you’ll agree to be released into my custody?”
Haley nodded vigorously.
“You know,” the trooper said, finally taking a step out of the doorway and into the bedroom, “custody, permission, you seem to have a kind of hazy understanding of these words. Miss, would you stand up and turn around, please?”
“What?” Karen said. “No!” She ran around the large figure of the trooper and stood between him and the bed where Haley sat, hugging her knees and crying.
“Ma’am, there’s no need for me to arrest you both, is there?”
“There’s no need to arrest anybody! Do not put your hands on her. I’m warning you!”
“You’re warning me?” The cop laughed, but his demeanor changed. “Lady, what is your name again?”
“Karen Firth.”
“If you interfere with me, and especially if you physically attempt to obstruct me, this is going to turn into a much more serious matter, okay?”
“Mom!” Haley said, to her mother’s taut back.
“If you want to touch her, you’re going to have to go through me,” Karen said.