The House on Primrose Pond

by Yona Zeldis McDonough

  “Really? I don’t remember her swimming much the summer I was here.” Susannah had thought it strange at the time.

  “Well, this was years ago. I can remember her in a black one-piece bathing suit that fastened around her neck. And big sunglasses. She seemed very fashion forward for Primrose Pond.”

  Susannah did not recall having seen such a bathing suit. “Did she have any close women friends in town?”

  Alice sipped her tea and considered the question. “She knew a lot of people—from the newspaper and the theater. I know Janet over at the library used to special order books for her. And there was another woman, Linda something or other. I can’t think of her last name.”

  “Could it have been Linda Jacobsmeyer?” asked Susannah. Linda was the woman who had cleaned out the house and gotten it ready for the renters, but Susannah had not been in touch with her for some time. She was pretty sure she had lost her contact information.

  “Yes, that was it.”

  “Do you have a number for her? Or an e-mail address?”

  Alice shook her head. “She moved away a number of years ago. But it should be easy enough to find her—can’t you find anyone on the Internet?”

  “I’m sure I could try—”

  The door opened and in walked Calista, bringing the chill of the day right in with her. The delighted look on her face when she saw Alice was like something small and sharp puncturing Susannah’s heart.

  “Dear girl, what a treat to see you!” Alice stood, and, to Susannah’s amazement, Calista dropped her backpack and crossed the room quickly to hug her. Emma must have interpreted this as an attack on her mistress; she jumped up and gave a sharp bark. Once again, Alice admonished her, but, this time, when the dog turned in a circle to settle back down, she bumped the table and Alice’s blue-and-white teacup sitting near the edge of the table fell to the floor. The cup was empty but it did not survive the drop. “Oh, I am so sorry!” said Alice. “I’ll replace it, of course.”

  “It’s no big deal,” said Calista, who was already on her knees picking up the pieces. “Mom has, like, a hundred of these.” But that one was my favorite, Susannah wanted to say. Because it was. “Anyway, you didn’t tell me Alice would be here!”

  “I was sure I mentioned it.” This was not true. She had been hoping that Calista would be off with her friends; that was what she typically did on Friday afternoons.

  Calista sat down and helped herself to a scone while Susannah went in the kitchen to throw away the broken cup. Charlie had bought this one for her, at an estate sale on Long Island; she’d had it since before they were married. Then she took out another cup and brought it to the dining room. Calista was now speaking in French, with reasonable fluency; Alice replied smoothly in kind.

  Susannah knew a smattering of French, enough to pick her way through letters or diaries when she was writing a novel set in France, but her speaking lagged far behind and she did not attempt to join in. After a few excruciatingly long minutes, Alice finally turned back to her. “She has an exquisite accent!”

  Calista beamed and Susannah busied herself with sweeping some crumbs into the cupped palm of her hand. “It sounds like you speak quite well too,” she said finally.

  “Junior year abroad, a lifetime ago,” she said, her fond gaze drifting once more toward Calista. “You should go to France, my dear. Paris.”

  “Oh, I want to go so much! In college, like you did. Or maybe even a summer program.” She glanced at her mother. “If I can earn the money, that is.”

  “Maybe you can get a job,” Susannah said. “You could advertise as a babysitter; I’m sure you’d find work.”

  “I have a better idea,” Alice said. “In the spring, I can start paying you to work with Jester. He truly needs the exercise and I’m just not up to giving it to him.”

  “But I thought Calista was going to be getting some kind of credit for that at school,” Susannah felt obliged to say. “At least that’s what Ms. Benoit said.”

  “I can still pay her, whether or not there’s school credit involved.” Alice had not finished her scone; so she had noticed. “That way, she could start saving for the summer. We can look up programs together. Antoinette doesn’t even need to know.”

  “I suppose not.” Susannah had the urge to pitch all the scones out the window into the yard; she could just imagine the glee of the raccoons. What was wrong with her today?

  “Really? You would do that? Oh, Aunt Alice, you are the best!” And Calista was up from the table and enveloping their guest in yet another enthusiastic hug.

  “Aunt Alice?” Susannah said.

  “That’s just our little joke.” Alice spoke from over the several small braids sprouting from Calista’s head. “I don’t have any nieces and Calista doesn’t have any aunts, so we thought we would just pretend.”

  Calista straightened up. “You feel like an aunt to me,” she said.

  Susannah had to turn away; she might actually start to cry.

  “And you feel like a niece to me.” Alice smiled. There was more talk of Paris programs, and Jester too. Susannah was fairly panting with relief when Alice finally got up to leave. She walked to the door, trailing praise for the scones—a lie if there ever was one—and murmuring about having them all over for dinner very soon. Emma followed close behind. Susannah handed her the coat; she did not even want to contemplate such an evening. But the good mood she’d engendered in her daughter lingered after she had gone, and Calista helped clear the table and did the dishes without even being asked. Then she trotted up the stairs to her room; Susannah heard the door close quietly a moment later.

  Back in the kitchen, she opened the Tupperware container in which Calista had stored the remaining scones and, with grim satisfaction, deposited them into the trash right on top of the shattered cup. Then she called Polly.

  “Of course you’re jealous,” Polly soothed. “Most natural thing in the world.”

  “Aunt Alice,” Susannah fumed. “They barely know each other!”

  “It’s a girl crush, don’t you see? Only the girl is a little older than usual.”

  “Is that what this is?”

  “Absolutely. Just leave it alone and it will play itself out.” There was the sound of crunching on the other end of the line; Polly must have been eating an apple.

  “You think?”

  “I know. Ginny once had one of those on a teacher. I heard about this woman morning, noon, and night and was of course compared to this paragon every day for, oh, about nine months, and found inferior in every possible way.”

  “Didn’t it make you angry?” Susannah was sitting at the table, orphaned saucer in her hands. Though most of her tableware was mismatched, that cup and saucer had been from the same set and shared both a pattern and a history.

  “Are you kidding? When the parent-teacher conference rolled around, it was all I could do not to pull her hair and slap the bitch!”

  Susannah laughed. This was what she loved about Polly—she was so out there.

  “But it all simmered down when Ginny found a boyfriend.” Another crunch. “Any chance of that happening?”

  “I’m not sure.” Susannah thought of the crew of boys—young men—she’d glimpsed in the back of the cars that dropped Calista off at the house. “The kids she hangs out with are older, not kids in her class. I’m not sure I like them.”

  “Do you actually know any of them?”

  Polly had her there. “Not really.”

  “Maybe it would be good to give them a chance?”

  Susannah was quiet, not wanting to concede the point. But she knew Polly was right—it wasn’t fair to judge her daughter’s friends until she knew them better.

  “You still there?” Polly asked.

  Susannah looked around the still not entirely familiar room and out the window across from where she sat. White, gray,
tan, brown. Snow covered the yard and coated the dark branches of the naked trees; snow, snow, and more snow. God, it was depressing. “Yes,” she finally said to Polly. “I’m here.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  After dinner, Susannah heard a car pulling up outside the house at the same time Calista must have spied it through the window. “There’s Megan.” She was already reaching for her coat. “We’re hanging out tonight.”

  “Where?” Susannah tried to see who was in the car, but it was too far away and too dark besides.

  “At her house. I won’t be late.”

  “Calista, you know that’s too vague.”

  “We’re going to watch a movie.” When Susannah did not answer, she went on. “I forgot to tell you—I got a ninety-six on my last English paper—that’s a solid A.”

  Susannah’s initial resistance to her daughter’s plans melted in the face of this new information; had Calista planned it that way? And anyway, hadn’t Polly said she should give these new friends a chance? “An A—I’m proud of you. Well, all right. You can go. Just be back by midnight.”

  “Okay.” Calista put a hand on the doorknob. “Bye, Mom.”

  A little while later another car pulled up, this one bearing Gilda Mooney’s father, who had come to collect her son. With both her kids out for the evening, Susannah was alone. She had a couple of library books she’d ordered through Janet, one on the religious climate of eighteenth-century New England and the other on the evolution of the justice system in colonial America. Both would be useful as background and she wanted to settle in with them.

  But after that conversation with Polly, her anger at Alice had subsided and she found herself thinking about the earlier part of her visit, when Alice had talked about her mother. She would contact Linda Jacobsmeyer; she ought to be able to track her down online. But she also had the feeling that the house still held clues, and if she looked hard enough, she would find them.

  She had been through the attic and her bedroom pretty carefully. But not the rest of the rooms upstairs. The kids were out, so this was a good time to explore. Susannah opened Calista’s door and, after hesitating for a second, went in. She wasn’t here to snoop, she told herself. At least not for information about Calista. She found nothing that belonged to anyone other than her daughter.

  Jack’s room was another story. His clarinet was in its case, but that was the only thing that seemed to be where it belonged. Clothes littered the bed and floor; open textbooks were strewn around. There were sheets of music and random papers; his backpack, gaping open, seemed to have exploded. Susannah picked her way through the mess to the bureau. The bunched-up clothes frothed out of the drawers, but when she poked through them, she saw nothing of interest.

  Then she turned to the closet, which was nearly empty. Jack hadn’t developed the habit of hanging up his clothes, and very little of what he wore needed hanging anyway. But wedged into the very back of the closet was a narrow three-drawer dresser. It was not visible when she had first opened the closet door and she had not realized it was there.

  The top drawer was empty and the middle one crammed, inexplicably, with old phone books—the one on top was from 1975. But it was the bottom drawer—secured by two nails and necessitating a hunt for the right tool to pry them loose—that yielded pay dirt: a menu from Le Chat Noir, a restaurant in Quebec, and a pair of ticket stubs from a theater in that same city. Nestled at the very back were three tiny cakes of soap, each wrapped in a crinkled, yellowing paper.

  Had her mother put all these things in here? If she had, it was a gesture in keeping with hiding the makeup bag in the woodshed. Her memory and her powers were slipping, but she still had an instinct to both preserve and hide certain precious artifacts from her past, even if she accomplished both aims rather crudely. The nailed drawer was proof that she still knew, though. And that she still cared. Mabel said she’d made a trip up here alone, without Susannah’s father. She could have easily done it then. And the boy who’d driven her up could have helped her nail the drawer shut. Or even done it for her.

  Susannah picked up a bar gingerly. SAVON, read the label. And when she turned it over, HOTEL DU LAC, QUEBEC. She set the soap on top of the dresser and looked more closely at the ticket stubs. They were dated August 18, 1994. A small shock of recognition coursed through her. She and her parents had been here, on the pond, in 1994. But they had not gone to Quebec that summer; she was sure of it. That meant that her mother had gone away for a few days—with someone else.

  On the front of the menu were the conventional offerings—coq au vin, blanquette de veau, salade niçoise—but on the back, she found a poem, or at least the first draft of one; several words and lines had been blotted or scratched out. There was no title.

  You were the lyre

  I was the hand

  You were the ocean

  I was the sand

  You foamed and you crested

  You ebbed and you flowed

  In the light of the moon

  You sparkled and glowed.

  But those days are gone now

  They slipped by so fast

  Cruel joys and sweet sorrows

  All over, all past.

  The light it is fading,

  And dark fills the room

  Soon you’ll be the angel who weeps at my tomb.

  The tone of this poem was quite different. Not hopeful, not hesitant. Not luxuriating in the aftermath of consummation. No, this poem was a leave-taking: mournful and resigned. Then she looked more closely at the bold, looping writing. Was it the same as the writing in the note? Was it? The bits of information Susannah had been gathering began swirling crazily around in her head. The order and significance of each individual element were not clear—not yet. But she believed she was getting closer to some kind of order and, with it, some understanding.

  Susannah gathered her contraband, brought it into her room, closed the door, and laid the pieces out like a puzzle. To the array she added the note, the volume of Yeats, the material Todd Rettler had sent, and the letter that came from George. Then she began shifting them around, trying to create a timeline, the way she did with her novels. She had not paid too much attention to the receipts when she’d first gotten them, but now she noticed that written across the bottom of one were the words Lunch, I. N. Vayne. So her mother had known the identity of the mystery poet. Had anyone else?

  Holding the wrinkled receipt in her hand, she recalled that there had been some kind of camping trip that summer; a bunch of them, including Travis and Corbin, had gone. They had stayed away two or maybe three nights; those could have been the nights her mother was in Quebec. But the dates. She had to know the dates of that trip. Then it hit her. She was seeing Corbin tomorrow night. Maybe he would remember.

  Susannah pulled everything she’d assembled out from under the bed and put whatever fit in the shoe box and the rest in a large envelope, then put both on a high shelf in her closet. Then she got ready for bed, where she fully expected she would not be able to sleep—she was so wired from her recent discovery.

  But she did fall deeply and quickly asleep; only her dreams—of tumbling, running, and even, in one, skydiving—left her enervated and exhausted the next morning. Would she even be up to her date with Corbin tonight? Maybe she ought to postpone. Then she remembered the kiss and she decided, no, she would not do that. Instead, she would make herself a very strong cup of coffee and try to get her day going.

  She pulled her fleecy new bathrobe—she had reluctantly decided to retire Charlie’s plaid flannel—over her sweats and thermal top. She’d never needed such nightwear in New York, but now she relied on it. Downstairs, she could see that it was going to be a bright, if cold, day; sunlight splashed on the snow outside and sent its reflected glare back in through the windows. On impulse, she crossed the enclosed porch, opened the back door, and took a few steps through the snow, getting cl
oser to Primrose Pond. This was crazy; it was bone-chillingly cold out here. She should have gotten her down parka, so she turned back to the house, intending to go back and slip it on over the robe.

  Then she stopped. Just mere inches away from her was the biggest moose she’d ever seen. Make that the only moose she’d ever seen. His fur was a mottled grayish brown, his nostrils gaped large and dark, and his antlers, spanning three feet, looked like bony hands trying to cup the sky. Susannah did not know what to do. She’d read that moose stags could be aggressive and even dangerous; they had been known to charge. So she remained planted where she stood, too scared to move, while the cold stung her hands, nose, and ears.

  But as she stood there, heart banging, she had to concede that the moose looked more comical than dangerous, his pliant lips engaged in constant motion. Maybe he was hungry? She thought of Jester eating the peppermint and reached into her pocket. No mints, but a ziplock bag of stale bread that she kept to crumble and feed to the birds. She extracted some of the bigger bits and tossed them onto the snow, as far away as she could. The moose looked but did not move, at least not right away. Then he began to walk toward the bread, lifting one enormous foot after the other.

  Keeping her gaze on him, Susannah backed away, slowly at first, and then more quickly. Within seconds, she was in the house, slamming the door. She darted to the window. The moose raised his head, probably in response to the sound. She had enough time to retrieve her phone and take several pictures as he looked around, his antlers bobbing gently. Then he ambled off toward a small copse of pines. Susannah watched him as he went—a stranger hailing from this strange new land.

  TWENTY-FOUR