The Invited

by Jennifer McMahon

  He laughed. Clearly the answer was yes. But Nate’s question was still in the air and he looked at her, waiting for a response.

  “I don’t know,” Helen admitted. “That’s so much more money.”

  “Not necessarily,” he countered. “Not once you factor in the true cost of renovating an old place like the ones we’ve been looking at. In fact, we might even end up saving money, especially when you look at it long term if we build it to be superefficient.”

  The more Nate talked, the more excited he got, the idea snowballing as he went along. They would do the work themselves—they were already discussing theoretical renovations to so many of the homes they’d viewed. Why not take it a few steps further? “Oh my god, why didn’t we think of this before? We haven’t found anything even close to our dream house because it doesn’t exist yet—we have to build it! We’ll be like Thoreau on Walden Pond!”

  She shook her head, gave a don’t be ridiculous laugh. She’d studied Thoreau in college, even took a field trip out to Walden Pond. “Thoreau built a tiny cabin big enough for a desk and a bed. We’re talking about a two-thousand-square-foot house with all the modern conveniences. Do you have any idea how much work that is?”

  “I’m not saying it’ll be easy,” Nate said. And then he threw the gauntlet down: “But don’t you think this is what your father would want?”

  “I don’t—” She faltered. She remembered helping her father with the finish work on a house he’d built the summer before she went away to college. “This house,” her dad had said, “it’s gonna be here a long, long time. You can drive by with your kids, your grandkids, and tell them you helped build it. This house, this thing we built, it’ll outlive us both.”

  “I think it’s perfect!” Nate said. “Trust me! It’s going to be perfect.”

  It was hard, really, not to get swept up in Nate’s enthusiasm. Not to believe him when he had a solution to a problem. He was the rational one, the critical thinker, and she’d come to trust him on all practical matters. He’d known (after hours of research) which car they should buy, the best plan for paying off the last of their student loans, even which gym they should join.

  She loved him for many reasons, but mostly because of the way he balanced her out, grounded her, took her most ethereal ideas and found a way to give them form. If he said building a house made more sense than buying one, then he was probably right. And if he said there was a way to do it and give Helen the sense of history she longed for, then she had to believe him.

  Helen reached over the pizza box, picked up one of the glossy New England real estate flyers, and flipped to the back, to where the land listings were. She started looking at pictures of vacant lots, doing her best to imagine her dream house standing there, she and Nate tucked safely inside.

  * * *

  . . .

  This is where our house will go, Helen thought now as she watched the men work on the foundation. She could almost imagine the lines of it, the shadow it would cast, the roof reaching up to touch the impossibly blue sky. The clouds were so low, so vivid, she was sure that if she climbed the hill, she’d be able to reach out and touch them. It was like being in a child’s drawing of the perfect landscape: trees, sky and clouds, happy yellow sun, and, beneath it, a square box of a house with a smiling couple standing outside.

  They had discovered this piece of land back in January and made an offer that day. The craziest part was it wasn’t even on their list to look at—they’d found it when they got lost looking for an old covered bridge Helen had seen signs for. They stopped at a general store for directions and there on the bulletin board was an ad for the land: forty-four acres in the small village of Hartsboro, Vermont. They called the realtor and arranged to meet him out there that afternoon. Half of the land was wooded, but the western part of the property consisted of the Breckenridge Bog. Land not useful for farming or building. Land that, local legend claimed—the realtor said this with a chuckle—was haunted. As they trudged out through a foot and a half of freshly fallen snow to look at the property, Nate chuckled with him. He said, “Do you think the seller would accept a lower offer on the basis that the land is known to be haunted?”

  “I think,” the realtor said, turning serious again, “the seller is highly motivated and would consider any reasonable offer.”

  They were in a large clearing with a hillside in front of them, woods to the right and left, the single-lane dirt road behind them. As they walked, it began to snow big, thick flakes that caught on Helen’s eyelashes. Their feet sank in the perfect white snow and Helen looked at the trees, blanketed in white, softly bent with the weight of it. Helen was struck by the quiet, the serenity of the landscape.

  “Haunted?” Helen asked, circling back. “Really?”

  The realtor nodded, then looked a little like he was sorry he’d mentioned it. “That’s what people say.” He shrugged, as if he didn’t really know the story, and he started telling them that the back of the property was bordered by a class three road that became a snowmobile trail in the winter. “You folks get yourselves a couple of snow machines and you’ll be in business,” he said. “But seriously,” he added. “What you’ve gotta understand is that even though this place is forty-four acres, only about four acres are suitable for building. The rest is just too hilly or marshy. That’s why the low price.”

  Helen did not believe in ghosts. But she believed in history. “Hey, it’s not every piece of property that comes with its very own ghost,” Helen whispered to Nate. If there was a ghost story attached to this land, then that meant the land had a story to tell. Maybe she wouldn’t get her hundred-year-old house with stories to tell, but she could settle for a place with history, a mystery even.

  Nate nodded, wiggled his fingers, and made a ghostly Oooo sound.

  Nate pointed out the sugar maples on the back hill and said they could tap the trees, boil the sap, and make syrup. “Can’t get much more quintessential Vermont than that!” he said excitedly.

  As they walked around the land, Helen had this strange sense of familiarity, of déjà vu almost, like she’d been there before. Silly, really.

  They saw the flat area with good southern exposure that would make a perfect building site and the old green trailer that stood on the edge of the clearing.

  “We can live in the trailer while we build,” Nate said. Then he leaned in and whispered excitedly to Helen, “It’s perfect! It’s got everything we’ve been hoping for and then some.”

  And it did seem perfect. Almost too perfect—it was exactly like the land Nate had been describing that they would find, the land he’d promised her. Helen had this sense then. This land—their new home—was meant to be; it had been waiting for them, calling to them. But the thought was not entirely a warm and comforting one; no, it was more like a prickle on the back of the neck. It both drew her to the place and made her want to get in the car and race all the way back to their condo in Connecticut.

  “I don’t know what kind of shape that old mobile home’s in,” the realtor admitted. “The seller was using this place as a hunting camp, but he hasn’t come up in a long time. It’s got plumbing and electricity, but I don’t know if it works. It’s being sold as-is.”

  Helen looked at the vintage trailer, aluminum and faded green, and guessed it to be about thirty feet long and maybe eight feet wide, up on cinder blocks. The roof wasn’t falling in, and the louvered windows weren’t broken.

  Nate was looking at it, at all of it—the trailer, the woods, the clearing—with an excited sparkle in his eye. He’d brought his 35 mm camera, the one he used to take photos on his birding trips, and was snapping pictures of it all.

  The Hartsboro land enchanted them both, even on that frozen day in January. Helen led them down the hill, finding the path to the bog through the trees easily, like she knew the way. She loved the otherworldliness of the frozen bog. They’d walked out
into the center of the bog while the realtor waited in his heated Suburban. “You folks take all the time you want,” he’d said.

  Nate pointed out tracks in the snow: deer, snowshoe hare, even the wing marks of an owl that had lunged down to swoop up some unsuspecting rodent from a bed of snow.

  “It looks like an angel landed,” Helen said, thinking of the ghost the realtor had mentioned, wondering if ghosts left marks in this world. If a ghost left a mark, she thought, it would be like this—delicate wing prints in the snow.

  Nate poked around, pointed out the drops of blood. “An angel who snacks on tasty voles,” he said, grinning.

  Nate had spent his summers as a boy at his grandparents’ farm in New Hampshire. Helen had known him only as an adult, but maybe he was secretly meant to be a country boy again, not cooped up in the suburbs where the only wildlife you encountered were the chickadees at the backyard feeder and the noisy squirrels battling them for choice black oil sunflower seeds.

  The land was about a mile up a dirt road from the center of the village, which consisted of a general store, town hall, pizza place, Methodist church, tiny library, and gas station.

  “We can walk to town,” Nate said.

  “I bet they have church suppers,” Helen said.

  “Square dances, maybe even,” Nate said with a smile, hooking his elbow into hers, skipping around in a circle over the crusty ice covering the bog.

  When they stopped, winded, cheeks pink, boots soaked through, Helen said, “I wish my dad could see this place.”

  Nate nodded. “He’d love it, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah,” Helen agreed, eyes going back to the wing prints. “He definitely would.”

  And so it was decided. The asking price for the land was well below what they’d budgeted, but still, they put in a lowball offer just to see what the counteroffer would be. To their surprise, their offer was accepted immediately. “I guess the guy really was a motivated seller,” Nate said. Two months later, they closed, never actually meeting the seller—a lawyer represented him, saying only that Mr. Decrow was down in Florida now and was unwell and not up to traveling. After the closing, Helen and Nate went out to breakfast at a little café on the outskirts of town. It was a celebration—they were now the proud owners of the land!

  But Helen felt self-conscious: they were too well dressed, wore inappropriate footwear and dressy coats; they were clearly outsiders. When they came back, they’d need to work harder to blend in, to not seem so out of place. Helen pulled out her notebook from her purse and started a list of the things they’d need: sturdy leather boots, wool sweaters, fleece layers, flannel shirts, long underwear. Then she started a list of the tools they would need, putting an asterisk beside those they had already collected from her dad’s basement: circular saw, keyhole saw, hacksaw, framing hammers, finishing hammers, squares, levels, a chalk line, a plumb bob, and on and on. There was comfort in making lists, in knowing just what to put on them, in checking off items accomplished.

  * * *

  . . .

  They had sold their condo and Helen’s father’s house. Both sales were quick and easy, despite dire warnings from well-meaning friends about the crappy real estate market in Connecticut. They’d quit their nice, secure teaching jobs at the Palmer Academy, giving up not only the bimonthly paychecks but also their health insurance and the matching contributions to their 401(k)s. They’d even traded in their little Prius for a Toyota Tacoma pickup truck. They’d sold or given away a lot of their belongings, putting the things they were most attached to into a rented storage unit.

  Their colleagues and friends thought they were crazy when they described their plans to build a house, grow a garden, raise chickens and goats.

  “Mmm, lovely. Sounds like all nine circles of hell,” Helen’s friend Jenny had said at the going-away party Jenny and her husband, Richard, hosted. Helen had laughed.

  “Did you ever think maybe you were born in the wrong century?” Jenny had asked, narrowing her eyes, topping up their glasses of pinot grigio. Helen had nodded. Yes. She thought that often.

  Jenny was Helen’s oldest friend—they’d known each other since kindergarten.

  “Think of everything you’re giving up,” Jenny had said. “And what for? So you can go freeze your asses off in the middle of freaking nowhere while you act out this 1960s back-to-the-land fantasy? You’ll be isolated. We’ll never hear from you again.”

  “Of course you will,” Helen had promised.

  “Yeah, on the news maybe. We’ll hear about how you were eaten by bears.”

  “Black bears don’t eat people,” Nate had said.

  “Wolves then,” Jenny said.

  “No wolves in Vermont,” Nate countered.

  “Whatever, Nature Boy.” Jenny rolled her eyes dramatically and gestured with her wine glass. “Something bad will happen, I’m telling you. You’ll join a commune or cult or something, and Helen will stop shaving her armpits and Nate, you’ll go all Jack from The Shining. Or Unabomber.”

  “Stop,” Helen had said, laughing.

  “Seriously,” Jenny said. “Ted Kaczynski did the cabin-in-the-woods, self-sufficiency thing and look how it turned out for him. Please, God, do me a favor and change your minds before it’s too late.”

  But they didn’t change their minds.

  When Helen expressed any apprehension about all the security they were giving up, Nate would say, “But remember, what we’re doing, what we’re going to create for ourselves, that’s real security. When we’re done, we’ll have a house without a mortgage that we’ve built with our hands, enough acreage to grow all the food we need. It’s what you’ve always dreamed of, isn’t it? Your place in the country?”

  And yes, it was. And she loved how quickly her dream had become his as well. How he’d thrown himself into it like a science project, drawing plans, making spreadsheets, spending hours doing research, even doing a PowerPoint presentation to show her their new plan, clearly laid out, step-by-step. “See, if we do this right, we have not only enough money to build our dream house and set up a self-sustaining homestead, we have a cushion to live on for at least another year, maybe more if we budget carefully. And if we find a way to earn money from the homestead—selling eggs, maple syrup, firewood, maybe your homemade jam—we may not have to ever go back to working full-time again. We can focus on the work that matters to us. Spend time outside, being caretakers of our amazing land. Think of it: walks to the bog every day, learning about all the creatures that live there,” he said, eyes bright with excitement. “Maybe we could even start a blog about our lives there!” he suggested. “I can talk to Pete. I’m sure he’s got lots of tips. And he actually makes decent money from links and ads and stuff on his.”

  “I can research the history of the land, find out why it’s supposedly haunted. Maybe there was a house or farm out there once?”

  Nate nodded enthusiastically. “We’ll have plenty to do to keep us busy and plenty of money to keep us going for a while,” Nate promised.

  They made a couple of trips up in April, then again in early May, to start cleaning out the trailer and meet with contractors to survey, design, and lay out the foundation for the twenty-four-by-thirty-six-foot saltbox house they’d designed, based on old plans Helen had found in a book on historical homes. One that closely matched that first house she’d fallen in love with in New Hampshire. The front would be full of windows, south facing to get all the passive solar heating they could.

  Now here it was, day one of construction. Helen watched the concrete ooze down the chute and thought, This is it; we’re stuck here now, for better or worse. They’d assured their friends countless times they were making the right choice—“Weekends in the country for everyone once the house is up!” Helen promised—and they’d spent a large chunk of Helen’s inheritance on the land, truck, tools, and building materials. The money
that was left was carefully budgeted for the remaining house materials and living expenses to get them through the next year at least.

  They’d spent last night in a motel, but tonight, they’d start sleeping in the trailer. Their first night on the land. Tomorrow, the lumberyard would deliver the framing lumber and they’d spend the day stacking and arranging. They’d gather supplies and work on the garden while they waited a few days for the cement to cure.

  It was a chilly morning, with a rawness in the air that made it feel more like March or April than the third week of May. Helen was amazed by the difference in climate just four hours north of their old home in Connecticut. Nate stood in his new work boots, his chin already scruffy. “I’m going to grow a big mountain man beard,” he’d promised whenever they discussed their new life in Vermont. She reached over, touched the stubble on his chin. He turned, smiled at her. “Happy?” he asked.

  She paused, then gave him a warm smile. “Definitely,” she said. There was nothing definite about it, admittedly, but…Say the words and make them true, she told herself.

  “I am happy,” she said.

  She told herself that if she said it enough, then maybe this feeling of panic, of free-falling into the unknown, would go away.

  “So happy.”

  Shape your reality. Make it true because you say it is.

  Nate kissed her. It was a long kiss, and the men raking cement watched but pretended not to. And Helen was sure she could feel other eyes on them, too. Silly, really, but she couldn’t shake the feeling. She pulled away, glanced at the tree line, then over toward the bog.

  She thought, for a half a second, that she saw movement. A shape disappearing into the mist.

  “Okay?” Nate asked.

  “Yeah, it’s just…”

  “Just?”

  “I thought I saw someone.”

  He smiled, scanned the yard and trees. The construction men and their trucks. “Well, we do have some company,” he said. “Plus, there are probably a hundred animals watching us right now: mice, birds, voles, maybe even a deer or two.” He seemed so excited, little boyish almost, as he looked around, imagining all the animals out there.