by Katrina Leno
“Mom?” she’d said, and when Ruth looked up at her, it had felt like her mother was returning from a long journey—her face was clouded over; it took her eyes a full minute to focus.
“Jane, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry, but something happened. Your father… Jane. Your father had a heart attack. Sweetheart. I’m so sorry. He’s gone.”
Ruth had said more, but Jane hadn’t heard a word of it; her ears were overcome by the sound of her own blood sloshing angrily through her veins, the sound of crashing waves, persistent and loud.
“What do you mean?” she said finally, interrupting her mother, her voice almost a shout. “What do you mean he’s gone?”
“I’m so sorry, Jane. I’m so sorry.”
It seemed like that was the only thing Ruth was capable of saying—I’m so sorry—and each repetition only served to make Jane angrier and angrier. She was aware that her emotions were confused, that she should be feeling sad, not angry, not resentful, not hateful, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it; she felt the way she felt, and she couldn’t do anything to stop it, to correct it.
“But what do you mean?” she’d screamed at her mother, and Ruth had stopped apologizing, Ruth had rested her forehead on the steering wheel and begun to sob.
Jane couldn’t help feeling a pang of that same resentment, now, that same anger, that same rushing in her ears, as she sat, listening to her mother trying not to cry. Because a few days after Greer had died, Ruth had come back from the lawyer’s office quiet, smelling like smoke again, and it took almost a week for her to finally tell Jane the truth: They were broke.
It seemed that lately it was taking longer and longer for Ruth to tell Jane the truth. Full minutes in the car to choke out what had happened to Greer. Days to reveal they were broke. Another week to mention the house in Maine, a house Jane had never heard of before, a house they were now barreling toward at sixty-five miles per hour.
What else had Ruth not yet worked up the courage to tell her daughter?
Greer Robinson (Ruth had kept her maiden name of North; Jane was a North-Robinson) had been a loving, devoted husband and father—but he had shared that one quality with his wife, that propensity for dishonesty. It had always been his dream to start his own business; their life as a family of three had been marked with financial ups and downs as Greer left steady, stable jobs to work for various start-ups that inevitably failed after six months or a year. Eventually, he’d taken their entire savings—apart from a few thousand dollars Ruth had in a separate account—and invested it in a business that had failed very quickly. All the money was gone. He had stopped paying the mortgage on the house months ago. He hadn’t told his wife about any of it.
So Ruth had come up with a plan: They would sell their house in California, barely break even, and move across the country to her mother’s estate in Maine. Emilia North had been dead for two years, and she had left the New England house to Ruth in her will.
“We’ll only have to pay property taxes and insurance,” Ruth had told Jane, like Jane had any idea what those two things meant or what they might cost. “We can manage that. I’ll get a job, and we’ll manage.”
“Why can’t we just sell that house and stay here?” Jane had asked.
“It needs too much work. It would never pass inspection. And there aren’t any mortgage payments. I know this sounds counterintuitive, but I just don’t have the money to sell a house like that.”
Jane glanced over at her mother now. Ruth had been acting stranger and stranger the closer they got to Maine, and now here they were, one hour in, and Jane wondered if she should offer to drive.
But then Ruth took a deep breath, a purposeful breath, and when she looked over at her daughter, her eyes were dry and wide.
“Ready for this?”
“No,” Jane responded bluntly. But she smiled a little. A sad smile that fooled no one.
“Me neither,” Ruth said.
She pulled out of the parking lot.
And when they got back on the highway, Jane almost wished she felt something—a jolt, a shock, a bolt of lightning—just as she wished she’d felt something when they passed the state line into Maine—but it was just the same as every single mile since California.
Just another mile marker disappearing into the distance behind her.
It took just over four hours from Kennebunkport, with a bathroom break and a stop for lunch and a gas top-off and two cups of cheap coffee so hot Jane couldn’t even take a sip for fifteen minutes.
They passed a sign that said: WELCOME TO BELLS HOLLOW. EST. 1680. “LITTLE PLACE IN THE FOREST.”
“Little Place in the Forest,” Jane read. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“A lot of these old towns have slogans like that,” Ruth replied.
“Weird.”
“There’s a Blueberry Capital of the World not far from here.”
“I don’t like blueberries,” Jane said, perhaps because she was determined not to like anything about Maine, including any of its seasonal fruits.
Ruth smiled. “Me neither.”
Another five miles down a quiet, tree-lined road and Ruth slowed the car and made a right-hand turn onto a street with no street sign. Jane thought maybe Bells Hollow was so small that it didn’t even need street signs. Maybe the postal workers knew everybody by name. Maybe they didn’t even have mail here.
They drove for a half mile more. There were only a few houses on the street, set far back from the road and from one another, big houses with big yards and big, long driveways. Each lot was cut out of dense woods, the dark trees skirting the edges of the property lines.
“Little Place in the Forest,” Jane whispered.
They were slowing down; Ruth gripped the steering wheel tightly, and gently eased the car to the side of the road. They were at the very end of the street. Jane looked past her mother out the driver’s-side window and there it was—North Manor, a house Jane hadn’t even known existed until her mother had slid an old Polaroid across the kitchen counter that night two weeks ago.
Like the other houses on the street, North Manor was set back from the road, a large colonial-style mansion with three gables at the front and four white columns supporting a white-railed balcony. The nine windows at the front had black shutters. There were two brick chimneys at either end of the house, and a faded brick path leading up to the front door.
In the Polaroid, the house had been pristine in its beauty.
Now, though, it was barely recognizable as the same place. All but two of the windows were smashed. One was boarded up completely. Two shutters hung at haphazard angles, and the grass was overrun with dandelions and looked like it would come up to about Jane’s shins. The brick path was littered with patches of weeds that had pushed aside the stone and made everything uneven.
“Jeez,” Jane whispered.
They hadn’t gotten out of the car. Jane didn’t even think her mother had looked up at the house yet; she was staring very purposefully at the center of the steering wheel.
“Mom?”
Ruth blinked rapidly and looked over at her daughter, keeping her eyes down. “What does it look like?”
“You want an honest assessment?”
“Please.”
“It sort of looks like one big tetanus trap.”
“Okay,” Ruth said, nodding.
“Are you going to look?”
“I’m going to look.”
“Soon?”
“Soon.”
A few seconds passed. Jane saw her mother’s lips moving quickly, silently—some private countdown she didn’t want to intrude on.
Then Ruth took a breath, lifted her eyes, and looked out the window at the place where she’d grown up.
Jane had only ever lived in their small house in the Valley. She couldn’t imagine leaving it, like her mother had, and returning so many years later to find it in near ruins.
“You okay?” Jane asked.
“Oh, I
don’t know,” Ruth said, sighing. “Look at this place. It’s a mess. I should have come back here so much sooner.”
“Did all this happen in two years? Since Grandma died?”
Ruth frowned. “I don’t think your grandmother was in her right mind the last few years of her life. I think she just let it go.”
“But it’s okay? For us to live here?” Jane asked. “Without, you know, contracting a staph infection or something?”
Ruth laughed. “The windows are the main thing. I called ahead and had them measured. They’ll start to replace them in the next few days, before winter sets in.”
The phrase winter sets in was entirely alien to Jane. In Los Angeles, winter meant it was sixty-five degrees out for a few weeks and people leaped at the chance to wear too-heavy jackets and floppy beanies. She had seen snow on a family trip to Tahoe when she was twelve, and she remembered it being exciting at first—but that excitement had worn off when her boots soaked through and she’d lost feeling in her toes.
Jane opened the car door and slid out. It was colder than she’d expected; there was a bite to the air that even the chilliest nights in California hadn’t managed to carry, and there was a breeze that blew Jane’s waist-length, wavy blond hair around her face. She caught it in her hands and trapped it in a low ponytail.
Jane heard Ruth’s door open and shut, and a few moments later, she was standing next to her, staring up at the house.
“It’s freezing,” Jane complained. “It’s only the beginning of October! Isn’t this supposed to be fall? I thought fall was, like, a gentle breeze and a pumpkin-spice latte.”
“That’s September,” Ruth replied. “October is basically early winter. Although we can still get you a latte, if you want.”
“Maybe later,” Jane mumbled, just as a gust of wind blew across the front yard, raising goose bumps on her arms and the back of her neck.
Ruth put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders. “I know none of this is what we wanted. If there was any way we could have stayed in California, honey…”
“I know.”
“We just owed too much on that house. I never would have been able to catch up. And Los Angeles is so expensive. It’s two lattes for the price of one, here.”
“I know.”
“And I love you very much, and I promise this won’t be forever. You’ll be applying to colleges this year. You’ll get into one back home, and you’ll go, and I’ll eventually sell this place and follow you there with my tail between my legs. We’ll make it work.”
“I know.”
“Can you say anything except I know?”
“He chose the worst time to die,” Jane said, just a little morbid humor between mother and daughter that made Ruth smirk and nod in agreement.
“Tell me about it. He certainly did throw a wrench in things.”
Jane had a flash of her father lying in his casket, looking waxy and strange in death, no outward signs of the heart attack that had killed him.
In the flash, his hands were clasped on his chest. He was holding a wrench.
Jane’s mouth felt suddenly chalky and dry.
“Mom—how come you never came back here?” Jane asked, a little nervous all of a sudden, like the chill of the air had worked its way into her skin and settled itself in her belly, to twist and writhe like some alive thing.
Ruth hesitated. It felt to Jane like she was deciding what to say, like she was carefully arranging her words into the most appropriate order. Jane thought back to Paula at the bookstore, the strange look that had come over her face, the way she had told Jane to be careful. Finally, in a forced kind of way, Ruth said, “It isn’t always easy. Returning to the past. Now, come on—let’s get inside and have a look around.”
She started walking to the house.
Returning to the past… Jane turned the phrase over in her head as she followed Ruth to the front door. She didn’t understand what it meant, or what it might be like to not want to return to the past. That was all she wanted to do; all she wanted in the entire world was to rewind, start the tape over, go back a few weeks or months and try a do-over, get her dad back and drag him to the doctor’s office before it was too late, fix whatever had gone wrong in his body that had made his heart turn against him.
Ruth fit the key into the lock, fumbling just a little to get it to move. When she finally pushed the door open, a wave of dusty, stale air hit them.
It was the smell of disuse, of empty rooms, of empty hallways, of two years without anyone walking around, without any air circulation. It was like mothballs stuck into the backs of closets, that sickly sort of smell that caused your throat to go dry, your saliva to evaporate.
It was a thick thing, a heavy thing. The feeling of neglect seemed to radiate from all around them. They stood in the doorway, peeking in, letting their eyes adjust to the dim light, and then Ruth stepped inside and Jane followed her and there it was, that phrase again, because walking through the front door felt exactly like returning to the past, in such a quick, immediate way it left her feeling a little dizzy.
Like walking through a familiar room in the dark and missing your step, knocking your hip into a chair you could have sworn was three feet away from you.
Like raising your hand to wave at someone in a crowd before realizing it isn’t who you thought it was at all.
Like a hollow swoop in the pit of your stomach from standing up too fast.
“What is this place?” Jane whispered.
Ruth actually laughed—and her laugh helped break the spell a little, helped return Jane to reality.
“It won’t be that bad once we fix it up,” Ruth promised.
“It’s like the creepy house in And Then There Were None,” Jane said. It wasn’t one of her favorite Agatha Christie novels, but the house on Indian Island gave her the chills just like North Manor did. She wouldn’t be surprised if a spooky voice started playing out of a gramophone, announcing their crimes.
Whatever Jane’s crime was, she was sure the punishment was too great to fit.
“I don’t remember that one,” Ruth murmured. She flicked the light switch next to the door—nothing. “Shit. That should have been on by now.”
“We are absolutely going to be murdered,” Jane said.
“This is not an Agatha Christie novel,” Ruth replied sensibly. “Get your cell phone out.”
Jane took her phone out of her pocket and checked it. “Great. No service. We are definitely going to be murdered.”
“Stop being so dramatic and turn the flashlight on.”
Jane did.
In the soft beam of the light’s glow, the foyer looked even spookier than it had a few minutes ago.
There was a faded Oriental carpet running the length of the hall; a wide, open staircase spun upward and disappeared into shadow; and the banister and entranceway table were covered in a thick blanket of dust.
Jane couldn’t imagine this house filled, as it once was, with people—let alone her mother as a child, her mother as a baby, her mother as a teenage girl, attending school and kissing boys and doing homework and playing games.
“It’s cold in here,” Jane said.
“The heat was supposed to come on with the lights,” Ruth replied.
Their house in California hadn’t even had heat. Jane looked over at her mother. She seemed to have shrunk two inches; her shoulders were hunched and sagging, her arms folded on her chest like she was trying to make herself as small as possible.
“How are you holding up?” Jane asked.
Ruth shrugged. “Not sure. You?”
“Not sure,” Jane repeated.
Ruth took a step forward. She rubbed at a spot on her left wrist, then she reached her hand out and placed her palm flat on the banister. “I broke my wrist on this staircase,” she whispered. “I slid down the whole thing on a trash-can lid.”
“Sounds unsanitary.”
“My mother almost killed me. I think she would have, if she hadn’t first
needed to drive me to the emergency room.”
Jane had only met her grandmother three times. Emilia North had visited for Christmases when Jane was four, eight, and twelve. They had never gone east to see her.
She doesn’t like visitors, Ruth had explained once.
“Where should we start?” Jane asked.
“This way,” Ruth said, and walked through an open doorway into a big sitting room. Someone had taped cellophane over the broken windowpanes, and some bigger pieces of furniture were covered with dusty, yellowed sheets. Jane could make out the shape of a piano in one corner; a large bookcase or hutch against one wall; a long, low sofa in the middle of the room.
“Who played the piano?” Jane asked.
“My father.”
Jane had never met Chester North; he had passed away when she was just five years old.
She wondered, now, whether it had hurt her mother to lose her father as much as it had hurt Jane to lose hers—
It must have.
“That’s a 1925 Steinway,” Ruth said. “We could sell it. It would probably pay for your first year of college.”
They walked into the next room. And the next room. An endless stretch of rooms, each with its collection of sheet-covered furniture, each alike in its feeling of loneliness.
They kept walking until they reached a room at the far end of the house. An enormous fireplace took up much of one wall. “We’ll sleep in here tonight,” Ruth said. “We’ll light a fire. We should be nice and toasty.”
“Are there doors?”
“Mais oui. Observe.” Ruth hooked a finger into the pull of a pocket door and slid it out of the wall.
“So fancy,” Jane said.
“I know, that’s why I said it in French.”