by Gian Sardar
“I was supposed to put it in your suitcase,” her mother continues. “I didn’t know what to tell him when he called.”
“What did you say?”
“I said he could have it, of course. But what do you say?”
Without answering, Abby goes to her room to wait for Aidan. She calls Hannah, whose acceptance of what’s gone on is tinged with fears of losing Abby. The words long distance punctuated conversations yesterday, the cost of round-trip tickets mentioned. I don’t know if he even wants a relationship, she told Hannah. I just know that I want him, and that changes everything. Now she tells her about her mother’s words, about the ring. The guilt.
“Listen,” Hannah says, “you know what you want. What you’ve always wanted. You just need to make it right.”
It’s true. In a way she feels as though she’d given Aidan her heart first and has simply reclaimed it for him. The rightful owner. If he wants it.
“Maybe that’s why it doesn’t feel like cheating,” she says. Through the window a slender branch of the maple trembles beneath the weight of a sparrow. The day is overcast. “In a way I feel like this is what’s right. That everything else was wrong.”
The ring is on her nightstand in its velvet box. She opens the lid and there it is, bursts of color unleashed, a spell of turquoise and lavender, wheat fields and a russet sky. She looks closer. The arctic hue of missed opportunity, the violet tinge of regret. But also the brazen red of truth.
—
What do you say?
In the two-hour drive to the Cities Abby leaves her mother and her words behind, and the weather swings into a summer day. When they reach Minneapolis it’s sunny, even hot, and Abby takes off her cardigan, warmth on her shoulders. She studies Aidan’s hand as he drives, tendons that fan to his fingers, and then places her own on top. She’s so caught up with him when they’re together, it’s unnervingly easy to leave the rest behind.
“There’s a great restaurant there,” Aidan says when they pass the Nicollet Mall, the blocked-off street.
The tour: memory roads, side streets of recollection.
“And there, on the right,” he says, motioning to the W Hotel. “That’s the hotel I was telling you about.”
The building is a tower that shoots into the air, the name Foshay at the top. Streaks of white clouds behind it, blue captured windows. How she wishes their day were different—that they could go to dinner, order a bottle of wine; she could slip her shoes off under the table and inch her toes up his leg. A walk beneath the glass awning of the hotel, through the double doors, gazes locked in the elevator’s mirror as it soars. She wants to see the night’s skyline in his eyes, her back pressed against the glass.
“The hotel sounds really good,” she says.
He smiles. “Trust me, I almost swung into valet. Can you spend the night tonight? At my place? I have to be at work early in the morning, but you can lock up when you leave.”
It seems impossible that after the trip to Morrow Lake there’d be any lines left to cross, but somehow this feels like one of them. His world. His bed. Where he hangs his shirts, his glass of water on the nightstand. Excitement pushes past guilt. “I get to see your place?”
“With the warning that I haven’t exactly been around to make it look its best.”
“No fresh flowers in the kitchen?”
“No food in the kitchen. Or, there might be, but best leave it where it is.”
“In that case, I accept this super romantic invitation.”
He laughs. “Good.”
But a moment later he says it again. “Good.” This time no smile.
She watches him. He’s thinking about something, she can see. Any noises last night? All quiet? “Why?” she asks. “What are you worried about?”
It’s clear he’s debating over what to say. At last, “I drove by last night, saw a car by your house. Close to three AM. Could’ve been anyone, a neighbor, someone lost, but with the noise you heard the other night—”
“And the cigarette butts.”
“Which were probably Brittany’s sister or her friends—but still, since I’m off, I want you with me. That, and I just want you with me.”
She laughs. “Straight to the point. I like it.”
They turn onto North First Avenue and pass a curved black Art Deco building that seems to hug the corner, facing the intersection as if keeping an eye on the neighborhood. Silver stars are painted on its side, each with the name of a band.
“Used to be a Greyhound bus station,” Aidan says, noting her attention. “Now it’s a club. Was in Purple Rain—one of those stars has Prince’s name on it. Okay, time to head to the house before I get too homesick. We’ll get out at Lake Calhoun, walk around, sit in the sand, we have the time.”
She watches him for a moment, framed by the city. He glances at her and their eyes meet. A quick smile before he turns back to the road. Homesick, Abby thinks, still watching him. That’s how I feel when I look at you.
—
That deep blue of summer, endless and brilliant. The heat seems to come with a noise like insects, a noise that shimmers. Coolers hold down blankets and bees are gathered at trash cans. Abby sits in the sand at the lake’s edge, happy, Aidan beside her, when suddenly she knows that if she closes her eyes she’ll open them to a different world, the water gone, replaced by the dark meadow, tall, dying grass an undulating pulse. Her heart pounds. This is not a dream. The sun is real. But she has to do it, a compulsion, a test. Without thinking she clenches her eyes shut and begins a count, and by the time she gets to seven she hears the whisper of the oak tree’s leaves, the clinking of the chandelier’s prisms. Eight. Nine. Just the beginning.
She opens her eyes. A sailboat slashes through the water, people splayed on bright towels.
“You’ve never been here?” he asks.
She’s still steadying her breath, watching a child with a red pail, pounding in sand. “Once. Here, to Calhoun. With some friends in seventh grade. I didn’t remember my grandparents ever lived here. That was way before I was born.”
For a moment she closes her eyes, feeling the press of sun. Trying to feel what’s good. The fact that somehow life has delivered her here, to this moment, with this man beside her, feels surreal, an about-face in her life she never saw coming. “Thank you,” she says. She opens her eyes, squinting against the glare. “For everything. You’ve done so much, all for some silly girl from L.A.”
Gently he takes her chin in his hand, turning her toward him. The reflection of the lake is bright in his eyes, patterns of shifting light. “Abby. In no way are you just some ‘silly girl from L.A.’ But you are the one who has deciding to do. I know what I want.”
It almost hurts, how happy that makes her. And what she wants is to remember everything. The way he said her name, the streak of sailboats, the green of his shirt and the blue of the water, the way he looked at her with a certainty that completely disarmed her.
In the car, they have the air conditioner on. To the right are rolling green hills. “I used to go there,” he says about the hills. “The Lakewood Cemetery.”
“You have relatives there?”
“No. Everyone’s in Idaho. Just a good place to think. People don’t bother you.”
It was his version of the river then, back when he lived in the Cities. A run around the lake, ending in the cemetery, catching his breath beneath the canopy of trees. Sometimes families would be there, clustered around a new headstone, clutches of fresh flowers scattered, a week, maybe two, after a funeral. It was then he felt he should leave. They were with their grief and he was using the calm to press his reset button, to start again. They were ending as he was beginning.
“That’s Lake of the Isles,” Abby says.
He follows her gaze to the smaller lake; darker, crowded with trees, an island in the middle. A couple is canoeing i
n the center, an old man on a bench at the shore.
Abruptly she sits back, face pale in the afternoon light.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“That’s it. The house.”
They’ve just rounded a block and a dozen stately homes are perched with views to the water—not one address visible. But she’s not looked away, pulled by whatever it is she’s seeing. He follows her gaze. A large brown stone mansion, castle-like, with a rounded tower in front and tall, narrow windows. Overt, imposing grandeur. A green lawn held in place by a black wrought-iron gate.
“The stone one?”
She nods. Only when pulled to the curb does he compare the address to what he’s written on a Post-it note: The numbers match. The Ballantine house.
Then he looks next door. “And your grandparents,” he says, “that would be their place.” Starkly different than the Ballantines’, her grandparents’ old house is grand and white, with arched Palladian windows and an immense front door flanked by double columns on either side. It, too, is beautiful, though not as alluring as the stone house, which seems to beckon as much as repel.
“I can’t see my mom living there,” Abby says. “Playing on that lawn as a kid. Maybe kids don’t play on lawns here.”
He opens the car door for her. The lake water is glass-still and the heat of the day has intensified everything. Reflections. Sounds. Smells. There’s a dark scent of the lake, a marshy, settled odor that hangs in the air. She steps onto the sidewalk, right between the two houses, and an elm leaf by her feet lifts into the air, skittering to the grass.
Strangely, the connection she feels is not to her family’s old house, but to this other one. Fascination, she knows. Something happened to Claire in this house. Claire Ballantine, whose very name resonates simply because of its elegance. And Abby’s grandmother. Something here left her grandmother distraught. But still I see the basement, and still I remember. “It’s so sad,” she says about the Ballantine house. “I’ve never seen such a sad house.”
He takes a few steps up the path and she watches him, the house tall in the background, majestic and despairing. The stones soak in the sun, scorched, and in a split second the noise from the cars, the whirring, swift arcs of sound as they round the bend, everything slows down. Becomes clumsier. Rounder. Intensified. But then she blinks. The world straightens and the sun blazes in the glass of the windows.
“What’s going on?” Aidan asks.
“I should’ve eaten breakfast.”
Sun is strewn through the trees. She meets him on the path, her grandparents’ house beside them, and for a moment she imagines them, Frank and Edith, as a young couple, standing on their own path, watching as Abby and Aidan take steps they used to climb. A night of gin rummy with the neighbors. Tweed suits and pearl earrings. The loose jangle of ice in a drink, a deck of cards shuffled and dealt. Now, standing at the door, Abby can almost feel their stare in the weight of the past.
And then the front door swings open, and Abby looks into a room that’s all dark wood, crowned with the radiance of the chandelier she’s always known, prisms burning with light, straight out of her dreams.
34
Then
EVA’S LOOKING UP, gaze fixed on the chandelier above her, as if with enough concentration she could possibly lower her eyes to find herself in the midst of a different night. A party. She’d be a guest; someone would take her coat. For a split second she feels it, really feels it, that she belongs, and in that moment she smiles—a smile that Claire catches seconds before she spins on her heel and heads into another room.
But then Eva looks down. The room is all wood, floor to ceiling, and it’s crushing, a dark presence. As she follows Claire, she sees it’s not just the foyer that feels wrong, but the whole house. Graceful, powerful, and elegant, yes. Alluring contradictions, the way a snowfall makes a room grow warm. But it’s not William, and it’s certainly not Claire. It seems to be no one’s, belonging only to itself. This was William’s childhood? Everything is hard edges and corners, shadows and echoes. She tries to imagine him as a young boy, running through the halls laughing, constructing a fort with furniture, or even making a random, rebellious mark on the wall, but can’t. The inability puts something like mourning within her, for what he never had.
They turn the corner into the parlor, and as they enter, Claire flicks on a lamp with yellow flowers, then takes long, assured steps to a tray of crystal decanters. Ice cubes plucked with a silver tong. Eva’s life with William in Rochester flashes in her mind, the metal ice cube tray, the crunch of the lever, cupped hands holding the frozen, slippery cubes on their way to a drink. The memory actually hurts, a life long ago.
“What’s your name?” Edith says, voice inflecting just barely at the end, as if it were really more of an accusation.
Eva doesn’t know whether to stand or sit. She looks behind her at a chair, but remains standing. She hates her confusion. Through the windows leaves have begun to move, thin branches caught in a low, aching sway. “Eva.”
“Well, Eva, you can stop looking at the place as if you’re about to inherit it.”
“I’m not.” She doesn’t like Edith. Of course if she were her friend she’d love her—domineering, bossy, protective. But Edith is Claire’s friend. Claire, who has now turned from them and is facing the window, perhaps waiting for William. What will he do, seeing her in here? She looks back at Claire. “He wants to be with me, you know.”
Claire doesn’t turn around.
“Right to the point, I see,” Edith says, shrugging off her mink, letting it fall like a cotton sweater to a chair.
Eva will not lose her footing. “We all know why he chose to stay with Claire.”
At this, her name spoken by the mistress, Claire turns. This, more than Eva’s being in the house—Eva, how many times has her husband said that name, cried that name—is the invasion. “You do not get to say my name. I am Mrs. Ballantine.”
“He’s with you because of a lie.”
Fury rises within Claire, her face flushing. Here, in her own parlor, is a girl telling her her worth, saying she’s not enough, saying her husband does not love her, and it’s so cruel and insolent and horrifying that in only steps she’s before the girl, looking down at her. “He is my husband. My husband. Our marriage is none of your business.”
“He was going to leave you. He told me that.”
“This little—” Claire turns to Edith, but what she sees clutches at her throat. “Edith. Is that real?”
And now Eva turns and sees the pistol in Edith’s hand.
Edith laughs. “It’s Frank’s. I don’t much like holding this thing, and I don’t want to use it. But I can.” She looks to Eva. “My husband always liked to find activities I detest, and one of them was shooting. But we put an end to that, because nothing makes a man want to crawl under a rock more than his wife being a better shot.”
“Edith,” Claire says, and her own hand rises up.
Edith continues. “This area gets a lot of attention. Two residents say you broke in. Look at you, you’re clearly the jilted lover.” She waves her hand with the pistol, and both Claire and Eva follow it with their eyes. “You see how that would work out. So let’s just call this over. You’re young, you’re not hard on the eyes, you’ll find someone else, and we’ll wish you the best of luck. We clear on the plan? William is married. William stays married.”
Outside, at long last, the clouds open up. Claire turns to the sound. Columns of rain fall with such thickness and force they appear to be solid cords from above, great strands connecting heaven and earth.
35
Now
THERE ARE MOMENTS—a policeman spotted on the porch, a trail of smoke a block from home, the piercing, solid shriek of the flatlining of a heart—in which the inevitable approaches, just around the corner, and your steps slow. A few moments of prolongment. Tighten your r
obe, a longer pause at a stop sign, greet the nurse at the counter who can’t hear your hello over the sound of your life changing. This is what it feels like as Abby finally looks away from the chandelier that seems to hang straight from her dreams. The rest is waiting.
“In here is the parlor,” the owner, Cynthia VonDeffner, says. Prim. Sensible. A blouse buttoned to the top. As they enter the parlor she stays behind, like a Realtor just within reach but far enough to allow for discussion.
Abby stops in the doorframe, studying the white paint, and Aidan places his hand on the small of her back. “It should be illegal to paint wood like that,” he says quietly.
There’s a small nick in the paint, a faint crevice, a mere line. Almost imperceptible under the years of enamel, but she sees it.
“Oak, I bet,” he continues.
Abby touches it, presses her fingertip into the slight groove, and nausea blooms within her. She yanks her hand back and closes her eyes, trying not to pass out.
“All right,” he says. “Tell me. What’s going on?”
“I really should have eaten.”
“On the wall over there,” Cynthia says from across the room, pointing to the corner, “is an actual bullet. Lodged in the wallpaper.”
Aidan turns. “A bullet?”
“And a vase broke,” Abby says.
Aidan looks back at her. “Abby, you’re way too pale. Sit.”
She does as she’s told, and takes a seat on a dark red velvet sofa. Through the window, water shines between trees.
“Okay. Now what about a vase?”
He’s watching her. She looks up at him. Such a concerned gaze.
You weren’t here.
The words leave her mind as quickly as they came. Their trail deep. She blinks, and finally feels as if she’s in the room. What had he just said? Something about a vase? “A vase?”