“Wake up,” Beth says quietly, and when Dan stirs next to her, she adds, “we’re here.” She has to tell herself, Get out of the car; go inside the house. She shakes her head. Dan wakes his sister, and Jeanette comes briefly to life in that moment when her body is awake, before her brain has booted up.
“It’s morning,” Jeanette says. “I slept in a car all night.” She seems proud of this fact, like it’s the kind of bohemian lifestyle she’s always longed for. Even as her kids open doors and stretch in the new sun, even as Beth’s father greets his grandchildren for the first time since they were little, Beth has to keep telling herself, Get out of the car.
Jeanette walks right up to Ernest DeWitt and hugs him, and something inside Beth stirs violently. She spills out of the driver’s seat and onto the driveway.
“Eliza,” her father says, and just hearing her childhood name makes her bowels turn to ice. He has his arms held open to her. She doesn’t want to forgive him so easily. She doesn’t want to hug him, doesn’t want to be here, yet here she is, standing dumb and tired in the driveway as the smile he wears grows strained around the eyes. His face sags at the jowls, his glasses are crooked on his nose, and she finds herself staring at him. She’d forgotten the details of his face, and she wonders briefly whether he really is her father. They look nothing alike, and not just because he’s white. The round, upturned nose, too small for his face, and the fleshy jaw. His arms, those strong, tan arms, go heavy, they droop, and Beth inserts herself into them to prop them up.
“It’s good to see you,” he says, and kisses her forehead. “When did you get in? I was waiting, but I fell asleep on the couch.”
“You painted the house” is all Beth can say.
“It was Linda’s idea,” he says, and turns as the back door claps shut. There, standing on the stoop, is a girl Beth recognizes immediately. Dirty blond hair, a little too much makeup smudged from sleep. Linda Williams. When she was in high school, Beth used to babysit the Williams girls. Linda would have been about ten, old enough to stay home alone really, except their mother seemed keen to foist the girls off on anyone else.
Beth wonders what her father is doing with this child, but it occurs to her that, as creepy as it is, their relationship makes a kind of sense. There’s something of the child in Ernest’s gaze, something that feels like a game of hide-and-seek: When you look into his eyes, you might catch a glimpse of a shoe or a pigtail disappearing around a corner, but when you follow it, it’s gone. Speaking with Ernest, it’s easy to lose all track of the present, you’re so focused on seeking out the child, hiding.
This wouldn’t be noteworthy in a man of twentysomething; you could pass him off as a late bloomer, but Ernest is in his early sixties, and so the game of hide-and-seek will forever catch Beth off guard. Yet women love him, and men yearn to be near him in hopes that some of the child will flit into their gaze.
Beth has always hated this about her father; she has only ever wanted him to grow the fuck up. A bit of a hypocrisy, really, given that she, too, has a child inside her, that she had felt the child stirring, shifting in sleep, when her father called her Eliza. Her anger at her father is, in part, anger at her own inner child, whom Beth can’t seem to shake.
“So nice to see you again,” Linda says, sidling up next to Ernest, inserting herself between father and daughter. Beth remembers Linda as a horse girl who always smelled like hay and manure. Now her hair is unusually full and glossy, and her fingernails are too long for a farm girl’s. None of this is to be overlooked; even so, Linda stands with her hands on her belly, still flat like a twentysomething’s. Beth notes Linda’s rosy cheeks, her pudgy face.
Beth closes her eyes. Her father has put a child in this child.
* * *
• • •
After unloading boxes, Beth leaves to return the trailer, but her car is on empty. She stops at the only gas station in town. A truck pulls up to the pump in front of her, with a man, woman, and child all sitting on the bench seat. When the man gets out, it takes Beth a second before she recognizes him; he’s older, yes, his hair retreating from his forehead, his skin wilted with sun damage, but once she notes the round blue eyes, the thick lips, it’s not hard to find Steve Brody in this face, worn past its years.
More startling is realizing the woman in the truck is Deb. In the decades since Beth last saw her, all the color seems to have drained from her, so that she’s not only old, but old-fashioned, like she’s stepped out of a 1950s television program: She’s gray in a Technicolor world. Deb doesn’t look at Beth, and Beth decides not to linger. She’ll fill her car halfway and leave.
She slides her card into the reader, and when she withdraws it, the reader beeps loudly. A message flashes on the display: Her card has been declined. She tries running it again, and again it is declined. She knows there’s money in the account; the bank probably put a hold on it because she didn’t tell them she was moving. While she decides whether to try again or drive around the block until the truck leaves, a car pulls in behind her, waiting to use the pump.
“Pump three,” a voice calls over an intercom, “please see the cashier inside.”
Beth looks up to find she is pump three. Steve also looks up. Beth doesn’t like the expression on his face when he recognizes her.
The man in the car waiting behind her scoffs. He has his window open, his arm draped out, and when Beth looks at him, he honks for her to get out of his way. He’s scowling at her, not a look of annoyance, but of hatred. Beth knows this look. He assumes she’s a deadbeat, a stain on society.
Worse, now Deb has seen Beth. Beth can tell because Deb’s cheeks have colored, and she stares out the side window so as not to look at Beth again. And while Steve won’t look at Beth, either, he’s puffed his chest out, and he’s smiling.
She can’t deal with this. Not right now. As she walks inside to prepay cash, the driver waiting behind her throws his arms up in disgust and squeals his tires as he maneuvers his car to the other side of the pump. Once inside, Beth browses the aisles of canned goods, the off-brand frozen pizzas, while she waits for both Steve and the other driver to finish pumping and leave.
* * *
• • •
The bedrooms in Ernest’s house smell like they’ve been locked up since Beth was a kid. She strips bedding, ashy with dust, and replaces the linens with her own. It makes no sense to her that he kept this big old house all these years. He never remarried. What use had he for three bedrooms, other than to collect dust? He hasn’t even stored anything in them. The house is furnished, but spare, as if waiting for people to come and live in it again. Well, here we are, she thinks.
Despite how much space there is, it’s not enough. When Jeanette found out she would be sharing a room with her mother—Beth had withheld this information until the last possible moment—she went into Dan’s room and shut the door. She hasn’t been seen since. Dan brought her lunch in his room. As patient as he is, even he is beginning to show signs of strain; he’s no longer quite as accommodating with his mother, and instead of helping unpack, he has plopped himself down on the couch in the living room with a book and has budged only for meals and bathroom breaks.
Beth takes the same bedroom she had as a child. Inside, she’s flooded with memories. They weigh on her so that she’s exhausted, and she takes to bed within a week of moving home. In here, there isn’t much to occupy her mind. A worn wood floor, mostly covered by a beige Berber rug. And that gaping wound of a window, dressed in gauzy curtains. Today, she lies in bed, staring outside, looking down on the yard of the empty Thurber house. Without warning, she’s back inside those walls, where too many adults live. Her babysitter, the white-haired witch. She remembers the walls hung with crucifixes and the portrait of blond Jesus in white robes, both his hair and his clothes tainted by cigarette smoke. And her babysitter’s middle-aged son, Gilmer, walking around in various states of undress. Gilmer an
d his sister are in jail now, awaiting trial for the horrible things that went on in that house. A trial won’t be enough, though. Corporal punishment wouldn’t be enough. Castration would be closer, but still insufficient.
And what of Mrs. Thurber? Dead probably. And oh so many children there, all of them affected. She wonders where they are now. Who were their parents, even? There were the Hudson boys, grandchildren of Mrs. Thurber. Jerry and Mikey. Are they still in town? She seems to remember her father saying Mikey was a cop now. She isn’t sure, though, because she hasn’t gone out much, and when she has, she’s wandered about town in a protective fog. Even now, her instinct is to freeze, to close her eyes, in order to shut out the memories. But that won’t do. To keep from looking, she pulls the curtains.
* * *
• • •
It takes a week for Jeanette to finally come out from her confinement in Dan’s room. She spends a day exploring the house. Such as it is. She would have much preferred moving in with her father, but her stepmother, Mara, said that children needed their real mother. Translation: Mara had no desire to raise another woman’s kids. Jeanette’s father had a chance at a do-over, and Jeanette knows she shouldn’t begrudge him that. Still, she does.
So this is to be her exile. A frigid, rambling house. A living room where the ceiling sags. Dingy shag carpet, tangled and matted, the color of muddied toffee. A bathtub that takes so long to drain that you stand in someone else’s dirty water if you shower in the morning—which is why Jeanette showers at night, or, worst case, takes a bath in the basin tub upstairs in the morning.
Her granddad’s house has a mustiness, a clamminess, that Jeanette can’t stand. She longs for the small, tidy house they left in Charlotte, the bright, sunny windows, the smooth tiled floors. Their house had been painted in pastels, a buttercream kitchen, a lavender bathroom. Her granddad’s house is white on white, the walls repainted so many times over the years that the surfaces look thick and wavy. The washer and dryer are old and clunky and take forever to finish a load. There is no dishwasher. The television is a monstrous box, like the house itself, with wires sprouting off the top, and nobs to pull and turn for power, volume, and channel selection. The bark-brown couch smells of pets, but there are no pets. When she asked her granddad how old the couch was, he said, “Someone left it on the curb on trash day,” with a note of bragging in his voice. “That must have been ten, fifteen years ago?”
The only nice thing about the house is Linda’s coffeepot: brushed metal, with a mesh filter basket. Jeanette coaxes a cup of coffee out of it one day when Linda isn’t there, but she does something wrong. The coffee comes out gray and translucent. But oh! The dark, smoky taste of the coffee Linda makes, the exhilarating jolt when it hits her blood! Jeanette tries it black, like her mother takes hers, but it’s too much. She’s been drinking it with milk and sugar for maybe a week now—not in secret, exactly, but she isn’t going to advertise it to her mother.
Dan dares Jeanette to go into the basement one Saturday morning. He comes up from there with a handful of Indian-head pennies, dark and worn and metallic-smelling, like blood. Tempting, but when Jeanette opens the door of the basement and sees the light from the hallway quickly dissolve into blackness, and the cool breeze lifts the odor of dirt and mushrooms up to her face, she reconsiders.
“Who cares about a bunch of old pennies?” she tells her brother.
She can’t shake the cold after that. It settles into her body to stay. She takes to rising early in the morning and standing over the floor vent in the kitchen, letting the hot air fill her flannel nightgown and blow life back into her frigid limbs. She shares a bedroom with her mother, whose sleep is fitful and irregular. Her mother thinks Jeanette doesn’t hear her crying at night, her breathing willfully even, the subtle splash of tears dropping onto her pillow. Worse yet is when her mother does sleep, and talks incoherently. Her mother looks sicker and more tired by the day.
Jeanette has always heard that Midwestern winters were brutal, but nobody ever warned her about Midwestern fall, the feeling that the world outside is shutting down, the ache in her spine that tells her to sleep, too, sleep for months. It’s already bad, and it’s only the end of September. She’s put on five pounds, has to check herself from snacking all day. She’s hungry and lethargic. This morning, on her way downstairs to stand over the floor vent, she contemplates whether she’ll make herself eggs or Cream of Wheat for breakfast, fantasizes about having both. She can imagine what her new friends at school would say. The smart girls in town don’t want to be friends with her, and she doesn’t have much patience for the Beckies on the cheerleading squad, who are unbearably bubbly, so she’s befriended a couple of horse girls, the first kids who would talk to her, girls who battle constantly to keep their slight frames slight. Allison, she knows, doesn’t eat meals. And yesterday, Jeanette went into the bathroom after lunch and heard someone throwing up. Caitlyn came out of the stall, smiled at Jeanette, and started talking about fifth period as if everything were fine. And now it makes sense: Caitlyn has sick breath, every morning and every afternoon. When Jeanette eats lunch at school, Caitlyn makes comments like, “I wish I could eat like that, without facing the consequences.” Jeanette isn’t sure whether Caitlyn thinks Jeanette’s eating doesn’t have consequences, or Jeanette doesn’t face them. She wishes she hadn’t quit band. All of her friends at her old school had been band kids, like her brother.
When she gets to the kitchen this morning, Linda is already slouched in a chair next to the floor vent, wearing a bathrobe and sweatpants, fuzzy socks on her feet. She clutches a mug of coffee in both hands, and alternately presses it to one cheek, then the other. Jeanette hesitates in the doorway, feeling despair bubbling inside her. Her feet are so cold she wants to cry.
“Want some coffee?” Linda says, and Jeanette blanks her face. “Right. Cocoa?”
“I’ll try some coffee.”
Linda smirks. Does she know Jeanette’s been drinking her coffee? And will she tell Jeanette’s mother? But no, Linda goes and pours Jeanette a cup, and Jeanette steals her place over the vent. The rush of warmth is bliss, her nightgown ballooning with heat.
“Smart,” Linda says when she returns with a steaming mug. She’s added milk and sugar; she knows how Jeanette takes it. “I need to get a nightgown.”
“How old are you?” Jeanette blurts out, then quickly checks herself. She takes a sip of the coffee and mutters, “Thanks.”
“Thirty-two,” Linda says. Her tone of voice suggests she is not offended, but rather amused.
“Younger than my mom,” Jeanette says.
“Yeah. It’s a problem.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Jeanette says, even though it does weird her out a little when she sees Linda and her granddad kissing. Warm now, she joins Linda at the table.
Linda runs a thumb along the rim of her mug. “How are you settling in at school?”
Jeanette can’t help but roll her eyes. Her mother hates it when she does this; she tells Jeanette not to sass. Linda only laughs.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to be excited.”
Jeanette pulls her feet up onto her chair. When she sees Linda looking at them, she tucks them underneath her, inside her nightgown. Her skin has gone ashy since moving here; River Bend doesn’t have the humidity she’s used to. She checks the weather app on her phone, hoping for rain, and is relieved to see that it’s supposed to warm up next week.
“Let me get you a pair of fuzzy socks,” Linda says, “and then I’ll make us breakfast.” And she goes upstairs to her dresser.
When Linda is gone, Jeanette counts the months. She heard her mom say something to her granddad about Linda being ten weeks pregnant. Next spring, there will be a baby in this house.
Jeanette doesn’t want to think about it.
* * *
• • •
Beth needs a job. She’s been looking for m
onths, since before the move, but nowhere in this godforsaken town is hiring. She gets desperate, to the point that she even applies to be a line cook at a rinky-dink country club up in Kalamazoo, a forty-five-minute drive away. She used to be a sous chef. She used to run a kitchen with twenty people working beneath her, a kitchen that cranked out 280 covers on a Saturday night. A nice place, too, the kind that would loan a man a jacket if he showed up in his shirtsleeves.
As September winds down, she finally manages to find a job cooking down at the Hudson House, where they do a lot of meatloaf-mashed-potatoes-canned-peas dinners. The only seasoning they believe in is salt, and that they use sparingly. Their pies come in frozen from Gordon Food Service. Their whipped cream squirts out of a can. And, too, Beth feels a tightness in her chest when she learns that she was hired to replace Gilmer Thurber. She can almost smell him in the kitchen. She tells herself this is temporary, that she’ll keep looking, but she quickly settles into complacency. She doesn’t have the energy to job search when she gets home in the evenings.
When she arrives home tonight, though, Jeanette has the table set, a salmon in the oven. She’s mixing black currants into couscous. She’s somehow managed to procure asparagus in the fall. Beth has taken to leaving her money for groceries. She’d love to go with her daughter, she’d love to see where she gets her ingredients, but she knows Linda must be taking Jeanette up to Meijer in the next town north. The family sits to eat, Beth and the kids, Linda and Ernest all crowded at the kitchen table, five people squashed in at a table meant for four. Meals are always tense for Beth: Dinner table conversations leave so much unsaid.
The House of Deep Water Page 10