by Aimee Molloy
Meanwhile, I feel like a loser, hanging around this house all day, nothing to do except water the plants. Which is why I have resolved to be more productive, starting today, the day I tackle the project I’ve been avoiding for weeks: Agatha Lawrence’s study, the room where she died of a heart attack, which is filled with her personal papers.
It was the deal on this house. It came as is, and as the attorney representing the estate of Agatha Lawrence explained, this included “all furnishings and any other items left behind by the previous owner at Eleven Cherry Lane.” I didn’t know this was going to mean six file cabinets encompassing a complete history of the Lawrence family, going as far back as 1812, when Edward Lawrence established Chestnut Hill. I poked my head into the room a few times, wishing I was the type of person who could throw a dead woman’s papers away without even a look. But I’m not, and so each time I shut the door, and put it off for another day.
This day.
I finish watering the plants in the kitchen and take my tea down the hall, steeling myself before opening the door. The room is small and simple, with a window overlooking the garden, largely obstructed by a boxwood that needs a good trim. I peek inside the empty closet and trail my fingers along the yellow wallpaper. It’s an interesting color—chartreuse yellow, with a repeating pattern of shapes that seem to feed into themselves. Agatha Lawrence favored bright colors, and I’ve surprised myself by liking them so much I’ve hardly made any changes to the decor. Apple-green walls in the kitchen, bright blue in the living room.
I hear a buzzing noise and notice a dozen or so tiny moths fluttering against the window, trying to get out. I cross the room and nudge it open, careful to avoid a crack running down the middle of the glass, yet another thing to take care of. As I shoo the moths outside, I see that Sam’s car is gone. He’s probably off to the Y, where he goes during lunch sometimes, returning with a mop of wet hair.
Looking around, I consider my options. I could turn the study into a guest bedroom, but what’s the point? There are three spare bedrooms upstairs already, and who’s going to visit me here? Linda? I highly doubt anyone from the city would be enticed by a tour of the strip mall and the additions to the dollar menu at the Wendy’s on Route 9.
I decide to table the question and start with the papers, quickly realizing that this was a family that did not throw things away. Original drawings of the Lawrence House, designed by one of the most renowned architects of the time. Newspaper clippings from as far back as 1936, when Charles Lawrence was a confidante of FDR. Dozens of scrapbooks—stoic Europeans, posing straight-backed on the porch. I become so caught up in the family history—they made millions in oil and, later on, plastic—that it takes a few minutes before I register the noise coming from one of the boxes I’ve moved to the corner of the room.
A voice.
I stop reading. I’m not imagining it. Someone is talking.
I set down the folder I’ve been paging through and walk toward the window. Maybe it’s that neighbor from the brown house on the other side of the narrow bridge, the only other house on the street, coming to say hello. The one with swingy blond hair and that strange-looking dog, always peering over the hedges, trying to get a look at the house. Sidney Pigeon—that’s really her name. I got a piece of her mail once, some bogus car insurance offer, and looked her up. Three boys, their photos all over Facebook. From the window of one of the upstairs bedrooms I can see her front lawn, and I’ve watched her out there with her husband, the way she follows him around the yard, pointing out chores like he’s two weeks into a job at Home Depot and she’s the brand-new assistant manager. And when you’re done here in lawn care, Drew, I’ll have something for you in the plumbing department.
But there’s nobody on the street when I look outside, and I tell myself I must have imagined it. As soon as I return to the papers, though, it starts up again. I inch forward, closer to the boxes in the corner, the voice getting louder as I kneel down and rest my ear against the cardboard. “It’s time for the delivery of the day,” a man is saying. “When our friends at UPS surprise one lucky fan with a special delivery.”
I laugh out loud in relief. A radio inside one of these boxes must have gotten turned on somehow. I strip off the rigid tape and open the flaps, rooting through the contents. There’s no radio here, or in the second box I search, and yet I can still hear a faint voice. I move the boxes aside, and that’s when I see it, in the floor where the boxes were: a shiny flash of metal. A vent.
I lean forward.
“Jose Muñez up to bat, Silas James on deck.” Sports radio? I sit back on my heels and clasp my hand to my mouth, putting it together. I can hear downstairs, directly into Sam’s office. I rise slowly and look out the window. Sam’s car is in the driveway, parked behind mine.
I’m frozen, unsure what to do, when a red BMW appears at the top of the hill and turns into the driveway. A woman steps out. It’s Catherine Walker, a patient. I heard her answer her phone two weeks ago on the way out of her appointment—the type of woman who says her name rather than hello when she answers the phone. If Google can be trusted, she’s a rising painter from New York, Andy Warhol Lite, and lives in a house fancy enough to get her a feature in Architectural Digest (who knew acrylic paintings of lipstick tubes could sell so well?).
Catherine’s dressed casually today: black leggings and a white button-down shirt, ankle boots with a heel on them. I step away and press my back against the wall. I know what I should do. I should cover the vent, return to the business of cleaning, and tell Sam what happened later, at happy hour. I thought I was going crazy, hearing voices, but it turns out the thing I was hearing was you, downstairs in your office. We have to get that fixed.
I push up my sleeves and return to the folder I was paging through—financial documents from the family business—when I hear the faint buzz of Sam’s bell. A moment later, the outside door slams shut.
I hesitate. I should leave, find something else to do. But instead I put the folder down, walk quietly to the vent, and kneel down beside it.
“Hello, Catherine,” Sam says, his voice clear as day. “Come on in. Sit wherever you like.”
I slide onto my stomach and press my ear to the vent.
Just for a few seconds. Just this once.
Chapter 5
“It sounds like you’re feeling better, creatively at least,” Sam says. He crosses his legs and glances at the clock on the floor next to the couch, where patients can’t see it. Six more minutes.
“Yeah. That place has got good energy,” Christopher says. “Something about it unlocks me.” Christopher Zucker. Early thirties. Creative director at a new design firm colonizing the former paper mill along the river. Sam started seeing him after Christopher’s doctor recommended he talk to someone about his anxiety. He’s spent the last twelve minutes of the session telling Sam how he’s been working in the coffee shop on the ground floor of his office building, trying hard to overcome a creative block. “Great views, too,” Christopher says.
Sam nods. “Has a patio overlooking the river, right?”
“Yeah, but I mean the girls. Yoga studio on the second floor. If you time it right . . .” He winks—patient attempting to normalize habit of objectifying women through alignment with therapist—and then changes the subject to Sofie, the twenty-one-year-old Czech model he met online. Sam nods, forcing himself to acknowledge a sudden pang of irritation, tracing it back to the idea of Christopher and Annie being at that coffee shop at the same time. Annie mentioned this place to him the other day, telling him she stopped there for lunch after a run along the river, and Sam imagines the way Christopher would have checked her out, the look of disdain she would have given him in return. (She’d hate the guy—his comments about women, his adult scooter.)
Sam has to be careful not to let his mind wander—Christopher can be hard to follow, and staying engaged takes focus—but before he can stop himself, he’s back in Brooks Brothers in lower Manhattan at four in the afternoon on
a cold afternoon last fall, where he saw Annie for the first time, standing at the tie rack in tight jeans and a tweed blazer.
“Let me guess,” she said when he approached to ask if she knew what “cocktail attire” meant. “You’re a bad boy turned cool/approachable academic who favors band shirts, but only if they’re ironic. You play basketball on your lunch hour with your nonacademic bros and then tapas and whisky with your colleagues. You’ve been invited to a wedding—his second—somewhere south of Fourteenth Street, and now you need a jacket.” She pointed toward the back of the store. “Wait for me in the dressing room.”
She brought him five different suit and shirt combinations, eight choices of ties, a classic navy blazer. Waited outside the room while he changed, stood beside him in front of the large mirror, swiping away lint and pressing wrinkles from his sleeves.
He bought everything she suggested. “That was more than I’ve ever spent on clothing in my life,” he said, finding her back at the tie display after he’d paid. “You should get a raise.”
“Oh, I don’t work here,” she said. “My boyfriend’s birthday’s coming up. Came in to buy him a tie.” That boyfriend was gone an hour later, about the time Sam and Annie finished their second drink at the bar across the street, where Sam probed her about her life, learned about her childhood in Maine, growing up in a house her father—long deceased—built himself.
She was his date to the wedding the next week, his wife within the year, marrying him in the backyard of their new home the day they closed on the house. Annie Potter, a woman like no other. Brilliant, funny, exciting as hell. He still has trouble believing he convinced her to follow him to Chestnut Hill, New York. Charming, that’s the word she used, the first time she came, ninety-nine minutes on the train from New York. “Did you know petroleum was discovered right here in Chestnut Hill?” she said, tugging him by the arm to point out the historical marker he’d never noticed outside the ice cream shop.
And she still thinks it’s charming. She even likes going to see his mother at Rushing Waters, where she’s made a list of every resident’s birthday, stopping at Mrs. Fields in the strip mall to buy them a cookie the size of a dinner plate, coming home to tell him that this was the right thing to do, moving here to help Margaret.
His mom was wrong. He’d never hurt her.
The thought is interrupted by the sound of a phone, and he feels his body tense, realizing it’s his phone, ringing from the inside pocket of his sports jacket. Christopher stops what he was saying—What the hell was he saying?—and Sam reaches into his pocket, embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” Sam says. “I usually remember to turn this thing off.” He sees the 1–800 number, another credit card company, before silencing the phone and returning it to his pocket. He allows Christopher a few moments to finish what he was saying and then shifts a little in his chair. “Looks like we’re out of time,” he says.
“Already?” Christopher says, making no move to stand. Something changes in his expression. “Because there was something else I wanted to mention.”
“Oh?” Sam says.
“A girl at work accused me of sexually harassing her.”
Sam has to restrain himself from laughing out loud. Classic doorknob revelation. A client spends the session talking about something mind-numbingly innocuous like the pros and cons of pour-over versus drip coffee and then right before time’s up—bam!—he drops a bomb, walks out. He needs to say whatever it is out loud, inside the room, but doesn’t want to hear the therapist’s response. “Well, that certainly sounds like something you and I should talk about,” Sam says. “Next Wednesday?”
“Sounds good.” Christopher slaps his knees and they stand up. “See you next week,” he says. “Same bat time, same bat channel.”
Sam flatters Christopher with the same chuckle he forces every time Christopher says this. The outside door slams loudly behind him. That fucking door. Sam takes out his phone, the sinking sensation growing in his gut as he plays the message. He was wrong. It wasn’t a credit card company, it was the bank that holds their mortgage. He deletes the voice mail without listening to it. It’s all going to be fine. The phone calls he’s avoiding. The bank. The credit card companies. He needs to avoid them for another week or so, just until he gets access to his father’s money.
Sam came across the letter from his father in his mother’s kitchen cupboard while preparing to sell the house. She’d been living at Rushing Waters for a few months when he found it, typed on the expensive stationery that his father used for the letters he sent Sam a few times a year, with his name embossed on the top. Other than a phone call every year or so, this was the extent of their relationship. Each was typewritten, and Sam imagined his father speaking a few sentences into a Dictaphone and handing it to a secretary. “Get that thing off for me, okay, sweetheart?”
He sat down at the kitchen table, the same table where he once choked down the world’s worst piece of Pepperidge Farm coconut cake, and tried to make sense of what he was reading. It was addressed to his mother. I have some things I need to say, Maggie.
Three pages long, the letter explained the regret his father had felt for the last twenty years—how hard it was for Ted, living with what he did to the family. I understand why you wouldn’t talk to me when I tried, but I want you to know that not knowing my son has been the most painful part of my life.
And then Sam got to the last page, with the big reveal. Ted and Phaedra had divorced, and he’d been given a sizable amount of money in the settlement. He wanted Margaret to have half of it. Two million dollars, Ted wrote, explaining he had already deposited the money in an account in Margaret’s name at NorthStar Bank. Please don’t be stubborn about this. Use the money as you’d like, for you and Sam. You’ve worked hard raising our son, and truly I can never repay you for that.
Margaret was watching television when Sam went to see her the next day. He could tell by the look on her face that her mood was stable. “Mom, what is this?” he asked her.
Her face reddened when she saw the letter, embarrassed, like the time she found Sam in the garage with a copy of Hustler magazine. He said he found it at school, too ashamed to tell her that his father had given it to him; that Ted had been giving Sam his copies since Sam turned twelve.
“Sit down,” Margaret said, taking the letter from him. “Let’s talk.” And just like that he was a kid again, that look on her face as she tried so hard to connect with him, the only guy she had left. But this time he was actually interested in what Margaret was saying. The whole thing made her so mad, she confided. Ted Statler, thinking he could make up for everything he’d done simply by throwing money at her—money he did nothing to earn. Her jaw was clenched with anger as she spoke, which Sam found utterly thrilling. His mother was angry at Ted Statler, the world’s biggest shitbag. Finally. “Which is why I’m giving all the money to you,” she said at the end of her diatribe.
He couldn’t believe this was his mother, the same woman who had been such a doormat all his life. “What?”
“I’ve started the process of giving you power of attorney,” she said. “You’re getting everything I have, including your father’s money.”
He must have read the letter two hundred times on the train ride back to New York the next day. The whole thing infuriated him at first. His mom was right, it was exactly as hypocritical and manipulative as one would expect from Ted Statler, a man who’d deigned to call his son no more than a handful of times in the last several years, thinking all could be forgiven with the sweep of a pen.
But then Sam started to think what his father’s money could afford him—a simpler life, a little bit of luxury. He’d been ready for a change after nearly a decade working in the children’s psych ward at Bellevue Hospital, teaching grad students and treating irrevocably damaged children. And suddenly he felt better about the whole thing. On their second date he told the story to Annie, who wisely suggested he wait until his mother signed power of attorney over to him before spending
the money, but it was complicated. Sam couldn’t say no to the money, nor could he stand the idea of having it. So he spent it, compulsively, every purchase aimed to wipe that smirk off Ted Statler’s face. Once he got started, he couldn’t stop himself—and on the stupidest shit. A nearly $5,000 Eames executive chair made of polished die-cast aluminum and locking casters? Thanks, Dad! A Lexus 350 with leather interior and automatic ignition? Thanks, Dad! Living large on credit, all of it to be immediately paid off as soon as his mother signs the money over to him, which is literally any day now, according to Sally French, the director of Rushing Waters.
But that was three months ago, and his mother still hasn’t signed the documents. “We’re working on it, Sam,” Mrs. French keeps assuring him. (She’s also been telling him to call her Sally, but she was their next-door neighbor growing up and he finds it impossible to reimagine her as a peer.) Margaret has deteriorated more quickly than anyone expected and, as legally required, has to endure a series of tests to prove she’s signing the papers in sound mind. She keeps failing.
He’s trying not to worry. It will all be fine. She’ll pass the tests, and he’ll get power of attorney. The money will transfer into his account, and he’ll wipe away the pile of debt he’s accrued, dozens of bills he’s been hiding here in his desk drawer, keeping them from Annie. (No need to worry her. It’s all going to be fine!)
The doorbell rings, and he slips the bills back into the drawer. With a deep breath, he presses the button to unlock the door.