I try to remember exactly what Blix had said about all the people in her crazy little community. Certainly she mentioned Lola and Jessica. But she just said that all of them needed love, and all of them were fearful of embracing it.
But the thing is, I can almost feel her around me just now, feel her thinking that Jessica and Andrew are meant to be together. Maybe that’s what this hazy feeling is about.
“Listen,” I say, “one day I called her up when I was so miserable, when Noah left. And I asked her to do a spell to get us back together. I could tell she didn’t think it was a great idea. She said she’d send some words for me to have a good life, for energy, for love . . .”
“That’s because she probably didn’t think Noah was right for you. Also I can’t imagine her agreeing to manipulate somebody’s path that way.”
“And then—right after that, I lost my job, which sucked, but then I moved back home, and then I fell in love again with Jeremy, my old high school boyfriend. So! That was obviously the spell she sent, right?”
“Well . . . sounds like it.”
“Only now! Well, now I get the news that she passed away and that she left me her house, and I come here, and here’s Noah! He’s back in my life. So . . . well, what I want to know is: Is this the spell? Is this what she intended to happen?”
She stares at me. “Wow. That’s the way this stuff goes. It might be the spell is working. Or not. We don’t know.”
“I like to think I believe in free will.”
“I think Blix would say that you have to trust what makes you happy,” she says. “She was always telling me that: trust joy. That’s free will, isn’t it?”
My phone pings just then with a text message. I’m expecting it to be from Jeremy, but instead it’s from a number I don’t recognize.
Marnie, this is Patrick. Downstairs. Sorry for the crashes last night. Cat knocked vase over, which fell into computer printer, drowning motor. Flashes of light ensued. Sparks. New printer being delivered next Monday. Cat very sorry. Told him he can’t keep getting by on his looks. He’s looking for new apt.
Jessica is watching my face. “Patrick,” I tell her. I smile and type back to him:
Yikes! Just make sure your wallet is safe when he decides to move out.
And he types:
Too late. Wallet already missing, and coincidentally, tuna fish cans are arriving by the boxload.
A few minutes later he writes: By the way, welcome to this house! Blix told me about you. Glad you’re here at last. Hope you like it. It’s crazy but in a good way. I think.
The golden haze is still around me when I get back to Blix’s house, where I find Noah practicing his guitar in the living room, and the haze is still there even when he sees me and wants to tell me again how he helped Blix over to the other side, and how he knew she should have called on the medical professionals, but instead she turned to him—HIM—and how bad it feels that even doing that for her apparently wasn’t enough. He’s clearly been brooding about this all night long, but I am in this haze like nothing I’ve ever been in before, you see, and everything seems so fraught with meaning.
The haze stays with me through the thirty-seven text messages (yes, THIRTY-SEVEN) sent to me by my family members and Jeremy, asking what I’m planning to do, if I’ve listed the house for sale yet, when am I coming home, and by the way, don’t even tell them I like it in Brooklyn because we are not New York people. (That, from my sister, who says she is holding the baby while she types, and she just wishes I could somehow hear the gurgling sounds the baby makes when my sister tells her my name.) Jeremy types over and over again: COME. HOME.
The golden haze peaks when I happen to go outside and see a car pull up next door, and an elderly man gets out and goes up on the porch where Lola is waiting for him. He puts his arm around her, and Lola eases herself away from him, shifts her hip just so, and they walk down the steps together. She ducks into the car without even glancing in my direction.
Noah goes out alone that night, and I get takeout and eat in my room, chatting with Jeremy on the phone. I tell him Brooklyn is big and dirty and complicated. He tells me that he went running on the beach, that it’s still so warm he almost was tempted to go swimming, and also that he had dinner with Natalie and Brian.
“And guess what. I was the one who finally got Amelia to sleep,” he says. “She put her little head on my shoulder and I walked her around and around the dining room table until she fell sound asleep.”
“That’s so nice,” I tell him. I want to tell him about the golden haze, but there are no words.
It might be part of the magic, and Jeremy doesn’t believe in magic.
The haze has disappeared, though, when Noah and I get to Charles Sanford’s office on Monday morning. Charles Sanford, a very nice-looking man with hair so slicked back it seems like it may have been buttered, studies us sitting across the desk from him and rattles his papers and lowers his spectacles and then says a bunch of words in a very lawyerly voice that confirm the fact that Blix Holliday has indeed left me her house.
Left it to me. Just me.
“However, there’s a stipulation,” says Mr. Sanford in a quiet, careful voice, looking at me. “And that is that you, Marnie, will have to agree to live in the house for three months before it is officially considered yours. Meaning that you can’t put it on the market until that period of time is up. Blix did not want you to simply sell the house and leave.”
Noah exhales loudly.
“So it’s not mine unless I live there?” I say.
“For three months,” says Mr. Sanford.
Three months. Three months.
“It’s an unusual stipulation,” he says, “but then Blix was not a usual type of person, now was she?” He shrugs. “What can I say? That’s the way she wrote it up. It doesn’t have to start right this minute, of course. You can go get your affairs in order and come back . . .”
“But whenever I come back, it’s for three months,” I say.
“Yes. That is correct. Perhaps you need some time to think it over.”
I become seriously interested in the little hammered gold nails decorating the upholstered armchair I’m sitting in. I run my fingers across them again and again, tracing the indentations. The light in the room is purplish. The carpet is soft underneath my shoes. There’s a tiny spiderweb in the upper left corner of the ceiling, near the window. My brain is ticking off the fact that three months will mean I’m there until the end of the year, pretty much.
Three months, three months.
My whole family is going to be so upset! And I’ll miss Jeremy. Taking a three-month break from him is not what I would have chosen. Oh, and Amelia, too. I was just getting situated back in Florida, beginning to feel connected and secure. Damn it, I’ve been happy there . . . and after such a big, huge unhappiness, this has felt like a gigantic gift.
Blix, what have you done to me? I’ll need a coat. And sweaters. And what will I live on?
And, oh my God, then there’s Noah.
I look over at him. He’s holding a piece of paper in front of him, which I happen to know is a checklist of questions that he’s been directed to ask by his mother.
He starts in, his voice heavy and serious. Might there be another will that’s more current somewhere? How do we know Blix was of sound mind? Can this will be contested? Blah blah blah.
When he asks Charles Sanford point-blank if I had any input into the terms of this will, and when exactly was I informed about it, I bristle and make a little squawking noise of protest. But Charles Sanford is patient, explaining that I had nothing to do with the terms of the will, but I can tell he’s getting fed up with Noah and his family, and anyway there’s a loud buzzing sound in my ears that means I can barely pay attention anymore to what’s being said. I work on rubbing the little nails in the chair and wonder what in the world Jeremy is going to say when he hears this news.
Do I even want this?