That stray dog had been the talk all that day—what to do with him, where he’d been—and it was only much later that I found my mind going back to that dog drifting into town out of the blue. I wondered if he was some kind of sign, a warning that something terrible was coming, that I should not take the much-exalted and mysterious Road Less Traveled, but the one well trod, wide-open, and brightly lit, the road I knew.
By then it was too late. The sun had set. Sleepy Sam was gone. I’d overturned the café chairs and put them on the tables. I’d hauled out the trash. And anyway, that flew in the face of human nature. No one ever heeded a warning sign when it came.
My mom and dad assumed I was joining them at the Dreamland Theater in Westerly for the screwball comedy classics marathon, like I did every Friday.
“Actually, I made plans tonight,” I said.
My dad was thrilled. “Really, Bumble? That’s great.”
“I’m driving up to Wincroft.”
They fell silent. My mom had just flipped the Closed sign in the window, and she turned, wrapping her cardigan around herself, shivering even though it was seventy-five degrees out.
“How long have you known about this?” she asked.
“Not long. I’ll be careful. I’ll be back by midnight. They’re up there for Whitley’s birthday. I think it’ll be good for me to see them.”
“That’s a long way to drive in the dark,” said my dad.
My mom looked like I’d been given a prognosis of six weeks left to live. Sometimes when she got really upset, she chewed an imaginary piece of gum. She was doing that now.
“Part of the grieving process is confronting the past,” I said.
“That’s not the point. I—”
“It’s all right, Victoria.” My dad put a hand on her shoulder.
“But Dr. Quentin said not to put yourself in stressful situations that—”
“We’ve established that Dr. Quentin is an idiot,” I said.
“Dr. Quentin is indeed an idiot,” said my dad with a regretful nod. “The fact that his name is one-half of a state prison should have been a red flag.”
“You know I don’t like it when you two gang up on me,” said my mom.
At that moment, someone—some red-faced weekender in seersucker shorts who’d had too many stouts at O’Malligan’s—tried to open the door.
“We’re closed,” my mom snapped.
That was how I came to be driving my dad’s ancient green Dodge RAM with the emphysema muffler fifty miles up the Rhode Island coastline.
Wincroft.
The name sounded like something out of a windswept novel filled with ghosts and madmen. The mansion was a sprawling collection of red brick, turrets, gardens, and crow gargoyles, built in the 1930s by a Great White Hunter who’d supposedly called Hemingway and Lawrence of Arabia his friends. He had traveled the world killing beautiful creatures, and thus Wincroft, his seaside estate, had never been lived in more than a few weeks in sixty years. When Whitley’s weird ex-second-stepdad, Burt—commonly called E.S.S. Burt—bought it in foreclosure in the 1980s, he gut renovated the interiors in an unfortunate style Whitley called “if Madonna threw up all over Cyndi Lauper.”
Still, it wasn’t unusual to open a chest of drawers in the attic, or a musty steamer trunk, and find photographs of strangers gripping rifles and wearing fox furs or some weird piece of taxidermy—a ferret, red frog, or rodent of unknown species. This gave every visit to Wincroft the mysterious feel of being on an archaeological expedition, as if all around us, inside the floors, walls, and ceiling, some lost civilization was waiting to be unearthed.
“We are our junk,” said Jim once, pulling a taxidermy lizard out of a shoe box.
Leaving the interstate, the road to get there turned corkscrewed and dizzying, as if trying to shake you. The coast of Rhode Island—not the infamously uptight Newport part, with the stiff cliffs and colossal mansions smugly staring down at the tiny sailboats salting the harbor, but the rest of it—was rough and tumbledown, laid-back and sunburnt. It was an old homeless beachcomber in a washed-out T-shirt who couldn’t remember where he’d slept the night before. The grasses were wiry and wasted, the roads salty and cracked, sprouting faded signs and faulty traffic lights. Bridges elbowed their way out of the marshes before collapsing, exhausted, on the other side of the road.
I still had their phone numbers, but I didn’t want to call. I didn’t even know if they’d be there. All these months later their plans could have changed. Maybe I’d knock and Whitley wouldn’t answer, but her ex-second-stepdad, Burt, would, E.S.S. Burt with his too-long, curly gray hair; Burt, who a million years ago had written an Oscar-nominated song for a tragic love story starring Ryan O’Neill. Or maybe they would all be there. Maybe I wanted to see the looks on their faces when they first saw me, looks they hadn’t rehearsed.
Then again, if they didn’t know I was coming, I could still turn around. I could still go join my parents at the Dreamland for His Girl Friday, afterward head to the Shakedown for crab cakes and oysters, saying hi to the owner, Artie, pretending I didn’t hear him whisper to my dad when I went to the bathroom, “Bee’s really come around,” like I was a wounded racehorse they’d decided not to euthanize. Not that it was Artie’s fault. It was the natural reaction when people found out what had happened: my boyfriend, Jim, had died senior year.
Sudden Death of the Love of Your Life wasn’t supposed to happen to you as a teenager. If it did, though, it was helpful if it was due to one of the Top Three Understandable Reasons for Dying as a Kid: A. Car accident. B. Cancer. C. Suicide. That way, after you selected the applicable choice, the nearest adult could promptly steer your attention to the range of movies (many starring Timothy Hutton) and self-help books to help you Deal.
But when your boyfriend’s death remains unsolved, and you’re left staring into a black hole of guilt and the unknown?
There’s no movie or self-help book in the world to help you with that.
Except maybe The Exorcist.
If I was a no-show tonight, my old friends would come and go from Wincroft, and that would be that. Not showing up would be the final push of that old toy sailboat from my childhood, the one shove that would really send it drifting out toward the middle of the lake, far from the shoreline, forever out of reach.
Then I’d never find out what happened to Jim.
I kept driving.
The twisting road seemed to urge me onward, yellowed beech trees streaking past; a bridge; the sudden, startling view of a harbor where tall white sailboats crowded like a herd of feasting unicorns before vanishing. I couldn’t believe how easily I remembered the way: left at the Exxon, right on Elm, right at the stop sign where you diced with Death, run-down trailers with strung-up laundry and flat tires in the yard. Then the trees fell away in deference to the most beautiful kiss of sky and sea, always streaked orange and pink at dusk.
And there it was. The wrought-iron gate emblazoned with the W.
It was open. The lamps were lit.
I made the turn and floored it, oak branches flying past like ribbons come loose from a ponytail, wind howling through the open windows. Another curve and I saw the mansion, the windows golden and alive, all hulking red brick and slate, crow gargoyles perched forever on the roof.
As I pulled up I almost laughed aloud at the four cars parked there, side by side. I didn’t recognize any of them—except for Martha’s Honda Accord with the bumper sticker HONK FOR GENERAL RELATIVITY. If pressed I could, with little trouble, match the other cars with their respective owners.
I had changed so much. From the look of these cars, they had not.
I checked my appearance in the rearview mirror, feeling immediate horror: messy ponytail, chapped lips, shiny forehead. I looked like I’d just run a marathon and come in last. I blotted my face on the roll of paper towels my dad kept in the door, pinched my cheeks, tucked the loose strands of dark brown hair behind my ears. Then I was sprinting up the stone steps and rapping the brass lion knocker.
Nothing happened.
I rang the doorbell, once, twice, three times, all in one crazy, deranged movement, because I knew if I hesitated at all I’d lose my nerve. I’d sink, like some lost boot caught inside a lobster trap, straight back to the bottom of the sea.