CAROLINE
Caroline heard glass breaking, and a short cry, as soon as she walked into the house. The sound cut through the “muffling”: that’s what the awful woman at Sunrise Center had called the effect of alcohol on Caroline’s brain, the time she had been forced to go to a rehab center after accidentally tapping another car on the way home from a dinner. No one had even been hurt, but the other woman, who’d had a baby in the car, had been hysterical about it and insisted on calling the police.
Muffling—the woman at Sunrise had said it as though Caroline should be ashamed. But afterward, whenever she’d had a couple, Caroline always imagined her brain nestled in a kind of hand-knitted mitten, warm and protected.
But now the muffling split apart, and for a short second everything was sharp and painful.
“Trenton,” she said, turning to Minna, feeling a sudden panic. “That’s Trenton.” She turned blindly in the hall; she didn’t know where the sound had come from. “Trenton? Are you okay? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” His voice was faint. She still couldn’t tell where he was. She had always hated that about the house: how it sucked up sound and voices and footsteps, as though they were all being absorbed, slowly but surely, into the walls.
“Where are you?” she cried out, still unable to quell the panic. Her chest felt as though it had collapsed, as though a big fist had reached out and punched backward in time, back to that awful night of Trenton’s accident—the two-hour drive through the dark; the dingy hospital and the ugly woman who’d barred her from going into the operating room, staring at her as though she was some species of insect; the long wait without anything at all to drink.
“He’s in the basement, Ma. Stop shouting.” Minna opened the basement door with a foot, as though it was the door to a public restroom and she was worried about germs on the handle. Amy made a rush for the stairs, and Minna grabbed her arm.
“What did I tell you, Amy?” she said. “You don’t go down there. Not unless Mommy takes you.”
Amy began to wail.
Caroline moved past both of them and angled her body so she could squeeze down the narrow staircase. Her head was pounding. “What are you doing?” she said, moving carefully down the stairs. Each step sent a small tremor of pain through her body: ankles, knees, hips. The doctor had said she should lose some weight. Cut out the booze. She had nodded and said oh, yes, absolutely, as she had done so many times with Richard, when she had no intention of listening.
If the doctor had her estranged husband, or her children, he would drink, too.
“Nothing.” Trenton was standing in the middle of the vast cluttered space, looking guilty about something. “I was just—cleaning up.”
It was obviously a lie. Trenton hadn’t helped at all in the three days since they’d been back in Coral River. Caroline realized that he’d probably been looking at pornography. He must have found his father’s collection.
Several months after Trenton’s birth, Caroline had gone looking for Minna’s old stroller in the basement and found a stack of magazines, stashed unself-consciously in a trunk that also contained several baby items and the hat Caroline had bought Richard on their honeymoon. She’d sat on the ground for hours, unable to look away, unable to stop turning the pages—the way she’d heard that a bad electric shock caused you to hold on.
“What was that awful noise?” she said. “Did you break something?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Trenton said. “The lightbulb just . . . exploded.”
“The wiring in this house was always screwy,” Minna said. Caroline turned and saw she had come halfway down the stairs. Amy was trying to get around her, and Minna shuffled side to side, like a hockey player protecting a goal.
Of course. Minna was taking Trenton’s side. Anyone could see he’d been fiddling around where he wasn’t supposed to—maybe he thought he had the right, now that the house was his. Caroline felt a rush of anger that replaced the fear and obliterated it.
The house had been a constant point of contention in her marriage. She had not initially wanted to move from their sprawling, sunny home in California, on its small trim lawn on a small trim street in a nice gated community not far from the ocean. She had liked the guardhouse, where an ever-rotating cast of polite young Mexicans stood watch and checked names against a list—as though each time she returned home, she was accessing an exclusive party.
And then Richard had decided he wanted to be back in New York, close to where he had grown up. He had dragged her across the country and installed her in a vast, dark, drafty house, plagued by mice and termites, erratically heated, prone to leaks and pipe freezes and toilets backing up onto the floor.
Caroline had declared war, first on him; she had refused to sleep with him for two months. When she realized that her tactics only amused him, and that he was getting it elsewhere, anyway, she declared war instead on the house. She ripped out wallpaper and replaced it with patterns of her choosing. She scrubbed the cabinets, rearranged the furniture, shopped, and shopped some more. She put lights everywhere, as many as twelve in a room. She’d never been good with her hands and never before cared to do work herself; in California, there had always been gardeners, and decorators to match the cushions with the couch, and Caroline had to do nothing but approve it all. She was surprised to find she had taste. She could get things done.
She spent a spring building up a garden—her very first—carting soil and fertilizer and new bulbs, small as presents, weeding and trimming and rooting oxalis from the soil, cursing the blue Veronica that wouldn’t bloom, and sweating into the soil beds.
And slowly, without her noticing, she had begun to love the house. She loved the way her bedroom filled up with light in the mornings, like a glass filling with rich cream. She loved the smell of the gardens after a rainstorm, and the smell of the woods in the autumn, rich and full and deeper, somehow, than anything she’d ever known in California. She even loved the creaking floorboards, and the pipes that shuddered and banged, as though they had a voice.
She loved the first freeze, which patterned the windows with lace, and making coffee in the kitchen wearing thick socks; she loved the cottonwood trees and their fluff, drifting through the weak spring light.
But she had continued to pretend to hate it. She had pretended, still, that Richard had brought her there against her will, because it gave her power over him. She had pretended that she was happy to leave him and move to Long Island with Trenton, even though it broke her heart. She had lorded it over Richard, the fact that he had made her unhappy for years and years, even though she was happy; at least, the house had made her happy.
But Richard won in the end. Maybe he’d thought the house would be a burden on her. During one of their last communications, he’d apologized at last.
“I should never have moved you from California,” he’d said, sounding small and old. “You always hated it here. I should have been a better listener.”
She had almost told him then. She had almost said No, you’re wrong. I miss Coral River. I’ve missed it every day. But it was too late to give up the lie, which she had clung to for so long, which had become as much a part of their relationship as either of the children.