The sun shines in the spare room windows, landing on Brooklyn’s clothes spread all around on the floor, along with a few garbage bags opened up to expose Ella’s abandoned things. Patricia helps her granddaughter find tops and matching bottoms, socks, and plenty of undies, calmly explaining her choices and showing her granddaughter how to roll her clothes up to prevent wrinkles and save space. Brooklyn does not pay complete attention, but she’s amenable and does her clumsy best to roll up a tiny T-shirt and skort. They add toothbrush, toothpaste, and hairbrush, plus some bows. Chelsea never let her put bows in her hair, but Brooklyn is all for it. Patricia wishes she’d known this sooner; she would’ve rained down bows for every holiday. It’s nice to learn they have certain tastes in common.
She takes more time packing her own things, unsure how long they’ll be gone or if it’s even worth coming back to an empty house from which she could be evicted at any moment. They’re pretty much out of portable food, but she takes care to bring all her first-aid supplies, including the Percocet, plus hydrogen peroxide in case her wounds get fussy. The bigger one is still a bit red and achy, and she’s been dousing it with peroxide, but at least she doesn’t have a fever. She’s bringing the thermometer, too. Maybe there’s a less pricey urgent care out there in the middle of nowhere, where she can get a prescription for antibiotics, if she hasn’t been tagged in some awful system for nonpayment.
Patricia is anxious to get on the road, and yet she can’t help noticing that she’s dragging her feet. She’s taken one last tour of the house at least three times as if something necessary might pop out from under the bed like a lost cat. She’s looking for—what? Some surprise cache of cash or jewels that she’s conveniently forgotten and Diane, or whoever stole her bag, benevolently left behind? She knows now, after a bit of internet sleuthing, that the jewelry she still has on hand is basically worthless, as the only jewelry rich people buy during pandemics are enormous gems, not someone else’s cast-off engraved anniversary band. She’s combed through every inch of Randall’s study, opening books and running a knife blade around promising cracks, but no convenient secret door has presented itself. Life, it turns out, is not a game of Clue. Sometimes there’s nothing left to find.
Chelsea’s next—ugh—fighting match is this evening in Jacksonville, and Patricia has used a discount website to secure a room at a nearby hotel. It’s the grubbiest place she’s stayed at in decades, but it’s all they can afford, and whatever Chelsea is up to, Patricia is completely certain that she doesn’t have a guest room and even if she takes Brooklyn back on the spot, an older woman with failing eyesight that Lasik can no longer touch up can’t be driving on the highway at midnight. If Chelsea has a plan, Patricia has decided she’ll be open to it. If Chelsea wants nothing to do with her, she’ll drive back tomorrow alone and go stay at the Herbert house for the foreseeable future. If she’s there, the police can’t find her, and there will surely be food, plus all the utilities. Randall can’t divorce and evict her if he can’t find her.
The thought of him selling this house, her house, makes her want to bare her teeth and bite.
Some stranger entering this space she’s carefully crafted, this life she’s built, judging it and deciding on some innocuous color to paint it, some cheap tone of taupe. They’ll take down anything personal, leaving a blank slate to attract the next owners.
Patricia isn’t ready to give up, but she’s also not willing to fight for what’s left.
The Herberts will be gone for quite some time. And when she runs out of food or they return, there’s always the Houcks.
Her neighborhood is a ghost town.
She is a ghost.
She shakes her head.
No good being morbid when there’s more to do.
She’s survived worse, after all.
Her sedan is packed as tightly as a tin of sardines. The trunk, the backseat. She assumed Brooklyn would sit up front, but the child balks at that and stands firm that it’s not safe for a highway drive. Finally Patricia relents and repacks everything, making a space behind the passenger seat for her granddaughter to nestle in with pillows and blankets. She finds it odd that the child still insists on wearing a seatbelt and continues asking for a car seat. At this age, Chelsea would make a bed in the backseat for any trip over an hour, lying the full length of whatever beat-up station wagon they were puttering around in that year until they drove it into the ground.
The last thing she does on her way out is reset all the security codes, even going so far as to call the security company and change the secret password.
Someone will come to lay claim to her home, and they will be greeted by shrieking alarms. She should’ve done this sooner. Much sooner. Before Randall and Diane stole her last Tarzan vine.
As the grand gates open and she drives through and Brooklyn hums along to some inane cartoon theme song, Patricia recalls the first time she saw this house, when Randall’s real estate agent drove them here in his black town car. They were sipping champagne because that’s how they used to do things, and they pulled up in front of the palm-lined sidewalk and she felt this lift in her chest, like a bird long held captive finally flying free. This place—she saw it as her Barbie DreamHouse. The sanctuary she’d always wished for and never gotten. The pony that never arrived for her birthday. She told herself it was the thing she’d always wanted, the only thing she needed, the last thing she’d ever want.
She was wrong.
The house didn’t satisfy her for long. As it turns out, what she really wanted was freedom from worry, and the house merely brought along a new cadre of worries. When it rained hard, she didn’t smile to be somewhere safe and dry and warm—she listened for leaks and flooding and looked for water damage on the walls. When it was sunny, she didn’t lie on a float in her pool, luxuriating in the warm kiss of the sun and the absolute languor of a private oasis—she noticed her dimpling thighs and the brown spots on her hands and wondered if she needed to have more sprinklers installed or tell Miguel to fertilize the grass that was a shade less green than the neighbors’. And she told herself she didn’t love Randall and if he chose to spend time elsewhere, that was his right, but she eventually got sick of dining alone when she’d thought their arrangement might provide some kind of comfort or companionship.
The castle became a cage, as castles tend to do.
She’s sorry to leave it behind, but she’s not as devastated as she thought she’d be.
For lunch, they stop at McDonald’s again. Patricia is beginning to remember that when you don’t have much money, it’s the little things that make life bearable. Hot fries eaten from a paper bag make her happier than her thousand-dollar high heels, these days. She can’t quite remember why those shoes became so important to her. She’d rather throw one at Karen and Lynn than pick out a new pair. She left them all behind, opted for comfortable moccasins and a pair of flip-flops and one pair of sneakers, in case she needs to…what?
Run?
Yes, because she’s done illegal things, and she might have to actually run.
“This is a good adventure, Nana,” Brooklyn says between bites of chicken nugget.
How pleasant it must be, to possess that sort of na?veté.
When she was Brooklyn’s age, Patricia was already a tiny adult.