“I grew up in Florida,” I remind him. “I eat overly tanned bitches who drive Audis for breakfast.”
His gaze warms, and he leans in, kissing my forehead. “I love you,” he murmurs against my skin, and I close my eyes briefly, curling my fingers into the fabric of his T-shirt, making myself stay here in this moment, with him, because I know that once we’re inside that house, things will change. We’ve been happy, so happy, for the last ten years, but we were also playing parts.
Cam, the regular guy who taught high school English, and rented a nice but small house, and didn’t have a bank account with nearly a hundred million dollars in his name and a mansion on the other side of the country.
Jules, the sweet wife who churned butter for tourists and did community theater and didn’t care about said money or said mansion.
I let myself mourn that version of us for just a second, and then I turn to the open door and step inside.
CHAPTER SIX
Camden
I forgot about the portrait.
The moment I step into Ashby House, I feel almost disoriented, thrown back in time so violently that I half expect to look down and see soccer cleats on my feet, dirt and grass on my knees.
It’s the smell, for one thing. That beeswax polish Ruby liked the cleaners to use, the sick, funereal scent of fresh flowers that have been left in their vases a day or two too long, the faint tang of woodsmoke that never went away, even in the summers, like every fire ever lit in every fireplace soaked into the pores of the place.
The Tiffany lamp on the table just inside the front door, a replacement for the one I broke when I was fourteen, casting little squares of colored light onto the black marble top of the table it sits on. The carpet runner on the stairs, held in place by brass rods, the navy-and-maroon pattern worn away in the middle of each step by more than a century of feet going up and down.
The way the front hallway widens, opening up into empty space, the better to display the massive windows that look out onto the back lawn before it drops steeply down into rocks and trees. I kicked a soccer ball off the edge of that lawn once, wanting to watch it roll down the mountain, but it was immediately swallowed by the trees, tangled in branches before it got more than three feet down.
All of that comes rushing at me, thick and dizzying, and I wonder if this is what having a heart attack feels like. Chest tight, mind reeling, air suddenly hard to come by.
And then I lift my eyes and see Ruby staring down at me.
The portrait hangs at the top of the stairs, massive in its gilt frame. It was painted by Ruby’s third husband, Andrew. She was married to him the longest, ten years, and maybe she loved him the most because Andrew was the middle name she gave me. He painted her picture right after they met, around 1969, so she wasn’t even thirty at the time.
Younger than I am now.
Her dark hair is loose around her shoulders, no bouffant for Ruby McTavish, even in the sixties, and she’s wearing an emerald-green evening gown as she perches on the arm of some antique chair, her legs crossed demurely at the ankles, her hands clasped in her lap. Her smile is faint, but genuine, I think. I remember that expression. And it’s a good portrait, objectively. True to life, and the contrast of the opulent dress and décor with her casual pose works well.
I focus on the other details of the painting because I don’t want to look into those eyes.
But I have to, don’t I? I owe her that, at least.
I’m back, I think, looking up, and even though I haven’t heard her voice in more than ten years, I imagine her reply.
You certainly took your time, my dear.
“That’s her,” I hear Jules say—it’s not a question—and I swallow hard, putting an arm around her shoulders.
I never called her anything else. By law, she was my mother, but the word never suited her or me for that matter. She was always Ruby.
“Cam, this place…” Jules starts, looking around. She doesn’t finish her sentence, but she doesn’t have to.
“It’s something,” I agree, and she turns to me with wide eyes.
“Okay, King of Understatement. God. How did you ever … I don’t know. Do math homework here? Eat Oreos? Look up tits on the internet?”
My shoulders relax a little.
Jules is here. Funny, quick Jules who loves me and understands me––as much as I’ve let her.
I can do this with her here. I can get through this.
“I actually did my math homework right through there,” I tell her, taking her shoulders and turning her to face another hallway, one that leads to the kitchen. “And I didn’t eat Oreos at all because Ruby had a thing about junk food. As for tits on the internet…”
Keeping my hands on her shoulders, I turn her to face me, bending my knees slightly so that we’re eye to eye. “These eyes never saw any tits at all until you took pity on me in the backseat of my car behind Senor Pollo’s.”
Her sputtering laughter chases away some of the shadows, just like I’d hoped it would, and that tightness in my chest fades as I pull her close, her body a soft, familiar shape against mine.
I’d always thought there was something about this house that poisoned everyone in it eventually. Turned the good to rot. But there’s too much sunshine in Jules for that to happen to her, and I need to remember that.
“Hope I’m not interrupting something!” a voice calls out, and that slight lift of happiness I’d been feeling slides away as quickly as it came.
I drop my arms from around Jules and turn around.
“Ben,” I say, and, sure enough, there he stands on the stairs.
It had been a shock to see that Libby was no longer a teenager, but Ben, strangely, looks almost exactly the same.
His hair is sandy blond, a few shades lighter than mine, and he’s just as tan as his sister, his teeth blindingly white as he smiles down at us. Ben’s dad, Howell, always wore polo shirts and khakis, his feet forever shoved into Docksiders, but Ben is in jeans and a fitted gray T-shirt, and as he makes his way down the stairs, I see he’s wearing a spotless pair of those expensive sneakers he’s always been addicted to.
I’ve got on a beat-up pair of leather ankle boots, but other than that, we’re dressed almost exactly the same, and there’s that dizzying sense of vertigo again because, as I sense Jules look back and forth between us, I know what she must be thinking.
Ben is two years older, and I’m maybe an inch taller than he is. He’s a little less lanky than I am, chest and arms thicker, and his hair is shorter. North Carolina still drips from his voice in a way that it doesn’t from mine, but, yeah, we look enough alike to be brothers. People used to assume we were, actually, an idea that horrified both of us.
Me in another life, I think now, looking at him as he offers his hand to shake. Me if I stayed here.
“Glad you made it,” Ben says, his glance brushing off of me, but fixing on Jules in a way that has my hands clenched into fists before I even realize it.
“The Prodigal Son returns,” he continues even though he’s staring at Jules. She’s smiling back at him, polite, but her toe nudges mine just the littlest bit.
A reminder, probably, that I owe her five dollars. Somewhere around Nashville, she had bet me someone in my family would say those exact words and I, stupidly, had thought that even Ben wasn’t that much of a cliché.
“And even better, he brings a new Mrs. McTavish,” Ben goes on, gesturing at one of the photographs on the table with the Tiffany lamp. “This house is named after the last McTavish bride, you know. Anna. My great-grandmother. Her maiden name was Ashby.”
He swings back to Jules. “What’s yours?”
I should’ve warned her about this, the family’s obsession with genealogy and who birthed who, like a dead relative you never met can tell someone everything they need to know about you.