Aunt Helen had owned the most expansive private library of anyone I’d ever heard of (she was featured on the front page of Libraries International twelve separate times). (Yes, Libraries International was an actual magazine.) So I wasn’t quite sure why one of her last wishes had been to have this particular book back.
I put it back on my bookshelf and went to play croquet with Abe.
The next morning was Sunday, my day with Sam. I woke up early and took a shower and found something to wear and then knocked on Abe’s door at ten.
“Go away,” he yelled.
Abe was sometimes a morning person and sometimes not. It came and went in waves.
“It’s me!” I said.
“Go away, me.”
“Abe, I miss you!”
“You live with me.”
“It just doesn’t feel like that lately, you know?” I leaned against the door and ran my fingernails down the wood over and over, because I knew that drove him crazy.
“FINE,” he yelled, so I turned the doorknob and let myself into the room.
Abe’s room was kind of a mystery to me. He didn’t love intruders and so every time I was let inside, it felt like my first time. Every wall was lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, now packed with first editions and rare hardcovers from my aunt. He’d unpacked much quicker than I had. Aunt Helen’s boxes were still sitting on my carpet, still covered in a blanket, waiting.
Abe was lying in bed, the comforter pulled up to his chin, his eyes squinted shut, and his face scowling.
“What do you want?” he hissed.
“I just wanted to say hi.”
“Next time, text me.”
“Have you ever been to New Canaan?”
“No.”
“Is there a Canaan? Is there an Old Canaan?”
“I was sleeping, Lottie.”
“Do you think people are inherently good or evil?”
“Are we doing this now? Are you really trying to do this now?”
“I don’t mean that in a weird way. Like, just off the top of your head.”
“You’re killing me.”
“What do you think happens after you die?”
Abe, who had shut his eyes, now cracked one open. He looked at me in the long, hard way only a sibling is capable of looking at another sibling. Like: I love you so much, but I also kind of want to kill you.
“Lottie,” he said.
“Abe.”
“Do you want to maybe talk about this later?”
“I’m about to leave.”
“Where are you going?”
“To New Canaan. With Sam.”
“What’s in New Canaan?”
“I don’t know. I thought you might.”
Abe pulled himself up, rubbing at his eyes. “Lottie, are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Let’s play croquet again. Whenever you get back, we’ll play croquet.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“With flamingoes?”
“If you can train them properly.”
He ducked back under the covers and pulled them over his head until I could only see his hair. I ran my fingertips over the spines of all his books. New and old. History and present. Then I let myself out of his room and went down to the car. I texted Sam: I’m on my way.
He texted back immediately:
I’ll see you soon.
I read Aunt Helen’s next letter before I started driving.
Lottie,
I did an interview with a magazine once, some foreign magazine I can’t remember now. The interviewer I remember, though; she was a petite girl with thick glasses and black, black hair, a bright-yellow shirt and bright-red lipstick and a bright-blue skirt. She was so bright, is what I’m saying, that it kind of hurt my eyes to look at her directly. But she was also very self-assured and not at all threatened by my intimidating artist demeanor (kidding). She looked me straight in the eye, point-blank, and said, in this beautiful accent I cannot now place, “What is the worst thing you have ever done?”
That was her opening question! My gosh, at the time it kind of ruffled my feathers, it annoyed me a bit. I didn’t know how to answer her, and I think I even felt embarrassed, a little accosted, like, where does this little imp get off being so bold? I’m sure I must have given her a half-assed answer, a stock answer, something like “Well, if I told you, I’d have to kill you.” Now I’m hoping that expression translated to whatever her first language was, otherwise I might have come off as quite the murderer.
Now, many years and many interviews later, she is one of the only interviewers I can actually remember (I also remember Oprah and Ellen, but that’s to be expected). And that question stands out as the most interesting question I’ve ever been asked. So, for fun, I’d like to answer it now. There is no one left to keep it a secret from; I shall soon be gone, and maybe the one good thing about death is you no longer have to worry about maintaining your public image. You no longer, essentially, have to explain yourself.
The worst thing I have ever done is to walk away from a friend at the very moment he needed me the most. That’s as specific as I want to be, for now (if there weren’t some cliffhangers to these letters, how could I be sure you’d read them all the way through?). As a much younger person, I was faced with a very difficult decision, and I chose to protect myself and only myself, to put myself first in every respect of the phrase. To abandon completely one of my few true friends. I have never forgiven myself for that (nor should I), and it is something I think about often. I was a selfish person, once upon a time. I am thankful to have (mostly) grown out of it.
You, however, are not selfish at all, and I admire that about you so much. I wonder what answer you would give, if someday an interviewer asked you the same question. I’d like you to have something fun to tell them, a secret that hurts no one, and so that is where my next task comes from: Do something you’re not supposed to do.
Do it with relish.
Enjoy the not-supposed-to-be-doingness of it.
Do it proudly. Break some rules. Hurt no one.
Love, H.
I opened the pinned address Sam had sent while I mentally calculated all the rules I was not prepared to break: stealing, vandalizing, murder. Obviously. I could run a stop sign on the way to New Canaan? But that didn’t seem like anything special; it just seemed dangerous and irresponsible.
The map routed me to somewhere called the Glass House. I spent the hour-and-a-half ride wondering both what I could do that I wasn’t supposed to, and whether it was literally a glass house.
It was literally a glass house.
Well—not at first.
The address Sam sent me took me to Elm Street, and a little brick building with a sign that said The Glass House. Sam was already there.
“This is a brick house. This isn’t a glass house,” I said, instead of hello.
“You’ll see,” he said.
A few minutes later we were herded into vans, and a few minutes after that we pulled over and disembarked, and I followed our small group up a hill.
It emerged out of nowhere, past a skinny stone wall and just in front of a peaceful pond. A literal glass house. Our tour guide stopped the group outside and began to give a short history, but I hardly heard him. I couldn’t stop looking at it.
“This is unreal,” I whispered to Sam.