Half an hour later, the Realtor gave them the key. “Take a walk around the place, see what you think. It’s not the turnkey you were hoping for, but the bones are there. She could be a real stunner with a little work and TLC.”
And the commission would be twice what the Realtor would get from the other houses she’d shown them, but Ethan bit back those words and followed his lovely wife into the run-down beast.
The Realtor was right, it did have good bones. The house had been abandoned; the previous owner ran into bad times and couldn’t make the payments, and the bank had foreclosed on this monstrosity. The floors were blond teak but scraped and scratched; the owners must have had a large dog. The front porch needed a complete overhaul; he could see a large crack in one of the plaster Doric columns.
Sutton came tearing around the corner from what he assumed was the kitchen. She had a smudge of filth on her cheek and was smiling wider than he’d seen since the first time he’d taken her to bed. Her eyes danced with happiness.
“Oh, Ethan,” she breathed, and he knew, without a doubt, the cause was already lost. They’d be putting in an offer this afternoon. This was their new home.
Would he have allowed her to fall in love with the old wreck had he known where the house would lead them? The agony they’d experience behind these very walls?
Bloody well not. The house would bring them nothing but pain and sorrow. He didn’t care if they were supposed to learn and grow from their experiences, this place was damned, and he’d known it that day when he’d allowed her to fall in love, allowed her to deviate so wholly from their plan. They’d had a plan, and if they’d just stuck to it, none of this would have happened, none of it.
They didn’t need five bedrooms and three fireplaces and an albatross of a house that would require an entire renovation inside and out to make it livable. They didn’t need anything but each other, a bed, a bottle of champagne, and their laptops.
He started to tell her so. He did. Something told him, as lovely as the house could be, they were making a mistake. But the words wouldn’t pass his tongue, and then Sutton was there, pressed against him, lush lips against his, her excitement coming through in passion and fire and promises of things to come, a future of love and happiness, and the next thing he knew, he was dizzily writing a check for fifty thousand more than asking, cash, to assure they wouldn’t get into a bidding war.
He wanted to say no, but he didn’t know what was to come.
So he walked out onto the falling-down porch and signaled to the Realtor, whose face lit up like a candle from within when she saw the rectangle of paper in his hand, mirroring his wife’s delighted visage.
They moved in a few weeks later, having painted the living room a soft dove gray and installed a sofa bed. They were planning to do most of the renovations themselves, but had found a local carpenter-cum-handyman who was going to do the detail work.
Days of scraping and painting and gutting bathrooms ensued. When they weren’t working on the house, they were working on their books, individual islands of words, adrift in the chaos around them. Their breaks consisted of runs to Home Depot and Porter Paints. They lived on takeout until the appliances arrived: the massive Sub-Zero they had to knock down part of a wall to fit in, the double convection oven that just barely slid into the wall space Ethan had designed, the Bosch dishwasher that made no noise when it was running. And then it was time to pick the counters, and Sutton fell in love with that bloody gorgeous marble, and the fighting began.
It was a stupid thing to fight over, a large slab of marble. But fight they did, and the house must have fed off the negative energy, because suddenly everything started going wrong. The paint peeled in the living room, they found asbestos in the attic that the inspectors had missed, a family of mice took up residence in the bedroom, partying and carrying on at all hours of the night. The crack in the damn Doric column gave way, and the porch crashed to the yard below, ruining $500 of plants and shrubs they’d put in the day before.
There were tears and arguments and cold shoulders, and when Ethan began to worry they wouldn’t find their way back, he gave in on the marble. Like a hurricane’s passing, life suddenly calmed. The fights ended. The house came together. They moved the furniture in from the storage unit, and then they were happy. So happy. Sitting together at the kitchen table over their cereal bowls, that big bloody slab of marble glowing gently under the soft white lights, their days were finally unencumbered by the specter of renovation.
Words, all they wanted was words. The two of them, heads bent over laptops, making, creating, in their perfect, customized new home.
How was he to know where things were headed?
It was all his fault. It really was.
He’d gone on a trip. Speaking to a library association. The hotel was small and intimate, the bar cozy. He’d gotten drunk. He only fucked her once, but when he missed his usual good-night check-in, Sutton had known immediately, and when he got home, they’d had the row to end all rows. The house—the goddamn house, that goddamn marble—took her side.
No matter what they did, no matter how they tried, they couldn’t get her blood out.
TELL ME YOUR SECRETS
Now
Ethan sat at the counter in the kitchen, elbows parked in defeat on the wide slab of Carrara marble. The female police officer stood opposite him, notebook out, pen poised above the paper, a quizzical smile on her face.
“Mr. Montclair? Are you all right?”
“I’m sorry, Officer. Yes, of course. You were saying?”
“When was the last time you saw your wife?”
He traced a gray vein in the white. That damn marble. He could never escape the unhappiness it reminded him of. He hadn’t wanted it, knew it was going to be ruined within a week, stained with wine or etched by the endless amounts of lemon juice Sutton poured into her water. He lost the battle, as he had so many others.
If forced, he’d grudgingly admit it had kept up surprisingly well, with only one real stain. Mulberry red, near the Sub-Zero. Sutton told their friends it was from the skins of blueberries left overnight.
They’d been at it for two hours now. Joel had said nothing, just sat in the corner owlishly watching the proceedings, coughing every once in a while, which Ethan took to mean stop talking, fool. After the first round of questions, Sergeant Moreno asked to see Sutton’s computer, and Ivy showed him where Sutton’s office was while Officer Graham grilled Ethan. She was looking at him sideways already, he could tell. Everything he said was being measured and weighed. Joel had warned him this was how things were going to go. They always looked at the husband. Everything he said sounded weak, insincere. He realized the interview was going badly. Very badly.
“Sir? Mr. Montclair? I know we’ve been over it once before, sir, but let’s run through it again. You never know what you might have forgotten or omitted, even accidentally.”