There were too many rooms and too much stuff in Esther’s house. Hundreds of years of families living and talking and loving and fighting and possessing things. She could understand why her mother would have liked it: the mystery, the idea of “haunted” objects—which she’d talked about often. She could understand why Esther would want to catalog the family history, but did they have to actually stay in this building to do all that? She looked again at her aunt Esther. The lady who was, even now, totally unflappable, a genuinely interesting person in her combat boots, highball glass in her hand—but she’d much rather hang out with her in Manhattan.
There’s a reason eight million people live in New York City, Janine had said just that morning, and she sure wasn’t kidding. Gretchen was starving. She wanted to get out of there and walk to the subway and go downtown and get some Indian food, a kati roll or maybe some chana saag. Then go to the Film Forum and watch a movie with Simon. Afterward they could sit in a café all night. That sounded like a good night. Not whatever this was. She didn’t want to think about what this was, because it was beginning to make her heart race and her hands sweaty.
She pulled out her phone—no reception again. She wondered if her room was the only one in the house with reception. “Esther,” she said, “I’m going to go to my room and call my friend.”
“Bad idea,” her aunt said.
“What?”
“Bad idea this time of night.”
“Are there . . . ?” Gretchen was too frightened to say the word. She didn’t know if she was about to say rats or ghosts.
“Rodents,” Esther said. “They’re nocturnal. You wanna hang out down here until you’re really ready to shut yourself in your room.”
“Are you kidding me?”
That was it. There was no way she was spending the night in this house trapped in her room by a herd of rodents. She shook her head in disgust and began walking toward the door. But there were so many doors and so many rooms that opened into other rooms. She was startled how easy it was to get lost just between the parlor and the porch and had to backtrack several times. Esther walked calmly behind her all the way saying things like, “Now, now. Take it easy,” and, “It just takes a little getting used to around here is all.”
Gretchen quickened her pace, gripped by an irrational fear that she might never find the front door, or that she was still dreaming. Finally, she flung open the door and rushed out onto the porch.
The dusky summer air enveloped her, smelling like wet grass and roses. Crickets were chirping, an owl was forlornly hooting. It was an ideal bucolic moment, more than a little jarring after being in the claustrophobic house, and after what had happened at the piano. The stars were coming out, covering the whole sky in a blanket of shining pinpricks of light—she had never in her life seen such a beautiful sky, or felt the balmy air of such a lush landscape. It was both stunning and calming. Gretchen propped her camera on the edge of the porch to steady it, set a very slow shutter speed, then shot the sky. And the outline of the forest behind it. Taking pictures made her feel invincible.
Esther might be crazy, but she was right about one thing—if Gretchen was going to look into what had happened to her mother, if her mother had, in fact, gone missing sometime after visiting Axton mansion, she needed to keep a cooler head. She must have dozed and had a nightmare back in the house, that was all. Any house left neglected like that would begin to feel frightening and claustrophobic, and not eating all day certainly affects your thinking. Of course that was all—there was no other explanation.
The summer air was making her feel more relaxed. Gretchen listened to the sound of crickets. Whatever was going on, she could handle it. She would make herself handle it.
Esther had come out and sat in the rocker, where she was smoking a cigarette and gazing up at the sky. Gretchen stood in the yard, looking at the silver light on the meadow and the dark outline of the forest in the distance. Finally she sat on the top step of the porch, near Esther.
“It’s pretty as hell here sometimes,” Esther said. “That’s another reason our family has stayed so long.”
The throbbing hum of insects was like a tonic. Moths and long-legged bugs fluttered around the porch light. She sat with her aunt watching the sky get darker.
Esther had brought her here to see something, to understand something. If her mother was alive, she would want Gretchen there too, where it was so easy to believe in spirits. She would want her to have made this pilgrimage, to see with her own eyes the brutal and benevolent place where her life began.
Suddenly Gretchen was filled with the anger and confusion she’d felt as a younger girl, angry at falling into a sentimental thought about Mona. All the things she tried to ignore came rushing back here in her mother’s family home. Who cared if Mona would have wanted her there? Mona who couldn’t even say good-bye, who had been so sweet and loving one day and then gone the next, leaving her father to pick up the pieces, leaving Gretchen to wonder for years what she could have done that would have made her mother stay.
Those old feelings of doubt had tortured her for so long, and now they were back. But maybe this time she could get some answers. Not for Mona’s sake, but for her own. She looked up at her aunt. She had a feeling Esther might understand what it was like to be angry about something you had no power to change.