myself.”
I studied the house, trying to take in the whole giant sprawl. Granted, it would need work. The place looked like it had stood vacant a long time, abandoned for ten, maybe even fifteen years. Ferns had sprouted though the slats of the porch. The columns were covered in a scaly silver mold. There were mushrooms growing in one of the rain gutters, a whole row, white with red spots, like tiny bloodstained umbrellas.
The grounds were in bad shape too: everything wild and overgrown, choked by weeds and bramble. Long tatters of moss hung from the trees.
Still, there was no disguising what lay beneath all the disrepair. With time and effort, this could be a wonderland for us.
Laura must have sensed my excitement. “This house is incredible. But it’ll be way too much work. I mean, look.” She waved a hand over the tall, weedy grass, which came all the way up to our thighs. “The yard alone will take weeks to clear.”
“We wouldn’t tackle the whole thing all at once,” I said. “We could just do a little every day.”
Laura turned to examine the house again. I spotted a tick crawling up the back of her shirt and quickly plucked it off before she could notice.
“I don’t know, Jake,” she said. “If it’s so great, why has it been standing here, empty, year after year? What’s wrong with it?”
“So,” I said to the realtor. “What’s wrong with it?”
The realtor shrugged, mopping the sweat from her face. Her name was Joyce. She was an older lady, a grandmotherly type; she wore her white hair in a bun; her sneakers were brand-new. The house had been hard to find. It lay off the main road, hidden behind the old lemon fields. Walking over from where we’d parked had been a big exertion for Joyce.
“Nothing’s wrong with this place, love,” she said. “People are just afraid of privacy, I suppose.”
I waited for her to go on. “You’re sure? There’s no catch?”
“Fess up, Joyce,” said Laura.
Joyce sighed and wiped her glasses on her shorts. “Look. The only thing I can think of that might have kept people away is the camp. There’s a camp nearby.”
“A camp? Like a camp for kids?” Laura said.
“No. It’s a camp for ladies,” said Joyce. “It’s more like a retreat.”
“Like a spa?” I was intrigued; I’d never been to a real spa before. I pictured myself relaxing in pits of bubbling mud.
“Not exactly a spa,” said Joyce.
“Not exactly how?” Laura asked.
Joyce picked a daisy from the brush and sniffed the petals. “It’s a federal retreat.”
“A federal retreat like a prison?” said Laura, sounding alarmed.
“I suppose it’s sort of like that,” Joyce said. “But it’s strictly a white-collar facility. It’s not like there are any violent offenders in there or anything. This is a place for society ladies.”
“A jail for them,” said Laura.
“Laura, it’s not something to worry about,” said Joyce. “It’s practically a resort.”
Laura turned to me. “Jacob, I don’t want to live near a prison. What if we were here and there was a jailbreak or something? Those women would make a beeline straight for our house.”
I noticed a glimmer of excitement in Joyce’s expression at hearing Laura refer to the house as “ours.”
“You heard Joyce,” I said. “It’s not that kind of place. It’s for society ladies.” I made a tea-sipping gesture.
“I’ve heard of some very high-profile women spending time there,” Joyce said, swatting at a cloud of mosquitoes. “Remember Shirley Sayles, the famous golfer? She bet all that money on the U.S. Open? The one she was playing in? She’s at the retreat right now.”
“Listen to that,” I said. “Shirley Sayles.”
“Maybe we should look at something else,” Laura said.
“Come on.” I stepped onto the front porch, which groaned loudly.
“Jacob,” said Laura.
But I was already opening the front door.
The inside of the house was dark and cavernous, with a fog of dust rolling across the floor. Trees stood crowded against the windows, their green-and-yellow leaves pressed to the glass like children’s hands.
As I stepped into the parlor, I could feel the temperature dropping around me. The room was empty except for a burned-out chandelier reaching down from the high ceiling. I glanced around, examining the peeling wallpaper, the molding sculpted along the ceiling’s edge. I already knew that this was the house for us. It had stood for over a hundred years, like a fortress hidden in the woods. Nothing about it was cheap or makeshift. The beams supporting the ceiling looked like they were carved from stone.
It didn’t take long for the house to win Laura over, either. The touches were what got her, all the charming details: the claw-foot tub in the master bathroom, cracked but still usable. The carved lemons at the ends of the banisters. The small stained glass window in the parlor door, round as a coin.
What really brought her around, though, was the garden room. It lay at the south end of the first floor and extended out from the rest of the house, overlooking the sloping backyard. The curtains were drawn when we entered, and the room was especially dark, except for a trickle of light seeping in through the far end of the ceiling. I figured there was a crack in the roof, but when we walked over, we saw that in fact, in a certain spot, the ceiling rose and gave way to a small crystal dome. Laura’s face lit up when she saw it, the gentle swell of glass, the elegant iron webbing. The dome was filthy with soot, but when she reached up and wiped off one of the panels, a spear of sunlight pierced the room.
“Romantic,” said Joyce, and then coughed from the dust.
Of course, even now, six months after we moved in, we still have lots to do. If you came over to our house today, you’d find some rooms fully furnished and others completely bare. If you chose to open the sliding door to the library, you’d find it thoroughly decorated—a sofa by the fireplace, a glass coffee table, the towering bookshelves lined with books. But, on the other hand, if you picked the door at the end of the second-floor hallway to open instead, you’d find a room with nothing in it but an old electric picture of a beach hanging on the wall. When the picture is plugged in, the palm trees sway gently in the breeze, the waves sparkle and roll across the white sand. A flying fish even jumps out of the water, then slaps back down.
There are a few rooms Laura and I haven’t even begun yet, storage closets mostly, little side rooms with shelves built into the walls. We leave the doors to them closed for days at a time, weeks. Sometimes we’ll forget one exists altogether, until one day when we happen to notice a doorknob sticking out of the wall. Just the other morning I opened the door to a storeroom near the basement and found a dead snake lying on the floor. It must have been there for months; all that was left of the corpse was a skeleton. A winding comb of bones coiled in the dust.
All the space used to make Laura nervous, the empty rooms, the dark door frames. Now and then she’d panic and call to me from wherever she was in the house and I’d have to come up from the cellar, or down from the study, and stay with her for a while.
Recently, though, I bought a pair of walkie-talkies from a toy store, so that whenever we’re working on different rooms we can stay in contact. We’ve started making up tag names for each other, like truckers.
“Kitty Cat, this is Hunka Luv. What is your twenty? Over,” I say, the plastic receiver to my mouth.
“Well, hey there, Hunka Luv,” says Laura. “I am currently en route to the shower, over.”
We sand, and we paint, and we drill, and every day the house progresses. The old layers of wallpaper are scraped off. Little by little the floors brighten, revealing rich swirls and knots in the wood grain. The chimneys are flushed out, and suddenly a cool, sweet draft flows through every room.
