She hadn’t minded the clinginess; she’d actually relished it, all those years before puberty and sports took hold. On the weekends, she would dress the girls in matching tutus and take them to dance class, or accompany them to Build-A-Bear birthday parties. Work was less intense in those days; she’d been able to take afternoons off when the preschool needed a parent chaperone for a trip to the zoo. Some days she’d pick them up at lunchtime and take them to tea at the Rittenhouse Hotel, or hair-bow shopping at the Spruce Street Bowtique. They were beautiful girls; Mary Ellen loved dressing them in elaborately accessorized outfits and French braiding their hair, and the twins blossomed in the light of her attention.
The GPS ordered her onto I-81; billboards and gas stations sprouted thickly along the roadside as she passed through Wilkes-Barre and Scranton. After a few miles, she turned onto a smaller road and found herself rolling past one-story ranch houses with long driveways and elaborate inflated Christmas decorations. The road began winding, climbing and plunging, as the houses thinned out and the scenery grew more bucolic. The area actually reminded Mary Ellen of parts of Vermont, in a slightly scruffier, less whitewashed way. She hummed along to the radio, feeling her mood lift as the car wound its way up a boulder-studded mountain.
The GPS said she’d arrived, but she didn’t see anything. She was supposed to look for a large tree with reflectors and a house number nailed to the trunk. Mary Ellen drove slowly, scanning the trees, but they were skinny, not large, and bare of house numbers. She found a wide spot in the road and turned around. Justine had given her the exact GPS coordinates, so this had to be the place. She noticed a gap in the forest, so she stopped the car and got out to peer into the woods. There it was: a narrow dirt road, which she assumed was the driveway, zigzagging down the hill.
As she inched the Mini down the snowy slope, Mary Ellen wondered if Justine had called the snowplow company as promised. She might have forgotten; after all, Justine never came here in the winter, preferring to spend time at her cottage on Sanibel Island—one of the many spoils of her divorce. Maybe, Mary Ellen thought ruefully, Justine would offer her the beach place in August, when it was one hundred degrees and humid, or in October, during hurricane season.
The car was actually doing fine; it had decent tires, and the snow wasn’t that deep. She eased it around the final switchback and came to a stop in front of the house.
The place was pure Justine: a sophisticated sculpture of a house, clad in artfully rusted metal and vast swaths of glass. It was all edge and plane, unsentimentally intruding on the mountain’s rough form, the snow’s mounded softness, the trees’ feathery boughs.
Glancing at the paper where Justine had written her instructions, Mary Ellen walked to the far left corner of the house and gingerly felt around behind the foundation. She pulled out a vitamin B12 bottle. It was empty. She shook it, stupidly, as if this would make the key magically materialize.
Mary Ellen felt her sense of adventure curdle into annoyance. She did not want to get back in the car and drive back to Philadelphia. Nor did she feel like searching for a locksmith in the middle of nowhere. Damn it, Justine. The whole free-spirited bohemian thing was great until it was time to remember things like getting the driveway plowed and leaving the house key in its designated spot.
Mary Ellen sighed and returned the bottle to its hiding place. She straightened and crossed her arms, considering the riveted expanse of metal. Stepping over a drift of snow that had gathered on the front stoop, she tried the door handle. It opened. Mary Ellen knocked her boots against the edge of the door, then entered the house and felt a gust of warm air. The kitchen counter, at the far end of the room, looked cluttered. She drew nearer, her boots squeaking on the bamboo floor. Then her breath caught in her throat. Open cans, dirty dishes, and empty soda bottles were piled on every surface, with what appeared to be shirts and socks wadded among them. Mud and forest debris streaked the floor, and the stainless-steel restaurant-style refrigerator was dull with greasy handprints.
Mary Ellen turned slowly toward the large main room. Art books were scattered across the floor, their jackets tossed aside, and a bath towel slumped over one side of the dining table.
She backed slowly away, pulling her phone out of her coat pocket. No signal. She’d have to drive toward town until she got to the spot with cell reception, then call Justine and deliver the news that—what? A squatter was living in her country house? There was no car outside; no recent footprints that Mary Ellen had seen. Could it be that the person was long gone?
“Hello?” Mary Ellen went back to the kitchen and looked more closely at the cans. They were scraped dry; so was the spoon. A piece of deli paper was tinged blue-green with mold. She went to the long, glass wall and looked down onto the deck. The snow, fluted along the grooves of the deck boards, was uninterrupted by footprints.
Mary Ellen picked up the towel on the dining room table and held it to her cheek. Dry. Balls of tissues spilled across the sofa and onto the floor; more deli containers were stacked on the floor against one window. She heard a sound from downstairs: the sucking slide of a patio door. She went to the window and saw a girl, all flying hair and flapping shirttails,
