“You don’t look nervous,” he said.
“I’m not,” I said. “Nervous,” I added. I was something, but I wasn’t sure what yet.
He kept grinding at the cigarette.
“How about you?” I said. “Are you nervous?”
He shrugged. “I’ve worked at Catherine for twenty-seven years. I don’t want to be here anymore, either. Anyway, they won’t think it’s me. They don’t know I can think that far.”
He chewed his lip.
“I love Yaya, too,” I said.
He kicked the cigarette away.
I whispered, “Thank you.”
He shrugged again.
I walked around to the front of the truck.
Glo sat in the driver’s seat, her hair twisted up with a pencil and fingernails painted fire-truck-red. She was reading a newspaper. She didn’t look at me as she said, “Hey, chica. We’re all packed. You ready?”
“Yes.” I hesitated. “How far can you take me?”
“Mmm. Probably somewhere off I-81. Then you should go off-road. They check the truck at destination.”
She folded the newspaper, then peered down at me.
“All that studying you did—no degree?” she said. “All for nothing?”
“All for nothing,” I said.
She shook her head. “Man.”
Bunny was watching me from the dock, his hand on his belly.
“Well”—Glo nodded toward the back—“get on in. ’Fraid you’re riding back there.”
I climbed into the truck. In the gloom, I could just make out an old couch, a stack of mattresses, and boxes of discarded clothes and supplies. But something else was glinting there against the wall. Something metal. I ran my hand along its familiar body.
The bicycle. The one we had found in the attic all those months ago.
Bunny loomed in front of the truck’s opening. He was holding a folded bundle of clothing.
“Ready?” he said.
“Yes.”
He handed me the clothing. “You can put these on.”
He turned. I dropped the towel and unfolded a soft, careworn Hard Rock Café T-shirt and black sweatpants. They smelled like Tide detergent. I’d almost forgotten that smell.
“You can turn around,” I said as I tightened the sweatpants’ drawstring. They were much too big on me.
He did.
“How do I look?” I said. “Cool?”
He nodded, smiling a little. “Oh,” he said, “and … here.” He rooted through his jacket pockets, then handed me something wrapped in wax paper.
I turned it over in my hands, but I couldn’t tell what it was.
“Ham sandwich,” he said.
I hugged it to my stomach. “Thank you.”
He closed the truck with a clang. I was plunged into pure black.
I crept against the truck floor, feeling my way among the boxes, until I found the stack of mattresses and climbed on top of them. I unwrapped the sandwich and took a big bite.
*
We traveled for hours. I lay spread-eagled on the mattress, blinking at the stale hot black air and trying not to be sick. I wasn’t used to the road anymore, to the way trucks lurched and trundled. We were going fast. We were going very far away.
I should have peed before I left the tower. I could feel my bladder pressing down, not letting me sleep. Every time my mind slipped into the unreal—I was on a ship on my way to Alaska; I was a star, soaring through the Milky Way—something jostled me back to reality.
There was a crack at the top of the truck’s door. I watched the sliver of night sky shimmer and shake.
Sometime in the night, I got up to stretch my legs. I reached my arms up and out, twisting from side to side. I touched my toes.
I made my way over to the bicycle. I ran a hand over the leather seat.
In a few hours, I would get on this bike. I wouldn’t have anything except the other half of the ham sandwich, but it would be enough. I would go, go, go. I would travel over side roads and hide in secret rooms. I would become a new person in a new place. I could do it. I’d done it before. I was running before I came to Catherine, and now I was running again. This time I wouldn’t stop.
I tried to feel sad about it. But I already felt nothing.
The truck slowed, then parked. Glo shuffled around in the cab. The door slammed and I heard her limp around the truck. Soon I smelled gasoline.
We were at a gas station. A normal place for normal people. Inside the station there was a coffeemaker with bad coffee and a cash register filled with soft dollar bills. The racks were crammed with chips, pretzels, glossy gossip magazines, and bundles of newspapers that sold for just three quarters each.
I sat back down on the mattress. I picked at the dirt underneath my nails.
*
Nick had climbed the beech tree the day before our summer finals, at the end of our first year. Or was it our second year? I wasn’t sure anymore. But I did remember that it was a drowsy late afternoon, the breeze brushing through the grass smelled sweet and lush, and we were far out, near the gate, lying in the tree’s shade. We had finished reviewing our German flash cards for the second time when Nick said, “How high do you think I can get?”
I’d looked up into the tree’s rich, luminous leaves, branches dappled with honey-yellow sunlight.
“Don’t,” Anna said. “You’ll break your arm.”
“Dare me?” Nick said.
“I dare you to study,” she said.
But Nick was already standing and brushing off his jeans. He squinted at the tree before grabbing at a low branch. The veins pulsed in his arms. He swung up.
Anna watched him with her hand on her throat. I don’t know why she was scared. He was strong and nimble as a boy hero. He was going higher and higher.
Soon he was small, abstracted in the leaves.
I called to him, “See anything?”
He lifted a hand to shield his eyes against the sun.
*
As the truck rocked, I finally dreamed. I dreamed that it was many, many years in the future and I had been running for a long time. I’d changed my name. I’d changed my body. I’d become good and bad women and earned good and bad money.
But through it all, I could never tell if I was happy. Even when something nice happened to me, something I deserved—a new deal closed, a new house, a new girl waiting for me on a banquette in some throbbing, neon club—I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t care. I sat on the subway and watched teenage boys smile into each other’s eyes, or a girl in a pink tank top giggle at a text, and wondered: Are they kidding? Do they really feel something? Are they here? Are they alive?
I blinked against the dark of the truck.
I hugged my stomach. I curled up tighter.
I used to believe the house was haunted. Really, it was the other way around; the house haunted me. Butter cookies on the tea tray, the weight of a doorknob beneath my hand, a pattern of golden leaves on the courtyard flagstones—every detail reappeared. And I knew that someday I would be frying up dinner or rushing past a perfume store or kissing the inner wrist of a pretty girl, and I would suddenly catch the scent of damp soil or floral baby shampoo—and I would be in the gardens, Catherine’s soft gardens, and I would be tender and new, and I would be home.
Then I would be, again, gone.
I closed my eyes.
Viktória probably wouldn’t even try to find me, once she realized I’d run. She knew I wouldn’t tell her secrets. I didn’t need to. Because one day the whole dark world would know Catherine’s truth. But for now, the house was mine. Lovely and mine.
*
The truck was stopping again. I opened my eyes.
The sky, through the gap in the door, flickered pale morning blue.
I rubbed my face. I had been asleep, deep asleep. I hadn’t realized how tired I was. All night long the engine had rumbled and my brain had whirred, but now there was only quiet.
I still needed to pee.
>
The front door slammed and footsteps crunched against gravel. I rubbed my face again. The footsteps, closer now, were brisk, precise, and even.
I stood to gather up my trash and the sandwich. While I was squeezing the empty wax paper into a ball, the truck door rolled open with a great crank.
I turned, raising my arm. I blinked against the light.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the whole team at HarperCollins, with particular gratitude for my sharp, steady, lion-hearted editor, Jessica Williams. Thank you also to Amy Perkins and Tinder Press for pushing me to dream bigger.
Thank you to all at the Friedrich Agency, especially my warrior of an agent, Kent D. Wolf. Thank you for believing in this story.
Thank you to all my educators and mentors, particularly those at the Brooklyn New School, the Berkeley Carroll School, Yale University, and The Museum of Modern Art, who taught me to take my daydreams seriously.
Thank you to my many communities of friends: the X-Plex, the Complex, Shaftmates, Gail Benjamin and Bob Miele, Schuyler and the Grant family, and Maryse Pearce. This story is dedicated to you; you save my life every day.
And of course, thank you to my family, especially my parents, Kevin Thomas and JoAnne McFarland, and my brother, Stephen Thomas. I love you forever.
About the Author
ELISABETH THOMAS grew up in Brooklyn, where she still lives and now writes. She graduated from Yale University and currently works as an archivist for a modern art museum. This is her first novel.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
catherine house. Copyright © 2020 by Elisabeth Thomas. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Cover design by Elsie Lyons
Cover photogrphs © Honshovskyi Vadym/Shutterstock (gate); ©karnaval2018/Shutterstock (spray paint); © Thirteen/Shutterstock (brushstrokes); © Igorsky/Shutterstock (texture); © Reddavebatcave/Shutterstock (texture)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition JULY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-290580-2
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-290565-9
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