Bliss House: A Novel

by Laura Benedict

  Getting out of the truck, he was confronted with the slow-burning stink of asphalt, which was never pleasant but was particularly nauseating in the stifiling July heat. He gave a brief wave to the paving crew foreman, whom he knew slightly. The man nodded back, but didn’t rush over to talk. There was no need. He was there to do the job, and if there weren’t problems, there weren’t any questions. Gerard hired only the best, most professional subcontractors. His clients paid for it, sure. But he made certain they knew what they were getting when they hired him.

  Early on, his extremely youthful appearance had concerned a lot of clients, but his gregarious wife, Karin, who (not coincidentally) was often also their real estate agent, gave her promise that they would be more than satisfied. Now, even though he was in his late thirties and far more successful than most of the well-padded, good old boy contractors in the area, Gerard was still narrow-hipped and slender. He kept his wiry brown hair cropped close and usually covered—to Karin’s dismay—with a ball cap. If his lips were a little thin and his nose on the narrow side, they only served to emphasize the intensity of his hazel eyes. The effect disarmed most women. Men who weren’t yet familiar with his reputation were usually swayed by Karin. Too swayed, sometimes.

  As he ascended the broad brick and stone stairway leading to the newly-installed mahogany front door, he noticed some damage to a strip of mortar dividing a row of bricks. He ran his finger down the mortar, following a long, jagged crack. It continued around the top of one brick, widening irregularly as though someone had tried to chisel it out, loosening the brick. He made a mental note to have one of his people come over and fix it.

  Gerard reached for the door handle, then stopped himself. He wasn’t yet used to anyone being at home in Bliss House. He, his crew, and subs had had the run of the place for months. The access had given him a proprietary feeling about the place—not that Bliss House would ever let a single owner fully imprint herself on it. Bliss House was a house unto itself, like a person with an oversize, overwhelming personality. He wondered if Rainey Adams was up to dealing with it. He didn’t know her well enough to guess, but he doubted it.

  He took his hat off and rang the bell.

  Rainey and Gerard sat at a card table in the Lee Suite, the rooms she’d set up as a temporary office. She was self-conscious about having Gerard in so intimate a space, but she’d wanted to get as far away from the front of the house as possible. The downstairs ceiling fans had done little to keep the stench of paving materials out of the house, and she had set out at least a dozen burning candles—vanilla, mostly—to combat the smell. One of the candles flickered between them like a table decoration in a restaurant.

  Gerard slid a paper-clipped sheaf toward her, photocopies of the set in front of him.

  “Here are the current change-orders,” he said. “I’m guessing there will be a few more after you’ve been here another few weeks. We’ll handle those as they come along.”

  Rainey looked over the list, conscious of him watching her. She’d always had a reputation for driving hard bargains with contractors. Many of her clients—if they didn’t have an architect directly involved with their projects—relied on her to deal with them. Their satisfaction rested on her. As did her commissions.

  Despite being put off by the high-pressure sales tactics that his wife, Karin, had tried to use on her when she was negotiating for Bliss House, she’d liked Gerard immediately on meeting him. It was a mystery to her how this quiet, outdoorsy man had settled on the charming but aggressive Karin as a soul mate. But the night she’d gone to dinner with them, just after the closing of the house sale, she’d watched Gerard’s eyes follow Karin as she greeted half the patrons in the restaurant. She bestowed air kisses on the women and touched the arms or shoulders of the men with playful familiarity. Karin wasn’t classically beautiful, but she dressed her well-toned body in expensive body-skimming knits and kept her glossy red curls restrained just enough to imply trustworthy respectability. She had an aggressive sensuality and smiled with abandon. But Rainey had worked with enough women like her to understand that her charm was just a veneer to make her aggression more palatable.

  “The cost of the plumbing changes alone could feed a family of four for a year,” Rainey said, laughing. “You probably think I’m a little crazy taking on a place this . . .” She glanced out the door to the hallway, taking in the space beyond. “I know we could’ve done both the house and the business in a smaller place.”

  Rainey watched a flicker of discomfort cross his intelligent face.

  “People do things for a lot of reasons,” he said, shrugging. “I didn’t think it was any of my business.” He paused a moment. “Karin told me the house had been in your family. It’s pretty common knowledge by now. That kind of information gets around Old Gate fast.”

  Rainey laughed. “That’s for sure.”

  She found herself wanting to tell him more, about how she needed something new in her life, yet at the same time something familiar. A safe kind of challenge. Something to fill the huge space Will had left behind in her life and in her heart. She had known the minute she’d walked into Bliss House that she’d found exactly what she was looking for. But she wasn’t sure how much to share with Gerard. He wasn’t her friend, not really. Since leaving St. Louis, she’d felt as though she’d lost her bearings when it came to dealing with people. She hated how insecure she felt. How lost. A complete break with the past and the person she’d been before was exactly what she’d wanted. Only she hadn’t counted on how much work it was going to take to build a new life. New friendships. New intimacies. Her only constant, the only important link to her old self, was Ariel. And their relationship was in tatters.

  Gerard went over the changes line by line. She was smart about the business, and when it came to discussing tile choices and paint qualities she was intensely focused. He wondered, though, about the dark circles beneath her eyes and how thin she was. He was used to fashionably thin women—Virginia was full of them—but Rainey Adams seemed even less healthy than when they’d met several months earlier. She’d been grieving deeply then, and had been pale, but still driven and energetic.

  “About the garage and the apartment above it,” he said. “I know you don’t want to do anything else about the third floor yet . . .” Here, he gestured to the ceiling, indicating the rooms above them. “But the carriage house is in really bad shape. Will you be using it anytime soon?”

  “No,” Rainey said. “Maybe for storage. Later. For a house this size”—she waved a hand, indicating the house around her—“the storage is weirdly limited. Only that sad half-basement. There’s hardly room for anything besides the boiler. And the stairs to the rooftop storage sheds are so narrow, I don’t know how anyone got anything up there.”

  Rainey started to go on, but was interrupted by a loud noise from out in the hall. At first, Gerard wasn’t sure what he heard, given the constant grind of machinery from the driveway. He saw the horrified look on Rainey’s face at the same moment he realized it had been a scream that they’d heard.

  Rainey upended her chair onto the floor and pushed past him, running from the room.

  “Ariel! Where are you?” Her voice was pure panic.

  He’d never seen the daughter, Ariel, and hadn’t even been certain she was actually now living in the house. Hers had been one of the rooms whose bath they had completely redone, but it had been finished well before their move-in date. Karin had mentioned Rainey was planning to homeschool her daughter, and that it seemed odd to her because the girl was high school age.

  The cry had come from one of the back hallways.

  “Baby?” Rainey was ahead of him, beyond the gallery, in the hallway to the servants’ quarters. She knelt at the foot of the stairway, bending over someone. He hurried to see if he could help, nearly tripping over a fuzzy lime-green hat covered with lilac peace symbols.

  “Is she okay?” he asked.

  There was another pained cry from the girl. Gerard
saw the ends of a pair of black ankle-length leggings and two bare feet poking from behind Rainey. One of the feet looked like any young girl’s foot—toenails painted a vibrant turquoise—but the other foot and ankle were a dull mass of warped scar tissue. A couple of the toes looked as though they’d fused together, and the nails weren’t visible. There was an arm, too, wrapped around Rainey’s neck. The skin was almost purple in the shadows, the hand stiff and awkward as a claw. Staying well away, Gerard pulled his cell phone from his pants pocket. “I’ll get the EMTs here,” he said.

  “It’s not necessary. You should just go,” Rainey said, her voice full of emotion. “Really. I’m sorry. I’ll call you later.”

  His gut told him that he shouldn’t leave.

  “If she fell, then she shouldn’t be moved until we make sure she’s not badly hurt.”

  Rainey spoke quickly to her daughter in a voice too low for him to hear. He finally saw a side of the girl’s head—a length of spiky black hair, a long patch of pinkish skin, a drooping eye that looked fearfully at him, then looked away.

  “I’ll handle it.” Rainey was impatient, and working very hard to remain composed. Polite. “I’ll call you.”

  It took every ounce of self-control he could muster to keep from going closer to see the girl. He tried to picture what she might look like as a whole person. What he’d seen of her was grim enough. Karin’s confusion about home schooling was now sadly answered.

  “Don’t hesitate,” he said. “Please.”

  Rainey didn’t respond, but gathered the girl closer to her. Gerard turned to go, regretting the heavy tread of his boots as he returned to the suite to gather his papers. As he made his way down the main stairway, he was conscious of being watched, but Rainey and her daughter were nowhere to be seen. If he’d been a less practical and sensible sort of man, he might have convinced himself that the stars painted around the ceiling’s oculus had arranged themselves into curious eyes that watched to make sure he was leaving.

  Chapter 7

  Ariel stared out at the gardens from the sofa in her mother’s bedroom, the late afternoon sun warming her face. She rested her head against the sofa’s overstuffed cushions, her bruised legs extended along its length. A mug of hot peppermint tea—her favorite—sat on the nearby table.

  The garden was overgrown, and sun-burned brown. Even the boxwood maze was yellowing, starved for nourishment. She could clearly see the maze’s beginning, end, and square center with its stone Hera standing on a pedestal, cradling a peacock in her arms. At the outer edge of the garden were the crumbled remains of a wall. She thought of the book The Secret Garden and wondered what that wall had once enclosed. Maybe it had had a door that led to someplace altogether different.

  She’d never want her mother to know, but she was glad they’d moved to Virginia. She’d been glad from the moment her mother said she thought it was a good idea to get away from St. Louis. Ariel knew there was nothing there for her anymore. Her friends didn’t really want to hang out with her—burned and hideous as she was—and she’d been grateful when their lame, pitying phone calls and texts stopped. And she certainly didn’t miss the barely furnished apartment her mother had taken near the hospital. Its walls were blank and the long communal hallways were blank and it looked out on a thin stretch of trees that separated their development from another very like it. None of her things from home were there because they’d all blown up and burned with the house. No pictures of Ariel as a toddler (not that she’d ever want to see them again), no old report cards, no baby dolls her mother had stored away in the attic for her to sneak up to visit and sometimes hold, even though she was getting too old for that.

  She tried not to think about those things, and almost never did, except for times like now when she was tired. She tried not to think about lying with her father in the hammock behind their house, listening to the birds and squirrels playing in the trees, as she played with his hair, as black as hers, winding the thick waves into curls around her fingers. She tried not to think about his laugh when she imitated her annoying art teacher or read him silly jokes from an issue of Reader’s Digest from the subscription that one of his elderly clients sent him for Christmas every year.

  Her mother had said that her father would’ve liked Bliss House, but Ariel wasn’t so sure. It was so big, and her father had never wanted to live in a big house. Her mother had even had to talk him into moving out to St. Charles County and building the new house. Ariel heard them talking when they thought she wasn’t around. It was a longer commute for him, he said, and he thought the Kirkwood house was just the size they needed for the three of them. Cozy, he called it. Her mother had laughed.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you use the word cozy before.”

  Her father had laughed then, too.

  “What if we need more room? Did you ever think of that?” Her mother’s voice had dropped, and Ariel had heard nothing more.

  Ariel had never asked for a brother or sister. She’d been happy with their life just the way it was. And then they had built the house and moved, and there was no brother or sister. Now there never would be.

  Though she liked Bliss House from the beginning—if a person could like a house the way they liked a person—it still seemed endless and strange to her. But that didn’t matter because her father was here. Somewhere.

  That morning, she had decided she wanted to get a better look at the third floor, and so had gone upstairs without telling her mother.

  The rooms above were different from the rows of bedrooms on the second floor. There were only four rooms up there, two of them small bedrooms, and the other two—facing each other across the open gallery of the well of the house—were larger than any of the other rooms in the house. One was laid out as a theater and contained an ornate oak proscenium stage rising two feet above the floor. The only furniture was a stack of metal folding chairs on a cart. Deep inside the stage was a child’s puppet theater, a few trunks, and an old standing mirror whose surface bore rough patches the color of tin. Because the theater room was on the western side of the house and had tall windows, it promised to be stifling hot late in the day, and probably freezing in the winter. There was a fireplace, but Ariel couldn’t imagine it could heat such a big room. It wasn’t a friendly room. The tall windows, the cold metal chairs, the darkened stage . . . who would perform in a place like this? It didn’t seem like it would be any fun.

  Across the gallery, in the ballroom, the button light switch beside the door made a soft clicking noise when she pressed it. The seven or eight electric sconces came on, but their light was dim. The room didn’t have a single window.

  She walked barefoot over the floor (miraculously, without her cane!), feeling as though she were in another world. She stayed close to the wall, her fingers sliding lightly over the wallpaper which was covered with palanquins, pagodas, and bent, bearded men, and dainty Japanese women in robes with flowing sleeves, their heads demurely bowed beneath mere suggestions of tree branches heavy with blossoms. When she was close to the doorway, she could see that everything was drawn in black or gold on a field of red, the gold glittering as though it were real. The women’s faces were similar though not identical to one another, and their robes varied in design. Each old man was exactly the same, and wore a round cap and carried an elaborate snake-headed cane.

  Seeing the canes caused a twinge inside Ariel, and she raised her unblemished hand to the ruined side of her face. She had much more in common with the old men than she did the beautifully dressed, perfectly-formed women. Only lately, she’d begun to feel better. Much better, physically and emotionally. It was as though the house had some power to heal her, a healing that had begun when her father—or his ghost, or her dream of him, still her father!—had touched her. That such a thing was technically impossible made no difference at all to her. The doctors and therapists had all made such a big deal about her healing being her journey. Her journey had taken a turn for the strange, but she didn’t care. Sh
e felt better, and that was what was important to her.

  The ballroom’s ceiling was slightly lower than in the other rooms in the house and directly in the center of it there were two thick metal rings. The metal was dull, and looked as old as everything else on the third floor. Her mother suggested that they might have held chains for a cradle or a swing, but Ariel didn’t have a good feeling when she looked at them.

  The fireplace mantel was almost a foot higher than her shoulder, and when she bent to look inside, she could smell the faintest odor of ash and woodsmoke. When could there have last been a fire here? She touched one of the tall metal panels that reached as high as the underside of the mantel and stood like guardians on either side of the opening. Both were covered with bursts of pom-pom flowers in relief. Chrysanthemums.

  Tired from exploring, Ariel went back to the center of the room and eased herself to the floor to sit. She’d been doing so well without her cane that she’d left it down in her bedroom. But now it occurred to her that she might have trouble standing again without it.

  Stretching out, she rested her ruined cheek against the floor. The bare wood felt cool and soothing on her skin. The door was open, but she was utterly alone in the quiet room. Even the sounds of the driveway construction in front of the house had faded away. It felt like some kind of blessing, this aloneness. Maybe she could just stay up here, and never go downstairs again.

  Downstairs, her mother was busy making more plans for the house and her business. Ariel didn’t like the idea of living in a place where strangers could show up at any time, wanting to buy things, or have meetings to make plans, or complain. Their house in St. Louis hadn’t been like that. Her parents had had parties, and her mother had stored things for her clients and made phone calls down in her basement office, but she’d also had the shop in town. Their house was always their home. Ariel was tired of how hard her mother was trying to make their lives different.