Bliss House: A Novel

by Laura Benedict

  Where are you, Daddy?

  At a sound from the other side of the gallery, Ariel scooted on her bottom into the shadows behind her. Someone was at the entrance of the ballroom, his back to her, his hands positioned to push the pocket doors aside. There was no way she was fast enough to move out of sight if he looked over his shoulder. She pulled the robe closer.

  Why would he want to go in there? Is he lost?

  He turned around, but didn’t seem to see her at first. He wasn’t very old—in fact, he looked only a few years older than she was—and she had the feeling she’d seen him before. He took a drink from the beer bottle in his hand and walked over to the railing to look down.

  “Nice party,” he said. The dome above them carried his voice to her so clearly that he might have been standing beside her.

  Is he talking to me? Ariel reddened as though she’d been caught doing something wrong.

  “I hated parties like this when I was a kid,” he said. “Is that why you didn’t come down? Do you hate them, too?”

  “Why do you want to go in there?” Ariel asked.

  “I’ve been in every room in this house,” he said.

  Now she recognized him. She’d seen him out the window with his mother, Bertie. They were cousins of some kind. Jefferson.

  “Can I come over there? It’s an okay party, but it’s kind of boring.”

  “You shouldn’t be up here.”

  Instead of heeding her, he started around the gallery. With every step he took, Ariel felt the knot in her stomach tighten.

  “Hey, I brought you a hat. Did your mom give it to you? I got it up by school. You should come up to UVA and look around sometime. Everyone who’s a Bliss goes there.” He paused a moment, his brow furrowing. “Only I guess your mom didn’t.”

  “Don’t!” she said. “Go back downstairs.”

  “Don’t freak out. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  That was how everyone approached her now, like she was some kind of helpless child, or a scared animal.

  For the briefest of seconds it occurred to Ariel that maybe he wasn’t real, that maybe something horrible had happened to the real Jefferson and this was only his shadow. She hadn’t seen him come up the stairs. Again, she pressed herself against the wall.

  The chandelier hung below them so that its light cast shadows over his face.

  She could hear the Chopin less clearly now.

  “I don’t understand,” Jefferson said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Go away!” Ariel was panicked. Should I scream?

  He was close enough that she could see the label on his beer. It was the same kind her father drank when they had barbecues at the house. He had liked to drink a beer as he floated on a lounge in the pool, and the summer before he died, she had swum beneath him and turned the thing over. His beer bottle had bobbed away to the deep end, but her father had just laughed and playfully dunked her in response.

  Where are you, Daddy?

  Jefferson squatted beside her. The way he had come right over to her, she had expected him to have a crazy look in his eyes. But his eyes weren’t threatening at all. They were nice eyes. Now that he was so close, she felt suddenly self-conscious. She turned her face away.

  “Hey, it’s okay.” He touched her shoulder. His voice was low and gentle. “I know all about the house,” he said. “I know about you.”

  Chapter 10

  Walking from room to room with a tray, Rainey picked up the few things the caterers had missed, and shut off lights.

  All evening there had been people—people she didn’t know—coming in and out of the house, laughing and drinking. The women in gauzy summer dresses, many of the men in navy or seersucker blazers, like something out of a Fitzgerald novel. In memory, their faces were a blur, but she hoped that when she had some time to reflect she would remember them all. Their future here depended on it.

  The party had gone well until just before ten when she’d gone into the dining room to discover a few remaining guests pretending not to listen to Karin and Gerard having a voluble argument out on the patio. She casually shepherded them out into the hall under the lame pretense of showing them the grandfather clock she had restored. Eventually Karin came back inside alone, got another drink, and entered the salon, all smiles. Within moments, she had launched into a story about an Art Deco swimming pool rumored to be buried in the woods beyond the crumbled garden wall, and was imploring Rainey to resurrect it. Gerard never returned to the party, and Karin went on with her evening as though he didn’t exist.

  Seeing Karin’s controlled, rather triumphant manner, Rainey suddenly decided that, whatever the fight had been about, Gerard had probably been in the right. She sensed something icy and untrustworthy at Karin’s core.

  Now, Rainey found an abandoned shoe beneath a dining room chair: a woman’s high-heeled gold sandal that certainly hadn’t come in on the foot of someone wearing khakis and a navy blazer. She wondered if it belonged to Martina, who had come with the professor of something-something. The professor hadn’t been bad-looking, with his gray ponytail and intense blue eyes. But they’d been a little too intense, a little too sympathetic when he’d asked her how she’d been doing since losing her husband.

  Lost, as though Will just wandered off or I left him at the grocery store.

  She’d been grateful when his attention had turned back to Martina, in her flirty smock dress and—no—Martina had been wearing expensive, scuffed red cowboy boots. The shoe had to belong to someone else. She set it on the sideboard, unsure what to do with it. Also, she wondered, who loses just one shoe at a cocktail party and doesn’t notice?

  Starting for the kitchen, she stopped to inspect the few inches of layered wallpaper that—just that evening—Karin had shown her was lifting from the wall.

  “You’ll want to glue that back down,” she said as though Rainey, a decorator, knew nothing at all about things like wallpaper. “It will just keep peeling if you don’t.” By that time, Rainey had noticed a precise, controlled edge to Karin’s words. Some people’s speech got messy when they drank too much, but others’ got more careful. And Karin’s wineglass had been refilled several times.

  The peeling wallpaper was a grand textured design of leafy bamboo that must have complemented the British Colonial furniture that someone told her the Brodskys were fond of. Beneath it were the fine barbs of a lushly painted peacock feather. The brilliant gold and blue surrounding the dark iris of the feather’s eye was as vivid in the mellow evening light as it had surely been the day it was painted. Setting the tray beside the errant shoe, Rainey peeled another couple of inches away. At the edge of the feather was a field of iridescent blue. Perhaps a midnight sky? The Victorians and Edwardians had been fond of mystical touches like peacocks and feathers of all sorts. On first walking into the house she’d felt the absence of the clutter that must have filled it when it was first built. But she wasn’t fond of clutter herself. She hadn’t yet bought everything she planned to acquire, but had managed a few good paintings and ceramics. There was time. Plenty of time to make the house hers.

  “What’s that?”

  Rainey jumped. Ariel stood beside her wearing a voluminous silk bathrobe that Rainey had never seen before. Her hair was wet and lightly-curled from the shower.

  “Where did you get that robe?”

  “I asked you first,” Ariel said. She leaned forward to touch the torn wallpaper. “Weird.”

  With her daughter so close, Rainey could smell the watermelon-scented shampoo she always used, but something else as well. Something floral. Tuberose? No. Sweeter. It was peony. Like the flowers on the robe. Rainey recoiled.

  “It’s something Karin Powell showed me,” she said. “I wish you had come down to the party for a little while.”

  Ariel scoffed. “No, you don’t. Not really.” As she turned away, Rainey had a glimpse of how she might look as a woman. Dignified. Hardened. But perhaps it had been the grown-up bathrobe that had put the strange image in h
er mind.

  Rainey let Ariel’s snotty comment slide. Forgetting about the shoe, she picked up the tray and followed her daughter across the empty front hall that, just twenty minutes earlier, had echoed with laughter.

  “I’m hungry. Is there any food left?”

  “Ariel, where did you get the robe? Please tell me.”

  “Found it in a closet.” Ariel ran one hand over a sleeve. “It’s pretty.”

  Rainey had a fondness for vintage clothes, and the robe, while in good shape, looked to be at least thirty or forty years old. How long had it hung in the house? In what room had Ariel found it? Rainey didn’t remember seeing a robe in any of the closets. But, truthfully, she hadn’t checked the house’s dozens of closets carefully. Ariel had obviously been exploring without her again, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, despite the fall down the stairs. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder who had owned the robe. Someone much older than Ariel, obviously. It was a woman’s robe. A woman with a taste for expensive things.

  “Honey, I know you’re hungry, but would you double-check the salon for glasses first?” This elicited a very teenage-like sigh from Ariel, who swept the hem of the robe around her with a dramatic flourish as she limped off—again, without her cane.

  It was Rainey’s turn to smile. Even this slight change in Ariel’s attitude was welcome. Given that her daughter hadn’t left Bliss House since they’d arrived, it followed that Bliss House was somehow good for her. Maybe soon she’d even feel secure enough to venture out a bit more.

  After the last of the party detritus was cleaned up, Ariel sat on a stool at the galley’s counter, a stack of leftover miniature salmon, chèvre, and cucumber sandwiches in front of her. Rainey thought to sit on the other stool, but changed her mind. It was enough that Ariel was willing to sit in the same room with her for more than five minutes. She contented herself with fixing Ariel a cup of herbal tea, then unloading the few serving pieces and silverware belonging to her that the caterers had run through the dishwasher. As she worked, she told Ariel about the party, and the way Bertie had interrupted her every time she tried to talk, and about the funny harem pants she’d worn, and how embarrassed her son, Jefferson, had looked when they arrived. Ariel even laughed once or twice, a guileless, childish laugh. It was almost like the worst parts of their past had never happened.

  Chapter 11

  Gerard sat in his truck, parked halfway up the drive leading to Bliss House. He was smoking his third cigarette of the night from the weeks-old box of Marlboros he kept in the glove box. Both he and Karin liked to have a cigarette or two when they’d had a few drinks. It was one of their secrets. He’d switched the radio off and rolled the window down. A bright symphony of crickets flooded in, drowning out every other nighttime sound but that of two barred owls calling to one another in the woods.

  Bliss House sat ahead of him, its windows blank with moonlight.

  He twisted his wedding ring around his finger, unused to wearing it. Most of the time he left it in the tray on his dresser because anyone who insisted on wearing a wedding ring on a construction job risked losing a finger. But Karin liked him to wear it when they were out together, even though she herself hadn’t been able to remain faithful to him for more than a few months at a time during the fourteen years they’d been married.

  Had he finally stopped loving her? This feeling—or this absence of feeling—was new to him. He’d accepted her as she was, sex addiction and all, and endured the judgment of people who thought they knew better how they should live their lives. After all, their relationship on the business end of things had made them quite rich. But tonight, when he saw her with a drink in her hand, and later another, he decided she’d bullshitted him for the last time.

  If I don’t love her, why in the hell am I here?

  He got out of the truck, shutting the door quietly behind him so that the latch made only a half-hearted clicking sound. He finished the cigarette and smashed the glowing butt beneath his heel.

  Ahead, Bliss House looked solid and satisfied, but lonesome and empty of life.

  Not so lonesome.

  There was a single car—Karin’s Cadillac convertible—parked beneath the trees, in the shadows of the driveway, about twenty yards from the front steps.

  Chapter 12

  The roses in the vase had dried, their petals dropping to the tabletop when Allison touched them. So she didn’t touch them anymore.

  She’d given up trying to remember what was day and what was night. It didn’t matter here in this place of no time. For the first little while, she’d worried that the room would become a place of no air, as well. When she’d seen that there was no window behind the curtain, she had panicked beyond all reason and begun to hyperventilate, which landed her on the floor, slumped against the bed. How long she was passed out, she didn’t know. It might have been seconds, or hours. But it didn’t matter. She woke to the same stillness, the same anonymous walls and gritty slate floor.

  If anyone had asked her before she was kidnapped how she might act, she would’ve said she would spend all her time trying to think of ways to get free. But it hadn’t been that way at all. She was bored. Mind-numbingly bored. She’d counted the animals on the curtain (87 deer, 52 horses, 35 small dogs) several times until she felt that she finally got it right. Half or partial creatures didn’t count. Only whole ones. You couldn’t count half of a horse or the hindquarters of a leaping deer as creatures. She’d washed her sundress in the sink countless times, using the bar of Ivory soap that Michael insisted she use to wash herself, then wrapped herself in the bed sheet for comfort, and wished for underwear. She’d made herself remember all the words to all the songs they’d sung in her high school chorus, singing—in her own thin and wavering voice—the solos she had never gotten.

  She waited. Waited for Michael’s return. Waited for him to decide to let her out. Waited for someone to come looking for her.

  She hadn’t told anyone—not even her mother—anything about Michael. Not even his name. The first night he’d spent with her, she’d checked his pockets while he slept. All she’d found was a fold of cash, his car keys (no house key), and a second, empty vial that had once held some coke. He was mysterious and good-looking. It had seemed like such an adventure!

  Michael, who always had cash. Michael, who always had coke. Michael, who always told her how pretty, how smart she was. Michael, with his vague promises about the future, and the things they would do together.

  “Have you ever been to London?” he’d asked. He’d brought a book about the Tower of London to her apartment, with pictures of the crown jewels and armor and the other treasures displayed there. There were pictures too of the cells where criminals, queens and nobles and even children, were held prisoner. It looked like a place where frightening fairy tales might come to life. The thought of traveling with him had thrilled her, and she’d imagined they might get married and honeymoon in London, and maybe see Ireland, too, where her mother said her father’s family was from. There would be girls like her there, girls with unruly red hair and brown eyes and fair skin that had to be protected from the sun. And Michael would take care of her, and give her nice things.

  Now, she realized that those dreams had only seemed possible because of the coke, which had made her stupidly optimistic. The certainty that the coke would always be there, and Michael would always make her happy, had betrayed her. Everything he’d said, everything he’d done, had been calculated to win her trust.

  She was the princess locked in the castle. Except that her shit smelled up the room from beneath the lid on the bucket. Though she could hardly smell it anymore because she was getting used to it. There was less, though, than there had been before because she didn’t feel like eating much. He was still bringing her food: bread and peanut butter (she had to spread it with a plastic spoon), peaches and bananas, candy and soda. Like she was a fourth grader on a school field trip. Not even the pot he brought her made her hungry—not like it had before s
he’d been locked up.

  For a while she’d tried to stay away from it, to keep herself alert. Then Michael had shown up and started their time together (his words) by pulling her to him more roughly than usual. When he tried to kiss her, she resisted. (Of course she had resisted! She still had her dignity then.) So he had punched her in the jaw. Neatly. Quickly. Confidently. What did it matter to him if she was hurt? It only made things easier for him.

  She soon understood that he liked it when she didn’t cooperate.

  He did everything confidently now. Gone was the sometimes-shy guy. Gone was the considerate gentleman. Gone was the man who might have taken care of her.

  She couldn’t remember making a plan. She just acted, and it cost her a broken collarbone.

  When she heard him unlocking the door, she’d hidden under the bed.

  “Allison, you’re being silly,” he said when he didn’t see her. “Come out.”

  He rustled a paper bag, like he was trying to get the attention of a child, or an animal.

  Pressing her cheek to the floor, she could see the door was closed behind him.

  There were often noises outside that door. Footsteps. Slow footsteps, like a guard walking back and forth. Once, she’d woken to a woman’s laughter and she’d run to the door to pound on it, and tried to rattle the ancient doorknob that would never move for her, no matter how she tried, no matter what she hit it with. When she got no answer, and was exhausted with calling for help, she found that the laughter had been replaced with something far more distressing: heavy, regular breathing, like a giant was sitting just outside. It wasn’t a human noise, but animal, and the sound of it had driven her back, away from the door, and she had climbed onto the bed and made herself as small as possible until—with a bristling, sweeping sound—it moved away.