by Laura McHugh
I hoped I hadn’t offended him by turning down his offer to help carry my things. He’d been working at Arrowood for ten years, since the original caretaker retired, and the house had been vacant the entire time. I wondered if it would be difficult for him to adjust to my being here. There would be less work for him now, since I could handle daily upkeep on my own, but there would still be things for him to do. He would keep making repairs as long as the trust had money to pay for them.
Heaney was halfway to his truck when he turned around. “I can see a bit of your mother in you,” he said. “Welcome back, Miss Arrowood.”
It was unusual for someone to compare me to my mother. I didn’t resemble her, and I hated to think that we were anything alike, yet he seemed to intend it as a compliment. Maybe she was different back when he knew her, before she’d had children and lost them.
Once Heaney had backed out of the drive, I approached the wide front steps. A wren eyed me from the porch railing, and when I got closer, it chirped and flew up into the mimosa tree. The front door was comically large and elaborately detailed, like something out of a fairy tale, and I wondered where you would find another one like it if it had to be replaced.
I turned the key in the lock and pushed. The door didn’t give easily, seeming to lean into me as I leaned against it, but I managed to get it open far enough to step inside. Darkness closed in as I shut it behind me. All the curtains were drawn, the only light filtering in through the stained-glass window above the second-floor landing. The air was heavy with the antique smell of old books and wood polish and mothballs, and I could feel it pressing against me from all sides as I stood, feeling exposed, in the cavernous center hall. My breath seemed to echo, bouncing off the black walnut floors, the old-fashioned wallpaper, the lofty plaster ceiling, to whisper in my ears.
To the left was a parlor with sliding pocket doors that led to the dining room, with its pressed-tin ceiling and venetian-glass chandelier, and the kitchen beyond it. To the right was Granddad’s office and a music room with a 1960s Sears console stereo and a Mathushek square grand piano that I had never heard anyone play. I followed the hall past the curved walnut staircase to the drawing room at the back of the house, my sandals ticking on the hardwood. It was brighter here, the curtains thin and gauzy. Sheets covered the furniture, though I could make out the familiar shapes beneath: the ancient leather sofa and chairs, worn slick by a hundred years of legs and elbows; the inlaid mahogany coffee table that my mother had ruined when she spilled a bottle of neon-pink fingernail polish on it. Triple-hung windows looked out over the flagstone terrace and down to the river. The window glass was old and imperfect, marked with bubbles and whorls. It seemed unlikely that the windows had remained intact all these years, and I wondered if the caretaker would have gone to the trouble of reglazing broken ones with antique glass or if the trust that provided for Arrowood went so far as to stipulate such a thing.
Outside, a decorative wrought-iron fence marked the back of the yard, the only thing keeping someone from walking off the edge of the bluff and tumbling to the water below. A stone table and bench sat out on the terrace, along with two large urns that used to overflow with petunias and sweet potato vines. There was the crab apple tree, minus the sandbox my granddad had built beneath it for me and my sisters, and the pole that had once held a martin birdhouse modeled after Arrowood. It was like one of those children’s games where you compare two pictures to find the differences; the view was deceptively similar to the one in my memory, except that certain pieces were missing.
I passed the hall that led to the laundry room and the porte cochere and returned to the main staircase, the heat and humidity growing more oppressive as I ascended to the second floor. I peeled my shirt away from my skin to fan myself. My parents’ bedroom was down the hallway to the left, and while it was the largest of the bedrooms, with a sitting room attached, I had no desire to make it my own. I turned to the right, past the narrow stairwell that led to the third floor and the widow’s walk, and paused, swallowing the bitter lump that rose in my throat as I neared the last three doors. They were identical to all the others: four-paneled, dark walnut stain, faceted glass knobs, transom windows above that didn’t open but let light bleed through.
The doors were closed, and I pictured the rooms as they had been when my sisters were here. Matching yellow cribs nestled end to end under the bright windows of their bedroom—old cribs that my mother groused about because the slats were spaced just right for the twins to get their arms and legs stuck; two child-size rocking chairs along the wall, one scarred with tiny tooth marks where Violet had gnawed on it; Madeline books and plastic stacking rings scattered on the braided rug, along with two of every stuffed animal, a Noah’s ark of Elmos and Barneys and Winnie-the-Poohs, to keep covetous tears to a minimum. Next to Violet and Tabitha’s room was the bathroom we shared, with the silver striped wallpaper and cold marble floor and old-fashioned claw-foot tub. My room, on the opposite side of the hall: white sleigh bed that had belonged to another Arden Arrowood, who had died of pneumonia at ten years old; a shelf of antique dolls that I was not allowed to touch; ruffled pink curtains Grammy had sewn for my sixth birthday.
I left the twins’ door closed and stepped into my old room, my stomach knotting up as I removed the draped sheets from the furniture. My bed was still there, and the matching dresser, and the rolltop desk, where I’d kept markers and crayons and a collection of geodes that my dad had cracked open with a hammer. We had left all the furniture behind in the move, because Granddad didn’t want us taking a single thing that belonged to Arrowood. I’d often thought of this room, of my abandoned belongings awaiting my return, and now I inhaled as deeply as I could, filling my chest until it burned, imagining that the stale air was preserved from my childhood, that breathing it in could somehow take me back to that Saturday seventeen years ago when I had last seen my sisters, before anything bad had happened.
CHAPTER 2
* * *
The storm held off, the clouds grumbling and spitting but not willing to commit. I unloaded my car, stacking boxes of history books at the foot of the staircase to carry up later, and took my travel mug into the kitchen to dump out the last of the burnt coffee I’d bought at a truck stop outside Kansas City. I pressed my hands against the cool marble countertop. There was still a large grayish stain near the sink where I had once spilled a pitcher of grape juice. I’d thought my mother would yell at me, but she had merely snorted. Who cares? That counter’s old and ugly like everything else in this house. She had wanted to replace it with shiny new laminate, something Nana never would have allowed.
It was past dinnertime. My stomach hadn’t felt right all day, but now, standing in the empty kitchen, I was starving. I checked the refrigerator out of habit, though of course there was nothing inside. I was irrationally panicked by the thought of leaving Arrowood so soon after I’d returned to it, like it might disappear in my absence, but I needed to get something to eat. “I’ll be right back,” I said, patting the front door as I locked it.
I drove slowly down Grand, relieved to see that all the houses I remembered were still there, and then cut over toward Main Street to get to the A&W Drive-In, where Grammy and I used to go in the summer for Coney Dogs and root beer floats. As I approached the restaurant, expecting to see the familiar orange and brown sign, I noticed that all of the outdoor order stations had been removed. I pulled in under the awning and saw that the building was empty. Industrious wasps had lined the window frames with papery honeycomb nests.
Disappointed, I got back on the road and kept driving, trying to think of someplace else to eat. I passed the old Kmart and saw that its sign was missing, too. The store had been transformed into an Assembly of God church, a banner with hand-lettered worship times strung above the automatic doors. Toward the end of Main, where it turned back into the highway, a Walmart had been built at the edge of town, its massive blacktop parking lot sprawling over what had once been a soybean field. A new
strip mall huddled nearby, filled with standard small-town shops like Dollar Tree and Payless, and next to that was a Sonic Drive-In, its neon sign obscenely bright against the overcast sky.
Sonic held none of the nostalgia of A&W, where the root beer had been served in frosted glass mugs, but it was a drive-in, and that had to count for something. I ordered a corn dog, which arrived limp and greasy, and a limeade, which was served in a sweating Styrofoam cup. I didn’t want to sit in my car staring at the Walmart as I ate, so I drove to Rand Park to sit on a bench in the muggy evening air and watch the river roll by.
The Mississippi was just as I remembered it, wide and gray beneath the dull clouds, its calm surface swirled here and there with eddies. I knew all of its variations: muddy and swollen in late spring, bearing dead trees with the bark skinned away, smooth as bone; deep blue in the summer sun, the shallows choked with water lilies; ice-sheathed in winter and dotted with duck blinds. When I was little, there had been a rock wall between the park and the water, but it had washed away in the flood of ’93, the year before we moved. I used to come to the park with Grammy and Grampy, my mother’s parents, and in one of my few clear memories of him, Grampy had climbed over the wall to scoop a baby turtle out of the river for me. It had been no bigger than a quarter.
After I finished eating, I pulled out my cellphone to call my mother and let her know I’d made it to Keokuk. She was living in Minnesota with her new husband, Gary. Technically he wasn’t “new,” since they’d been married for nearly five years, but I was still getting used to the idea of him. Gary presided over the congregation of an evangelical megachurch, one of the largest in a regional franchise. I didn’t believe Mom at first, when she explained that churches could be franchised, the same as a Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I attended a service with her once when I was visiting, and found the Passage to be the complete opposite of the Catholic churches I’d attended growing up. I was used to kneeling on a wooden rail and reciting rote prayers with a gruesome, life-size figure of the crucified Christ hanging over the altar. The Passage had a coffee shop in the lobby that sold DVDs of Gary’s sermons, and a bright yellow playground slide that funneled children downstairs to Sunday school. A Christian rock band played onstage, complete with a concert-quality light show, and on the back of each lushly cushioned pew, instead of a little shelf holding hymnals or missals, there was a cup holder for your latte. It didn’t feel like a church, and I supposed maybe that was the point.
I was glad to see Mom doing well—she had been despondent for so long after what happened to the twins—but she seemed to have become a different person. She had stopped taking the pills she’d depended on for as long as I could remember, the ones to ease her anxiety and manage her depression and help her sleep at night. She was always quoting televangelist Joel Osteen, or starting sentences with “Gary says…” instead of speaking for herself. She shopped at Chico’s now, and Coldwater Creek, and wore a flashy diamond ring, which she constantly reminded me was 1.2 carats, as if that meant anything to me.
My mother thought that Gary had come into her life through divine intervention, the hand of God pushing them together. She and Dad had been separated for some time, though not divorced, and purposefully or not Dad had drifted closer to Keokuk, tightening his orbit around the place he’d been set on leaving. I had gone away to college, leaving Mom alone for the first time in her life, in a shabby duplex in Rochester. My mother, who had ignored Grammy’s deathbed pleas that she return to church, claimed that the Holy Spirit came to her one morning and dragged her out from under the covers. According to Mom, the Spirit guided her as she showered, curled her hair, dressed in her nicest suit (the navy polyester one that she wore to funerals), and drove until she reached a church. The Arrowoods were Catholic, and my mother’s family was Methodist, but Mom wasn’t concerned with denominations. She recognized the Passage from a commercial she had seen on television. When Pastor Gary shook my mother’s hand that day, she felt peace flowing into her after years of emptiness, filling up all the dark, dusty cracks in her soul.
A romance blossomed during their weekly Bible study meetings. They married soon after my parents’ divorce was final and moved into a spacious new ranch house—so new they got sick breathing fumes from the carpet and paint. I’d never known my mother to be religious, but she claimed that she had been born again, and she played the part of pastor’s wife with the convincing zeal of a pre-scandal Tammy Faye Bakker.
Mom answered just as the machine was picking up. “It’s me,” I said. “I made it.”
“Arden, I still think this is a mistake,” Mom said. I could hear a TV news show in the background, the kind where everybody talks over each other until one of them starts yelling, and then they see who can yell the loudest. “What about school? I know it can’t be easy, not after the mess you got yourself into, but Gary says if you don’t finish now, it’ll get harder and harder to go back.”
“I didn’t call to talk about that, Mom. I just wanted to let you know I got here okay.”
“I’m only thinking of your best interests. It’s hard enough to get a job these days.” She said it like she knew from experience, which she didn’t. She hadn’t worked in a long time, unless you counted being Gary’s wife. “And you know it didn’t go so well when you were staying up here with us, so that’s not really an option if things don’t pan out.”
“Yeah, well, that’s one thing I don’t have to worry about now, a place to stay.”
She sighed heavily and I imagined her eyes rolling, her pale lashes made spidery with multiple coats of black mascara. “Gary and I are praying for you, that you’ll get yourself back on track. We’re praying real hard.”
I pictured her and Gary praying for me while they drank their lattes and swayed to the Christian rock band that played onstage at the Passage, Mom wearing a brightly printed Chico’s tunic and matching acrylic nails, and Gary with his hair shellacked into a gravity-defying pompadour. They were praying that I would get myself together, that they would never again receive a late-night phone call requiring them to come to my aid.
“Hey,” I said, wanting to change the subject. “I didn’t realize the caretaker was an old friend of yours and Dad’s.”
“What?”
“Dick Heaney, the caretaker. He said he knew you back in school?”
“Maybe,” she said. I could sense her disinterested shrug over the phone. I’d been dismissed by it plenty of times myself. “It’s a small town.”
After I hung up, I sat watching the river awhile longer, the surface changing color, chameleon-like, as the sun lowered down behind the clouds. Gnats and river moths flitted around my face, landing on my sweating skin, catching in my hair. My muscles were stiff from the long drive, and my head was beginning to ache, a red drumbeat at the base of my skull. I drove back to the house (my house, I whispered as I opened the door) and headed upstairs to take a bath.
The bathroom was exactly as I remembered it, with the same striped wallpaper and veined marble floor and framed print of Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna,” which had faded into sepia tones. The old claw-foot tub was still there, each scaly foot clutching a silver ball. The twins and I had taken baths together, always begging our mother to dump in more Mr. Bubble, which she usually refused to do. She’d sit on the toilet seat with her ratty copy of Fear of Flying splayed between her fingers, shaking her head without looking up from the pages. I opened the cabinet under the sink, half-expecting to see the same pink bottle of bubble bath seventeen years later, or maybe even Fear of Flying, which never seemed to leave the bathroom, though of course I found neither. A family of silverfish scuttled under a rusted toilet brush, disturbed by the light.
I twisted the handles to run water in the bathtub and flinched at the high-pitched shriek that cut through the quiet room. I had nearly forgotten how it was in an old house, all the ghostly sounds: the way the floors creaked and settled as night fell, the radiators knocked and hissed, doors slammed shut when the wind
took a deep breath through the chimneys. I’d forgotten how water laboring through ancient pipes could trick you into hearing voices in the walls. I had thought once, when I was little, that I heard someone in the hallway whispering my name. Instead of calming me with logical explanations, my mother had suggested that the other Ardens were calling to me, the ones who had died in the house long before I was born. I had nightmares about them crawling into my bed in filmy white nightgowns: Arden Blythe, who had succumbed to pneumonia in the third-floor bedroom, her skin burning with fever and her lungs filling up; Arden Jane, who had fallen from the landing and broken her neck; Arden Amelia, who went into anaphylactic shock, stung by a bee that had entered the kitchen in a bouquet of peonies. None of them had lived past childhood.
I stripped off my clothes and sank into the water, leaning back and stretching out as far as I could. Even then, my toes couldn’t reach the opposite end of the tub—it was grand in scale, the same as the rest of the house. When I closed my eyes, I could smell the sweet candy scent of Mr. Bubble, and I wished it could be that simple, to shut my eyes and move back in time, erasing everything that had gone wrong in the years between. I traced the scars on the inside of my arm, jagged pink lines spanning wrist to armpit, reminders that I could not undo anything, that I could not go back to Colorado.
The old rubber stopper I’d put in the drain was shrunken and cracked, and the bathwater seeped out before it had a chance to turn cold. I nearly fell stepping out of the tub onto the slick marble floor, where a large puddle had spread out across the tiles. Either I’d splashed water over the side without realizing it, or the tub was leaking. I’d be more careful next time, and if there was a leak, I could call Heaney to come and fix it.
