“Any sign of your mother?” Marshall asked Jenny.
“I’ll see if I can help,” Jenny said. She came back in a few minutes, shaking her head.
“She said if we were ready, we should go, not to wait.” She looked at Conrad. “Do you mind being abandoned? We’ll open the house when we get there.”
“Nope,” said Conrad. “See you up there.”
“If we don’t break down,” Marshall said. “Stop if you see us on the side of the road.”
Conrad nodded, and Marshall, Jenny, and Ollie climbed into the laden car. It rolled slowly down the driveway, and Jenny waved and called, “See you up there!”
Conrad waved back, watching them descend the short slope and turn cautiously onto the dirt road, Jenny’s arm still waving.
When the car vanished, the place was restored to silence and everything seemed to expand: the willows, with their cascade of leaves, the deep green lawns, cool and sumptuous despite the heat. Conrad thought of Ali. He’d have liked to show him this place. That’s a white ash. Ali had looked so closely at the photograph.
Conrad climbed into the driver’s seat. He left the door open, one leg stretched outside. It was getting hotter, but this was not real heat. Here it was humid and enervating, the heat like a burden, but it wasn’t real heat. Conrad turned the key in the ignition and skimmed the radio stations, then turned it off and sat with his head tilted back, eyes shut. He felt pretty good. He’d cleared two-thirds of the meadow, working all of July, tugging out the roots, dragging the branches into big piles of wilting leaves. He was looking forward to kicking back.
Lydia appeared in the mudroom, calling out, “Okay! Sorry!” She turned to lock the door, then pushed out through the white gate. She wore a wide, floppy hat and carried a canvas bag. “Sorry to take so long,” she said. “There was a load in the dryer and I couldn’t leave it in there. And I had to write notes to Katia.” Her face changed as she saw that he was in the driver’s seat. “Are you driving?”
“I offered,” he said.
“So you did,” Lydia said, and got in. “Okay, then, we are off, off, off.” She fastened her seat belt and turned to the back. “Hi, there, Murph, you beautiful pussycat. Are you all right?”
Murphy gave her a smoldering look.
“Con?” She smiled at him. “All set?”
“Locked and loaded,” Conrad said. “Full battle rattle, ready to roll.”
She gave him an uncertain smile. They started down the driveway, the tips of the willow branches trailing faintly against the roof. Lydia leaned back.
“I love this,” she said. “I love this moment when we really leave. I love this house, but I love the feeling of leaving it, leaving everything behind and heading off into the summer.” She turned and smiled at Conrad. “Con, I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Yeah, me, too.” He smiled, his eyes on the road.
“I mean, back from Iraq, of course,” she said, “but also right here, right now, in the car with me.”
Conrad nodded slowly in agreement, feeling vaguely guilty. He felt as though he should be offering something, doing more than he was. “Me, too,” he said again.
Their narrow dirt road sloped gradually through the woods, down a long hill. At the bottom it reached a fast paved road that led to a big six-lane highway. Conrad turned down the ramp, and the car slid into the stream of traffic heading north through upper Westchester County.
In places the highway had been drilled out of standing stone, and high man-made bluffs slanted steeply away from the road. The open cuts revealed the bare interior: Skeins of strata drifted in pale galactic swirls through the dark stone. Igneous, sedimentary—and what was the third kind? Dropped from outer space? He couldn’t remember. He liked these bluffs, they were like a giant geology lab, demonstrating exactly the way the earth had been formed.
As they drove north, the highway cut through hilly woodland and overgrown pastures. Up here, too far for daily commuters, the land was mostly open and undeveloped.
In the nineteenth century it had all been farmland, but when the railways opened up the Midwest, the big agriculture of the era moved out to the great fertile plains. The local farms turned to orchards and dairy herds. Dairy farms survived until the forties and fifties, when refrigeration made local milk unnecessary. Now the dairy farms had failed and the land was either abandoned or being developed, the old apple trees suffocated by bittersweet and the fields gone to weeds and saplings.
Lydia had told them all this a hundred times, her voice reproving, as though her family were somehow guilty, responsible for the twin juggernauts of commerce and technology. As a teenager, Conrad had resented this burden. Lydia felt responsible for everything—every one of her patients and everyone in their families, the environment, and every plant and creature on the planet. How could anyone live like that? And why did she want to share the burden with her children? It made him resentful and impatient.
From the highway the old farmhouses were visible, solid white clapboard colonials, the handsome barns nearby. No animals, though, no tilled fields.
But he wasn’t so different from his mother, actually. He’d been sort of trying to save the world, joining the Corps. Now he couldn’t remember exactly why. At the time it had seemed unarguable. Now his own ideas seemed as confused and childish as his parents’ idealism, all that naive sixties bullshit. How could they have thought anything was so simple? How could he?
Driving onto the highway, Conrad had moved at once into the fast lane. There was a lot of traffic. He didn’t like being constrained or having other cars around him. He especially didn’t like cars coming too close. When a car moved alongside him in the middle lane, he sped up, keeping a constant eye on the rearview mirror. He actually didn’t like having any other cars at all on the highway. He preferred driving in convoy, on a road that had been cleared of other vehicles.
“The first time we rented the house at the Cape,” Lydia said, “I think you were three or four. We went up there in the first place because Marshall’s family had always gone there, so he loved it. They had a big house on the water in South Yarmouth. You remember it.”
His grandparents’ house had been sold years before, but he had memories of it: the big sunny rooms, the croquet lawn. They’d driven past it many times, though it was hidden now by pines and a high stockade fence. They could see the upper part, white clapboards, glossy black shutters. Beyond it was a lawn and a path down to the water. The driveway was made of clamshells.
“We used to come up and stay with your grandparents. You were probably too young to remember that. Then one day when it was raining, we called a real estate broker, just out of boredom, and drove around to look at rentals.”
He had never heard this.
Lydia looked ahead. “Your father always said he didn’t want to inherit his parents’ house. He didn’t want the responsibility of looking after a second place. And he couldn’t spend the whole summer there, the way his father had.”
Behind Conrad, in the left-hand lane, was a small white sedan. Nearly every car in Iraq was a small white sedan. Everyone drove them: taxi drivers, businessmen, and insurgents. Suicide bombers. The sight of the car made Conrad’s pulse quicken, though he wasn’t in Iraq and he knew this wasn’t a suicide bomber. The car was moving fast, coming up on him from behind. Streams of cars were sliding along all three lanes; directly ahead of him in the fast lane was a big black SUV.
“So your father was already looking around. Even if we’d kept the family house and just used it ourselves for a couple of weeks and rented it out for the rest of the season, he’d have had the responsibility. He said he never wanted to drive up in the middle of winter to get the boiler fixed or the chimney patched. He always said, ‘Never own if you can rent.’ Of course, he meant a summerhouse, not our house.”
Beside Conrad, in the middle lane, was an opening. The next car back, a bullet-shaped silver sedan, was driving badly, wallowing back and forth. Some idiot, texting.
“I remember we saw several houses that day. Most of them were awful. Brand-new little bungalows, cheek by jowl beside other horrible little houses in developments or else right on top of the road.”
Lydia had folded her arms on her chest. She sounded dreamy and abstracted.
“It’s sort of terrible, going around and looking at other people’s houses. You see their lives, everything they’ve chosen, the lamps, the bedspreads, the chairs. I mean, not that they’re so awful, only that the people are so exposed, so naked, for you to walk through passing judgment. Which is just what you do. If you don’t like the houses, the owners feel they’ve failed. You voted against their taste, their choices, everything. I felt so bad for the owners. They were always there, lurking around in the kitchen or the hall, moving out of each room as you walked in. I walked around saying loudly how beautiful each house was, admiring the curtains.”
“Only you, Mom,” Conrad said.
The white car was closing the gap. In the front seat were two military-age males wearing dark glasses.
“No, really,” Lydia said. “They knew we were judging them. It’s a horrible feeling. I read once that when people’s houses have been robbed, the first stage is being frightened and angry, but then people get indignant because the thieves didn’t take other things that the owners thought were valuable. They’re upset that the thieves didn’t take more.”
The white car was hanging back now, just out of rifle range.
“I remember one house. There must have been a mix-up about the appointment. We got there, and the broker went to the front door and then came back to the car and said we’d have to wait for a bit. We sat and waited. The broker kept going up and knocking, and then she’d come back and get into the car again.”
Conrad kept his eye on the rearview mirror. It looked as though one of the males was using an electronic device. It was how you detonated an IED—you could use a cell phone, a remote-control device for a TV or a toy airplane. All it took was one click.
“Finally the broker called to us to come in. Inside was a young couple standing side by side in the hall. They were furious. Especially her. We said hello, and then they stood there glaring while we walked through the house. It had just been neatened up. It didn’t feel really clean. You had a sense of things stuffed under the sofa, jammed under the mattress, crammed into closets. I didn’t dare open any doors; I thought everything would fall out on top of me.”
The male in the passenger seat was using a cell phone. He was talking into it and staring straight at Conrad. The white car was coming up fast, closing the gap.
“You could feel the tension radiating from them. Each time we went past the hall, they were standing there, arms crossed, not speaking. I thought they’d just had a fight about the house. They kept cleaning it up to be shown, and then people didn’t take it. It would be so insulting.”
The silver car in the middle lane was driving erratically, but Conrad thought that if he shifted suddenly into its lane, the car would drop back. There was no other way. Then he could slide over into the far-right lane, drop back himself, and slow down, leaving the white car trapped in the far-left lane.
“I kept saying, ‘Oh, how interesting,’ about everything,” said Lydia. “The place was pretty awful, actually, full of cheap, trendy furniture. These awful swagged curtains. The woman was furious, her eyes all squinted up.” Lydia squinted her own eyes. “She wouldn’t look at her husband.”
The white sedan drew closer, right behind him. Conrad watched it in the mirror. The two men were staring straight at Conrad. When they were ten meters away, without warning Conrad swerved abruptly into the middle lane, nosing in front of the wobbling silver sedan. It shifted wildly into the right-hand lane, nearly hitting a car in it, then veered back into the middle lane, barely under control. Conrad swerved over again into the slow lane, shoving between a green car and a pickup truck. The silver car blared its horn furiously, and the pickup truck, now behind him, did the same. Conrad straightened, speeding up, then slowing, so the driver in the pickup truck could calm down.
“Conrad!” Lydia leaned forward, grabbing the dashboard.
He said nothing, watching the rearview mirror, checking the road ahead, and watching the white sedan. Still in the fast lane, it kept going, behind the black SUV. Conrad watched it move out of sight. Up ahead was an overpass; he focused on that.
“Conrad, what is it?” Lydia said. “Seriously, don’t do that.”
“Sorry,” he said.
He was only partly here with his mother. He felt her sitting there in in her batik-print shirt, her wrinkled green pants. She was real, and he knew that what she was saying was real, but at the same time he was in another real place, where cars on the road were deadly risks, carrying this threat: the exploding bloom of darkness. The two places were not connected.
“Conrad,” Lydia said. “I mean it. Please let me drive if you have to do things like that. This is dangerous.”
He said nothing, watching the cars around them.
“Con, can we talk about this?”
His chest tightened. Talking about it was the thing he would not do. What he kept inside him was the real thing, the world he knew, carried inside his chest. Letting it out was the risk. He wouldn’t talk about this, couldn’t tell his mother about the suicide bombers in the small white sedans, couldn’t tell her about cell phones used as detonators, couldn’t tell her about IEDs thrown from overpasses. The words would make no sense here. There was no way between the worlds.
Conrad drove ahead without answering. The white car had gone on, vanishing into the long line of cars. When he saw a rest stop, he pulled off the road.
“I want to stretch a bit, Ma. You want to drive?” he said.
“Happy to,” Lydia said.
She got out of the car and stood on the pavement in the sun, smoothing her hair with both hands. Conrad went into the bushes to pee, and she climbed into the driver’s seat. She put her hands on the steering wheel and flexed them, opening and closing her fingers. She’d been clenching them hard against the dashboard. She turned around to look at Murphy.
“How are you doing, my gorgeous girl?” she asked. Murphy was crouched and motionless, her pupils enormous and black. She stared back at Lydia.
“You thought that was kind of scary,” Lydia said to her. “I know. I thought so, too.”
14
The house and barn both faced the road, but from different places on the hillside. The barn was low, and close to the road. The house was farther back, and up the hill.
The house was eighteenth-century, small and weather-beaten. On the front, the house was only one story high, though up under the roof peak, it rose to two. The shingled sides had once been white, but the paint was peeling off and turning the walls to a shimmering gray. The lawn sloped from the house toward the barn. At the bottom was a stone retaining wall, holding back the hillside. In a gap were three wide stone steps and a rickety wooden railing.
Conrad pulled the car up before the barn. The big doors were open onto the shadowy dimness. Against the far wall squatted an ancient icebox; the wooden swoop of a scythe hung beside it. The rope swing was looped up to one side.
“Here we are,” he said. “Everything looks the same.”
“It always does,” Lydia said. “I don’t think they’ve done a thing to it in twenty years. Which is kind of why I love it.”
Marshall’s car was beside them, doors open, the back half full of bags. Lydia got out and opened the back door.
“How are you, my beauty?” she crooned to Murphy. “We’re here, it’s over.”
Conrad opened the rear door to the solid mass of bags.
Lydia said, “I’m going to take Murph up to the house, then I’ll be back to help.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ve got this.”
He loaded himself up, suitcase in one hand, canvas bags in the other, and headed to the house at a rapid jog. His body knew this—the three stone steps, the
slope of the lawn going up to the house.
No one used the front door. It was old and solid, with a heavy brass knocker. It faced the road, but everyone came in through the side door, which opened into the kitchen. That door was relatively new, with a glass panel and a modern lock: the kitchen and the bathroom had been added in the twenties or thirties, when plumbing and electricity came in. An outside shower was on the wall beyond the door.
As he approached the house, Jenny appeared. She held the door open.
“Welcome.” She made a sweeping gesture.
“Glad to be here,” Conrad said.
The kitchen was long and meandering. In the center stood a square wooden table with a linoleum top; on the far wall was the sink, overlooking the back deck. The stove stood against the back wall; above it was a row of blue-and-white porcelain jars, labeled in French: RIZ, SUCRE, THÉ, CAFÉ. The smells were familiar: old dry wood, sun, a faint hint of kerosene.
The kitchen was cluttered. Bags of food stood on the counter, suitcases clustered on the floor. Marshall was looking for lightbulbs, Lydia was unpacking food. Conrad unloaded the car, and then picked up his duffel bag from under the table. He started up to his room.
As he left, Lydia called, “Con, why don’t you take the blue room this year, instead of sharing with Ollie?”
Conrad had reached the living room and paused. “The guest room?”
“Well, yes.” Lydia sounded self-conscious.
Of course he got it. The guest room had a double bed, and Claire was coming up the next weekend. But the family rule had always been no cohabitation at home.
“Okay,” Conrad called back. He climbed the steep staircase slowly; the steps were so narrow he had to turn his feet sideways. This was cool, but wasn’t it a little weird to have your mother publicly enable your sex life?
The guest room was off the upstairs landing. The walls were a faded blue. The room was bright with sun: a big double window faced the meadow; a dormer looked over the back. The double bed faced the window; a bureau next to it. Spindle-backed chairs stood against the walls. Filmy white curtains hung at the windows. Clean and spare, the room smelled of old plaster and wood, baking heat, and summer.
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