by Ted Thompson
“My family is not going to get rid of the lobster.”
“Well, maybe not, but if you consider the aggregate effects—”
“Are you from an environmental group or something?”
“Not really.”
“A homeowners’ association?”
“No.”
“But you do own a home around here.”
Anders looked across the inlet. It was all trees and rocks.
“Listen to me,” he said. “I don’t care how much money you have, you can’t just show up here and start tearing apart history. You can’t do that.”
“I’ll tell you what.” She handed the packet back to him. “I’ll give you a minute to get off my property before I call the cops.”
Beside the inn, a patch of pines had been ripped out of the ground, to clear room for the equipment, he figured. There were holes where the big fists of roots had been and tread marks striating the frozen dirt.
“I’ll buy it,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“I’ll buy it,” he said again, this time feeling out the sound of it. Larry’s check was still sitting uncashed on the kitchen counter across the inlet.
“It’s not for sale.”
“You can keep the property. I just want the building.”
She squinted at him with her exacting eyes.
“The foundation’s cracked,” she said. “Crumbling. We didn’t want to tear it down either, but the whole thing’s sitting on a drying sand castle.”
“Look, I’m basically offering to give you the waterfront.”
“Are you serious?”
Behind her, across the inlet, a car had pulled into his driveway. Someone was getting out. The car door slammed. “I just want the building. You can build what you want on the rest of it.”
The woman thought about this. “Let me see if Emily’s available.”
* * *
Of all the news that could derail her preparations for the evening—preparations that had gone from a manageable list of beans to boil and silver to polish to an all-out scramble when she realized that once again her son had disappeared—none was as dramatic as the phone call from Sophie that announced she was baking. This was nothing new—Helene couldn’t remember a dinner party that hadn’t ended in everyone moaning politely as they chewed a square of one sort or another—but this time Sophie was “baking!,” a proclamation that indicated she was out of bed and bopping around the kitchen in flour-dusted yoga gear.
“I’m making éclairs,” she had said.
“You are?”
“They smell amazing, Helene. I wish you could be here right now to smell them with me, they smell like chocolate and bread and—oh, what’s that word, it’s on the tip of my—doughnuts, I guess. It smells like doughnuts.”
“Sophie, are you okay?”
“I’m great, I am great. I love you so much, you know that? Sometimes I think you worry too much. You take on too much but you are such a good person.”
Compared to Sophie’s catatonia of the last week, this was troubling. There was nothing quite as unsettling as seeing someone comatose with grief—unless, of course, it was hearing someone jabbering on about the loveliness of everything while baking a tray of pastries.
It turned out to be three trays, platters piled high and wrapped in foil, one of which, Helene was fairly certain, was a cake. The Ashbys came in with all the familiar hoopla—hugs and kisses and coats and drinks—and they were not only exactingly punctual (they even beat Tommy and the kids) but also, seemingly, remarkably stable. Their clothes had the pristine neatness of dry cleaning just out of the plastic, and although Mitchell’s floral tie and his fresh shaving nicks made it seem that Sophie had forced him out of the house, he carried it all with a convincing air of normalcy—a loyal soldier in their joint front of propriety.
“You guys,” Helene said, looking from one to the other. “You look wonderful.”
She brought them into the living room, where they sat on separate ends of the sofa and looked at her as if waiting to be told what to do.
Donny had put Bing Crosby on the stereo, a bounce of schmaltz from the ceiling speakers, and they stared forward at the long string of Christmas cards swagged along three walls—caps and gowns and beach homes, the occasional uncomfortably religious illustration, and one architectural rendering of someone’s planned addition. Mostly, though, it was kids—a semicircle of tooth-fairy grins and grandkids in Harry Potter costumes and adorable soccer players with jerseys that fit like dashikis.
“You know what,” Helene said, watching them scan the cards, “why don’t we go into the dining room?”
Neither of them moved.
“Listen,” she said in her softest voice. “You guys don’t have to stay. At any point, if you feel uncomfortable, just get up and go, okay?”
It was then that Sophie seemed to register Helene’s presence, and she leaned forward to speak as if she were about to reveal something urgent and private. “Is Preston,” she said and stopped herself. “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“All riiight!” said Donny, charging in with three full goblets of wine. “Who wants red?” There was a long pause in which no one gave any indication of having heard him.
“No one asked for wine, Donny.”
“I’ll take red,” said Mitchell.
Sophie had reverted to the same mannequin stare she had had over the past seven days.
“You know what, Soph?” said Helene. “I’m not going to be drinking tonight, so there’s no need to—”
“I’ll have red,” Sophie said.
“Donny,” Helene said. “Can I see you in the kitchen?”
“What we want to know,” said Mitchell, his voice firm and tight, “is, Where is your son?”
For a moment her impulse was to lie. It was a reflex whenever anyone asked about Preston, but this time, perhaps the first time in thirty years, she didn’t think he’d done anything wrong.
“We don’t know where he is,” she said. “Actually.”
“I thought he lived here.”
“He’s staying here, yes,” she said. “But whatever it is you think he did—”
“Helene,” said Sophie and before she’d spoke another word, Helene could see that something in her friend had shifted. It was something she couldn’t quite place, but it reminded her of the way Sophie had behaved when, not eighteen months after they had both given birth, Preston had come along and suddenly Helene was doing it all again. And what a weird thing! To feel resentment from your best friend for the distance your newborn baby placed between the two of you, an unspeakable undercurrent that came out in tipsy asides about how the only closeness with a child you could ever really trust was when it was living inside you, that everything after that was a total crapshoot, all said with a smile and punctuated by the commiserative clink of wineglasses.
But how was this for unspeakable: When Charlie had been willed into the world at a maternal age that Helene had privately found unethical, Sophie had refused a box of Preston’s baby blankets that Helene had been saving for her own grandkids, as though there were a germ of imperfection in it that her miracle baby might catch. And now that it was clear he had caught it anyway, Helene felt an irrational need for vengeance radiating from her friend, as though Sophie believed that since she had lost her second child, it was only fair that Helene should lose hers too.
“Knock-knock!”
Tommy arrived with a pre-dressed turkey on a silver platter (something he had brought her every Christmas Eve since his migration back home), a pair of hyperactive children, and a wife hauling their overnight bags. Lisa was a small, bony woman who refused to take Tommy’s last name and seemed to look down at Helene for taking Anders’s almost forty years before, even though Helene had maintained a career while raising her kids and Lisa had used her advanced degree to become a Pilates instructor, which was fine, although it seemed mostly like an excuse to w
ear elastic clothes and be passive-aggressive about things like processed sugar.
“Ho-ho-ho,” said Tommy as he led in the rest of the gang. “Hope you guys are hungry!”
As he passed her, Tommy leaned over and whispered, “You should answer your phone once in a while.” Before Helene had a chance to ask why, she noticed the two figures on the landing beside Lisa who, judging by their diminutive statures and blank masks of greeting, must have been Lisa’s very Lithuanian grandparents, up for a surprise from Teaneck, New Jersey.
“Welcome!” Helene said, muscling her way through the single-kiss, double-cheek dance and taking a pile of coats up to her bed, where she dropped them onto the mattress and had the sudden urge to curl into a ball underneath them. She went back downstairs and poured into glasses the remains of their meager supply of wine—a supply she had thought would be sufficient for a room of nondrinkers and Tommy, who tended to sip a single glass all night, as though he were chaperoning. Now she needed to send Donny to pick up reserves for Lisa, who, it turned out, happily drank when her discomfiting grandparents were around, and for the grandparents themselves, whose background and cultural norms she knew nothing of but who seemed to greatly enjoy petite syrah.
She cranked up the Bing Crosby to drown out their small talk and, before heading back into the living room, took a satisfying pull from their one remaining bottle.
“I have cheese,” she said, setting out the two wedges of manchego she had prepared for hors d’oeuvres. Mitchell and Sophie had wound up at the end of the sofa across from Lisa’s grandparents, a pairing that left all four locked in silence—which, now that Helene thought about it, wasn’t actually the worst thing.
“Tommy, can you help me for a second?” she said, and she was back in the incandescence of the kitchen with the only person she felt comfortable with.
She pointed out at the living room. “When?”
“Today,” he said. “I tried to call.”
Helene shook her head for a while. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re having a somewhat different kind of event.”
Tommy closed his eyes. “I know. They look terrible.”
“They are terrible,” she said. “They are understandably terrible. But, listen, I need you to tell me where your brother is.”
Tommy stared at her blankly.
“He didn’t call?” Helene asked.
“He doesn’t call me mid-fuckup, Mom, that’s you he calls.”
Helene shook her head.
“Mitchell and Sophie are convinced,” she said, “they’re somehow convinced he was with Charlie.”
“Preston?”
“It’s ludicrous.”
“Well, was he?”
Helene looked at him. “Jesus, Tommy, are you serious?”
“I mean, it’s not so out of the question, is it?”
“He doesn’t even know Charlie. He’s almost twice his age—what would they even have to talk about?”
Tommy looked at her.
“I don’t want to think about that. I just need to be sure he stays away from here. Will you call him and tell him that?”
“That he can’t come home? On Christmas Eve?”
Helene stared at him expectantly. Tommy had tied an apron over his shirt and rolled up his sleeves in preparation for his kitchen duties, and for the first time in a while she saw in him the kid who had gamely pretended to be a horse along with Samantha Ashby and her bossy friends, trotting in circles around the backyard and neighing, because it was easier than saying no. “Okay,” he said.
It wasn’t until she looked away that she noticed someone was listening in the doorway.
“Sophie,” she said.
“Mitchell says we need more wine.”
* * *
His father’s rental was wide open and no one was there. It was furnished with the sort of run-down camp furniture that was unexpectedly light, and a sandy linoleum floor that hadn’t been cleaned since the previous summer. He sat down on a love seat and listened to the wind whip through the seams around the windows. His father had yet to get the turtle a tank, a fact he figured out by watching the creature in the middle of the living room work his way across the linoleum to the kitchen.
When his father came home, it seemed almost as though he had expected Preston to be there. Despite his father’s semivagrant appearance (Preston knew the look of someone who had been sleeping in his clothes), he was happy and light in a way Preston couldn’t remember him—jazzed about something and going on and on about it in bewildering detail, as though Preston had been present for the debate that had been raging over the past thirty-six hours in his father’s brain.
“Not to mention the tax incentives, which essentially offset the restoration cost if it’s amortized over fifteen years. Fifteen years! That’s nothing. The government’s giving money away so people will take on projects like this. And I told them that. I told them it doesn’t matter if the foundation’s crumbling, it’ll be cost-effective no matter how you cut it. It’s not like this takes much expertise in finance. It’s just practical—and it’s the right thing to do!”
“Dad.”
His father looked up.
“What are you talking about?”
His father took him outside to a trail and down to a clearing. He pointed at a dilapidated old building across the water. “I’m talking about that.”
“You bought that?”
“They were going to destroy it, Preston. Destroy it. These assholes don’t know the first thing about history.”
“With what money?”
His father glared at him.
“It’s not an unreasonable question, Dad.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Well, I do. We all do.”
“The house in Connecticut is your mother’s problem. She can deal with that money hole. It’s her rich boyfriend’s problem.”
“Do they know that?”
“Yes,” said his father. “Yes,” he repeated, a little less sure.
Preston held up the envelope. “Is that what this is?”
Anders took it. He looked over the documents inside. “Yes,” he said, refastening the brads and handing it back to him. “This needs to go to your mother.”
“Dad,” said Preston. “What’re you doing up here?”
“I already told you but clearly you weren’t listening.”
“Come back with me. Give this to Mom yourself.”
“Did you not hear me?” He gestured across to the inn. “I’ve got things to do.”
“It’s Christmas Eve. You’re up here alone.”
“I have permits to get, I need to talk to an architect—”
“What is wrong with you?” said Preston. “You always do this. You get lost in these private battles that no one else can see and then you wonder why no one understands you. Do you really think this inn matters? Do you really think if you preserve that building anyone will care?”
“Of course they’ll care! They’ll all care! It’s a living piece of history and I saved it, goddamn it. I saved it!”
Preston took a deep breath. When his father started yelling, it was usually the end of the conversation.
“Well,” he said, seeing his father’s flushed face. “As long as it makes you feel better.”
He was halfway up the trail when his father stopped him. “Wait,” he said. He had run up behind him and was catching his breath. “You drove all the way up here for that?”
“I was worried about you.”
His father looked him in the eye.
“I can’t go back there.”
“Just give them their gifts.”
“It’s my fault,” his father said. That boy is gone and it’s all my fault.”
* * *
It never snowed in southern Connecticut on Christmas Eve, though sometimes it rained, and now, looking through the windshield, they saw sleet had started to fall. Compared to the white dusting on the lawns of Maine, this was gray and grim, and it ma
de the high windows on their kitchen seem like a warm beacon of light.
“Only an hour and a half late,” his son said.
“There are a lot of cars here. Aren’t there a lot of cars?”
“Don’t worry,” said Preston, climbing out of the Escalade. “You know all these people.”
“I thought you said it was family only,” he said.
Preston closed the car door behind him.
“Hey,” Anders called. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Bring the stuff,” said his son, heading to the house.
On the way down, Preston had promised him a quiet family affair, with gifts under the tree and the grandkids watching Claymation specials on TV and a turkey that Tommy had spent the week brining. They would all exchange gifts, he said, a simple ritual, nothing more to it, and spend the evening together as they always had, sipping wine beneath a sound track of carols. They had stopped at the drugstore and bought what wrapping paper was left and then spent a frantic half hour at Anders’s condo wrapping the presents, and now, in Anders’s lap, there was a laundry basket filled with objects that were wrapped in shiny unseasonable paper. It was quite a pile, and maybe a tad embarrassing—a concern he had raised repeatedly with his son and that Preston had assured him was unfounded and overthought. “It’s Christmas,” he had said. “This is what you’re supposed to do.”
He was right, of course, and under normal circumstances Anders would have taken great pleasure in this display of generosity, might even have hauled them over in a laundry sack and ho-ho-ho’d his way through distributing them, a pleasant thought that vanished along with his confidence as soon as the front door opened. Tommy’s wife, Lisa, was standing there.
“Anders?” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I was—did Preston go in this way?”
“Preston’s not here,” she said and looked at the laundry basket. “What is all that?” Lisa had always looked down on Anders, particularly after the divorce, but her usual polite condescension turned, with a stifled laugh, to something much more sinister.
“Ho-ho-ho,” he said.
“Oh, those are—oh! Hang on,” she said, and she went back into the house.
