Half of What You Hear

by Kristyn Kusek Lewis

  How naive I’d been. The minute you leave Greyhill proper, everything looks the same. Idyllic, with rolling pastures crisscrossed by old stone fences, the purple-gray peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains framing the view but also distracting for that very reason, and it’s impossible to navigate. It is so expansive, so empty, and so different from what I’m used to that sometimes, when I take a moment to really notice it, I feel my breath catch, the space almost startling me. It is hard to believe that we are just eighty miles from DC.

  I fling Mindy’s envelope onto the counter and reach for the chips. “So this party’s a big deal?” I repeat, my hand digging into the bag.

  “What?” Cole says, a touch of defensiveness in his voice.

  “Nothing.” I look across the room and smile at him. He thinks I am criticizing his friends, and he’s right, I am. But it’s not that I don’t like them. I simply don’t know them yet. And the problem is that they all know who I am, or they assume they do—I have cable news to thank for that—and that’s what makes me nervous.

  I turn and open the refrigerator. “What do you want for dinner?” I ask, scanning the contents of the shelves as I lick the salt from the chips off my fingertips. Another new thing since we moved: I’m cooking again. There is no more sloppy takeout eaten at the kitchen counter while we scan emails, no more bullshit slow cooker gruel, no more racing by the store to “pick up something quick” in the twenty-minute window between leaving work and grabbing the kids from their after-school program.

  “Anything,” he says, wrapping his arms around my waist. He kisses my neck. “Maybe that?” He points to a parchment-wrapped package I bought at Bully’s, the local grocery store, this morning. A cut-up whole chicken. “Heritage breed,” the butcher had said proudly from behind the counter. “Killed it myself yesterday.”

  Cole starts for the door.

  When we agreed to take over the inn that’s been in Cole’s family for generations, Bradley and Diane, his parents, warned us over champagne and cake that the business might surprise us. “You know, this could be every bit as busy as your lives back in DC,” Bradley said, a line neither of us really believed, even while we knew there was a steep learning curve ahead of us.

  So far, we’ve been right. It’s not that the work isn’t hard—Cole’s at the inn seven days a week and often heads back in the evenings after dinner just to check on things—but it’s different. It’s happy work, catering to people, coddling the guests—a welcome change from grinding it out for fifteen hours a day on a laptop or in meetings, the way we used to do.

  And the business is stable . . . I think. Let’s say I’m 80 percent sure. The only other hotel option nearby is a terrifying motel fifteen miles down the highway that’s begging to be a crime scene. It’s reassuring that we’ve been the only game in town for decades, ever since Cole’s great-grandfather decided to turn his childhood home into an inn after he returned home from the First World War. Back then, Greyhill was a stop on the C&O Railway, a pass-through between the coal mines of Appalachia and the ports in Newport News and Norfolk, so there was actually a need for a place for people to stay when they were passing through on business. But the railroad is long gone, so now the inn quietly caters to couples on weekend getaways and to guests of Greyhill residents, and occasionally to people who have business in Charlottesville, about thirty-five miles away. It would be nice if it were a bustling business, but Cole assures me that his parents have never had a problem making money. Still, I insisted on seeing all the income reports and spreadsheets before I agreed to jump in with both feet, and I keep reminding myself that I’ve visited enough over the years that I’d know if we were making a mistake.

  I hear Cole collecting his keys, the rustle of him putting on his coat. “Hey,” I yell. “You’ll be home . . . ?”

  “The normal time,” he says. “Five thirty or so.”

  I chuckle.

  “What?” Cole says.

  “I just can’t believe you’re home for lunch and then home again at five thirty,” I say.

  “Are you complaining about it?” he says, laughing down the hall.

  “Of course not,” I yell back. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he says. “But if you’re going to get sick of me . . .”

  “Go to work!” I yell, laughing.

  “Bye.”

  * * *

  We decided when we moved in that Cole didn’t need an office at home, not with the inn just two miles away, so the sunny room at the front of the house, with a big bay window overlooking the yard, is mine.

  The Ammandale house, Martha Brown, the Realtor, had called it, after some long-ago former owner. I’d always known the white Dutch Colonial that sat across the street from Cole’s childhood home as the Millers’ house. They were distant Ammandale cousins, Ms. Brown explained to me, a knowing in her voice that smacked just slightly of condescension.

  I’d always loved the house and its pretty white facade, the crisp black shutters framing the windows, the tawny cedar shingles on the roof, an old oak tree just to the right of the house in the front yard, exactly where it should be, a rope swing hanging from one of its limbs. Mr. Miller had put the swing up years ago, for Cole. They’d never had their own children, Mrs. Miller had wistfully told me once, but Cole had been “a joy to them,” growing up right across the street, like a beloved godson or nephew who always obliged when they asked if he could haul their Christmas tree out to the curb after the holidays or help Mr. Miller clear the gutters.

  I don’t want to say that my husband had an ulterior motive when he told me last spring that Mr. Miller had finally convinced his wife to move to a golf community in Sarasota, but he knew that he was starting a conversation. We were sitting in maddening traffic on the Beltway, a panorama of brake lights in front of us, on our way back to DC from Easter brunch at the inn. Livvie and Max were in the back seat, trading candy from the baskets we had given them earlier that morning, and I could feel my body tensing as our car inched farther into the crush of Northern Virginia, a bottleneck of noise and people that made bucolic Greyhill feel like something I’d imagined.

  Earlier that day, Diane and I had stood in the archway of the main dining room, watching as Cole’s father, dressed as the Easter Bunny, posed for pictures with the guests’ children. She mentioned, once again, that Bradley would love to retire, saying it in a hushed tone like this was a secret rather than something she’d expressed a dozen times before. I pretended not to hear her and watched Bradley hop a loop around a crowd of mesmerized toddlers. If I were him, I’d work until the day I died if it would give me a reason to be out of the house and away from Diane.

  She’d never liked our lifestyle in DC. When she and Bradley came to visit (which wasn’t all that often, because of the inn and also because Diane preferred that we come to her), she complained that it was too noisy, too busy. Our place was too small. The restaurants were too crowded. In the past couple of years she’d become more vocal about her desire for Cole to take over the family business, but Cole and I had made a practice of ignoring her “hints.” He hadn’t been able to picture leaving his job as in-house counsel at the National Wildlife Federation any more than I could imagine leaving the White House. But when I got fired and started wondering aloud, especially after my sessions with Dimitria, my therapist, whether the hustle-and-strive we had in DC was the life we still wanted long-term, Cole revealed that there was a small, secret part of him that actually liked the idea of stepping in for his dad at the inn. He said he’d never mentioned it before because he didn’t want me to have to give anything up. But now, he started, measuring his words, maybe things are more flexible. . . . He graciously left out the fact that because of what I’d done, nobody in Washington—at least, none of the good people in Washington—would consider hiring me any more than they’d consider employing one of the pandas at the National Zoo.

  I looked out at the traffic that night and told Cole what I’d said to him many times before:
I had fallen in love with Greyhill the first time he took me there, and had long harbored fantasies about what life could be like for us in his sweet hometown. They were unrealistic, never-gonna-happen fantasies, on par with my dreams of a cottage on the Maine coast and a flat in Notting Hill, but they existed nevertheless.

  And the Millers’ house: not only was it triple the square footage of our place in DC and easily half the price (Cole had to ask Mr. Miller to repeat himself when he’d offered a number out on their driveway earlier that day), it was also the House, a home like the one I’d held in my dreams since I was a little girl growing up in a forgettable saltbox with peeling paint and rusting gutters in a down-at-the-heels suburb of Burlington, Vermont. I’d gazed longingly at the Millers’ house every time we came to Greyhill, and even referenced it when we were house hunting near Capitol Hill: I’ll know it’s the right place when I feel the way I feel when I look at the Millers’ house.

  That night, we crawled through the traffic. We parked the car. I started the laundry, checked to make sure we had milk for the morning, and looked at my appointment book while I chewed the ears off the chocolate bunny Cole had given me earlier that day.

  And then, right before bed, I walked out of our bathroom and announced to Cole through a mouthful of toothpaste that I wanted to make an offer on the house. He looked up from what he’d been reading, looking as stunned as if I had emerged with my hair dyed hot pink. He made me insist that the move was truly what I wanted and continued to repeat the question, dozens of times, over the next few months, right up until the morning the moving truck pulled up to our curb. I assured him, over and over and over again, that I was sure. I wanted the house, the adorable town, the backyard for the kids, the promise of a new start—not just for me but for all of us. Our family. This would be our next chapter. This would be our home.

  I sit down at the desk and click open my email, scanning a forwarded article from my dad about the lineup for this Sunday’s Patriots game, which I’ve started to believe he sends more out of habit or superstition than a belief that I might actually read it or watch the game. It is so quiet, and I start to feel a familiar uneasiness rise up inside me. It happens all too often lately, when I’m in the house alone. I think of Dimitria and what she said in her gloriously ornate Greek accent during our session when I told her we were leaving Washington: “What if people think you’re running away?”

  I miss our weekly appointments more than I thought I would. I never pictured myself becoming the type of person who not only needed weekly therapy but craved it. Then again, I didn’t picture a lot of things that have happened in the past year. Weekly. I play with the word in my head like it’s a riddle, a tongue twister I have to practice to understand. Weekly. Weakly. Weekly. Weakly. I feel weak. Like a weakling.

  Before the move, those appointments had become the highlight of my Monday through Friday, the one thing that broke up the hours after Cole and the kids went off for the day and I sat alone in the house, my teeth unbrushed, watching the Today show. (Often all four hours.) Those commercials they play during morning television? The ads for stain remover and cereal? I know them all now. I catch myself singing along to the jingles when they come on, or mouthing the dialogue. The ones that really got to me, though, were the personal-injury lawyer ads that started showing up around ten o’clock, after the rest of the world had turned off their televisions and moved on with their lives. Have you been hurt on the job?

  Well, yes, actually, I’d mutter to the empty room. Yes, I have.

  Every time I walked into an appointment with Dimitria and slung my bag down onto the pristine Oriental rug, I said the same thing, the thought that railed at me all day long, neon red letters screaming at me inside my head: “I should be at work.”

  I know how that makes me sound. Workaholic. Ego-driven. Selfish. All of which was true, to an extent, but you could say the same thing about anyone you pulled off the street in DC. My official title had been White House social secretary and special assistant to the First Lady. Do you know how delicious that was, for a girl like I’d once been?

  It’s not that I thought I was too good for therapy. Quite the opposite, in fact. That was what had landed me on the Eames lounge chair in Dimitria’s sleek office in the first place. We’d actually been meeting on and off for years, whenever I needed a tune-up, someone to help me sort out the usual shit—years ago, the exhaustion of juggling my career and infant twins, and then later the stress of a big, big job and a husband’s big, big job, plus kids who were careening full speed toward adolescence.

  Just this morning, wiping milk from the corner of Max’s lip: Is that hair? I’d said, gripping his chin in my cupped hand. Mom, stop. . . . He’d shrugged me away with a grimace, and I’d reached for my coffee, taking a deep, long sip so he wouldn’t see the way his rejection made my lip tremble.

  My hang-up, let’s be clear, is not the therapy itself but the reason for it this time around.

  What if they think you’re running away, Dimitria had said. What happened to you was a scandal, Bess! A beeg one!

  A big one?! I repeated, sparring with her. You think I don’t realize that?

  My photo had been printed in every major newspaper in the country, my name a punch line on the late-night shows for a week after the story broke.

  I’d been to other therapists before. The kind who wore goofy LIFE IS GOOD T-shirts to the office and put their palms on their hearts while they listened to you, the kinds who played new age background music and gave limp advice: Imagine, Bess, that you’re placing your negative thoughts on a cloud. Close your eyes, Bess. Watch them drift away.

  Dimitria wore angular business suits and gave off the impression that smiling was beneath her. She pushed me around, got in my face (not literally, of course, though I wouldn’t put it past her). The one time I heard her laugh was when I told her about the clouds. She snorted. “No! No,” she said, punctuating the words with a pointed finger. “You take your issues to the firing range. You line them up. And then you shoot them dead!” Our hour together often felt athletic, physically cathartic in the way that a good cry feels.

  People are going to think what they’re going to think, I told her right before we moved, and she nodded, pleased with me. That’s the big lesson I’ve learned through all of this. Or learned again, because I’ve most certainly had it proven to me, like a club over the head, more than once over my forty-two years. Each time, I get back up. That’s what I need to keep reminding myself.

  I pick up my phone and check my texts. For years, I slept with two smartphones just inches from my pillow—one personal, and the second a federal government–issued BlackBerry. I fantasized about a life where I didn’t have to live by their chimes and dings.

  So what an irony that now that I’m free I swipe down on the screen dozens of times a day, like I’m playing the slots. Again and then again, watching that little spinning pinwheel and hoping (c’mon, baby!) for a message from an old colleague that might—poof!—make my life fall neatly back into place. A job offer, perhaps. What I wish for most of all is a missive from FLOTUS. We made a horrible error, Bess. We need you! But that will never happen. I am yesterday’s news, no longer relevant.

  Maybe I did run away, I think. And so what? What does it matter now?

  I imagine my ex-colleagues back in DC, what they might be doing at 10:00 a.m. on a Tuesday, as I look around the room. The walls are covered in Mrs. Miller’s original, timeless grass cloth, with the kids’ pictures, which we’ve taken during the height of cherry blossom season every year since they were infants, hanging in gold frames on one side. I have this beautiful room, a room of my own, all to myself, and I don’t have the slightest idea what it is I’ll actually do here. I will help at the inn, of course, eventually. I’m not sure how, exactly. It’s all still sort of murky, but when Diane and Bradley and Cole and I sat down to talk everything over all those months ago, that was what we’d decided. I didn’t want to commit to anything formal, and my in-laws, especia
lly Diane, were happy to oblige.

  “Take your time,” Bradley said. As he reached across their old farm table to squeeze my arm, I’d felt a pang in my chest, remembering his kindness when he called me the day I was fired, and how he’d had William, the owner of the local bakery, overnight a dozen of my favorite shortbread cookies from his shop. The card was signed by both of them, but I knew better, if for no other reason than that Diane would never condone sending me fattening food.

  “Yes,” Diane had said, her eyes boring into mine despite her tight smile. “You might find that you prefer to just focus on your family for a while.” She’s never believed in my career. Never approved of it, I should say. Not when I could be home ironing Cole’s shirts. The first time she called after I was fired (I got the sense that Cole or Bradley had put her up to it), she sounded relieved. “The kids must be thrilled!” she said, a comment that still stings when I think of it.

  It is so quiet. I click on my email again, and a line from that old Talking Heads song pops into my head: And you may find yourself . . . in a beautiful house! I love this house, but I miss my old one despite everything. I miss it all.

  One afternoon shortly before we left DC, I watched our Realtor from a window seat in the coffee shop across the street from our place. I was armed with a cappuccino and a chocolate-chip cookie, my reward for being a good girl at therapy that morning. The potential buyers were a young couple—the man in the standard-issue blue gingham shirt, the woman in a law-firm-appropriate black sheath. They carried their phones purposefully in their hands, like walkie-talkies.

  I hated them. They reminded me of Cole and myself years ago, the midafternoon sun shining on them like its perfect golden glow had been calibrated just for that moment. My stomach burned as I watched them climb the steps to my house, a house we’d bought seven years ago when the world seemed like it was ours for the taking. They looked so . . . what was it? They looked so goddamn sure of themselves.