First: the house in Newton, which in memory seemed to slide backward and shrink, the way her father had even then. As if James himself were the departing car, the receding lines of a midsized sedan, dark blue, spinning tires, red taillights, the rear window through which, each morning, one might glimpse his silhouetted head or only the reflections of trees. The sound would diminish, abate; in the evenings she’d wait for the reversal, the engine whir emerging from the weave of kid sounds and dog barks, leaf raking or snow shoveling or lawn watering along the block. In Newton, early on, the bay window: she could sit still then and wait, holding but not reading the illustrated book from which she remembered a forbidding gray castle with a cylindrical tower, the princess only a blur of pink.
For Katy, the house in Newton first defined house. Her room painted yellow with white trim, a low wooden bed covered with stuffed animals; beside it, a dresser, a bookshelf, two bins in which she kept the toys of the moment, mostly miniature figures, human and animal, from various tableaux—farm scene, medical office, grocery—a postman in a blue uniform and a doctor in a white coat. For a brief time a Raggedy Ann that later became Molly’s. On the opposite side of the room, Molly had her own wooden bed, her own stuffed animals and dolls, her own bookshelf and dresser. Nora had painted yellow daisies on Katy’s dresser, pink ones on Molly’s. The house itself seemed indistinguishable from Nora: the most satisfying room the room Nora currently occupied. Though Katy explored, she did not stray far. Even when Nora hired a mother’s helper, Katy would trail Nora through the house.
Theo seemed to care only that Nora was home. He did not wait by the bay windows for James to return from work—as if, confident their father would find him, he did not need to wait. Or as if he did not need anything. Theo’s room was from the start a separate realm into which Katy wandered only in his absence. Library books on volcanoes and stars, baseball cards, a dead butterfly, stones. Valuable because they were Theo’s.
From the living room bay window she could see the Kellers’ blue house and the Santa Lucias’ white one, the O’Malleys’ lawn next door. She had lived there always—the same always occupied by Toby Keller and Elena Santa Lucia—a singular extending present interrupted only by summers in Blue Rock, where her father appeared not as a retreating car but as a laughing man.
When the house in Newton emptied itself onto a truck, she ran back and forth across the unobstructed floors, tagging the walls, tagging them again, speeding past the sounds of her mother’s protests, as if her mother were a speaking television. She ran the stairs, the running becoming its own buffered sphere, like the interior of a car on the highway, a fast-moving bubble you stayed in apart from the world. You could go on forever, not expecting to be plucked from the driving rhythm, your body pulled straight up, grabbed and lifted by your father, today a full-sized man whose arms had you straitjacketed against his chest: Your mother said stop. But how crucial the motion, and you slapped at his arms, Katy, stop it, and the straitjacket seeming to tighten and you kicked and he kept saying enough now until you went limp and teary, after which he set you down, and Molly stood in the doorway watching while your mother told you to go get in the car with Theo, right now. And in the backseat, Theo watched you kick at the upholstery, until your mother brought Molly to the car. Out the window, the houses and trees began to pass as in a movie, and then a movie about highways and cars, one of them somewhere your father’s.
After Italy, no one visited Newton again: for a time the house remained in her mind a space she could picture but never find her way back to, and one where Molly stood in the doorway, where Molly might still wear the pink pajamas and eat her toast alone. Eventually, in Blue Rock, the images from the Newton house began their retreat, becoming opaque and unpleasantly shadowed, like pond water in October.
Later there was only Blue Rock, the always of Blue Rock the only apparent always—though always, too, the place her father was leaving behind (in her mind his car forever the same retreating sedan). It was the Shore Road house, pitched at the edge of the sea, Katy presumed to be indelible, her point of orientation not only from her college dorm and Tim’s Boston apartment but also from the string of increasingly large, well-appointed condos her father lived in, which she thought of as motels. In their North Shore house, James and Josie kept a bedroom they called Katy’s, a peach-and-white guest room with floral touches, hers, but only in relation to the other bedrooms or common spaces of the house: here she could close the door. Yet it was a room she entered only on scheduled visits, a house to which she did not own a key, in a town near the sea but not her town—and, strangely, not her sea. The beachside roads of Blue Rock, its cliff-side and harborside streets, the sand-filled town center became the measures by which she judged any elsewhere: Blue Rock or not–Blue Rock, Shore Road house or not.