The moving truck finally arrives on Saturday, pulling down a driveway freshly plowed thanks to a cashier’s check carved off Claire’s first earned salary in fourteen and a half years.
It feels like Christmas—like the Christmas that was virtually canceled when they sold their house. Addison had stonewalled the buyer about the holiday, maybe because it was the last thing he felt he could still control. “We gave up half a million dollars to these people. I will not give them my Christmas on top of it,” he fumed, venting to Claire until she could only sit and watch him pace, watch him funnel his rage—every cursing word of blame he’d held in check when he’d faced the review board and sacrificed his dream drug—onto this one symbolic day of peace.
The buyers threatened to walk until he galled them into silence with a week of exorbitant rent so that his own family, Jory and Claire and he, could sleep on air mattresses and open their few presents in the middle of a bare living room. The house had looked enormous after the movers took the last of their furniture away. The blank walls echoed, the floor danced with floating ghosts of dust and hair; only the lit-up Christmas tree held any cheer—not even that, it was just a little less sad than the cheerless, vacant space that now belonged to another family.
Jory watches the truck turn around and back up to the door, stomping her feet against the cold while the drivers unlock the metal doors. She looks truly excited for the first time in a month; as if she is waiting to find her life inside there, hoping that the enormous van will disgorge everything she’s missed along with her white and blue bedroom furniture, then swallow up her loneliness and haul it away to some distant state, some other kid’s misfortune.
Despite all they have sold or put in storage the room is too crowded once the van is unloaded. Their contemporary furniture looks ridiculous in this old farmhouse, if Claire is honest with herself. She sits on the arm of Addison’s leather recliner, which they’d discovered on a trip to England—the shipping cost had almost exactly equaled what she earned in a month at the clinic. Every wall is lined with stacked boxes; the dining table and kitchen counters are buried under crates of things they have no space for. She should have left half of it behind.
She gets up and peels the plastic tape off a cardboard container—kitchen items: a fruit dehydrator, a pasta press, an espresso machine; a set of Christmas dishes she’d ordered from Denmark and never used. She sinks down into the oversized chair and wraps herself up in a silk and wool throw that had perfectly matched the wallpaper in their library. The fabric and leather, even the tang of forged metal bracing, exude an odor of home—the scent of a place that is still identified in her mind when she speaks the word, home. Maybe, in time, in patience, it will seep into the plaster and paint and wood of this house. Or the next house. The house they will reward themselves with when this is over. So she will make this Christmas, of a sort. It surprises both Jory and her that such familiar items can feel so new after five weeks of eating and sitting on garage sale castoffs. The last thing the movers lower from the truck is a jaggedly cut slab of concrete, which Claire tells them to put at the bottom of the porch steps.
“What is that, Mom?”
“Your footprints. From when you were five and we had the new patio laid in the garden.”
Jory stares at them for a contemplative moment. “Does Dad know you chopped a hole in the patio before the new people moved in?”
“I’m sure they’d rather have their own kid’s footprints in their cement.”
As soon as the movers have wrangled her bed frame and dresser up to her room Jory hunts down clean sheets and pillowcases, sweeps the pine floor twice before she unrolls her rug. Claire carries a box of Jory’s summer shorts and swimsuits upstairs and Jory looks almost embarrassed to be caught arranging books and various kitsch collected from fairs and parties, investing her heart in this room, this still-opposed home.
“It looks nice in here! Your furniture fits pretty well, don’t you think?” Claire says, but she feels a catch in her chest remembering Jory’s window seat overlooking Lake Washington. Claire had painted the walls with blue and white flowers and yellow kites, hung a sheer curtain over the opening so Jory could hide in her own safe, secret world.
“Do we have any window cleaner?” Jory asks.
Claire stifles her amazement. “Sure, under the kitchen sink. Don’t use all the newspaper, we need it for the stove.” She swings the closet door open with her foot and drops the packing box on the floor.
Jory lets out a small cry. “Wait…” At the same moment Claire notices a plastic storage box in the corner of the closet. She pulls the chain on the overhead lightbulb; the top of the container is pierced with dime-sized holes. The sour smell hits her the second she pries off the lid. “Jory! How long has this been here? You can’t keep a mouse as a house pet! What? Did you rescue it from the Havahart? What were you thinking?” Her voice heats into a white anger, igniting every retort she has stifled in the last weeks. Jory feels it, is already crouched on the other side of the large box, grabs the rim as if her mother would destroy the small, terrified creature cowering in a mound of shredded flannel. Claire stands up and Jory’s fierce grip jerks the container hard enough to flip it onto its side, jar lids of water spill across the floor and the mouse disappears under the door in a flash of fur.
Claire looks at the filth of wet rags and food and excrement and, suddenly, the task of cleaning it up seems as monumental as unpacking every box downstairs, or heating this freezing, desolate house, or stretching her paycheck from today until Addison announces he has signed with Novartis or Bristol-Myers Squibb. She sinks onto the floor and braces her back against the wall, staring at the upended bin.
The room splinters with silence after their altercation. Then Jory heaves one single, pleading sob. “I was lonely. I was just… lonely.” Claire reaches over and takes her hand, pulls Jory to her chest and waits for the earth to settle.
She stays up past two in the morning clearing a path to the refrigerator, poking through random boxes and listening to cassette tapes on an old Sony Walkman that had miraculously escaped the trash pile. She makes a cup of hot chocolate and spikes it with peppermint schnapps, loses it in the forest of boxes and finds it again, multiple times.
Their Seattle house had started life as a 1960s rambler on an oversized lakefront lot; it came on the market only months after Addison sold Eugena. By then it was dwarfed by the new, hotel-sized homes on either side of it, smaller than their neighbors’ garages. Addison and Claire were still too flush with the shock of unanticipated wealth to buy anything ostentatious, anything that didn’t demand sweat equity. They had agreed they would go slowly, cosmetic fixes only until Addison could get his next blood test to market. Claire would eventually finish her residency and take her boards, as soon as Jory started all-day school, so she could bring in at least a part-time salary. And the house was sweet in its humble, squat proportions, Claire thought. The three of them could move about the low-ceilinged rooms with enough personal space to breathe and grow and create, but still sense, always, the other two. Room for independence without isolation, privacy without secrets.
They painted the shingles, put a swing set in the fenced yard and moved in on July fifth, the first official day of Seattle sunshine. But by early winter the drafty windows and warped doors and claustrophobic kitchen were getting to them. Addison said they were heating half of Lake Washington. They might as well invest in a sound structure. And by early spring the stock they’d collected in exchange for Addison’s biotech start-up had split and risen and split again. They started to feel safe. They started to notice their neighbors had all gotten newer cars and taken more exotic vacations and built new additions onto their already massive homes. They started to spend.
They hired an architect. Claire collected file drawers full of magazine pages and tile samples and paint chips. Their dinner talk lingered over notions of how a house can affect productivity and mood, how space and light can transform the language of private life. As the stock rose and split and split again they luxuriated in unfettered choices about windows and ceiling heights, curved walls and arched doorways—stone and plaster and wood made intimate, plotted out in blueprints and billed by the hour. Jory had been only four at the time, but they’d bought Lego sets and doll furniture and encouraged her to build the bedrooms and play spaces and closets of her fantasies while the architect took notes. They ended up taking the house down to the studs. The whole remodel took two years and cost more than any new house in the neighborhood. And now it was owned by someone else.
On the last night before the movers came to haul their belongings away, with boxes stacked so high the house looked like a cubist representation of family memory, Claire had walked out onto the dock that jutted into Lake Washington from their stone retaining wall. She stood under the cold, fixed stars and listened to the silence, felt the cold, damp air, as fresh as any wilderness lake. She had promised herself, when they’d moved in, that she would do this every night—take ten minutes, five minutes, two minutes, to walk from her warm house onto the dock, taste and smell the water and sky that she had paid millions of dollars to “own.” She tried to remember the last time she had opened the doors to the porch after dinner, stood suspended above the lake and looked into its black mirror for falling stars. It had been years.
She hunts down her hot chocolate one final time—gone cold with a skin of milk floating like an island in a brown pond. The kitchen sink is still hidden under boxes; she walks out the front door and steps barefooted into the snow, taking a queer pleasure in the stinging cold. There is no lake at this house, no dock to allow her to walk over the water. But there are stars, even more brilliant in the middle of winter, in the middle of nowhere. She cranks her neck back and searches for the north star. The cassette tape hisses between songs and then Joni Mitchell is singing, “Still I sent up my prayer/Wondering who was there to hear/I said “Send me somebody/Who’s strong and somewhat sincere.’”
She listens until her feet hurt too much to stand it any longer, and flings the contents of her mug across the snow. Then she pulls her arm all the way across her body and hurls the cup out as hard as she can, hearing no sound when it sinks into the snow.