Late June
TWO WEEKS AFTER the closing, Emma packs both cars with some basic kitchen stuff, clothes, towels, sheets, blankets and pillows, her laptop, and some books. Two cars for two people isn’t very ecological, but it will give them freedom if one needs to go back to the city, or if they both stay upstate and need to run errands in different directions.
She and Ben celebrate their first night in their new home with the all-night sex they used to have before she got pregnant.
Ben says, “Am I out of my mind, or is the smell of Sheetrock superhot?”
THE HOUSE IS a construction site, but JD has carved out a livable space—living room, bedroom, bathroom, part of the kitchen. The mattress and the refrigerator Emma ordered arrived the day after she called. Amazingly, the water pump just needed minor adjustments, and one phone call got the gas turned on. JD seems to know what to throw out, what to leave, what to ask Emma and Ben about before carting it off to the dump. The nasty mattresses and metal bed frames disappear from the upstairs rooms, but the attic is untouched.
Every morning, JD shows up with a dozen boys in the back of his pickup.
Looking out the window, Ben says, “Those kids aren’t wearing seat belts. Are we sure the guy’s indemnified?”
“He said he was. And we have insurance. Plus, look, he’s driving really slow.” It’s kind of a role reversal, Ben being the worrier. Both of them like it. It’s new.
The kids worship JD. They compete to do anything he asks, no matter how tedious or menial. Scrape the cracked linoleum off the mudroom floor? Sure! Under JD’s supervision, they swarm the house while still respecting Emma and Ben’s privacy. They remind Emma of Santa’s elves, or the mice sewing Cinderella’s ball gown.
“Good news, you probably noticed, you’ve got wireless,” JD tells them. “You need to set up the router. The installation costs extra… a rush job, but I assumed you guys would think it was worth it.”
Ben says, “Oh, man, we do. That would have taken six months in the city.”
He slaps JD a hearty high five. JD looks past him at Emma, who doesn’t like fighting the impulse to roll her eyes, she and the handsome contractor gently mocking the dorky husband. Ben isn’t dorky. He just acts that way around JD.
They’re planning to stay for a week, ease into the house. JD says there’s so much that needs to be done, he can stay out of their way.
AROUND NOON ON Monday Ben gets a phone call from Avery, his producing partner. An interesting project. The backer who’s bringing it to them wants to meet today. He’s rich enough to call the shots.
“Is this new?” asks Emma. “How come you never mentioned—”
“New to me,” Ben says. “I told you. It just came up. Shit like this happens in the theater. Things happen in ten seconds, or never. Those are the options.”
Does Emma want to go back to the city with Ben?
“I think I’ll stay,” she says.
It’s only when she says it that she knows it’s true. She feels an almost physical craving for this place, this light, this air. If it weren’t such a beautiful day, maybe she would feel different. But leaving would be wrenching. She wants the clear light, the breeze, the smell of the purple flowers whose names she doesn’t know. Just being here makes her feel expansive, as if something inside her is growing along with the baby, as if she’s becoming more generous, more… something.
Ben says he’ll be gone a night, maybe two. Standing in the driveway, he holds Emma close and kisses her for a long time.
Emma hopes JD isn’t watching. Or maybe she hopes he is.
As Ben pulls out of the driveway she has a moment of panic, where she wants to run after him crying, Don’t leave me! She imagines him hitting the oak tree, a momentary fantasy that seems so real she can almost hear the crash.
Nothing bad is going to happen. Ever since they started talking about the house, she’s given herself a series of dares that she has to take. She dares herself to stay here alone.
The birdsong is constant, symphonic. The steady, reassuring thump of JD’s hammer and even the whine of power saws marks time in a pleasant way. It signals progress. The dappled sun feels hot on her hair. It’s pleasantly cool in the shade. She walks down the driveway and stands in front of the house.
It’s impossible to believe that this gigantic, beautiful place is hers. A house, a baby, a husband she loves. She has no right to be this happy. She looks around for wood to knock on.
She plans to poke around in the weedy yard, but winds up eating the last of the good bread and cheese they brought from the city, then goes upstairs and lies down. Just for a few minutes! She falls asleep to the sounds of JD and his crew calling to one another.
HER MADDENING RINGTONE punctures the dream she forgets immediately on waking.
“Emma, listen.” Ben’s practically hyperventilating. “Sturgis came to me with this project he wants to do, it’s a reboot of Peter Pan, but with an all-female cast, Lost Girls instead of Lost Boys.”
“Wow.” Emma can hear how fake her enthusiasm sounds. “Isn’t Peter Pan always a girl?”
“Sure. But the Lost Boys are always boys. Trust me. Sturgis thinks it can make money.”
Emma thinks she knows who Sturgis is, she’s supposed to know who Sturgis is, but at the moment she can’t remember. And it’s too late to ask.
“I know that it means I’m going to have to be in the city a bunch. But you can go back and forth. You can have the best of both worlds.”
“I like it here,” says Emma. “It’s fine.” She’d imagined being here with Ben. She feels a quick stab of disappointment, then something takes its place. Curiosity. How will it be without him?
“Are you sure you’re okay? What about at night? If you feel the tiniest bit weird, or scared, or the tiniest bit anything, I swear, call me and I’ll drive right up and get you. My phone is always on.”
“I have a feeling I’ll sleep like a baby,” says Emma. “And the baby will sleep like a baby.”
THE FIRST NIGHT, she goes around locking the doors, double-checking, shutting the windows, turning lights on and off, looking behind the shower curtain. She even tucks a kitchen knife under her pillow. But after a while the silence seems like a blanket she can pull over her, and the sounds—an owl in the distance, frogs from a nearby swamp—sound like an orchestra that only she can hear. She’s not at all scared. Little Person is keeping her company. An angel is watching over them.
How comfortable her bed is, how reassuring the night noises. The cheeping of the frogs is regular and soothing. She falls asleep and dreams about a house. But unlike the houses she visited before in dreams, this one is friendly, bright, and welcoming instead of dim and befogged by loss. The house is filled with people having fun, but it’s not confusing, like parties in dreams. Then the dream changes, and the house fills with peacocks, then lambs, then furry animals. Emma is sitting in a chair, nursing a baby, and the animals kneel before them like the beasts in a Nativity painting.
She’s awoken by sunlight beaming through her windows. She opens the balcony door—JD has told her that the balcony is solid enough for now, but he’ll reinforce it later—and steps into the brilliant green morning. Dew glitters on the leaves, and light shines through the white petals of the late-season daffodils that have come up on their own. Sun pinks the delicate blossoms of a cherry tree growing wild in the woods. A cardinal and a bluebird perch on the railing. A hummingbird flies past, buzzing so loudly she mistakes it for a giant bee. A blue jay roosts on a branch, looking at her for so long that she wonders if she’s still dreaming, until its flies away, and she knows she is home.
She goes downstairs and makes a cup of ginger tea with the electric teapot she’s brought from the city. It feels good to have life simplified, pared down to what she needs. She eats a slice of bread with butter—not the fancy imported butter Ben insists on, but perfectly good, normal butter.
Then she goes and sits in the theater. They’ve asked JD to tell his guys to clean it up, get rid of the dust and scraps, but otherwise leave it alone until they decide what to do. She sits in the third row of folding chairs, expectant and excited, as if she’s waiting for a play to begin. She tries to imagine the place full of people who played on Broadway until they ran into… problems.
The only time Emma ever acted was in her high school Christmas pageant. She’d played the angel Gabriel. All she’d had to do was raise her arm over the girl playing Mary and say, “Fear not, the Lord is with you.” Everyone wanted to play Mary. They chose the blondest, prettiest girl. No one wanted to play Gabriel, especially after someone said that the angel was actually a boy.
Fear not. Fear not.
Emma isn’t afraid.
She thinks about the three hermits. Had they come into the theater? Signs of their presence are rarer than remnants of the clinic. Or maybe JD has already tossed things he knows she’d rather not see. He’s thoughtful of her that way.
Emma goes upstairs and makes her bed. She’d like a nap but resists the impulse.
Outside, she finds JD tearing down the rotten back steps so he can replace them with new ones. He’s shirtless and it’s hard not to look at the muscles shifting under his bare, tanned back. What a cliché. She and Ben joke about it. But the jokes make her so uncomfortable, you’d think she was sleeping with the contractor.
Does she have a crush on JD? She’s shy around him in a way that reminds her of how she’d felt around boys she’d liked in high school. No, junior high.
She just likes to be around him. He has a distinctive smell. Like wood chips and fresh sawdust and soap and something piney. She loves being near enough to him to inhale it, at the end of the week, when he gives her the invoices he saves in a blood-colored manila folder. She likes standing side by side, as if they’re working together—which they are, though he’s doing all the labor and all she’s doing is making small decisions and writing checks.
But that’s not all. At first, she spends a lot of time wandering from room to room, trying to get a feel for each space. What could it be like? What color should it be? She makes lists of things she wants Ben to bring up from the city. Her copy of The Joy of Cooking. She imagines baking projects, berry cobblers and cinnamon coffee cakes. She orders books about famous gardens that might inspire her to think about the land around the house, most of which is overgrown except the circular driveway and a large, ragged circle in back that one of JD’s workers mowed. She orders two art books of watercolors, one by Sargent, the other by Ensor. There’s something in them she needs to see.
So far one of her favorite things is to go through the closets of dishes that did in fact come with the house. The bank certainly didn’t want them.
Standard hotel china, Fiestaware platters, gold-rimmed teacups and saucers, dessert plates encircled with thick, embossed flowers. She washes each piece lovingly and tries to find it a place that, she knows, will change when JD builds new cabinets.
She searches for the most beautiful dishes online and feels a little shock when she finds them. Sometimes, a little guiltily, she checks how much they cost. Some pieces are quite valuable, but she would never part with them. It would be like losing a childhood toy, or one of the ticket stubs—she still has them in a drawer in the city—from a play or film she went to, early on, with Ben.
ONE WARM AFTERNOON she’s reading on the porch when she looks up and sees JD—shirtless, of course. All she can manage to say is, “Don’t you worry about ticks?” How prudish and no fun!
“Ticks don’t like me, or they would have got me by now. It’s weird how bugs like some people and not others. I had a girlfriend, we used to go into the woods, and she’d come back covered head to toe with bug bites, and I wouldn’t have one. Not one. She used to be pretend-angry about it. But I think she really was angry. I mean, she wasn’t the sanest person in the world—”
Emma feels a little spike of jealousy. She doesn’t want to think about whatever JD and his crazy girlfriend did in the woods.
“That’s kind of unscientific,” she says.
JD puts down his crowbar and looks at her. His shrug isn’t dismissive. It’s just a shrug.
“It’s worked for me so far.”
“Knock on wood,” says Emma.
JD says, “Speaking of which, a lumber delivery’s coming today.”
“Fine. Let me know how much.… Listen… Is it safe to cook on the stove?” So far she’s been living on fruits, raw vegetables, food she’s brought from the city.
“Sure,” says JD. “It’s all hooked up. Go right ahead. That stove is awesome. Every time I look at it, I see some Norman Rockwell mom baking apple pies.”
“That’s the idea,” Emma says.
“Cook yourself something delicious,” JD says.
Emma takes a deep breath. “Hey, can I ask a favor? Can I borrow a mask and gloves?”
A few days before, she’d seen the workers using masks and gloves when they stripped paint off the staircase to reveal the burnished oak beneath. When the oak began to appear, JD called her to see. Amazing! Then he suggested she go for a ride, in case the fumes rose to the bedroom. She’d been reading a depressing novel about the end of the world. So, yes. Sure. She went to the supermarket. JD left all the windows open. The boys will wait to finish the job till the next time she goes into the city.
“Sure, why?”
“I’ve been wanting to go up to the attic. Poke around.”
“It’s filthy up there.”
“That’s why I want the mask and gloves.”
“Just don’t trip on anything. That attic is a dumpster fire. We should have thrown all that stuff out by now.”
Emma likes it that JD says we. Is she included, or does he just mean himself and his helpers? She reminds herself: It’s her house. Her decision.
“Hold off on that, okay? I want to see what’s there. I’ll be careful.” Emma’s touched that he’s worried about her. Well, sure. How would it look if his client got hurt on his watch?
There’s something she wants to ask him, but she can’t remember. She’s always forgetting things lately. She puts a pen or coffee cup down, then spends twenty minutes looking for it. At rehearsals she’s gone to with Ben, when actors forget their lines, they just say “Line” and the script person gives them the line. She wants someone like that in her life.
A FEW NIGHTS later, she wakes from a deep sleep and knows she’s not alone. Something or someone is in her room. She can’t see it, but she feels a presence. It’s breathing, thrumming in the air. A bird. Please let it be a bird.
Terror pulses behind her eyeballs. She turns on the light.
Something is flying around the ceiling, bashing into the windows and walls. It’s gigantic. An eagle, a hawk…
A bat. There’s a bat in her room. She grabs her phone and runs into the hall and slams the door behind her.
It’s 10 p.m. Not all that late. She fell asleep early. She needs to call someone. Ben can’t help her, but if she could talk to him, it might calm her down. She dials his number. It goes straight to voicemail. He doesn’t pick up. He said he always keeps his phone on. And until now he has. How could anyone not answer a call from his pregnant wife, alone at night in the country? Has he forgotten about her? Likely he’s gone to bed early, too. He often turns off his phone at night. She’ll have to remind him.
Maybe she should go downstairs, but the couch hasn’t been delivered yet, and there’s nowhere to sleep. The floor is hard and dusty. Ouch.
Then she remembers JD saying to call anytime, day or night, if she’s worried or anything goes wrong or there’s any kind of trouble. That’s what’s happening now. He can always not answer, or tell her to tough it out, he’ll be there in the morning. Through the door, she can hear the bat, bashing into the walls. She wants to be in her bed. She wants the bat out of her house.
She’s about to call JD when she remembers something that happened a while ago ago.
She’d been sitting on the porch when JD came tearing out of the house. He was pale and sweating, his hair stuck to his forehead.
Emma’s first thought was that one of the helpers, the kids, had been injured. Oh, please, no. She’d feel responsible, and Ben would blame her for hiring JD, even though it was just as much his idea as hers. Just let everybody be all right, and she’d deal with whatever she needed to.
“What’s wrong?”
JD hadn’t noticed her. He looked more embarrassed than troubled.
“Nothing for you to worry about. One of the kids found a dead mouse in the wall. And I’ve got a thing about mice in the walls. I don’t know. The smell…”
“It’s awful,” agreed Emma. One of the cheap apartments she’d lived in, before Ben, had a serious mouse problem.
“We have all the windows open and the air blowing through so you probably won’t notice it. It’s just a thing I have. Maybe from my childhood, I don’t remember. I need a second to get past it, then I’ll go back to work.”
“Take your time,” said Emma, but JD was already gone, leaving her thinking that it was sort of attractive, this sign of weakness in the big, strong contractor. A dead mouse!
Now the memory keeps her from calling JD to help her get rid of the bat. If a dead mouse freaked him out, how will he deal with a bat? Except that the bat is very much alive.
She calls JD.
The phone rings a half dozen times. He sounds groggy, and it seems to take him a moment to remember who she is.
“Wait a second,” he says. She hears footsteps. Is he taking the phone into another room? Is someone there? The girlfriend who got all those bug bites in the woods? Why should Emma care?
She apologizes for bothering him, for calling so late, for—
“What’s wrong?” He knows she wouldn’t be calling at this hour unless it was important. He probably hopes it isn’t something he’s done, a short in the wiring, a blown fuse, a plumbing leak…
“There’s a bat in my room.”
“A bat?”
“A bat. I don’t know what to do. I’m terrified. I…”
“Don’t move. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
Emma checks her watch. He’s there in ten. He must have been speeding. Emma feels like bursting into tears when she hears his truck pull up in front of the house.
Only when he walks in and finds her huddled on the floor near the door does she realize that she’s wearing her thinnest nightgown. She’s practically naked. He looks her up and down, not lecherous or creepy, just looking. His eyes pause on her rounded belly, then shift back to her face.
She wishes he wasn’t looking at her. She’s glad that he is.
There’s a bat in her room. That’s why he’s there. He hasn’t come to look at her or make her feel something that feels uncomfortably like desire.
“Relax,” he says. “Don’t you hate it when someone orders you to relax? I know a bat swooping around your head is maybe not the most calming thing in the world. Just stay here. I’ll be right back.”
He goes upstairs. Emma waits. She hears him walking around, then nothing…
A short time later he comes downstairs.
“All clear. The coast is clear.”
“Did you kill it?”
“I opened all the windows and he flew out. He didn’t want to be there any more than we wanted him there.”
“God, I can’t thank you enough. Thank you, thank you—”
“One thank-you is enough.” JD smiles his slow, irresistible, ever-so-slightly practiced smile and puts a brotherly arm around her shoulders—or maybe it would feel more brotherly if her arms weren’t bare. “See you in the morning, bright and early. Try and get some sleep, okay?”
“Okay,” Emma says.