THE HOUSE WAS BRICK, PAINTED WHITE. THERE WAS SOMETHING alluring about that red so transformed. The house looked old but new. It looked solid but light. Perhaps that was a fundamentally American desire, or just a modern urge, to want a house, a car, a book, a pair of shoes, to embody these contradictions.
Amanda had found the place on Airbnb. “The Ultimate Escape,” the ad proclaimed. She respected the chummy advertising-speak of the description. Step into our beautiful house and leave the world behind. She’d handed the laptop, hot enough to incubate tumors in her abdomen, over to Clay. He nodded, said something noncommittal.
But Amanda had insisted upon this vacation. The promotion came with a raise. So soon, Rose would vanish into high school disdain. For this fleeting moment, the children were still mostly children, even if Archie approached six feet tall. Amanda could if not conjure at least remember Archie’s high girlish voice, the chunk of Rose against her hip. An old saw, but on your deathbed would you remember the night you took the clients to that old steakhouse on Thirty-Sixth Street and asked after their wives, or bobbing about in the pool with your kids, dark lashes beaded with chlorinated water?
“This looks nice.” Clay switched off the car. The kids released seat belts and pushed open doors and leaped onto the gravel, eager as Stasi.
“Don’t go far,” Amanda said, though this was nonsense. There was nowhere to go. Maybe the woods. She did worry about Lyme disease. This was just her maternal practice, to interject with authority. The children had long since ceased hearing her daily plaints.
The gravel made its gravelly sound under Clay’s leather driving shoes. “How do we get in?”
“There’s a lockbox.” Amanda consulted her phone. There was no service. They weren’t even on a road. She held the thing over her head, but the little bars refused to fill. She had saved this information. “The lockbox . . . on the fence by the pool heater. Code six two nine two. The key inside opens the side door.”
The house was obscured by a sculpted hedgerow, someone’s pride, like a snowbank, like a wall. The front yard was bound by a picket fence, white, not a trace of irony in it. There was another fence, this one wood and wire, around the pool, which made the insurance more affordable, and also the home’s owners knew that sometimes deer strayed into attractive nuisances, and if you were away for a couple of weeks, the stupid thing would drown, swell, explode, a horrifying mess. Clay fetched the key. Amanda stood in the astonishing, humid afternoon, listening to that strange sound of almost quiet that she missed, or claimed she missed, because they lived in the city. You could hear the thrum of some insect or frog or maybe it was both, the wind tossing about the leaves, the sense of a plane or a lawn mower or maybe it was traffic on a highway somewhere distant that reached you just as the persistent beat of the ocean did when you were near the ocean. They were not near the ocean. No, they could not afford to be, but they could almost hear it, an act of will, of recompense.
“Here we are.” Clay unlocked the door, needlessly narrating. He did that sometimes, and caught himself doing it, chastened. The house had that hush expensive houses do. Silence meant the house was plumb, solid, its organs working in happy harmony. The respiration of the central air-conditioning, the vigilance of the expensive fridge, the reliable intelligence of all those digital displays marking the time in almost-synchronicity. At a preprogrammed hour, the exterior lights would turn on. A house that barely needed people. The floors were wide-plank wood harvested from an old cotton mill in Utica, so flush there was nary a creak or complaint. The windows so clean that every month or so some common bird miscalculated, and perished broken-necked in the grass. Some efficient hands had been here, rolled up the blinds, turned down the thermostat, Windexed every surface, run the Dyson into the crevices of the sofa, picking up bits of organic blue corn tortilla chips and the errant dime. “This is nice.”
Amanda took off her shoes at the door; she felt strongly about taking your shoes off at the door. “This is beautiful.” The photographs on the website were a promise, and it was fulfilled: the pendant lamps hovering over the oak table, in case you wanted to do a jigsaw puzzle at night, the gray marble kitchen island where you could imagine kneading dough, the double sink beneath the window overlooking the pool, the stove with its copper faucet so you could fill up your pot without having to move it. The people who owned this house were rich enough to be thoughtful. She’d stand at that sink and soap up the dishes, while Clay stood just outside grilling, drinking a beer, a watchful eye on the children playing Marco Polo in the pool.
“I’ll get the things.” The subtext was clear; Clay was going to smoke a cigarette, a vice that was meant to be a secret but was not.
Amanda wandered through the place. There was a great room with a television, French doors out to the deck. There were two smallish bedrooms, color schemes of aqua and navy, Jack and Jill bath between them. There was a closet with beach towels and a stacked washer and dryer, there was a long hallway to the master bedroom, lined with inoffensive black-and-white beach scenes. Leaving aside tasteful, everything was thoughtful: a wooden box to hide the plastic bottle of laundry soap, a huge seashell cradling a cake of soap, still in its paper wrapper. The master bed was king-size, so massive it never would have rounded the stairwell to get into their third-floor apartment. The en suite bath was all white (tile, sink, towels, soap, a white dish of white seashells), that particular fantasy of purity to escape the reality of your own excrement. Extraordinary, and only $340 a day plus the cleaning fee and refundable security deposit. From the bedroom Amanda could see her children, already wiggled into their quick-drying Lycra, hurtling toward the placid blue. Archie, long limbs and acute angles, barely convex chest sprouting brown twists at the pink nipples; Rose, curvy and jiggling, downy with baby hair, her polka-dot one-piece straining just so at the legs, pudendum in relief. An anticipatory scream, then they met the water with that delicious clack. In the woods beyond, something started at the sound, fluttered up into view from the general brown of the scene: two fat turkeys, dumb and wild and annoyed at the intrusion. Amanda smiled.