No one comes to the door when Molly rings the buzzer. The house is quiet. She looks at her phone: 9:45 A.M. It’s a teacher enrichment day and there’s no school, so she figured, why not knock out some hours?
Molly rubs her arms and tries to decide what to do. It’s an unseasonably cool and misty morning, and she forgot to bring a sweater. She took the Island Explorer, the free bus that makes a continuous loop of the island, and got off at the closest stop to Vivian’s, about a ten-minute walk. If no one’s home, she’ll have to go back to the stop and wait for the next bus, which could take a while. But despite the goose bumps, Molly has always liked days like this. The stark gray sky and bare tree limbs feel more suited to her than the uncomplicated promise of sunny spring days.
In the little notebook she carries around, Molly has carefully recorded her time: four hours one day, two the next. Twenty-three so far. She made an Excel spreadsheet on her laptop that lays it all out. Jack would laugh if he knew, but she’s been in the system long enough to understand that it all comes down to documentation. Get your papers in order, with the right signatures and record keeping, and the charges will be dropped, money released, whatever. If you’re disorganized, you risk losing everything.
Molly figures she can kill at least five hours today. That’ll be twenty-eight, and she’ll be more than half finished.
She rings the bell again, cups her hands against the glass to peer into the dim hallway. Trying the doorknob, she finds that it turns and the door opens.
“Hello?” she says as she steps inside, and, when she gets no response, tries again, a bit louder, as she walks down the hall.
Yesterday, before she left, Molly told Vivian that she’d be coming early today, but she hadn’t given a time. Now, standing in the living room with the shades drawn, she wonders if she should leave. The old house is full of noises. Its pine floors creak, windowpanes rattle, flies buzz near the ceiling, curtains flap. Without the distraction of human voices, Molly imagines she can hear sounds in other rooms: bedsprings groaning, faucets dripping, fluorescent lights humming, pull chains rattling.
She takes a moment to look around—at the ornate mantelpiece above the fireplace, the decorated oak moldings and brass chandelier. Out of the four large windows facing the water she can see the sine curve of the coastline, the serrated firs in the distance, the glittery amethyst sea. The room smells of old books and last night’s fire and, faintly, something savory from the kitchen—it’s Friday; Terry must be cooking for the weekend.
Molly is gazing at the old hardcovers on the tall bookshelves when the door to the kitchen opens and Terry bustles in.
Molly turns. “Hi there.”
“Ack!” Terry shrieks, clutching the rag she’s holding to her chest. “You scared the hell out of me! What are you doing here?”
“Umm, well,” Molly stammers, beginning to wonder the same thing, “I rang the buzzer a few times and then I just let myself in.”
“Vivian knew you were coming?”
Did she? “I’m not sure that we settled on an exact—”
Terry narrows her eyes and frowns. “You can’t just show up when you feel like it. She’s not available any old time.”
“I know,” Molly says, her face warming. “I’m sorry.”
“Vivian would never have agreed to start this early. She has a routine. Gets up at eight or nine, comes downstairs at ten.”
“I thought old people got up early,” Molly mumbles.
“Not all old people.” Terry puts her hands on her hips. “But that’s not the point. You broke in.”
“Well, I didn’t—”
Sighing, Terry says, “Jack may have told you I wasn’t crazy about this idea. About you doing your hours this way.”
Molly nods. Here comes the lecture.
“He went out on a limb for you, don’t ask me why.”
“I know, and I appreciate it.” Molly is aware that it’s when she’s defensive that she gets in trouble. But she can’t resist saying, “And I hope I’m proving worthy of that trust.”
“Not by showing up unannounced like this, you’re not.”
All right, she deserved that. What was it the teacher in her Legal Issues class said the other day? Never bring up a point you don’t have an answer for.
“And another thing,” Terry continues. “I was in the attic this morning. I can’t tell what you’re doing up there.”
Molly bounces on the balls of her feet, pissed that she’s being called out for this thing she can’t control and even more pissed at herself for not convincing Vivian to get rid of things. Of course it looks to Terry like Molly is just twiddling her thumbs, letting the time slide like a government worker punching a clock.
“Vivian doesn’t want to get rid of anything,” she says. “I’m cleaning out the boxes and labeling them.”
“Let me give you some advice,” Terry says. “Vivian is torn between her heart”—and here she again holds the wadded-up rag to her heart—“and her head.” As if Molly might not make the connection, she moves the rag to her head. “Letting go of her stuff is like saying good-bye to her life. And that’s tough for anybody to do. So your job is to make her. Because I promise you this: I will not be happy if you spend fifty hours up there shuffling things around with nothing to show for it. I love Jack, but . . .” She shakes her head. “Honestly, enough is enough.” At this point Terry seems to be talking to herself, or possibly to Jack, and there’s little Molly can do but bite her lip and nod to show she gets it.
After Terry grudgingly allows that it might actually be a good idea to get going earlier today, and that if Vivian doesn’t show up in half an hour maybe she’ll go up and rouse her, she tells Molly to make herself at home; she has work to do. “You’ve got something to occupy yourself with, right?” she says before heading back to the kitchen.
The book Vivian gave Molly is in her backpack. She hasn’t bothered to crack it yet, mainly because it seems like homework for a job that’s already punishment, but also because she’s rereading Jane Eyre for English class (ironically, the teacher, Mrs. Tate, handed out school-issued copies the week after Molly tried to pilfer it) and that book is huge. It’s always a shock to the system to reenter it; just to read a chapter she finds she has to slow down her breathing and go into a trance, like a hibernating bear. All her classmates are complaining about it—Brontë’s protracted digressions about human nature, the subplots about Jane’s friends at Lowood School, the long-winded, “unrealistic” dialogue. “Why can’t she just tell the freaking story?” Tyler Baldwin grumbled in class. “I fall asleep every time I start to read it. What’s that called, narcolopsy?”
This complaint evinced a chorus of agreement, but Molly was silent. And Mrs. Tate—on alert, no doubt, for the slightest spark in the damp woodpile of her class—noticed.
“So what do you think, Molly?”
Molly shrugged, not wanting to appear overeager. “I like the book.”
“What do you like about it?”
“I don’t know. I just like it.”
“What’s your favorite part?”
Feeling the eyes of the class on her, Molly shrank a little in her chair. “I don’t know.”
“It’s just a boring romance novel,” Tyler said.
“No, it isn’t,” she blurted.
“Why not?” Mrs. Tate pressed.
“Because . . .” She thought for a moment. “Jane’s kind of an outlaw. She’s passionate and determined and says exactly what she thinks.”
“Where do you get that? Because I’m definitely not feeling it,” Tyler said.
“Okay, well—like this line,” Molly said. Riffling through the book, she found the scene she was thinking of. “‘I assured him I was naturally hard—very flinty, and that he would often find me so; and that, moreover, I was determined to show him divers rugged points in my character . . . he should know fully what sort of a bargain he had made, while there was yet time to rescind it.’”
Mrs. Tate raised her eyebrows and smiled. “Sounds like someone I know.”
Now, sitting alone in a red wingback chair, waiting for Vivian to come down, Molly takes out Anne of Green Gables.
She opens to the first page:
Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place . . .
It’s clearly a book intended for young girls, and at first Molly isn’t sure she can relate. But as she reads she finds herself caught up in the story. The sun moves higher in the sky; she has to tilt the book out of the glare and then, after several minutes, switch to the other wingback so she doesn’t have to squint.
After an hour or so, she hears the door to the hall open, and she looks up. Vivian comes into the room, glances around, focuses on Molly, and smiles, seemingly unsurprised to see her.
“Bright and early!” she says. “I like your enthusiasm. Maybe I’ll let you empty out a box today. Or two, if you’re lucky.”