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The house loomed ahead of them, a grand estate more than a hundred years old that Charles’s great-grandfather had passed on to Sylvie. It was made entirely of stone with a low wall around it, a little balcony on the upper floor surrounded by a wrought-iron terrace, and a six-car detached garage across the driveway. The house had several chimneys for the four fireplaces inside, three gables that demarcated the separate wings, and a brass weather vane in the shape of a rooster at the very highest point. There were three patios, a sunroom, and a pool out back, and the whole thing was surrounded by thick, shapely pines and an elegant garden. Whenever Joanna beheld the estate, she got reverent chills; she always felt like she needed to be on her best behavior here. It was like what her mother used to say to her when they went to Mass at the drafty, icon-filled, stained-glass Catholic Church in Lionville, Pennsylvania, where she’d grown up: Don’t make any noise. Don’t touch anything. God’s looking at you.
Sylvie was already waiting for them on the large brick side porch, her hands clasped at her waist, a brave smile on her face. As always, she was impeccably dressed in an ironed lavender skirt and a perfectly tucked-in eyelet blouse. She even wore heels, lavender, to match the skirt, and pearls looped twice around her throat. She always dressed this way—to go to the grocery store, to go for a walk. The ring Charles’s father had given her a few months before he died glimmered under the porch light.
“I made banana bread, Charlie,” she said after everyone hugged. “Your favorite. ”
They entered the house through the kitchen. Dim, golden light filtered through the stained-glass window, dappling the white wooden cabinets, the ancient, rounded Sub-Zero refrigerator, and the stout, space-age MasterChef stove. The smell of banana bread drifted comfortingly through the air. Sylvie had put on an old classical record, presumably plucked from the collection that belonged to her grandfather.
“Sit, sit,” Sylvie urged, gesturing toward the kitchen table. A bunch of vacation property brochures were spread out on the surface. As Joanna and Charles sat down, a very different sort of song thumped through the walls to their left. Joanna cocked her head, listening to the thumping beat, the muddy bass, the muffled shouting. Scott’s suite shared a wall with the kitchen. She tried to meet Charles’s eye.
“So listen—we’re so behind!” Sylvie said, fluttering from the oven to the cupboards to the sink and then repeating the cycle all over again, though bringing nothing to the table. “We haven’t picked out a vacation house for this summer! But I think I found a good one. It’s on the water in Cape May. July seventh to the twenty-first. ”
She plucked a magazine from the pile on the table and leafed to a marked page. “Here. It has seven bedrooms, which seems like a lot, but you know those houses—they’re all huge. Really, I wonder if we should just buy a place instead of rent. Then we could decorate it the way we want. ”
Charles shifted in his seat. Joanna wondered if he was thinking what she was thinking: planning a vacation in the middle of a scandal seemed inappropriate. Only, was that what was going on? A scandal?
“And it’s brand new,” Sylvie went on, pointing at the tiny pictures of the house’s interior: a country kitchen with white bead board on the walls, a master bedroom with lavender striped curtains, and a shed filled with beach balls, bicycles, plastic kayaks, and kites. “It won’t have that smell; you know that old beach smell? Even the nicest houses get it sometimes. ” She flipped through the catalog to another page. “Though this one’s nice, too; it’s closer to town. It’s hard to decide. ” She looked up at Charles, her face softening as if a thought had just struck her. “Honey, don’t feel like you have to come for the whole time. I know you have to work. But at least for a week, right? And then for the weekends?”
The volume on the other side of the wall rose higher. Joanna glanced at Charles again, but his eyes were stubbornly fixed on the rental magazine.
“And we’ll need so many supplies,” Sylvie added. She grabbed a Land’s End catalog from the bottom of the pile. “I’ve marked lots of things. ” She turned to a page that displayed flashlights, travel mugs, a fondue pot. “We could make s’mores on the beach,” she crowed gaily. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”
“Huh,” Charles murmured vaguely.
Sylvie folded her hands over the magazine. “How is work, by the way?”
Charles shrugged. “You know, busy. ”
“Dealing with any interesting clients?”
There was an abrupt, fuzzy thud next door, and then a faster-paced song. Joanna flinched, but she didn’t bother glancing at Charles again. He was obviously ignoring it, and her.
“Not really,” Charles spoke over the noise. “Same ones. ”
“And Joanna?” Sylvie turned politely to face her daughter-in-law. “How’s the new house coming along?”
Joanna smiled. “Good. Lots of boxes to unpack still, though. ”
“Have you met any of your neighbors?”
She looked down. “Uh, no one yet. But I’m sure we will soon. ”
Sylvie nodded. Joanna could tell she was searching for something more specific she could ask her about—a hobby, maybe—but was coming up with nothing. “Excellent,” she finally said. And then, “Goodness. The bread. ”
She scampered to the oven, slid on two mitts, and pulled the banana bread pan from the tray. Steam curled around her face, fogging her small, wire-framed glasses. She carried the pan over to the table, removed one of her oven mitts with her teeth, and set it on the table below the bread pan. The knife slid easily against the sides of the pan, and more steam gushed out. She pushed the pan over to Charles who cut himself a thick slice and put it on his plate. He used the side of his fork to cut off a bite.
Joanna waited and waited. Just as he was about to put the bite in his mouth, she touched his arm and said in a voice far whinier than she intended, “Charles?”
He looked up; she nudged her chin toward the pan. He lowered his fork. “Oh. Sorry. ”
He began cutting her a piece, but she changed her mind and waved him away. “I’ll be back,” she muttered, standing.
“Joanna,” Charles protested. “I didn’t know you wanted any. You don’t usually eat dessert. ”
“It’s fine,” she said loudly, backing out of the room. “I just … the bathroom. ” She rounded the corner into the hall.
It was probably silly to feel slighted over banana bread. More than that, Joanna just felt too weird sitting there, looking at vacation houses, chatting about work, ignoring the obvious, especially with Scott fiddling with the stereo one wall away. Nothing seemed to ever get to the Bates-McAllisters, though. Joanna certainly hadn’t been raised like this. If Scott was her brother and her parents were faced with such a scandal—and if her parents were still together—they would confront the problem head-on. Her mother would be a hurricane of panic, making sweeping what-will-the-neighbors-think-of-us statements. Her father would be smacking his fist into an open palm, declaring he’d never wanted to live in such an arrogant, stick-up-your-ass part of Pennsylvania in the first place. He was from the western part of the state, where what one drove and where one shopped and the way one pronounced certain vowels didn’t matter nearly as much. His anger would just incite her mother’s panic—If only you would’ve tried harder to fit in, Craig, this may not have happened, she might say—and that, in turn, would stoke his fury, and they’d circle each other like two worked-up dogs, their bad energies becoming so toxic that a massive fight was inevitable.
Joanna walked down Roderick’s grand hall, which was lined on both sides by heavy, gold-framed oil paintings of foxhunts on scenic vistas, Scottish moors, and generals on horseback. Charles had first brought her here to meet his family two Julys ago, and though she’d been building up the Bates-McAllisters and their estate in her mind long before she and Charles met—though Charles didn’t know anything about that—the house had lived up to every one of her expectations. Sylvie’s meticulously tended garden had
been abloom, the tiki lamps by the pool cast soft shadows across the slate patio, and there was a full moon over the roof, so perfectly centered that it was as though Sylvie and James had commissioned it to hang there for them alone.
She’d been blind to the house’s imperfections for a long time. She didn’t notice the wet wood smell. She didn’t see the chips in the leaded glass, the stains on the intricate woodwork, or the large brown patch on the ceiling from a previous leak. It didn’t occur to her that the Chippendale highboy chest of drawers was water-warped, or that the oil paintings needed a professional cleaning and that the chandeliers were missing several of their crystals. So what if one of the rooms was filled with nothing but piles of papers, old, cloth-wrapped paintings and a piano with chipped, yellowed ivory keys? So what if the library had a mouse hole the size of Joanna’s fist? So what if the oil painting of Charles Roderick Bates, Charles’s great-grandfather, which hung over the stairs, freaked Joanna out every time she passed by it? All old aristocratic homes had charming idiosyncrasies. And this was Roderick.
But lately, something had changed, and she’d begun to see the house as, well . . . old. Unkempt, even. The rooms were always too cold, especially the bathrooms. The cushions on the living room couch were uncomfortable, a sharp spring managed to press into her butt no matter which position she tried. Some of the unused rooms smelled overwhelmingly like mothballs, others like sour milk, and there were visible gaps amid many of the bathroom floor tiles, desperate for grout. The most unsettling thing, though, was that when Joanna walked into certain rooms, it was as if someone—or something—was following her. The house and everything in it seemed human, if she really got down to it. And not like a sprightly young girl, either, but a crotchety, elderly man. The pipes rattled like creaky bones and joints. When she sat down in a chair, any chair, there was an abrupt huffing sound, like someone collapsing from a long day’s work. The radiators wheezed, coughed, and even spat out strange hints of smells that seemed to be coming from the house’s human core. A whisper of soapy jasmine seeped from its plaster skin. An odor of ham and cloves belched out of an esophageal vent.
She stepped down the hall now, gazing at the black-and-white photographs that lined the walls. Sylvie had taken the pictures during a trip to the beach when the children were young. In some of them, Charles and Scott, probably about eight and six, were flying a kite. Charles had an intense look of concentration as he held the kite’s string, as if a judging committee was watching, while Scott looked disdainfully off toward the waves. In the pictures of them in the ocean, Scott ran happily toward the waves, his arms and legs outstretched like a starfish. It was startling to see a photo of Scott so young and carefree, enjoying life. James skipped out to the ocean, too, equally exuberant, but Charles hung back, his expression timid and penitent. The last photo in the row was a close-up of the three of them. Scott and their father were soaked, but Charles’s hair was still neatly combed, bonedry. Two genuine smiles, the third seemed forced.