Rounding the house’s corner to the garden, she’s bombarded by the smell of fresh, cold dirt and the sight of tulips and daffodils—jonquils, she thinks, touching the one at her ear—and a magnolia tree that looks like it’s ready to explode into flower.
Near the edge of the east lawn, Mr. Vanders sits on a funny, crooked bench that looks more like it’s made for meditation than for gardening. Or maybe it’s just the slow, contemplative manner in which he’s digging. The garden and yard are covered with uneven, random holes and piles of dirt.
“Hello there,” Jane says, not wanting to interrupt, but wanting him to know he’s not alone.
He attempts to speak but instead begins sneezing.
“Bless you,” says Jane.
“Thank you,” he says, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket. “Forgive me. I’m allergic to spring. Going for a walk, are you?”
“I needed to clear my mind,” Jane says, gesturing with her book hand. “I’ve been feeling muddleheaded. So I came outside for some air. Should you be gardening if you have allergies?”
“We mustn’t neglect the gardening,” says Mr. Vanders. He sneezes again, explosively, then sighs, stretching his back.
The damp chill is doing wonders for Jane’s mental clarity. Jasper sniffs happily at the holes Mr. Vanders has made, then starts digging one of his own. Jane feels an urge to go for a jog across the yard and toss her book like a javelin.
Mr. Vanders closes his watering eyes and turns his dark face to the sun. Jane can see every fine line crisscrossing his skin and wonders if the day will come when sudden little details will stop being about Aunt Magnolia, when the lines in the face of an old person won’t make her think, Aunt Magnolia will never be that old.
She remembers, with a start, that Mr. Vanders knew Aunt Magnolia. Before she started feeling so foggy, she meant to investigate. “I haven’t managed to talk to Mrs. Vanders yet,” she says, “about my aunt.”
“Mm-hmph,” says Mr. Vanders, not opening his eyes. “Maybe after the gala. She’ll find you once it’s all over with.”
The gala, Jane remembers. The gala is tomorrow. The details of this day are trickling back. She takes one great, big breath and decides that never again will she go into the library. “Apparently something happened with a Brancusi sculpture?” she says. “Of a fish?”
Mr. Vanders opens his eyes, blows his nose. “Apparently.”
“We’re lucky Lucy St. George is visiting, since she’s an art investigator,” Jane says, with a sudden flash of the jailbird umbrella. “It’s scary, actually, isn’t it?” she says. “If someone in the house stole a piece of art?”
“Yep,” Mr. Vanders says, not sounding scared, or even particularly interested. Jane considers his messy garden. It’s unclear what he’s doing besides creating craters.
“Do you like gardening, then?”
“I wouldn’t say so,” he says, grasping his back. “My lumbar region is in agonies and I couldn’t tell a flower from a weed if my life depended on it. But I’m trying to approach it as an exercise in mindfulness.”
“Is it working?”
“Not particularly,” he says wearily.
Jane watches Jasper root happily around in his hole. Then she anchors her eyes on Tu Reviens again.
“Have you always lived here?”
“Aside from college and grad school and some travel,” says Mr. Vanders, “yes. My parents worked for the Thrashes. I grew up here, and have watched Octavian, then my own son, then Kiran and Ravi and Patrick and Ivy, grow up in this odd, wonderful house.”
Jane considers the winter garden. “Even the glass of that wall is a patchwork,” she says, indicating the panels.
“Just part of the house’s lopsided charm,” says Mr. Vanders.
“Is it? Kiran says that Charlotte thought the house was suffering from its origins.”
“Well,” says Mr. Vanders. “We all suffer from our origins in one way or another, don’t you think?”
Jane thinks of her own story. Her father had been a high school science teacher. Her mother had been near the end of her dissertation on a new meteorological explanation for why it rains frogs. She’d been invited to speak at a weekend conference on Frog-Inspired Architecture in Barcelona and Jane’s parents, in love with their eighteen-month-old baby but exhausted, had decided to make a thing of it. They’d left Jane with her mother’s younger sister, Magnolia. This had been difficult for them, and for Jane’s mother in particular, who’d just weaned Jane. She’d almost canceled the trip at the last moment; she’d almost contrived to take Jane along. But Magnolia had told them, No, go, see the churches, eat paella, get some sun, spend some time alone. The plane, hit by lightning, had lost an engine, then crashed during landing. Jane didn’t remember them; she only remembered Aunt Magnolia, who had used to cry, sometimes, when it rained frogs.
It’s hard for Jane to miss something she can’t remember. Or does some part of her miss it? Might it be buried and unseen, but something on which the whole of her life rests, like the foundations of a building?
“What about a house?” Jane says to Mr. Vanders. “Can a house suffer from its origins?”
Mr. Vanders purses his lips at the house. “I guess if this house were a person, it’d be a reasonable candidate for an identity crisis. Poor house!” Mr. Vanders cries, holding his arms out suddenly, as if he’d like to embrace the house. He intones in a hearty voice, “You are our Tu Reviens!”
“Do you think that helped the house?” Jane asks, amused.
“Well,” says Mr. Vanders, “the more we accept our lack of cohesion, the better off we are.”
“Oh?”
“Let go of the illusion of containment and control!” he says, flinging out his arms.
“Good lord,” says Jane, trying to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Vanders having conversations like this at night while sitting in bed.
“If the house is distressed by its lack of cohesion,” says Mr. Vanders, “it’s because of society’s unreasonable expectations for integration.”
“I see,” says Jane, not seeing.
“The house could also be suffering from a diagnosable psychological disorder,” he says. “Why shouldn’t a house have dissociative disorder or even a severe narcissistic disorder? In a different universe, we would call in a house psychologist and get it the help it needs. Though presumably the house, being a house, isn’t suffering at all, except from clogged gutters.”
“What did you study at school, anyway?” asks Jane.
“Oh, this and that,” says Mr. Vanders.
The French doors of the back terrace distantly open and Kiran comes out. She wades toward Jane through tallish grass, then skirts the dirt piles at the north edge of the gardens. She seems distracted, her face closed and trapped someplace far away. Jasper, meanwhile, is bounding around in his now very deep hole, licking something and making frenzied yipping noises at Jane. He seems to be trying to get her attention. Jane crouches down, tucks her book into her lap, and attempts to wipe mud from his fur with her hands.
“Hey, Mr. V,” says Kiran vaguely. “How are you?”
“Decimated by pollen,” says Mr. Vanders, appraising her with a quick glance. “How are you feeling, Kiran, sweetheart?”
“Marvelous,” Kiran says, an obvious lie. “Come play bridge,” she says to Jane.
“I don’t know how to play bridge,” Jane tells Kiran, still making dubious attempts at wiping mud from Jasper. “And my hands are dirty.”
“I’ll teach you,” Kiran says. “Come on. Phoebe needs a partner.”
Phoebe. Jane saw Phoebe in the servants’ wing last night, with Patrick and Philip and a gun. She keeps forgetting about that. Should she tell someone? What if Phoebe stole the fish sculpture?
Jasper shoots out of his hole and rolls around in the grass, barking. He pops up again, shaking himself out, surprisingl
y clean. “All right,” Jane says, wiping her hands on the damp grass. “I’ll try bridge.”
She grasps Winnie-the-Pooh carefully between her wet thumb and forefinger and pushes herself to her feet. Maybe spending some time with Phoebe will clarify things.
Glancing into Jasper’s hole as she passes it, Jane notices something long, pale, and opalescent inside. “Nice talking to you, Mr. Vanders,” she says. “By the way, Jasper seems to have unearthed an interesting long, white rock.”
Mr. Vanders’s eyebrows rise slowly to his hairline. He watches Kiran, Jane, and Jasper as they pick their way across the gardens to the house.
* * *
Kiran leads Jane to a small door in the house’s back wall, through a dark corridor, then into a space flooded with moving light. Jane’s never seen this room before. It’s the indoor swimming pool, with gold tile floors and massive glass walls, one of which is an enormous fish tank. A lime-green eel stares straight through the glass at Jane with an almost human leer stretched across its face.
“Shark tank,” says Kiran in a bored voice, then heads along the edge of the pool toward a couple of doors at the room’s far end. “One of Charlotte’s design choices.”
“Sharks?” Jane says, then barely suppresses a gasp as a gigantic bull shark swims by. Bull sharks are predators. Jane used to have nightmares of Aunt Magnolia being eaten by one. The shark reaches the end of the tank, turns, and swims back the other way. The eel is still leering at Jane like some sort of terrible, crazed clown, but the shark neither knows nor cares that Jane exists.
Jasper nudges Jane’s leg to get her moving. As she follows Kiran, she’s certain the eel has its eyes on her back. It reminds her of the woman in the photo in the receiving hall; its expression is the same. Charlotte. Jane decides she’s not going to talk, or think, about Charlotte anymore. It makes the air feel charged.
Kiran rounds the pool, chooses a door in the narrow wall at the pool’s end, and leads Jane through a small, teak-paneled changing room that glows with the quality of its varnished wood. Teak is not cheap. Jane has made only one umbrella with a teak rod. Of course, maybe the first Octavian Thrash stole the teak from a monastery in Burma, which would’ve made it quite economical.
Another door brings Jane, without warning, into the library.
* * *
At the library’s west end, Jane sits at a card table facing her partner, the mysterious Phoebe Okada. Jasper’s tucked against Jane’s feet. Kiran and Colin make up the other team and Lucy St. George has curled herself up in a nearby armchair. Jane has lost her daffodil somewhere; it’s not behind her ear.
“I can’t stay long,” she says, because she’s promised herself not to spend time in the library. The problem is that the waves of color soothe her anxieties. When she entered, the blues and greens and golds swept her gently across the room. If the room is like being underwater, surely it can’t be the wrong place for Jane to be?
Phoebe, to her surprise, is an intuitive teacher. She can anticipate Jane’s bridge questions, then answers them so that she understands, and with no particular snobbishness. “It’s an elegant game once you get into the rhythm. Good,” she says as Jane trumps the ace of spades with the three of hearts. “You’re catching on.”
At the other end of the room, a toddler bolts through a doorway suddenly, then disappears through the door to the changing room. Jane can’t see the child’s face or skin, only a mop of dark hair and fast, sturdy little legs. A middle-aged, light-skinned black man bolts after the child, slowing only to look over a shoulder and assess the occupants of the library. He catches eyes, briefly, with Phoebe Okada, exchanging a significant, mysterious expression. He’s wearing a chef’s hat and checkered pants. Then he’s gone.
“Does your cook have a child?” Jane asks Kiran.
“Come on,” Phoebe says to Jane, with some impatience. “Focus on the game.”
“What?” says Kiran. “Cook? My head hurts. Does your head hurt?”
“Your cook,” Jane says. “That’s the guy who wears checkered pants and a chef’s hat, right?”
“Cook dresses like that sometimes,” Kiran says. “Though I always get the feeling he’s doing it to be ironic.”
“Ironic?” Jane says. “What do you mean?”
“How should I know?” Kiran says, then sighs. “What does it matter? It’s like his name. His name is Cook, that’s why we call him Cook. Corcoran, actually, but he’s always gone by Cook, and I think he does, in fact, like to cook, but I don’t think he ever cooks. He’s always busy doing god-knows-what instead. Playing his damn saxophone. Caring for his parents. Cook is Mr. and Mrs. V’s son. Patrick does most of the cooking. Everyone in the world has fulfilling work but me.”
This is such a striking thing for a bored millionairess to say—especially about her own servants—that Jane is momentarily stunned into silence.
“Kiran,” says Colin gently, not taking his eyes from his cards, “you speak half a dozen languages fluently and have as keen a political mind as anyone I’ve ever known. You’ll find a job, when the time is right. Don’t rush yourself.”
There’s a particular quality to Kiran’s silence. Jane is beginning to recognize it: a kind of irritable resentment at the expectation of her gratitude. As if his niceness is oily and self-serving.
Nearby, in her armchair, Lucy St. George sighs over The House of Mirth. “I thought I remembered the plot of this book,” she says, “but I guess I don’t.”
Jane glances at Lucy uneasily. Lucy’s wrapped her hand in a bandage, which seems extreme, for a splinter. There’s a bruised look to the skin around her eyes, a fragility Jane sees in her own mirror after nights when she’s not slept well. “What do you mean?” she asks. “Is the plot different from what you remember?”
“Everyone is playing more bridge than I remember,” says Lucy. “Lily Bart is sitting in an armchair in a library, reading a book and watching her friends play bridge, endlessly, which I don’t remember. Didn’t she usually play bridge herself? Isn’t that what got her into financial trouble? And wasn’t she always having clever conversations with gentlemen?”
“I don’t remember the plot either,” Jane says. “I just remember thinking there wasn’t much mirth. Is your hand okay?”
“She’s getting awfully sleepy as her friends play bridge,” says Lucy. “It’s making me sleepy.”
Jane’s own bridge game is stalled, because Kiran is staring into space. “Charlotte chose something interesting for the ceiling of this room,” Kiran says.
“I don’t want to talk about her,” Jane says, automatically.
“Doesn’t it look like an open book?” Kiran says. “The way Charlotte designed the ceiling?”
“Don’t say her name,” says Jane. “She can hear her own name. It wakes her up.”
“What?” says Kiran. “What are you talking about, Janie? Just look at it!”
Jane cranes her neck. The ceiling has two halves, painted white, that, ever-so-slightly vaulted, meet in the middle. The effect is accentuated by what seem to be small images, like miniature ceiling frescoes, arranged in neat lines across each “page.” Jane finds it difficult to decipher the images. This difficulty contributes to the ease of imagining them as letters, or words. Yet, they’re regularly shaped, aren’t they? Not letters of the alphabet, but rows of rectangles and squares. Little windows or doors, painted on the ceiling? Little book covers?
Lucy, now dozing in her armchair, makes a loud snorting noise through her nose. It sends a shock through Jane’s body, like the sound of a gunshot would, and Jane sucks in air.
“Lucy!” she cries. “We should wake up. We should have a clever conversation.”
“Huh?” Lucy says, half-asleep. “Lily Bart is sleeping.”
“You’re not Lily Bart.” Propelled by a sudden sense of urgency—she doesn’t know where it comes from, and even Jasper is startled
by it—Jane gets up and grabs on to Lucy’s arm, hard, shaking her. “Wake up.”
“I want to know more about Charlotte and the ceiling,” Lucy says blearily.
“No,” Jane says. “We don’t want to talk any more about—”
Jane means to end with the word that. Her mouth forms the shape of the word that, then somehow the word Charlotte, awkward and full of spit, shapes itself around her intentions and pushes itself out of her mouth. “Charlotte,” Jane says. Frightened, she tries again, but again, her mouth won’t take the form she wants it to take. Her lips purse forward and her breath pushes through. “Char—” she says, struggling against it. “Char—!”
“Shark!” cries Phoebe, who holds her cards in tight hands and stares at Jane, eyes wide and frightened. “Shark,” Phoebe says again, with some triumph. “Try it. You can turn it into the word shark.”
Jane thinks of the bull shark in the fish tank. She imagines the creature pulling the word shark out of her mouth as it swims back and forth. “Charlotte,” Jane says, almost weeping with frustration.
“Shark!” says Phoebe. “Try harder!”
Jane reaches for something more powerful: the gentle whale shark Ivy carved into the edge of her worktable. Jane holds her hand up and imagines touching it.
Jane is underwater, touching the underbelly of a benevolent shark. It glides above her and moves on. Everything is quiet and slow. Jane is herself. “Shark,” she says, feeling the compulsion sink away, down into the darkness. “Shark! Oh, I’ve never been more happy to say the word shark.”
“That was strange,” says Phoebe. “Wasn’t it?”
“What’s wrong with you guys?” asks Colin, squinting at each of them in turn. “You’re being really weird. You’re making the strangest faces too. And what’s wrong with the dog?” he adds, for Jasper is tugging on Jane’s bootlaces with his teeth.
“I don’t know,” Jane says. “But I want to leave.”
“You’re all acting funny,” says Colin.