They looked at properties in Connecticut and Massachusetts but ultimately narrowed their search to Vermont and New Hampshire. None of the houses they looked at was quite right. Helen loved the old colonials and farmhouses, but houses that were one-hundred-plus years old needed a great deal of work: they saw crumbling foundations, dirt-floored basements, old knob-and-tube wiring, leakingpipes, rotting beams, sagging roofs. Helen was enamored with the idea of finding an old house, a house with history, and bringing it back to life. Her favorite house was one of the first they’d seen: an old saltbox in a tiny village outside of Keene, New Hampshire. There were hand-hewn exposed beams in almost every room and wide-plank pine floors. She stood at the deep soapstone kitchen sink and looked out at the front yard, feeling at home immediately. But Nate—now armed with weeks of research—pointed out the dry rot, the ancient wiring that was a house fire waiting to happen, the damage to the old slate roof.
“We could save it,” she said hopefully.
He shook his head. She could tell he was doing all the mental calculations. “I don’t think there’s enough money for that. This poor house needs to be taken apart and rebuilt from the ground up.” Helooked around helplessly. “We should just build our own place,” he muttered.
Though it was Nate who came up with the idea, it took several more weekends of viewing a dozen more broken-down houses (a few of which delighted Helen, but he’d pronounced not worth saving) before the idea took root.
They were having dinner in a motel room—pizza, ordered in—after another long day of driving around the back roads of Vermont. “Maybe we should consider it,” Nate said. “A new home, built from the ground up. That way we can get exactly what we want.”
“But a new house just seems so cold, so sterile,” Helen argued. She thought of her Little House on the Prairie books. She thought of her father, of the countless old houses he’d worked on—of the way he’d study a house and make a comment about its good bones or its character. He spoke of old houses like they were people.
“It doesn’t have to be,” Nate said. “It can be whatever we makeit.”
“But there’s no sense of history,” Helen said.
“We can base it on an old colonial design if that’s what you want,”Nate said. “Think about it—we get the best of both worlds! We can take something classic and make it our own. Energy efficient, eco-friendly, passive solar, whatever we want.”
Helen smiled. “Have you been down a Google rabbit hole again?”
He laughed. Clearly the answer was yes. But Nate’s question was still in the air and he looked at her, waiting for a response.
“I don’t know,” Helen admitted. “That’s so much more money.”
“Not necessarily,” he countered. “Not once you factor in the true cost of renovating an old place like the ones we’ve been looking at. In fact, we might even end up saving money, especially when you look at it long term if we build it to be superefficient.”
The more Nate talked, the more excited he got, the idea snowballing as he went along. They would do the work themselves—they were already discussing theoretical renovations to so many of the homes they’d viewed. Why not take it a few steps further? “Oh my god, why didn’t we think of this before? We haven’t found anything even close to our dream house because it doesn’t exist yet—we have to build it! We’ll be like Thoreau on Walden Pond!”
She shook her head, gave adon’t be ridiculouslaugh. She’d studied Thoreau in college, even took a field trip out to Walden Pond. “Thoreau built a tiny cabin big enough for a desk and a bed. We’re talking about a two-thousand-square-foot house with all the modern conveniences. Do you have any idea how much work that is?”
“I’m not saying it’ll be easy,” Nate said. And then he threw the gauntlet down: “But don’t you think this is what your father would want?”
“I don’t—” She faltered. She remembered helping her father with the finish work on a house he’d built the summer before she went away to college. “This house,” her dad had said, “it’s gonna be here a long, long time. You can drive by with your kids, your grandkids, and tell them you helped build it. This house, this thing we built, it’ll outlive us both.”
“I think it’s perfect!” Nate said. “Trust me! It’s going to be perfect.”
It was hard, really, not to get swept up in Nate’s enthusiasm. Not to believe him when he had a solution to a problem. He was the rational one, the critical thinker, and she’d come to trust him on all practical matters. He’d known (after hours of research) which car they should buy, the best plan for paying off the last of their student loans, even which gym they should join.
She loved him for many reasons, but mostly because of the way he balanced her out, grounded her, took her most ethereal ideas and found a way to give them form. If he said building a house made more sense than buying one, then he was probably right. And if he said there was a way to do it and give Helen the sense of history she longed for, then she had to believe him.
Helen reached over the pizza box, picked up one of the glossy New England real estate flyers, and flipped to the back, to where the land listings were. She started looking at pictures of vacant lots, doing her best to imagine her dream house standing there, she and Nate tucked safely inside.
. . .
This is where our house will go,Helen thought now as she watched the men work on the foundation. She could almost imagine the lines of it, the shadow it would cast, the roof reaching up to touch the impossibly blue sky. The clouds were so low, so vivid, she was sure that if she climbed the hill, she’d be able to reach out and touch them. It was like being in a child’s drawing of the perfect landscape: trees, sky and clouds, happy yellow sun, and, beneath it, a square box of a house with a smiling couple standing outside.
They had discovered this piece of land back in January and made an offer that day. The craziest part was it wasn’t even on their list to look at—they’d found it when they got lost looking for an old covered bridge Helen had seen signs for. They stopped at a general store for directions and there on the bulletin board was an ad for the land: forty-four acres in the small village of Hartsboro, Vermont. They called the realtor and arranged to meet him out there that afternoon. Half of the land was wooded, but the western part of the property consisted of the Breckenridge Bog. Land not useful for farming or building. Land that, local legend claimed—the realtor said this with a chuckle—was haunted. As they trudged out through a foot and a half of freshly fallen snow to look at the property, Nate chuckled with him. He said, “Do you think the seller would accept a lower offer on the basis that the land is known to be haunted?”
“I think,” the realtor said, turning serious again, “the seller is highly motivated and would consider any reasonable offer.”
They were in a large clearing with a hillside in front of them, woods to the right and left, the single-lane dirt road behind them. As they walked, it began to snow big, thick flakes that caught on Helen’s eyelashes. Their feet sank in the perfect white snow and Helen looked at the trees, blanketed in white, softly bent with the weight of it. Helen was struck by the quiet, the serenity of the landscape.
“Haunted?” Helen asked, circling back. “Really?”
The realtor nodded, then looked a little like he was sorry he’d mentioned it. “That’s what people say.” He shrugged, as if he didn’t really know the story, and he started telling them that the back of the property was bordered by a class three road that became a snowmobile trail in the winter. “You folks get yourselves a couple of snow machines and you’ll be in business,” he said. “But seriously,” he added. “What you’ve gotta understand is that even though this place is forty-four acres, only about four acres are suitable for building. The rest is just too hilly or marshy. That’s why the low price.”
Helen did not believe in ghosts. But she believed in history. “Hey, it’s not every piece of property that comes with its very own ghost,” Helen whispered to Nate. If there was a ghost story attached to this land, then that meant the land had a story to tell. Maybe she wouldn’t get her hundred-year-old house with stories to tell, but she could settle for a place with history, a mystery even.
Nate nodded, wiggled his fingers, and made a ghostlyOooosound.
