“Stacy Sousa. I’m the agent representing the seller. Welcome.” She shakes Diana’s hand, and Diana recognizes her from the photo on the for-sale sign. “Let’s go inside.” Stacy turns back to the house, talking to Diana over her shoulder. “Did you have any trouble finding the place? It’s secluded, isn’t it? Like an oasis.”
“Yes ... I mean no. I used the GPS on my phone.”
“Those apps are a godsend. What did we ever do without them?” Stacy holds open the porch door for Diana as she leads the way inside.
A generous mudroom flows into the kitchen, where a fire crackles in the stone hearth. Above the mantel hangs a large seascape of a lone boat tossed over storm-driven waves, the horizon dark and menacing.
“This is the kitchen,” Stacy announces unnecessarily, dumping her box next to a plate of sugar cookies on the rectangular table. She removes the listing brochures and sign-in sheet from her box. With a gesture, she invites Diana to the table.
Diana scribbles her name, the signature messy and difficult to read, and picks up a brochure.
Stacy glances at the sheet. “Donna, is it? Have you been looking long for a place?”
Donna it is. It’s a needless deceit, but one that steadies Diana. She stands in front of the fireplace, warming her hands and examining the seascape. The painting is sad: the moment before a terrible event happens. “My search is very recent.”
“You’re welcome to look around.” Stacy gestures to a doorway in the far corner of the room, then turns back to her brochures, spreading them out across the table. “Before I forget: The owner is home. Wasn’t feeling well. Nothing contagious, nothing you need to worry about. She’s in the sunporch. Won’t bother you at all. I thought it best to continue since we did so much advertising. Hope you don’t mind.”
Diana trips over the threshold and grabs the wall to keep from falling. She didn’t expect to meet Grace O’Connor today, and she finds herself frozen, uncertain whether she should proceed or come up with another plan.
Stacy looks up eagerly from her spot at the table. “Yes, Donna? Do you have a question?”
“No, no question.” Suddenly hot, Diana unbuttons her coat and loosens her scarf.Everything will be fine,she thinks, fanning herself with the brochure and moving away from Stacy Sousa and her efficient real estate instincts.I came all this way for answers. Now’s not the time to waver.
Diana enters a large hallway with a set of stairs in the middle and walks through the closest door. A bare desk sits under a window of wavy glass, and a tan love seat covered in chintz pillows occupies the far corner. The bookshelves are what prompt her to cross the room; all the way to the ceiling they go. Diana trails her fingers along the spines of the books. Ward, García Márquez, Woolf, Thoreau, Atwood, Didion. The books are neat and dust-free and clearly have some kind of organization to their placement Diana can’t decipher. Perhaps by how much the reader loves them—that’s her favorite system. One shelf is dedicated to Bibles: King James, Coverdale, Inclusive, Modern English, and several others; another to animal husbandry, with a focus on horses; and yet another is filled with manuals about wildflowers and apple-growing techniques.
Diana returns to the hallway, where a woven, L-shaped basket rests on the two bottom stairs. Her grandmother used one of these. It’s a catchall for items that need to go upstairs. Diana hasn’t seen one in years, not since her grandmother passed away when she was in middle school. Inside is a set of knitting needles and a copy ofNational Geographicmagazine. She’s curious why Stacy Sousa hasn’t squirreled the basket away somewhere.
She climbs the stairs, her hand trailing up the banister. The wall to her left is covered in photographs. Some are old, black-and-white portraits of serious-looking men and women, children standing frozen at their side. In the center hangs a large picture of a young woman in a gold, glass-less frame. She sits astride a brown horse in front of a red barn, its doors open to a paddock.
In another photo, several people crowd together on the house’s front porch. Is the couple in the back the O’Connors? The others, anolder woman and a teenage girl with curly hair, are a mystery. On the end, though, leaning against the porch railing, a baseball cap pulled down across his eyes, is Tom. Diana recognizes the slant of the shoulders, the long legs. She sees this boy in Duncan every day.
She stares at the photo—why has all this been unknown to her?—until she hears the kitchen door open and close. Stacy Sousa loudly offers greetings. Someone else answers. Diana isn’t the only visitor to this open house.
She hastens up the stairs and into the empty hallway. She passes sparsely furnished bedrooms, stopping at what she guesses to be Grace’s room. A bed covered in a pink, quilted satin comforter is positioned under two windows overlooking the backyard. An Impressionistic painting of a riderless horse galloping through a forest, the sky luminous with morning light, hangs across the room. On either side of the bed are Shaker-style tables. One holds a glass lamp, a digital clock, and a pile of books; the other is bare.
On the dresser is a black-and-white photo of a young man in a suit and tie, a younger version of the man whose obituary Diana found while reviewing the archives at theHamilton Star. William Duncan O’Connor. Other personal items have been cleared away so that people like Diana—trespassers—can envision living here, so they aren’t distracted by someone else’s life. What would strangers say about her bedroom? Would her too-big bed and closet still filled with Tom’s clothes say “widow”? “Lonely”? “Grief-stricken”?
“I have to get out of here,” Diana says. As she walks down the staircase, she notices the steps here squeak like the ones she has at home.
At the bottom, standing next to the basket, Diana pauses. Stacy Sousa and the new arrivals are still in the kitchen, blocking her exit.
“These windows! Aren’t they special? They’re original to the house. They don’t make them like this anymore.” The real estate agent’s voice rises and falls. “This house has so much space. It’ll be perfect for a family. How many children did you say you have?”
Diana escapes down the hall, away from the kitchen. Turned about in the house’s mazelike layout, she tries another door, only to find herself standing in the pantry. Mason jars of jam and cans of soup are stacked on one side; toilet tissue is on the floor next to a bag of dog food. Most of the shelves are bare. This is the opposite from Diana’s pantry, which overflows with options to feed her kids and their friends.
She tries one more door, hoping it leads outside. As the door opens, Diana realizes she’s in the sunporch, looking right at Grace O’Connor.
The older woman is propped up on a wicker sofa, a knitted afghan spread across her lap. A black Labrador perches at her feet. He lazily raises himself and sniffs as Diana enters. Through the window, Diana spies her car, a few hundred feet away.
Grace is an older version of the woman on the horse in the photograph, with tapered cheekbones and gray hair in a loose bun. Diana’s first impression is that Grace is unhappy. She understands, of course; she’d be pissed off having strangers stomping around her house, poking in her closets and drawers, and examining her life.
“I thought this was the door to the outside. I didn’t mean to disturb you,” Diana stammers, clutching the real estate brochure in her hand, folding the corner back and forth to stave off her nerves.
“It’s not a problem,” Grace replies, patting her dog’s head until he lies down again. “The seller isn’t supposed to be home during an open house, isn’t that right?”
“Your house is lovely,” Diana says impulsively. “How did you come to live here?”
“My husband grew up in Hamilton, and he took over this farm from his uncle when we were newlyweds. It’s my favorite in the spring, when wildflowers bloom in the yard and the land comes alive, especially the apple trees.”
