She barely heard him. He had already explained that the owners were selling the place with everything in it: dishes, furniture, sheets and towels. An old hand-crank ice cream maker. The Bing Crosby 78s.
They were standing under the giant ash tree, with the front door behind them. The door was blue, but needed paint.
“Hear that?” he said. It was the sound of water. “There’s a stone arch bridge just down the road, over Hopewell Falls. This time of year, with all the rain we’ve had and the runoff from the snow, the water’s running high. If you favor trout fishing, the swimminghole below the falls is the spot for you. Nice place to cool off on a hot day.”
She had no idea how to catch a trout, and less what she’d do with one if she succeeded. But the part about the waterfall got to her.
“I’ll be buying this house,” she told him.
6.
Who Should We Call?
Eleanor was sixteen, the winter of the crash. Her parents, Martin and Vivian, had been driving home to Boston from a ski trip in Vermont. Nighttime black ice on a two-lane highway, tires locked, a skid into the path of an oncoming Pepsi delivery truck. Impact sufficiently violent that one of her mother’s boots had turned up fifty feet from the side of the highway. Her father would have been smoking, which explained why the windows were open, though how it was that the boot made it out of the car was one of about a hundred questions Eleanor preferred not to consider, same as she chose not to think about how—if things had been different between them—she would have been there in the back seat when they hit the truck. Some teenagers would have been with their parents on that ski trip, but Martin and Vivian were happiest when it was just the two of them.
She was halfway through her junior year at her Connecticut private school when she got the news. Sometime a little after ten that night—a Sunday—came the knock on her dorm room door.
Later she would remember the sound of showers running in the bathroom they all shared, down the hall. Simon and Garfunkel on somebody’s record player.I am a rock, I am an island.The smell of marijuana from the joint her roommate, Patty, had lit earlier, and Patty opening the window next to her bed at the sound of the knocking, the voice on the other side of the door announcing the presence of a faculty member.
“Eleanor? It’s Mr. Guttenberg. We need to talk.”
“Oh, shit,” Patty said, just before Eleanor opened the door. For a moment they had actually believed this would be the big catastrophe of the night: Patty getting put on probation or kicked out of school,even. But as it turned out, a drug violation had been the last thing on Mr. Guttenberg’s mind.
At the time Eleanor had been painting her toenails. For weeks the evidence remained. One foot with all blue nail polish. The other, three toes only.
After he told her the news—“Head-on collision,” “died instantly,” “at least they didn’t suffer”—Mr. Guttenberg patted Eleanor on the shoulder, almost as if he were petting a dog. (Somewhere in the background, Patty was wailing.Oh my God, oh my God. Eleanor made no sound.)
“Who should we call for you?” he asked her. The emergency numbers on the forms she’d filled out back in September listed her parents’ number. No point calling that one now.
“My mother had a second cousin in Illinois,” she said. Or maybe Wisconsin.
She actually slept that first night—an odd, dead kind of sleep, more like a blackout. The next morning there had been a moment when she woke up and, for a few seconds, forgot what had happened. She heard the sound of the girls along the hall and the clanging of radiator pipes. Then it came to her.
“Who can we call for you?” the headmaster’s wife asked her when she stopped by that morning with a plate of blueberry muffins. There was nobody. Her family had consisted of three people. Two of whom were now dead.
Eleanor had never asked her mother the reason why she was an only child. She had the feeling that after they had her it must have occurred to them that they really hadn’t wanted to have children after all, and the best they could do was not have any more.
She was probably no more than three years old when she made up her imaginary brother, Anthony. He was older, and very handsome. He played dress-up and later Candy Land with her—a game her mother said was boring—and when she walked to school he held her hand. Somewhere along the line he turned into a teenager who carried her on his shoulders and drove her places. By this point, she no longer talked to him in her head the way she had when she waslittle, but even in her Holcomb Academy days, she sometimes let herself picture what it would be like if Anthony were there. Calling her up, or driving to see her on Family Weekend and taking her bowling. She knew what kind of car he’d drive. A VW Bug.
Or maybe she would have had a little sister. “I’ll always take care of you,” she would have told her sister that she never had. She pictured herself wrapping her arms around a little girl who resembled herself, but smaller, pressing her tight against her chest and not letting go—the same exact thing she would have liked to have someone do for her.
As things were—in real life—there was nobody to talk to about what happened. The people she used to have, with whom she might have discussed losing her parents, were the parents she’d lost. But the larger truth was that she couldn’t have talked to them about it anyway. Martin and Vivian had died that night, but they had been largely absent forever.
It was just Eleanor then. One other distant relative somewhere in the Midwest that she’d met a couple of times when she was little. No grandparents.
She’d made the trip home to Newton by herself; her father’s law partner, Don, picked her up. She’d met him a few times over the years, at her parents’ annual cocktail party, where her job was passing the hors d’oeuvres, but didn’t recognize him when he came up to her at the train station and, a little awkwardly, offered what passed for a hug. From there they went straight to the funeral home.
Later that weekend she’d made her way through the rooms of their house figuring out what to do with all their stuff. Only she couldn’t figure it out. How was a not-quite-sixteen-year-old supposed to begin taking apart a house full of furniture and clothes, books, records, papers, photographs, ski equipment, tax returns? All the odd things that nobody talked about: Her father’s underwear and a collection ofPlayboymagazines from the sixties. Her mother’s diaphragm. The liquor cabinet containing six different bottles of whiskey, ten of vodka; the clock over the television in the family room:No drinking until 5P.M.Every number on its face a five.
Eleanor knew people whose parents viewed their children as thecenter of their universe, but that was never how it was in her own small family. She had friends whose parents barely spoke to each other and never touched, might even have slept in different bedrooms, but never missed their children’s games or band concerts. In Eleanor’s world, it was nothing like that. Her parents had already been together almost twenty years when she was born, and it had always appeared to Eleanor that they never fully got over viewing her as something of an interloper in their private world.
She could remember, from earliest childhood, the cries coming from their bedroom, late at night, a strange and confusing combination of what sounded like wild joy and injury. Her father’s eyes anytime her mother walked in the room. Her mother’s eyes meeting his. Herself, off in the corner with her colored pencils, close to invisible.
Thursday nights, watching Dean Martin—the two of them with their martinis. Friday afternoons, happy hour at a bar they liked at Coolidge Corner. Sunday mornings, she understood not to disturb them in bed till after ten o’clock, and used to watch the clock, waiting. “Adult time,” they called it. This took place not only Sunday mornings, but at dinner, too, when her mother put on one of her silky lounging outfits and the two of them shared their bottle of wine, and if Eleanor was quiet, she got to listen in to their conversation. Sometimes alone in the living room, they put on Mantovani records and danced. Eleanor could have set the drapes on fire when they were dancing that way. They wouldn’t have noticed.
Other times she heard her father’s voice, loud and angry. They were crazy about each other, but sometimes, they were just plain crazy.
Somebody would throw something. Somebody threw something else. Then came the sound of breaking glass. Their voices, saying terrible things. Then—not right away—the laughter. Then their voices were quiet again. Then the sounds from the bedroom.
