She spent a spring building up a garden—her very first—carting soil and fertilizer and new bulbs, small as presents, weeding and trimming and rooting oxalis from the soil, cursing the blue Veronica that wouldn’t bloom, and sweating into the soil beds.
And slowly, without her noticing, she had begun to love the house. She loved the way her bedroom filled up with light in the mornings, like a glass filling with rich cream. She loved the smell of the gardens after a rainstorm, and the smell of the woods in the autumn, rich and full and deeper, somehow, than anything she’d ever known in California. She even loved the creaking floorboards, and the pipes that shuddered and banged, as though they had a voice.
She loved the first freeze, which patterned the windows with lace, and making coffee in the kitchen wearing thick socks; she loved the cottonwood trees and their fluff, drifting through the weak spring light.
But she had continued to pretend to hate it. She had pretended, still, that Richard had brought her there against her will, because it gave her power over him. She had pretended that she was happy to leave him and move to Long Island with Trenton, even though it broke her heart. She had lorded it over Richard, the fact that he had made her unhappy for years and years, even though she was happy; at least, the house had made her happy.
But Richard won in the end. Maybe he’d thought the house would be a burden on her. During one of their last communications, he’d apologized at last.
“I should never have moved you from California,” he’d said, sounding small and old. “You always hated it here. I should have been a better listener.”
She had almost told him then. She had almost said No, you’re wrong. I miss Coral River. I’ve missed it every day. But it was too late to give up the lie, which she had clung to for so long, which had become as much a part of their relationship as either of the children.
And now he was dead, and he would never know, and the house belonged to Trenton.
Had Richard done it to punish her, because she hadn’t come back? Or had he really thought she wouldn’t want it?
“You shouldn’t be down here,” she said. Her headache was getting worse. “You shouldn’t be messing around.”
“I told you, I was cleaning up, okay?” Trenton said, drawing out the last word so it suggested vast indifference. The anger came in short, sharp pulses now and seemed concentrated directly behind Caroline’s eyelids. She, Caroline, had been slaving away since she’d arrived in Coral River. And Trenton, as usual, had sulked and brooded and made everyone’s lives miserable, made enjoyment impossible, like a fly in a bowl of soup.
If anything, he’d gotten worse since the accident. He sat for hours in front of his computer, doing God knows what (more p**n , probably). He answered her questions in monosyllables, was cagey about Andover, and complained about having to return there.
“This afternoon I want you to help Minna,” Caroline said. Every so often she remembered that as his mother, she could tell Trenton what to do. Most days he seemed like some far-off constellation, ever present but mysteriously out of her orbit. “I want to see you packing boxes. I don’t want to hear a single complaint. And clean up that glass.”
“I told you, it wasn’t my—”
“Just do it,” she said, cutting him off.
Trenton mumbled something that Caroline couldn’t hear. But she didn’t care. She was done; she had handled Trenton, and now she could go upstairs and sit down, take the weight off her feet, have a drink in peace.
She was irrationally angry with Richard for dying and leaving her alone. Even though they had been separated for ten years, and divorced for four, he’d been a constant in her life. His phone calls, his moods, his pleas for her to return; he had grounded her.
Minna was still standing on the stairs, and Caroline couldn’t move around her.
“Oh my God.” Minna’s eyes were fixed on the far side of the basement. “Oh my God. Are you kidding me? He f**king kept it?”
“Minna!” Caroline said. Amy put her hands over her ears and began to hum.
Minna obviously didn’t hear. She moved down several steps, still fighting to keep Amy behind her. Caroline realized she was looking at the piano.
“It doesn’t even play anymore,” Minna said.
Caroline was losing patience for the basement, and for her children. “How do you know?” she said.
“Minna whacked it with a baseball bat,” Trenton said. “You don’t remember?”
Caroline definitely did not remember that. “When?”
“I was fifteen, Ma.”
“But . . . ” What Caroline did remember was a young Minna, her hair coiled and pinned neatly to her head, her long, slender fingers skating over the keys like a shadow passing over water. She didn’t know why Minna had stopped playing. “But you were going to go to Juilliard. And Mr. Hansley said . . . ”
“Don’t,” Minna said sharply.
“Mr. Handsy?” Trenton said.
“Hansley,” Caroline correct him, before she realized that he’d been making a joke. Then she had another memory, less pleasant: coming into the piano room on a hot summer day with a pitcher of lemonade, and Mr. Hansley scooting quickly away from Minna. Hansley smiling, fiddling nervously with his glasses, talking too fast. Minna silent, staring at the keys, refusing to make eye contact.
Gripping the banister, Caroline began to climb, forcing Minna to squeeze herself against one wall so that she could pass. When Minna shifted, Amy ducked around her and barreled past Caroline.
“Amy!” Minna reached for her and then stared, exasperated, at her mother. “See what you did?” she said.
But Caroline didn’t care. She was glad to have caused Minna some minor irritation. Minna chose not to remember all the things Caroline had done for her: the calamine lotion Caroline had applied to Minna’s bug bites; the Band-Aids she’d put on Minna’s cuts; the scrambled egg soup she’d made for Minna whenever she was sick.
She didn’t remember that Caroline had tried to buffer her from the worst of Richard’s moods—his rages, definitely, but also his indifference, which seemed to fix onto an object just as strongly as his anger. Caroline could still remember thirteen-year-old Minna curled up under her blanket, shivering, blue-lipped, after Richard forgot to pick her up from a dance lesson and she’d been forced to wait for an hour and a half in the rain.
“It would be better if he hated us,” she’d said. “But he just doesn’t care.”