The Mansion Read online

  It was cool in Cortaca, almost cold, and he was glad that one of the new things he’d sprung for had been a coat at an outdoor store. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d wear when the snow started falling, when the temperature dropped in Whiskey Run, but it was warm enough for a day at the end of October in Cortaca. The woman in the store had told him and Emily that the coat was “city technical,” and it was exactly the sort of coat he could wear walking into an inn that had a hopping bar on the ground floor. Emily glanced at him again, still looking worried, like she had in the parking lot. “It’s fine,” he said. And it was fine. He could even go into the bar. They could go into the bar. She could have a glass of wine or a beer and he’d have a seltzer or a Diet Coke. He hadn’t felt the familiar, hellish call since he’d gotten back from his trip in September to see Shawn.

  They checked in and went up to their room. There were only a dozen rooms in the place, and he was relieved that by the time they reached the top of the stairs, the music and conversation from below had disappeared into the thick carpets. It was one thing to walk past a bar, another thing to sleep on top of one. Their room was near the back, and when they opened the door, Emily let out a little gasp. On the table in the entry, there was a bouquet of flowers the size of a lamp, a bowl of fresh fruit, two neatly folded hoodies with the Cortaca University logo on them, a pink logoed baseball cap for Emily, a red winter cap with the school crest for him. There was no note, but there was no need. They both knew it had to have been arranged by Shawn. Or, rather, one of Shawn’s people.

  Emily declared the room to be adorable and then locked herself in the bathroom to freshen up before they went out for dinner. Billy wondered if when Emily said “adorable,” she really meant “cozy,” which was just another way of saying small, but he supposed the building had been built in a different time, when king-sized beds didn’t exist, and that they’d probably had to work all sorts of architectural magic to give each of the twelve guest rooms its own bathroom and to shoehorn in a desk as well. And it was sort of adorable. He heard the shower turn on, and he sat down on the bed to pull off his boots. The cobbler had given them a polish when he’d resoled them, and the brown seemed somehow deeper, the scars in the leather old and weathered, marks of character rather than damage done. He’d gotten the boots here, in Cortaca, his junior year of college, at Cortaca University’s annual yard sale. Almost brand-new, dumped by some rich kid who didn’t want to bother bringing them home after graduation. You could get sweatshirts for two bucks, jeans for five, T-shirts for a dollar. Hot pots and microwaves and inkless inkjet printers. The boots had set him back eight dollars. Best money he’d ever spent.

  He went to the window and pulled back the thick, wine-colored curtains. There was a decent view of the first third of Restaurant Row and the mouth of the pedestrian mall. They were on what he still thought of as the “good side” of the mall, and there was a steady stream of cars turning or dropping off diners. He was surprised at how many of the people were adults rather than students. He remembered a Cortaca inhabited almost purely by fellow college students. Myopia. He’d only ever lived here as a student, and at that age, people in their thirties and forties and beyond were of no interest. They were old. Somebody in their thirties might as well have been invisible. He was one of those people now, though, thirty-six. And passing through. He had thought, once, that he would live in Cortaca forever, but now it was like running into an old girlfriend from high school: a recognition that you’d once been intimate, but that you were a different person back then and were a different person now, and anything other than fond nostalgia was a waste of time.

  He watched a group of three girls walk off the pedestrian mall and toward the inn. They looked young to him, and he wondered if they were high school students, but they wore short skirts and wool jackets that looked expensive even from far away. He leaned in closer to the window, blinking, unsure if what he saw made sense: one of the girls was in all black, wearing a headband with black cat ears on it and mascara-drawn whiskers, and another one had on a golden halo that could have been made of pipe cleaners, and a pair of wings on her back. The third girl’s costume was hidden under her coat. October 30. The day before Halloween. A fungible holiday for college students. He remembered Halloween as an excuse to drink hard liquor mixed with Sprite his freshman year; to swallow ecstasy and do shots of tequila and stay in with his girlfriend his sophomore year; to drink beer until he threw up his junior year, still somehow ending up in bed with a girl whose name he couldn’t remember and had probably never known. His senior year, Halloween was the first time he’d tried a line of coke. The year after that, Halloween was a cold, quiet, lonely, terrifying night, he and Shawn both piss drunk and huddled in their sleeping bags, just the two of them in the cabin, the decrepit mansion glaring at them as they tried to sleep and forget what had happened with Takata. And then, the year after that, their second year in the cabin and only days after they’d thrown in the towel on Nellie and settled on trying to make Eagle Logic work, he’d woken up at two or three in the morning to the sound of Shawn stumbling into the cabin, shitfaced, with a drunken girl in tow. Emily. Her presence had marked the beginning of the end. No. That wasn’t true. Things had gone off the rails well before Shawn brought Emily home.

  The three girls passed beneath his window, one of them looking up and then quickly looking away from him. He supposed, with the lamp on behind him, up against the window, he looked creepy watching them. He shoved his hand into his pocket, fingered the two-year sobriety coin he’d gotten in Seattle. It was brass, but it felt like plastic. Unsubstantial.

  “Hey,” he heard behind him. “Why don’t you close those curtains?”

  He let the curtains fall closed and turned around. Emily stood in the doorway of the bathroom. Her hair was slung over her shoulder, heavy and dark with water, dripping onto the towel she had wrapped around her body.

  “Are you starving?” she said, letting the towel fall away. Her naked body caught the soft light of the lamp. “Or can you wait for dinner?”

  He could wait for dinner.

  SIXTEEN

  * * *

  WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

  Halloween. A day for ghosts.

  She wasn’t surprised that it took them most of the day to make it up to where Cortaca University had installed Shawn and Billy’s old cabin as a museum. She could feel Billy’s reluctance. He didn’t say anything, of course. That wasn’t his way. But they lingered over breakfast and then wandered in and out of the boutique shops on the pedestrian mall. She was astounded at how much nicer it was down there. Some of that, she knew, was memory and age. Leaving her shift as a waitress at Stardust Bar—now a clean-looking sandwich shop—at one in the morning was going to give her a different view of Cortaca than browsing the shops with money in her pocket at eleven in the morning. But some of it was that the pedestrian mall had been completely redone since the last time she’d been in Cortaca. Where before there’d been twisted trees and crumbling pavilions breaking the view, now there was an open courtyard with benches, concrete ramps to seating areas, planters with flowers, and a low-rise stage that worked more like a window than a wall. Only the smallest handful of storefronts were empty, and of those, two were under construction with OPENING SOON signs on the windows. It seemed like Billy touched every piece of merchandise in every store, and they still hadn’t gone up to campus by the time they were ready for lunch, close to one o’clock.

  Finally, they went up the hill. They started at the arts quad, looking at buildings she’d haunted as a student and touring the new ones. When they got closer to the engineering quad, she thought Billy might be reluctant to go into the Eagle Computing Pavilion, but he was surprisingly eager to look at the monolith that Shawn had funded. The building was large but modestly finished on the exterior, fitting neatly into the landscape of the engineering quad. If it weren’t for the sheer newness of the stone cladding and the slate roof and the lack of established ivy on the walls, she would have thought
the building had always been there. Inside, however, it was a monument to Shawn’s success.

  And then, finally, there was nothing left but to go see the museum.

  There was a tasteful sign, the size of a hardcover book, marking the path through the trees to the cabin: THE BIRTHPLACE OF EAGLE TECHNOLOGY. It was a short path, barely fifty feet, but enough to make it feel like they were entering a different world, going back in time. She walked ahead of Billy, and it seemed like it took him a long time to catch up. She wondered what he was thinking, if they’d made a mistake by coming out here. Bad enough that Shawn had roped him into this old, forgotten ghost of a project with Nellie, but working on Nellie at least made a certain sense for Billy. She had wanted to believe that Nellie was forgotten, that she was a bad memory from the past, but Emily knew better: Billy had never really let go of the idea. Plus, who was she kidding? The money. The new car. She patted the car key in the pocket of her jacket. Her new jacket. Was she that easily bought off? Maybe. Probably. It had changed their life: even if he couldn’t do anything with Nellie, they’d be able to walk away scot-free, debts magically erased, money in the bank. They could start a family. And maybe if he couldn’t get Nellie to work, it would help Billy to understand that he’d finished his own long walk away from his past with Shawn, from his failings, his own ghosts. They’d get that out of going to Whiskey Run, even if they got nothing else, she thought, but what had she expected Billy to find here, in Cortaca, in the old, reconstructed cabin? Because she’d been the one to push him to come here, to take a look. He hadn’t said no, hadn’t said he would rather avoid the cabin, but she knew. She knew.

  She looked back. His hands were stuffed in his pockets. His cowboy boots scuffed against the path. They stopped to look at the cabin from the outside.

  It looked almost exactly the same to her. Cortaca University had done a nice job moving it here from Shawn’s estate. They couldn’t replicate the wreck of Eagle Mansion haunting the sky above or the Saint Lawrence River cutting through the land below, but it was nicely wooded—she could barely see the computing pavilion from where they were standing—and there was a small pond behind the cabin. If you didn’t know better, you would have assumed the cabin had always stood here.

  She reached out to squeeze Billy’s hand. He gave it a perfunctory squeeze back, and she had the sudden urge to tell him to turn around, but she didn’t. Instead, they walked forward together and went into the cabin.

  It was a disaster.

  Neither of them said anything.

  The cabin felt smaller than she remembered. A student wearing a name badge sat reading in a chair by the door. She didn’t even look up from her book as Billy and Emily opened the door and walked into the single room. It was tiny. Barely twenty feet by fifteen. They walked all the way in; there was a narrow aisle and a small circle in the middle that could hold, at most, four or five people at a time, the rest of the cabin roped off. On one side, by the window, there was the desk—the old door from the outhouse, the half-moon cut into the wood—a laptop on it that was, as near as she could tell, the same model that Shawn and Billy had actually used. It wasn’t functional, of course, but the computer was plugged into an extension cord that ran in under the closed window, just as it had when she’d lived with them. In the far corner, there was the woodstove and the basin they’d used for washing dishes, the hand pump. The walls were still covered in scrawled handwriting. Numbers and notations and letters and formulas, all written with permanent marker, some in Shawn’s hand, some in Billy’s, faded a little, but still legible: the hieroglyphic history of what became Eagle Technology. And on the far side, a single, solitary camping pad and sleeping bag. One. Only one.

  Oh.

  One camping pad. One computer. He’d been erased.

  She saw Billy glance at the sleeping bag, look again, stare at it now, and then look away, his gaze alighting on the single computer, until finally, blessedly, he looked away from that as well and wandered over to the wall of notations. He stood in front of the scribbled notations, and she couldn’t tell if he was really looking at them or if he was simply avoiding looking at where his history had been wiped away.

  She felt the hot stone of crying coming to the surface, and she tried to swallow it down. She wanted to reach out and touch his back, to take him in her arms and comfort him, to let him know that he could never be completely removed. But she knew that wasn’t what he wanted.

  The first night she’d come here—here? there? she felt dislocated—it had been so late, and she’d been drunk enough that she hadn’t really realized that Shawn’s roommate—she didn’t know who Billy was then, didn’t know he’d eventually be her husband, didn’t even know he existed—was in the same room. She and Shawn had both been completely bombed, and neither of them should have been driving. That was a fiasco in and of itself, a minor miracle that they didn’t kill themselves or anybody else on the long drive to the cabin. She still couldn’t remember who had driven that old station wagon that had once belonged to Aunt Beverly from downtown Cortaca out past Whiskey Run and into the woods. So, so drunk, and such a long drive, but when they finally got there, they both still felt that same urgency to shed their costumes. Halloween of her junior year of college. Good god, she thought. Tonight marked thirteen years gone by. Lucky thirteen. No, not tonight. Tomorrow, because by the time they came stumbling into the cabin, it was well past midnight, not Halloween anymore, but November 1. No. That was a lie. She knew it was a lie. She could say November 1 all she wanted, but it was still Halloween. She remembered reading once, years and years ago, that Halloween was the night when college students were the most likely to get drunk, the most likely to have sex with someone new, and it made sense to her. What other night could you so successfully pretend to be somebody you weren’t? New Year’s Eve was for new beginnings, and Valentine’s Day was for the desperate and the rooted both, but Halloween was the night when you could play tricks with yourself, when you could convince yourself that you were somebody different, when you could make yourself believe that you deserved to be a student at Cortaca University.

  It was only going to be for the night. She’d had a few boyfriends as a college student, and she’d kept all of them at arm’s length, but when she met Shawn that night, she decided almost immediately that she was going to sleep with him. He was handsome and hurting, and although he looked almost overwhelmed by the music and the press of bodies in the house on Stewart Avenue—whose house had that been? why had she and her roommates gone to that Halloween party and not to some other party?—she and Shawn had friends in common, and even back then, he could be charming when he wanted to be. By midnight, they’d drifted out onto the porch, and he’d given her his jacket.

  “Sounds desperate,” she said. “No plumbing? Only a woodstove for heat?”

  “Don’t forget that we don’t have any furniture, I’m sleeping on a camping pad on the floor of the cabin, and it’s like an hour’s drive from here.”

  It was closer to an hour and a quarter.

  “Wow,” she deadpanned. “Sweeping me off my feet here.”

  “It’s all part of the evil genius,” he said. “I’m going to make you feel so sorry for me that you’ll sleep with me out of pure pity. And that way, no matter how terrible I am in bed, you’ll feel virtuous for your actions and will probably sleep with me at least a few more times before realizing that you can do better.”

  She’d laughed, and he’d kissed her or maybe she’d kissed him, and at some point she decided that she absolutely had to see this fabulous cabin, to see the utter luxury of his existence, and one of them had driven the station wagon—how drunk they’d been! how foolish and careless, how heedless of the value of human life to make that drive, how lucky to not get a ticket or worse!—and they were both frenzied by the time they fell to the floor of the cabin, the anticipation of the long drive making it sweeter. They spent themselves completely, not making love or even having sex but screwing, desperate and animalistic, tangling them
selves up in his nest of sleeping bags and blankets before falling asleep.

  When she woke the next morning, she felt Shawn’s arms wrapped around her, and the air of something else. Someone watching. A man, not even ten feet away, also on the floor and in a sleeping bag, turned on his side and staring at her. She didn’t know, of course, that it was Billy, that in barely seven months she’d be leaving with him, that she’d be the wedge that broke Billy and Shawn apart, that for the rest of his life, whether he said it or not, Billy would blame her for his not being part of the rise of Eagle Technology.

  For not being rich. For not being lauded as a genius. For losing his place in history. For being written out of the story.

  Whether he said it or not.

  He’d said it. He’d come out and said it straight to her.

  She blinked back to the present.

  The single camping pad and sleeping bag were forlorn.

  She looked over at Billy. He was leaning in now, going back and forth over the writing on the wall, the formulas and markings, left to right, top to bottom, and she could see him disappearing into it. His lips were moving now, like an eager child learning to read, and she could hear soft, puffing murmurs coming out of his mouth. He put his hands on the rope barrier, concentrating. After several minutes, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and started taking pictures of the wall as a whole and then close-ups of every section, careful not to miss a single squiggle.

  He was actually humming as they walked out of the cabin, an odd, secretive smile gracing his face.