The Mansion Read online

  The town still had that disorienting feel of an old toy taken out of the box for the first time, and he noticed a new building that he didn’t think had been there before, on the airstrip end: a bakery. He thought to point it out, but Emily had the car on driverless, and she’d already told it to go to the coffee shop, so instead he just watched her watching the stores and restaurants and buildings glide past. She was smiling.

  “God. It used to be such a depressing place. Now it looks like a window display,” she said. “I love it! You could imagine all of Whiskey Run behind glass. Particularly with this snow, it’s like something from an upscale department store at Christmas, trying to get you to buy designer clothes and jewelry with the promise of nostalgia.” As she said it, they passed first a boutique clothing store, and then a tiny jewelry store, and she laughed aloud. “Good god. All of this is here just for Shawn and a few guests a few times a year? The hubris it takes to build yourself an entire town.”

  The car pulled to a stop in front of the coffee shop. Coffee Emergency. Billy already knew it was the sort of place Emily would love, the kind of coffee shop she’d want to open for herself.

  “Technically, the town was here already,” Billy said. “He just bought all of it, bulldozed and rebuilt most of it, and is running all these businesses at an enormous loss . . . Yeah. Okay. He’s a rich guy who wants things a certain way.”

  Emily stopped with her hand on the door handle, shook her head and looked at him. “No, Billy. A rich guy who wants things a certain way will buy himself a fancy car or only fly first class or be a pretentious prick when he’s ordering wine. This is something different. There’s something about all this that’s just—”

  “Scary.”

  She hesitated and then opened her door. “Well, we’re here,” she said.

  He followed her into Coffee Emergency. They both used the bathroom and ordered lattes, and by the time they were back outside, they could see the jet tracing the sky, Shawn Eagle coming to Whiskey Run ten minutes early.

  EIGHTEEN

  * * *

  ALL SOULS

  There were many things that Ruth and Rose tried to tell their mother that Beth either didn’t believe or didn’t understand. It was not, the girls thought, their mother’s fault. She was intelligent and attentive, but they often felt that what seemed like the most simple things to them, bone-deep truths that came as easily as breathing, might as well have been ideas from another universe as far as their mother was concerned.

  For instance, their dreams.

  They had tried on more than one occasion to tell their mother that they shared their dreams, but Beth did not grasp what they meant. Perhaps it wasn’t that she would not understand, but rather that she could not understand. Though, if she’d been able to look at it from the outside, it might have been more clear, for neither of the girls was ever asleep without the other being asleep; even when Rose was three, and had needed minor surgery to remove a cyst on her shoulder, Ruth had fallen asleep in her father’s arms at the same time that the IV drip in Rose’s arm sent her under. Or maybe Beth should have realized that it was never a single child coming to her bed in the middle of the night, but always both girls, childhood dreams interrupted by something more sinister.

  But while it may have been something that Rothko and Beth should have noticed, there were so many things about their twin daughters that already seemed odd to them that the way they always seemed to be sleeping at the same time was not something they noticed. When Rose and Ruth said that they shared dreams, it was another comment that passed their mother by.

  It was a shared dream that had woken them up early this morning, November 1, the morning after Halloween, a few minutes before five o’clock Chicago time, the same moment their aunt Emily had risen to go for a run before leaving Cortaca for Whiskey Run. They were not surprised that they had dreamed of unpleasant things in the night. The sticky sugar of Halloween candy was still thick on their tongues despite their father’s urgings to do a good job of brushing their teeth before bed. The candy had not come from trick-or-treating; they were not averse to candy, but Halloween was a holiday they feared. Their father had tried to cajole them into going door-to-door like their friends from school would have, but even in the early stages of the night the streets were too alive for their comfort. Instead, they’d raided the bowl of candy their mother had put by the door, eating until they turned sluggish and cranky, and then gone to bed at their usual time. They’d slept well enough, though fitfully, with dreams of a grave that had been reopened, the rotting flesh of the newly dead added to the bones of the long gone, dreams of tunnels under the earth hiding skeletons from both the past and the future, dreams of trees thick enough to steal away the light, until near on five o’clock. The nightmare that woke them was quick and brutal, an interloper burrowing into a dream they had been enjoying and knifing them to alertness.

  The dream had been simple and calm after a fitful night: Lake Michigan frozen and gently tipped into a small hill toward Chicago so they could toboggan across ice and a soft layer of snow, their mother and father also on the sled, laughing, arms wrapped around the twins, an endless slide to their home. It was a dream they knew was probably a memory of a time they’d actually gone sledding, a happy moment they would have shared with Beth and Rothko when they were younger. A dream of home and being held. The kind of dream that can last forever and is still never long enough, the first truly deep sleep after a night of unease.

  And then the light in the dream changed from the refracted whiteness of snow and winter to the thick, sticky yellow light that came every time something true and bad happened in their dreams. On the toboggan, in the dream, Ruth and Rose held hands and squeezed each other’s fingers. They knew to beware.

  The nightmare: on the expanse of white, Aunt Emily and Uncle Billy, with Uncle Billy standing off to the side, wearing his cowboy boots, jeans, a T-shirt, holding his arms out at a low angle, his left hand gashed open to show wires instead of bone, but bleeding like he was a normal person. The blood dripped and dropped, staining the snow. Aunt Emily was in front of them, too, but she was looking at Uncle Billy and seemingly oblivious of the toboggan headed her way. Her arm was cut open also, blood pouring from her wrist and off her hand like a fountain. And then, from the ice, cables and metal crawled up and hissed like snakes ready to—

  They were awake.

  In that first moment, neither girl was sure who reached up and who reached down from her bunk to touch the other’s fingers, and neither one was sure who slid down from the top bunk to pile herself next to her sister on the bottom bed. Their skin was cold, as if they’d been out playing in the snow, and Ruth tucked the blankets tighter around them. Rose suggested they go and tell their mother that they’d had a bad dream, but Ruth said no. They had been, they knew, weighing on their mother’s mind. They’d heard her talking about them the night before.

  Their condo was well insulated against the Chicago winters and the heat of summer, but on the inside, the walls were thin and the doors, heavy things with brass fittings, gapped at the floor; what their parents thought of as quiet whispers in their bedroom traveled to Ruth and Rose’s room by the highway of wood floors and open industrial-style ceilings. Some sounds were not meant for them—the happy sort of crying that was a regular occurrence from their parents—and they did not listen to those, but when their parents talked of the two of them, they could not help but take an interest. So they knew that their parents had concerns, that they thought, sometimes, about sending Ruth and Rose to a therapist, about having them tested at school. They had been talking about them again the night before, worried because the girls did not want to trick-or-treat.

  “Except that if somebody was going to ask us why we’re so worried, what would we say? There’s nothing actually wrong with them.”

  Their father’s voice. A gentle, low whisper. He was a funny man. Warm and sweet. The house he kept inside his own mind was a good place. Neither Ruth nor Rose had ever been to t
he beach on her own, but the house that occupied their father’s mind was on a beach, had a porch overlooking the ocean. When he disappeared inside himself, the girls sometimes went to visit him there. They stayed invisible and quiet—they did not want to disturb him in his private space—but they liked the comfort of the sand and sun, the gentle swell of the waves brushing the beach.

  A short laugh from their mom. “I guess we can’t really say, hey, our kids seem happy and are bright and have plenty of friends, but they’re kind of weird sometimes. Do you know what they said to me yesterday afternoon? Rose said that the woman who lives above us had a baby inside her but now it’s gone and she doesn’t want to tell anybody but it made her happy for the baby to be gone. Come on. How creepy is that?”

  Their mother was different from their father. She, too, could be funny, and she was also warm and sweet. She knew the magic trick of all good mothers: the ability to expand her arms so that she could always carry the weight of her children. She rarely yelled at them, and when she did, it was to get their attention, not to punish. She tried so very hard to understand her daughters, to be present for them, but like their father, their mother sometimes drifted off to the house inside her. The difference was that while their father’s house was full of light, a golden sun warming him as he let the sound of the ocean lull him with its peaceful rise and fall, their mother’s place was something dark and sinister.

  Early, when they were younger, the girls did not understand that these were private places, that people did not want to share the homes inside them. They knew that every person had a space inside them that they would retreat to, but they had just assumed that their mother could visit their father’s beach in the same way that Ruth and Rose could jump back and forth between what each of them was thinking. But as they got older, they realized that no, in the same way that their mother could not visit their father’s beach, their father had never visited the house in their mother’s mind either. On the days when their mother was quiet and sad, Rothko would ask her what was wrong, and the girls wanted to tell him the truth: she was in the scary house.

  Perhaps, if Beth displayed photos from her childhood or had ever returned to Kansas City and brought the girls by her childhood home, they would have recognized the connection between the space in their mother’s head and the house she grew up in. Or perhaps not. They might not have seen how the houses were both different and similar. It was the same building, of course: the sagging front porch, the two-by-two windows in front and back, upstairs and downstairs, the peeling dark blue paint on the shutters. But the house in their mother’s mind was always tentacled by shadows, the light of the street lamp falling just short of the front steps. A few times they’d followed her down the sidewalk, staying two steps behind her, keeping silent so that she wouldn’t think to look behind her, but they’d never gotten the courage to turn from the walk to follow her onto the porch and into the house. There was something about the way the house occupied their mother’s mind that scared them. They’d watch her go through the door and shut it behind her, both of them understanding that whatever was behind the splintered door was not something they wanted to see.

  Whenever their mother came back from visiting that house inside her—visits that lasted for a moment or, occasionally, for days on end, even if she tried to pretend nothing was wrong—Ruth and Rose found themselves unaccountably bursting into tears. They could not control it. Beth always rushed to them, took them into her arms, cuddled with them on the couch or the bed, but they were never sure if they were seeking the comfort of their mother or if it was the other way around. All they knew for sure was that they didn’t like to follow their mother when she visited that dark house in her mind.

  But because they knew that it was there, it surprised them when they realized that their mother didn’t really see it herself. She was “tired” or “overwhelmed with work” or “just a little sad.” That’s what she’d say, but Ruth and Rose knew the truth even if their mother didn’t: she’d gone into the house again.

  And maybe that realization, that their mother didn’t even know the house was always there, waiting for her in that dark corner of her mind, was why Ruth and Rose had accepted that neither of their parents really believed them when they said that they shared dreams. Their parents didn’t understand, and to wake Beth up to tell her about the dream? It would be just one more thing that would make her worry. Ruth looked at the clock—their parents didn’t let them get out of bed to watch television until at least seven. In the meantime, they could stay like this, in the bottom bunk, under the covers, holding each other tight and whispering about things they already knew.

  On the floor of the bedroom, they heard Rusty walk. The dog’s nails ticktacked on the hardwood floor. He circled and then settled onto the ground with a heavy sigh. The girls couldn’t remember a time without the dog. Sometimes, when they had dreams that were particularly upsetting, when they felt trapped inside that thick, sticky yellow light of nightmares, like mosquitoes trapped in amber, afraid that they’d never wake up, Rusty would come into their room and yank at the pajamas of whichever girl was in the bottom bunk until the girls woke. He was there to protect them.

  “We can tell Mommy that we don’t want to go to that place for Christmas,” Ruth said. “Tell her that we want to stay here, in Chicago, that Aunt Emily and Uncle Billy should come visit us. We can push.”

  Rose didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Both of them knew there was no point. No matter what they said to their mother, Beth wouldn’t understand. And a push wouldn’t work on her, either. Sometimes they could get their father to respond to a push, but even that was hard. It worked with teachers and Aunt Emily and their grandparents, depending on what they were asking for, and it almost always worked on strangers. They didn’t like to push when they didn’t have to. It tired them out and left them with an ache behind their eyes. And even if they didn’t know the word for it, there was something about using a push that felt too intimate. But when they did push, they could usually get people to do what they wanted.

  But not their mother.

  “Or,” Rose said, “we could call Aunt Emily. Warn her. Just tell her about the dream. Tell her what’s coming.”

  This time Ruth didn’t answer. They were both thinking about what had happened the last time they had tried to warn somebody, when they had told their preschool teacher that she should leave her husband, that she wasn’t safe.

  Sometimes it was worse to try to warn people. It was like throwing a rock to scare away the fish; the ripples had to wash up somewhere.

  “You’re right,” Rose said to her sister, even though Ruth hadn’t spoken. “Nobody will listen.”

  “It will be okay,” Ruth said. “Uncle Billy promised. He shook on it.”

  He promised.

  He would keep Aunt Emily safe.

  NINETEEN

  * * *

  OPEN HOUSE

  Emily couldn’t decide whether she was actually starting to feel cheery about the whole enterprise or had simply decided to force herself to feel cheery about being in Whiskey Run again. One thing was for sure: it would be odd seeing Shawn Eagle again after all these years. But odd in a good way or a bad way? She was still attracted to him. She knew that. She’d never been not attracted to him. In college, he’d been a beautiful young man: the cheekbones, the dark hair that fell over his face, the blending of white and Native American and who knows what else over the generations making him look exotic, the sense that there was something deep and tragic hidden beneath his quick smile. He hadn’t been the first guy she’d slept with, but there hadn’t been many others before him, and in all the ways that counted, he might as well have been the first.

  Seeing him now? It was hard not to be a little impressed. Okay. A lot impressed. It bothered her, it really did, that the private jet impressed her, but who was she kidding? It would have impressed most people. A pair of SUVs were already waiting on the tarmac, and she and Billy pulled up in their Honda Pilot as
the jet was taxiing over. She stole a glance at Billy. He looked . . . She wasn’t sure, and it didn’t seem right, but he actually looked excited. The two of them got out of their car and waited. A young woman in business attire came over and introduced herself, told Billy it was good to see him again, and offered them each a bottle of water. Emily shook her head.

  The door of the jet opened down into a set of stairs. The first person out was a trim man in a dark suit. No tie. Although he wasn’t a particularly large man, there was something coiled about him that made Emily realize he was a bodyguard even before a gust of wind pulled back the edge of his suit coat and showed a pistol holstered underneath. The second and third people out were also clearly security. They were followed by a black woman who was, quite simply, gorgeous. She looked like the kind of woman you saw only in movies. Had Billy not mentioned Wendy ahead of time, Emily would have assumed the woman was Shawn’s girlfriend, not his assistant.

  When Shawn came out of the plane, it was almost anticlimactic. He didn’t take her breath away. She read her fair share of romances and erotic novels, escapist fantasy that she loved, so she was familiar with all the romantic clichés. She expected something to happen when she saw Shawn again for the first time. But there was no lump in her throat, no hitch in her heartbeat.