The Mansion Read online

  That was guilt she’d carried with her for a long time, and she was almost certain it was that same guilt that had made her so upset about the idea of Emily going back to Billy. There was unquestionably a difference between Billy and her father: Beth never worried about Billy being around Ruth or Rose. He was a drunk, but he was never that.

  But he hit Emily. Once.

  Beth had been thrilled—and surprised, given how long she’d been dithering about her marriage—that Emily had the balls to straight up walk out the first time Billy punched her. First time, last time. That’s how it had to work in Beth’s book. Hadn’t the two of them learned that much from their mother? And yet, Emily believed him when he said that he’d changed, believed that rehab worked magic.

  He’d stayed true to his word as far as Beth knew. No drugs, no drinking. He hadn’t raised a hand to her sister since that one time. For all that, however, Beth just couldn’t get over it. She’d heard her dad say he’d stop drinking. Heard her dad apologize to her mother, and her mother kept believing he’d change until the day it killed her.

  And then her dad had made the same apologies to Beth. He was sorry, he loved her, he couldn’t help himself, and if she would only let him . . . No. No, Billy’s behavior wasn’t something Beth was ever going to be able to fully let go. Emily might mark time from when Billy got clean, but Beth marked time from when Billy first landed a punch, waiting for it to happen again.

  Still, the truth was, it hadn’t happened again. Billy kind of seemed like he’d gotten his shit together. She didn’t have to forgive Billy, and she didn’t have to forget what had happened, but if she didn’t want to push Emily away, if she wanted to be a real part of Emily’s life and put herself in a position to keep a better eye on things, to be a better big sister, she’d have to fake it. Which meant that almost as quickly as the words came out of her mouth—“You mean, since he hit you”—she was backpedaling and apologizing.

  “Oh, shit. I’m sorry, honey.” (She wasn’t.) “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.” (She did.) “I shouldn’t have said it. That wasn’t fair.” (No, it seemed fair enough.)

  She held her breath, waiting for Emily to yell at her, but Emily was quiet. Beth felt some relief. You can’t unsay something, so she’d gotten to make her point and then walk away from it.

  “No. It wasn’t fair,” Emily said.

  “I’m sorry.” (But it was fair. He hit you.)

  A loud sigh from Emily. Then, “How are the girls? I haven’t even asked. I’ve been too busy complaining about living in this crazy mansion and having nothing to do.”

  “You’ve got plenty of stuff to do. You’ve got to make up all sorts of interesting ways for your characters to have sex.” She didn’t hear Emily laugh, but even over the phone, she could feel the air between them clear up. “The girls are good. The weather here is completely shitty, though, so we’ve been cooped up. It’s been raining all week, which is one thing in May, when you’ve got those lovely, warm spring showers, but it’s another thing as we’re swinging around the corner to Thanksgiving. Last I checked they were playing some sort of elaborate version of school in the bunk beds.” She got up out of her bed and started walking toward the door. “Want to talk to them?”

  “Sure,” Emily said.

  Beth put her sister on speakerphone and automatically started talking louder. “You can tell them why you aren’t coming for Thanksgiving.”

  “First of all,” Emily said, her voice tinny and thin coming out of the phone’s speaker, “if I go anywhere for Thanksgiving, Marge will kill me if it’s not with her family. Second of all, you guys are already coming out here for Christmas. It’ll be fun. I’m sure Whiskey Run will be beautiful in the snow, and we’ll have the run of the whole mansion, and Nellie—”

  “No!” Beth screamed the word as she stepped through the doorway of the girls’ bedroom. One of them was standing on the top bunk, the high ceilings of the condo giving plenty of room to spare, and the other was standing on the ground below. From the entrance to the bedroom, she couldn’t tell who was who.

  “No!”

  They were laughing and jumping, holding opposite ends of a blanket and tugging back and forth. As she caught sight of them, the girl on the ground gave a hefty yank just as the one on the top jumped into the air, jolting her forward so that she stumbled and caught her foot on the guardrail. It happened so quickly that Beth didn’t have time to do anything other than yell that single, singular word “No!” before one of her daughters pinwheeled to the ground.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  * * *

  A HISTORY LESSON

  Shawn sent one of his jets for Emily. It was over-the-top and completely unnecessary—it was only a broken arm—but Billy appreciated the gesture. His first reaction when Nellie told him that the jet was coming to take Emily to Chicago was a flash of anger, but after a second he came to think it was actually pretty sweet.

  “I mean, come on,” he’d said to Emily, “given how much money the guy has, it’s probably the equivalent of one of us offering to give a friend a ride to the airport, but still.”

  It is important to Shawn that you are happy.

  “See? Listen to Nellie. Shawn wants to make you happy.”

  By the time she got in the Honda to head to Shawn’s airstrip, she’d mostly calmed down, but she had been seriously freaked out by the incident. Not that he could really blame her. From her perspective, all she’d heard was her sister yelling “No!” and then a whole bunch of screaming and crying for a couple of minutes. By the time Beth told her that one of the girls had fallen off the bunk bed and broken her arm—it was a compound fracture, meaning the bone was sticking out, so it was pretty darn clear what they were dealing with—Emily was completely losing her shit. Not that Billy would have noticed if Nellie hadn’t interrupted him. He’d been in the office working and Emily had been walking around inside Eagle Mansion, doing laps, since it was drizzling outside.

  The funny thing, at least to Billy, was that even a couple of hours after it happened, as his wife was getting ready to meet the jet, he still couldn’t get a straight answer about which of the twins had gotten hurt. Emily told him that Ruth had fallen off the bed, and then she said it was Rose. Then she said, no, she was sure it was Ruth, and then she said that the girls were insisting to Beth that it was Rose who had fallen off the bed even though Ruth was the one with the broken arm. He loved the twins; how cool and offbeat they were was part of what had turned him around on the idea of their having kids, but yeah, the girls were weird.

  Either way, with the private jet and Shawn arranging for a chauffeur to meet her at the airport in Chicago, Billy figured Emily would make the hospital about the same time whichever one of his nieces it was came out of surgery.

  In the meantime, he was surprised to admit that the idea of Emily’s being gone for a few days gave him a certain sense of relief. No, not relief. Joy, maybe. He was bummed that she was going, so relief was the wrong word, because he did like having her in the house and spending time with her even if he mostly hadn’t been spending time with her, but there was something appealing about the idea of a few days of bachelordom. Yes, it was selfish, but the truth was that he’d been working like a dog, as hard as he ever had when he first started trying to make Nellie in the first place. He was ready for a break, and with Emily gone, he could relax completely, however he felt like it. If Emily were here, she’d want to go for a hike, or even take a day trip somewhere, ask about how things were going with Nellie, talk over Shawn and Wendy coming to join them for Thanksgiving, or go back to one of her favorite subjects of late, which was the baby they were now actively trying to have. Well, maybe not actively, because she still hadn’t said anything about the fact that she wasn’t using birth control.

  Okay, so the no-sex thing was going to be a bummer, but having Emily visit her sister for a few days meant that if he wanted to take a break, he could do whatever the heck he liked without feeling any guilt or pressure about hanging with Emily
. And then he could go back to putting Nellie through her paces. He finally felt like he’d found some of the threads that were tangled, and he was beginning to gently tease them out. Shawn and his engineers had done some really interesting things, but they’d also loaded her up with all sorts of weird junk that was now woven throughout. He had to be careful what he pulled in case the whole thing unraveled.

  The biggest issue was what they’d done with all the security access levels. First Day, Second Day. It created a confusing sort of echo within the program. Nellie rewrote herself in real time, creating new programs to deal with past and anticipated questions, but with the different access levels, it made things even more complicated. Writing on top of writing on top of writing. He hadn’t figured out how to—or if he could—strip it out, but it was more complicated than it needed to be.

  In a lot of ways, he thought, working on Nellie was like working with a perfect piece of marble; all he had to do was chip away the excess to reveal the masterpiece waiting underneath.

  First, though, he needed to take a break. Catch his breath. Decompress. He saw Emily off in the Honda, went back up to the Nest to work for a while, and then went to bed around midnight. He woke up late morning, and by the time he showered and got his act together, it was close to lunch, which was ideal; all he wanted was to go into town and get a big, fat, ridiculous cheeseburger, some onion rings, and a Diet Coke. After he had that grease explosion, he’d walk around town and explore a little bit—Emily had told him that it was actually pretty cute despite the way it all felt too new—and then go back to Eagle Mansion and take a nap. After that, he thought, he’d be feeling great and ready to dive back into Nellie for the next week and a bit until Shawn came for Thanksgiving.

  He mulled over the idea of having Shawn and Wendy for Thanksgiving as the Honda drove him into town. He hadn’t been in favor of the idea, but Shawn wanted to come to see if Billy was making any progress, and Emily had insisted. Billy never cared much about Thanksgiving. Emily hadn’t either, she said, when she was a kid, but her college roommate Marge was huge into Thanksgiving, and had sort of adopted Emily. Probably every other year Marge persuaded Emily to come to New York City—Marge’s parents had an insanely huge and expensive place on the Upper East Side, overlooking Central Park, and had bought Marge her own five-bedroom, six-bath penthouse with only slightly worse views of the park—and Thanksgiving was absolutely a thing for Emily now. By extension, that meant it was a thing for Billy. He thought that probably—maybe—Marge would be open to his coming this year, but that was no certainty. Back when he was drinking everything in sight, when he . . . when Emily went to live with Beth for those few months and he was getting sober, Marge had called him and given him the sort of verbal blistering that left a mark.

  For all that, Billy actually liked Marge. She took her money for granted, but not in a shitty way, and she’d been incredibly generous to Emily and so thoughtful about it that Emily, and, again by extension, Billy, never actually felt weird about taking her gifts. He thought Marge liked him, too, and now that he was clean and sober, he thought that of all Emily’s friends, she was the one most likely to actually give him a second chance. But it didn’t matter, because he wanted to stay in Whiskey Run so he wasn’t thrown off his rhythm with Nellie.

  He suggested to Emily that she go to Chicago or New York, but she flat-out refused to go somewhere for Thanksgiving without him.

  “And if we’re stuck here,” she said, “I don’t want to do Thanksgiving just the two of us.”

  “Three,” Billy said. “Don’t forget about Nellie.”

  “Ha, ha,” she said.

  But Billy hadn’t been joking, and when she said that she wanted to invite Shawn, he didn’t have a good reason to say no. As Emily pointed out, the man was already planning to come for a check-in, and Eagle Mansion was, after all, Shawn’s estate.

  For that matter, Billy thought as he drove past the row of stores and restaurants trying to decide where to eat, he shouldn’t forget that Whiskey Run was Shawn’s as well. Every shopkeeper and waiter would know who he was. Mind your Ps and Qs.

  He got to the end of the strip and then had the car turn itself around so that he was headed back in the direction of Eagle Mansion. He went past the Thai place and Blinker’s, the pizza place, past the Eagle Technology Store, which was a smaller version of the Eagle Technology Stores dotting malls all over the world, and stopped near the other end of the line, in front of a place called Timber Brew. He wasn’t going to have a drink, so if it was just a bar, he’d keep going. A bar wasn’t the right place for him. He wanted a burger, though, and he refused to believe that with all the shit Shawn had built in his personal city, there wasn’t somewhere you could get a burger. He looked through the window and took heart; there were maybe a dozen people sitting at tables and eating. It was clean and new-looking inside, which wasn’t a surprise, but it also felt slightly more alive than the Thai place had. Maybe that was because there were actual customers. Where had they come from? Looking closely, however, he thought he recognized one or two faces. Perhaps one of the guys on the lawn crew who came out to Eagle Mansion every week to blow leaves, or maybe somebody who had been working construction when he came to visit in September. Locals, he guessed, which made sense. With Shawn running things, they all had jobs that paid well and schedules that afforded them a lunch break.

  He ordered a cheeseburger topped with fried onions and barbecue sauce, an order of onion rings, and a Diet Coke. Exactly what he’d been hankering for. He’d brought his tablet so he could read, but there were sports highlights on the television over the bar, so he watched those instead. Admittedly, he thought, it was hard to mess up a burger and rings, but the food was excellent. He didn’t even miss not being able to have a beer. He felt himself begrudgingly giving Shawn a nod: he had to be losing money on the place, but it was hard to argue that life wasn’t better in Whiskey Run since Shawn had rolled into town.

  He washed up after eating and took a slow stroll down the street. He stepped inside most of the little stores, fingering the dresses in one store, looking at the jewelry in the art gallery, which featured only upstate New York artists, thinking about what he might get Emily for Christmas. He popped into the candy store and bought—or, rather, Shawn bought—a small bag of English toffee and chocolate-covered sponge. It was relaxing, and he took his time. Where the strip of shops and restaurants gave out, he turned around and headed back on the other side. He was just browsing, though at the hardware store he bought a roll of canvas and a box of permanent markers, thinking he might use them to diagram some logic-flow questions he was working through. It took him a little more than an hour moving at a leisurely pace to go from Timber Brew down one end and back up the other. He’d parked in front of Timber Brew, which was a few buildings up from the end, and as he crossed the street, he saw that decrepit, beat down–looking bar with the wooden sign and the faded red paint: Ruffle’s.

  He knew in his marrow that it wasn’t a coincidence. He wanted to believe that he’d just ended up standing there, in front of Ruffle’s, but he couldn’t. He knew the truth: the moment Emily told him she was going to Chicago was the moment he’d decided to have a drink. He couldn’t bring liquor back to Eagle Mansion without risking getting caught, and he couldn’t have a drink at one of Shawn’s places in Whiskey Run, so that meant, inevitably, he was going to end up here, at Ruffle’s, the one place in town he could have a drink without it getting reported back to Shawn. He took a quick glance down the street, but nobody was out, so he ducked in through the front door.

  It wasn’t as dim inside as he’d expected, but the owner would have been doing himself a favor by turning the lights down: the place was a dump. There was sawdust on the floor, but that couldn’t hide the rough planks scarred from cigarettes, from back when smoking in a bar was still legal in New York State. The pool table had newish-looking felt, but the table itself was beaten and gouged out, one of the feet missing and replaced by a chunk of two-by-four. And
yet, as much as Ruffle’s was the antithesis of the clean and new Timber Brew and all the other places in Whiskey Run, Billy loved it immediately. It had that sour smell of spilled beer and disappointment that all good drinking places carried. The bar itself was some sort of dark wood and seemed positively alive with history; Billy was sure he wouldn’t be able to count the hours that elbows had spent propped up on that bar. There were a couple of tables scattered toward the back, and behind those, a hallway that led, Billy was sure, to a pair of absolutely rank bathrooms. Old-school country music was playing quietly.

  He was the only person in the place, and he sat down on one of the stools at the bar and waited patiently. He felt unaccountably calm. He wasn’t supposed to drink. He understood that intellectually. But this felt so right. He’d have just one drink and then he’d head back to Eagle Mansion recharged and ready.

  After a few minutes, he heard the sound of somebody moving, and then the door behind the bar opened. The bartender didn’t look surprised to see Billy sitting at the bar and waiting. He opened the door fully, stepped back behind the door, and came out again carrying a cardboard box heavy enough to make him grunt. He put it down on the bar in front of Billy, and Billy heard the satisfying clink of bottles moving against one another.

  He was an older guy, probably late sixties. Out west, Billy thought, he’d be wearing a cowboy hat and could look the part. Leathery skin with deep wrinkles, a thick, gray handlebar mustache. He wasn’t big, but he looked solid, and Billy bet the old man could whip his ass. He was rocking a pair of black jeans and a worn work shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. As Billy watched the bartender pull bottles from the box, he couldn’t help but notice the knotted muscles in the man’s forearms. Seriously, he thought, give the guy a pack of cigarettes and put him on a horse and you’d have an advertising campaign for Marlboro.