One
The fateful letter’s lain on the entryway table for days, getting buried under junk mail until the morning of Nana’s birthday bash, when Jo is exhorted to deal with the pile because her mom, Abigail, can’t possibly think in this chaos, and why can’t they be more tidy, and what has she done to deserve any of this?
She gets strung out every time they have to attend a thing at Nana’s, especially if it’s a holiday thing, or a birthday thing with such weight as Nana turning seventy-five and inviting half the planet to pay homage.
“It’s not my mail,” Jo grumbles. She’s sixteen: nobody sends her mail. So it’s not her pile or her job.
“Get that look off your face!” Abigail snaps.
She’s a balloon, seven months pregnant, easily flustered, and ready to pounce on the slightest thing. Jo scowls and loads the mail up in her arms. “It’s not my fault it gets like this. It’s consumerism. Look, it’s all ads and catalogs. It’s disgusting.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Abigail rolls her eyes at the ceiling. “Get on with it. Today’s going to be awful.”
Only because you make it that way, Jo fumes inwardly. She dumps the mail on the breakfast table, shoving aside the dirty plates left by her stepdad, Robert. Abigail says he can’t help never cleaning up, it’s how he was raised; plus, he’s a man. So he gets to leave a trail of dirty plates and cutlery and half-finished drinks around the house, and they—or rather Jo, now that Abigail’s increasingly ornery and tired—have to pick up after him the days the housekeeper doesn’t come. Robert shouldn’t be let off the hook. It’s so patriarchal, not to mention lame.
She’s been stacking junk mail on the right and bills and such on the left, and then she comes upon the letter, which is addressed, weirdly enough, to her: Josephine Margaret Lavoie.
It’s so startling that she just stands there drinking in the strangeness. It’s from a Nathanael Fletcher, Esquire., in St. Johnsbury, VT.
Vermont.
A tendril of unease snakes up through her belly into her throat. She tears at the envelope, unfolds the single sheet, and scans the contents.
“Mom?” she calls. “Mom!”
“What?” her mother screams from some other part of the house. “Why do you always yell? Why can’t you just find me?”
“Where are you?” Jo hollers, now in the hallway.
“UpSTAIRS!” Abigail screeches.
Jo takes the stairs two at a time. Her mom is in front of her wardrobe mirrors, wearing the dress she spent hours choosing at Nordstrom while Jo d
ied of boredom.
“I look like a whale,” she says in despair.
“Gammy Maureen’s dead,” Jo says, holding up the letter. “She left me the house.”
Abigail’s mouth opens in shock. Their eyes hold in the mirror. Slowly, Abigail turns around. “She what?”
Robert takes over deciphering the legalese when he comes back from tennis. He stands in the front hall, pink cheeked and dripping, frowning down at the letter. Abigail peers over his elbow while Jo frets, watching, waiting. A whole house, left to her. She owns an actual house. Even if it’s that one.
She feels a twinge of guilt that she’s more focused on the house than Gammy Maureen being dead. But in her defense, Jo barely knew her. The last time anyone even heard from Gammy was two years ago, at the funeral. She showed up in an ancient Cadillac, having driven on her own all the way from Vermont. The gathering for Jo’s dad, Enzo, was pitifully small, and when she limped in everyone stared. She stood out with her long gray braids and wrinkled linen outfit and leather sandals. She spoke to no one, just sat there with her hands clasped in a fist. At the end of it, on the steps outside, she stopped in front of Abigail and said: You ruined his life.
Abigail was too shocked to reply, and Gammy Maureen tromped down the steps to her boat of a car, threw her cane in the back seat, and roared off. In the moments after, Abigail feigned indifference, calling Gammy crazy as a sack of cats and an irrational old hag. But later that night, she blew up, storming around kitchen: So now I’m responsible for everything? she ranted. He chose me, and she never got over it! Crazy old cow! She’s the one that drove him crazy, not me! Then she screamed at Robert and smashed a dish when he remarked that she was having more cigarettes than her usual two per day.
For her part, Jo couldn’t believe someone so old—she had to be about eighty—drove all the way from Vermont and back in one day, alone. It was really striking, that determination, that abiding love. The mess of everything and the distance and the sadness encapsulated by this old lady’s long, lonely journey, and the will she had to deliver just the one sentence like a whip—it was hard not to be impressed, despite her mom’s humiliation. It was also amazing that Gammy hadn’t changed at all from when Jo met her, like she’d stepped right through time in her same musty farm clothes, striding tall with no care for anyone’s opinion.
In fact, now that Gammy’s gone, Jo realizes she’d imagined her there on the farm just trucking along forever.
But she’s dead. It’s truly a shock.
And the house—that it’s Jo’s.
She was only eight the one time she visited. The trip wasn’t planned; her mom was away, and her dad took her. The first days there were magical. She got to pet and brush the pony in the dim, breezy barn, swim in the pond, eat berries right off the bushes. Gammy taught her sewing and gave her tons of chocolate her mom nev
er allowed. Then things took a turn. The grown-ups had a huge fight. Jo can’t remember what happened—just that it was nighttime, and Gammy sounded so frightening, yelling over and over, Get out! Jo got badly hurt and still has ugly scars down her arm; Gammy hit her with a rake by accident, her dad later told her. She can’t remember that or anything else, not even when he drove them off in a paranoid schizophrenic state. Her next clear recollection is of the blue wooden floors in the motel room all the way over in Maine and hearing the ocean crashing outside the window. He hid her there for four days before the police showed up.
Nana refers to it as That Incident With Your Father, dismissing the whole thing with disapproving amusement, like a punch line to the story of Abigail’s disastrous first marriage. Jo can’t bear it when Nana talks that way. She can still hear her dad and Gammy shouting, she can feel the darkness of the night all around. If she pushes herself back through time, trying to be there again, she gets clammy and anxious. Something awful happened. She knows it, but no matter how hard she tries, she just can’t remember.
So thinking of the house, usually, is like tumbling into a black hole of sickening panic. But today, because of the letter, the house presents differently in her memory: bathed in sun, surrounded by waving green fields. She recalls the white clapboard siding, stairs with peeling paint, wind chimes singing on the front porch. Her years-old anxiety is swept away by excitement: My own house!
She gets enthralled by an image of herself in a convertible on a sunny highway, her hair flying, heading north.
“You don’t really own the house,” Robert interrupts her fantasy. “It won’t be yours till you’re eighteen. And then, gosh, we don’t want this, do we?” He tilts the letter at Abigail with an amused look. “What a headache.”
Jo’s insides crumple in embarrassment at her dumb notion of driving off, alone and free. She only has a learner’s permit: she can’t even go down the block.
“Once the will’s through probate, just tell him we intend to sell, and that’s that.” Robert flicks the paper as if it’s a pesky insect.
“It’s not that simple,” Abigail says, taking the letter out of his hand. She folds it slowly back up. “He says she left a trust for the people living there. What about them?”
Robert’s already halfway down the hall. “What are you going to do, take over supporting them? We’ve got to sell,” he reiterates, leaning ov
the staircase railing. “Trust me, hon, there’s no decision to make here.”
Once he’s safely out of earshot, Jo blurts, “I don’t want to sell!”
“Oh, what do you know,” Abigail says tiredly.
“So he gets to decide, even if it’s my house?”
“Young lady,” Abigail warns, going icy and stiff.
Jo glowers at her mother, who strikes a pose with her hands on her giant belly, communicating how much she dislikes disturbing the gestational process. Stupid amoebert, Jo thinks nastily. That’s her name for the baby, a combo of amoeba (formless, hideous, mindless thing) and Robert (annoying bore). If it weren’t for the amoebert, maybe Abigail would wake up to how pathetic her marriage is, maybe then they could finally get out of here.
But no.
“He’s right to be realistic,” Abigail says. “Maureen’s dumped a huge responsibility on us.”
“It’s on the lawyer, isn’t it? It’s not on us.”
“That’s just technical. I mean, the place is ours. Yours,” she corrects, reading Jo’s look. “But you’re a minor, so it falls to me. I’m the one who has to deal with it.”
The resentment in her tone smarts. “The letter says he’ll take care of them. There’s money for that. So what’s the big deal?”
“But how much money? For how many years? What else do they expect from us? Jo, it’s just not that simple. I mean, what happens if the roof needs replacing? Who pays?” She frowns at the paper in her hand, as if it might be signaling new messages. “I’ll have to go—God, I didn’t even think of that. But when?” she says in alarm, touching her pregnant belly. “It’ll have to be now, in the next few weeks! I won’t be able to deal with anything after the baby comes! My God, what a mess.”
Jo’s emotions are in such a whirl she can barely process her mom’s words. The fantasy of her escape in a convertible has evaporated, but her mom going there instead feels all wrong. The house is supposed to be hers. She should be the one to go.
But why does she even feel attached to that stupid house?
Because it was Daddy’s.
The sudden revelation hurts so awfully that she bends her head, scared she’s about to bust out crying.
“To think she had nothing, literally nothing, to do with us,” Abigail rants, “and then she goes and dumps this on us! I’ll have to go through her things. My God, that house was crammed with junk like a Turkish bazaar!”
A memory slides forth: the plaid couch in the TV room, sun slanting through the filmy curtains, dust in the air. The old brown dog on the ratty bed. An open box of candy, wrappers strewn across the table.
“I want to go with you,” Jo hears herself say.
Abigail is startled. “Why would you want that?”
“It’s my house. Why shouldn’t I go?”
“I don’t think it would be mentally healthy,” Abigail says with clinical coldness. “Anyway, you have art camp.”
“I don’t want to go to art camp.”
“Of course you do.”
“No, you want me to go. I want to go see my house.”
“Fine, then. Have a few sessions with Dr. Coletti, then we’ll see.”
The idea of having to sit in that chair all over again—this is going sideways fast. “Save the co-pay. I already know he’ll tell me it’s good to face up
to things once and for all.”
“Really?”
Jo isn’t sure Dr. Coletti would say that, but it sounds good. “Absolutely. And I can defer art camp. They let you do that, you know.”
Abigail considers all this, her eyes narrowed. Jo holds her ground.
At last, Abigail shrugs. “Well, all right, then, if you really want to. I could use the help taking inventory. And I might as well find a real estate agent. Maybe they can come take a look,” she muses, as if it’s her own idea, not Robert’s. “The lawyer can figure out what to do with these people. We shouldn’t have to have this burden.”
“What about me? Don’t I get any say?”
“Josephine, really. When you see it again, you’ll be fine with selling.”
“You don’t know that,” Jo retorts.
“Oh, Jo . . .” Her mom sighs, prequel to one of her laments about how Jo doesn’t understand, how she’s too young, how she’s so obstinate.
“Whatever,” Jo snaps, cutting her off. “I’m going to my room.”
She leaves her mom standing in the hallway wearing her tragic abandoned-heroine look. Upstairs, Jo closes her bedroom door hard, communicating that Abigail better not follow the way she sometimes does. She waits a moment, listening. Nothing.
She flops onto her beanbag, arms thrown behind her head. The room is hot, even with the air-conditioning on and the blinds lowered against the pounding July sun. She wishes she’d snagged some ice cream from the kitchen before holing up in her room. She can’t very well go down now; it’d be anticlimactic.
Her mom never listens to her, Jo fumes. If she’s so bent on selling, why even bother going? She hated the house, says the time she lived there was a slice of hell. It was when she got pregnant with Jo and dropped out of college. Nana and Pops were so frantic they hired a private detective to make sure she wasn’t being held captive by a cult. There was no cult, there was just Gammy. Whenever she comes up in conversation, Abigail makes the cuckoo sign at her temple and rolls her eyes. Gammy definitely had issues; it’s why Jo’s dad turned out the way he did—not because of genetics, since he was adopted at twelve, but just from living so many years with her.
Nana says Abigail let herself get silly with love instead of reading the obvious signs of looming disaster. Maureen was bad enough, but Enzo wasn’t even her actual son, and his background was a total mystery because he couldn’t remember it. Who couldn’t remember anything, not even one detail? Someone severely damaged, that’s who. Someone dangerously broken. Plus, he was dark-skinned, Hispanic looking. He could be from anywhere. He might even be Arab. Who knew what he’d done that he supposedly couldn’t remember? This was who Abigail went and
got pregnant with, a fellow with no lineage, no money, nothing to grab on to but his wild hair and big laugh. Abigail should have known he’d never fit in, and then, as if to hammer the point home, he ran off with Jo and ended up in the loony bin.
Sometimes, Jo feels a reluctant pride in that younger version of her mom. She went against everything for the sake of doomed love: her parents, their expectations, society. It’s unreal, seeing her now. Look who she married the second time around, after all: just about the most conservative, bland, oyster-shucking, tennis-playing guy in a bow tie you might find wandering a Cambridge street. A stranger to their family would never for a single second dream Abigail once ran off with a schizophrenic in a farm truck. It’s as if her whole Rebellious Phase, which is what Nana calls it, never even happened.
Jo is startled by the sudden rise of voices downstairs. She tiptoes across her room, cracks the door to listen. Robert and her mom are fighting about the Vermont trip. He doesn’t want Abigail going, thinks it’s reckless. She isn’t giving in, though. It’s weird, since usually she does when he gets this way, all logical and stern. Maybe her mom actually wants to go, deep down. Maybe she just wants to see, the way Jo yearns to. Like a final goodbye to the past.
She imagines the house on the hill, empty, silent, waiting for them. It’s weird to think Gammy died and no one told her, even if it’s not like Gammy ever called or wrote or anything. It hurts, too, thinking about her dad, how he’s gone forever, and how he was young and happy there, once upon a time. She knows he was because she has pictures his girlfriend, Sue, brought over after he died, along with a bunch of stuff in his old canvas satchel. He wanted Jo to have it, Sue told her, and she was making good on her word.
Jo shuts her door, muffling the ongoing argument. The satchel’s tucked in the back of her closet, and she has to drag out shoes, old puzzles, a sleeping bag, before she gets to it. She kneels on the floor, one ear attuned to the drama downstairs. The buckles are rusted, the leather straps floppy with age. Her dad carried it everywhere, laden with water bottles and snacks and random junk toys he bought at checkout counters. Now it’s just got his old stuff in it, the stuff he wanted her to have. She hasn’t looked at it in a long time. There’s an envelope of photos and his old plaid shirt, the one she practiced embroidery on when she was little. There’s one of the wooden boxes he carved with two animals inside, a fox and a bobcat. He made a whole forest of animals for her, and she’d line them up in a parade. There’s his whittling knife, a Swiss Army knife, and a box of shining, pretty lures. He always said he would teach her to fish, but they never got around to it. At the very bottom, wrapped in an old linen dish towel, are the iron cowbell and chain. They always stayed in the bag, no matter what. She picks up the heavy, cold bell with both hands. When her dad took her to the motel, he made a tent out of sheets and hung this bell over where she
slept. It would keep her safe, he said.
What matters, Dr. Coletti’s words float into her head, is that he did keep you safe.
Sure, if being safe from imaginary creatures counts. Meanwhile, the bell could’ve fallen on her head and knocked her out.
Thinking of her dad lugging around these weird talismans and how he bequeathed them to her with this mishmash of stuff brings on a stifling tightness inside her chest. She forces herself to breathe through it, a trick Dr. Coletti taught her, then buries the bell back in its hiding place. It’s just all so sad, and it’ll never be any different.
She sinks back into the beanbag with the envelope of faded photos from his childhood. At least in that part of his life, he was happy and normal seeming. There’s one of him and Gammy on the front steps, and another of him at the barn, holding a goat by a rope. Jo’s favorite is the one of him in the field. She stares hard at the young man with his explosion of curly black hair and laughing eyes. The yellow field stretches far away behind him, the blue sky faded almost white. He looks like a regular guy in this picture, healthy, outdoorsy. Jo imagines herself in that field with her own wild hair blowing in the wind. She knows nothing about fields or goats. All she knows is every day, she wishes she were somewhere else, and that now, out of the blue, there’s a somewhere else to be.
A loud clatter jolts her. Abigail didn’t go for glass this time, Jo surmises. The copper fruit bowl hurled against a wall, maybe. Abigail hurling something across a room is the climax to every one of their arguments, like a shot fired to bring order. Now Robert will get all conciliatory and goopy, and Abigail will drag things out a bit longer, banging stuff around and complaining he never helps, till she finally burns out and they cuddle and make up. If Jo appears anytime before that phase, Abigail will zero in on her: Why can’t you ever do your hair properly? Why do you have to be so sullen all the time? So she stays put, even though she’s kind of hungry and could use a snack, but then that would provoke the lecture about watching her diet.
Jo sighs, maneuvering herself onto her back on the beanbag. She stares at the ceiling, waiting. After a short while, she hears the heavy footfalls and grunts that signal her mom’s dramatic, pregnant ascent of the stairs. Soon, there will be a whole new eruption, because Abigail hates the dress she got and how will she ever look presentable and to think of all those people seeing her like this.
Jo holds up the photo to the light streaming through the shade. Her father appears as the ghost that he is, an outline against the yellow field, like he’s floating in his transparent slice of heaven. ...
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