The Hundred-Year House

1

For a ghost story, the tale of Violet Saville Devohr was vague and underwhelming. She had lived, she was unhappy, and she died by her own hand somewhere in that vast house. If the house hadn’t been a mansion, if the death hadn’t been a suicide, if Violet Devohr’s dark, refined beauty hadn’t smoldered down from that massive oil portrait, it wouldn’t have been a ghost story at all. Beauty and wealth, it seems, get you as far in the afterlife as they do here on earth. We can’t all afford to be ghosts.

In April, as they repainted the kitchen of the coach house, Zee told Doug more than she ever had about her years in the big house: how she’d spent her entire, ignorant youth there without feeling haunted in the slightest — until one summer, home from boarding school, when her mother had looked up from her shopping list to say, “You’re pale. You’re not depressed, are you? There’s no reason to succumb to that. You know your great-grandmother killed herself in this house. I understand she was quite self-absorbed.” After that, Zee would listen all night long, like the heroine of one of the gothic novels she loved, to the house creaking on its foundation, to the knocking she’d once been assured was tree branches hitting the windows.

Doug said, “I can’t imagine you superstitious.”

“People change.”

They were painting pale blue over the chipped yellow. They’d pulled the appliances from the wall, covered the floor in plastic. There was a defunct light switch, and there was a place near the refrigerator where the wall had been patched with a big square board years earlier. Both were thick with previous layers of paint, so Doug just painted right on top.

He said, “You realize we’re making the room smaller. Every layer just shrinks the room.” His hair was splattered with blue.

It was one of the moments when Zee remembered to be happy: looking at him, considering what she had. A job and a house and a broad-shouldered man. A glass of white wine in her left hand.

It was a borrowed house, but that was fine. When Zee and Doug first moved back to town two years ago, they’d found a cramped and mildewed apartment above a gourmet deli. On three separate occasions, Zee had received a mild electric shock when she plugged in her hair dryer. And then her mother offered them the coach house last summer and Zee surprised herself by accepting.

She’d only agreed to returned home because she was well beyond her irrational phase. She could measure her adulthood against the child she’d been when she lived here last. As Zee peeled the tape from the window above the sink and looked out at the lights of the big house, she could picture her mother and Bruce in there drinking rum in front of the news, and Sofia grabbing the recycling on her way out, and that horrible dog sprawled on his back. Fifteen years earlier, she’d have looked at those windows and imagined Violet Devohr jostling the curtains with a century of pent-up energy. When the oaks leaned toward the house and plastered their wet leaves to the windows, Zee used to imagine that it wasn’t the rain or wind but Violet, in there still, sucking everything toward her, caught forever in her final, desperate circuit of the hallways.

They finished painting at two in the morning, and they sat in the middle of the floor and ate pizza. Doug said, “Does it feel more like it’s ours now?” And Zee said, “Yes.”

—

At a department meeting later that same week, Zee reluctantly agreed to take the helm of a popular fall seminar. English 372 (The Spirit in the House: Ghosts in the British and American Traditions) consisted of ghost stories both oral and literary. It wasn’t Zee’s kind of course — she preferred to examine power structures and class struggles and imperialism, not things that go bump in the night — but she wasn’t in a position to say no. Doug would laugh when she told him.

On the bright side, it was the course she wished she could have taken herself, once upon a time. Because if there was a way to kill a ghost story, this was it. What the stake did to the heart of the vampire, literary analysis could surely accomplish for the legend of Violet Devohr.

2

Doug worked in secret whenever Zee left the house.

The folders on his desk were still optimistically full of xeroxed articles on the poet Edwin Parfitt. And he was still writing a book on Parfitt, in that its bones continued to exist, on forty printed pages and two separate diskettes. The wallpaper on his computer (Zee had set it up) was the famous photo of Parfitt kissing Edna St. Vincent Millay on the cheek.

But what Doug was actually sitting down to write, after a respectful silence for the death of both his career and the last shred of his manhood, was book number 118 in the Friends for Life series, Melissa Calls the Shots. He hid the document on his hard drive in a file called “Systems Operating Folder 30.” This book, unlike the Parfitt monograph, even had an actual editor, a woman named Frieda who called once a week to check his progress.

Doug’s stopover in the land of preteen literature was only the latest in a wretched chain of events — lack of money, paralysis on the monograph, failure to find employment, surreal indignity of moving into the coach house on Zee’s mother’s estate — but it would be the last. He would get this done and get paid, and then, because he’d be on a roll, he’d get other things done. He would publish the Parfitt book, he’d land a tenure-track post, and somehow along the way his hair would grow thicker.

He’d found Frieda through his friend Leland, a luckless poet who wrote wilderness adventures at the same press for “two grand a pop.” Leland talked like that, and he drank whiskey because Faulkner had. “They give you the entire plot,” he said, “and you just stick to the style. Really there is no style. It’s refreshing.” Leland claimed they took a week each, and Doug was enchanted with the idea of shooting out a fully formed book like some kind of owl pellet. He hadn’t written fiction since grad school, when he’d published a few experimental stories (talking trees, towns overcome with love) that now mortified him, even if Zee still adored them. But these publication credentials, plus Leland’s endorsement, landed him the gig. He knew nothing about wilderness adventure, but the press was suddenly short a writer for their middle-grade girls’ series — and desperate enough to hire a man. And so. Here he was.

The money would be nice. The coach house was free, but not the food, the car payments, the chiropractor. And that last wasn’t optional: If Dr. Morsi didn’t fix Doug’s back twice a week, he’d be unable to sit and work on anything at all. Frieda sent him four other books from the series, plus a green binder labeled “THE FFL BIBLE” with fact sheets on each character. “Melissa hates dark chocolate!” came several bullet points above “Melissa’s grandfather, Boppy, died of cancer in #103.”

“The first chapter,” Frieda told him on the phone, “introduces the conflict, which is the Populars on the team, will Melissa ever be goalie, et cetera.” He’d never met Frieda, but imagined she wore pastel blazers. “The second chapter is where you recap the founding of the club. Our return readers skip it, so you can plagiarize chunks from other volumes. The rest will be clear from the outline. Everything’s wrapped up at the end, but there’s that thread you leave hanging, ‘What’s wrong with Candy,’ which is where 119 picks up; 119 is being written already, so — as we tell all our writers — it’s important you don’t make uninvited changes to the world of the series.” Doug took comfort in the fact that this was clearly a memorized speech, part of the formula.

He dumped the books at the thrift store, hid the “Bible” pages among some old tax forms, then went to the library every day for a week to skim the series.

And meanwhile, the little house was strangling him, tightening its screws and hinges. There was an infestation of ladybugs that spring, a plague straight out of Exodus. Not even real ladybugs but imposter Japanese beetles with dull copper shells, ugly black underwings jutting out below. Twice a day, Doug would suck them off the window screens with the vacuum attachment, listening as each hit the inner bag with a satisfying thwack. The living ones smelled like singed hair — whether from landing too close to lightbulbs or from some vile secretion, no one was sure. Sometimes Doug would take a sip of water and it would taste burnt, and he would know a bug had been in that glass, swimming for its life and winning.

There was a morning in May — notable only for Zee storming around in full academic regalia, late for commencement — when Doug, still in bed, nearly blurted it all out. Wasn’t it a tenet of a good marriage that you kept no secrets beyond the gastrointestinal? Hundreds of movies and one drunken stranger in a bar had told him as much. And so he almost spilled it, casual-like, as she tossed shoes from the closet. “Hey,” he might have said, “I have this project on the side.” But he knew the look Zee would give: concern just stopping her dark eyes from rolling to the ceiling. A long silence before she kissed his forehead. He didn’t blame her. She’d married the guy with the fellowship and bright future and trail of heartbroken exes, not this schlub who needed sympathy and prodding. When she dumped her entire purse out on the bed and refilled it with just her keys and wallet, he took it as a convenient sign: Shut the hell up, Doug. He might have that tattooed on his arm one day.

Zee’s mother, Gracie, would sometimes include the two of them in her parties, where she’d steer Doug around by the elbow: “My son-in-law Douglas Herriot, who’s a fantastic poet, and you know, I think it’s wonderful. They’re in the coach house till he’s all done writing. It’s my own little NEA grant!” Doug would mutter that he wasn’t a poet at all, that he was a “freelance PhD” writing about a poet, but no one seemed to hear.

The monograph was an attempt to turn his anemic doctoral dissertation on Edwin Parfitt into something publishable. Parfitt was coming back into style, to the extent that dead, marginal modernists can, and if Doug finished this thing soon he could get in on the first wave of what he planned, in job interviews, to call “the Parfitt renaissance.” The dissertation had been straight analysis, and Doug wanted to incorporate some archival research, to be the first to assemble a timeline of the poet’s turbulent life. In her less patient moments, Zee accused him of trying to write a biography — academically uncouth and unhelpful career-wise — but Doug didn’t see what harm it would do to set some context. And the man’s life story was intriguing: Eddie Parfitt (Doug couldn’t help but use his nickname, mentally — after nine years of research he felt he knew the guy) was wealthy, ironic, gay, and unhappy, a prodigy who struggled to fulfill his own early promise. He committed suicide at thirty-seven after his lover died in the Second World War. Parfitt had left few personal records, though. Nor had he flitted about the Algonquin Round Table and cracked wise for posterity. Entire periods — the publication gap between 1929 and late 1930, for instance, after which his work became astonishingly flat — lacked any documentation whatsoever.

Not that it mattered now.

Each morning, as Doug switched off his soul and settled in to write (“Twelve-year-old Melissa Hopper didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer,” the thing began), he imagined little Parfitt stuffed in the bottom desk drawer on those diskettes, biding his time between the staplers, choking with thirst. The ladybugs hurled their bodies against his desk lamp, and it sounded like knocking — like the ghost of Parfitt, frantically pounding against the wood.

—

In the brief window between commencement and the start of Zee’s summer teaching, Gracie invited them to the big house for brunch. They ate on the back terrace overlooking the grounds — the paths, the fountain, the fish ponds. It was like the garden behind a museum, a place where art students might take picnic lunches. Bruce, Gracie’s second husband, had conveniently excused himself to make his tee time when Gracie announced that she had invited Bruce’s son and daughter-in-law to move into the coach house too.

“It’s really a two-family house,” she said, “and what was done, way back, was to keep the gardener’s family there as well as the driver’s, and they all shared the kitchen. Can you believe, so many servants? I couldn’t manage.”

Zee didn’t put the butter dish down. “Mom, I’ve met Case twice. We’re strangers.” Bruce’s children had always lived in Texas.

“Yes,” Gracie said, “and it’s a shame. Didn’t you dance with him at our wedding, Zilla? You’d have been in college, the both of you. He’s quite athletic.”

“No.”

“Well he’s out of work. He lost five million dollars and they fired him. Miriam’s a wonderful artist, but it doesn’t support them, you know how that is, so they need the space as much as you.”

Doug managed to nod, and hoped Zee wouldn’t hold it against him.

“So they’ll both hang around the house all day,” Zee said.

“Well yes, but it shouldn’t bother you, as you’ll be at work. It only concerns Douglas. He could even write about them!” Gracie rubbed the coral lipstick off her mug and smoothed her hair — still blonde, still perfect. “And something will open up at the college for Douglas, I’m sure of it. Are you asking for him?”

“Really,” Doug said, “I don’t mind. I can get used to anything.”

—

That afternoon, Doug watched his wife from the window above his desk. She stood on the lawn between the big house and the coach house. Anyone else might have paced. For Zee, stillness was the surest sign of stress. She stared at the coach house as if she might burn it down. As if it might burn her down.

She wouldn’t let herself pitch a fit. At some point she and Gracie had come to the tacit agreement that no actual money or property would pass between them. It was the apotheosis of that old-money creed that money should never be discussed: In this family, it couldn’t even be used. Doug had doubts whether Zee would even accept her eventual inheritance, or just give it directly to some charity Gracie wouldn’t approve of. She was a Marxist literary scholar — this was how she actually introduced herself at wine and cheese receptions, leaving Doug to explain to the confused physics professor or music department secretary that this was more a theoretical distinction than a political one — and having money would not help her credibility. But she had accepted the house.

And now this.

—

The Texans were just there one Tuesday in June when Doug returned from the gym. He picked a box off the U-Haul lip and carried it up to the kitchen, which sat between the two second-floor apartments. Doug loved the feel of an upstairs kitchen, of looking out over the driveway as he flipped pancakes.

A woman with curly brown hair stood on the counter in cutoffs and a tank top, arranging plates in a high cupboard. He put the box down softly, worried that if he startled her, she’d fall. He waited, watching, which seemed somehow inappropriate, and he was about to clear his throat when she turned.

“Oh!” she said. “You’re — Hey!” He offered a hand, but she shook it first, then realized what it was for and held on tight as she hopped to the floor. She was a bit younger than Doug and Zee, maybe twenty-eight. And tiny. She came to his armpit. “Miriam, obviously. I hope we’re not in your way. I had to scoot some glasses over.”

“Doug Herriot,” he said, and wondered at his own formality. “I can clear out the lower cupboards. You’ll never reach that.”

“I’m not so tall, am I! But Case is. We’ll be fine.” She opened the box on the table, saw it contained clothes, and closed it again. “This is a hell of a place.”

He looked out the window and laughed. “Yeah, it’s not subtle.”

“Oh, I meant this place!” She tapped the open cabinet door. “This is quarter sawn oak!”

Doug had no idea what she meant, but he nodded. He wasn’t surprised that the kitchen should be well built; the same architect had designed both houses, and presumably the same carpenters and brick layers had constructed them. The stone wall that bordered the estate also formed the eastern wall of the coach house, or at least its ground floor. The second story rose above that, making the structure look from the road like a child’s playhouse perched atop the wall. Really it was quite large. The ground floor had at first been open garage space, with two arched entrances for cars. Gracie and her first husband, Zee’s father, had the arches filled in with glass panels, and stuck a sunporch on the back. Why they bothered was unclear, except that in the post-chauffeur sixties they’d wanted an attached garage on the big house and felt they ought to transform the old one into something useful and rentable.

The estate had belonged to Gracie’s family all along — the Devohrs, though Gracie never used her maiden name. The Devohrs sat firmly in the second tier of the great families of the last century, not with the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts of the world but certainly shoulder-to-shoulder with the Astors, the Fricks, and were lesser known in these parts only by virtue of their Canadian roots. Toronto was hardly Tuxedo Park. Of those families, though, only the Devohrs were so continually subject to scandal and tragedy and rumor. An unkind tabloid paper of the 1920s had run a headline about the “Devohrcing Devohrs,” and the name had stuck. So had the behavior that prompted it.

Before that infamy, back in 1900, Augustus Devohr (unfocused son of the self-made patriarch), wanting to oversee his grain investments more closely, had built this castle near Lake Michigan, thirty miles straight north of Chicago. By 1906, after his wife killed herself in the house — the suicide that had so bothered an adolescent Zee — he wanted nothing more to do with the Midwest or its crops. In either a fit of charity or a deft tax dodge, Augustus allowed the home to be used for many years as an artists’ colony. Writers and painters and musicians would stay, expenses paid, for one to six months. And — a knife in Doug’s heart — Edwin Parfitt himself had visited the colony, had worked and lived right behind one of those windows, though Doug would never know which one. It was the real reason Doug had even agreed to move into the coach house: as if the proximity would, through some magical osmosis, help his research.

Miriam climbed back on the counter, her small legs folding and then unfolding like a nimble insect’s. She redid her ponytail. She wasn’t exactly attractive, Doug decided (he’d been deliberating, against his will), but she had an interesting face with a jutting chin, eyes bright like a little dog’s. And as soon as he thought it, he recognized it. It was the beginning of a thousand love stories. (“She wasn’t beautiful, but she had an interesting face, the kind artists asked to paint.”) And uninvited, the next thought bore down: He was supposed to fall in love. It wasn’t true, and it wouldn’t happen, but there it was, and it stuck. Anyone watching him in a movie would expect him to fall in love, would wait patiently through the whole bag of popcorn. He tried to push the thought away before she turned again, before she saw it on his face. He excused himself and left the room.

3

Doug was reading in bed when Zee got home. She closed the door. “Did you see them?”

“I met her — Miriam — and she’s okay. She’s small. But then I stayed in here working. I’m sure we don’t have to whisper.”

It was probably true — the two bedrooms were at opposite ends of the second floor. Each apartment had a large entry room, which would once have been the sitting area but which Doug and Zee used as a study, desks under both windows. Before the Texans came, they would use the other apartment for laundry folding or exercise or sex.

“You just hid in here? Did you meet Case?”

“I didn’t want to make them feel they were invading. You know, like if I sat and watched them unpack. Right?”

She was disappointed. She’d wanted the whole story, the gruesome details. Something concrete at which to direct her anger.

She had managed to stay calm and pleasant all day. She had forced herself to smile when Sid Cole had called to her across the lawn — in front of students — that “Marxists don’t drink cappuccino!” She’d even raised her coffee cup into the air. She had laughed out loud: Ha!

The irony was not lost on her that she, willfully mistaken for a Communist by her most obnoxious colleagues, should be allergic to communal living.

“Does she have a Texas accent?”

“No, actually. I don’t think so. Not really, more like — I don’t know.”

What was wrong with him?

She said, “Did she take Case’s last name?”

“I have no idea.”

“That would have a horrible sound. Miriam Breen. It’s too ugly.”

“Yes, it’s ugly.”

Zee changed and found her glasses and lay on top of the covers, underlining an article in The New York Review of Books.

“It should give you some impetus to write,” she said. “The more annoying these people are, the better.”

“I’m writing every day.”

She hoped it was true. The worst part of her wanted to stand over his shoulder as he wrote, to suggest commas. Once, early in grad school, she’d tidied up a paper of his when he was out for the night. He’d never noticed.

Doug flipped himself around on the bed and started rubbing her feet.

“Doug,” she said. “Stop it.”

“I can’t hear you.”

“I have stuff to do.”

“I’m sorry, I’m way down here by your feet, and I can’t hear you.”

He peeked over the crest of her knees like a groundhog, then ducked down. He did it till she laughed. She put the journal down, and he worked his way up.

4

Case and Miriam and Zee were at the table when Doug came out the next morning, fortunately having remembered to put on pants. Case was tall, as Miriam had said, and deeply tan with big, straight teeth. Polo shirt and flip-flops. In a movie, Doug thought, he’d be the guy who beats up John Cusack. The men shook hands, and Doug found himself giving Miriam a ridiculous little salute. He began making eggs, just so he had something to do.

Zee was dressed for teaching her summer session class, silk blouse tucked into her skirt in such a tidy way that if he hadn’t known better, Doug would have imagined her morning routine involved duct tape. “So,” she said, “I hear you’re searching for a job, Case.”

Case looked up from his cereal, leaned back, and regarded Zee as if she’d ruined his beach vacation by asking where he planned to be five years from next Thursday. “I’m in no rush,” he said. And then he laughed, releasing them all abruptly from whatever contempt he’d held them in. Doug decided, in that moment, that he despised Case Breen.

“He needs a few weeks to recoup,” Miriam said. “We’re aiming for September.”

“Gonna get some exercise. Might shop for a new car.”

Zee said, “What’s wrong with your old one?”

Miriam put her hand on Case’s shoulder and said, “I hope we won’t be in the way. I know you’re making a sacrifice. I was going to set up on the sunporch to work, but only if it’s okay with you.”

Doug gestured to the constellation of ladybugs on the ceiling. “You won’t be more trouble than our other houseguests.” No one laughed.

“Or the ghost,” Zee added, and smiled as if she’d just played some kind of trump card, as if Case and Miriam would now spring up and flee. “Violet mostly sticks to the big house, but you’ll hear her knocking on the windows some nights. You’ll get used to it.”

Miriam said, “Oh, I love ghost stories. I do.”

Zee picked up her keys. “I’m kidding, of course.”

She left, and Doug ate his eggs standing up. Case asked if Doug wanted to join him for a run, and he managed to bow out, blaming his bad knees.

“Suit yourself,” Case said, and (Doug could have sworn) glanced at Doug’s paunch before leaving the room.

Doug started scrubbing dishes, and a minute later Case appeared down on the drive, changed and stretching his calves. Miriam came over to rinse and dry, and they talked above the sound of the water. He learned that Miriam’s art was mixed-media mosaics.

“Most people would call it detritus collage,” she said. “But I use classical mosaic techniques. Just using found pieces. I’m always cutting up Case’s clothes.” She pushed her curls from her face with a wet hand. “Tell me about your poetry.”

“No,” he said, which she didn’t deserve. “Sorry. I’m not a poet. I’m writing about a poet. Gracie’s mixed up. I didn’t mean to shout at you.”

She smiled, as if it were regular and amusing for people to make idiots of themselves in front of her. “What poet?”

“Oh. Edwin Parfitt? He was a modernist.”

“Sure, right, that one poem! From high school! I mean, not—”

“‘Apollo on the Mississippi.’”

“Yes! ‘Whose eyes’ bright embers gleam.’ That one!”

“He was a one-hit wonder. It’s his worst poem, but it’s all anyone knows. That and his suicide note. He drowned himself in a lake, and the note had instructions for his friends to burn his body on the beach just like the poet Shelley. And they did it.” He let the soapy water out and sprayed down the basin. All because of that inane thought yesterday, he was aware of the distance between their bodies.

“I’d love to read it,” she said. “Your book, not the suicide note.” She dried her little red hands. “Well, both.”

5

Zee took two aspirin, forgetting they’d just make her sicker to her stomach. The cramps might have been from dehydration, or from the hell of teaching summer school English to the seventeen-year-olds who were supposed to be experiencing college-level academics but were more interested in college-level drinking. But the headache was definitely from having her home invaded.

She gave up on grading (“Most people,” began one essay on Heart of Darkness, “will encounter water at some point in their lives”) and stacked the papers neatly on the corner of the desk, so it would look like a planned installation rather than an abandonment. On top she put the strange metal thing she’d found in the woods behind the big house that spring. It was probably some sort of machine part, but she loved the design of it, the waffled roundness, and she loved its thick and ancient rust. She thought of it as a metal daisy top: six hollow petals around a hollow center. She stuck a pencil in one of the holes, and now the stack looked complete.

She checked mail and got coffee in the English office. Chantal, the department secretary, was on the phone, so Zee lingered over a sabbatical notice on the board.

Zee was obsessive about the bulletin board, and about the campus papers and the department calendar. She figured her job had two parts: the work part and the career part. The work part right now was teaching, publishing, flying to petty conferences in depressing university towns. The career part was showing up at concerts and sitting behind the college president, keeping in touch with everyone from grad school. If she could, she’d have hosted dinner parties. It was easy enough to tell her colleagues she and Doug were renting a coach house in town, but it would be far too risky to bring them so close to the Devohr family history. She couldn’t imagine the jokes Sid Cole would make if he knew she’d been to the manor born.

Thank God the “Devohr” was buried under her father’s name, Grant. She’d been tempted to take Doug’s name just to inter the Devohrs one layer further, but she refused to part with that last scrap of her father. She told colleagues, if they asked, that her mother had stayed home, and her father had been a journalist and a recovering alcoholic, all of which was true. Really, she felt she could say “recovered” alcoholic now, in defiance of all the careful AA jargon, because he’d never have the chance to fall off the wagon again, and never had in the twelve years she knew him, not even on the night Nixon was reelected and he was the only man in town hurling books at the TV. He had a lifelong habit of sucking coins — popping a nickel in his mouth and flipping it with his tongue while he wrote or thought — that she figured must have been some kind of crutch. A reminder not to drink, maybe.

Chantal hung up and crossed her eyes at Zee. “Are we working out?” she said.

“I need to punch someone. But working out will suffice.”

Chantal had a thousand little braids, and not one was ever askew. She was the most competent person Zee knew — a filing system to rival the FBI’s — and Zee liked her better than any actual department member. They did the ellipticals side by side, and Zee told Chantal about the Texans moving in. “I never get along with southern women,” she said. “I’m always offending them. What I see as debate, they see as assault. The worst part is, Doug will fall in love with her.” She was whispering. There were students all around.

“Is she pretty?”

“The point is she’s there.”

Chantal was cheating, taking her hands off the grips. “But he’s not like that, is he? Your husband?”

“He’s so desperate not to work on the Parfitt thing, he’d fall in love with a zebra. He might not do anything about it, but he’ll fall in love.” A woman like Miriam, with the wild eyes and chewed-off fingernails, would fall for anyone who listened to her emote — especially Doug, whose half smile was a sort of magical charm. It had disarmed even Zee. But Doug wouldn’t recognize the difference between love and a diversion, would think that just because he hadn’t been distracted like this before, there was destiny involved. “You know what his nickname was, in school? Dough. Because he was Doug H., but also because he’s just — he’s malleable. He’s suggestible.”

Chantal pushed the button to up her speed. “Keep him on his toes. Not to tell you what to do. But a bored man is — I don’t know, isn’t there an expression for that?” She laughed. “A bored man is not a good thing.”

6

Doug walked to the library, even though he was more inclined to watch morning TV and do half-hearted yoga downstairs. The Texans might not irritate him into working harder, but they would embarrass him out of doing anything else. He even stayed up in the adult section, something he hadn’t done since he’d started the Friends book.

“I wondered if you had anything on Laurelfield,” he said to the reference librarian. “The old artists’ colony.” He’d asked just a few months ago, but there was always the chance something new had appeared.

Laurelfield was still, technically, the name of the house. Those olden-day Devohrs had named their homes like pets. When Zee and Doug were first dating, Gracie had sent out Christmas cards with an artist’s rendering of the estate on the front, the word Laurelfield in script beneath. “It looks like the logo of a ham company,” Zee had said. “Thank you for buying Laurelfield smoked sausages.” It was the first time Doug had fully stopped to think what it meant that his girlfriend’s family had spawned five Canadian MPs, that they had namesake buildings and foundations all over Ontario.

The librarian led him to the glass-front cabinet and pulled out four books on local history. The only helpful one was the photo book of local estates he’d seen before, but he sat anyway in a computer chair staring again at the grainy photo dated 1929.

Designed in the English country style by Adler Ross in 1900 for the Devohrs of Toronto, Laurelfield was home to the Laurelfield Arts Colony from 1912 to 1954. Notable residents included the artists Charles Demuth, Grant Wood, and Emil Armin; composer Charles Ives; and poets Marianne Moore, Lola Ridge, and Edwin Parfitt. The home is now again a private residence.

These seven guests, while impressive, were the only seven he’d ever seen listed — and were, in other words, the only ones of note. Perhaps this was why there were no archives, no coffee table books of photographs and reminiscences.

The picture was taken from high up. It showed the north end of the big house, plus the space between the two buildings, filled by a massive, long-gone oak. Doug squinted at the windows, hoping to see lord knows what. Parfitt making out with Charles Demuth, maybe. There, in the bottom right corner, sat the coach house, two cars on the gravel drive in front, the ground floor still open to motor traffic. A man in knickers leaned against the eastern wall near the cars, his hand raised to his mouth. Smoking. By his feet, a blur of a dog. Doug knew the man wasn’t Parfitt, though he couldn’t say exactly why. The prosaic hat, perhaps, or some intangibly heterosexual angle to the hips, or the fact that here he stood by the cars when Parfitt would be upstairs on his bed, ankles crossed, gin in his left hand, black fountain pen in his right.

Doug had no idea when Parfitt was actually in residence at Laurelfield. He visited both Laurelfield and the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire throughout the twenties and thirties, but the Parfitt archive at Princeton mentioned Laurelfield only once, in a letter from 1942: “I haven’t been as sick since one summer at Laurelfield,” he wrote to his niece, “and this time it’s worse because I’m getting old, Annette, I am.” When Doug had found that reference, he was already dating Zee, had already seen the Laurelfield Christmas card. He double-checked with her, as casually as he could (“Didn’t you say your house was an artists’ colony? At some point?”) and when Zee confirmed, it wasn’t that Doug saw her as a ticket to Laurelfield but that he took the connection for a sign. Here was this woman whose childhood bedroom might have been the very room in which Parfitt had written! The stars were aligned, and he should marry her. Zee, no Parfitt fan, was less impressed by the coincidence. “Lots of people stayed there,” she said. “He was probably in Grand Central Station at some point, too. That doesn’t make it hallowed ground.”

Doug xeroxed the picture and started home. It was blazing hot, the time of day when more reasonable nations took a siesta. He felt productive, for a moment, the xerox folded in his pocket, until it hit him that this was his way of “getting to work” on what should have been hard-nosed textual analysis: copying a picture of a house that he could see out his bedroom window anyway.

Halfway back, Case passed him running, on the opposite side of the street. Shining in the sun. Looking like he belonged in this town, in a way Doug never would.

7

Zee decided not to drink at the lunch.

The eight department members still in town were squeezed into the back room of Pasquali’s with spouses. Zee did not invite Doug to these events, preferring to talk him up in his absence. She’d created, over the past year, a mythical Doug whose earth-shattering book would soon be completed, whose thesis adviser wanted him to return to teach in Madison.

The celebration of Sid Cole’s twentieth year at the college (his thirty-fifth year teaching overall) had been put off for a few weeks by Sid’s gall bladder surgery. But now here he was, with his caterpillar eyebrows and obsessive lip-licking, as sprightly and malevolent as ever. Old age turns the most horrible people into “characters,” their misanthropy masquerading as crustiness. Sid was known to offer students a five-minute break in the middle of long afternoon classes, then mock anyone with the nerve to leave. The adoring faithful stayed and gleefully jotted “Coleisms” in their notebooks.

Cole was to blame, in Zee’s mind, for Doug’s joblessness. Two years ago, right after the college hired her, they offered Sid Cole’s job to Doug. Cole had announced his retirement, and Doug was the perfect fit. Then, the day before Doug was to meet with the dean and talk salary, twelve of Cole’s students showed up at the old man’s house with a bag of letters. They quoted Milton and Frost and Thoreau. They convinced him to stay. Zee’s contract was already signed, and Doug’s only other leads were on the east coast. Now, even if Cole retired, Doug — two years and zero publications later — was significantly less qualified for the job than he’d been back then.

Two things were necessary: a vaguely Doug-shaped hole, and a Doug who could account, impressively, for the past two years. The latter she had some control over; he’d finish the book this summer, even if she had to write the damn thing for him. The former was harder, but there were two small colleges in this town alone and a dozen more in Chicago, any one of which might become an option. It seemed even the adjuncts had sunk in their teeth, though, and weren’t budging.

And Cole announced, regularly, that now he was in for life. “They’ll have to carry me out on my desk chair,” he said, “exams clutched to my chest with rigor mortis.”

Zee sat between Ida Hayes and Jerry Keaton, grateful at least for her free pasta. Golda Blum, the acting chair, made a toast to “Sid’s illustrious decades of terrorizing students and baffling his colleagues.” It was an unspoken rule that to toast Cole was to roast him, and that he in turn would grunt and curse like the village drunk. Hoffman and Grasso stood to read a poem they’d written in a fit of Chianti-induced cleverness: “Old King Cole was a Derrida soul, and a Derrida soul was he — and he called for his Yeats and he called for his Poe and he called for his lady-friends three!”

Cole stood to give a brief speech about how he planned, in his twenty-first year at the college, to scare each and every student out of his classes, until he was left with “exactly one attractive and intelligent specimen that will grade its own papers and massage my neck.” When even Golda laughed, Zee pretended to as well. Cole must have felt his age protected him against rumors of impropriety, though Zee understood there were plenty of whispers about the man back in the eighties. She’d heard a senior boy claim he knew “for a fact” that the policy of leaving office doors cracked during student conferences could be traced to Cole’s misbehavior some fifteen years earlier. He had been married once, briefly, but by the time he came to campus he’d long been a swinging bachelor — attractive, back then, too — so rumors were bound to follow him. The fact that the rumors stuck, though, spoke to his behavior, not his erstwhile good looks. Jerry Keaton, for instance, with his kind eyes and soft voice and pictures of his toddler son all over his office, would never attract such talk.

Zee got through lunch by pretending it was Cole’s retirement party. And when that fantasy failed, she imagined relaying one of her own less amusing Cole anecdotes. She might tell about his sophomore advisee who came to Zee crying, after she’d shown Cole a course list including Stage Makeup for her double major in theater. “So you’re learning to put on makeup?” he’d asked. The girl had shrugged and said, “Basically.” He took her face in his hand, turned her head to the side, and said, “Well, it’s about damn time.” But even if Zee had worked up the nerve to tell this story, to say “Let’s raise a glass to the most insensitive man in Illinois,” the others would have chuckled, waiting with bated breath for the old man’s reply.

Cole, she realized, was talking to her from down the table, pointing his empty fork at her chest. “Comrade Grant is uncharacteristically withdrawn today,” he called. “I suspect she’s planning her Marxist revolution!” Before the laughter died down, he continued. “This is why I’ll never leave. She’ll replace me with her minions and all the seniors will take ‘Why Dickens Was a Stalinist.’”

She felt, as she often did around Cole, like a child outwitted by a clever uncle for the amusement of other adults. Mercifully, the conversation swelled again, and the waiter brought coffee. Zee wished he would sweep her up with the empty wine glasses and carry her back to the kitchen and plunge her into the sink, where she could remain till the lunch was over.

The other day, her mother had called her office number. “I was thinking,” she said. “Why couldn’t Douglas work in Admissions? Because that doesn’t require you to publish, does it?”

“Admissions is bubbly twenty-four-year-olds with diverse backgrounds.”

“Well he’s diverse. He certainly didn’t grow up here.” Zee had said she had to go, and her mother said, “It’s not going to fall in his lap, dear. To be perfectly frank, I don’t know what good that biography will do. There are so many books nowadays! But we’ll think of something.”

Sitting there sober with her drunken department, Zee did think of something. Doug was a man who needed a job. Cole was a man who did not deserve the job he had. And here she was, passively wishing. And leaving Doug home alone all day with that woman. When Chantal had said to keep him on his toes, she’d probably meant something along the lines of meeting him at the door in lingerie. But Zee had more at her disposal than underwear. And she knew how to do more than grade papers and wait.

She turned her tiramisu slab on its side to cut it better. She had nearly forgotten who she was.

8

They were all due at the big house at six, for cocktails and dinner to welcome the Texans “officially.” The Breens, Doug tried calling them in his head, but to him Bruce and Gracie were the Breens, so Texans it was. Maybe if he started calling Case “Tex,” he’d like him better.

In the two weeks they’d shared the house, the couples had fallen into a routine of cooking separate dinners, perhaps overlapping in the kitchen for five or ten awkwardly sociable minutes. Doug and Zee found themselves eating takeout downstairs more and more.

Zee came into the bathroom when Doug was brushing his teeth. She said, “I have some motivation for you. I think something might be happening with Cole. This might be his last year.”

Doug made a mouth-full-of-toothbrush noise. Zee wasn’t often prone to wishful thinking, but Doug knew enough about Cole not to get his hopes up.

They all four walked up the drive together, Doug carrying a bottle of wine too cheap for Gracie and Bruce to drink. They passed Case’s new car: a black 2000 BMW 3 Series convertible, liquid-shiny, parked beside their own weathered Subaru. Doug had gladly joined in Zee’s eye rolling, wondering how Case thought he could blow through his savings, how weirdly sure he was of landing a new job the moment he started looking. How a convertible would get him through a Chicago winter. But privately, all Doug wanted to do was lick the hubcaps.

He marveled anew at the way the thick ivy turned the big house into an organic entity. The house turned brown every fall, it died every winter, and by late spring it was in full foliage.

The front door was locked, and so they stood waiting as Hidalgo, Gracie’s standard poodle (“Is there something bigger than standard?” Doug had asked Zee several times now. “Because he’s really not normal”) flung himself at the window again and again, claws scraping the glass.

“Oh God,” Miriam said, “I hate poodles.”

“Just wait,” Doug said.

Bruce answered the door himself, tossing Hidalgo peanuts to keep him at bay. “Welcome!” He gave each woman a long kiss on the wrist like a lecherous Austrian prince, pumped Doug’s hand, and slapped his arm around Case. “My boy!” he shouted, as if he’d never talked to his son before in his life.

Bruce was red-faced, with big cheeks and a ring of white hair and a belly of hardened fat. Later, he would bully Doug into smoking a cigar with him out back. But he was a good man, and Doug hadn’t really had a father, so the handshakes, the cigar, the talk about bumping into the Clintons on Martha’s Vineyard — he found them weirdly thrilling.

Doug saw Hidalgo advancing and kneed him in the chest before the claws could make contact with his shoulders, before the beast could leave welts down his arms again. Hidalgo was not one of those poodles with the haircuts. He was shaggy, fur the color of a rotten peach, breath like hot compost. Bruce threw another peanut.

Gracie stood waiting in the library, in a long, gauzy green thing that Doug’s mother would have called a Hostess Dress. Zee kissed her cheek. “So you’re locking us out now?”

“Bruce,” Gracie said, “did you lock the door? The ghost must’ve done it.”

“The ghost only ever does three things,” Doug whispered to Miriam. “Closes doors, knocks on things, and flushes toilets.”

Miriam whispered back: “Maybe it died from getting locked out of the bathroom.”

Bruce mixed everyone gin and tonics without asking, and poured himself his standard glass of Mount Gay rum. “Let me tell you something, though,” he said, in a voice that wasn’t at all asking permission to let it tell you something. “We’re going to need new locks anyway. Y2K, December thirty-one, these fancy security systems are worthless. Crime will shoot up, credit cards won’t work, and are you aware, even your car, your car has a computer. I’m buying a ’57 Chevy. No computer, and I’ve always wanted one anyway. But I’ll tell you, no one should be out celebrating that night. Nuclear power plants, think about that. Best we can do is hunker down with the canned goods and barricade the doors.”

“How festive,” Gracie said. Bruce had given the same speech at every opportunity for the past year, but this was the first time he’d mentioned the nuclear plants. “Let’s change the subject, shall we? Something less apocalyptic. Case, how’s your job search?”

Case, sprawling on the couch, stretched his legs out. “I got some fish in the water,” he said.

Zee said, “Some lines?”

“One could say that, Zee. One could say that.”

Bruce said, “I’m going to introduce him to Clarence Mahoney. Big guy in Chicago. Lots of projects, and none of this dot-com nonsense. Watch what happens to those dot-com folks, January one.”

Case turned to Doug. “Tell us what your poems are about,” he said. “Nature, or what?”

Doug tried to hide the ice cube under his tongue while he talked. “I’m actually writing a monograph. A book. On a poet named Edwin Parfitt. He stayed here a few times, at the arts colony.”

“Just imagine,” Gracie said, gesturing around the room. “This place filled with painters and musicians!”

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Doug went on, willing himself not to look at Zee. “What about back in Toronto? There wouldn’t be anything from the colony up there, would there? Archives or photos? That got taken back?” He’d asked it before, but her answers were always so evasive that he held out hope she might blurt something different if she was in a good mood, if the weather was right, if she’d had enough to drink. (Once, after champagne, she’d volunteered the story of Zee’s birth in fairly graphic detail.) Plus she never seemed to remember that she’d already turned him down.

“Oh, dear God, no. The colony was such a burden to my father, he’d have shredded all that. The woman who ran the place, you know, turned out to be a Communist. And the drinking! It was always in the papers, someone driving into a fence. He was glad to be rid of the whole mess.”

Zee would bawl him out when they got home. Not just for bothering her mother, but for grasping at straws. Zee so often had to defend, to people like Sid Cole, her own interest in historicity and context, that she ought to have been sympathetic to Doug’s search for something archival. But she saw no similarity.

“So that’s when you moved here?” Miriam asked. “After it closed?”

“More or less.”

There had been profound resentment in the artistic community back in the fifties, when her father reclaimed the house and moved Gracie in here with her new husband, George, Zee’s father. When Doug was engaged to Zee, he had secretly ordered a history of the Devohr family through interlibrary loan. That was the only mention of Gracie at all — the strong implication that her father closed Laurelfield just to get the drinking, womanizing George Grant out of Canada.

“So your job is to write the story of this guy’s life?” Case seemed to find this hilarious.

“It’s really an analysis of the poems. How his life affected his work.”

“Like a term paper,” Gracie offered.

“Yes,” Doug said, after he drained his glass. “Like a really long high school English paper.”

Zee, to his relief, smiled sympathetically from the other couch. She was stunning in her blue sundress, and her collarbones were a work of art.

“Refills,” Bruce announced. “Would anyone care to climb Mount Gay with me?”

Doug had been prepared for the line, was always prepared for it, but it was still a struggle not to lose it. And it was a struggle not to look at the flaming, shaking, red spot next to him that was Miriam’s face.

—

Doug stayed quiet through dinner. Sofia, the housekeeper, shuttled back and forth with plates of swordfish and asparagus, lemon sorbet, pineapple cake.

Case was telling them all a story about sailing, something about his buddy getting lost in the Gulf, when he leaned the whole chair back and hit the sideboard behind him, sending a green china vase to the floor and into a million pieces. “I’ll — oh, God, I’ll — hey, I’ll pay for that,” Case said.

“With what?” Gracie muttered.

Miriam convinced Sofia to surrender the dustpan so she could sweep the shards herself.

“He gets his coordination from me!” Bruce shouted. “That’s why they kicked him off the football team!”

Case looked like he didn’t know what to do with his hands, or how to arrange his mouth.

Doug searched for a way to change the subject, but Zee beat him to it. “You do realize that’s the ghost behind you,” she said to Miriam. “The painting, I mean.”

Bruce gave the ancestor a look most men reserved for centerfolds. “She’s a beauty, isn’t she? A natural beauty. Nothing fake back then.”

“Except the paint,” Zee said.

Doug didn’t know much about art, but he could recognize that it was a great picture. If he ran into this woman on the street in modern dress, he’d recognize her instantly. Gorgeous, it was true, by any standards. Black hair and dark eyes, like Zee, balanced by the shoulders of a black gown. But somehow profoundly evasive. Some paintings seemed to follow you with their eyes, but this one had the opposite effect: No matter where you stood, Violet woudn’t meet your gaze. He couldn’t figure out why — he just knew he didn’t want to be alone in this room at night.

“Do you mind my asking how she did it?” Miriam said. “How she died?” She was still down on the floor sweeping, a disembodied voice.

“I always imagined hanging,” Gracie said. “But my family never spoke of it.”

“Maybe that’s why I’m getting a vibe on the staircases! Maybe she did it from a railing.”

Doug hadn’t contemplated this before in detail. He’d always imagined her drinking poison quietly in bed. “She might have jumped from a window.”

“She’d make a better ghost if she wore white,” Case offered.

Miriam stood up with her dustpan and looked at the painting. “She’s got me fully convinced.”

9

They were all back in the solarium with coffee, windows open, hot night air rolling through. Hidalgo slept on his back. Zee wanted to be home and asleep, but she forced herself to smile at Miriam. “I’ve peeked at your new project,” she said. “I hope you’ll hang some of your pieces around the coach house.”

“Anything that doesn’t sell.”

Zee wondered if Miriam had ever sold a piece in her life. The new one was an atrocious swirl of orange with blue and brown things sticking out.

“Tell me, what inspired that orange piece?”

“Oh, it’s a fractal! It’s basically math, so don’t ask me to explain! You can just see they’re amazing, the colors and symmetry.” Zee wanted to shake her. It was her greatest fear for her female students, that they’d end up giggling and apologizing at everything.

Case grinned. “You know what I call those? The barf pictures. It’s the barf series.” He’d been drunk for a while.

“I’m starting a new bunch, though. Unloved dresses. I’m butchering them and doing tessellation around the forms. If you have any old prom dresses or anything… And I have to say, I’ve never worked better in my life than I have the past few days. This place must have a magic spring under it.”

Gracie patted her knees and sat forward. “Miriam, we’ve got the perfect little consulting job for you. There’s a painting I want to rotate out of storage, and Bruce hates it. The signature is unreadable, so we have just no idea. It’s raw, but I think it’s sweet.”

Bruce loped behind the far couch and returned with a gilt frame, the farmhouse and pasture inside all awkward angles and illogical sunlight. Like the product of an art therapy class at a nursing home. Bruce said, “We should be paying for her opinion. She’s an expert, you know.”

“We’ll pay her with old dresses!” Gracie said. “She can take Zilla’s cotillion dress. It’s still up in the closet. Remember the yellow one, with the shoulder pads? Oh, it was ghastly! I told you at the time.”

Something came to a boil inside Zee’s head, some irrational sibling rivalry she’d never had to develop skills for dealing with. She did not need a yellow silk dress from an arcane ritual she’d been forced through at age fifteen, even if Greg Stiefler had kissed her in that same dress on the lawn of the Chippeway Club. “You can’t give away my dress,” she said.

Bruce said, “I thought you were for the redistribution of goods to the proletariat!”

“Where did you get this?” Miriam asked. She rested the frame on her lap, squinting down at the corner, running a finger over the paint. She pulled her curls back.

Gracie said, “I believe it’s left from the colony. There you go, Doug! Something from the colony!”

“It could be…” Miriam said. It obviously pained her to be critical. “This person might have had some natural skill, but no training. The perspective is off.”

Case squinted over her shoulder. “Isn’t that what the modernists did?”

“Well, not like this. I’m just saying it’s not likely from the colony.”

Gracie flushed and took the painting off Miriam’s lap. “Oh, don’t worry, dear. We value your opinion. It’s funny, though. George, Zee’s father, seemed awfully fond of it. And he was an art critic! He must have seen something there. I wouldn’t know one way or the other. Sofia!” Sofia was clearing the sugar and cream. “Can you run to the northwest bedroom, the flowered one, and see if Zilla’s old yellow formal dress is still in the closet?”

“Oh, please don’t—” Miriam started, but she swallowed her words. Sofia was already gone.

10

(The white skin

Of his inner arm

The back of his neck, where

His hairline rubs his collar

His hipbones

I could drag him to me

By the beltloops)

11

The house had settled into a peaceful rhythm, everyone happily ignoring everyone else. (Sofia, fortunately for all, hadn’t found the yellow dress that night. She’d come down with dust in her hair and sweat on her upper lip. “I even look in the old things from forty years ago, all the long gowns!” On a certain level, Doug was disappointed. He’d pay for a glimpse of this ugly dress.)

And then, on Saturday, Case had been out for a long run when Doug and Zee heard him scream so loudly from below that they’d both leapt from the table. They found him crumpled in the doorway. He’d simply missed the step into the house, landed terribly, and his Achilles tendon had snapped and “rolled up like a window blind,” according to the medic.

—

Doug was in the kitchen one morning a few days later when Miriam came up, filled a glass with ice and whiskey, and headed downstairs again. Doug followed a minute later (victim to a potent mix of curiosity and procrastination) and found Case with his leg propped on the ottoman in its blue medical boot, the drink half-drained. Miriam sat cross-legged on the floor, and they were watching a black and white movie. Doug knew Miriam had been renting them all summer—Sunset Boulevard and Top Hat and The Big Sleep—but this was the first time he’d seen Case join her.

“Mind if I take a break down here?” Doug said. Case shrugged and Miriam said, “Please do.” He sat on the arm of the couch, across from the Morris chair Case had claimed, the one Doug had come to think of as his own. Doug guessed the chair had been in the coach house all along. A brass bar for adjusting its hinged back; worn, cracked leather. He could picture the beleaguered chauffeur who once sat there to read the paper and dream of sailing to Siam.

Doug said, “What are we watching?”

It was Bluebeard, Miriam explained, the 1930 MGM version. “It was a cursed movie,” she said, a few minutes later. Case didn’t seem to mind when she turned the volume down. He was watching his glass, anyway, not the screen. Doug didn’t mind either, as her narrative was more interesting than the film. “Absolutely everyone in it was dead within seven years. That’s Renée Adorée, the French one, and she died of something normal. But the other one, playing her sister, that’s Marie Prevost. She died alone in her apartment, and her dachshund started to eat her.”

“Jesus.”

“And John Gilbert, Bluebeard, he was married to Greta Garbo, but he drank himself to death. And then the German maid, the one giving the dirty looks?” Miriam usually moved her hands when she talked, but right now she kept them wrapped around the remote, as if the actors onscreen were doing the gesturing for her. “That’s Marceline Horn. She died the day after Bluebeard wrapped, and they realized it was from poisoned makeup in her dressing room. Someone put arsenic in her lipstick. The sicker she got, the worse she looked, so she put on more and more makeup to cover it up.”

“Seriously?”

“There’s a scene — I’ll show you — in one scene, you can see she’s sick. She was supposed to eat the food, but she couldn’t.”

Case cleared his throat and said, “You done, babe?”

Miriam stood. She took a moment to tighten her body, to compose a smile. She handed Case the remote and went to the sunporch. Case switched to CNN, where the news was about people building survival shelters in Colorado, taking their millennial fears a few steps further than Bruce.

“Look,” Doug said, “I had knee surgery a while back. I know it’s — you feel kind of trapped. I know.”

Case didn’t answer.

12

If she hadn’t already decided to take action, two things would have made up Zee’s mind. The first was Sid Cole knocking on her office door. He’d climbed all those stairs just to ask if she’d noticed that Jerry Keaton was calling his seminar “The Gay Canon.”

“You were at that meeting,” she said. “Weren’t you?”

“I’m going to teach a class called ‘Milton the Marginalized.’ How about ‘Chaucer, the Forgotten Poet’?”

Zee knew better than to pick a fight, even on someone else’s behalf. She said, “If it makes you feel better, I think he’s got some Shakespeare sonnets on the syllabus.”

“Haaa!” Cole made a great show of collapsing against her wall. “Shakespeare, that famous queer. The Pansy of Stratford-on-Avon.”

The second thing was that Doug had begun working harder on the monograph. The very day after she told him something might be happening with Cole, she came home to find him still at the computer at five thirty, still in the boxers and undershirt he’d slept in. He’d forgotten to eat lunch. It almost broke her heart, to see him working this hard on something no one really cared about, something no one but Zee was waiting for. (The book wasn’t for the masses, but for the fifteen people in the world who already knew everything about Parfitt, and the hiring committees that would never read it but would care that he’d written it.) She couldn’t bear if his effort were all for nothing.

It was funny how much she’d hated Doug when she met him in grad school. He had that lingering, sideways half smile that so often presaged trouble: Here was a man who’d make you feel like the center of the universe, until, just after you’d become hopelessly attached, you realized he looked this way at all women. Besides which he had questionable taste in both shirts and poetry (Edwin Parfitt was a poet her father had once rightly called “miniscule”), and he’d somehow conned all the professors into believing he was the greatest student ever to walk through the program. She invited him to her February spaghetti party along with everyone else, but she’d been rude enough to him over the past six months that she was shocked when he showed up. He held out a bottle of sake, which he told her he’d brought precisely so she couldn’t serve it with spaghetti. “You have to save it for yourself.”

Much later, as the lingerers helped clean up, his wayward elbow knocked a picture frame off her end table, and although the glass was fine, the frame, made of porcelain, had cracked into quarters. The picture was the one of herself, age five, reading Green Eggs and Ham to her father. She didn’t want him to fix it. “I know you have superglue,” he said. “Don’t lie to me.” And long after everyone else had gone, he sat on the couch holding pieces together until the glue was set and the thing was whole, if spiderwebbed. “She’s not quite seaworthy,” he said. He put it in the middle of the coffee table, a sort of offering.

It was certainly not his macho insistence on solving her problems that won her over — she did not see herself as a fragile thing that needed fixing — but the fact that he seemed so determined to make her not hate him. It became hard not to root for him. It was another six months before they became romantically involved, but the dots weren’t hard to connect. Was there much distance between rooting for someone and loving him? Was there any difference at all, even now?

13

Five weeks in (and a week overdue) Doug was still stuck on the soccer team tryout, so he was going back to chapter two, which he’d saved because it was easiest. This was the plagiarism bit, the part that necessitated the presence of the actual Friends for Life books. He’d borrowed several from the library, and he placed pens across the pages of each to hold them open.

The first sentence of chapter two was always something like “It seemed the club had been together forever, thought Candy [or Molly, or Melissa] gazing at the faces of her five friends.” Doug started with, “They had so many memories together, these six friends, and as Melissa looked into their faces, she was transported back to that day when they first formed their club.”

He moved on to his descriptions of each girl. By the time he got to Cece (“She was the crazy one of the group,” the others uniformly read. “She even showed up at school once wearing her brother’s army jacket as a skirt!”) he was punchy and decided he’d venture into new territory. “Crazy old Cece,” he wrote, “had started a business of writing poems on her friends’ hands. She charged ten cents a line and had already made enough for a new pair of earrings!”

And so of course it would happen to be this particular day that Miriam knocked softly behind him. He managed to close the computer window, but not the books. He swiveled, hitting his knee on an open drawer.

“I’m on a quest,” she said. She held out a small, orangish-red piece of glass. “I’m searching for absolutely anything in this color.”

“Let’s look.” He led her quickly into the bedroom. Of course there was nothing orange, and now he was just staring at the unmade bed. Doug knelt to examine the stack of books under his nightstand. He rifled through his own laundry basket, hoping not to be faced with the dilemma of dirty boxers in just the right shade. He moved to Zee’s dresser — as if she’d ever let Miriam use her jewelry — but Miriam was gone. He found her back in the study, in his desk chair.

“I used to love these!” she said. She was holding Candy Takes the Cake. “God, these have been around forever!”

Doug sank to the floor, where all he could do was laugh. “Don’t you want to know why I have them?”

“I figured it wasn’t my business. I was looking for orange covers, but I see they’re library books. Is this… research for the monograph?”

“Oh, Christ. Yeah. So. The monograph is apparently titled Melissa Calls the Shots,” he said. “Number 118. I’ve never done this before. It’s just for the money.”

“I’d hope so.”

“You’re the only one who knows. Zee would kill me for not working on Parfitt. There is an actual book I’m neglecting. A serious book.”

“You don’t call this serious? Listen: ‘Lauren might have forgotten a lot of math that summer, but one thing she learned was this: She would never take the Terrible Triplets camping again.’ That’s poetry!”

He stood and swiped at the book, but she held it out of reach. “Please don’t say anything.”

“We’ll make a deal. Get me something orange, and promise to let me read your Parfitt thing and this thing too. It’s hard to sit on such juicy gossip.”

Doug found her an orange bank-logo pencil and an orange ad page from The New Yorker, and he suggested she might scan the storage room downstairs for seventies-vintage upholstery.

He couldn’t concentrate after that. He spent the rest of the morning vacuuming ladybug carcasses from behind the furniture.

14

Zee knew Sid Cole would be out to dinner with the provost. And she guessed correctly that he’d fill the time between his late class and the seven o’clock reservation with the office hours he always complained were unnecessary for summer students. He sat snacking and grading and growling at any hapless teenager who dared disturb his peace. Zee stuck her head in to ask if he had any papers she could recycle for him. The man had famously refused the college-issued bin and threw everything from root beer bottles to old issues of PMLA into the black can under his desk. He smiled up at her, his mouth full of pretzel.

“You are a hardboiled egg, Zsa-Zsa. A hardboiled egg.” Last spring he’d started amusing himself by supplying ridiculous endings for her initial, as if he’d never seen her full name on articles and campus directories.

She made three more trips down from her office and past his second floor one, returning from the student snack bar with a newspaper, then a coffee, then a brownie. By six forty-five his was the last light on, and by six fifty he had gone, leaving his door closed but unlocked. It was lucky, but it also meant he’d be back: For years he’d done all his writing in his office at night. She had an hour though, at least.

His computer was on, as she’d hoped. The air-conditioning blasted. The rumor, according to Chantal, was that he kept the room cold so he could see the girls’ nipples through their shirts.

“Has anyone reported it?” Zee had asked.

“Oh, it’s just what the kids say. How would they prove something like that?”

Zee jiggled the mouse to wake the computer, and went online, relieved that his Internet was even hooked up. Cole was largely computer illiterate, using his new, department-purchased iMac for nothing more than typing.

She spent the next hour downloading the most explicit free pornography she could find. She was careful to avoid anything potentially illegal (as much as she loathed Cole, she didn’t want him arrested), but focused on college-aged girls, on sites that claimed “She Just Turned 18 and She’s Wet for You!” The downloading was painfully slow, but she managed to save thirty pictures in a folder labeled “Photoedit”—easy enough to find if someone was searching, but nothing Cole would notice himself.

It was funny: As she slunk out the door, she felt some feminist guilt over the pornography itself, the girls who probably weren’t eighteen at all but sixteen with drug problems, but she felt no moral guilt about the act of sabotage, about advancing her husband’s career by less than legitimate means. She felt less like Machiavelli than Robin Hood, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. And helping the department, too, and the students. Cole was a parasite, a toxin, a cancer cell. Zee wasn’t upsetting the universe, but balancing it.

—

She did the same thing on Thursday, when Cole simply left his office unlocked for the night, and again the following Wednesday. It would look better if they were downloaded on more than one occasion — less like sabotage, more like porn addiction.

Meanwhile, she told the following story to her classes, to Chantal, to three different colleagues, and to all the college students she could find who’d stayed in town as lab assistants or nannies: “You won’t believe this, but I’ve heard one of our summer kids has Cole using the Internet! He needed to buy pants, but he hates running into students in the stores, so apparently this lovely young woman showed him how to shop online at L.L.Bean. Really she did it for him, but he was sitting right there. He was worried about getting lost on the Internet, so she showed him the ‘Home’ button. He goes, ‘So I just click my heels together three times?’ He said he was going to look up White Sox scores. I think he might be hooked!”

Her colleagues believed it, even Chantal believed it, because despite Zee’s abiding hatred for the man, she’d been careful never to say a quotable word against him, careful to throw him an acerbic line when she passed his office.

If anyone teased Cole about online shopping he’d respond that he never used the Internet — but they’d take it as another of his jokes, more crustiness on top of the crust that was Cole.

—

On Sheridan Road, the traffic was stopped. No way to turn her Subaru around. She waited and cursed her luck and tried to see what kind of flashing lights those were, so far ahead.

When the cars finally oozed forward, she rubbernecked with everyone else. A fire truck, and, in front of it, a little black BMW, its hood charred and smoldering. No collision, no dents. Just one of those burst-into-flame scenarios.

She wouldn’t have recognized the man who sat folded on the curb, head in his hands, if it weren’t for the blue medical boot on his foot, the crutches stacked neatly at his side.

15

Doug turned in Melissa Calls the Shots just twelve days overdue, and after he’d finished some quick revisions for Frieda he received an actual two thousand dollar check in the mail, followed by the contract to complete two more books before the end of summer. One was another Melissa book, this time about her work backstage at the school play, and one was a Cece book. “I loved the detail about her poetry business!” Frieda said. “I think you’ll have a great ear for her.”

The whole week had been hot, but Doug made himself exercise anyway, circling the grounds and stretching. Behind the big house, he stopped to do the back releases Dr. Morsi taught him, then stepped on the fountain lip to stretch his hamstrings.

Miriam had been digging at the back of the fountain, and he nearly stepped in the hole. Apparently she’d been out here breaking old plates when she noticed a different shard, a red and white one, sticking out of the dirt. She’d pulled it out and dug around and found more — not just that one pattern but dozens of other colors of porcelain and glass and terra cotta. She’d excavated about two cubic feet back there. Her own archeological dig. “It’s like the house is giving me pieces,” she said. “Like they’re growing from the ground.” (“Or like someone had a really bad temper tantrum once,” Zee said. “And broke all the china in the house.”)

He’d remembered to bring bread crumbs, and he dropped them in the three koi ponds. How long did koi live? Eighty years? These ones were enormous and mottled and drowsy, and he liked to imagine Edwin Parfitt feeding them his leftover breakfast.

At the south end of the property, he toed helplessly at the foundations of the studios Gracie tore down in the seventies, when they were past repair — the long one that must have housed several artists, and the small one behind that. Both lay far enough back that the remains weren’t eyesores, and Gracie seemed content to wait for erosion and vegetation to swallow them. Even farther in the woods stood a granite statue of a squatting bear, about three feet high, moss covering its right flank. Doug sometimes rubbed its head for good luck. What else were statues for? The one surviving studio, on the other end of the property behind the vegetable gardens, had long ago been converted to a groundskeeper’s shed, but Zee remembered her father referring to it as the composer’s cottage — which was the only reason Doug hadn’t cut through the padlock and scoured the walls for Parfitt-era graffiti.

As he rounded the big house, he saw Sofia heaving paper grocery bags from the back of her van to the garage floor. The driveway was eerily empty: Gracie and Bruce off on separate golf dates, the Subaru with Zee in the city, Case’s BMW zapped by the Greek gods. Doug offered to help, but Sofia shook her head. Then she said, “This is ridiculous that Mr. Breen wants.”

There must have been twenty bags, from several different stores — Jewel, Dominick’s, Sunset, Don’s. He righted a Jewel bag that had fallen and saw it was full of blue cylinders of Morton’s table salt. So was the next bag over, and the next.

“He is for the end of the world,” Sofia said. “On the New Years.”

“He’s… stockpiling salt for the end of the world?”

“Is for take the water out of the food.”

“Wow.”

“Yes, is wow.”

Doug held up his hands as if to say, Hey, he’s your employer, not mine. Although Sofia probably saw them all as family, saw Doug as part of this entitled clan as much as anybody. And really, he was. Who was he kidding? Yet as he headed back to the coach house, he felt the urge to call over his shoulder that he’d gone to a crappy public school, that he never had a decent bike, that he was raised on off-brand TV dinners.

Up in the kitchen, he opened a beer and watched Sofia out the window. He could hear her grunting from all the way up here. No, that wasn’t right. She was too far, and it was coming from downstairs.

He went back down and found Miriam sobbing on the sunporch, her face folded into her arms on her card table. He tried hard to walk away.

“Hey,” he said, “hey.”

“I’m sorry, this is so embarrassing.” Miriam sat up, still sobbing, and wiped her face with the bottom of her T-shirt. He was surprised she didn’t leave makeup on it — he’d been told women from Texas wore makeup at all times. “This is so stupid.”

“I can leave,” he said.

“It’s — did you hear what happened?”

“Case’s car? Yeah, we all heard.”

“Oh. No, not that. John F. Kennedy Jr. He was flying his own plane last night, with his wife, and it crashed in the ocean.”

“They died?”

“This is the silliest thing to be crying about. I guess I was just a little bit in love with him. Like everybody else, right? I mean, I just always thought someday I’d at least get to meet him, and we’d have a really great conversation.”

Doug was thinking, on one level, about the Kennedys, about little John-John saluting his father’s coffin. On another, much louder level, he was realizing: Miriam is crazy. Miriam is absolutely bat-shit crazy.

He should have seen it before, in the bizarre, clashing mosaics covering the sunporch floor, in her cutting scraps from cracker boxes, her smashing empty wine bottles and saving grape stems. He looked closely now at the two big pieces on the floor. The one that was nearly finished centered around a blue sundress covered almost entirely by other, tiny things — paper, wood, broken plastic toys, beads, a clock hand, pen caps, dried flower petals, paper clips — so that they constituted another dress, a beautiful one, with swimming lines and arcs of light. But there was something insane about it, something that screamed “outsider art,” the kind of work made by someone who lived in a cabin and produced her best pieces when she went off her meds.

“You must think I’m crazy,” she said.

“No, no, not at all! It’s a sad event. That’s horrible, that whole family. There was the one who just died on the skis, right? And now this. And he was the best one.”

She sniffed wetly. He wanted to leave, but she’d be hurt. So he said, “Did you see what Bruce is making Sofia do?” and told her about the salt for the end of the world.

“Oh, he asked us to store the canned goods! Did you know that? He goes, ‘You have all that room on the ground floor, how about we fill you up?’ He’s worried about mice in the basement at the big house.”

“Mice that bite through cans?”

She smiled a little, which was a relief. “Apparently. I mean, I guess there’s pasta boxes and stuff. And their pantries are packed already, and he said the attic is full of old furniture and file cabinets Gracie won’t throw out.”

He laughed, trying to make her laugh. “What files could Gracie need? I’ve never seen that woman touch a piece of paper that wasn’t a note to the staff.”

“Maybe they’re from that arts camp. He said the furniture was. He said there were at least twenty mattresses up there, and headboards and dressers.”

“Really.” He’d been leaning against the door frame, but now he sat on the floor among the heaps of cloth and shredded magazines.

The vague promise of some artifact of Edwin Parfitt’s had hit Doug in the solar plexus, and he felt like a man meeting his former lover on the street, someone he believed he’d forgotten but whose overwhelming effect indicated otherwise.

“Christ,” he said. “That old bitch! Listen, you know first of all it wasn’t an arts camp, it was a major arts colony. Okay, so, no, a minor one, but extremely important, at least in the twenties. I mean, you’re an artist: Charles Demuth? Grant Wood? There could be — think what could be up there!”

“What do you mean, Charles Demuth? He stayed here? I adore him!”

“I mean his stuff’s in the attic.”

She looked as if he’d told her JFK Jr. had just swum to shore, shaken but still dreamy.

“Potentially,” he added. “But didn’t artists do that, sometimes? They’d leave paintings as payment?”

She sunk her head again. “I don’t know, Doug, this isn’t what it sounded like, with Bruce. He just said there were disgusting file cabinets and the furniture. If there were anything valuable, he’d know.”

“But if someone like Demuth just doodled on an envelope! Bruce would have no idea what that even was!” Doug wasn’t sure why he was trying to get Miriam interested, since he didn’t want her messing this up for him. Maybe he was just irrationally insulted that she wasn’t as excited as he was.

He refrained from mentioning Parfitt. If she’d been paying any attention that night at the big house, she’d have heard him say Parfitt stayed there. But then she hadn’t even seemed to register that it was a real arts colony. In her short time here, she hadn’t struck him as someone terribly curious about much outside her jungle of beads and scraps. She hadn’t been out to explore the town, and she never talked on the phone. It had all seemed vaguely charming before, but now, for some reason, it upset him.

He left her to her collages and her weeping, and asked her not to say anything about the files.

“More secrets!” she said. He couldn’t read her tone. “What fun.”

16

(There was a man

I wanted to kiss

On the eyes

And there was a man

I needed to pin down.

There was a man

I wanted to smash

Into my breasts and there was a man

Whose lips were pillows. Here

Is what I want to do

To you: throw you to the floor and lick

The crease behind your ear.

It is a part of yourself

You have never seen.

I see it every day.

I want to leave you

Diminished.)

17

Zee needed to get off campus for her own sanity, which was the only reason she’d agreed to meet Gracie at the Chippeway Club. It was one of those places she’d rather not be seen, on principle, by some faculty member who’d wrangled an invitation.

Gracie reclined by the pool in a pink one-piece, her limbs tan and slim. Zee joined her and watched the lunchtime calm at the kiddie end as children sat by their nannies to digest their grilled cheeses. Between the pool and the golf course stretched a field of browning grass decorated with three white teepees, some kind of sick and inaccurate homage to the Chippewa, who hadn’t really lived here anyway. Zee herself hadn’t set foot at the club till after her father died, when her mother shocked her by saying they’d been members all along, and now that her father couldn’t object they were free to go there, and wouldn’t Zee like to learn golf? As a teenager she knew that the other kids, the fun ones, would sneak out to the teepees during weddings and graduation parties to deflower each other and finish the wine they’d stolen.

Zee ordered a Long Island iced tea. The club served them notoriously strong.

“Mom, we need Case and Miriam out of that house. It’s distracting Doug.” Her mother’s expression behind the big sunglasses was unclear, but she kept talking. “The whole point of moving in was the peace and quiet.” She hadn’t planned on bringing this up today, but then this morning at breakfast, Doug had asked Miriam if she wanted the used coffee filter for her “art,” and she’d folded it in fourths and tucked it in her shorts pocket.

“Are they loud? I suppose it’s cultural.”

“Miriam has that whole porch covered with the trash for her collages. I mean literally, garbage.”

Gracie shook her head. “Bruce is convinced of this Y2K fiasco, and he won’t throw his son on the street with the world about to end. And the poor thing. His tendon! And now they have no car. How would they even leave? On horseback?”

The waiter handed Zee her drink in a frosted glass. She hated how good it felt to be taken care of. Zee drank like someone was timing her and then lay back to feel the sun tighten her skin. She remembered her father’s objection to the club name: “Chippeway,” he said, every time they passed the sign, “in that context, suggests nothing so much as poorly played golf.”

Zee kept her eyes closed and said, “I’ll make a deal with you. After the New Year, if the world doesn’t end, Case and Miriam need to leave. His ankle will be better. If you get them out, I promise Doug’s book will be done and he’ll be at the college by next fall. If they stay… I don’t know.”

“I can work on Bruce, but I don’t see how you can guarantee anything about poor Doug.”

“I’ve always been lucky.”

18

All the cars were gone, and Doug let himself into the big house through the garage with the emergency key.

As often as he’d been on the ground floor, he hadn’t ventured upstairs since the days when he was dating Zee and she’d bring him home for Thanksgiving and set him up in a guest room with a set of fluffy towels. He dragged his hand up the railing. This must be what people meant by patina, this buttery softness. The house seemed as much alive on the inside as on the leafy outside — the way the wood of the door frames contracted in winter and expanded in summer, the way the glass on these staircase windows was thicker at the bottom than the top, from the slow, liquid pull of a century.

Hidalgo hadn’t met him at the door, and Doug assumed the beast was in his crate. There were clicks, though, and creaks, all around him in the hall, and he reminded himself about houses settling. He tried to recall which was the door to the attic stairs. It must be this one, at the north end: next to a closet, but not a closet, the brass keyhole made for one of those toothy old keys with a loop handle. He tried the elliptical little knob, but it just clinked tightly back and forth. He knelt, his eye to the inch of gap at the bottom of the door. It wasn’t dark — he remembered the dormers running along both the back and front of the house — but all he could see was tan. The riser of the bottom step.

Something crackled behind him. Doug’s back had been turned on the hallway for a long time, as if he’d never watched a spy movie in his life. He rose and turned, certain he’d see an angry Bruce or a frightened Sofia. But there was just afternoon light from a high window, magnifying a million specks of floating dust. Now that he’d become aware of his back, of the fact that he couldn’t turn his head like an owl, he was uncomfortable whichever way he faced. He wanted to flatten himself against a wall. Instead he walked calmly down the stairs and out the garage door.

19

After one more Long Island iced tea, Zee left her car at the club and Gracie drove her home, a Bobby Darin CD playing and the windows down.

“Aren’t we living it up?” Gracie said.

Sofia was unloading the dry cleaning from her van. Miriam, barefoot, sat on the bench by the coach house with a book in her lap. And, bizarrely, Doug was emerging from the big house’s garage, staring at everyone. As Gracie got out, Miriam rose and hopped across the hot gravel. They formed a little group of four on the driveway, which Zee watched from the car for a long, blurry second. Something was off. The pieces of the world were not where she’d left them.

Her mother waved her out of the car, and by the time Zee stuck her head into the heat Sofia was backing toward the big house. “You see! I get, I get!” Zee wanted to form a question, but she couldn’t decide which one, and her lips were asleep.

“Thought I heard Hidalgo freaking out in there,” Doug was saying, and “wanted to be sure he was okay,” but Gracie wasn’t listening.

Sofia returned, butter-yellow fabric in her plump arms.

“This is the one? I find it on the floor of the flower bedroom, behind the bed. This is whose?”

Zee blinked at the thing. It was her cotillion dress, shoulder pads and ruched waist, but wadded and wrinkled.

“I haven’t seen that in nineteen years,” Zee managed to say. And yet she felt she somehow had — but no, it was just that they’d talked about it so recently.

Gracie clapped her hands, as if chunks weren’t falling out of the universe and onto guest room floors. “Well, that’s just the luck of Laurelfield! Miriam, you need to know that this is the distinctive legacy of the house: ridiculous luck, whether good or bad. We’ve had tragedies here too, but then magic things like this happen! Now you have to make a wonderful mosaic out of it.”

Sofia held the dress out, but Miriam looked at the thing like it was tainted. “I don’t understand,” she said.

Sofia shrugged. “Maybe was the ghost.”

Zee took it from Sofia herself. It wasn’t dirty, just creased in a thousand places. The sun was too hot, and even the dress was hot, and she felt she might melt into it. “Maybe it was Doug,” Zee said, not looking at him. “Maybe he was trying to help Miriam find it.”

Doug made a startled, choked noise, a refutation and a laugh at once.

Gracie said, “Why on earth would he do that? And leave it on the floor? He’s not a raccoon, dear.”

Zee draped the dress over Miriam’s arm. “Here,” she said. “Clearly it was meant to be.”

She wondered if this would all make sense once she sobered up, but she doubted that. She wanted to stomp, to scream, to ask why things would rearrange themselves just when she’d got them straightened out. Instead she walked back to the coach house, trying not to sway. Doug caught up and whispered: “What the hell was that? Was that a joke?”

“Covering for Sofia. She probably went back to look, and it was on the closet floor. My mom would pitch a fit about the wrong hangers or something.” She wasn’t certain she’d made sense, but she hadn’t slurred. Doug stalked past and turned on the TV.

Could that have been it? Or could Doug really have snuck into the house days ago to find the thing, to present it to Miriam like a dog with a bone? And then, when he heard footsteps, stuffed the dress behind the bed. Then he’d gone back to retrieve it today, only it wasn’t where he’d thought it would be.

When Zee saw from the upstairs window that Miriam had gone back to her bench, the dress folded neatly beside her, she went down to Doug on the couch. She straddled him and unbuttoned her blouse and yanked his head back by the hair. She knew he wanted to be mad at her, and she knew he wanted to fall in love with Miriam, but for the next ten minutes he’d be unable to do either.

20

On the hottest day of August, Doug met up with the friend who’d gotten him started on Friends for Life and the lucrative but soul-sapping Melissa Hopper in the first place. Doug and Leland had taught high school together in Ohio, in the hazy few years between college and grad school — the same years when Zee was off on her Fulbright, saving the world. Leland had recently begun wearing black button-downs with the collars wide open, so now Doug was a little worried, meeting him in a Highwood bar, that they’d be mistaken for a gay couple. Leland taught poetry classes all over the suburbs, living not off the paychecks but off the wealthy women who preferred him to their CEO husbands.

“It’s on me today,” Doug said. “You saved my ass. You saved my pocketbook.”

“And they’re fun, right? You get to be the adolescent girl you never were.”

“I will never admit to that.”

There was a bowl of nuts on the bar. It was good to be out of the house, and it was good to be eating nuts and drinking and watching the Cubs. When they started tanking in the fourth, Doug filled him in on Case and Miriam. He described the scooter Case was now using to get around town — how he’d prop his bad leg up on a little shelf and push off with the other. He’d had a few job interviews set up in the city, but he’d canceled those, worried how he’d look showing up sweaty from the train and cab, on top of wounded.

“Tex and the crazy lady,” Leland said. “Tex and the Wreck. That’s a country song, right there. This woman, is she of the attractive persuasion?”

“Fortunately no. I mean, maybe a six. The craziness doesn’t help. Six point five.”

“This kid’s an asshole.” He was talking about the Cubs. “But then, your wife makes everyone look like shit, right? Tell me something: The Victoria’s Secret catalogue gets to your house, you even bother to look? Or is it like, hey, I got better stuff upstairs?”

Doug was glad there seemed no obligation to answer. Leland had met Zee only once or twice, and he hadn’t looked at her with any more interest than most men did. Doug knew what he was really saying, what everyone was really saying when they commented on her beauty: They weren’t sure how she’d ended up with Doug. He wasn’t shorter than her, or bad looking. He’d always gotten plenty of girls. It was more what people presumed about women as intense as Zee, about what they were after and what they could get. Women like Zee did not pick nice guys with average golf games who occasionally forgot to brush their teeth. They picked jackass publishing executives with famous ex-wives and ski houses.

“And can we get the bullpen up?” Leland said.

Partly to keep him from talking about baseball when Doug knew relatively little about the Cubs, and partly because this was why he’d called Leland in the first place, Doug told him about the files in the attic. He told him too about the past month of unsuccessful fishing. In the days after he tried the attic door himself, Doug tried wheedling a key out of Sofia, who apparently didn’t have one, and out of Bruce, who’d laughed and said, “You want Gracie to kill me? I been up there once, to trap a squirrel. Look, I don’t even open the crisper drawer without her say-so. You know? This is called marital peace.”

“Do you have a key?” Doug had asked, and Bruce had clapped him on the back.

“It’s not really my house, right? And — Doug, my friend — it’s definitely not yours.” Bruce turned to go, then came back. “Hey. Don’t let me hear you bothering Gracie with this. She’s had enough stress with the landscapers.”

And before all that he’d asked Zee — as she lay there with her head on his lap, in those lovely, sleepy minutes after she came down and fucked him on the TV room couch — if her mother might ever let him explore the attic and basement for colony artifacts. She’d given him the look the question deserved. “I’ve hardly been in that attic,” she said. “And I can tell you exactly what’s in the basement, and right now it’s supplies for Armageddon.”

Leland had turned on his bar stool so his back was to the TV. “Marianne Moore,” he said finally. “Christ. I know you’re gay for Parfitt and all, but do you realize what someone could do with unpublished Moore documents? Jesus God, I’m drooling here. Fuck. I mean, if she stayed there, it’d be late in life. She never went anywhere without her mother while the mother was alive. So this isn’t early shit. This isn’t juvenilia. This is, like. Fuck.” He slid his empty glass to the bartender. “I mean, just a draft. A photo!”

It was sublimely gratifying to see Leland’s reaction, after Miriam’s calm pessimism. “I know. It’s gotta be something. Otherwise why the evasion, you know? That’s what I’m saying.”

“So you gotta get it out of there.”

“Sure. I know. It’s keeping me awake.”

“You tell Zee?”

Doug shook his head. With each day he knew he was less likely to. He wasn’t sure if she would laugh and tell him he needed real source material, not old phone bills, or if she’d storm the attic herself and take over the whole enterprise, but something in his bones rebelled against what should have been spousal transparency. Maybe the secret of the Friends books had indeed been a tiny wedge.

“So you’re going to help me.”

“I’m — okay, what, we’re breaking in? I wear a ski mask?”

“You pretend to be a photographer.”

Leland laughed and shook his head. “No, no, this is sounding like a sitcom.”

“Listen: Any Moore documents, any correspondence, you can have it. You can publish it, sell it, it’s yours.”

“Huh. Christ.”

“I just want the Parfitt stuff.”

What he asked Leland to do was call Gracie pretending to be with the Adler Ross Foundation. Adler Ross was the architect of the place, just famous enough for someone to care about his attics. Leland was going to be sad and sweet and claim this was the last attic he needed to photograph to complete the records. He’d take pictures of the windows, throw around some jargon, get out of there. “It’s reconnaissance,” Doug said. “You just see if there are file cabinets. And if everything’s going well, maybe ask if you can move one to get a better picture, then you say, ‘God, these are heavy, what’s in these things,’ right? And meanwhile you’re watching what key she uses on the attic door, where she puts it when she’s done.”

“This is insane, Doug. I’m not a good liar.”

“Marianne Moore. Marianne Moore’s undiscovered poem about her secret affair with Mickey Mantle.”

“Well, yeah. Okay. True.”

21

Zee had waited patiently through the whole summer session, through one sweltering reception on the president’s lawn, and the first two weeks of class. She finally let herself go to the science building computer lab to type up the letter. She sat with her back to the windows and typed in eight-point font, then blew it up only for proofreading.

Dear Dean Shaumber and Prof. Blum,

I write on behalf of myself and two other female students who feel disturbed by the photos on Dr. Cole’s computer. We are sure you are familiar with the photos, as they are common knowledge. Although he closes that file when we enter the office, it is unnerving to know he has been looking at the photos, and that he is in a state of mind to degrade women.

We simply wish him to consider the effect this behavior has on those women who visit his office. We are also upset about his continual use of the word “coed,” but this is old news and we understand nothing is going to be done about it, and furthermore we and the other students we have spoken to are far more disturbed about the pornography.

Respectfully submitted by three women who wish to remain anonymous.

Zee went back and forth on the spelling of effect, but figured the three imaginary girls would be imaginary English majors, and would get it right. She left two copies in the printer trays where they could be found by students, then stuck one copy in Shaumber’s mailbox and one in Blum’s.

This last she did right in front of Chantal, but there were plenty of other papers in there already. She turned calmly and asked Chantal to make some copies. Her mother had always maintained, back in the days when Zee and her father had played hide-and-seek around the house, her father as gleeful as any eight-year-old, that plain sight was the best place to hide. They’d talk Gracie into hiding, and when they found her she’d been sitting in the kitchen right where they’d left her, smoking a Virginia Slim. “But it took you five minutes!” she’d say when they complained. That was in the days before her mother put on airs, back when the estate was just a ramshackle shell for a regular, sloppy family, entire guest rooms given over to Zee’s Lego configurations. Friends from the art world — George’s reviews eventually went beyond the local scene, and the house became a pit stop for artists passing through Chicago — would play Mastermind with Zee at the table while Gracie cooked eggs. The only formality was her father’s predilection for folding the dinner napkins into sailboats on special occasions. Things hardened after his death. It was later that year — Zee was still twelve — when her mother saw her take a spoonful of chocolate frosting from the container and said, “That’s how girls get fat.” Her mother had gotten a manicure, had wallpapered the bathrooms, had joined the Presbyterian church, all new things Zee didn’t understand except to know that everything was different now, that without her father’s laugh dismissing the rest of the world, there were appearances to be maintained.

—

On her way out of the building she ran into Cole, who held the door open. Those eyebrows: long white hairs among the dark short ones. Someone had planted them in the wrong garden. “Smile!” he shouted, and because her every interaction with the man was a charade anyway, she did just that. He didn’t let her past, though. He poked a bony finger into her sternum, right above her blouse. “Do you know why I like it when you smile?”

“I do not,” she said, still grinning, though her ears were hot now, and her neck.

“You resemble someone I used to know. It’s uncanny. The ears and chin.”

“Why, thank you,” Zee said, and leaned back so she could get around his finger without it grazing her breast.

“A man, mind you!” he called after her. “It was a man!”

22

Doug had been much more confident about the soccer chapters in the previous book — he’d played varsity in high school, three lifetimes ago — than about the theater business here. He was flummoxed by the parts of Frieda’s outline where the Populars and the Friends shared a dressing room. In the back of an old notebook, he’d begun listing things he needed to research:

Would have bra?

Purse? Backpack?

Stage makeup?

Undress in front of each other or hide in stalls?

Chairs backstage? Benches?

They read like a pedophilic stalker’s notes, and he wanted them scratched out as soon as possible. He could maybe use the Internet for the theater parts, but he shuddered to think where an AltaVista search for “twelve-year-old, brassiere” would lead.

He started down to look for Miriam, but she was on the landing of the stairs, cross-legged, sorting through an ice cube tray of colored beads. She said “Oh!” and some of the glassy blue ones splashed out and rolled down the steps. Doug bounded down, picked them up with the sweat of his fingertips, then shook them into Miriam’s outstretched palm.

“I’ll tell you why I’m here,” she said, as Doug sat on the step above her. He regretted his choice of seat immediately. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and he could see too far down her green tank top. He leaned back and looked instead at the ceiling. Miriam said, “I wasn’t sleeping well, so I thought I’d spend time in the ghostliest part of the coach house. Just to dare something to happen. If it does, I’ll know. And if it doesn’t, I’ll sleep better.”

“Why is this the ghostliest part?” He hoped she didn’t have a good answer.

“Oh, you know. Doorways, staircases, attics, windows. You never see a ghost in the middle of the room.”

“I’ve never seen a ghost at all.”

“Well, yes. That.”

“But Doug,” she said. “I found out. How she died.”

“What, Violet?” He sat back up despite himself.

“I went to the library and they got me set with microfiche. There was an obituary with no information at all — But did you know she was born in England? I love it! English ghosts are scarier, right? — so I was about to give up. But then there was this weird article a few days later that was like, ‘Husbands, pray for your wives!’ You know, very 1906. And then it talks about ‘to perish by starvation, in this land of plenty.’ And it was clearly about her. Starvation.”

“Seriously. Wow. Wait, I thought she killed herself.”

“Exactly. Something doesn’t add up.”

“Was anorexia a thing back then?”

Miriam tilted her head. “That’s the boring version. I think Augustus killed her. I think he starved her.”

Doug let out a low, slow whistle and laughed. “So I need your help on something less serious,” he said. “Since you’re already in on my secret.” He decided not to ask the bra question, in light of current circumstances. “Do twelve-year-olds carry purses?”

She put the bead tray down. “Oh, fun! Well, the Populars would have chic purses. The Friends should have backpacks. Cece probably has an army surplus bag, something cool that she stenciled on.” Doug scribbled in the notebook as she talked, and twenty minutes later most of his problems were solved.

She said, “Just pay me back when you find that original Demuth painting.”

And then, before he could fathom why he was doing it, he told her about the plan with Leland, who had conceded to go undercover next week. Maybe it was for the same reason he hadn’t shared the news with Zee: One secret, whether shared or kept, begot more.

“I want to help!” she said. “I won’t get in the way. It’s just that nothing exciting has happened to me for such a long time.”

“You’d be handy for identifying art,” he said. “Not that my hopes are up. I’m skeptical. But just a list of who stayed here and when, if Parfitt were on the list — it would be huge. You know, who was with him, that kind of thing.”

Miriam rubbed her bare arms. “See, don’t you feel the ghosts around you when you say things like that? All those people, all that creative energy — it had to go somewhere. And Parfitt was another suicide. People like that are the most probable ghosts.”

He stretched his legs, which had fallen asleep.

“Oh!” Miriam said. “You have scars!” She was eye level with his knees and the thick white scars below each kneecap, and to Doug’s surprise she reached out her finger and traced down the length of the left one, as if it concerned her greatly.

Doug knew he ought to run for his life, but he did the next best thing. He said, pointedly, “How did you and Case meet?”

“Oh, he bought one of my pieces. And I thought he was so old, because he was twenty-eight! Can you believe that? I was still in college.”

“He’s had a rough go here.” He laughed in what he hoped was a friendly way.

She said, “I wonder about this house. This whole place. Gracie said it’s lucky and it’s unlucky. It’s been lucky for me. I’ve never done so much good work in my life.”

“Don’t take philosophical advice from Gracie.”

Miriam picked a red bead out of the container. “I’ve seen an astrologer do a birth chart for a house, just like a person.” She saw the look on his face. “I know, stars, but it’s no weirder than genetics or pheromones telling us what to do, right? It’s just the genome of a place.”

“But you like it here.”

“It’s like — did you ever play with magnets as a kid? You know how if you have them turned to the wrong pole it pushes away, but you flip the same magnet around and it clicks together? I feel like Case is the wrong pole, the one that gets pushed. And I’m the right one.”

It wasn’t till he was back in his room, silently mouthing her words just to feel their strangeness on his lips, that he felt they almost made a kind of sense.

One Twix and two beers later, he was on fire. He found the bra information in the FFL Bible. He was stupid not to have looked there first. Candy got a bra in book 60, apparently, then Molly, but not Melissa. He spun his chair to celebrate, and got back to work. With Violet’s unexplained starvation fresh on his mind, he decided (why the hell not? The books could use some edge) to give one of the Populars an eating disorder. He showed Amelia Wynn, the sixth-grade dictator, eating a glass of salted ice. He showed her counting her ribs in the dressing-room mirror. Her arms were as thin as tapers.

23

(I wrap my ankles around chair rungs

So I don’t spring out and bite your shoulder.

Your thumb and finger

On the edges of a CD

Your tongue

Makes its way between your teeth

In time with music

I want to be

That music

The hair just below

Your navel

Curls to the left.

Let me untwist it)

24

By October, there were rumors. Cole was rarely in his office, and one afternoon Zee saw Jerry Keaton pull Bob Grasso into the seminar room and close the door. She asked Chantal if she knew what was going on, and Chantal shook her head — but she did not ask what Zee was referring to. And that was confirmation enough.

Her seminar kids were already calling themselves The Ghostbusters and had written wonderful essays on The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House. They’d been quick to point out that these stories weren’t so much about ghosts as madness, and our slippery hold on reality. Good kids. She was surprised to find she was having more fun with them than with her Fictions of Empire students.

After class, Fran Leffler followed Zee to her office to talk about grad school. Fran was a major, a sorority girl with dimples. Zee told her to sign up for Literary Theory, then leaned across her desk: “Listen, Fran, this is under wraps, but I’m sure you’ve heard about Professor Cole?”

Fran looked concerned, like Zee was about to tell her the man had cancer.

“I’m just asking because I believe this sort of thing is important to talk about, and you seem like someone who might hear if — Well, I just want to make sure people feel comfortable coming forward.”

“Coming forward? Did he, like—”

“Oh, no! No, not that. It’s just his computer. I guess — I shouldn’t say this, but I’ve probably said too much already, and I don’t want your imagination getting the best of you. Apparently some students, some female students, have been made uncomfortable by the images on his computer. They were, you know… explicit.”

Fran shook her head in horror, but her eyes were lit with gossip. “Is he in trouble?”

“He’ll be in trouble if he needs to be. Who knows if it’s even true. But, as a senior — if you heard anything from younger women, anyone in your sorority — I hope you’d let someone know. At this point they’re just gathering information. And you didn’t hear it from me, please.”

As Fran left, Zee took her shoes off and stretched her feet. Later that same day, she watched Golda Blum and some man she’d never seen before, a dumpy guy in a communist-green polo shirt who could only work for IT, go into Cole’s office without him.

—

“It’s marvelous,” Gracie said. They were at the breakfast table in the big house late that afternoon. Zee had just told her she could stop worrying about Doug, that there would be openings by the fall, as long as he could finish his book in an unshared house. (The debate would take months, of course, and they’d let Cole finish the year. But they’d start the head hunt soon to replace him.) Hidalgo, under the table, breathed hot air on Zee’s legs. “Do you think the school will really remain open, though, after this whole computer thing?” It took Zee a few terrifying seconds to realize she meant the Y2K bug. “Bruce reads absolutely all the news, and the smartest people are saying it’s just the end of everything.”

Sofia was cleaning out the refrigerator, tossing old containers of deli salads Gracie and Bruce had never gotten around to eating. Zee wanted to ask her more about that dress, that yellow dress that had no reason to be on the floor, but now was not the time. It had been bothering her for weeks now, and the more she thought about it, the more she felt that somehow she’d seen it very recently, and remembered touching it. She’d started to consider that she might have done something in her sleep, walked to the big house and found the dress, crumpled it and hidden it from Miriam.

But this was ridiculous, and she’d long ago trained herself not to second-guess things to the point where she lost the reality of them. She used to worry all the time about losing her mind. In the library at boarding school she’d found a book, The New World Barons, published in the 1960s, with sections on the Palmers and Carnegies and Devohrs, among others. “The Devohr history is not one of summer estates and long lineage held taut by familial love; it is one of scandal, Diaspora, insanity.” She spent hours on the floor between shelves, reading about the Devohrs who killed themselves, the ones who vanished into Mexico, the one they found buried under old newspapers. She returned to the book many times, to trace the lines of the small, gray jaws with her pinky. Great-aunts and distant cousins. Her grandfather, Gamaliel, as a long-haired boy in a dress. (His mother, Violet, not a Devohr by birth and not a Devohr for long, merited mention only as “another suicide.”) Zee had never met any of them. Gracie’s parents died before Zee was born, and Gracie’s brothers were all “degenerates” to whom she no longer spoke. No cousins ever visited, no aunts. The Devohrs weren’t people so much as sea turtles that laid their eggs and then crawled back to the ocean, not particularly invested in meeting their progeny ever again. That she and Gracie were relatively close was a miracle.

Gracie said, “Do you think the college might find a job for Case as well? Something in the business office?”

Zee was still contemplating what kind of response this merited when Gracie’s phone rang. She answered it and handed it to Zee. It was Doug.

“Hey!” he said. “You’re at your mom’s!” He was a terrible actor.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, no, I just wondered. So you won’t be back for a while?”

“Maybe an hour.”

“Okay. Like, a whole hour? Okay!”

She hung up and told her mother she needed to get going right away.

“It’s just as well. Some poor fellow’s coming over to take pictures. The architects are sending him. I don’t know what on earth he wants.”

Zee put her teacup in the sink, kissed her mother’s cheek, and ran out the side door. A car was pulling up to the front, the beat-up black Saturn of the architectural lackey, who had no idea what Gracie would put him through.

In the coach house, it seemed eerily like a normal Thursday afternoon. Miriam on the sunporch, fully clothed, working on her unloved dress collages. Case sulking at the kitchen table. Doug sprawled on the bed with Sports Illustrated, smiling, as if he’d been expecting her.

25

On the phone, Leland had said the pictures turned out but he wasn’t sure what the hell he was looking for. Doug didn’t know why this was disappointing. He hadn’t really believed Leland would find a cardboard box labeled “Parfitt’s Memoirs.” But somewhere between getting Leland into the attic, and getting Zee out of the house in time, and arranging this meeting down at the beach, Doug had come to assume there would be a major payoff. He’d stopped considering the possibility that Bruce was wrong about the file cabinets. That there might be nothing there but a pile of dusty bed frames. He’d forgotten that even if there were colony files, they might have just been heating bills.

It was a cool, sunny day, and Lake Michigan was Caribbean blue. Doug found Leland and Miriam at separate picnic benches on the grass between the sand and the cars. He introduced them, and Leland poured out an envelope of snapshots: windows, bureaus with missing drawers, piles of headboards and desk chairs, and yes, four black metal file cabinets, each two drawers high, with no visible locks.

“They were old enough. You see the script on the logo?” He’d managed to sneak a close-up of the manufacturer’s plaque on one cabinet. “Looks like what, forties? Fifties? That fits, right?” Leland attempted to lay the photos into the general shape of the attic. “It wasn’t easy,” he said. He was taking up one whole bench, his legs spread wide, looking at Miriam in her yellow shirt in a way that implied Doug had sold her short. “I didn’t tell her it was the attic I wanted till I’d thanked her a million times, told her what a jackass my boss was, how I was afraid I’d get fired. So by the time I said ‘attic,’ she’d feel bad saying no. Oh, and I told her my girlfriend was from Toronto. That helped. I don’t have a girlfriend, but hey. So she did say no, she told me there were bats and she hadn’t been up there in years. So I go, ‘Oh, well if it’s hard for you to climb, I can go by myself.’”

“Oooh, brilliant!” Gurgle of southern laughter, toss of curls.

“So twenty seconds later she’s marching up the stairs. And here.” He shuffled through the photos and found two of the attic door — one from outside, one from inside. “It’s a simple old lock. The key was just two prongs.”

“But she had the key on her?”

“No. I mean, I was exaggerating about the twenty seconds. Really she disappeared for five minutes and came back with the key. So sue me. I’m a poet. I’m prone to exaggeration.” He grinned at Miriam, who was too absorbed in the photos to notice.

“Here’s what I think,” she said. “I doubt there’s anything valuable there. No one would put a rolled up painting in a file cabinet.”

“But a poem!” Leland said. “A poem that was part of someone’s application!”

“Slides,” Doug said. “Letters of recommendation. Project proposals. Listen: Just this summer? The New York Public Library bought the archives from the Yaddo colony for some huge amount, and they’re saying there’s unpublished Carson McCullers in there. We’re not in the same league, but still.”

“So how do we convince her to let us look?”

Doug sighed and watched the joggers going past. He wasn’t sure if Gracie’s persistent and decisive evasion of Laurelfield history had to do with her guilt at having displaced the colony, or her shame at being associated with so many unwashed artists, but she hadn’t budged. At Bruce’s birthday dinner last week, when Doug had asked if historians had ever shown interest in documenting Laurelfield, Gracie had said, “Douglas, isn’t there something more productive you ought to focus on? Perhaps you could publish a novel.” (“What is her problem?” Miriam had whispered later. “Her energy is so off.”)

“What if we talk her into donating it to a library?” Leland said. “Or the college?”

Doug said, “I think she’d sooner donate her kidneys.”

“It doesn’t seem that Gracie’s the right person to make the judgment call,” Miriam said. “She’s not a writer, she’s not an artist, she’s not a historian. And didn’t you say”—she turned to Leland—“it’s an easy lock to pick?”

When a man sat down at the next bench with his laptop they began whispering, but what they came up with over the next hour was a hypothetical scenario so risky that Doug knew he’d never pull the trigger on it. They were having fun though, and so he let Leland and Miriam plot.

They agreed that the best time to break into the attic would not be on one of the rare occasions when both Gracie and Bruce were gone. Sofia was usually around, as were Bruce’s personal secretary and the guy who came to walk Hidalgo. If someone met them on their way out, they’d have a hard time explaining the armloads of files. Miriam was the one who remembered the Democratic fund-raiser Gracie and Bruce were hosting in early December, which Doug and Zee and the younger Breens would be expected to attend. They could easily smuggle Leland in. Sofia would be working downstairs with the caterers. It would be loud. No one would hear if they had to bust down the attic door.

“It’ll be like Notorious!” Miriam said. “Only we won’t get caught like Ingrid Bergman.” Seeing how her hands flew around her hair and her nose flared out, how her whole face was pink and bright, Doug wondered if she’d actually been depressed all summer. Those other times she’d seemed happy, like standing on the counter that first day with those plates, it must have been something fake. It was nothing like this.

Doug finally shook his head. “Zee would never forgive me,” he said. “Not for going after the files, but — I mean, Gracie would kick us out.” He could imagine his mother-in-law smiling thinly, saying that now that he’d found a new career in espionage, he could surely afford his own home.

“It’s five weeks away,” Miriam said. “You have time to decide. Don’t say no just yet.”

When they finally disbanded, Doug felt they should all put their hands in a heap and chant something, like a field hockey team. But he let it end with Miriam heading down the beach for pebbles and he and Leland trudging all the way back to town for coffee.

“You jackass,” Leland said as they crossed the train tracks. “I can’t fucking believe you.”

“What?”

He shook his head in a rueful way that he must have stood in front of the mirror and practiced, a poet’s astonishment at the varied and exasperating world. “You rate a woman a six point five and go off about how crazy she is.”

“Oh, she has her moments. I probably didn’t do her justice.”

“That’s not what I meant. You’re in love with her.”

Doug almost ran into the guardrail. So they were starting, the inevitable assumptions. He decided to wait long enough that his answer wouldn’t seem defensive, because it wasn’t, and he needed Leland to understand that.

They were all the way across the street by the time he said, “I am sincerely not.”

“I’m just saying, the only reason I can think to sell a lovely person like that so short is that maybe you’re fighting something.”

“Or maybe she’s really crazy. You walk in when she’s working, and she looks like a homeless person. She’s got pencils behind both ears, and pins sticking from her mouth, hair frizzed out. Her pupils are fully dilated.”

“Okay, sure. Sure. But let me ask you this: Why do you keep walking in when she’s working?”

Doug considered punching Leland in the face, but decided against it.

26

As Zee sorted handouts before class, the talk grew shrill in the corner. “It was right there on the screen,” Meghan Dwyer said. A smart, sweet girl who could actually write. Everyone was turned toward her. “And I wouldn’t say it was underage stuff. But it was graphic. I know some people are picturing just, like, a topless woman leaning on a car. But this was, like—” she looked around, saw Zee immersed in her papers, and mouthed the words “—butt-fucking.”

Zee wondered, in brief amazement, if it had all been true, if she’d simply set things in motion. But no, this was her own creation, her own monster. She had willed this into being.

—

Near the end of class, Dev Kapoor raised his hand, a look on his face like he was trying to fend off a headache. He said, “How come ghosts are always from the past? I mean, why are they never from the future?” The class snickered. Zee suspected his peers had a different impression of Dev than she’d gotten from his workmanlike papers.

“Go on,” she said.

“A ghost from the future would have a lot more at stake. Ghosts from the past are always in the Hamlet model, right? Like, remember me and avenge my death. But a ghost from the future is going to be desperate. If things don’t go right he won’t be born.”

“Time doesn’t work that way,” Fran Leffler said, and then they all started in, telling him he’d watched too many movies.

“Maybe I don’t mean a ghost. More like a spirit or a force. But anyway, my point is, a ghost from the future wouldn’t be scary, right?”

Zee said, “So we’re afraid of the undead, but not the unborn.”

Sarah Bonheur thrust her hand definitively into the air and didn’t wait to be called on. “A Christmas Carol,” she said. “By Charles Dickens. The ghost of Christmas Future is the scariest of all.”

Dev said, “Oh. Right,” and collapsed back in his chair.

But Antwon Haynes picked up the ball. “That’s an exception. Maybe it’s like what we’re afraid of isn’t death, but the past. No one walks by a crime scene the very next day and feels a ghost. It takes twenty years, right?”

They were on to something, Zee thought. We aren’t haunted by the dead, but by the impossible reach of history. By how unknowable these others are to us, how unfathomable we’d be to them.

She started writing on the board.

—

Cole had been making himself scarce outside of class, so Zee was caught off guard when, as she passed his office, he stuck his head out and motioned her in. It was the first time she’d set foot there since the sabotage, but here were the same books stacked on the floor, same Post-its covering the Indiana University diploma.

“Zenobia, my dear, I need your advice,” he said. He sat on the front edge of his desk, which left Zee choosing between the student chair, three inches from Sid Cole’s crotch, and his own desk chair, inappropriate in a different way. She opted for leaning against a bookcase. “As a communist, you’re interested in intellectual freedom, no?”

“I’m not a communist, I’m a Marxist scholar.”

“Here’s my point: The administration should not be able to access the computers of tenured faculty. Let’s imagine you were looking at some Web site of a communist politician, and then you’re hauled in front of a committee. When the whole point of tenure is the freedom.”

“I’m not tenured.”

“You’ve heard what’s happening, I’m sure.”

Zee attempted to look bewildered, but he shook his head.

“You hear everything. You know what the deans ate for breakfast. You know when Blum takes a crap. And what I want to know is, when did we become afraid of sex? We ask them to read Lolita and Chaucer, but a nude picture is going to warp their minds? They’re adults!”

Zee genuinely was bewildered now, by what seemed a confession, but she reminded herself that this was just Cole, that he was the kind of man who would argue against the Dalai Lama, simply for the thrill of battle. So she said, “I think if you believe strongly in this, you should fight it, whether you did the thing or not.”

“Ha! I’m not asking your permission. What I’m wondering is this: You always have your finger on the pulse, so to speak. How many faculty do you suppose would back me?”

“It depends what you’re planning to do.”

“If I say, either you stay out of my computer or I quit my job and take this very public. How many people would support me on that?”

“You’re not asking them to quit with you.”

“No. Write letters, shave their heads.”

She picked up a little jade monkey from the shelf and felt its smooth back with her thumb. A strangely delicate object for Cole to possess. “I imagine you’d have some support. Just don’t count on all the feminists.”

“Isn’t everyone a feminist now? I thought that was the point of Women’s Studies.”

“I can probably help with the feminists.”

Despite everything, when he winked at her right then, she could see why he charmed the kids. It was so hard to get on his good side that once you got there, even under false pretenses, it felt validating, like the hard-won respect of a difficult father.

—

Doug looked much younger asleep. It was comforting, in a way. A reminder that she was the one with the plans, that she was the one keeping things together.

You could only lose control if you let go. You could only lose anything if you let it go. She said to herself.

From the shoulder of Doug’s T-shirt she pulled a long, curly brown hair.

27

The ivy on the big house had yellowed, to disturbing effect. The vines seemed somehow malevolent now, a strangling, draining force, all roots and tendrils, fused with the stone.

Doug thought all through the rest of October about the risk involved in going behind Gracie’s back once and for all. He considered, too, that a political fund-raiser might involve Secret Service in some way. He asked Zee, casually, if there would be guards. She said, “It’s more like a Tupperware party.”

But the real threat wasn’t Gracie or even men with earpieces. It was Zee, who had surely already noticed how antsy he was lately. If they went through with it, he wouldn’t be able to look her in the eye for weeks.

He knew Zee wanted, more than anything, for him to finish the monograph — but she’d see this as more procrastination, as chasing fingerprints when he ought to be engaged in hard-nosed analysis. He could imagine her forehead creased, her hands on his shoulders. “You thought,” she’d say, “that you could finish your book by breaking into my mother’s attic? That was your plan? Show me how much you’ve written.”

He felt, bizarrely, that he was choosing between Edwin Parfitt and his wife — and not for the first time. The night he met Zee, at a welcome cocktail party at the graduate dean’s house, and she’d learned he was planning to write about Parfitt, she’d said, “Parfitt. Wow. Oh dear. I put him in a category with Joyce Kilmer.”

Doug had been blinded by the shine of her black hair, by the thin straps of her dress, but he’d managed to call her out. “That’s because you know exactly one poem by each. You know Kilmer’s ‘Trees,’ and you know Parfitt’s ‘Apollo on the Mississippi,’ and they’re both sappy. They were completely different poets in every way. They weren’t even writing at the same time!”

“Yes, they are different. They’re both trite, but Parfitt is also opaque. And my God, you could march to his rhythms, right?”

Doug was holding a bacon-wrapped scallop that he had no idea what to do with. “He just had this one cheesy period: 1930 to ’32. Everything got all happy and rhymey. I mean, happiness is bad for poetry. And ‘Apollo’ was from that time. But that’s the stuff that got famous. You need to read his early sonnets. The Persephone series, and the Aeneas ones. And his last poems are devastating. Have you read ‘Proteus Wept’? Or ‘Pond’s Edge, Forgotten Girl’? It’s so different from what you think.”

“I’ve read it. He loved to eroticize those drowned women, didn’t he?”

Doug had decided by this point that he hated this bitch, this sharp-chinned bitch who was looking over his shoulder for someone better to talk to. “Well, he was gay,” he said. “If drowning turns you on, that’s your issue.” He’d stalked away.

Over the next year, as hatred melted into repartee and then to lust and sex and dating and engagement, he’d managed to convince her that Parfitt was someone she ought to like, though she never did become a fan. “You have a similar worldview,” he told her.

“What worldview is that?”

He couldn’t answer, but he wanted to say: Both of you — you feel so small that you’ll never realize the volume of your own voice.

28

Miriam stood at the counter, prying a small pumpkin open with a kitchen knife. She was making soup to go with the lasagna Doug had prepped that afternoon, or so she had announced, but Zee had yet to see so much as a pot. It was already six thirty, with the older Breens due at the coach house in half an hour.

Doug was in a suspiciously good mood, bouncing around and inviting Case to join him for a beer on the tiny, precarious balcony off the kitchen. Zee almost stopped them, almost said that if Case stepped on the balcony, it was sure to be hit by lightning and break clean off the house. His ankle should have healed twice over by now, but he’d strained the tendon again leaping from his flaming car. So here he was, four months after the initial injury, still in the boot, still in pain. If things continued this way, one day Case would just combust like his car had. Miriam would wander back to Texas alone with her garbage. Problem solved.

Now that things were going so well with Cole, Zee was meditating, that night, on the one issue remaining: how to guarantee that Doug finished saying whatever he had to say about Edwin Parfitt so the monograph could be under contract by spring. Despite his improved work ethic, whenever she asked how much he’d written it was never more than a hundred words, and he was never ready to show her.

With everyone occupied, Zee walked quietly back into the apartment.

Getting into Doug’s computer was so easy, compared with the risk of hacking Cole, that her pulse hardly rose. She looked first, optimistically, in the “Recent Documents” menu. The list included “In the last months of,” “To Whom It May Concern,” “Budget 99” and “Systems Work Folder 30, B.” She checked the first, the only one with any promise, hoping the document would refer to the last months of Edwin Parfitt’s life. It did. It read, in its entirety, “In the last months of Parfitt’s short life, these five poems comprised not only the (don’t repeat w/ thesis, but + PATHOS of Apollo on Miss. and Peonies).”

She knew he saved chapters individually, and he claimed he’d completed at least four, but this fragment was not encouraging. And if he hadn’t been writing, what had he been doing every day? Zee’s head began throbbing. The anger was there, strongly — the urge to throw the computer through the window and watch it shatter on the gravel — but more overwhelming was the sensation of the entire universe backfiring. Here was the precise opposite of everything she’d fought for. No: It was as if some malevolent genie had twisted her wishes into realities she couldn’t handle. Cole was imploding — confessing, even! — but Doug wouldn’t be ready to take the job. The job would open up just in time to go to some wunderkind who’d hold it for fifty years.

She should look at the other documents to make sure, and she should look at everything saved in his “Diss.” folder, no matter how old, and she should look on all the disks she could find, just in case he’d been an idiot and neglected to save his work on the hard drive. With twenty minutes before her aggressively punctual mother and stepfather would arrive, she began searching in earnest.

29

Miriam’s soup, she announced, wouldn’t be ready for another hour, but it was worth the wait. Doug served Bruce from the bottle of Mount Gay purchased specially for the occasion. The rest of them got to work on a Pinot Noir. Zee was still hiding in the bedroom, sleeping or seething or grading papers, and nobody proposed calling her into the kitchen.

Gracie wandered, inspecting the cabinet hinges and the chipped tiles by the oven. She paused by the old panel right next to the refrigerator, about three feet square, that they’d painted over that spring with the same light blue as the rest of the kitchen.

“This was cheaply patched,” she said, “wasn’t it? Long before my time. I believe it’s where they cut to install the electricity. My grandfather had the big house all wired up just as early as it was ever done, but he left the colony director living here with no lights until, I don’t know, the thirties. He was never one to think of his employees.”

It was the first time Doug heard Gracie refer to the colony with anything other than complete disregard. Apparently her disregard for her father was stronger. Gamaliel — a name Doug found suitably villainous for the man who’d shuttered the colony. When he’d mentioned him to Miriam, she’d said, “Oh, let’s call him Gargamel! Like the bad guy from The Smurfs!” And ever since, Doug had pictured a man skulking around in a black robe, plotting the demise of the little artists. The real Gamaliel had suffered a nervous breakdown following the 1929 stock market crash, and although his fortunes had recovered, his mind never did. At least this was what Doug had gathered from The Devohrs of Toronto: A Family Portrait, back in graduate school.

“Miriam, there’s a commission for you!” Gracie said. She was still examining the panel. “You might as well make yourself useful. Couldn’t you paint it or something? A landscape?”

Miriam had perched on the counter, bare feet swinging, wine glass in hand. “I don’t paint much. How about a traditional mosaic? In glass and little tiles?”

Case said, “Hey, see?” He turned to Bruce with a sharp, unfriendly grin. “That’s how it’s supposed to work. Hooking people up with gigs. What are you doing for me?” Joking, but of course he wasn’t.

Bruce looked at his son with what Doug took for deep irritation. “My friend Clarence Mahoney will be at the fund-raiser. That’s what I’m doing for you.”

The art project, at least, was quickly settled, and Bruce told Gracie she was “a regular Medici.” Miriam was already eyeing the piece of wood like something she planned to ravish.

There was a small crash from Doug and Zee’s rooms, and a grunt of what sounded like frustration. They ignored it.

“Oh, just think!” Gracie said. “This might turn out to be your best artwork ever, and I thought of it just by happensack!”

Case let out a quick burst of laughter, and Miriam quickly stuck her head into the oven under the pretense of checking the pumpkin. Bruce beamed like Gracie was the cutest thing.

“Just by happensack,” Doug repeated, and managed to keep a straight face. “And of course you’ll pay Miriam for the tiles,” he said, because he knew Miriam wouldn’t say it, and he knew Gracie wouldn’t think of it. “Unless you want it made of snipped up shirts and compost.” He looked at Miriam to see if he’d offended her, but when she emerged from the oven she was smiling appreciatively.

“Oh, of course. And something extra for the labor. Shall we see what’s keeping Zilla?” There was a horrible scraping sound just then, though, and no one volunteered.

By the time the soup was blended, the orange mess sopped from the counter, the remains served, and the lasagna finishing in the oven, they were all in high spirits. Maybe not Case, but certainly the rest of them. Gracie was more and more talkative with the wine, and Doug and Miriam couldn’t stop giggling. The soup was delicious.

Gracie said, “I’ll have you know we hung that farmhouse painting in the solarium regardless. I realize it’s a bit naïve, Miriam, but it’s innocent, and I like that. I don’t like violent art. And my late husband, as I mentioned, adored it.”

“Good King George,” Bruce said. He was sloshed. “George the Late. George the Infallible.”

Miriam took a big breath and glanced — apologetically, it seemed — at Doug, and then said, “Speaking of things I could be doing with my days. Bruce mentioned there were old filing cabinets — up in the attic? Those must be a burden. Wouldn’t you like help cleaning those out?” Doug’s first inclination was to panic, to kick Miriam under the table, but he supposed it was all right. Zee wasn’t there to hear, and Case didn’t care, and Bruce’s presence might force Gracie’s hand. “I mean, I want to earn my keep.”

Gracie didn’t look at Bruce at all, just blinked at Miriam. She said, “I can’t help but think it’s a shame you never had braces, Miriam. It really does mark a person. I always say, if you want to know someone’s lot in life, look at the teeth.”

—

Zee returned to the kitchen as the main course was served, and there was something about her smile, her slow pace, that made her look like a drunk trying to walk a straight line. She kissed her mother’s cheek, and Miriam scrambled for another place setting.

Gracie was going off about the Internet, and Zee joined the group of baffled, nodding heads. “What’s so horrifying is they can just put your name on there, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” Gracie said. “Even for the phone book they have to have your permission! And correct me if I’m wrong, but I have the impression they can even show photographs. I don’t know if you need a special computer to get them, but just think! Miriam, have you seen this? In your work with the computers?”

Miriam protested that she was a technophobe in disguise, and Doug could practically hear the creak of Zee’s eyes rolling beside him. “Some of my planning is on the computer,” Miriam said, “but then it’s all hand work.”

“Tell them about the secrets!” Bruce said. “All her secrets are under there!”

Miriam’s neck turned red. “Oh. Behind the materials,” she said. “After I’ve outlined my shapes, and before the mortar, I write a secret in paint. People like knowing it’s there, I think. If a buyer asks, I’ll sometimes tell what it said.”

Case said, “Secrets about me, right babe?”

“I didn’t know it myself, till we read that article last year,” Bruce said. “Miriam, have they seen the article?”

Zee said, “It’s amazing the secrets people can keep. Isn’t it.” There was something wrong with her. Doug put his hand on her knee and she jerked away. “I used to think I could tell when someone had a secret. I really did. And it turns out—”

But Gracie shrieked and they all turned to her. “There was a ladybug!” she said. “Right on my plate.”

30

Zee rose from bed like a heavy animal, her legs slow and numb.

Out at the table, the two of them giggling over breakfast. “Happensack — the luckiest town in New Jersey!” Miriam could hardly get her breath.

Doug: “It’s the karma that gets you stuck on the turnpike!”

Zee couldn’t look at them.

Miriam: “It’s a sack full of four-leaf clovers!”

“It’s when someone accidentally kicks you in the nuts!”

Doug’s book bag lay on the floor. He was headed to the library, he said. She wanted to tear the zipper off, to see what was really inside. Books about adolescent girls, love letters to Miriam, a hundred bags of cocaine. The possibilities were endless.

Instead she said, “Miriam, why don’t you meet me for coffee this morning? We haven’t had a chance to talk much lately.” They’d had nothing but chances to talk: right now, for instance, and the million times Zee swept past the sunporch pretending to be absorbed in the mail.

Miriam said, “Oh, lovely,” and Zee said, “There’s a chance I’ll be waylaid by the dean.”

And at ten o’clock, with Miriam waiting at Starbucks, with Case off at the doctor, chauffeured by Sofia, Zee drove back to the house and slammed her way into the silent, cold porch. Finished canvases leaned three deep against the walls, but the piece centered on Zee’s yellow cotillion dress was still in progress, laid out on the floor like a corpse. The black swirls around it were finished — river stones and coffee beans and checkers and an old Escape key and barrettes. The dress was only half covered, in yellow but also orange and little spots of brown and green. The green: It took a minute to realize why the green looked so familiar. Here were the shards of her mother’s celadon vase, the one Case had knocked to pieces. Had Miriam even asked to keep these? Had she stolen them that night? Zee wiggled her thumb under the bottom of the hemline and yanked up. Stones and scraps flew off, skittered across the floor. Some of the fabric tore. It was only half a dress, really, as Miriam had cut the back entirely away. But here were the words, the secrets, just as Bruce had said. Zee left the dress attached by the left shoulder and read what she could of the black painted script below, obscured by glue, bitten around the edges by the mortar and stones.

The hair just below

Your navel

Curls to the left

Let me untwist it

That was near the top. Farther down, below an unreadable swath:

Lick the scars

Up your knees

Taste what

You drank

And down by the hemline:

I forget to look

In mirrors

My guts have all

Sprung loose

She slapped the dress back down. There was an ugly satisfaction in finding what she’d known she would, despite the sudden light show behind her eyelids that was like the beginning of a migraine, but with a drumbeat.

Zee dragged Hidalgo from the big house. She got saltines from upstairs and sprinkled them all around, behind Miriam’s trays of beads, under her papers. Then she shut him in. He might get free, but not before doing a lot more damage and clawing up the windows. He watched her leave, his eyes black and questioning. “Be bad,” she said.

Her face, her smile, her breathing, would be fine at the coffee shop. If she could smile at Sid Cole, she could smile at Miriam. As she sped to town she developed the leaden sensation, though, that she hadn’t just been right in her fears, but had actually caused something, yet again, to happen. That she’d willed this into being as surely as she’d brought about Cole’s implicit confessions. She was getting everything she wanted, but also — like in a nightmare, where you’re the author and also the victim — she was getting everything she feared: Miriam’s crush, Doug’s ineptitude, even the appearance of that stupid dress. She thought, I need to be careful what I fear next. And then she thought: What I fear next is madness. What I fear next is madness. What I fear next is madness.

31

I’m so glad we can chat,” Frieda said, though she didn’t sound glad at all. Doug had gone on an absolute tear the past few weeks and finished the two new books, FedExing the diskettes and riding his bike triumphantly home from the post office.

“Something tells me I messed up.” He sat down with the phone base in his lap.

“Well, we can fix it. It’s not unusual that our writers find their voice and start embellishing a bit, and please take that as a compliment. You’re a real writer.”

“It was the eating disorder thing.”

“The problem, in this case, is that it’s the topic of the next book in the series, What’s Eating Molly, which has already been written. And then — the Cece book is wonderful, you really have an ear for her, but we meant for the character of the neighbor to be peripheral. As it is, you’ve fleshed him out so much that I think readers would expect him to return.”

“Right. Okay.”

“What it boils down to, really, is that you’ve made uninvited changes to the world of the story. And you know, a little thing can have huge repercussions down the line. Someone discovers they’re allergic to peanuts, for example, and then five books later—”

“I get it. How long do I have to fix this?”

Frieda sighed — an actual sigh, a rope around Doug’s neck. “At this point, you know, you’ve been fabulous, but we have faster writers, ones who can do this in their sleep. I’m going to bring one of them in, and they’ll split the payment.”

—

Doug was surprised how upset he was. There was the money issue, to be sure, the four thousand dollars he’d counted on cut down to two or less, and there was the ignominy of being, essentially, fired. But moreover he felt a sense of failure, of stupidity. He’d messed up something that should have been a piece of cake. And for what? For trying too hard. When here sat his other project, the real project, for which he’d accomplished nothing at all beyond breaking and entering.

He poured yesterday’s tepid coffee into his thermos. He was searching for milk when he heard Miriam sobbing again, this time from inside the rooms she shared with Case. He was about to make a silent joke about another dead Kennedy when he realized Case was in there with her, that the sobs were covering the rumble of an angry male voice. Doug heard the word disaster, and he heard actually and Texas and forget it. He waited longer than he was comfortable, listened for any reason to break down the door: slaps or crashes or sudden screams. But it was just this torrent of words and crying.

Doug started humming loudly as he dumped in a scoop of sugar and shook the thermos up. He gave words to the humming: This is my cue to leave. This is my cue to leave. Okay, then. He dug in his desk and found the diskettes that were Edwin Parfitt’s prison, and he found the bound copy of his dissertation, and he found last year’s research — Xeroxes and notes and outlines. He stuck them in his bag with the thermos. It had taken a punch in the balls from Frieda and Melissa Hopper, it had taken hysterical Texans spooking him from the house, but he would finally get to work.

And what was more: He was done being a baby. If there were files twenty yards away from him, he was going to help himself. The fund-raiser was a week away, but that was enough time to plan the details. He’d have knocked on Miriam’s door right then to tell her so, if she hadn’t been indisposed. Instead, he headed out the door and into the rain.

In front of a library computer, he spread things out. He borrowed a stapler and some markers from the front desk. By the end of two hours, he had a plan for a new shape to the book, given that something, anything, could be found in the files. Parfitt was famous (if he was famous for anything, which he wasn’t) for periods of hyperproductivity followed by long fallow stretches. This was often attributed to his depression, though Doug had never found any signs of the man’s mood swings other than his offing himself — and Doug wondered if he could piece together some other theory, based on the poet’s time at MacDowell and Laurelfield and his publication schedule. The MacDowell archives were at the Library of Congress, and maybe he’d be allowed access. Those librarians couldn’t be harder to get past than Gracie. And the sickness Parfitt had mentioned in that letter to his niece — there might be something about that in the Laurelfield files. That he’d had to leave early, that he was depressed, that he had some condition like lupus that would have immobilized him for months or years. Perhaps he’d had, like Doug, an invisible troll sitting on his shoulders keeping him from his work — until, one day, the troll hopped off.

32

As the days grew short, as the ghost stories of the semester piled up in her dreams and (as fifteen-page papers) in her inbox, as she lay awake half the night and walked sleeping through the day, Zee began to wonder if her sanity, her residency in the rational world, wasn’t a thin veneer. Something ready, all along, to crack.

She’d always believed she could read Doug like a book, but apparently this wasn’t true. She hadn’t even known what he was writing. She looked at him in the mornings and wondered who he was.

So what was real? And who was running the show? She used to think she was the one in charge. Now she began to fear this same thing.

She found herself pressing on the kitchen counter to see if it would give way, if it would turn to a liquid or a vapor.

—

The last weeks of November passed in a dull and angry blur. Chantal asked if she was feeling all right. “No,” she said, and walked away.

In the bathroom of the English building, she noticed her arms had grown thin. There she was in the glass above the sink, still visible, fluorescently lit. What had once been a nice, symmetrical face had grown bony and shiny, like a cartoon of an unfortunate stepsister. As she stood at the hand dryer, the tiles on the floor began rearranging themselves, jumping to new spots. No. It was scraps of toilet paper, blown by the hot air.

Doug didn’t seem to notice that she’d spoken maybe twelve sentences in the past week. She’d climb into bed and pretend to fall asleep immediately. He’d keep reading for an hour, his face glowing in the lamp and from some deeper contentment too. She found five hundred dollars in his sock drawer and figured he’d gotten it from those horrible books. She wondered if he was spending it on Miriam. She took a fifty from the stack, and used it to buy the bottle of vodka that lived in her office desk for the next week till it was empty.

—

She walked in to find her ghost seminar in deep debate. Sarah Bonheur was red in the face, practically shouting. “It would be a statement on how this school feels about women,” she said. “Like, look at their date rape policy. Oh, excuse me, their lack of policy.”

Chad Crosley, polo shirt and ratty cap, shorts despite the freezing weather, leaned back and said, with authority, “You know why they’ll never fire him? He’s an alum.”

“Exactly! It’s the old boys’ network. The alum thing is a male thing.”

Zee, setting down her papers, shook her head. “He’s not, Chad. He went to Indiana.” Fran was agreeing loudly with Sarah. “Look how long it took them to build sorority houses! Like we’re some afterthought. If Dr. Cole is still here after Christmas, I’m transferring.”

Zee — maybe it was the swig of vodka before class — snapped. “Look, Fran, you don’t know the whole story. We’re trying to teach you to think like adults, and you’re jumping to conclusions like children.” Fran stared, cowed. Zee wondered why she’d just defended Cole, without ever deciding to. “Professor Cole has nothing to do with your sorority house, Fran.”

Chad, sullen under his cap: “I’m sure that dude’s an alum.”

—

Zee had no fondness for Case Breen, but she wanted to cry when she saw him. He lay on the downstairs couch, covered in ice packs, his neck swollen so his chin had nearly vanished. Miriam knelt by his side, and when Zee asked what had happened she lifted the ice packs to show how his face had swallowed his eyes, reduced them to slits.

“He was out walking,” Miriam said. “Which he shouldn’t have been. You know that bear statue, back in the woods?” Apparently Case, in an effort to avoid the trucks out front, the florists and caterers setting up for tonight’s fund-raiser, had circled the rear of the property and taken a rest on the pedestal of the statue. (Zee, in her childhood, had named the bear Theo. She hadn’t been back there in ages.) Bees began swarming out from under the thing, and Case, leaving his crutches behind, didn’t get far enough fast enough. “He isn’t allergic at least, but they took out forty-three stingers. And of course he hurt his ankle again.”

“Good God. Really? Bees in November?”

Case made a noise from the couch, low and guttural. His arms were covered with white cream. Zee wondered if he could still talk, but then he said, “Leave me alone. Both of you. Go away.”

33

There were two complications at the beginning of the fund-raiser, even after Miriam managed to prop the puffed-up shell of Case in the corner, a scotch in his hand, and leave him to his own devices. The first was that Gracie had recognized Leland, despite his Clark Kent act (shaved face, glasses). But Doug and Miriam had been standing far away, after sneaking him in through the garage, and Leland had preempted her question by saying, “I hope you remember me. I’m Jack Spence, whose life you so kindly saved by letting me photograph your attic. And I’m also a big Gore supporter. When I learned the event would be at your house, I couldn’t resist!” Gracie had smiled warmly and introduced him to the lanky state senator holding court by the cheese table. Zee recognized Leland too, but only vaguely. “We’ve met before,” he said, and before he could give her the second speech he’d practiced, she nodded and wandered away.

The second snag was when Zee pulled Doug into the closed-off hallway to Bruce’s study, pushed him up against the wall, and unzipped his pants. In seconds he was growing full in her hand, and his brain had turned almost completely off. It was seven fifty-five, and he was supposed to meet Leland and Miriam outside the kitchen at eight o’clock, in the moments right before the speeches started. With every reserve of physical willpower, he peeled his mouth from hers and slid down the wall and zipped back up. “Not here,” he said.

By the time he turned back, she’d been replaced by a blade of ice. She wrapped her arms around her stomach and glared so deeply into him that it seemed a serious accusation, an indictment. But he didn’t have mental space left to decipher the look. She walked away, and he sat on the couch to wait out his erection.

At a minute past eight, Doug scooted past a scurrying caterer and planted a hand on Leland’s shoulder. Bruce was clanking a glass already in the library. The quartet had stopped playing.

Miriam grinned up at Doug, all teeth. This was the happiest he’d seen her since before Hidalgo tore up her work. She had chosen a silver cocktail dress so she could be the one to handle anything dusty, afraid streaks would show on the men’s black dress pants. She’d straightened her hair and pulled it back. Leland, meanwhile, was bouncing out of his skin. His pockets were full of the needles and keys he’d cadged from the same friend who’d been tutoring him all week on picking old locks. The three passed through the kitchen to climb the back stairs. The caterers paid no attention. No one was there as they made their way down the silent hall to the attic door. And no one heard as Miriam said, “We’re like the Bloodhound Gang!”

And really, that was exactly what it felt like to Doug — that for the first time since maybe college, he had a cohort, and a pack mentality. Earlier, as the room had filled, Doug felt connected to them both by invisible strings. Their eye contact was loaded with a thousand reminders and encouragements.

Doug stood guard at the top of the stairs, and Leland told Miriam she should try the lock first. “I’m sure you have the steadiest hands,” he said. There was no time for such gallantry, and Doug saw from the way Leland was rocking on his heels that he couldn’t wait to take over, to show off his new skills. “Give me some light,” Miriam said, and Leland produced his little pocket flashlight and held it right over her ear. Doug wondered if his heart might actually stop, if the sustained thumping he hadn’t endured since his last real soccer game (twelve years ago? thirteen?) might simply kill him, if he might become the next ghost of Laurelfield: The man who died for no reason in the middle of a party. They found his crumpled body at the foot of the stairs.

But then he heard a click and a gasp, and he turned to find them both staring at the door, an inch-thick crack of darkness at its open edge. “Jesus!” Leland said. “God, that was impressive! I think I’m in love!”

Doug pulled out his own flashlight, and they passed the switch on the wall without flipping it. They closed the door, careful to test that it would reopen on the way out. “Oh, wow,” Miriam said, climbing first, “don’t you guys feel that? On the stairs? Don’t you feel that presence?”

Leland said, “I can’t believe that worked. I can’t fucking believe it.”

Doug climbed behind the other two, overcome by the unhelpful realization that he wanted out, that it was too much, that he’d rather be down on Bruce’s couch getting screwed by his wife, or at the party listening to fund-raising news, or, better yet, in bed with a magazine and a beer. But no: The new Doug did things. For instance, the new Doug held the flashlight steady even when Miriam announced brightly, “Hey, there are micies! Don’t worry, little guy! Oh, he ran away.” And the new Doug was the one who navigated the maze of bed frames and dressers until he came, with awe and recognition, to the four file cabinets forming a crooked little quad by one of the moonlit dormers.

“Okay,” Leland said, “say a prayer.” And he pulled the top drawer of one cabinet. With a musical creak, it opened. He said, “Give me the light. Okay. Okay. Tisdale, Robin. Tollman, Harold. Tower, Rosamund.”

Miriam squealed and threw her arms around Doug’s neck, then hugged Leland from behind and tried to peer over his shoulder. They shushed one another and opened more drawers, announced the contents and shushed again. Two entire cabinets held the alphabetized colonist files, and the other two were a jumble of year-by-year records and correspondence. Miriam dove into those, instructed to search specifically through the twenties and thirties, and the men focused on the drawer that would contain both M and P. Because M came first, Leland dug through first. Doug restrained himself from shouting that the Parfitt research was the reason they were up here to begin with. He held the flashlight for Leland. Miriam pulled out files to read their labels by the moonlight.

“Moor, no E,” Leland said. “Another Moor, no E. Christ. Oh, Christ. Marlon Moore? Marlon Moore? This is what they’re going by?” He hefted an enormous file from the cabinet and sat with it on the floor. “Some douchebag named Marlon Moore. There’s half a book here. No, literally. There’s half a novel. And some idiot thought this was Marianne Fucking Moore.”

“Can you scoot over?” Doug said. “We don’t have time.” He stepped across Leland and pulled the drawer as far as it would go. There it was: Parfitt, Edwin, a hanging file with a white label. It was alarmingly thin, though, and as he pulled it out he feared there would be a single piece of paper inside, an unpaid fifty-cent phone bill.

When he did open the folder there was, indeed, a single sheet, but that sheet was so bizarre he didn’t have time to gape at its thinness, its singularity. He didn’t say anything at all as he shone his flashlight around the edges. It was a photograph, taken outside. The more he looked at the background, the more he became convinced this was the back corner of the big house, the largest koi pond off to the right, and a bench. But the background was hard to focus on, because the subject of the photo was two men, both stark naked, both dripping wet. One was laughing, head lolled back. The other stared straight at the camera, his grin urgent and almost malevolent. Each man had a hand around the other’s penis. And neither man was Edwin Parfitt.

Doug struggled for something to announce, but his brain had short-circuited entirely, and Leland was reading aloud from Marlon Moore’s manuscript. “Rose was mad with grief,” he said. “Yeah, I’m mad with grief. Listen to this: One who has not wandered under those titanic pines will scarce comprehend the weight of time that settles on the solitary philosopher seeking shelter ’neath their dripping arms. The pages are out of order, too. Not that it matters.”

“It’s eight thirty,” Doug said. “We need to load up.”

“Did you find Parfitt stuff?” Miriam turned to him, eyes alarmingly bright in the moonlight.

“I’ll show you later.”

“I’ve got 1920 through ’39, but each year is three inches of stuff. You have to pick.”

“Pick for me. No, 1933.”

She pulled two files from the drawer. Leland handed Miriam his suit jacket, then loosened the belt of his too-large slacks, and Doug and Miriam worked together to tuck the two thick 1933 folders and the flat Parfitt one into the waistband. Miriam secured the last and tightened the belt, and Leland wiggled his brows over her head at Doug. When he was retucked, jacket covering the bulges, he took a few trial steps.

“What about this, though?” Miriam grabbed a small green lockbox off the top of one cabinet. “This has to be interesting, right?”

Doug had noticed it in Leland’s photographs, but he’d been so focused on the promise of Parfitt files he hadn’t thought much of it. Now, though, he was willing to try anything.

“Just carry it out,” Doug said. It looked natural in Leland’s hand, like something he was supposed to be taking from a political fund-raiser. “Walk with authority.”

The music started far below. Leland swore and Doug scooped the Marlon Moore file back into its drawer. Miriam used the dust cloth from Doug’s pocket to wipe any sign of activity from the cabinet tops.

Back at the party, with Leland gone right out the front door, Doug and Miriam filtered into the living room, each grabbing coffee and then talking loudly to each other about Bill Bradley. There stood Case, alone next to the grandfather clock. He’d been meant to find Clarence Mahoney, Bruce’s friend with all the connections — he’d been banking on it, in fact, on schmoozing his way into a job tonight — but his drained glass and the fact that he didn’t seem to have moved were not auspicious. Doug wondered if he could even see the room, with his eyes swollen like that. There was Bruce, cheeks and nose bright red, throwing his arm around someone. There was Zee, keeping a narrow balance as she crossed the room. She put her hand on Doug’s tie and slid it down to his navel. Her voice was flat, her face centimeters from his own. “Where were you?”

“I stepped outside for a breather,” he said, as planned. But it was freezing out, he realized, and he was drenched with sweat.

Zee just smiled, and slowly turned to Miriam. “Miriam, what did you think of the state senator? The one from the South Side?”

“Oh, the — wasn’t he? He was great.”

“And the one after him. What was his name again?”

“Oh, you’re asking the wrong person!”

Zee said, “Yes. I am.”

34

Zee was composing her final exam when Cole knocked on her office door. “Zelda, my one true friend!” he said. “I had to see for myself!” Every wall of her office was covered with pictures of nude men, which she’d had color printed at Kinko’s. Some lounged on motorcycles, some touched themselves, some coyly pulled their jeans down to their knees. Cole stood in the middle of the room, turned a slow circle, emitted a long whistle. “They’re not for the ladies, are they?” he said. “These pictures are for the fancy boys.” Zee had taped them up on Monday, and by Tuesday Jerry Keaton had gone as far as he dared, sticking a postcard of a lingerie-clad Betty Paige on his office door. Ida Hayes, playing it safe but perhaps saying something more profound about the principles at stake, had copied Adrienne Rich’s explicit “floating sonnet” for her classes. Golda Blum had come by to advise Zee that if she was being more flagrant than Cole she might expect starker consequences as well. But Golda was only exasperated and stressed. Zee knew when Golda was furious, and this wasn’t it.

What Zee had realized, the day she snapped at Fran, was that her support of Cole had shifted from ironic and undermining to genuine. The first letters she wrote on his behalf were designed to make things worse. (“His jokes about wishing to date certain students have been largely misconstrued.”) But around the time she realized what Doug was really writing, around the time he began mooning over Miriam, disappearing with her at the fund-raiser, she’d lost all interest in getting him Cole’s job. The thought of Doug, undeserving, unambitious, sitting lovestruck in an office he didn’t deserve — in Cole’s office, the good little corner one, where that man had written real articles, had graded and conferred for twenty years — made her sick. And without Doug to root for, she found it harder and harder to root against Cole, especially when she saw the tenacity with which he fought his case, never once, never once, claiming the pornography wasn’t his. She regretted, now, what she’d done, but it was a strange brand of remorse — more tactical than moral.

“And why, pray tell, do you possess a pistol cylinder?”

She tried hard to understand, and finally realized Cole was looking down at her desk. The metal flower, from the woods.

She picked it up and looked through the six perfect holes. She felt stupid — hadn’t she seen them in a thousand movies? — but Cole didn’t need to know that. “Souvenir,” she said. “From my last shootout.”

And there was Chad Crosley walking in to ask about his C-minus paper, beet red, hands around his eyes like blinders. He’d been warned.

35

Leland’s apartment in Evanston smelled pleasantly of cigar smoke. The walls were lined with bookshelves, and an inordinate number of small, dim lamps lit the living room. The three of them sat on the floor, around the neat stack of files and the lockbox. It had been two days since the fund-raiser, but this was the first time they’d been able to meet. Doug had said he was going to the Northwestern library, and Miriam had invented a yoga class.

“Did you read the files?” Doug asked.

“I did better.” Leland flicked the lockbox open, and Miriam applauded. “Well, my locksmith buddy did better.”

“What’s in it?” Doug lifted out the stack of papers and envelopes.

“Nothing good, sorry to say. It’s just Gracie’s stuff. We can’t be this lucky with locks and get lucky with the content too. But you have your Parfitt file, right?”

“You really didn’t look? That’s amazing restraint.” Doug ceremoniously opened the file to reveal the photograph: wet bodies, laughter, penises.

“Jesus God,” Leland said. “Is that Parfitt?”

“Not even.”

Miriam had gone bug-eyed, and some old rule flitted through Doug’s mind, something about not being vulgar in front of southern women. But what she finally said was, “You know what’s weird? They don’t even have hard-ons. I mean, it’s not sexy, you know?”

Leland turned it over. “Crap. Did you see this?” He pointed to the spidery handwriting on the back, the single slanted word and question mark: Father? “Someone thinks that’s their father? It can’t be Parfitt’s father, right? The photo quality looks like twenties or thirties, at least.”

As Leland and Miriam passed the photo, Doug flipped through the lockbox papers. The 1954 deed to a car. A 1955 marriage license for George Robert Grant and Grace Saville Devohr. A copy of Gracie’s birth certificate.

“Hey, guys,” he said. “How old did you think Gracie was?”

“Sixty,” said Leland. “Maybe fifty-eight.”

“Sixty-two,” Miriam said. “Bruce is sixty-four, and she’s two years younger.”

“Look.” He put the certificate on the floor. “1925. She’s seventy-four.”

They both squinted at it, with as much voyeuristic glee as they’d ogled the photo.

“So she had Zee when she was forty,” Doug said. “But does Bruce really think she’s younger than him?”

“Maybe that’s why she didn’t want you in the attic,” Leland said.

Miriam said, “That’s why she’s afraid of getting put on the Internet! She doesn’t want anyone doing the math.”

They spent the next hour poring over the 1933 files, and the one major validation for Doug was the fact that at the end of the file lay a document with the heading “Confirmed Guests, Winter 1934,” in which “E. Parfitt” was listed, alongside the note “(4th visit).” Although there was nothing he could immediately use, there was the promise of more. And the fact that the records were so detailed boded well for lists of who was there with Parfitt on his other stays, even minus anything meaningful in his own file. The other artists might even have mentioned him in their own diaries and correspondence. It would be enough for a clever writer to build some analysis around, some stuff about influence — provided he could get back up to the rest of the files. They’d left the attic door unlocked, but they were sure Sofia, ever thorough, would have discovered it by now and said something to Gracie.

They ordered pizza and Leland dialed up his Internet. Their intent was to find Gracie, to see what was already out there about her. Leland had some vague idea that Doug could use her real birth date to his advantage, either by threatening to expose her or promising to protect her, though Doug doubted he had the guts to pull off either. They found a photo of Gracie as a toddler, blonde curls and a white dress; and another of her at eleven or twelve with her three younger brothers, all a bit petulant next to their dour grandfather, Augustus. It was, indeed, dated 1936. (“My God,” Miriam said, “see, he’s terrifying! Don’t you think he murdered Violet?” “No, but I can see why she wanted out,” Doug said. And Miriam said, “I’m glad it’s her ghost and not his.”) And then, following Leland’s hunch, they looked up Gracie’s father, Gamaliel, and studied his face.

“That could be him,” Leland said. He was holding the photo of the two naked men next to the computer, comparing the stern businessman on the screen with the naked man on the right, the one throwing his head back in laughter. “It’s a funny angle.”

Miriam said, “And we don’t have Gargamel’s penis online, for comparison.”

“I can’t imagine the chain of events, though,” Doug said. “Gracie finds this picture, recognizes her father, writes on the back, and then of all things she puts it in Edwin Parfitt’s empty file folder?”

“Or,” Miriam said, “she emptied the folder because she knew you’d get up there. And she put this there instead.”

“Does she hate me that much?”

“Why else would this be the only file that’s different? Like, where’s his confirmation letter? Where’s his application?”

They stared a bit longer at the online photo of Gamaliel. He was older, but the chin was right, the ears were feasible. Doug remembered that game from the senior yearbook, match the baby with the eighteen-year-old, and how it had been impossible, except for the one Asian kid. Impossible to identify the people who had been your whole world for four years.

It was getting late, but there was more to discuss: How to return the lockbox to the attic, for instance, before Gracie discovered it was gone. How to get the rest of the files.

Leland said, “Look, you don’t need to sneak around anymore. You don’t need to pretend you did nothing wrong. You can play your hand.”

“I didn’t know I had a hand.”

“You have — you have some tools at least. You know Gracie’s real age. You know her father might or might not have gone skinny dipping with a male companion.”

Miriam said, “We know she either hates Doug or doesn’t want him writing about Laurelfield.”

“That’s not really a tool,” Leland said.

“You’re a tool.”

He pelted her with a pizza crust.

Doug added, “And we know her biggest fears. That civilization ends on the thirty-first, or that it doesn’t and the Internet survives.”

Miriam nodded slowly. “That’s all you need, isn’t it? That’s all it takes to run the world. Knowing people’s fears.”

36

(The air between

our bodies

The miles between

intention

and act

The windows, eclipses, forgettings, doorways,

misses and losses and half-slept dreams

The shrinking space between now

And century’s end

Here

Under stone

Overboard

I’ll tell

the secret I have seen:

The ghosts live in

the space between)

37

On December 31 Zee and Doug walked to the big house, arms full of belated gifts. They’d spent Christmas itself at Doug’s mother’s house in Pennsylvania, and there, amid the hoarded statuettes and smoke-stained walls, Zee had felt almost normal again. They ate casserole for four days straight, and helped put in storm windows. It didn’t feel like a return to stability or even a vacation, though, so much as a stay of execution. They had to come back to Laurelfield to face their lives and their marriage and the end of the millennium. Any number of explosive things.

Gracie had decreed that the millennium would go out with a late Noel, and that all presents must be wrapped in silver and blue to make Miriam more comfortable. (“I don’t get it,” Doug had said, and Zee had said, “Just because she’s Jewish. My mother’s an idiot.” “Miriam’s Jewish?” And when she’d stared at him in disbelief, he’d added, “I guess I just thought of her as Texan.” “What, they don’t have Jews in Texas?” “No, like ‘Don’t Mess with Texas.’ Like that sort of overrides everything. I don’t know.” And she’d looked at him hard, trying to figure out if he was really this clueless, or if he thought he needed to pretend, this late in the game, that he hardly knew Miriam. She wanted to tell him he needn’t bother.)

They gathered in the living room around the tree, Case and Miriam underdressed in jeans. Case still wore his boot, but at least his face had resumed its normal shape. The golden tan he’d shown up with that summer was long gone, replaced by a sickly gray. Sofia was off, the food she prepared yesterday already reheating in the oven.

There were flashlights and oil lamps lined up on the sideboard, waiting for midnight, and boxes in the kitchen full of food and aspirin and matches and batteries and vitamin C and toilet paper, alongside office-sized bottles of water and a kerosene stove. Bruce kept checking his watch. It was only six thirty, but every hour he turned on the TV to check the march of time and potential disaster. City after city survived. Electricity had stayed on in Beijing and New Delhi and Moscow and Paris. Bruce was convinced now that the real trouble wouldn’t start until midnight hit the U.S. east coast, and so that’s what they were waiting for: eleven o’clock central, when the Times Square ball would fall and so, presumably, would humanity.

Miriam scooted around the floor like a lithe elf to distribute the packages. For Bruce, a book on subsistence farming. For Gracie, an antique toast rack. When Miriam opened her present from Doug, Zee nearly gagged: a Ziploc bag of sea glass, blue and green and copper. It would have taken him weeks on the frigid beach to collect so much. Miriam said, “I know how I can work them in!” She meant the monstrous thing on the board in the kitchen, the vertiginous patterns she was laying down inch by inch in wet mortar, better than her other work only in that the pieces were tile and glass instead of garbage. Case gave everyone chocolate. Miriam began opening Zee’s gift, which was truly awful. Three days ago, Zee had gone back to her office and grabbed the pistol cylinder. It was an antique, of sorts. It was interesting. It was also a nongift. It was, quite literally, an empty threat of violence.

But Miriam didn’t seem alarmed. “This is amazing!” she said.

“I thought you could stick pencils in it.”

“It has to be ancient. I love it.”

Zee was chagrined that no one had to ask what it was. Even her mother, after a moment of silence, said, “Zilla, where on earth did you find such a thing?”

And Zee said, “Boston.”

There were survival kits from Bruce, sweaters from Gracie, a collection of Marianne Moore poems from Miriam to Doug, with a bizarre inscription: for walks under those titanic pines. Doug turned pink. He smiled at his shoes.

And then — as if Zee had done it herself, as if her rage had flown across the room — the window behind the tree shattered into a million raining shards. They kept falling, with a sound like a xylophone, until nothing was left, just a rectangle of night and frigid wind. Gracie stopped shrieking and they all took shelter on the far side of the room. Miriam’s arm was cut, and Doug’s eyebrow, but not badly. Bruce checked his watch (only seven fifteen, not nearly time for the apocalypse), grabbed a poker, and headed out to make sure it wasn’t a thrown rock — but they knew it wasn’t, the way the glass had just disintegrated so gracefully, from everywhere at once. Gracie scampered to silence the burglar alarm.

—

They all moved gingerly for the rest of the night, in case another window shattered. After dinner, Zee cleared the table and snuck back to the living room. Bruce had duct taped a blanket over the window, but the frozen air still crept through. She poured straight vodka into her teacup, and let the tea bag diffuse and turn the liquid golden. She didn’t care how it tasted. Bruce retreated to his study to watch the New Year hit whatever Atlantic islands were three hours ahead. Gracie stood in the kitchen, sorting absently through yesterday’s mail, throwing away a late Christmas card from distant family in Toronto. “I don’t know why they persist in sending these,” she said. Back in the dining room, Miriam hovered over Doug’s chair, inspecting his eyebrow. Her small breasts were inches from his mouth. “I’m worried there’s a sliver still,” she said.

Zee pretended to read Bruce’s Tribune and then circled back to the dark living room again, her teacup empty. She’d already started to pour when she noticed Case standing silent with his crutches by the blown-out window. If she hadn’t been numbed from the alcohol, she’d have screamed.

“Would you like a drink?” she said.

Case’s face was ravaged, sunken, nothing but eye sockets and cheekbones. It was hard to remember the way he used to smirk at everything.

She tried again. “Case, I’m sorry about all of it. You’ve had terrible luck. No one deserves that.”

“You know what’s funny?”

She shook her head.

“As soon as someone says luck, you know we’re not really talking about luck anymore. If it were luck, the coin would come up heads half the time. Right? It would balance.”

“But it never does.”

“I just think luck’s the wrong word. When we bother talking about it, we mean there’s been a whole string of good things or a string of bad things. Like the coin keeps coming up tails.”

“So maybe what we mean is fate.”

“You know about her, don’t you? You know about her.”

“Oh. Oh, Case.” It was terrible: She honestly hadn’t given him much thought in all this. He had it worse than her, home all day to see it, no job. “I do know. Case, I’m sorry. I — everyone’s going to get through this.” She brought him a glass of vodka, which he took and held like he didn’t know what it was for.

Case said, “She put her finger on my lips.” He reached out one finger and actually pressed it right to Zee’s mouth before she could move, before she could even register his words. His eyes were wild and green, fixed on hers. Zee took his hand as gently as she could and removed it from her face. “And you’ve seen her too, I know you have. She comes to you too.”

Zee regretted the alcohol fog that wasn’t quite allowing her to shift paradigms. He couldn’t be talking about Miriam, could he? He looked like he might cry, actually cry. “Are you talking about Violet?”

He shrugged, humiliated, and didn’t answer.

“Case, I think you need to see a doctor. This house can get to people, but no, I haven’t seen — not literally. Not like that.”

He was devastated, she could tell. However difficult it was for him to say all this, he’d been counting on her understanding, on some kind of validation.

“This place doesn’t want me,” he said. “It’s rejecting me. Like a transplanted organ.”

“You shouldn’t be here. You should go back to Texas.” She said it purely out of concern, and only afterward remembered that this was what she’d wanted all along.

He blinked down at the vodka. “Miriam won’t leave. This is the happiest she’s ever been. This is the best work she’s ever done.”

She wished she could tell him that it wasn’t the house, that Miriam was only happy because she was in love with Doug, and it was the wrong kind of happiness. But she couldn’t do that to him right now. “Tomorrow, if the world doesn’t end. Bruce will loan you guys money, right? Go home and get healthy.”

But now Gracie was in the doorway saying “There you are,” and asking who would join Bruce for a spin in the ’57 Chevy “before the streets get dangerous.”

Case said he would, and he handed Zee the vodka and walked from the room like a broken marionette. Zee went back to the dining room, where Miriam and Doug both still sat. Their whispering stopped the moment she appeared. But she wasn’t there for them, she wished they knew. She walked around to the back wall, to the portrait of Violet. If the artist had been less skilled, her great-grandmother might have remained as flat and uninteresting as any other ancestor. Instead, her skin glowed and her mouth hovered before some small movement, as if she were just now about to say something she’d held in these past hundred years. Zee tried to look at Violet straight on, but Violet was always looking somewhere else.

It was frustrating. Because (and maybe it was just the vodka) Zee needed that moment of silent communication. She had a question for Violet today, a hypothesis she wanted confirmed in this most unscientific of manners. You aren’t even the ghost, she wanted to ask, are you? Something drove you crazy in this house, and it’s the same thing killing Case, and it’s the same thing driving me mad. Everyone in this house is crazy. And look at the blown-out window, the strangling ivy. It isn’t you. This is why I felt fine in Pennsylvania. Something’s wrong with this house. Something’s broken. Things don’t work normally here. (If the semester weren’t over, she’d float the idea by her seminar: not a haunted house, a haunting house.)

But Violet avoided her eyes.

38

At ten thirty, fortified by bourbon, Doug asked Gracie if he could speak to her in the solarium. Gracie had been drinking champagne since six, and Miriam had made sure to refill her glass every time it was even halfway empty, till she was wobbly and glassy-eyed. Miriam ran interference now on everyone else, making sure they stayed in the den, where the TV replayed the celebrations from the International Dateline and points west. Doug and Gracie sat on the long white couch and he said, “I have an offer for you. A good one.”

She looked skeptical. She said, “If this is about your employment situation, I can’t do more than I already am.”

“No. It’s — I think you know that I’ve been in the attic.”

Her hand fluttered to her forehead.

“I shouldn’t have, I know, but please understand how important this is for me. Those archives are the whole meat of the book. But I’ll get back to that.” He pushed his fists into his knees. “While I was up there, quite by accident, I also found some personal papers of yours.”

“Oh, Douglas.” She started looking for her champagne glass. Doug found it on the floor and handed it to her.

“And I did figure some things out. I want to help you. In exchange — I mean, I know you’re nervous about the Internet. I checked, and it’s already out there. It says you’re seventy-four. We can’t change what’s already there. But if it’s important to you, there are ways to create alternate timelines, to get those circulated as well, to confuse things. I have a friend who does Internet stuff. I want to help you. I do.”

Gracie leaned back, her eyes closed. She looked pale — fine wrinkles on top of tissue-paper skin on top of a sudden gray bloodlessness — and he felt he should be taking care of her, getting her a blanket, rather than tormenting her like this. But then she sat up and leaned toward him. She tapped his leg.

“Douglas, you’re clever. And I’m smarter than I seem. I want you to know that.”

“I’m sure we can strike a reasonable bargain.” He was glad Miriam and Leland weren’t there to hear how ridiculous he sounded.

“Those papers are just a joke. People with our kind of wealth, we need other documents sometimes. Alternate documents.”

“But that would be illegal.”

“Not at all. Bruce is smart with these things, and he has lawyer friends.”

“Gracie, I’m talking about old documents. Long before you knew Bruce.”

Miriam had told him just to stare Gracie down if he was at a loss. He pressed his thumbs together and looked right at her. She gave a high laugh, a sound like a teacup hitting the floor.

“Well. Are you trying to ask for money, Douglas? You’ve never been direct.”

“I just want the colony files.”

“What files?”

He said, with as much conviction as he could summon, with an edge of threat that surprised him when he heard it: “The Parfitt files. You know exactly what I mean, because you’re the one who replaced them.”

Gracie looked furious now, which was at least a development, if not an admission. She said, “I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about. Replaced them!”

“I went searching, and instead of what I should have found—”

“Douglas, I’ve been good to you.”

“And that’s why I know we can help each other.”

“What precisely did you find?” The downside of her champagne consumption, he realized, was that she’d become difficult to read. He didn’t want to anger her further by implying that her father was gay, so he tried to word things carefully.

“I found — I mean, you must know. It was those two people who — I don’t know who they were, exactly. Two people, here at this house. Doing something very strange, very unorthodox. You do know what I mean. And please don’t lie to me.”

Gracie took a breath so deep that Doug worried about her ribs. “The world’s about to end, isn’t it? One way or the other.” She was so small on the other end of the couch. She said nothing for a long time, and Doug wondered if the question wasn’t rhetorical after all. Then she said, “But you have to understand that there was no point calling the police. Douglas, there was a lipstick mark halfway down the top of her dress. That’s how far her neck had snapped. The car was like an accordion.”

Doug had the horrible feeling that he’d jumped down the wrong rabbit hole, that the prospect of Edwin Parfitt was growing dimmer and dimmer as he fell. All he could think to say was “Oh.”

“It was the worst thing I’d seen in my life.” She was crying, he saw with horror. Her eyes were pink. He felt like hyperventilating himself, and it was only his utter confusion that kept him pinned to the couch, that kept him from breaking down over lipstick and accordions himself. “But you do know it was an accident. I’d die if you thought otherwise. Max would never have let him take the car if he knew Grace was in it. He didn’t answer the phone — he wouldn’t answer the phone — but he didn’t know it was her.”

There was a paper napkin in Doug’s pocket, and he unfolded it and handed it to her and tried to rewind those last sentences, tried to guess whether speaking of herself in the third person was a rhetorical flourish or a sign of mental breakdown.

He said, idiotically, or perhaps brilliantly, “Max wouldn’t have let him. If he knew Gracie was in it. The car.”

“She was always Grace. Oh, she was a fool. No one got divorced in 1955, but still, I remember thinking there was something wrong with her that she didn’t leave him. He was terrible. A terrible person.”

Doug wished he had Leland on an earpiece, telling him what to say. He managed: “How so?”

“Oh, you know, a drunkard.” She was still crying, but there was a gossipy edge to her voice now, a mean one. She spoke quickly. “That’s why the family left them alone out here. They never came to check on her. Not once. They died not long after — the father, and then the mother a few years later — and the brothers didn’t care for her a fig. But Douglas, that family! They made it easy for us, by not caring. Half the time she was hiding a black eye. He tried me, but I could handle him. I knew about drunks. My father was in jail, Douglas. Can you believe that? George never dared mess with me.”

George was Zee’s father, the gentle man who had taken Zee on the train to the Art Institute once a month. Doug knew he’d once had a drinking problem, but he’d never heard of any violence. And Gracie’s father might indeed have been jailed once or twice — the Devohrs were never long out of the gossip columns in those days — but none of it, together, made sense. Hidalgo trotted in and stuck his nose in Doug’s crotch.

“And what would we have done, if we hadn’t stayed? The family would have come and covered the furniture with white sheets. They’d have been in no hurry to sell. We’d have been out on our ears. And Max would have died. It would have killed him to leave, I really believe that. He was a true gentleman. You should have seen how he turned the pages of the newspaper: He picked up the corner with his finger and thumb, and just lifted it over. Everyone I’d ever known turned pages with their whole palm, like something they were wiping away. It wasn’t a romantic relationship we had. But it was better than most, and Zilla is something. We wanted her so badly. She was born ten years later, exactly. I always took it for a sign. Ten years.”

Doug tried to think if he’d ever heard of someone named Max. He managed to push Hidalgo away and lock his knees against further attack. He said, “Who else knows all this?” As if he himself knew it, or understood it, or had any idea how much of it was a joke.

Gracie shook her head. She was looking at some spot near Doug’s face, but not at Doug. “Max, until he died. I suppose the gardener knew. I always guessed Max bribed him, but I said I wanted no part of it. The hole for the greenhouse was already dug, but the cement wasn’t poured yet. So it was all done the next day, just Max and the gardener. I hid upstairs, but I could hear the wheelbarrows crunching along the drive to the big house. Wheelbarrows.” She covered her nose and mouth with her hands and closed her eyes. The sound of wheelbarrows was apparently the worst part, to her. “And he fired the rest of the staff. Big tips, of course. More money than they’d ever seen. And hired new people.”

Miriam poked her head in the door just then. If she’d overheard anything, it was only that last sentence. “Ten fifty-five. Five minutes till doomsday, east.”

“We’re just finishing up,” Doug said, though he didn’t know if that was true.

Miriam raised an eyebrow — Doug’s face must have looked as ashen as it felt — and ducked out.

“I need you to know it hasn’t been easy, Douglas. Especially at first. The research we had to do, the places we had to avoid. It helped that she’d never shown her face in town, and they’d only been here a few months. Those ridiculous sunglasses. And he was always off in Highwood, drinking. They looked nothing alike. George and Max. But it didn’t matter a bit, in the end. People see what they expect to. And the rest can be handled with money. Still, if you think I haven’t had a thousand heart attacks along the way. And the close calls, the parties where someone was from Toronto and I’d have to get sick and leave. It’s stolen years from my life.”

Doug took a risk. “So it’s — under the greenhouse.” He wasn’t sure at all what he was referring to, but the remote possibility remained that it was something to do with Parfitt. Or else why the missing file? He looked over his shoulder, at the sliding glass doors that separated the solarium from the greenhouse. He could see a few geraniums out there, borrowing some of the indoor light.

“Yes. Both of them. Good lord. If you want the real ghosts of the house, it’s those two, not poor old Violet.”

“Those two, meaning—”

“They made that window shatter, you know. They’ve done it before.”

And there was Bruce at the door, waving urgently. “Come on!” he shouted. “This is the big one!”

As they hurried down the hall after him, Doug realized he hadn’t gotten a single answer about Parfitt. He didn’t understand what she was saying, but he believed her. He just had no idea what it was he was supposed to believe. What ingredients he’d just swallowed. He wanted to march Gracie back to the solarium and lock the door, to ask her fifty more questions, but first he needed to see if the world was ending. He was less certain of its survival than he’d been an hour ago.

Zee and Miriam and Case sat on the leather couch, staring at Dick Clark and the drunken masses in Times Square. No one on the screen seemed particularly panicked. They jumped around in the cold, kissing strangers.

Doug and Bruce and Gracie stood with their hands on the couch back, braced for some kind of impact.

—

The ball came down, and the world did not end.

President Clinton addressed the nation. Bands played, proposals abounded, and after a soothing update about the absence of nuclear meltdowns, the station switched over to the Chicago team and the depressingly anticlimactic forty minutes they had to fill until midnight Central from the floor of a balloon-filled ballroom.

Case said, “We’re still here.” Something odd about his voice, as if he wasn’t entirely sure of the fact. Or as if he was disappointed to find himself still alive, still on the couch, the lights still on.

Bruce turned down the volume and spoke for the first time. “Well, you never know,” he said. There was phlegm in his voice. “You never know what could still happen. But it looks like a lot of bullshit, doesn’t it? It looks like a great deal of human folly here this evening.”

“It never hurts to be prepared,” Gracie said.

“And the things we bought — the car, the food, the water — they’re not useless. I’d always wanted that Chevy, all my life.”

They nodded. Doug was afraid Bruce would start weeping. He couldn’t handle any more of that tonight.

“You know what else? We’ve lost sight of something, with all this millennium bullshit, with all the computer nightmare. We’re forgetting that this is the end of a century. The worst century, I believe, in all of human history. Hitler, Stalin, genocide, the worst warfare in what, a million years of human life on this planet.”

“But a lot of good, too,” Miriam said.

Zee turned to face her. “Oh? Like what?”

“Penicillin? And all the art. Think of, you know, Georgia O’Keeffe. And jazz, and movies! And airplanes. All of it.”

Gracie said, “It’s the house’s birthday. Did you know that? This house is a hundred years old now.”

“I don’t think they built it on New Year’s, Mom.”

“They started building in nineteen hundred!”

“What do you think, Doug?” Bruce’s voice was a little off, a little too loud. He put down his rum with a clatter and undid his collar. “You’re the writer here. Was the twentieth century a comedy, or a tragedy?”

“Or a tragicomedy,” said Zee.

Doug said, “I don’t know.” He was still thinking about Gracie, and didn’t trust himself to form a coherent sentence.

“Well, I think it was a tragedy,” Bruce said. “An absolute and gruesome tragedy. The whole damn century would’ve made more sense backward. Where we’ve ended is worse than where we began.”

Miriam said, “Maybe it was a love story.”

Doug was so busy watching Zee sneer at Miriam that he didn’t see Bruce collapse on the floor beside him. He heard Gracie scream, and there was Bruce, his right arm flapping, his face pale and wet.

Case ran to the phone, and for the five minutes it took the ambulance to get there, Gracie kept shrieking that someone should do CPR, and Zee kept calmly explaining that you could only perform CPR on a dead person and Bruce wasn’t dead.

Doug monitored Bruce’s pulse, which was weak but consistent, and tried to remember what other medical skills he’d been taught in his 1985 training for YMCA camp counselor. Hidalgo ran in circles and barked.

Miriam managed to let the paramedics in through the triple-locked doors, and as they carried the stretcher through the house Hidalgo lunged at it again and again with his front paws, until one of the men sent him flying with a knee to the sternum. Bruce was stable as they carried him out, conscious and wheezing and trying to lift his head.

Gracie rode in the ambulance. Once she was out the door, Doug suggested that Zee drive with Case in Gracie’s car, and he and Miriam follow in the Subaru. “Someone needs to put Hidalgo in his cage,” he said. The job would take twenty minutes of bribery and wrestling, and required at least two people. “We’ll come right behind.” Zee shot him a withering look he couldn’t quite interpret, but she grabbed Case’s elbow and steered him out the door.

Miriam held up her hand to show it shaking. If she’d been closer to her father-in-law he would have waited, but he couldn’t hold it in. “You won’t believe this,” he said.

As they turned off the TV (seven minutes to midnight) and the lights, and constructed a trail of Milkbones to Hidalgo’s kennel in the mudroom, he repeated what he could. He knew he was leaving things out, and he told her at least three times about the man named Max and the way he turned the newspaper pages.

“I was totally drawn in,” he said. “I couldn’t think straight. You’d have done a better job. Anyone would’ve.”

Miriam spun in circles, trying to catch Hidalgo’s red leather collar. “So basically her story is she can’t be seventy-four because she’s really some other person?”

“I believe that was the gist of it. She kept talking about ‘Grace’ like that wasn’t her. So allegedly Grace died, I think? In the car crash. And someone else died too. I don’t know if she said it was George, but that was what I got. She said 1955.”

“Hmm. Those are the principles of a good lie. Tell a big one, and throw in details. Hidalgo! Sit! Hidalgo!”

“Right. So you — you think she was lying.”

“She gave you one excuse for the papers, and when you didn’t believe it she gave you another, complete with tears and melodrama. She told you nothing about the files?”

Doug felt like an utter idiot. He’d become a dimwitted television viewer, sucked into a soap opera and too distracted by the amnesia and stolen identity and ghosts to realize he’d just watched five ads for laundry detergent. Gracie had warned him, hadn’t she? That she was smarter than she looked. But no, it had been real. It had felt real.

“She was crying,” he said. “I can’t explain — it wasn’t like she was making something up. She was letting something out.” He got Hidalgo straddled for one second, but in the next Doug was falling into the wall and Hidalgo was again circling frantically.

“It’s insane. I mean, for many reasons. Not one person in the whole town saw they weren’t the real Grants? Not one family member suspected something funny?”

“I didn’t tell that part right. The woman, Grace, she always had a black eye, because the husband hit her, and he was always out drinking. So they didn’t go into town. And the family didn’t visit.” He wasn’t sure if he was defending Gracie’s story, or only his own credulity, however fragile.

“I’m not buying it. Hidalgo! Biscuit!”

If Miriam didn’t believe it, Miriam, who believed houses had souls, who wouldn’t write anyone a letter when Mercury was retrograde, then was he the most gullible man in the world? But his narration was flawed. Nothing new there. He had made uninvited changes to the world of the story.

In one ninja-fast move, Miriam wrapped her fingers through Hidalgo’s collar and pushed his backside until he stood, stunned and whimpering, in his kennel.

“Impressive,” Doug said. He checked his watch. “In fact, that was officially the best dog-wrangling of the twenty-first century.”

“Of the millennium!” Miriam said. “Happy New Year.”

—

They sat with Zee a long time in the ER waiting room, watching Ricky Martin gyrate soundlessly on the overhead TV. Case came out at two-thirty to lead them to the ICU, where chairs lined the end of the hallway. Places for people to get bad news. Gracie was in one, her legs crossed at the ankle, her pocketbook clutched on her lap.

“He’s still stable,” she said. “It was a massive coronary. Doesn’t that sound dramatic? But they’ve got the best doctors in there. Bruce and I are big supporters of this hospital, and not for nothing. Douglas is going to help me get some coffee now, because in my nervous state I can’t pour a thing.”

She held his arm all the way down the corridor and around the corner. She stopped and clenched both his shoulders in her hands. She was sharply sober. “It should go without saying,” she said, “that what passed between us was privileged information.” He feared for a moment that she’d guessed what he told Miriam. But no, it was just a warning. “You do know which side your bread is buttered on. If this information were to get out at all—at all—there would be Devohr cousins descending on us in an instant. Like locusts. You’d be homeless, among other things. Not to mention, it would kill Zilla.”

He said, “I wouldn’t dream of repeating—”

“Good. And I want you to know that while I wouldn’t cheapen our relationship by paying you off, I do guarantee that if you hold your tongue, I’ll make it worth your while in the long run.”

He wanted to ask if there was some medication she’d been neglecting, and he wanted to ask if she thought he was a moron, and at the same time he wanted to tell her he believed every word. But here was his opportunity. “All I need is the colony files in the attic. Just the key to the attic, really.” Doug saw dimly, through the fog, that he was demanding things from a woman whose husband was in Intensive Care. He was a bad person.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake. Of course. Run and get me coffee, though. Cream and sugar.”

Doug practically floated to the cafeteria, and although he told himself several times that he should be worried about Bruce, all he could think of was that key, and those files, and of how he’d relate Gracie’s vehemence to Miriam later.

He returned with a thin cup of scalding coffee. Back in the ICU corridor, they were all standing: Zee with her hands on her hips; Miriam clinging to Case; Case pale and thin; Gracie with her hand to her forehead; two doctors, one tall, one short. As Doug approached the group, Zee turned and glared. “He’s dead,” she said. As if it were Doug’s fault. As if Doug, in those five minutes, had betrayed them all.

39

That ridiculous cup of coffee, that flimsy prop. When it was obvious to everyone — humiliatingly, glaringly — that even in the midst of her crisis, her husband dying, Gracie had felt the need to drag Doug aside and upbraid him for his brazenness, for staying behind with Miriam to wait for midnight, to kiss her at midnight, to be with her alone in case the world ended, to leave Zee an abandoned fool at the end of the world. When Zee and Case had met her in the ER, Gracie had grabbed her arm so frantically, asking where was Doug, and Zee saw that she knew. No one could hide anything from her mother.

They went into the room, first Gracie and then Case and then all of them, and there was Bruce, still so pink, so sweaty, the hairs in his nostrils still wet, his fat hands resting so lightly on the sheet, that he couldn’t possibly be dead. They should have waited an hour, till he was bluer and smaller.

The nurse said, “There’s been a whole lot of heart attacks, the last few days. A lot of stress right now.” As if it were all the rage.

Case, behind Zee, said quietly: “This is my fault.” Zee turned and saw that Miriam was over near Doug — of course — and he must have been saying it just to her, to Zee.

She whispered back: “That’s not true, Case.”

“You know it is. I’m a lightning rod. I told you.”

She pulled him away from the bed. The others were talking to the nurse. She said, “Case, I used to hate you, I really did, with your little car and your haircut, but — you didn’t do it. It’s not your fault.” She should have stopped there. She didn’t. “You just need to get away from that house. I mean, especially now. Why stay?”

Zee was asking herself as much as she was asking him, but he was the one who turned and crutched his way out of the room. She didn’t follow.

Gracie leaned over the bedrail, gazed at Bruce’s face with her blue eyes huge and dull, but she didn’t make any noise. When Zee’s father died, Gracie had folded up like a clever piece of origami, right in a hallway of this same hospital, and Zee stood there, twelve years old, stroking her mother’s hair and waiting to feel something more violent, more physical, herself.

She marveled at the difference in Gracie’s reactions, at her stolidity now, her asking the nurses what she needed to sign and how soon the body would be moved. But of course Zee’s father had been her first love, and they’d been so deeply in love. And his illness had been drawn out—protracted was the word — and he’d been in pain for months, his body weakened by those early years of heavy drinking, his liver and spleen finally both giving way.

Her father was a good man, maybe the only good man she ever knew. He was gentle and quiet, and in third grade when her friend Ellen said he was just like Mr. Rogers, only smaller, Zee said, “You’re totally right!” and wasn’t offended at all.

He took her to the Art Institute and showed her the hidden woman behind Picasso’s blue guitarist. He taught her to handle books like precious objects, never to dog-ear. He told her long, fantastic stories, and if she sat in his lap she could sometimes hear a coin clinking against his teeth.

What would he make of her life? He’d be proud of her work, she was certain, proud of her commitment to dissecting power structures and money and class. He who had vetoed the Chippeway Club. The grounds crew and maids he hired (of necessity, or the house would fall apart) were always starving artists who did a terrible job for which he overpaid them. He’d be sad at the spiral she was in. And he’d be disappointed that she’d abandoned her name. By twelve, the burden of the nickname Godzilla became too much, and so after his death she reduced herself to the sound of a single letter. He had named her, and she had lost her name, and for some reason this made her sadder than anything else. He had loved that house, and she had tried to come home, but it was destroying her. She began sobbing. She went for a walk through the halls.

When she came back, there were Doug and Miriam and Case in a little triangle. Miriam was saying, “You need to lie down. Why don’t I drive you home?”

“Just dizzy,” Case said. “I’m not tired.” He looked up and saw Zee. His eyes were flat little plates that reflected no light at all.

Doug said, “Case, sit down. You’re going to pass out.”

He didn’t move.

“You look terrible,” Doug said.

Case didn’t even look at him, just kept staring at Zee. She ought to have said something reassuring about the laws of the universe, about cause and effect. (The things she wasn’t sure she believed in anymore.) But Doug kept talking.

He said, “I’ll drive you.”

Case said, “No, man, I’m good.” Then he looked at Miriam, a terrible look, and said, “You can have it, Mir.”

Miriam sat on the floor and put her head in her hands. Her shoulders started moving up and down.

Doug said, “What? She can have what?”

Case walked right past Doug, right past Zee, and out of the hospital.

In the big window at the end of the corridor, the sun was coming up on the twenty-first century. New nurses were starting the morning shift.

40

Though Case came back to town for the funeral and posted himself next to Miriam in the church, he wasn’t staying in the coach house. Doug was reminded of Hamlet, skulking back to the graveside before heading into more tragedy. Doug didn’t understand what had happened that night at the hospital, or the next day, when Miriam shut herself in the sunporch and Case packed things into duffel bags and headed off in a cab. He worried it was his fault, that something he’d said in the hospital hallway — what had he even said? — had broken their marriage in two.

Zee implied there was more to it, that she’d seen this coming. But Zee was always seeing things he wasn’t.

Miriam moved slowly in the next weeks, fragile and unfocused — but she didn’t have that wild look of someone who’s reliving a shock again and again. Whatever it was that had gone bad, she’d already figured it out ages back. There were purple circles under her eyes, but Doug never heard her crying.

She worked only occasionally on the kitchen mosaic they’d come to call the Happensack, and spent most of her time on a series of Gothic mansions, cross-sectioned like dollhouses. She used bigger scraps and tiles, creating flaps that lifted to show secret rooms beneath. Sometimes there would be a second, smaller door behind the first. One piece was based on Jane Eyre: a mad face painted on a button, peering from an attic window. Another was The Secret Garden, another was Rebecca, and a fourth was Laurelfield itself, the big house and coach house, built from symbols of luck both good and bad: clovers, acorns, rabbit’s foot keychains, broken mirrors, pennies, toy ladders, and — most disturbingly to Doug — hundreds of ladybugs she’d swept from the floor, their faded bodies forming the borders between the rooms.

Doug cooked dinner for all three of them every night, and Zee would take her pasta or soup back to her desk. She wasn’t comfortable with grief. Doug ate with Miriam at the kitchen table, and when they talked it was about music or celebrities or Seinfeld.

They watched Bluebeard again together, and she pointed out the scenes where Marceline Horn looked sick. They paused the movie to study her face, then fast-forwarded. At double speed, the two sisters ran to the tower to lock themselves away from Bluebeard. At double speed, Bluebeard beat down the door.

—

Both Gracie’s story and the subject of the colony files had been put on ice for now. Nor could Doug claim the attic key yet. Gracie was barraged with a stream of visitors and fruit baskets and hadn’t emerged much from the big house. And to bring up the story with Miriam would be to bring up New Year’s Eve, the night that her world did, after all, come to a halt, even as the rest of the planet kept spinning. Doug promised Leland he’d fill him in when things settled, when he had time to digest the bizarre changes of fortune that had befallen everyone in the house. Everyone but Zee, really. She was the only one whose life wasn’t massively altered for better or worse. But Zee had always been above the sways of fortune.

And so it was three weeks later that Leland finally came for dinner, and the Bloodhound Gang reunited. Zee was at a conference in New York, and Doug made flatbreads. As they opened the second bottle of wine, Miriam brought her materials up to work on the Happensack, and the men sat watching her and discussing Gracie’s story. Doug had made sure this time to tell it slowly and accurately, hoping he could get Miriam to understand what it was he’d heard that was so persuasive. But when he finished, it was Leland who spoke. “What an amazing load of bullshit! Did Scooby-Doo pop out and rip off her mask?”

“I’m just saying it was convincing, the way she told it. At least she thinks it’s true.”

Leland took a long sip of wine. “She hears the wheelbarrows ‘going off’ to the big house, right? Meaning she was here, in the coach house. So she’s what, a maid or something?” He hit the table. “Can you imagine Gracie in a maid outfit? Can you imagine her cleaning? Okay, and we have this Max, and we have a gardener. And Max has something to do with the car. And the phone. If it’s 1955, how old is Gracie? If she’s really sixty-two right now.”

Doug calculated. “Eighteen.”

Leland was having fun, it was clear. And possibly showing off for Miriam. She was inscrutable, though, focused on her tessellations. “And then there’s Grace Devohr and George Grant. They’re married, they’ve just moved here, right?”

“The colony closed at the end of ’54,” Doug said. “So it fits.”

“And no one in the entire town knows them. And they get in a car crash.”

“Somewhere close, I think,” Doug said. “Like, on the property.”

“So Max and the gardener roll their bodies away in wheelbarrows, and bury them under the greenhouse.”

“Oh, God,” Miriam said. “Can we not?”

“I’m just sorting the bullshit from the baloney here. And then follows the most brilliant identity theft of all time. Max and Gracie — whatever her real name is, Molly the Maid — become the Grants. So Zee’s parents — Zee’s the daughter of some maid and butler. Not a Devohr at all. I love it! And no one suspects anything for forty-four years. Eleven presidential terms.”

Doug said, “Well, yeah. Yeah. But honestly, why would they suspect? Look, it doesn’t have to be likely. It just has to be possible. I mean, we think it’s hard to get away with crimes because we only ever know the stories where someone gets caught. So we think everyone gets caught. But we have no idea how much never comes to light.”

“Maybe,” Leland said, pointing a finger at him, and for a moment Doug thought he was serious, “maybe Gracie is really Marianne Moore. She’d only be about a hundred ten.”

Doug said, “Look. Look around this town. You think all the millionaires in this town came by their money honestly? You think there were no Cayman accounts, no fraud? I’m just saying weirder things happen every day. And why would she make up a lie that’s self-incriminating? When you lie, you make yourself sound good. Not like a felon.”

“God,” Leland said. “Suddenly you’re a Baptist preacher.”

They looked to Miriam for a verdict. She turned from the Happensack to face them, balanced in a squat. “I’ve been thinking about it. A lot. And no, I don’t believe her. Because people don’t reveal everything the first time you push them. If you think you’re caught, you only tell half the story. Right? But that means whatever she’s covering is worse, or more embarrassing. Something about the colony, maybe. Because that’s the one thing she won’t even talk about.”

Leland said, “Who wants to bet the colony was a front for a sex club!”

“Sex club, arts colony,” Doug said. “What’s the difference.”

But Miriam didn’t laugh. She went back to her mosaic, and they watched in silence as she arranged a two-inch square section on a cookie sheet, using tweezers, and pressed a sheet of sticky contact paper to the top. She spread the mortar quickly on a new patch of board, then pushed the sheet of tiles into it, holding it in place a minute. When she peeled the contact paper away, the pieces were embedded. It was hypnotic: both the way she worked and the Happensack itself. Doug grew dizzy if he stared too long at the unending pathways, the shapes that were clear one second and dissolved the next into chaos. She had incorporated Zee’s pistol cylinder into the bottom right corner, sticking a piece of glass in each compartment. It looked like a flower.

Miriam finally said, “For instance. Let’s say the real Grants truly died. How do we know their deaths were accidents? It’s much more likely the servants killed them.”

Leland said, “Don’t eat any food she cooks.”

Miriam told him to stop.

—

Down on the sunporch, they turned on Miriam’s computer. They were hoping for a wedding photo of Grace Devohr and George Grant, or any adult photo at all, really, but they had no luck. Doug had brought down the photo from Zee’s dresser, the one of her reading with her father, its frame still showing the cracks he’d fixed back in grad school. But there was nothing to compare this picture with. She was about five, so George Grant (based on the marriage license) should have been forty-seven. This man looked closer to sixty — his hair gray, his face well carved. Even Leland and Miriam had to admit it. But then he had those puckish features that can make a man look either older or younger than he is.

Doug had always been drawn to his face, this father-in-law he’d never met. It was his wife’s face, sharp and quick. Small eyes, round ears. He’d always felt he could picture George Grant moving, could hear his voice. Now, Doug tried to imagine this man starting life as someone named Max, someone in charge of the cars. The same driver he’d pictured so many times as he sat in the old Morris chair, the man dreaming of faraway lands. So perhaps Max had reached those lands, ending his days as master of the mansion, critic of the arts, father of a golden child. Doug wanted to believe that life could be like that.

Something had occurred to him: Zee’s middle name was Devohr. It might have been a way to cement Zee’s inheritance, if any questions arose later. It might have been a joke or homage or apology. But Leland and Miriam would only have used this information as proof of Gracie’s lying — and he surprised himself by saying nothing, protecting the story as if it were his own.

“So what’s next?” Leland said as he left. It was funny how they all assumed they’d reunite immediately. But it felt as natural as if these had been Doug’s college roommates, back when “Where are we going tonight?” was not a presumptuous question.

Miriam rubbed her hands together. “Tomorrow’s the day Doug gets the rest of the files,” she said. “It’s time.”

—

With Leland gone, with the kitchen quiet, Doug was antsy. The little house was a boat in icy water. As he helped Miriam put away her tiles, she said, “I have to admit I’m a little freaked out.”

“Don’t let Leland get to you.”

“It’s not — it’s just everything.” She looked a little shaky. “Would it be weird if we camped here, in the kitchen? I’ve got sleeping bags. You could leave once I’m asleep. I mean, like, far apart sleeping bags, not—”

“It wouldn’t be weird.”

Miriam brought out the two shiny blue mummy bags she and Case used for camping back in Texas. They put one on each side of the kitchen table, separated by a little forest of chair legs. Lying there, the finished bits of the Happensack glowing in the light from the window, they talked for another hour.

“I think part of my skepticism,” Miriam said, “a small part, is Gracie’s sense of entitlement. Some of the things she says! Remember what she said about my teeth?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes the people who think they deserve stuff are the ones who started life deprived. And then when they’re lucky they feel they earned it.”

“And all the things she’d have to have gotten away with! I just can’t wrap my mind around someone having that much good luck.”

“But can you imagine the same amount of bad luck?”

It was a mistake. He shouldn’t have said it.

“Yes,” she said.

“You look like a caterpillar in there.”

“Good night, caterpillar.”

“Good night, caterpillar.”

41

Zee was a fraction of herself, a vertical fraction, and another sliver of her was still back in New York at the interviews, and another was in the mirror that spat her decaying face back at her, and another had curled up and died.

There was no one home in the coach house, and she left the door open to the wind. The bed, yes, she checked twice, was still short-sheeted. The jackass hadn’t even made an effort to rumple the covers. Two wine bottles in the recycling.

All she’d needed, in the end, was physical proof. There had always been the possibility, however remote, that those words on Miriam’s work had been about some other man with scarred knees. That they’d been wishful thinking. That nothing had happened yet, as thick as the air was with inevitability.

In the last weeks, their private jokes had grown more flagrant. “This is the greatest soup of the millennium!” Miriam had said, and Zee could only assume it had to do with the night they stayed back at the house, the night of the heart attack, when Doug would have stooped to kiss her at midnight, and Miriam would have tucked her head under his arm and said, “That was the greatest kiss of the millennium.”

She threw things into two suitcases. Clothes and jewelry and shoes, medicine and family photos. Sofia could pack the books up later, could send them to New York.

She’d felt clearheaded in New York, but back here she was underwater again. She had to leave. Obviously, she had to leave. The only question had been whether to take Doug with her. They could have waited till summer. If she’d come home and found no evidence, that’s what she’d have done. Broken the news slowly, convinced him he wanted to live in New York, and they’d be away from her mother and Miriam and Laurelfield, horrible Laurelfield, by July. But here was the evidence, and there was a spare room waiting for her in New York, and Doug was a stranger.

Or maybe it was as simple as this: She’d never been a hard-boiled egg but a raw one — and Doug, Doug’s solid devotion, had been the shell keeping her in. When that shell cracked, what else could a raw egg do but run?

Down on Miriam’s sunporch, she found red acrylic paint and a firm, narrow brush. She took them back through the TV room — there were mountains of file folders there, probably something to do with Miriam’s next ridiculous series — and up to the bedroom, and covered the wall with words.

Doug, you idiot.

You left a trail.

But I already knew, and I took a job in NY.

I never saw how ugly I was till you reflected it back at me.

If Case comes home, tell him I’m sorry.

Tell him to run far away.

Tell Miriam that thing in the kitchen is the only pretty thing she ever made.

She stood in the woods behind the big house, and she looked at it, at all the windows. She closed her eyes, but when she opened them the house was still there.

—

She stuck a brief resignation in Golda’s box, ignoring Chantal. She might have said in the letter that the porn was her fault, but Cole wouldn’t even have wanted that. He’d adopted this battle wholeheartedly.

—

She’d brought with her the photo of herself reading Green Eggs and Ham, the one where she looked so much like her listening father. She had another copy in her album, and she wanted to leave this part of herself, this sharp and innocent part of herself, here. But more importantly, she didn’t want to keep the frame that Doug had fixed so long ago. She leaned it against Cole’s closed office door, with a note. Dear old bastard, it said. For you to remember me. Portrait of the Communist Heretic Zilla Devohr Grant, circa 1970. You’re laughing at “Devohr,” aren’t you? That’s my real gift to you. Back in her office, she filled boxes with books and syllabi and handouts. Her diplomas, journals with her articles. She saved everything from the computer to disk. She wouldn’t teach many of the same courses in New York — the school was so nontraditional that the intros and surveys didn’t even exist — but she wanted all her files nonetheless. Gretchen, her roommate for one year of college, was hard-skulled and ironic, as perfect a department head as Zee could imagine, and her phone call had been a sudden shaft of light. Yes, Zee had said, she was very much interested in a job like that. Zee had told both Gretchen and the hiring dean the story of Cole (the official one, minus her interferences) over dinner, and — she knew it would be all right after the dean told about hanging Robert Bork in effigy on the Oberlin quad — she also told them what she was planning to do. It wouldn’t affect her new contract, they assured her.

She’d been thinking a lot lately about the myths her father used to read her at night: Daphne, Philomela, Actaeon. She realized years later they were all stories of metamorphosis, and she wondered how much he needed these myths to affirm his own reinvention from alcoholic slouch to responsible father and art critic. She’d tried so hard to transform herself — Zee the earnest academic was not the same person as Zilla the privileged child — but she’d slipped. She’d ended up living at home, and sure enough her entire adult life had crumbled away.

She would do it properly this time, in a town where she knew exactly one person. As her father had done, leaving Toronto with his new wife, remaking himself in the grandest American fashion. Some things she could not escape: that gene for mental illness. The sharp and unattractive edges of her own personality. But in New York she’d be away from Doug, and from the self who’d been played for a fool. She’d be away from that house.

She marveled at the lucidity of her thoughts, then realized this was not a good sign. When did people do that, except when they were drunk? And she wasn’t, she was fairly sure.

She took the boxes to her car, and she bought, for the last time, a grilled cheese sandwich from the co-op. It was the only thing they did well, and they did it exquisitely. It was half butter, and the toasted bread broke in your mouth and then melted like the thinnest sheet of ice. In an hour she’d be free. She needed to finish just this one thing first — to undo her damage, outscandal the scandal.

—

At two fifteen, as a class period ended, she stood in the middle of her office and took off her clothes, all of them, and folded them into her purse. Her flesh was pale from the winter, her arms and legs unrecognizably thin. She stuck another muscle relaxer on her tongue. She walked, with just her purse, into the hallway and down the stairs, past students she knew and ones she didn’t, past Chad Crosley, past Fran Leffler. If sound came from their open mouths, she couldn’t hear. She walked past Jerry Keaton, who tried to grab her arm and then thought better of it. She heard Chantal calling out: “Zee! Dr. Grant! Can you — Oh, someone get her a — Zee, come in here!” Out onto the lawn, the icy lawn, her feet in the slush. She didn’t care if she fell, but she didn’t fall. Past the administrative building, through parting clusters of students in parkas. She heard one say, “Where’s my camera?” And another, “Oh, dude, it’s about Cole! I get it, it’s about Cole.” And another, “Hey it’s that math prof! Shane, wasn’t that your math prof?”

Past the library, past the co-op.

All the way to her car. She couldn’t feel her feet.

She drove off campus with the conviction, the finality, of someone driving off the entire planet.

42

Doug had started to see the world as reticulated. The way the colored pieces of any view fit together: windowsill, wall, sky, driveway, tree, roof. Shoe, carpet, book. If you looked long enough, the three-dimensional world flattened to a plane where every block of color was a tile, so tightly clicked together that no mortar showed at the cracks.

He stared at the Happensack for hours a day, whether Miriam was in front of it smoothing mortar over the top and scrubbing it off with a hard sponge, or whether he was alone at two a.m. as Miriam, similarly insomniac, worked downstairs on other things. They continued to sleep in the kitchen. The first night, he hadn’t gone to bed at all. He’d been at the police station, and then slumped at Gracie’s table. (“What did you do?” Gracie kept saying, until Doug worried the officers would think he’d strangled his wife.) The police traipsed through the coach house. “Talk about the writing on the wall,” one said, unhelpfully, and even his partner didn’t laugh. The second night, he’d been downtown meeting a private detective, and afterward he made it only back up to Leland’s place, where he lay on the couch for five hours but didn’t sleep. The third night, Miriam told him he needed to lie down. She zipped him in and brought him a pill and put a washcloth on his forehead, and then it was morning. And for fifty nights since then, he’d crawled in four feet away from her.

He worried the hard kitchen floor would ruin his back, but it didn’t. Dr. Morsi agreed: Regardless of the disintegration of his heart and brain, his back had never been better.

—

Gracie had accused him, in those first weeks, of telling Zee what he knew. She said, “It would have pushed her over the edge. She worshipped her father.” Doug might have asked which father, and who Zee’s father even was, if her father was a chauffeur named Max, if her father had perhaps posed nude by the koi ponds. But his jaw was full of lead, and Gracie was in a dull and constant rage. He only encountered her now on the driveway, roaring past in the Mercedes. It was a miracle of good timing that Doug had gotten the files out of the attic the day before Zee left, or Gracie might never have handed over the key at all.

Although the Parfitt file was still conspicuously missing — he and Miriam wondered if it was actually Zee who’d replaced it with the photo, falling apart long before he knew it but one step ahead as always — the rest was a treasure trove. If he could have crawled into the files to live, and never had to worry about food or detectives or showering, he’d have done it. There were sheaths of correspondence between the longtime director, Samantha Mays, and the artists and writers and composers who saw her as their guardian angel. There were slides of paintings. Miriam pored over the Demuth ones, comparing them to prints in library books and calling a friend at the School of the Art Institute who drove up to borrow them, along with the Grant Wood slides and the files of artists Doug hadn’t heard of. There were project proposals and sample work. There were letters of recommendation.

Miriam was most excited about the files of two female sculptors, Fannie Cadfael and Josephine Lizer. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it! The bear statue, in the woods! I knew that was a Lizer. I should’ve said so! White rabbits!” Even Doug registered, through his haze, that this made no sense. Miriam explained, her hands flying, that the White Rabbits were the women who had assisted the sculptor Lorado Taft before the Columbian Exposition in 1893. Taft begged special permission to use women, until the man in charge snapped that he could use white rabbits if they’d get the job done. Those women proudly clung to the name as they launched their own careers as some of the first successful female sculptors. A Josephine Lizer piece, even one covered with moss, was a big enough deal that it sent Miriam running for the phone.

Less valuable but more personally intriguing were the references, in the forties and fifties, to a colony caretaker named Maxwell Perry. “That has to be Max!” Doug said. “And he stayed after they kicked the artists out.”

Miriam said, “Well, sure, that was probably really the driver’s name, and he’d probably really been the caretaker. When people lie, they don’t make up all the details.”

Leland just said, “Any caretakers named Marianne Moore?”

Parfitt, it seemed, had stayed at least six times, and as late as 1941, just four years before his suicide. Some rosters listed his apartment on Rush Street in Chicago, and the earliest — in 1929—had a Philadelphia address that was news to Doug. The most useful detail was the fact that for every stay but the last, his lover, the artist Armand Cox, had been there at the same time. (“Armand Cox?” Miriam said. “That’s his real name?”) It meant their relationship started earlier than was thought. Doug imagined Parfitt writing at a Laurelfield desk, his partner down in a studio designing stage sets and drawing his magazine covers, his fadeaway girls. The two reuniting at the dinner table, discussing the day’s work.

Even so, it wasn’t enough. Doug tried his best, in the blur of weeks after Zee left, to imagine what a project centered around these scraps of information might look like. And then, the punch in the gut: In late March, a professor from Yale published a long article on Parfitt in The New Yorker, a rediscovery piece. The professor, said his bio, was about to publish a book on the lost modernists. It wasn’t that his work entirely supplanted Doug’s. It was that ten other people were now going to get the same idea, and do it better, and do it faster, and be more qualified to tell the story.

But Doug imagined he might write a nonacademic article about Laurelfield itself, or about artists’ residencies in the 1920s. He could drive to other colonies, the places that still kept their records in dusty attics. He had a hell of a story for the introduction, at least: the first-person narrative of recovering the lost Laurelfield archive.

He spoke to the historical society about taking the files off his hands once he’d copied the parts he wanted.

These papers were the trails of the artists — and, in the cases of the most obscure visitors, these might have been the only remnants of their art. But what trail he himself had left, what had prompted Zee to choose that word, trail, for the wall, he still wasn’t sure. Something told him it wasn’t a trail up the attic stairs, but something that had led her to Melissa Hopper and her soccer tryouts, her babysitting gigs, her crushes — yet the trailhead was missing. He’d hidden every scrap of paper, scoured his desk every day before Zee came home. He felt stupid, or at least outsmarted. He had a thousand imaginary conversations with her. The speech evolved and mutated. It went through angry cycles, conciliatory ones, and there was a pleading phase. It grew shorter and more concise. Eventually it became a single and blanketing word, a one-breath mantra: “No.” With every step around the fish ponds, every thrash in his sleep. No to it all. No, this didn’t happen. No, you couldn’t have been in your right mind. No, I’m not the pathetic slug you think I am. No, I didn’t want this. No, I don’t take it back. No. No. No. No. No.

A package arrived in the mail: Melissa Calls the Shots, Melissa Takes a Bow, Cece Makes the Grade. He dumped them in a desk drawer. He spent the day wishing he could call Zee and tell her that the changes she’d made just weren’t working for him. “You altered the universe,” he’d say. “We’re going to ask you to start over.”

—

In April, a call from the detective: Zee was in rural New York. Here was her address. Here was her number. “Look, man,” the guy said, “you could try and get her committed, but I haven’t seen that work out so well. Seemed fine to me.”

This was the afternoon of the same day Miriam filed for divorce from Case. Doug might have driven straight to New York that very night, but he couldn’t leave Miriam alone right then. And moreover: If he was still sure of anything about Zee, it was that contacting her against her will would make things worse. He wanted to believe this was all that kept him back, that fear wasn’t part of it. That a modicum of relief wasn’t part of it.

Miriam wanted sushi, so they went out and Doug let her order for him. She told him, only after he’d swallowed and liked it, that unagi was eel. She told him that when she met Case she’d been so young that she’d taken the regular trappings of his adult life — his job, his car, his drawer full of polo shirts — as signs of maturity and stability. Here was someone who could support her while she made art, a steady rock on which to build her life. Really he’d been anything but. Every year had been worse, every day had been worse — and then they came here, and things got unbearable.

“I think I feel happy tonight,” Miriam said. “Is that awful to say?”

Doug looked at the sushi on his plate. It, too, was tessellated: the wet pink rhombus of salmon, the grains of the rice, the thin edge of seaweed. He thought, I am a different person now. I am someone who eats eel, and this small artist is my best friend. I am someone who has turned the TV room into a file-sorting station, someone who believes fantastical tales of identity theft.

If everything else were still the same, he’d have felt Zee’s absence like a gaping hole. But if he could continue to reconfigure his entire life, there would be no missing place where Zee had been. He thought of Parfitt’s last published poem, “Proteus Wept.” In Greek mythology, the sea god Proteus changed shape to avoid telling mortals the future. Parfitt had twisted it, though: Parfitt’s Proteus changed to avoid remembering the past. It ended with a litany of the forms he took: A lark, a crow, a spoonbill! / This sea-foam, rank and green. Yet Parfitt himself ultimately chose death over reinvention. It was as if he wrote the poem to convince himself of future possibility, and failed. But Doug could do better.

—

He didn’t drive to New York the next day, or the day after. He didn’t call, and then he continued not calling.

What he did instead was ask Sofia to make him an appointment with Gracie. She had written Zee a letter once they had her address, and Zee had written a short note back that, by not expressing anger over car crashes and wheelbarrows, had put Gracie’s mind at ease.

Hidalgo greeted him at the door, relatively sedate. Doug scratched him, just to steal a moment to fortify himself. It had occurred to him that the reason Gracie let him continue to stay in the coach house was that she thought he had far more information than he did. He had to choose his questions well, lest they betray his ignorance. He wasn’t sure how to begin.

But, at the kitchen table, Gracie spoke first.

“Douglas, I’ve come to a place of peace,” she said. “Either my daughter is crazy, or I raised her wrong, but I don’t believe this was your fault.”

He said, “I really didn’t do anything, Gracie. Honest to God, I didn’t.”

They talked about the detective, and about leaving Zee alone awhile.

Then Doug said, “I hope you can help with something.” He showed her the photograph, careful to keep a hand over the men’s naked torsos. “Because I’ve appreciated your honesty. What I still need to know are these men’s full names.”

She put on her reading glasses and squinted down. “I haven’t a clue. Is there a correct answer?”

“Theoretically.”

“That’s out back of the house, isn’t it? It’s the kind of thing Zilla’s father would have known. Every few years, someone would call up asking about the colony. He’d rattle off who stayed here.”

“But you don’t know these men?”

“I’ve never seen them in my life. What are you hiding under there?”

He slid the photo back in its envelope and asked her blessing to transfer the files to the historical society. “They should be preserved,” he said. “With acid-free folders. And there’s nothing in there that would, you know, incriminate you. I’ve been through every inch.”

Gracie folded her glasses. “Douglas, I’ve been a bit of a fool. When you cornered me on New Year’s Eve — that’s really what you did, you cornered me — I was in quite a state. Bruce had me convinced of the end of the world, for one thing. I can’t quite remember all I told you. But I realize I might have said more than I needed.”

Doug said, “I’d already been in the attic, remember. There were a lot of papers up there.”

“I see.” It didn’t seem to bother her particularly, though. “The papers you want to donate — it’s just the colony papers, correct?”

“I have no desire to get you in trouble.”

She was quiet, and he worried he’d said the wrong thing. Finally she said, “There’s actually something I need from you. I’ve made a decision, Douglas. With Zilla away, with Bruce gone, I think the time has come for me to move on. Did you know I have a sister? A half sister named Elizabeth, and I never stopped writing to her. She doesn’t know quite where I am, just that I’ve had a good life. She writes me back at the post office. We got together in Colorado a few times, after Zilla’s father passed, and before I met Bruce. She’s moved to Sedona. It’s beautiful out there. You know, it was the saddest part of leaving Florida, not knowing what would happen to my sister. She was only four, and leaving her was the worst thing I ever did, the worst thing in my life. But she got out too, and she was a teacher, and now she’s divorced. I’ve been sending her money every month since she was old enough to cash a check. And I think it’s time to be Amy Hall again, to go out and join her. Grace can’t live much longer, and there’s the matter of the Internet. The last thing I want is to become famous for being the oldest living person. Where would I be then? Max made sure from the start that we kept paying ourselves salaries. Every month I’d write a check from Grace Grant to Amy Hall, and I’d cash it at the bank in Libertyville. And Max did the same. I have quite a bit saved up, and that’s all I need.”

Doug tried to look skeptical, but found himself nodding instead. “Sedona is beautiful.”

“Douglas.” She put her hand on his. Veins like mountain ranges. “I want you and Miriam to take care of everything here. I’ve talked to my lawyers, and there can be a transfer of property and funds. To the two of you. Lord knows Zilla doesn’t want it. Maybe she’ll come back, and maybe she won’t. But the house will be yours. We’ll keep Grace alive a few years, and then she’ll die. These things can be arranged, with money to grease the wheels. It’ll be my worry.”

“You want us to take the house?” The squeak of his voice woke Hidalgo, who stood and hit his head on the table.

“I want you to reopen the colony.”

He wasn’t entirely sure what his face was doing. It was the most outrageous thing anyone had ever said to him.

“Don’t answer yet. It’s the right thing. The colony was shut down for bad reasons, for greed and spite. Max would tell me stories — artists by the ponds, writers under the trees. When I first showed up there were still cabins, you know, artist’s studios, with skylights and sinks. I know I always spoke poorly of it, but that was — I felt I had to. He said it was quiet all day, everyone working, and then at night they all came together and made a racket and had dinner in the dining room. Can you imagine? And the work they made! We never could have reopened it ourselves, even though Max wanted to, he wanted to desperately. It would have brought too much attention. The Devohrs would have descended. But you and Miriam, you’re so many layers removed. It would set the universe right.”

“Wouldn’t the right thing, technically, be to give it back to the Devohrs?”

“The Devohrs left Grace out here with an alcoholic husband, and they never once came to see her. Never once.” She pointed a finger right at him, as if he were trying to argue otherwise. “We had a plan in case they did, a whole elaborate plan. But it never happened. They made it easy for me. It was easy because they never showed up, and it was easy because I never felt bad. And they don’t need it, do they? Zilla’s the one always talking about Marxism, and look! Here I am, little old me, redistributing the wealth!”

“Oh. God.” There was still the possibility this was all a bribe, Gracie’s chance to cover up something gruesome, to get out of town before Doug turned her in. That’s what Miriam would have said.

“There’s money to get it started. I know how much these things cost, I’m not naïve, and there’s plenty. Of course it’s mostly Bruce’s money at this point, so he’s the one to thank. I was nearly broke before he came along. And poor sweet Miriam can help you. She knows the art world. She’d know how to build a studio. Why she married that pompous ass is beyond me, but otherwise she’s a smart girl.”

Doug realized that in the time she’d been talking, every color in the kitchen had grown brighter. His mind was listing reasons why this wasn’t a tenable plan, but it was thinking twice as fast of what would need to be done, planning where people would sleep, what grants could be applied for, what Leland could bring to the table. Doug would have a job. He’d have a life. He felt as if he’d stepped into the Happensack, into its vertiginous abundance.

Leland would tell him he was a sucker, and Miriam would worry Gracie was leaving them with a basement full of dead bodies or worse, but when you’re drowning in the ocean and someone throws you a rope, you don’t ask what it’s made of.

He said, “I have to talk to Miriam. I’d have to tell her — I mean, what could I tell her?”

“Don’t worry about it.” She smiled, and he knew it must have been painfully obvious that he’d already told Miriam everything. “Go talk to her now.”

And he got his things, and he walked back to the coach house.

No, look: He was running.

43

Summer and fall swept through with a cleansing, scorching heat, and when the students returned to campus, they eagerly told the few seniors returning from a year abroad the story of Professor Grant walking off campus nude.

There was Old King Cole. His Melville class applauded him the first day. For still being there, for still being Cole, for waggling those eyebrows and saying, “You don’t kill an old virus that easy.”

When students came to his office, he pointed to the little framed photo on the wall, the girl and her father. She was reading and she was happy. Each time he’d say, “That’s a picture of the bravest woman in the world.”

44

On June 10, 2001, a poet named Sara Calovelli pulled into the Laurelfield driveway in a dying Honda Civic with Ohio plates. Though eight more artists and writers and composers would arrive later that afternoon, she was officially the first resident of the Laurelfield Arts Colony in forty-seven years.

Doug and Miriam ran out from the office to meet her, and introduced her to Ben, who’d get her settled in the main house. Dinner was at six, they told her, and then there would be a bonfire out back. When Sara had disappeared through the front door with her suitcase, Miriam did a little jump and clapped her hands.

The chef had the grill going, Sofia and her crew were putting out soaps and towels, and Denise and Chantal worked frantically from the office that used to be the coach house TV room, dealing with all the last-minute things like medical forms.

Everything had fallen into place — money, staffing, town approval — with such ease and speed that Doug and Miriam kept waiting in vain for something to go terribly wrong. That winter, they’d received a donation from some Miss Abbaticchio, an elderly woman in town, that surpassed even the money Gracie had left. The desks from the attic were all still usable. The Illinois Arts Council came through nicely.

The buzz they’d built in the year of frantic work created a deep applicant pool, and Miriam and Leland knew the right people to rope into admissions panels and a board. An article in the Tribune, “Refounding a Haven,” came out the same day Doug learned that Zee was living with a sixty-year-old physics professor.

And it was the strangest thing: That night, as he lay in bed, he had to remind himself to feel sad.

His bed was downtown now, in an apartment above the bagel shop. Miriam stayed in the coach house, and Doug and Zee’s old quarters had become a guest room and studio.

Gracie had sent them congratulatory flowers, delivered that morning. She wrote them occasional notes from Sedona, which Doug took to be some kind of proof. (“Her going where she said she’d go proves exactly nothing,” Miriam said.)

They sat next to the driveway, and Miriam picked up a handful of its smooth gravel: white and tan and black. She arranged the stones in a trail down her shin.

Doug said, “Are you tessellating yourself?”

She said, “I’ve had a funny thought all day. It seems like this is the only way things could have turned out. You know? Like all the bizarre and horrible things that happened, they pushed us both here. The colony was taken away, the house went back to the Devohrs, and after everything here we are, two people who aren’t even Devohrs, opening it back up.”

Doug laughed and said, “You think the house just really wanted to be a colony again? It missed all the artists, so it smashed that car and waited half a century?”

“I wasn’t going to say the house,” Miriam said. “I was going to say ghosts.”

At some point they’d agreed that if he could believe Gracie’s story, she could believe in her ghosts, and he wasn’t allowed to laugh.

Doug said, “Last chance to dig up the greenhouse. Before that writer gets here.”

“Ha.”

“Just to prove I’m not a gullible ass.”

“We’ll never do it. It’s such a great studio. If I were a writer, it’s the studio I’d want.” She cleared the gravel from her leg and it fell on the driveway with a sound like rain. “Even if we did,” she said, “even if we found bones. What would it prove? You’ll never know the whole story. You realize that, right? That you’ll never know.”

Doug looked at her, speechless. She was right. Like so much she said, it was a revelation. It was also an absolution.

—

Before dinner, there were cocktails in the library. The travel-weary artists revived, chattering and checking out the displays. Doug had filled the shelves with copies of all the books and musical scores he could find by the earlier generation of residents, and books of art prints as well. He’d even hunted down Marlon Moore’s only published work, which seemed to have predated the attic manuscript. Moore turned out to have been a local writer, a professor in Zee’s old department in the late twenties. The novel, Jack of the Woods, was truly awful, but Moore’s spot on the shelf was one of Doug’s favorites.

Doug had finally convinced Miriam that what would make the room complete was to put the Happensack above the fireplace, where Gracie’s farmhouse painting had once hung. They’d wanted to install it before the guests arrived, but they ran out of time. There were so many little crises in those final days of preparation. For now, the spot was empty.

After dinner, the artists toured the grounds — the reconstructed cabin studios, the wood-chip path to the bear statue — and gathered at the bonfire, which Leland had roaring. Beside him on the ground was a stack of things to be burned.

Miriam explained it to the group. “There’s been a lot of good and a lot of bad at Laurelfield since artists last gathered here. Those of us who’ve been working to make this all happen — we wanted to clear away the past to make room for the new, and the amazing, and the good. And so tonight we’re going to burn some bad art.”

The crowd laughed, and Doug held up the farmhouse painting, removed from its frame, and tossed it on the fire. It cracked and hissed and then it blazed away.

Leland personally threw in, with great relish, some horrendous poems he’d written after a breakup five years back. Miriam contributed what was left of the yellow dress piece — clawed to scraps by Hidalgo, never really salvageable. Doug threw in three slim paperbacks: Melissa Calls the Shots, Melissa takes a Bow, Cece Makes the Grade.

“Oh, I used to love those!” said someone across the fire. “They were terrible!”

As the night grew cool the artists gathered closer to the blaze for a minute, and then they headed off. They had work to do: canvases to prime, desks to arrange, poems to start.

Doug turned to Miriam and said, “Let’s get the Happensack right now. We’ll be too busy tomorrow.”

“We don’t have anything to patch the wall with. We’ll have a gaping hole for days.”

He shook his head. “I want it in the library when they come down to breakfast.”

—

Up in the coach house, they took turns hammering a chisel to break the thick paint seal around the edge, then going at it with the pry bar, getting behind each of the four nailed corners in turn, a bit at a time.

Doug took a shift as Miriam held the edges of the board, ready to catch its full weight if it came loose. He felt utterly happy. It was a happiness beyond the colony, beyond the triumph of the day. He didn’t know, after all the disastrous things that had happened, why he should be so profoundly, overwhelmingly satisfied with life. But he was.

The board gave a thrilling crack and Miriam wrested it backward, the nails sliding out, and Doug wasn’t sure if he should grab the board or catch her from behind. But moreover — in that exact moment, as he watched her stepping back, finding her balance, panting — he felt as if something had dislodged inside him as well. He said, “Put it down.” He let the pry bar fall to the floor.

“No, I’ve got it.”

“Please put it down.”

“Why?”

“Put it down.”

She did, she leaned it against the wall, and he stood and hooked two fingers into the collar of her shirt and pulled her, stumbling, toward him. In front of the gaping mouth of the wall, he kissed her. There would be time later to move the board, and time to shine flashlights into the wall, and time to replace the small orange tile that had clattered to the floor. He’d been waiting only three seconds for her, but he felt he’d been waiting a century, as if there were nothing more obvious, more necessary, in the world.