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“Dad. No.” Rebecca shook her head as though she scolded a child.
“Come on, Becca. It’s getting cold out here. Your mother wouldn’t want us to get sick.”
Rebecca crossed her arms over her chest and hissed. “I haven’t been here since I was eighteen years old. You haven’t been here in longer than that. We’re basically strangers. It would be breaking in.”
Victor already had the key in the lock. “I forgot how nice it felt to trust your neighbors.”
“Dad!”
Victor stepped into the foyer and removed his shoes. Lightning slashed through the violent sky, and thunder made the house shake. Rebecca followed after her father and closed the door carefully behind her as though frightened it would break.
And just like that, she’d entered her own personal haunted house.
The old house had been built in the year 1867. For Rebecca, that had seemed like an impossible time period, so many years before her own grandfather had been born, and as a child, she’d been fascinated with imagining all the other children who’d ever lived in the old place. What had their names been? What had they looked like? Sometimes, she and her sisters pretended they lived in the Victorian in 1867, that their father was a whaler, and they eagerly awaited his homecoming after three years at sea. At the time, they hadn’t known that one day, their father really would leave. They probably wouldn’t have played the game if they had.
Victor eased through the shadows of the foyer, through the living room, and into the kitchen. Rebecca shrugged off her jacket and tiptoed through the house, noting Esme's beautiful design changes over the years. Over the fireplace hung a painting of sailboats at the Nantucket Regatta. Next to the baby grand piano hung a recent photograph of Larry and Esme, in which Esme wore a cream satin gown. She was, eternally, a knock-out.
“Dad?” Rebecca walked into the kitchen to find him filling two glasses with water.
Victor turned to pass one glass to Rebecca with red-rimmed eyes. “It’s really something in here, isn’t it? I can’t believe she painted that burgundy accent wall. She begged me to do that for years, but I thought it would look tacky.”
“It looks really good.” Rebecca clutched her glass and eyed the burgundy living room wall, which you could see from the kitchen.
“I know. She was right. She was always right.” Victor sipped his water.
Rebecca and Victor sat in the breakfast nook for the first hour or so and watched the storm from the back window. It was eerie in the big, creaking house, and Rebecca had demanded that her father not go exploring. “It’s bad enough we came in.”
After the storm cleared, Rebecca was certain Esme would return soon. She strained to hear the sound of the garage door opening or the rub of the tires over the driveway. She refilled her glass of water and checked the fridge, which was well-stocked with food. Where in the world was her mother?
When thirty minutes had passed, Victor stood and placed his glass of water on the counter with a clunk. He then returned to the living room.
“Where are you going?” Rebecca demanded. She was on edge, and her ears rang with panic.
“Just stretching my legs,” he said.
But Rebecca knew better than to trust Victor Sutton. In a moment, she heard the creak of the first step on the staircase, followed by the thunk-thunk-thunk of his body moving to the second floor. Rebecca groaned and rushed after him, readying her demands that he return downstairs. But when she got to the second floor, she found him standing in the doorway of what had once been her bedroom, and something very hard and cold within her melted.
In that old house, Victor was a slave to his memories, just as Rebecca was.
“Look.” Victor opened the door wider to reveal the bedroom. Rebecca stepped forward to peer around her father at a room that seemed only partially in the twenty-first century. On the far wall hung a bulletin board where Rebecca had pinned forty or fifty photographs of herself, her friends, and her sisters. It showed them at prom, some on horseback, then at the beach with their adolescent bodies tanned and toned to perfection. Rebecca couldn’t breathe. She entered the stale air of the room and stared at the photographs, muttering, “Why didn’t she take these down?”
But Rebecca knew the answer. Removing the photographs meant Rebecca’s time in Nantucket was over. Removing the photographs acknowledged what no mother wanted to—that her baby was grown-up and gone.
Shame spiraled in Rebecca’s stomach. She dropped onto the edge of the bed and looked around at the other trinkets left in her bedroom—several cookbooks she’d dog-eared and scribbled in, a yearbook from 1994, and a Nantucketers baseball hat she’d stolen from an old boyfriend. When Lily had dated in high school, Rebecca had scolded her to give old boyfriends’ sweatshirts and hats back. She hadn’t realized how hypocritical she was.
Victor had left her bedroom. Rebecca heaved a sigh and patted the old bedspread, then headed to the doorway, assuming Victor had just gone to Bethany’s or Valerie’s bedroom. But when she stepped into the hallway, she found Victor at the far end. His head was in the crack of the doorway, but he kept his feet at a distance as though frightened the room would eat him alive.
Rebecca shook violently. She’d been annoyed at her father’s curiosity and his digging around. But she hadn’t expected him to be so violent in his meddling. She hadn’t expected him to open that door.
Rebecca hustled down the hallway. She felt wordless, enraged. Just before she reached Victor, she got a single glance into the room, one that revealed it to be every bit the same as it always had been—through the eighties and into the nineties. It was akin to a museum with no item out of place. Victor turned to reveal panicked eyes. Before he could speak, Rebecca grabbed the knob and slammed the door back in place. The sound ricocheted up and down the hallway.
Chapter Seven
It was now eleven at night. Another storm churned across the island, and the house shivered around them. Rebecca and Victor sat sullenly. They’d hardly spoken since the incident upstairs.
“We should go get a hotel room,” Rebecca suggested, although exhaustion from the day kept her glued to the chair.
Victor was quiet. He stood from the breakfast table and headed for the cabinet, an antique passed down from Grandpa Thomas’s mother. Rebecca’s stomach gurgled and groaned.
