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He shrugged. “You’d feel differently if you’d grown up with her.”
She thought of her father back in Utah, clinging to his broken junk tighter than he had ever held on to her. Thought of the way her husband ludicrously insisted that she was too hard on her dad, that he was unwell, had possibly even felt the life-shattering impact of her mother’s loss more deeply than she had.
“Maybe you’re right,” she conceded. “Family does have a unique way of getting under your skin.”
But every time her mother-in-law hugged her goodbye, the older woman’s affection was so genuine, so enveloping, it filled that void of love her own father never poured anything into. She would close her eyes, inhale that nearness, that acceptance, and for the first time since she was a child wordlessly breathe,Mother, Mama, Mommy.
Her mother-in-law particularly enjoyed hearing about their house, chuckling at stories of people like the chimney sweep. There were plenty of them, true believers who preached about ghosts in the attic, spirits under the stairs, the fingernails of ugly, vengeful history clawing from the floorboards. The older woman nodded along as she recounted how they’d decided not to install an alarm system after the installer had explained false alarms would be a problem in the oldest portion of the house, with the way the windows rattled. They’d have to shell out some real cash, pay for a monitoring service, exterior cameras and outdoor wiring, to make any system functional. Given that the few break-ins in their area in the lastdecade had been seekers (drug or thrill), her husband had decided it was all a waste of money.
“Nothing ever happens out here,” he’d huffed. “What would someone steal? We don’t even have a nice TV.”
She’d frowned at him, thought,And yet, you won’t get rid of that gun.
“That alarm man,” she told her mother-in-law, “stood right out on the lawn looking up at the house, and, dead serious, was like, ‘The best security you’ve got is that this place is really fuckin’ spooky.’ ”
Her mother-in-law rolled her eyes. “I swear, it’s always the burliest-looking men who are the biggest babies.” She paused. “Even so, I don’t know if I’d want to live in that house. Too many reminders of unpleasant things.”
For the true believers, there was too much of the supernatural about the place. For people like her mother-in-law, there was too much reality.
The people enslaved by the family that built the home back in 1722 had painted murals on the attic walls, drawings that instantly undermined the lessons she recalled from grade school history class. There, only the Salem witch trials, Lizzie Borden with her ax, and other female insanities had interrupted the ball of New England righteousness that bounced from pilgrims to revolutionaries to Union soldiers.
Her father-in-law had sneered at the drawings as though they were a personal insult, wrinkling his nose as if smelling something sour.
She hated the spiders and wasps and mustiness of the unfinished attic, how it was invariably miserably cold or swelteringly hot, but always paused by the painted wall. Her own calling was technical, but she believed this gave her a unique appreciation for the fluid.Although the lines were faded with time and lightly water damaged, all the portraits—the drawings of Black figures near the ceiling who floated in a kind of heavenly judgment above the pale, wigged men and their rouged wives painted near the floor—were shot through with personality, had clearly been based on real people.
Despite her mother-in-law’s flinty ability to face down death, the older woman had grimaced at the time-tilted stones of the home’s graveyard, the oldest each topped with a carved skull flanked by wings.
“It’s just so maudlin, dear, having it right by the children’s swing set.”
“Mmm,” she’d hummed, busy reading the original enslaver’s epitaph.
He lived a long unblemished life.
Virtue and industry, he practised and taught.
Reader, if this be pleasing to God and beneficial to man,
do thou likewise.
1702–1778
Is there anyone who thinks they’re evil? Or does evil always see itself as superior?
As her mother-in-law thinned, became pained and sleepy and distant, her husband’s appearances at the apartment dwindled.
“That girl’s keeping him from us,” she heard her father-in-law complain in the next room. “God knows what she tells him.”
Her husband’s protestations that he was the one who got groceries every week, picked up his mother’s prescriptions, drove her to see this or that friend, lacked conviction. He knew as well as the rest of them that he was fleeing to the skies, leaning out of his two-seaterSuper Cub airplane to capture a God’s-eye view of New England. His photos were seasonal: glowing foliage; hundreds of colorful people on beaches, around pools; tiny dots of humanity rushing down ski hills. Photos that sold well to interior designers, specially printed in massive sizes and delivered to similarly massive vacation homes of the beach, country, and mountain type.
“Look how easy death is to defy,” the headstrong tilt of his chin said. “I do it every day.”
Yes, she saw that terror crouched behind her husband’s bravado. In the loving beam of his mother’s fading gaze, he short-circuited. This was why his dangerous work had become all-consuming, leaving her and the children to travel to the apartment alone.
“We didn’t raise him like this,” her father-in-law groused in the next room. “He’s being manipulated by that girl.”
When the older man received nothing but her curt, silent nods in response to his imperious criticism of her cooking (salty), the way she folded things (crooked), or how she hadn’t used distilled water in the iron (ruinous), he began pick-pick-picking at his grandson.
“Hell, kid, you throw worse than a girl! Your sister can throw. Sister’s more of a boy than you are,” and “What’s this? Are youcrying? Over a TV show? Christ almighty,” and to her exhausted mother-in-law, cuddling the three-year-old in her lap, “You need to stop babying him. It’s one thing for the girl to be a tomboy. But you’re going to turn him all wrong, too.”
