A Sudden Light: A Novel (2 page)

“Twenty-three years.”

“Twenty-three years. Your mother was a fine woman.”

“Indeed she was.”

“A real tragedy.”

Val nodded to himself and then smacked the roof of the car and straightened with a hitch of his pants. He walked to the old wooden gate and pulled a counterweight; the arm arced upward, clearing the path. As we eased by, Val waved. “Welcome home,” he called out.

What tragedy? The death of my grandmother was a taboo subject. I’d tried asking about her before and it didn’t work; my father wouldn’t talk about it. I’d become convinced that my father would never talk about it.

As we drove away from the guard booth, the world changed as if we had been teleported into a medieval forest. We snaked through ravines and past driveways leading to houses I could barely see because they were set so far back and a million trees stood between the houses and the road. Evergreen trees: cedars and spruce, firs and pines. Deciduous trees: oaks and birches, maples and madrona, that peculiar Northwest species with its red peeling bark. Deeper and deeper we drove into the forest; the house markers grew less frequent, the drives became more grand, gates began to block access, jagged stone walls ran alongside the road. As we continued, it felt like we were going further back in time. The winding
lane withered into a pockmarked and pothole-riddled gravel path that crunched under our tires like the brittle bones of the dead, and then we got to the end of the main road. To the side of the road was a broken iron gate, laid off its hinges long ago by grounds workers long gone, and I knew we had arrived at our destination because there was nowhere else to go.

We crossed the threshold of the property and continued along the winding driveway, which dipped down into a cool ravine before rising quickly to a crest that revealed a broad clearing on a bluff overlooking Puget Sound. My father pulled the car to a stop on the drive, and I found myself speechless. Not out of protest; no. But because I was stunned into silence by the sight of Riddell House.

My father had told me about it, the place of his father’s birth and home to two generations before that. He’d described in vague, sketchy terms the house built by his great-grandfather nearly a century ago. But he’d only outlined the deficits of the house. It was falling down, he told me. It’s practically condemned, he said. We’re only going there to put it out of its misery, knock it down, sell off the land, and be done with it. But he didn’t tell me the whole story, apparently, because Riddell House was not what he’d described. I was expecting a rickety old shack, hardly worth the time to glance at. What I saw was not a shack.

My father climbed out of the car; I followed and stood next to him at the edge of the drive. Across a vast field of dry grass loomed a massive structure made of logs and bricks and stones, crowned with a roof of heavy cedar shakes accented by green copper downspouts and flashing. The house was circumscribed by a veranda on both the first and the second of the three floors. The drive swept past a grand front stairway and looped around to meet up with itself again, while a spur split off and disappeared behind the house. I quickly counted a dozen chimneys, though I was sure there were more; I estimated at least a hundred windows, though I didn’t take the time to count. The house appeared squat from our perspective, as if it were hunkering down to the earth. The
pillars that encircled it and made up much of its exterior walls were tree trunks. Fully grown, giant trees. Stripped of their limbs and clad in their native bark. Each one, a perfect specimen. The tree pillars stood vertically, side by side—the tallest of them fifty feet, by my estimation, at the roof’s peak—a regiment of silent, glaring giants.

Riddell House.

I took a deep breath and inhaled the breeze: shellfish and seaweed and mud. It smelled like low tide when I was a kid and my parents would take me out to Mystic, Connecticut, for the day. Littleneck clams and rock crab and seaweed. The wind blowing, and me, fighting against the flapping paper nest that held my fries in the plastic basket. My father smiling at my mother with soft eyes, and then leaning in to kiss her. My mother kissing back. And me, finally retrieving a fry, and thinking it was the best fry in the world.

The things we remember.

To the west, Puget Sound sprawled out between us and the trees and wilderness of the Kitsap Peninsula and the curtain of mountains beyond that, rising blue into their jagged peaks.

“First objective completed,” my father said. “Locate and identify Riddell House.”

My relationship with my father at that point in my life wasn’t horrible, but it was pretty superficial. It was based on things that weren’t, rather than things that were. We didn’t simply go to the store or clean the gutters; we executed “missions.” We used code words. We went into “stealth mode,” or did something “commando-style.” His big line was “we’re in the acquisition and development phase.” Like we had to create an artifice around everything. An ironic layer. We wrapped a protective coating of self-consciousness around the things we did, and, as a result, sincerity was almost entirely lacking. We were going to buy eggs at the store. But not really. We were embarking on Project Ovum, which entailed executing a series of missions that concerned national security. When I was little, I thought it was cool; I didn’t think it was cool when I
was verging on fourteen. Because I began to realize it wasn’t a kid’s game for my father; it was how he lived his life.

I stretched and rolled my head around on my shoulders. It felt good to be out of the car and in the hot sun. I watched the breeze sweep across the meadow and bend the long grasses toward me with an invisible hand. The breeze reached me, swirled around, and cooled my neck.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “It looks fine to me. Why are we tearing it down?”

My father looked at me for a moment.

“It’s rotten” was all he said, and he motioned for me to return to the car.

We drove the final stretch of gravel drive that sliced across the field like a gray scar; when the car stopped, a cloud of dust swallowed us whole for a moment. When it cleared, we got out to examine the monolithic house, which, from up close, soared into the sky and blotted out all else. The heft of it was powerful; the trees that made up its walls were immense. Maybe it was the long flight and the long drive; maybe it was feeling like I was on solid ground for the first time after our journey—but I felt almost overcome with emotion. I didn’t cry, but I had that pre-crying feeling, and I wondered at it. I wondered why I felt something so visceral. I felt somehow inspired.

“It’s rotten,” my father repeated.

Why should my father insist on such a thing? I looked over at him; he shook his head pitifully. I looked back at the house and tried to see it through his eyes: the brick foundation was brittle; mortar between the bricks had flaked away in places and holes penetrated into the darkness. The flower beds were unkempt; ivy snaked up the log pillars, heavy and tenacious, glued to the wood with pale tentacles. We mounted the steps, and I noticed the warped planks of the porch. The windows were composed of small panes of rippled glass, distorted, full of imperfections. Many of the panes were cracked, and some of them had been broken out and replaced by plywood. My father rapped his knuckles on one of the pillars and frowned at the hollowness of the sound. I heard it, too. It sounded dead.

My father picked at the chinking with his fingernail; the dry mortar scraped off, turned to dust, and was gone. We both saw the paint on the window frames, which peeled off in long, jagged strips, and we saw the cracks between the window frames and the cedar shakes. Riddell House was, indeed, rotten.

“Would it pass inspection?” I asked.

“You mean by a person who wasn’t in a coma?” my father responded.

He knocked at the door. He tried the latch. He knocked again: nothing.

“I told Serena what time we were getting in.”

He reached up and felt along the top of the doorframe; he produced a key.

“Some things never change,” he said, and he slipped the key into the lock. The front door opened.

I remember feeling pulled in by the magnetism of the place as I stepped into the entry hall. It was like a time capsule, recently defrosted from the center of a giant glacier. A fully intact world from turn-of-the-century Seattle; a museum. A dusty, faded, moth-eaten museum.

It was a world that smelled of decay, heavy with moist, thick air, which floated in the rooms like an invisible fog. The interior was constructed of fine wood, in contrast to the unmilled trees of the facade. Dark wood with inlays and tight grain and chocolate stain. Oriental rugs in all the rooms and a grandfather clock that was not tick-tocking, its hands poised at six-fifteen. The foyer soared upward into an atrium. A hallway opposite the front door disappeared into the darkness, and a wide staircase climbed up to a second-floor balcony. I stepped into the room to my right and looked around. The furniture was plush and overstuffed; the rugs and walls and ceiling were dark and somber. Iron lions, sitting up on their haunches with their claws bared, guarded a central fireplace. On the wall next to the fireplace hung a painting nearly eight feet tall, depicting a well-dressed man with wild silver hair and a cane. He was looking directly at me, and he held out his hand in such an aggressively welcoming gesture that I was startled.

“Your great-great-grandfather,” my father said, standing behind me. “Elijah Riddell.”

“Why’d he put a painting of himself in his own house?” I asked.

“That’s what rich people do.”

“Rich people are weird.”

“Maybe she’s in the kitchen,” my father said, starting off toward the back of the house.

I wanted to stay and explore the rooms, but I was intimidated by it all. The house began to feel alive, almost, and breathing—a thought disturbing enough to make me follow my father toward the kitchen rather than linger by myself.

We walked past a dining room with a table nearly twenty-five feet long, surrounded by dozens of chairs, then a dark room with floor-to-ceiling books and stained-glass windows. Eventually we arrived in the kitchen, which I initially judged to be larger than our entire house in Connecticut. To one side of the kitchen was a cooking area with a large butcher block table worn smooth by decades of chopping, a bread oven, and a giant cast-iron stove beneath an expansive copper exhaust hood. Opposite the stove was a long wooden table with a quirky assortment of wooden chairs, an entertainment area of a sort, with a couple of easy chairs and a small sofa and a new TV on an old TV cart. On another wall was a stone walk-in fireplace outfitted with long hooks, which, my father explained, were used for cooking cauldrons of stew in the old days. He pointed out the rotisserie brackets, too, which were used for sides of lamb and slabs of beef.

“To feed the armies?” I asked, but he ignored my comment.

“This place was built before electricity,” my father said. “There was no gas supply. The whole area was wilderness when Elijah built his estate. Everything in this house was coal fired; I’ll show you the basement; it’s a pretty fascinating place. At some point someone put in a cutting-edge system where they used calcium carbide and water to produce acetylene to power an electrical generator—”

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

“I thought it was cool when I was a kid. I can show you the system. Anyway, they had electricity up here before anyone else did. Long before The North Estate was annexed into the city and they brought up municipal electricity and gas.”

“Is that where our inheritance went? Developing a cutting-edge electrical system?”

“You know,” he said, “at some point you’re going to realize that being a smart-ass isn’t as much about being smart as it is about being an ass.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Did you read that in a fortune cookie?”

“Probably.”

I smiled for the first time on our ridiculous journey. Part of it was my father’s joke. Part of it was my father, himself.

I mean, he looked ridiculous. He looked like Shaggy from
Scooby-Doo!
He was wearing the same old khakis he always wore and a white T-shirt and boating shoes—and he traveled like that! He’d gotten on an airplane and flown across the country looking like that! When my grandmother and grandfather on my mother’s side would visit from England, they would wear formal clothes to fly. My grandmother would wear pearls and a fancy dress, and I once asked my grandfather why they did that and he said, “If we crash and die, we want to die in our best clothes.” Now
that’s
respect for the system.

Jones Riddell—my father—was sporting a wiry beard that was too long and gray, and the mustache covered his upper lip, which drove my mother crazy—but she never said anything. She never made him change. I knew she let him be all the things she disliked so much so she could continue disliking him. The hair on his head was too long and his face was too tan and was getting wrinkled because he spent so much time outside in the sun working on his boats. My mother didn’t make him wear sunscreen because she had given up. If I walked out to the road to get the newspaper from the box, my mother made me put on sunscreen, but not my dad. She had given up on him altogether.

We stood awkwardly in the kitchen of the empty house. I glanced out the bay window that faced north to the meadow and saw a woman riding a bicycle, looking like she had been plucked from an old-fashioned movie. She rode an antique-style bicycle, with baskets attached to a platform extending over the rear wheel. The baskets were full of groceries overflowing from paper bags. The woman, who was youthful and lithe, wore a long dress that fluttered coquettishly over her tall boots, and somehow—miraculously—never got caught up in the chain. Her long auburn hair was held by a ribbon tied low near the nape of her neck, and she held her face slightly raised toward the sky, as if to greet the sun. I pointed to her and my father noticed.

“There she is,” he said as the woman cruised up the drive.

She spotted our car parked in front of the house and looked to the bay window and must have seen us inside because she smiled and waved. She rode up to the back of the house and disappeared from view; a few seconds later, she entered the kitchen. Her cheeks were flushed and she was out of breath. Her eyes were bright and smiling and, I noticed, locked on my father. She rested one hand below her neck and the other on her hip. Her dress was sleeveless, revealing her toned arms, and it fit tight around her waist, showing off her womanly aspect in a way I had only seen in movies and on TV.