A Sudden Light: A Novel (31 page)

“Why don’t you tell
me
about it?” I suggested helpfully after a moment.

“Forget it,” my father groaned, disgusted.

“No,” I persisted. “Seriously. Tell me about the plan. This Kensington House place looks pretty nice. Have you visited it?”

“No,” my father grumbled, “I haven’t.”

“Maybe we should go check it out. See what it looks like in person. Look, Grandpa,” I said, holding the brochure out for him. “Look at all these old people having a good time.”

Grandpa Samuel raised an eyelid and peered at the brochure without moving, like a lizard basking on a rock in the sun; he couldn’t be bothered to actually
move
.

“I don’t like people,” he said.

“Sure you do,” I said cheerfully. “You just don’t
know
many people.”

“The people I do know, I don’t like.”

“You need to meet
these
people. These people are super nice. And once you get to know them . . . You didn’t know me a couple of weeks ago and you like me, don’t you?”

“The only one,” he admitted reluctantly.

“So it’s possible. Friday nights are movie nights. They show the classics. Movies you haven’t seen in years.”

“I don’t like the movies,” he croaked.

“Forget it,” my father said, shaking his head. “Let him die and be buried in this house for all I care. This is the only thing I’ve ever asked him for. I never asked him for money or trust or love, and he certainly never offered any on his own.”

My father gathered the folders and reached for the drawings, but I got to them first and rolled them out.

“What’s this?” I asked. “Is that Riddell House?”

My father sighed, resigned himself to participating in the presentation, and pointed to the middle of the top drawing.

“
That’s
Riddell House,” he said. “There’s the cottage. And see the wheelhouse down by the creek?”

“Fascinating,” I said. “So this is like a— What do they call it?”

“It’s a survey. And underneath is a topographical, so you can see the hills and the bluff.”

I set the top drawing aside on the kitchen table and it started to curl up, so I motioned for my father to use sandwich plates to keep it flat. Then I studied the topographical map. It had a lot of curvy thin lines on it.

“The closer the lines are to each other, the faster the elevation
change,” my father explained. “Each line denotes a different elevation, see? Look here, by the bluff. The lines are so close together, it’s almost one thick line. That’s the cliff.”

“Ah,” I said, rubbing my chin, pretending I had never seen a topographical map before. “I see. And what’s this other drawing?”

My father staked out the topographical map, and I held the third drawing open. Riddell House wasn’t on it. Neither was the cottage. But the wheelhouse was.

“This is the proposed replat. The lots are all very big, as you can see. High-value real estate. Plenty of setback. The current drive would have to be moved, so this is a new road, and there has to be a turnaround at the end of it, here, for fire trucks. It’s part of the code.”

“So how many lots would there be?”

“Twenty lots,” he said. “Ten acres each. It’s the law of diminishing returns. If we try to pack more lots in, the value per acre will drop. The threshold seems to be twenty lots of ten acres.”

“What about Observatory Hill?” I asked, pointing to a part on the map that had been cordoned off.

“That would be part of a reserve. The family graveyard would be left intact with a small fence around it. And there would be a plaque about the history of The North Estate. Two acres will be set aside for that.”

“Wow,” I said, trying to sound impressed. But I thought:
Two acres out of two hundred? Benjamin Riddell’s legacy reduced to two acres?
“You guys thought of everything.”

My father winked at me, which pissed me off. I was being forced to pitch a ridiculous proposal to Grandpa Samuel, and now I was a coconspirator?

Everybody was talking about this sort of thing back in 1990. Even as a kid I knew about it. They called them McMansions. People with money—not the super rich, with their multiple homes and their private jets; just the regular rich people, who had a big house and maybe a time-share at a ski resort in Montana—wanted their space, and their
extra bedrooms, and their walk-in closets, their four-car garages, and their hot tubs and saunas and wine cellars and lap pools and sprinkler systems and invisible dog fences, and they wanted their hardwood floors and their stainless-steel appliances and TVs in every room and alarm systems to keep others out. They wanted gates that opened with garage door clickers, and their house numbers on brass plaques. They wanted well-lit, even pathways so children and elders wouldn’t trip and skin a knee or break a hip. And they didn’t realize they were raising a generation of children who could only walk on level ground. The pathfinders of the world, henceforth, would be confined to the pre-paved paths.

But I remember very clearly, standing in the kitchen that afternoon, feeling a flash of rage against my father. I had half a mind to grill him on the impact those twenty soulless McMansions would have on the local environment: the sewage, the toxic fertilizer seeping into the water table, the emissions of dozens of gas-guzzling cars neatly tucked away in their multicar garages, to say nothing of the aesthetic decimation of the last few acres of old-growth forest in an urban setting.

But what good would that have done? I swallowed my lecture of righteousness and winked back at him. And I nearly gagged at my own wretchedness.

(Ben was teaching me, and I was learning. But was I learning quickly enough?)

One of the dark gray folders on the table had “Riddell House Inspection Report” printed across the front of it in silver letters. I picked it up and paged through it while my father busied himself with the drawings. The report was full of information and photos and a narrative analysis. It explained what the house was made of—no surprises there: it was all wood—but visual inspection of the exterior logs suggested that rot was likely present and the inspectors recommended bore testing, especially of the load-bearing logs. And there was stuff about drainage and the foundation and the systems and the
fire safety—or lack thereof. Basically, it was like living in a box of kindling. The fact that we hadn’t burned to death already was shocking.

“It doesn’t look good,” I said, and then I casually passed the report to Grandpa Samuel, who actually took it and looked through it.

“So it would take
a lot
to stay here, then,” I said to my father. “I mean, if you wanted to be safe.”

“An awful lot,” my father said.

“I mean, to bring it up to code—”

“Oh, I don’t think you could bring it up to code,” my father jumped in. “That would be cost-prohibitive. And you don’t have to do anything like that; an existing house is grandfathered. I mean addressing the electrical issues, and— But it would be smart to replumb the place. You’ve tasted the water.”

“It tastes like rust,” I said.

“Galvanized pipes. They’re so full of rust and gunk, the flow is restricted. The water pressure on the third floor is practically nonexistent.”

“But the water pressure down here is okay,” I said.

“Right,” my father agreed. “Because they’ve cranked up the pressure so it works on the top floor, but now it’s around one twenty or one thirty psi coming in from the meter, and if anything blows, it’s serious flood time. No. If anyone intended to live here for the long term—or the short term, for that matter—he would be wise to think about the plumbing and doing something about the rot in the timbers that hold up the ground floor. Those are two crucial things just to keep the house standing. It would be smart to install French drains at the corners to try to direct some of the rainwater away from the foundation. And I don’t know when was the last time the timbers were treated for wood-eating insects. There’s evidence all over the basement—”

“Termites?”

“Wood beetles.”

“Wood beetles,” I echoed seriously, and then I turned to Grandpa Samuel, who was deep into the report. “What do you think, Grandpa?”

He looked up, and for a second I thought he was crying. But his eyes always looked like that. They seeped and looked glassy. I figured it was an old person’s thing. Or maybe I was wrong; maybe he was crying.

“I can’t leave,” he said quietly.

“Sure you can, Dad,” my father said, sounding very gentle. I didn’t think I’d ever heard my father address Grandpa Samuel as Dad before, except that very first day. My father slipped into a chair at the table. “Think of how easy it would be. Movers come and do all the work. There’s a brochure right here on downsizing. Think of how comfortable we’d all be after. But most of all, think of Trevor.”

My father reached out and pulled me toward him like we were making a commercial for the Church of the Latter-day Saints or something.

“Think of Trevor’s college education. Think of him getting a good start in life. You know? He’ll want to start a family of his own one day, and wouldn’t it be nice for him to have a little nest egg that you could provide him? You’ve always said that Grandpa Abe didn’t leave you with anything. Wouldn’t you like to correct that? Wouldn’t you like to provide for your grandson the way you wish your father had provided for you? You can fix the wrongdoing of Grandpa Abe. You can fix it right now! Wouldn’t that feel good?”

“I can’t leave,” Grandpa Samuel said again.

“Why not?”

“Because she’s still here.”

My father recoiled slightly.

“She’s not here, Dad.”

“Yes, she is. She’s here.”

“She isn’t here, Dad. She’s dead.”

“She dances for me at night.”

“She really doesn’t,” my father said tightly, and I could see that the infinite kindness and patience he had been showcasing for us was not so infinite after all.

“Serena says she can’t hear her, but I can. At night. I hear her dancing.”

“That isn’t her, Dad,” my father said, his voice rising, his anger getting the best of him. “It’s what Serena says: squirrels dancing on the roof. It’s rain. It’s woodpeckers pecking this place apart.”

“Sometimes I hear music.”

“Goddamn it, Dad!” my father barked. He stood so quickly, he knocked over his chair. “There is no music! There is no dancing! She’s dead, Dad. She’s been dead for a very long time. And she’s not coming back, and her ghost isn’t here, and she doesn’t dance for you, and she doesn’t play Billie Holiday records on the record player. She’s dead!”

I was disturbed by my father’s anger, because I knew—or I
believed
—that my father
did
believe it was Isobel. His anger meant Serena had gotten her hooks into him.

Grandpa Samuel looked down at the report and shook his head.

“No,” he whispered.

My father gathered himself. He shook his head as if to clear it of cobwebs. And then he put his hands on the kitchen table and leaned over Grandpa Samuel.

“You still can’t step up and be a man, can you? You can’t do the right thing for your children and grandson. You have a chance to be a man, but you won’t step up and do it.”

My father raised himself to his full height, gathered his papers and documents. He slowly rolled his drawings. He moved to the kitchen door before looking back one last time.

“I don’t particularly care,” he said. “I have plenty of time. One day you’ll die and this nightmare will be over. But I’d be concerned about Serena, if I were you. She’s extremely anxious. If you drag this out with doctors and competency hearings and all that, I have a feeling she’ll make your life very difficult. And when she wins—which she will, by the way—you can kiss Kensington House good-bye. Serena is not above revenge. As a matter of fact, she showed me the place she really wants to put you. It’s next to the Taco Bell on Aurora Avenue. You know, behind the strip mall with the 7-Eleven and the paintball store? Apparently
they’ve been moved up Medicare’s rating scale from ‘much below average’ to ‘below average.’ Good luck with that one, Dad. I’m pretty sure Mom won’t be dancing on the roof of that place.”

He left.

Grandpa Samuel began rubbing his stumps hard, like he was trying to get something out.

I hated the idea of selling off Riddell House to make room for McMansions. I hated it because it wasn’t what Ben wanted, and because Riddell House was so important to Grandpa Samuel.

But my father was
my father
! And I wanted him to like me. I wanted him to
love
me. And I wanted him to be happy with my mother and me, like we were happy before. Because we
were
happy once. I know it sounds sappy, but picking pumpkins on a brisk fall day, or following a creek deep into the Connecticut woods for hours and hours, or throwing rocks into an angry winter ocean . . . I remember these things. I remember looking at my parents and then knowing what love really was. I remember it so clearly! In their eyes! Between them! I saw an energy that was going back and forth between their eyes, and in that energetic stream the entire universe existed!

I sighed heavily, and Grandpa Samuel stared at me, waiting. Sad and lost.

He was waiting for me to tell him what to do.

“Let’s go down to the barn,” I said, and I touched his elbow. “We’ll make some chair legs. So they’re ready when the customer comes to collect them.”

“Someone’s coming to collect them?”

“He’s coming,” I said. “I’m pretty sure. One day, he’ll come.”

Grandpa Samuel nodded once and let me help him up. And then he let me lead him down to the barn.

I
wrote in my journal until late. Just past eleven o’clock, I got up to use the bathroom and I heard voices from the kitchen. Serena and my father were talking; I moved quietly along the hallway to the servants’ stairs; I eased my way down to the first floor and stopped inside the door. I perched on the bottom stair, and, from there, I could hear everything.

“It’s like he has an instinct for it,” I heard my father say. “He knows exactly what to say to drive me crazy.”