The Lake House (10 page)

“No, I was raised to be a wife. Why can’t you understand that I want a career?”

“So you’ve made your decision.”

“Mother, please, I need you to understand.”

“Victoria, what I understand is that you’re being selfish and stubborn. You belong at home with your family, not playing movie star on the other side of the country. You’ve hurt everyone, not just Joseph, and I’m ashamed of you. I expect you to think about what I’ve said and return home.”

But Victoria didn’t listen. She rebelled against her mother’s wishes and stayed in California.

Victoria stood and placed her gloved palm against the stone, as if reaching out to her mother. “I found the frame with the picture of my premiere. I keep wondering if maybe you’d placed it on the shelf,” Victoria said to her mother’s memory. “Do you remember when I called to tell you that I was going to be on the silver screen for the first time and I invited you and Daddy to the premiere? It took me years of going to casting calls to get that job. I never told you, but I quit the job as a receptionist and began working as a dancer at a dinner theater to gain experience . . . something I knew would shame you to no end, so I never told you, but it didn’t matter . . . you were ashamed of everything I did.”

Victoria turned to the stone with her father’s name. He’d always been supportive of her decision to become an actress. The first time he came to visit her small basement apartment, he took one look at the dark rooms and immediately set out to find her a new place. He moved her into an apartment in Santa Monica where she could lean out the window and see the ocean. All of which he paid for while she built her career. When he came for her premiere, he bought her a silver Dior gown with a plunging back to wear to the event. Never did she feel more elegant as she walked the red carpet on his arm. But no amount of glamour could mend her broken heart when her mother didn’t come to the premiere. It effectively severed their already strained relationship.

The memory of the night she’d received the phone call telling her the news of her mother’s death replayed in her mind as she caressed the headstone. It’d been almost midnight in Santa Monica when the phone rang. A man with brown eyes had been unzipping Victoria’s sundress.

“Hello,” Victoria answered, laughing as the man reached under her dress and tickled her waist.

“Victoria, it’s Molly.”

“Molly, I’ve missed you. Please, come visit me.” The four glasses of champagne Victoria had drunk at dinner made her giddy. She playfully pushed the man away and sat on the couch. Molly sniffled and her voice trembled. “Victoria, I’m sorry to tell you this. Your mother suffered a heart attack and didn’t make it. Your father is devastated. You need to come home.”

Victoria didn’t remember hanging up the phone. She didn’t see her date close the door on his way out. In the back of her closet, behind the shoe racks, she’d hidden the rosewood box her grandmother had given her for her seventh birthday. Surrounded by gowns and silk dresses, her sundress still unzipped, she squeaked open the lid and pulled out five years of letters. With shaking hands, Victoria removed the flowered stationery and reread the last letter that had come one month earlier:

It’s been six years since you’ve come home for the holidays. I’m asking you to join us. I’ve included a plane ticket and I expect you to honor my wishes.

At the airport the next day she exchanged the ticket, meant for the holidays, and flew home for her mother’s funeral. The cold fall day spent clutching Molly’s hand as the casket was lowered into the grave was nothing like the homecoming Victoria had imagined all those years she’d been away.

The entire Nagog community stood in black around the hole in the ground as Victoria struggled to control her tears. Her mother wouldn’t have cried. She would’ve bottled up her emotions until she could feel them in private. In honor of her mother’s style, Victoria wore a pencil skirt and a black button-down
shirt under her black wool coat. In this last moment, Victoria would show everyone that she was her mother’s daughter, even though she hadn’t been able to live her mother’s life.

Back at her childhood home, Victoria left her father’s side only to search for Molly. As she approached the doorway to the sunroom, she heard Maryland, Evelyn, Agatha, and Sarah talking.

“Did you see that she didn’t shed one tear?” Agatha was saying.

“I can’t believe it,” Evelyn said. “How do you not cry at your own mother’s funeral? I’d be devastated.”

“I’m not surprised,” Sarah said. “She left and didn’t look back. Obviously, she never cared about anyone but herself to have done what she did to her mother. I think Victoria’s actions broke her mother’s heart and brought on her illness.”

“Sarah, that’s an awful thing to say,” Maryland said.

“But it’s the truth,” Sarah said. “Mrs. Rose was ashamed of Victoria’s life and the way she treated this community. She was never the same after Victoria ran away. And then to have to see Victoria flaunt herself on billboards selling household products, it destroyed her heart.”

“And from what I hear, Victoria is leaving in a few days because she has to be on a movie set,” Agatha said. “You would think that she would stay and take care of her father after all he’s been through. But Victoria always had to be the star, and that’s what’s important to her.”

It was only later, in the privacy of Molly’s kitchen and the comfort of her friend’s embrace, that Victoria could finally sob for everything she’d lost.

She took one last look at the graves. Her father had died of
a heart attack two years after her mother’s death. Everyone in the community said he’d died of a broken heart from missing her mother. Once again Victoria returned to her childhood home to bury a parent. The lawyers explained that her father had left her a sizable estate, including his factories, which he’d placed in a trust in her name. The men of Nagog oversaw the sale of the business. She closed up the Nagog house and returned to Santa Monica.

Snow had begun to fall again and Victoria knew she needed to leave the cemetery. She looked to the sky. “I thought I’d have more time, Mother. That’s been my problem my whole life. I’ve always felt that there would be time to make amends, but now I’m an old woman talking to ghosts because I don’t know how to heal things with the family I have left.”

H
eather mentally cursed Charlie for not taking the time to clean off her car while she’d been in Africa. An icy sheet had covered Heather’s car, already encased in snow. The plows had pushed three feet of snow up against her car blocking her in. With a scraper she hacked at the inch-thick layer frozen onto the windshield. It had snowed or rained almost every day in the week and a half since she’d been home, which made the car that much harder to shovel out. A slushy mound dropped from a tree branch onto her head, and she let out a muffled scream of frustration.

Finally she was able to ease the car forward, and then with a jolt, she moved into traffic and headed for the main highway, where her small car hydroplaned in the big puddles that flooded the road. A truck sprayed her windshield with a brown wave that
obstructed her vision. When the water cleared, she found herself inches from hitting the guardrail. She screamed and swerved, nearly smashing into the car in the travel lane. The muscles in her arms shook as she grabbed the wheel tighter and regained control over the vehicle. Air escaped her lips in fast gasps as she remembered to breathe.

At the Concord rotary, she almost turned back, deciding that she shouldn’t risk her life to see a house she probably wouldn’t buy. But she was only a few miles from Littleton and it would take at least an hour to drive back to Boston in the bad weather. More than anything she wanted to be out of her car. She crept along the winding roads and ducked her head to look through the one clear area on the windshield. Her muscles remained clenched until she pulled into Nagog Drive.

She turned off the car and placed her head on the steering wheel. Her hands continued to shake as she took in gulps of air. She hadn’t entered a church since her grandmother’s funeral. No one had taught her to pray, so she faked it.

“Whoever just kept me alive during that drive, thank you.”

Heather opened her umbrella and stepped from the car. She tucked her hair behind her ear and looked at the house. Even through the cold drizzle, the place looked warm and inviting, and the sight of it calmed her nerves. Heather had studied architecture during her travels. Her columns tended to include descriptions of neighborhood homes—she felt it brought her readers closer to a location. Or maybe it was her own desperate need to find a place to call home.

Fresh paint, colonial blue, coated the wooden clapboards of the house. Whereas the other homes in the neighborhood had front porches with wood or stucco pedestals or columns, this
one had a small deck with white rails. Heather assumed that it originally had a porch, but someone had chosen to remove it during renovation to get a better view of the lake. Instead of heavy wooden doors typical of the time period, there were glass French doors.

Though the house was clearly a Craftsman bungalow, with thick wood casings around the windows and a front gabled roof, there were also Victorian accents like bay windows with diamond patterns and scrolled patterns on the rafters. Whoever had built this place hadn’t been ready to fully embrace the modern architecture of that time.

A man with curly salt-and-pepper hair ran toward her in the rain. He extended a gloved hand. “I’m Aaron. You must be Heather.”

“Nice to meet you,” she said as he ushered her onto the deck.

Aaron wiped moisture from his forehead and dug in his jacket pocket for the keys. “The house is over one hundred years old, but everything has been updated. My wife’s family has owned it since it was built. It has a fieldstone foundation.”

“Yes, I noticed that,” Heather said.

“They don’t build foundations like these anymore.” Aaron continued to look for the keys in his other pockets. “I’m sorry this is taking so long. I just flew in this afternoon and I’m a little frazzled. I know I put the keys somewhere.”

A black car pulled into the drive. A tall woman in a beige suit and thick brown heels ran to the porch, her briefcase held over her head for protection. Aaron found his keys in his jeans and unlocked the French doors. Heather walked into the dark living room. He turned on a small table lamp and the room glowed with soft light.

“I’m Janice. I spoke with both of you on the phone.” She handed them business cards imprinted with her picture and the RE/MAX logo. “This place is lovely. I don’t think I’ve ever been through the neighborhood.”

“This is the first house that’s ever been on the market in this community,” Aaron said. “All of the houses have been passed down through the generations.”

Heather half listened as she walked around the large but cozy room. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases framed the sides of a large rectangular window that had two diamond-pattern casings. From here, Heather could have touched the large lilac bush that almost screened the entire picture window and created privacy between the houses. She imagined sitting on a couch, a book on her lap, as the scent of lilacs permeated the room. Polished maple beams had been used as molding in the recessed ceiling. She touched the rocking chair next to the hearth and it brought her back to nights being rocked to sleep to the sounds of a crackling fire.

“Why don’t we move on to the rest of the house?” Aaron said. He led them past the maple staircase and down a short hall to the dining room.

Crown molding trimmed the ceiling in this room and gave it an elegant feel. Rainbow prisms danced from the small cut crystals in the light fixture. Through the two windows on the opposite side of the room, Heather could see the next-door neighbor’s house, which was only about thirty feet away. Heather looked out the window and saw a detached double car garage. “Does the garage come with the property?”

“One side of it does,” Aaron said. “It’s a strange situation. There are actually two doors and a wall separating the space,
but my wife’s family and the Woodwards next door were good friends and they decided that they could get by with only one building permit if they shared the garage.”

“How does that work with selling the property and clearing the title?” Janice asked.

“I’m not certain about that, since no one has ever thought about selling.” Aaron began to talk faster. “In this community, it’s almost like buying a townhome. The association owns the land, but the structures have individual titles. The community center across the way is also common property. But the fees are only one hundred dollars a month and they cover trash, plowing, and the use of the beach and the center.”

“Why are you selling?” Heather asked as she walked to the other end of the room where a serving buffet had been built into the wall.

“These homes have been passed down for almost a century. It’s time for my wife and me to give it to our sons, but they live near us, in Miami. This place needs someone to enjoy the lake and throw summer parties. It needs a youthful presence.”

“So, you live in Florida,” Heather replied.