The Good House Read online

  “You don’t have to withdraw the question. It’s just not an easy question, and it’s especially hard to talk about it with you. I hope you know why.”

  “Of course I know why,” Angela said. “It’s harder for me. I’m pretty sure my ex-husband had a girlfriend named Luisa. She’s a recurring character, and I’m beginning not to like her.”

  Myles smiled sadly, a faraway look in his eyes. “You would like this one,” he said. When he exhaled, her napkin fluttered in his breath. “I’m sorry, Angie. I should have told you right away. But I didn’t know if…”

  “If it would bother me.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “I wish it didn’t,” she said. “But it does.”

  “So I can see.” The check came back with lightning speed. Myles had left his American Express Platinum Card on the table, so the waitress took it and vanished again. “Do you think maybe we ought to talk about your grandmother’s house instead?” he said.

  “No, that’s okay. I’ve said what I wanted to say. I’m just tired now. I want to get back to my room and fall asleep to HBO.”

  “Angie, listen,” he began. “Luisah is…” He didn’t finish.

  Shit. He does love her then, Angela thought. “She’s what?”

  “She’s a good person. She’s mixed, black and Japanese. She’s a vegetarian. We have fun together. We go to plays and art-house movies in Seattle. There’s an A.M.E. church up there we like, so we go a couple times a month. We go hiking. Am I in love? I don’t know. The last time I knew I was in love, I was eighteen years old.”

  Angela felt unsettled by the magnetism in Myles’s eyes. She could not look away from him, and she didn’t have a snappy response this time, except in her quickening heartbeat.

  “Six months isn’t a long time,” she said, already sorry for saying it.

  “It isn’t a short time.”

  Their waitress returned right in time.

  The drive back to the hotel was practically no more than crossing the rain-slick street, and Angela didn’t have time to think of a way to extricate herself from her conversation with Myles painlessly. She’d wanted to know, but knowing was giving her gas. The true sign of love, she thought. As Angela concentrated on calming her bowels, her mind flashed her an image of a bathtub full of churning water, turning brown, then black, and she felt her throat constrict.

  The Red Lion was at the edge of Kelso, Longview’s sister city, near the freeway ramp. Myles’s black Saturn came to a stop before she realized it, parked in front of the automatic double doors at the hotel lobby entrance. An empty luggage cart gleamed in brass outside. Most people who stopped here never ventured beyond room service, she figured. It was a business hotel for people passing through Longview on their way to other places, and in that sense it suited her perfectly.

  Myles allowed the car to idle, but when she didn’t move, he switched the engine off. With the windows rolled up, the scent of the cologne she recognized from the Fourth of July party filled the car, spicy and pleasant. Angela’s arms and legs felt like hot oven coils, the way they had in high school when she and Myles sat beside each other on Gramma Marie’s couch, trying to touch and yet not touching. This was a familiar place for them. Then, as now, Angela wanted to lean over to kiss him, or reach boldly for his thigh. A king-sized bed was waiting in her room, and Gramma Marie was no longer monitoring her chastity, or what had been left of it.

  But Angela had started this, and she had to finish it.

  “I’m happy for you, Myles,” she said. “Guess I should have come back six months ago.”

  Myles gazed at the steering wheel, blinking. “There is that.” His voice was solemn.

  “Our matchmaker friend Liza’s sure going to be disappointed. She thinks you’re waiting for me.”

  “I was,” he said, gazing at her askance, and her heart twitched. “That summer you came back. I’d heard you were in town with your son, your marriage was in trouble. I wanted you to be happy, that was the main thing. But with Ma getting sick when she did, it started to feel a little like…it was supposed to happen that way. I’d be back, you’d be back. Something might happen. We’d pick up where we’d gone wrong. Then, Tariq came. And Corey died. It’s in my letters.”

  Angela closed her eyes. Her chest seemed to be splintering. “Shit. I couldn’t read them.” She could hardly remember why, except that she’d tried to blot out everything after July Fourth. “One more reason to wish my son had never died,” she said finally.

  Her comment felt ugly, but some things you just had to laugh at. You laugh or you cry.

  He kissed her cheek, pressing his lips firmly. “The least reason,” he whispered.

  Angela held his face with her palm. His skin was rougher than it had been in high school, marred but still wonderfully his. Two inches separated their lips. “What’s wrong with me? Is it normal to hang on to a high school thing?” she said.

  Myles covered her hand, then brought it down from his face until her hand rested on her own knee. He patted her knuckles before taking his hand away, and she felt the absence of his body heat. “It’s not normal, and it’s not just you,” he said. “What happened with us is the closest thing I’ve known to magic. And it hurts like a sonofabitch sometimes, speaking for myself. But here’s the thing, doll-baby: We had something special at your Gramma Marie’s house, just like we had something special at The Spot. I can’t explain it. But you know.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Well, let’s keep that memory, then. That’s our mutual gift. As for the rest of it, I’ve spent years banging my head against the wall over why we’re always pushed together and pulled apart. That almost drove me crazy after high school, lady, and it started to drive me crazy again after Corey died. But it dawned on me one day that I’m notsupposed to understand—and as long as I remember that, I’m at peace.” And he was. Myles sounded serene. Angela tried to remember ever seeing this kind of serenity up close, much less experiencing it.

  Myles rubbed her chin. “I don’t know what’s going on at the house lately, why horrible things have happened there,” he said, “but I do know it can’t be that house itself. I kissed you in that house, on your grandmother’s sofa. Any place that can give us what we felt can’t be marked with some kind of evil, some curse. Not your Gramma Marie’s place. I don’t believe that, Angela. I won’t.”

  “I don’t understand it either, Myles. But I think it is. Somehow, it is.”

  They ran out of words. The silence in the car only heightened Angela’s awareness of Myles’s physical presence, his maleness, and their nearness felt insufferable. She wished she and Myles were different people, because truly selfish people always seemed to get what they wanted, no matter what the consequences. But she’d learned too much about consequences to ignore them.

  “Tell Luisah I’m sorry I kept you,” Angela said.

  “I’ll do that,” Myles said. She heard the relief in his voice.

  “Tell her if she gets tired of you, I don’t mind secondhand goods.”

  “I’ll leave that part out,” he said, smiling. He paused. “I love you, doll-baby. Always have.”

  “Me, too.” Her voice was a squeak. It took more strength than Angela would have thought imaginable to push open her car door and climb out to stand on her own feet, and more still to watch Myles’s car round the driveway and leave.

  The eighteen-year-old she had been when she had left Sacajawea shouldn’t have had the power to make the decision to send Myles away, she thought. An eighteen-year-old had no way to understand how many acts in life, once done, could not be taken back.

  Thirteen

  SACAJAWEA

  JUNE20, 2001

  THIS IS SOME BULLSHIT.As usual, this lady is tripping,” Corey muttered.

  The upstairs junk room looked worse than he remembered, clusters of things tangled into each other in a mess; scarred old bureaus, vanities and bookshelves, faded draperies and linens, piles of books and newspapers, and boxes st
acked until they were as tall as he was, making him feel like he was standing at the entrance of a maze. The room was on the sunny side of the house, hot as Mercury because there were no shades or curtains over the large double window. This room felt airless, and dust was already tickling his nose. He’d told Mom his hay fever had gotten worse in the past year, but she’d given him a look like she thought he was making it up to get out of doing some work. Why was she so quick to believe she was being lied to all the time?

  “This lamp is awesome,” Sean said, his voice muffled because he was hidden behind boxes, out of Corey’s sight. “I bet it’s, like, eighty years old. Think your mom’ll let me have it?”

  “The way you’re so busy kissing her ass all the time, she’ll let you have anything you want,” Corey said, half to himself. Sean treated every visit to his house like a field trip, pulling hisoh, gosh act.What an awesome library, Mrs. Toussaint! Do you mind if I borrow this book? Oh, yes, we read Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston in my honors English class in Santa Cruz last year, Mrs. Toussaint. This is such a great photograph of your grandmother, Mrs. Toussaint. Have you thought about enlarging it and framing it on your wall? Your job is so cool, Mrs. Toussaint—I’d love to meet celebrities all the time. Corey figured Sean was acting like that because he didn’t have a mother, just his dad and his sister and brothers, but it still got on his nerves. Let Sean come here and try to live with her a few days if he thought his mom was so damn great. That would give him a quick reality check.

  Straightening up the junk room was the latest project Mom had laid on him, as if she weren’t already taking up all his time. She’d made him read two books and write reports on them last summer, but this year he had to read three—and they had to be books in Gramma Marie’s library, so he could forget about Stephen King or Steven Barnes or Tom Clancy, the books he read for fun. He’d tried to find the shortest, thinnest books he could, but James Baldwin’sGo Tell It on the Mountain was too full of problems to enjoy on a summer’s day. Baldwin’s language was deep, and Corey could relate to the teenage character wrapped up in his family’s dramas, but he couldn’t give himself over to the book. Maybe he was too pissed at Mom to let himself like it. Corey felt like he spent all his time working and reading, but he’d rather be reading than cleaning, that was for damn sure. He hadn’t made this mess. Why should he have to clean it up?

  “I don’t know what the hell she expects me to do with all this shit,” Corey said.

  “She said to make it neat. Maybe you should put the furniture on one side and the boxes on the other,” Sean said, straining his thin arms to open the window. When he heaved, the window gave way with a grating squeal, and fresh air flew into the room. “I’ll help you. It won’t take that long. Then we can go ride out back.”

  Corey almost smiled at that idea. Sean had first let him ride Sheba a few days after they met, and he’d liked sitting high atop the horse’s broad back, feeling the jarring motion of Sheba’s strides beneath him, snapping his neck back. He’d gone horseback riding at summer camps when he was younger, but it was different to be on your own, riding on a trail or downtown with Sean, talking while they let the horses walk. He had the hang of it pretty much, pulling the reins to get Sheba to go where he wanted. He’d love to be riding in the shaded woods behind the house, over to the creek the horses liked to drink from, instead of standing here in all this mess.

  “She’s got people she pays who could do this. That’s the fucked-up part,” Corey said.

  “You cuss a lot. You ever notice that?”

  “And if I bend over at the right angle, you can kiss my ass. You ever notice that?”

  Sean laughed. “I’m just saying. Miguelito’s going around the house sayingbullshit all the time now, and my dad thinks it’s my fault.”

  Corey laughed. “I keep forgetting to watch my mouth around little kids. Sorry. It’s a habit.”

  “Everybody’s got their bad habits,” Sean said, and suddenly Corey smelled cigarette smoke. He whipped around and saw Sean leaning out of the open window, blowing smoke outside while his arm dangled over the windowsill. He was gazing out toward the woods.

  “Put that out, man. For real.”

  “The window’s open,” Sean said, like he couldn’t see that with his own eyes.

  “Shit, I don’t care. My mom’s got a nose like you wouldn’t believe. She’s probably smelling that all the way downstairs, and she’s gonna come up here fussing. Your dad might let you smoke at your house, but that’s a hippie thing. My mom’s not like that.”

  Sean shrugged, and smoke floated out of his nostrils in two streams, the way Warner Brothers cartoon characters looked when they were supposed to be mad. “He wants me to quit, he just doesn’t hassle me about it. Know what, though? I think I’m hooked on these things.”

  “Yeah, like my dad. He can’t go five minutes without lighting up. But that’s not my problem. You can take your nicotine junkie ass outside and smoke, but you’ve got to put that shit out in here.”

  Sighing, Sean mashed the cigarette out against the sole of his shoe and flicked it out of the window. “Whatever.”

  “You better go find that cigarette later, too. If she finds it first, she’ll be all over me.”

  “You’re really scared of your mean ol’ mom, huh?” Sean said, grinning at him.

  “Fuck you. You don’t have to live here.”

  “I bet you can’t go ten minutes without cussing.”

  “That’s a bet. Five bucks,” Corey said.

  “Make it twenty minutes for ten bucks, then. Starting now.”

  “You’re on. Easy money,” Corey said, and they shook on it. Then, Corey sneezed. After he sneezed, he had to stop himself from sayinggoddamned dusty-ass room . He almost lost the bet, just that fast. Corey picked up one of the old newspapers, a PortlandOregonian, and the headline was from the 1970s, something about Watergate. If he dug to the bottom of the newspaper stack, he’d probably find headlines about everything from the first space flight to the start of World War I. Maybe older stories than that. There must be a hundred years’ worth of junk in the room alone.

  Corey and Sean pushed an old wicker bureau and rickety wooden dining room chairs to one side to begin clearing a path. His mother had told him she wanted to be able to walk through and sort out what to keep, but if it were up to Corey, he’d just hire a crew to bag it all up and haul it to a dump. What was the point of letting it pile up? Dad said being a pack rat was a defense mechanism, a way people tried to hold off death. If that was true, it must have been genetic, because Gramma Marie had it, and Mom was the same way at home. She hardly threw anything away. She had every school paper and holiday card he’d ever written in boxes in her closet somewhere.

  Sean started rattling about the Seahawks and why he thought they were going to have a better season this year, probably better than the Raiders, which was a joke. Corey kept his mouth shut because he knew Sean was only trying to goad him into cursing. He wouldn’t fall for that.

  But Corey lost the bet anyway.

  After he and Sean moved a stack of boxes out of their path, Corey got his first good look at the closet door in back of the room, behind a coatrack draped in fabrics. He sneezed again, but he nearly swallowed it back in surprise. Goose bumps swelled on his arms. He stumbled toward the door, toppling the coatrack as he shoved it out of his way.

  The closet door was painted bright blue.

  “Holyshit,” Corey said.

  Sean let out a triumphant laugh. “Seventeen minutes! Aw, man, you had me going, but I knew you couldn’t last. You’re so pathetic. You owe me ten bucks.”

  Corey ignored Sean, standing before the door as he gazed up and down. The paint looked fresh and vivid, exactly as he’d known it would. His gaze rested on the glass doorknob, and his body felt charged with electricity. “I dream about this door,” Corey said, very softly.

  “If that’s the best you’re doing in your dreams, I feel sorry for you.”

  “No, I’m seri
ous,” Corey said. “Man, it’sthis door. It’s a room with white walls and boxes, and this door is in the back. And there’s a glass doorknob. And in my dream, the doorknob starts to shine like a light.” In his mind, he faintly saw a flash of blue-white light, the light he’d seen in his sleep. Then, nothing. “But I always wake up before I can open it.”

  If Sean had asked him this morning if he’d ever had a dream about a blue door, he would have said no. He hadn’t remembered the dream until now, seeing the door in front of him, and now that he’d seen it, Corey thought it was possible he’d had the dream several times this summer. Maybe every night since he’d been in Sacajawea.

  Corey’s limbs went cold.

  “You look freaked out,” Sean said.