Page 38
“Then my job is even easier. Lucas. Go.”
Luke drinks the espresso. All of it, in one go, which is his version of signing something.
“I’ll talk to Rodriguez,” he says.
We leave Friday at 14:00 to beat the traffic, which means we sit in the traffic with a head start.
We take Luke’s car – a grey Ford Escape, nine years old, paid off, maintained like a surgical instrument. It’s called an Escape, which today I read as instructions. Luke drives; he watched me merge onto the BQE once and said, “Never again.” The city thins out. Neither of us puts on music. The quiet is the comfortable kind – and at the first red light his hand finds my knee out of habit and stays. First easy silence in three weeks.
Somewhere past Manorville, the pines barrens take over, and I feel it start to happen – the thing that always happens on this road. The relaxing. I spent every summer of my childhood on this drive, in the back of a sequence of increasingly ridiculous cars, next to Max and his printed out travel itineraries and Mapquest directions, and no matter what the school year had been – and some of them were bad, in the well-catered way my childhood was bad – this road meant it was over. The tie came off somewhere around Exit 70. My mother almost always stayed in the city.
For me, the house at the end of this road is where my father taught me to swim, holding me flat on the surface of the ocean and bellowing encouragement that could be heard from the village. It’s where Max – thirteen years older, already in medical school, with no obligation on earth to spend a Saturday in the dirt with his kid brother – helped me bury a time capsule the summer I was eight. He surveyed the site. He drew a map with coordinates. We never found it again, which he considers both a personal affront and a cold case, and which took me years to recognise it for what it was. He didn’t dig because he believed in time capsules. He dug because I asked him to. It’s where the worst thing that ever happened to me was a second-degree sunburn in the summer I was nine, which father treated as a medical crisis requiring a specialist.
Luke grew up eight minutes from a hospital he now works at and it took a Bic pen and years of night shifts to get him there, and I grew up in a house where the greatest recorded injury is a sunburn, and I’m taking him there on purpose.
The gates come up on the left just before 17:00 – stone posts, the hedge, the sign with the manor’s name I’m not going to say out loud first, he’ll find it himself later and I’d rather not be in the car when he does. The gravel crunches under the tires. Through the trees, the light is golden and sideways, and the house comes up out of the lawn the way it always has, cedar and white trim and far too many windows, and every muscle in my body reads it as one word, and the word is home.
Luke leans forward over the wheel to see the top of it.
“Preston,” he says. “The house has a separate wing.”
“Two, technically.”
“The house has wings,” he repeats, filing it.
The car stops on the gravel.
“You grew up here,” Luke says.
“Summers,” I say. “June through Labour Day.”
He looks at the house a moment longer. Then he shakes his head once – not the hard way, the wondering way – and something in my chest unknots. Three weeks ago that head-shake would’ve had a ledger behind it. Today it doesn’t.
“Two days,” I remind him. “Just us.”
“Just us,” Luke says. He looks at me when he says it, and we both hear the thing neither of us adds. The conversation rode out here with us – in the trunk, under the luggage. It can wait until we’re ready. That’s the point of the weekend.
He squeezes my hand once and gets out of the car. He gets the bags. At the door he stops and looks up at the cedar shingles going bronze in the light.
“If I get sunburned,” he says, “I’m suing Alistair.”
“Noted,” I reply.
Chapter 8
The Visitors
LUKE
The house has nine bathrooms. I counted. Preston doesn’t know the number, which tells you everything about both of us.
He gives me the tour Friday night with the lights low and his voice doing the thing it does when he’s nervous and pretending not to be – too many facts, delivered too casually. This is the study, this is the other study, this is the room his mother called the morning room because apparently rooms out here have shifts. I follow with my hands in my pockets and catalogue it the way I’d catalogue any new unit: exits, capacity, supply lines. Eight bedrooms. Two kitchens, one of which exists, as far as I can tell, to keep the other one company. A laundry chute Preston used to send Max’s textbooks down, an offence Max hasn’t forgiven to this day.
“And this,” Preston says, opening a door at the bottom of a stone staircase, “is the wine cellar.”
I stand in it. The famous cellar. It’s cool and quiet and runs the length of the kitchen above, racked floor to ceiling, and before I met Preston and became an extension of the York family, I’d have stood here doing division – bottles into rent. I wait for the math to start.
It doesn’t. It’s just a room. A good room, kept at fourteen degrees by a man in Costa Rica who hasn’t lived here in years and still pays to keep the temperature of his liquid memories stable.
