I stand there, wanting. Wanting, wanting, wanting in a way that’s both pointed and vague. Wanting the life I destroyed, and not wanting it at the same time. Wanting one more day in the before times, wanting to yell at my father, wanting—
Well, wine, mainly.
Rubbing my tongue over my teeth, I turn and start going through the cupboards, looking for something. Anything to ease this hunger for the thing I can’t have. Riffling through the pantry I poke through jars of rice, pasta, odds and ends that only a serious cook would bother with, preserved lemons and black cardamom and tinned tiny fish.
Where the fuck is the candy?
Finally, I find a Christmas tin, stuffed away forgotten in the back, and pop the lid off. Mother lode! Butterscotches and peppermints twisted into cellophane, some chocolates that have gone pale on the edges with age, an unopened bag of ribbon candy, and another of the old-fashioned hard candies that look like they’ve been sliced. I carry the whole big metal box out to the kitchen and pour it on the counter, spin open a butterscotch, and greedily pop it into my mouth.
Oh. Yeah.
The outside has that slight stickiness of age, but the sugar washes through my mouth, down my throat, hits my pleasure centers, and immediately some of the anxiety slides out of my body. Sucking on it happily, I turn the bags over to check the expiration dates: 6-3-17.
The chocolates are dead, then. I toss them in the trash. The rest are hard candies and should still be okay. At least until I can get something else in here.
Somewhere behind me or below me comes a sound. A soft thud and then something I can’t quite identify—a little animal noise, maybe. I pause to listen, the hair on the back of my neck rising.
When I was a kid, I thought this place was haunted. It has so many alcoves and arches and rooms all opening one into another, the kitchen to the dining room to the salon to the patio to the living room to the stairs, that you could almost imagine a shadow running ahead of you into the next room. It was the biggest house I’d ever walked into, never mind lived in. When my mother died, we were living in a one bedroom with a galley kitchen, which would have all fit right into the salon.
When I listen, nothing more comes, and my greed overcomes my fear of walking spirits. I pick out another handful of candies to try—a long wavy piece of red ribbon candy, a bunch of the little slices, more butterscotches, which I stuff in the pockets of my pj’s.
Another noise alerts me—this time more of a creak. I frown, listening hard, not chewing so I can hear, but it doesn’t come again. Is it the puppy?
No. Coming from another direction. Probably the old house settling.
Or my dad, hanging around. “Don’t even think about it, Dad,” I say. “I still won’t talk to you.”
The room is silent. With my pockets stuffed full of candy, I head through the patio doors to the pool area. Outside, the sky is clear and starry, the edges washed out at either end by light, but in the middle is a host of stars. I think of the desert, shockingly filled with stars, so many it’s hard not to get dizzy. As a city girl, I almost fell over the first time I saw the stars over the desert.
Out here the air is warmer than the house. I sit by the pool and look through a window cut in the shrubbery for this purpose. Popping hard candies in my mouth as often as necessary, I stay with my feet and look at the sky. For the moment, all is well.
It won’t last, but right now I’m okay.
Chapter Eight
Meadow
After dinner, Maya goes upstairs and I wander out onto the balcony of the guest room. She decided on the main bedroom, which was appropriate, but it makes me feel a little lost, too. Lost again, maybe. I pride myself on being a survivor, but the well of sorrow over Augustus, then and now, seems almost insurmountable. That’s the thing about grief. It spirals up and up and up, revisiting us again and again, reaching out with electrified tentacles to sting us when we least expect it.
I look out over the swimming pool to the constant waves. The noise of the ocean will drive me crazy overnight, rolling and rolling and rolling. Some people love it, but the endlessness of it, the knowing it will never stop, makes me restless. Only the house, settling in like a grandfather made of stone, calms me; only being inside the rooms I know so intimately eases me.
Perhaps I want to be with another version of myself, the me who learned to love the sound of the ocean as I slept next to my husband. Augustus bought the house with the first big money he earned, snapping it up thanks to a customer in the real estate business. He couldn’t live here, and had no time to clear it out that first year. It was in bad shape when we first toured it, packed to the ceilings in some rooms with paper and books and scripts and things nobody wanted to examine too closely, the kitchen both brilliant with all the tile and alcoves and horrendous with neglect. The pool had been empty for decades, the living room so dusty it was clear no one had entered the room in just as long.