Back then, I was headed down, down, down, away from Ashby House, away from the McTavishes, away from memories that I couldn’t bear to recall. I remember turning up the radio so loud that it made my back teeth ache, the drums and the bass crashing through my brain, the kind of noise that would have made Ruby say, “Turn that down, for goodness’ sake, Camden! I can’t hear myself think!”
That’s what I was going for, a sound so loud that thoughts were impossible.
But it turns out there are some thoughts that no amount of noise can silence, and I’d made that drive down the mountain with nausea coiled in my stomach and my face wet with tears.
I swore I’d never go back.
So it feels slightly unreal to make that last turn, that place where the asphalt becomes dirt for just a few yards, pitted with holes, thick tree roots bumping us along hard enough that Jules grabs what she calls the “Oh Shit Handle” above her head.
Nelle wanted to pave this part of the road, but Ruby said that would make it too easy for people to come and gawk at the gates of the house. I always thought she overestimated just how much people wanted to see a random chimney or the hint of a window, but there had been several times I’d driven out of those gates as a teenager to see a family in a rented Subaru pulled over on the side of the road near the gate, phones in hand, standing up on their tiptoes in bright white sneakers as they strained to catch a glimpse.
Personally, I couldn’t give a shit if tourists came to look—isn’t that why people build places like this, anyway?—but I agreed with Ruby that we shouldn’t make the road smooth. Let all these bumps and jostles and the fear of a blown tire serve as a warning of what they’d find at the top of this mountain.
A haunted house where the ghosts hadn’t had the courtesy to die yet.
I clench my teeth.
This is why I didn’t want to come back here. I don’t think shit like that in Colorado. There, I’m mostly focused on work, on things I need to do around the house, on Jules. I like that version of myself—a normal guy, with a normal life––and I had started to believe that, maybe, that’s who I was now.
But apparently not. Put me on the road to Ashby, and I’m that Cam again. Ruby’s project, heir to the McTavish estate, the “Luckiest Boy in North Carolina.”
That was a real thing someone wrote about me. It was for some magazine profile Ruby did when I was twelve. I remember the photographers coming to the house, the scratchy suit Ruby made me wear. The photographer took a picture of me in my bedroom, a massive suite on the west side of the house that had gorgeous sunset views, but was decorated like it belonged to one of the Golden Girls. All chintz and florals, a big canopy bed （every twelve-year-old boy’s dream, a canopy bed）。
They had me sit in the middle of that massive bed, wearing my suit and bow tie, holding a basketball in my lap. I didn’t even play, but North Carolina is basketball country, and I guess they thought it would make me look more like a regular kid.
I looked like a fucking ventriloquist’s dummy who’d come to life in an assisted-living facility. No basketball was going to undo that.
But I smiled and let them take the picture because that’s what Ruby wanted and later, when the magazine arrived at the house, I flipped through it, mostly to see how bad the picture was. I needed to brace myself for the merciless mocking I was no doubt about to endure in school once the issue hit Tavistock mailboxes.
The picture was as terrible as I thought it would be, but what I hadn’t been prepared for was the caption.
Camden Andrew McTavish: The Luckiest Boy in North Carolina.
Even then, I’d known what bullshit that was. But I also got it, I guess. I’d been an orphan, in and out of the foster system since birth. A multimillionaire plucking me out of poverty, installing me in her palatial home, making me heir to her fortune?
Yeah, I see where that sounds pretty fucking lucky.
If you didn’t know Ruby.
The dirt track turns into gravel, and my heart beats faster. This is it, the last approach to the gates. The trees on each side nearly block out the sun now, their limbs arching and meeting overhead. It always made me feel like I was being slowly swallowed by something as I drove up this road. Everything gets darker, tighter, funneling you in.
I glance over at Jules, wondering if she senses the same claustrophobic air settling in, but she’s sitting up in her seat, her sunglasses shoved up on her head, her eyes taking everything in.
She’s smiling a little, hands clasped on her lap, and I try to see this place through her gaze.