“Oh, Fi, thank you,” said Caroline. We were on the phone, Caroline in Austin, me in my apartment in Queens that I shared with Jenji and Beth, two friends from Vassar and a third, Umani, we’d found on Craigslist. I was twenty-seven years old and worked as an editorial assistant at an environmental NGO called ClimateSenseNow! My job sounded good at dinner parties, but it required little more than correcting the maddening typos of my boss, Homer Goshen, Ph.D., and writing the occasional high-minded press release. Because of this, and because I was paid less per hour than an adolescent babysitter, I felt justified in taking regular sick days. Inexplicably, Homer allowed it. Hope that ankle heals up, he’d say over the phone, or That must be a nasty bug. A guilty pang always followed these calls, but rarely was it strong enough to make me go to work.
“The Goats are useless,” Caroline continued. “No one can come, even for a few hours. They’re all so busy getting married or finishing their dissertations or whatever. Emily showed at New York Fashion Week, did Noni tell you?”
Emily was Nathan’s second sister, a recent graduate of FIT, prone to wearing foodstuff as clothing.
“She hasn’t mentioned it,” I said, although of course Noni had. “It’s hard to keep up with the achievements of those Duffys.” In the background I heard one of the twins singing a nonsense song and Louis calling, “Mom, where’s my oboe?”
“I’m glad you’re moving back east, Caroline,” I said.
“God, so am I.” There was a muffled pause as she spoke to Louis, and then she returned. “And, Fiona,” she said, “we need to talk about Joe.”
“Sure.” I was hungover, eating potato chips out of the bag, and I paused to lick salt from my fingers. “Joe, sure,” I said, and then we spoke a bit longer about flight arrivals and train times, and then I hung up the phone.
I didn’t think much about why Caroline had mentioned our brother. It was one week before Joe’s engagement party, and I assumed she wanted to discuss the wedding. He was set to marry Sandrine Cahill, a popcorn blonde who worked as an accessories buyer at Barneys. Sandrine grew up outside Chicago, the only child of an industrious midwestern family that presided over the manufacture of something ubiquitous but boring, like computer paper or parts of a car. Sandrine was not objectionable in any obvious way. She came from sensible money, and she worked hard to build on it, yet there was something ruthless in her pursuit of the good life. New York did that, I think, to some people. Sandrine wanted prestige and fancy things. She wanted recognition, and she wanted you to know exactly what she possessed: a front-row seat at Marc Jacobs, perfect abdominals, a position in the Junior League, a dinner reservation at Nobu. I couldn’t stand her, nor could Renee, but Caroline the eternal optimist insisted we were being unfair. Surprisingly, Noni tolerated her, too. I think our mother secretly admired Sandrine, even after the engagement fell apart, for her collection of achievements. I couldn’t help but feel Noni’s comparison and judgment: If only Fiona were such a go-getter! Think what she might accomplish.
On Tuesday morning I took the train from Grand Central Station through the city bustle and vacant lots and gray, low urban sprawl, out past the suburbs proper, and into the wider expanses of green until we reached the small middle- and working-class towns like Danbury and Woodbury and Hamden.
Caroline, in a red coat, waved at me from the platform. “You’re so skinny,” she said as we hugged, and it was neither a compliment nor a complaint. I’d lost another twenty pounds since she’d seen me last Christmas. It was now October.
“Just wait until you see the house,” Caroline said. “It looks exactly like a castle. I think this will be it. Our forever home!” She winked. The forever home had been her black swan for years now. After the third move, from Mississippi to Ohio, Caroline began talking about the forever home the way first-graders talked about the tooth fairy. Could it possibly exist? Would she ever see it?
We drove alongside the Metro-North train tracks and rows of beaten-down bungalows, through Hamden’s low-lying downtown, then past the green college quad and sports fields and into the residential neighborhood where professors lived in rambling old homes with poster boards of KERRY-EDWARDS ’04 perched on every lawn. Caroline accelerated and slowed as she squinted at house numbers. It was late morning, sunny and crisp, trees capped with bright orange leaves. Hamden reminded me so much of Bexley: the same splintery homes, pavement surging with tree roots, the same pumpkins with the same toothy faces. Along the sidewalk, a girl kicked sullenly at leaves, her body thick beneath a pink parka, her legs stout and round as logs. As we passed her in the car, I felt an ache not of nostalgia or grief but something in between the two.
“Here it is,” Caroline said at last, and pulled in to a short, gravelly drive.
The front yard of Caroline’s forever home was covered with damp, unraked leaves and flanked by a row of overgrown shrubs. A fallen tree branch long as the car. A side bed of brittle, brown daisies. A white plastic bag stuck on a bush that flapped in the breeze. Caroline’s eyes swept over the mess, but she didn’t comment on it, just tilted her head back to take stock.
The house was a pale lavender with yellow trim, the paint faded and flaking. Green clumps of moss clung to the steeply pitched roof, and the front steps were grayed and sagging with age. But the place was large, a true Victorian, with tall windows, gabled molding, and, best of all, a rounded towerlike structure with its own pointed roof rising from the second story.
“It’s just like a castle,” Caroline said, turning to me, eager as a puppy for affirmation. It was a look I’d never seen before. I was so young when Caroline left Bexley, and then she’d always lived so far away. And all those blond, clever Goats took possession of Caroline in a way that I understood and resented only years later. They helped her through pregnancies and childbirths. They advised on what kind of minivan to buy, would Montessori be a good fit for Louis, do the twins really need that DTaP vaccine? She let herself be folded into the Duffys, and who could blame her? Two bright, chirpy parents, cousins and family football games at Thanksgiving. The Skinners were too few and too complicated to compete with all that photogenic togetherness.
But now here she was. Her hair hung lank from airplane air, her red coat was too thin for this chilly day. She’d arrived into JFK at five fifteen that morning, traveling all this way for a house she’d seen only in photographs.
“You’re right, Caroline,” I said, and smiled. “A castle.”
We opened the front door and stepped into a damp and penetrating cold. I shivered. We stood at the foot of a wide staircase that led up into darkness. To our left, the large living room was bare, with a sooty fireplace on the far wall that gaped dark and menacing as a wound. There was dust everywhere and a dry brown substance crusting the shadowy corners of the room. The place smelled of mold and something else. Something closed-in, musty, animal.
Caroline dropped the bag of cleaning supplies to the floor.
“I think we might need some help,” I said. “What about Renee or Joe?”
“Renee’s taking on extra ER shifts,” Caroline answered in a monotone. “As if the surgical fellowship isn’t enough. And Joe … I don’t know. I didn’t ask him.” The last she said vaguely, walking away from me into the dim interior of the house.
We went room to room, the only sound our dull footsteps and Caroline’s occasional sharp intake of breath as another mess or sign of age came into view. In the kitchen there was a squat white refrigerator with a long silver handle and a walk-in pantry, its shelves lined with scraps of greasy paper, smelling of old bacon and ammonia. In the hall we found one half bath with an unspeakable toilet. In the dining room, cobwebs intricate as chandeliers hung from the ceiling.
We finished our circle and arrived back in the living room.
“Caroline, can the college find you another house?” I asked gently. The kids and Nathan were set to arrive from Austin in two days.
“Oh, no, this is the only one,” she