The Cloisters(43)

We sat in silence for a beat before Margaret said, “Well, I prepared a few things for you in the fridge. But I assume you can fend for yourself. We can get more from the market if you want, but Jack won’t be going into town until tomorrow afternoon.”

“Thank you, Margaret. I don’t think we need anything else.”

“I’ll be off for the night then.” She slipped out of the apron she was wearing and circled back around the island to give Rachel another hug and leave a solicitous hand on my shoulder.

“You know where we are.”

After she was gone, I said, “I thought that was your mother.”

Rachel shook her head. “Margaret. Our caretaker. She’s worked here as long as I can remember. Come on,” she said, getting up from her stool. “I want to show you your room.”

Rachel led me through the front foyer and up an arcing staircase with a heavy pine banister to the second floor. The hallway ceiling was curved and made of the same pine that decorated the rest of the house; it crested overhead, like a wave. Rachel took me as far as the third door to the left and opened it.

“There isn’t anyone else up here except us. There’s a matching staircase and wing of rooms on the west side of the house, too, but they’re only used when there are big parties at the house, or we have a lot of guests.”

I memorized every detail: the way the pine paneling nested together, the way the brass switch plates were polished, the fact there were fresh flowers in every room and most hallways. I’d never stayed anywhere as nice as Rachel’s house at Long Lake, neither a hotel nor someone’s home, and I found myself struck by how casually Rachel moved through a space I was desperate to savor.

Rachel stood inside the room, which had a four-poster bed and a brick fireplace, a bank of windows and a glass door that opened onto a second-story deck. Outside, the area around the house was completely dark except for the sliver of moon, hung low, that lit the lake.

“It’s quiet up here. Not like the Hamptons or Long Island,” she said. “Really quiet. And dark. Intimate. And up here, no one asks any questions about who your parents are or where your house is. The house belonged to my maternal great-great-grandparents,” she said by way of explanation. “Back when no one wanted to go to the Hamptons and everyone came up here. They built it in 1903. My grandfather liked to sail the little boats on the lake. Every year there’s a regatta. It’s named after him: the Henning Summer Regatta.”

I had seen the little boats at the end of the dock when we arrived, their white hulls gleaming in the reflected moonlight as they hung in the boathouse.

“And because of how much my mother loved this place, we always came here, nowhere else, for the summers.”

While it sounded lonely, I was grateful for the solitude, for the space Rachel had been able to put between us and the city. And there, on the bed, were my bags. And inside them, the card, which had made the long journey from downtown to upstate in less than five hours.

At the floatplane center, I had noticed that Rachel had silenced her phone. When she pulled it out, Patrick’s name had flashed across the top of the screen. And in that moment, I was grateful to have Rachel to stand between us, to have her absorb the growing friction between Patrick and me. The length of the day suddenly hit me, and I couldn’t help but look longingly at the bed—its carefully folded quilts and fluffed down pillows.

“I’m right next door,” Rachel said, reading the exhaustion on my face as if it were her own. And then, after she closed the door, I sat on the bed, looking out into the darkness of Long Lake. The big house, silent save for the creaking wood, contracting as it released the heat of the day.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN


For all the time Rachel and I had spent together, we had never been alone, unstructured hours unspooling ahead of us. Every moment had been spent at work on something. We had never gone out to dinner or lunch, as friends do, only grabbed a few cappuccinos, a beer, a stolen sailboat. But all those moments, it turned out, had added up to a friendship. And so, in the kitchen, the next morning, we sat at the counter, drinking our coffees black with our bare feet curled under us.

“In the 1920s the secretary of state used to fly up from Albany for summer weekends. And for a while, my parents lent it to the director of MoMA for the Fourth of July. I think Dorothy Parker may have stayed here once because I found a copy of Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate with her name inscribed inside of it. And in any case, I’ve decided that she was here,” she said, taking a sip of coffee, “for a weekend, or something, and must have left it behind.”

The idea that the house used to be filled with parties and laughter left me with a kind of nostalgia, and I wondered what strange games had been played in the shadow of the Adirondacks. Save for our conversation and the gentle lapping of the lake against the shore that filtered through the windows, the kitchen was quiet. It was easy to imagine what it must have been like with music and people littering the veranda on a cool summer night, music drifting into the hardwoods.

“Have you often brought friends here?” I asked, imagining groups of girls clustered around the counter where we sat, bacon crackling on the stove.

Rachel shook her head. “You’re the first. I haven’t had many girlfriends.”

In that, at least, Rachel and I were the same.