The Invited(23)
Helen thought back to the actual saltbox they’d looked at in New Hampshire at the beginning of their search; that house had sparked something deep inside her, had made her feel instantly at home. It was right in the village, down the street from a charming town green and a Congregational church. She found herself playing the what-if game—What if they were there instead of here? What if she’d found a way to convince Nate to buy that house, to not move to this land on the bog in the middle of nowhere?
Helen squinted down at the plans Nate had worked so hard on for months: the open kitchen and living room, a large pantry beside the kitchen, a woodstove in the center of the house, a half bath downstairs that shared a wall with the mechanical room, where the furnace and water heater would live, along with an eco-friendly low-energy washer and dryer. Upstairs would be the bedroom, the bathroom, and a library with floor-to-ceiling shelves. Later, as time and finances allowed, they’d add a screened-in back porch. “I took everything you loved about that New Hampshire saltbox and just made it even better,” Nate had told her with a proud smile when he brought her his first sketched design.
What she’d loved most was the history of that first house: the smell of the old wood, the creak of cupboard doors and floorboards, the warbly imperfections in the old single-pane windows.
But she looked down now at what Nate had labeled DREAM HOUSE in neat block handwriting, at the carefully rendered plans done to scale: elevation drawings; close-ups of each wall, the roof, and the stairs; detailed illustrations showing how they would frame the floors and ceilings. There were materials lists calculating how many board feet of lumber they needed, how much insulation, how many bundles of shingles. Everything looked so tidy, so perfect on paper: his plan for her happiness laid out in neat columns.
And back in Connecticut, Nate managed to convince Helen that they could do this. He’d read books, watched videos, attended courses. “And you grew up building,” he’d reminded her. “It’s in your genes.”
But none of that had prepared Helen for how unnerved she’d feel at the familiar screech of the powerful saw. Or the way Nate had looked at her when she’d mismeasured. Like she was a goddamned idiot.
“It’ll get easier,” Nate said now, putting his hand over hers and giving it a squeeze. “I’m not saying it’ll be without its challenges, but we’ve just got to follow the plans. Stick together. We can do this.”
Follow the plans, she thought.
She smiled, took another gulp of wine.
She thought of all the times she and her father had dealt with jobs that didn’t go as planned: weather delays, bad batches of lumber, late deliveries, angles that didn’t work no matter how perfect they’d looked on paper. She worried that Nate seemed to live in a world where unpredictable things didn’t happen.
Her eyes moved to the little bundle with the tooth and nail, resting on the kitchen counter beside the sink now, next to the dirty dishes.
Nate rolled up the plans for their dream house.
“Tomorrow will be a better day,” she said.
Say it and make it true.
CHAPTER 6
Olive
MAY 19, 2015
Daddy’s truck was in the driveway. He was home an hour early.
Had the school gotten in touch with him? Told him Olive hadn’t shown up yet again? Had he come home to look for her?
Olive felt panic seeping in, a little dribble at first, then a steady stream as she got closer to the house.
She’d spent the day searching around with her metal detector on the northwest side of the bog. The metal detector was on the fritz—sometimes beeping when there was nothing at all beneath it, sometimes just dying altogether. It was crap, but she’d picked it up for thirty bucks at a church rummage sale last fall, so what did she expect? She was saving her money for a much better one, a hundred times more sensitive and powerful. It even came with headphones. Olive was sure that if she had this, she’d find the treasure in no time. She’d been saving her allowance, doing any odd jobs she could find. She’d even skipped eating school lunch and pocketed the four bucks Daddy gave her each day. And Mike had offered to buy the old crappy one from her for the same price she’d paid for it, which seemed unfair, but he insisted, saying he knew it would be good luck for him because it had been hers and look at all the cool stuff she’d found with it.
During today’s search, from time to time, she’d take a break and go up the hill on a little path to check on Helen and Nate (she knew their names now from hearing them talking, from watching them, but more than knowing their names, she felt she knew them). She’d been watching them from behind the moss-covered root system of a tree that had fallen over—it made the perfect cover. They were trying to frame one of the walls, but things hadn’t ended well—they’d started fighting as soon as things got hard. Olive almost felt sorry for them. Then they’d quit early (after getting into a fight when Helen cut a board too short) and gone down to the bog, which meant Olive’s searching was over for the day. It was time to call it quits anyway, because she wanted to get home before Daddy, get dinner started, and make it look like she’d gone to school and was doing her homework like the good girl he thought she was.
But seeing Daddy’s truck in the driveway wrecked all that.