We Are Not Ourselves(73)

Gloria led them up the driveway to a staircase at the back entrance. A patio of moss-covered brick, framed by a stone wall and a terrific amount of growth, resembled an English garden gone to seed. It opened up onto the craggy slope, which contained an enormous stone blanketed by ivy. Atop the hill were houses accessed by another street.

The kitchen looked like it had been despoiled by squatters. Cabinet doors didn’t close right, the wallpaper bubbled, and the brick floor was coated in a thick, dingy skin of polyurethane. Everything on the rear side of the house—the kitchen, the den, the dining room—was dark as a catacomb, but she could tell that light would penetrate its depths on a good day, particularly if she trimmed some of the bushes, and while the dining room had a matted rug and a rickety-looking chandelier, she could envision the grand meals she’d serve there, and the living room was practically bleached by light. Next to it was the brick-floored foyer and the entrance proper, and a flight of banistered stairs leading to the second floor. Off the landing at the bottom of the stairs was a little flight down into what could be a reading room, next to what would be Ed’s study, with a bay window and built-in bookshelves.

Gloria went to the two front doors and threw them open with a flourish. Light flooded in. Looking left from the front porch, which was fringed by a rotting wooden fence, Eileen could see where the road curved and headed down to Palmer Road, the main artery into the town that lent this house its respectable mailing address.

Eileen stood on the porch, imagining people opening the big metal gate at the bottom and making their way up the gently winding path. The thought of their approach thrilled her, the moments of anticipation, the embraces, the handing off of wine bottles, cakes, presents. And then she turned and saw Connell looking out the window in the living room, an ethereal light flooding against him, so that he resembled a figure in one of those portrait paintings of the children of nobility from centuries past. These days and years would act as a crucible in which his fate was distilled. The closing down of possibilities had begun, almost imperceptibly. She had to act quickly to preserve her image of the life she imagined, in which Ed toiled happily in his study, turning over ideas until they yielded fresh hypotheses, and she was a grand hostess and the matriarch of a respected clan. This house would be the backdrop to the second act of their lives together. It was Connell’s contemplative gaze that gave her that assurance.

“What do you think?” Gloria asked rhetorically as she drifted into the room. She was a maestro of timing: there was no need to respond. She led them up the stairs like a groom guiding his bride to the bower.

“I’ll show you the other bedrooms first,” she said, “and then the master suite.”

She led them to a room so massive it could have swallowed Connell’s current bedroom whole, along with the spare, with room left over.

“This could be your bedroom,” Eileen said.

“Sweet!” He darted into the room and walked its perimeter like a cat marking its territory. He opened and closed the closet doors and then lay in the center of the room and stretched his arms and legs as far as he could. She laughed out loud at his exuberance.

“Come on,” she said. “Get up now.”

“It’s okay,” Gloria said. “He can be excited.”

“You could land a plane in here,” he said.

“Maybe a helicopter,” Gloria allowed.

“There’s no doubt it’s a big enough house,” Eileen said cautiously. How “slightly” out of her price range was this house? This might be another tease, only this time she wouldn’t have done it to herself.

“You haven’t even seen the master bedroom.”

“I’m a little worried about the price.”

“You’re prepared to spend four hundred thousand,” Gloria said. “Five at the most.”

“The uppermost,” Eileen said.

They were in the hallway now, their voices low.

“This house is five sixty.”

“That’s a big difference.” Eileen tried to hide the panic and disappointment that had already set in.

“Not when you think about the fact that when it’s fixed up, it’s a three-quarter-of-a-million-dollar house. Minimum. Minimum.” Gloria spoke coolly, a little impatiently, as if they were discussing an artwork she didn’t want to sully with considerations of money. “There are some catches, though.”

“Catches,” Eileen said.

“Not necessarily deal breakers. How handy is your husband?”

She thought of Ed at home in the garage, tools strewn around him in a blast-radius circle, trying to make the house presentable enough to entice her to stay in it. Everything he knew about home improvement he’d learned from how-to books. Whenever he made a study of something, though, he could do it at least passably well. “If I can earn a PhD,” he’d said when they’d had a short in the hallway light, “I can figure out how to fix some faulty wiring.” And he had. The handiness came at the expense of great effort. Doing a big project around the house always left him exhausted.

“He’s pretty handy,” she said. “Why?”

“This house was on the market for over a year, then taken off and relisted. They just dropped the price.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s suffered some water damage. It’s a twofold problem. It’s at the bottom of a hill, so there’s always runoff. And it’s built on a rock, with a rock behind it, so everything just flows into it. On top of that, the pipes burst this winter. There’s a lot of damage in the basement. A lot of it needs to be ripped out and rebuilt. Plus there’s no guarantee the water won’t come back. You’re going to need a new roof in a couple of years. It’s an expensive proposition to fix this place, but it’s a steal if you can do any of the work yourself.”