The Dutch House(74)

“Look,” Maeve said in a whisper.

The light in the master bedroom had come on. The master bedroom faced the front of the house, while Maeve’s room, the better room with the smaller closet, looked over the back gardens. Several minutes later we saw the light in the upstairs hallway, and then the light on the stairs, like the first time Maeve had brought me back when I came home from Choate, but now the whole thing was happening in reverse. In the car, in the dark, we said nothing. Five minutes passed, ten minutes. Then a woman was walking down the driveway in a light-colored coat. While logic would suggest that it could have been a housekeeper or one of the girls, it was clear to both of us even from a distance that it was Andrea. Her hair, pulled back in a ponytail, was a brighter blond in the moonlight. She kept her arms around herself, holding her coat tightly closed, the edge of something pink trailing behind her. We could see some slippers that might have been boots. It looked for all the world like she was coming straight for us.

“She sees us.” Maeve’s voice was low and I put my hand on her wrist on the off chance she was planning to get out of the car.

When Andrea was still a good ten feet from the end of the driveway, she stopped and turned her face to the moon, moving one hand up to hold closed the collar of her coat. She hadn’t stopped for a scarf. She hadn’t expected the early morning dark to be so clear or the moon so full, and she stood there, taking it in. She was twenty years older than I was, or that’s how I remembered it. I was forty-two, Maeve was forty-nine, soon to be fifty. Andrea took a few more steps towards us and Maeve slipped her fingers through mine. She was entirely too close, our stepmother, as close as a person on the other side of the street. I could see both how she had aged and how she was exactly herself: eyes, nose, chin. There was nothing extraordinary about her. She was a woman I had known in my childhood and now did not know at all, a woman who had, for several years, been married to our father. She leaned over, picked up the folded newspaper from the pea gravel, and, tucking it under one arm, turned away, walking into the frost-covered field of the front lawn.

“Where is she going?” Maeve whispered, because for all the world it looked like she was headed towards the hedge that bordered the property to the south. The moon hung on her pale coat, her pale hair, until she passed behind the line of trees and we couldn’t see her anymore. We waited. Andrea didn’t reappear at the front doors.

“Do you think she’s gone around to the back? That doesn’t make any sense. It’s freezing.” It hadn’t occurred to me until now that I was never the one driving when we went to the Dutch House, and that from this vantage point the view was subtly changed.

“Go,” Maeve said.

We stopped at a diner instead of going straight to the train station to pick up her car, and over eggs and toast, the same thing we’d eaten for dinner, broke down Andrea’s trip to get the paper frame by frame. Had she seen something out there we couldn’t see? Were those slippers or boots? Andrea had never gone to get the paper herself. She had never come downstairs in her nightgown, or maybe she had, when none of us were awake. Of course, she would be living in the house alone now. Norma and Bright, whom we always thought of as being so young, must be in their late thirties by now. How long had Andrea been there alone?

Finally, when we had exhausted every fact and supposition, Maeve put her coffee cup down in its saucer. “I’m done,” she said.

The waitress came by and I told her we’d take the check.

Maeve shook her head. She put her hands on the table and looked at me straight, the way our father would tell her to do. “I’m done with Andrea. I’m making a pledge to you right here. I’m done with the house. I’m not going back there anymore.”

“Okay,” I said.

“When she started walking towards the car I thought I was having a heart attack. I felt an actual pain in my chest just seeing her again, and it’s been how many years since she threw us out?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“That’s enough, isn’t it? We don’t need to do this. We can go someplace else. We can park at the arboretum and look at the trees.”

Habit is a funny thing. You might think you understand it, but you can never exactly see what it looks like when you’re doing it. I was thinking about Celeste and all the years she told me how insane it was that Maeve and I parked in front of the house we had lived in as children, and how I thought the problem was that she could never understand.

“You look disappointed,” Maeve said.

“Do I?” I leaned back in the booth. “This isn’t disappointment.” We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it. I was sickened to realize we’d kept it going for so long, not that we had decided to stop.

But I didn’t need to say any of that because Maeve understood it all perfectly. “Just imagine if she’d come to get the paper sooner,” she said. “Say, twenty years ago.”

“We could have had our lives back.”

I paid the check and we got in the car and drove to the parking lot at 30th Street Station. It had been only yesterday that Maeve had come to New York to see May dance. It could be said that by stopping at the Dutch House, and then going to the diner, we had wasted the advantage we’d gained by getting up so early. There wouldn’t be much traffic for Maeve going back to Jenkintown, but I would hit the full force of rush hour driving into the city now. I would do my best to explain it all to Celeste. I’d tell her I was sorry I’d been gone, sorry I was late coming back, and then I would tell her what we had accomplished.