The Dutch House(89)

“We should go then,” my mother said. “Pop in just to see it, say hello.”

“We shouldn’t,” I said.

“Look at the three of us, undone by a house. It’s insane. We’ll go up the driveway, see who’s there. It may be someone else by now.”

“It’s not,” Maeve said.

“It will be good for us,” our mother said, shifting the car into drive. Clearly, she saw this as a spiritual exercise. It meant nothing to her.

“Don’t do this,” Maeve said. There was no tension in her voice, no urgency, as if she understood that this was the way things were going to play out and nothing short of jumping from the car was going to stop it. We were moving forward, forward, forward.

When had our mother left? In the middle of the night? Did she walk outside with her suitcase in the dark? Did she tell our father goodbye? Did she go to our rooms to watch us sleeping?

She drove through the break in the linden trees. The driveway wasn’t as long as I remembered but the house seemed exactly the same: sunlit, flower-decked, gleaming. I had known since my earliest days at Choate that the world was full of bigger houses, grander and more ridiculous houses, but none were so beautiful. There was the familiar crunch of pea gravel beneath the tires, and when she stopped the car in front of the stone steps I could imagine how elated my father must have felt, and how my sister must have wanted to run off in the grass, and how my mother, alone, had stared up at so much glass and wondered what this fantastical museum was doing in the countryside.

My mother exhaled. She took her dark glasses off the top of her head and left them in the console between the seats. “Let’s go see.”

Maeve kept her seatbelt on.

My mother turned around to look at her daughter. “Aren’t you the one who always says the past is in the past and we need to let things go? This is going to be good for us.”

Maeve turned her face away from the house.

“When I worked in the orphanage, people came back all the time. Some of them were as old as me. They’d come in and walk up and down the halls, look in the rooms. They’d talk to the children there. They said it helped them.”

“This isn’t an orphanage,” Maeve said. “We weren’t orphans.”

My mother shook her head, then looked at me. “Are you coming?”

“Ah, no,” I said.

“Go on,” Maeve said.

I looked back but she wouldn’t look at me. “We don’t have to stay for this,” I said to my sister.

“I mean it,” she said. “Go with her. I’ll wait.”

And so I did, because the layers of loyalty that were being tested were too complicated to dissect, and because, I will admit this now, I was curious, like those aging Indian orphans were curious. I wanted to see the past. I got out of the car and stood in front of the Dutch House again, and my mother came and stood beside me. For that moment it was the two of us, me and Elna. I would never have believed it would happen.

As for what was coming, we were not made to wait. By the time we were at the foot of the steps, Andrea was on the other side of the glass door. She was wearing a blue tweed suit with gold buttons, lipstick, low-heeled shoes, like she was on her way to see Lawyer Gooch. When she saw us there she raised her hands and began slapping them hard against the glass, her mouth open in a rounded howl. I’d heard that sound in emergency rooms late at night: a knife pulled out, a child dead.

“That’s Andrea,” I told our mother, just to underscore what a spectacularly bad idea this had been. Our father’s second wife was a tiny woman, either smaller than she once had been or smaller than I remembered, but she pounded the window like a warrior beats a drum. Along with the screaming and the slapping I could hear the sound of her rings, the distinctive crack of metal against glass. We were frozen, the two of us outside and Maeve in the car, waiting for the moment when the whole front of the house would shatter into a million knives and she would come for us like the fury of hell itself.

A heavyset Hispanic woman with a long single braid and the cheerful pastel scrubs of a pediatric nurse moved quickly into the frame and gathered Andrea into her arms, pulling her back. She saw the two of us there in front of the station wagon, tall and thin and similar. My mother, with her short brush of gray hair, deep wrinkles, and drilling gaze of preternatural calm, nodded as if to say, Don’t worry, we will not be advancing, and so the woman opened the door. Clearly it had been her intention to ask who we were, but before she had the chance Andrea shot out like a cat. In a second she had crossed the terrace and came straight to me, at me, as if she meant to go through my chest. The force with which she hit punched the air from my lungs. She buried her face into my shirt, her small arms locking around my waist. She was wailing, her narrow back straining against her grief. In half a second Maeve was out of the car. She took hold of Andrea’s shoulders and was trying to pull her off of me.

“Jesus,” Maeve said. “Andrea, stop this.”

But there was no stopping this. She had locked herself to me like a protester chained to a fence at a demonstration, and I could feel her heartbeat, her ragged breathing. I’d shaken Andrea’s hand that first day she came to the house, and with the exception of brushing past her in the small kitchen or being forcibly crowded together for a Christmas photograph, we’d never touched again, not at the wedding and certainly not at the funeral. I looked down at the top of her head, her blond hair brushed back and caught in a clip at the nape of her neck. I could see the smallest line of white growing in where her hair was parted. I could smell the powder of her perfume.