Her Life Is a Borrowed Room in This Open House
Open House by Janis Hubschman
The realtor had let herself into the house on Sunday morning while Frankie slept—overslept, rather—and baked something sweet-smelling. Now she was darting around the kitchen, opening cabinets and banging them closed, while monologuing into her Bluetooth earpiece about escrow or maybe escarole. Frankie only half listened; she lurked in the doorway in her black turtleneck and jeans, damp hair pulled into a low ponytail, saying a silent goodbye to her kitchen, the only room in the one-hundred-year-old farmhouse that reflected her taste. Last year, she’d been forced to renovate after her husband, seventy-four and thirty years her senior, started a fire in the toaster oven. The fruit and rooster wallpaper swapped for a blue-and-white floral, the cherry cabinets for white, the brown Formica countertops for pearly granite. Pleased with the brightened results, she’d replaced all the gold appliances with stainless steel, though it had busted her budget to do so.
“Smells good in here,” Frankie said when the realtor ended her call.
“Toll House cookies!” Suzy said. “Trick of the trade.” In her mid-fifties, blonde and conventionally pretty, Suzy wore a navy pinstriped suit, the jacket cut close to her narrow waist. “Out of all the senses, smell is the most evocative.”
“That’s true. I remember the first time I met my stepdaughters. They were making pies right here. They wore these adorable little—”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a cutting board, would you? I’d hate to scratch this gorgeous countertop.”
Aprons. What was Suzy’s deal? The realtor stood to earn a healthy commission: the least she could do was listen to one measly memory. Frankie crossed to the lower cabinet, slid out the wooden board, and slapped it onto the counter.
“I looked all over for that little rascal,” Suzy said. “Usually, it’s right next to the knife block.” She picked up the knife. “So, what was I saying? Oh, right, sense of smell. I challenge you to find even one person who associates baking smells with something bad.”
She could think of one: someone who was raped in a bakery, but she kept this to herself. She’d repressed quite a few noxious comebacks these past weeks, while submitting to the realtor’s endless instructions for cleaning, painting, staging, and landscaping. At times, she’d felt cornered, even bullied, into going ahead with the sale, despite her growing ambivalence. The timer dinged. Suzy slipped on the blue oven mitt, and smiling tensely, waited for Frankie to step aside.
“We’ll just let these cool a minute.” Suzy slid the baking sheet out from the oven and rested it on the countertop. “Would you like to take this batch to the nursing home?”
“Sure, thanks,” she said, thinking: Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry. “Don’t you want to put them out for the people?”
“Actually, no. I just need the baking smells. The cookies make a mess. Crumbs everywhere—” The doorbell rang, and Suzy looked at the oven clock, her face creased with annoyance. “For goodness’ sake! Early birds?” She looked older and sadder. Like a different person.
Frankie opened the door to her twenty-nine-year-old stepdaughter, Clara, who was dressed like an acrobat in a black V-neck sweater and leggings. She had inherited her German mother’s tall, sturdy frame, fair complexion, and fawn-colored hair, which she wore in a single braid, thick as a fist, down the center of her back.
“Stupid truck’s blocking the driveway,” Clara said, thrusting a take-out coffee at Frankie. Behind her in the October mist, two landscapers planted yellow chrysanthemums along the walkway. “They couldn’t do this last week?” Clara said. “Talk about last minute—” She broke off to sniff the air. “You’re baking?”
“Hello, to you, too.”
“Sorry.” Clara reached around to pat Frankie’s back. “How’re you doing? Is this hard?”
“A little.” She peeled back the plastic coffee lid. “I may be having second thoughts—”
“It’s brighter in here.” Clara moved past Frankie and took in the spacious living room. “I like it. What’d you do?”
“What? Oh—well, this rug’s new, and the linen drapes. What else?” She sipped the scalding coffee and examined the room, her gaze falling on the scratched wood floor, the buckling walls, the chipped newel post. All the flaws that had stopped registering long ago were obvious and intolerable now that strangers would be eyeing them.
“Basically, I de-cluttered,” she said.
“It’s called staging,” Suzy called out from the kitchen.
Clara’s eyes bugged out; she mouthed, “What?”
“Thanks, Suzy!” Frankie shouted. “Forgot the word.” She pressed a finger to her lips and beckoned Clara to follow her to the far corner. “The realtor. I’ll introduce you in a minute. I’m curious to know what you make of her.”
Clara’s judgments were often hasty and harsh. Without evidence, she’d accused the nursing home staff of abuse last week after Frankie mentioned seeing a bruise on Bruce’s arm. Apart from Clara, however, she had no one to ask. After her layoff from the university press the summer before, she worked from home on freelance editing projects and only occasionally met up with her former co-workers. Her book group, formed during Bruce’s Princeton tenure, was slowly unraveling as the older members moved away or lost interest.
At a louder volume, in case Suzy guessed they were talking about her, Frankie said, “I put away those needlepoint pillows, your oma’s. You can have them if you want.”
“Oma Lilly was a straight-up bitch. You should just burn them.”
“Really?” she said, taken aback. “You think Jean would want them?”
“No fucking way.”
“Well, if you’re sure. What about this painting?” She gestured toward the dark oil painting, a forest scene inside an ornate gold frame, hanging over the fireplace. Clara’s mother had brought it from Germany. “Do you want it?”
“No.” Clara hitched her tote strap higher on her shoulder. “Burn that too.”
“You sure?” Clara’s answer surprised Frankie: though her stepdaughter was unsentimental, she had adored her mother. “It’s old, might be worth something,” she tried.
“Then sell it. I don’t want it. Don’t look at me that way, Frankie. That painting gave me nightmares when mom was sick. Ask Jean. I dreamed I was lost in that forest. I mean, I dreamed I was trapped inside the painting.”
“Wish you’d told me. I would’ve taken it down. I hate it, too.” She had made no changes to the décor when she moved in with Bruce and his two daughters sixteen years ago, though the late Annaliese’s somber art and heavy antique furniture had oppressed her. “I don’t want to erase the girls’ mother,” she’d told her new husband. But at twenty-eight, she’d had no decorating preferences; she tried on other people’s opinions and tastes. If she had it to do all over again, she would redecorate every room. Outside, rain lashed the windows. A pale maple leaf pressed against one pane like a small hand. She felt drained, thinking about the long day ahead.
She opened the breakfront drawer, took out a lime-green Game Boy, and handed it to Clara. “The cleaning crew found this behind your dresser.” Frankie remembered how Bruce had nagged thirteen-year-old Clara at the dinner table, in the car, and at bedtime to “put that thing down.” In private, Frankie tried to make him understand: to ease his own grief, he’d had his adoring Princeton students and his bottomless Twain research. And Frankie, the English department administrator, a much younger woman, to satisfy needs that fell well outside her job description.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” Clara handed the Game Boy back to Frankie.
In the heavy downpour, Clara cruised through Sunny Vista’s small parking lot, the car’s wipers on top speed, searching for an open space. Frankie held the Tupperware container on her lap, a Target bag filled with new undershirts and briefs wedged between her feet.
“Are you going to tell Dad about selling the house today?” Clara believed her father should know, but she’d promised not to interfere.
“I’m not sure,” she said, though she was leaning toward never telling him. He’d soon forget everything, including the house. And what if Suzy couldn’t find a buyer, or Frankie changed her mind about selling? She would have upset Bruce for nothing.
Clara began a second loop around the parking lot. Sundays were the busiest at the nursing home, and rain increased the visitors’ numbers. Last Sunday, another washout, a woman in her late fifties with pinched features and overplucked eyebrows had asked Frankie if it bothered her dad that there were so few men at the home. Frankie had been standing over Bruce as he studied the receipt from the grocery bag she’d used to carry his books—Augustine’s Confessions, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Paradise Lost—books he’d requested from his personal library in a moment of increasingly rare lucidity. The titles, she’d hoped, were an ironic acknowledgement of his monthslong confinement, but it was the receipt that claimed his attention while the books sat neglected on the side table.
“He’s not my dad; he’s my husband,” she’d snapped, forcing the woman to stutter an apology and hurry off.
‘He’s not my dad; he’s my husband,’ she’d snapped, forcing the woman to stutter an apology and hurry off.
A reasonable assumption, she thought now. So why had she taken offense? Maybe it wasn’t offense she’d felt. Paradise Lost had been one of the first books Bruce had lent her. They’d discussed the poem for hours and hours. She pried open the Tupperware lid and took out a chocolate chip cookie. Clara thrust out her hand and Frankie placed a cookie on it.
“You wanted my opinion?” Clara said, chewing. “About that realtor, that Suzy Q?”
“Suzy Whitacre. Yes, tell me,” she said, with no expectation of deep insight or revelation; Clara had spoken briefly to Suzy, grilling her about the Princeton real estate market. Clara slammed on the brakes. Taillights had lit up on a white Cadillac parked in the row closest to the building, only fifty yards away. Waiting, Clara brushed crumbs from her lap. “So, this Suzy Q—”
“Suzy Whitacre.”
“Whatever. She looks like a fake person.”
“Fake? As in shallow? Or fake like a replicant?” She half hoped for the latter. Suzy’s studied courtesy, her self-conscious cheerfulness had a Stepford Wife quality.
“Replicant?” Clara made a face of disbelief. “Jesus, I’m not insane.” She pulled into the vacated spot so fast, Frankie feared they’d hit the parked cars. Clara shut off the engine and twisted in her seat, leaning her back against the door and tucking one leg beneath her. “I mean fake like a casting agent’s idea of a cheerful, selfless mom. Was she on one of those Nickelodeon sitcoms Jean and I used to watch? I swear I’ve seen her somewhere.”
“You’re probably thinking about her advertising signs. They’re everywhere.” Frankie had stared at one on her grocery cart last week for five minutes before she’d connected the pretty face with Suzy. She yawned. If only they could pass the afternoon inside the warm Honda, chatting and eating cookies. She preferred visiting Bruce alone. Easier that way to numb out, to practice denial.
“Nope. Not the signs.” Clara reached for her umbrella on the back seat. “I’ll Google it. You’ll see, she’s one of those perfect moms.”
“Perfect mom.” She scoffed. “What an oxymoron.”
“What are you talking about?”
“A contradiction in terms. If you and Jean judged me against those sitcom mothers, well . . . ,” she trailed off, feeling unexpectedly emotional.
“I know what the word means.” Clara met Frankie’s eyes. “Listen, we were practically feral when you showed up. I mean, who leaves an eleven-year-old in charge of a house and her nine-year-old sister? Dad was AWOL for like two years. Believe me, we were thrilled to have you take care of us. No one ever judged you. Okay?” She gave Frankie’s shoulder an awkward pat.
She nodded, grateful. Clara had told her this before. So, why did she need to hear it over and over again?
In the Memory Wing, Clara went on ahead to the solarium where the inmates—her name for the residents—received visitors, while Frankie popped into the staff’s break room. Once or twice a week, she brought the staff bagels, pastries, or donuts. Clara called this her don’t-hurt-my-husband bribes. They’d both seen the viral videos, the orderlies abusing or manhandling the slow or uncooperative residents. In one black-and-white video that Jean, her younger stepdaughter, had sent, an aide slapped an elderly man’s face hard every time he slumped over in his wheelchair. Idiotic to think a raisin bagel would deter a sadist. If Frankie found a second bruise, she would hide a camera in her husband’s room—Jean’s suggestion. Jean, twenty-six, lived in Washington State and played clarinet with the Seattle Symphony. Her husband, Wendell, a software developer, had offered to hook them up with some “sweet” surveillance equipment.
For now, Frankie would rely on trust and kindness, though she couldn’t help thinking that Annaliese, Bruce’s first wife, a mathematician, would have opted for something more rigorous, like an official investigation. She arranged the cookies on a scratched yellow plastic plate. Without attribution, the cookies would be pointless. She took a Bic pen from her pocketbook and scrawled across a brown paper towel: Enjoy! From Frankie Mulroney! She laid the note on top of the cookies, but then picked it up again and scribbled Shay, a name she’d never taken as her own.
Rain drummed the solarium’s glass roof and muffled the visitors’ conversations. She guessed there must be thirty or so people in the room. The air, clammy and close, smelled faintly of ammonia. She spotted Clara hovering behind her father who was seated at the card table across from another man, a stranger to Frankie. Male residents came and went at such a dizzying pace that by the time she learned their names, they were gone from the nursing home and maybe gone from the world. As she drew nearer, Frankie discovered that the two were actually playing cards and betting with cellophane-wrapped hard candies. Her husband’s opponent had a pile of Jolly Ranchers and Starlight peppermints twice the size of Bruce’s. He also had an astounding protuberance, like a small doorknob, on his forehead over his left eye.
“He’s got two pairs,” Clara whispered to Frankie. “Tell him; he won’t listen to me.”
She smiled at her husband’s card partner before bending down to eye level with Bruce. His face brightened when he saw her. The bruise on his forearm had faded, and she saw no new marks. A quick assessment of his silver hair, ruddy skin, and navy wool pullover—all clean, all neat—reassured her. She moved closer for a kiss, and he opened his dry lips. Still enjoyable to kiss him. They hadn’t had sex in two and a half years, but she remembered their physical life with pleasure. Bruce’s unhurried, attentive lovemaking, after all her younger, greedy boyfriends, had been a revelation. She pointed out his pairs. He wriggled his eyebrows playfully and tossed two peppermints into the pot. His partner folded, and Bruce used two hands to sweep the small pile of candy toward himself. The other man stood, filled his pockets, and took off—probably to fleece another, more debilitated resident.
“Does he ever talk, that guy?” Clara dropped into the vacated seat.
“Excuse me, young lady,” Bruce said. “Maybe she’d like to sit.” He had forgotten their names again. He met Frankie’s eyes, a wry smile deepening his long dimples. It was their old way of communicating in the girls’ presence, mutely expressing their affection or frustration with the children.
Clara, looking sheepish, rose from the chair, but Frankie gestured for her to sit. She set down her shopping bag, pocketbook, and empty Tupperware on the card table, and circled behind Bruce to massage his tight neck and shoulders. His lifelong sedentary habits had not changed: tall and lanky, he’d grown a little belly, and his legs were thinner, frailer. He avoided all the chair exercise classes—just as he’d ignored his doctor’s orders to exercise when his health had started to decline at sixty-four. Instead, he’d holed up in his study preparing lectures and burning through weekends writing his second book; he’d flown to conferences during the winter and spring breaks.
Now she wondered if he had been racing the clock—his father had succumbed to Alzheimer’s at seventy—but at the time, she’d fixated on her own resentment and loneliness. That made her an easy mark for Kip Jones, the new faculty hire, a seasoned flirt. When the intense four-month affair ended with Kip’s abrupt departure for another teaching post in Texas, she’d felt limp and empty, a purse turned inside out.
“So, old man,” Clara said, stretching out her long legs. “What’s new?”
“New?” He chuckled. “What do you think? I’m stuck in this . . . this cuckoo’s nest.” He sounded amused and resigned. In recent weeks, he’d stopped pleading to be taken home, which should have been a relief but felt like a betrayal. The old meticulous Bruce with his subtle, logical mind would’ve been—had been—horrified to find himself trapped here.
“What’s new with you?” he asked. “You married yet?”
Frankie’s hands froze on Bruce’s shoulders as she watched her stepdaughter’s grimace soften into a patient smile. “Not until I find a man as wonderful as my father,” Clara said.
He laughed. “Smart girl.” He gave her a thumbs-up. “So, how’s . . . how’s work?” Bruce had always connected with his daughters through their academic careers and later through their professions. Clara was a data analyst in the Rockefeller Foundation’s grant office. Now she told her father about a global commission to end energy poverty.
“Energy poverty,” he repeated, nodding thoughtfully. As Clara elaborated on the project, he continued to repeat the odd word or phrase, an old teaching technique, Frankie suspected, meant to reassure the speaker that he was listening, that her ideas had merit. When Clara reeled off some figures, he twisted in his chair to view the room behind him. Clara raised her voice, as though his hearing was the issue. He pushed back his chair, and Frankie staggered out of the way. She reached out for him, heart racing, when he struggled to a standing position. It was muscle memory from the winter evenings when she’d had to stop him from leaving the house in his pajamas. Once she’d found him teetering at the top of the staircase, his arms loaded with books.
“Do you need the bathroom?” she asked, taking his elbow.
“I need . . . I need . . . .” He looked around with a panicked expression. “Where’d that fella go? The one with the . . . um . . . .” He touched his forehead.
“He’s with his daughter.” Frankie gestured toward the couch where the card shark sat with the woman she’d rebuffed last weekend. She brought her iPhone out from her pocketbook. “I have Jean’s latest recording. The symphony? Come sit, Bruce. Take a listen.”
Clara got up to help lower her father into the chair. Frankie handed him her AirPods; he looked with a bewildered expression at the two white plastic devices resting in his palm. She shot Clara a worried glance before calling out Bruce’s name. He looked up, and she pointed to her ears. He inserted the earbuds one at a time. She found the recording on her playlist. He closed his eyes and settled back in the chair with a contented smile on his still handsome face.
“He seems out of it,” Clara said, frowning down at Bruce. “Usually, he’s like this later in the day. Did they change his meds?”
“They raised the dosage on his antipsychotic; I meant to tell you. He blocked his door with a chair. He thinks someone’s taking his stuff.”
“Maybe something else is scaring him.” Clara patted her father’s shoulder. He grabbed her hand and held it. “Time to set up that camera, Frankie,” she said.
“Okay.” She tugged at her turtleneck; the room was too warm. “I guess you’re right.”
“Of course, I’m right.” Clara unhooked her tote from the chair. “I’ll go talk to the director. If they’re overmedicating Dad to make him easier to handle, I’m raising hell.”
After Clara left, Frankie moved the empty chair closer to Bruce. She took his large hand in hers. No doubt her stepdaughter would get some straight answers. While she admired Clara’s initiative, she sometimes feared her questions and demands would provoke the staff into taking out their resentment on Bruce. On the other hand, Frankie was probably too accommodating, too understanding; after months of managing her husband’s care at home she knew how challenging the job could be. Bruce plucked one earbud from his ear and offered it to her.
The gentle, melancholy strains of a Mozart clarinet adagio loosened the tight knot in her chest, and she breathed more deeply. The rain had become a misty drizzle and a weak light filled the solarium. This moment was as good as it would ever get. She remembered her mother’s warning: “If you marry him, you’ll end up being his caretaker.” Anyone could have predicted that. What Frankie hadn’t anticipated was how much it would hurt her heart to say goodbye to Bruce after every visit. Or the particular pain of imagining one of the night orderlies reacting with indiscretion or unkindness to Bruce’s occasional incontinence. Or how she’d seethe when visitors or staff spoke to her brilliant husband as though he were a child. When Bruce was still begging her to take him home, she’d asked the director about weekend visits, but his doctor had advised against it. Frankie had been secretly relieved, remembering his wakeful nights, his belligerence when confused, and that terrifying fire in their kitchen.
What Frankie hadn’t anticipated was how much it would hurt her heart to say goodbye to Bruce after every visit.
Bruce’s hand loosened its grip on hers. He’d fallen asleep.
Clara returned, looking agitated. Frankie removed the earbud. “Is something wrong?”
“Everything’s fine. Well, not really. Dad was hallucinating. And the medication is helping, but it’s making him sleepier.” She glanced at her father, slumped in his chair, snoring. “I left a message for his doctor to call us.”
“Oh, good. Thank you. Let’s get someone to—” she began, but Clara talked over her.
“The thing is—oh my god, Frankie. I looked her up, that Suzy Whitacre. You are not going to believe what I found.”
In the car, before they left the nursing home parking lot, Clara pulled up the newspaper account on her phone and read it aloud: “On June 15, 2004, in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, Thomas McCrae (42) threatened his wife, Susan Whitacre McCrae (39), with a butcher knife before kidnapping their two-year-old daughter, Tracey. After a weeklong manhunt, authorities found the father and daughter dead in a motel room 281 miles away in Fredonia, New York. Police labeled the deaths a murder-suicide. The child had been suffocated, and Thomas McCrae had slashed his own wrists.”
On the short drive to the Princeton Café, Frankie silently read the newspaper account. She didn’t want it to be true, but when she proposed that the woman in the article wasn’t the same woman baking cookies in her kitchen, Clara shot her a pitying glance. “It all lines up: the dates, the name, your Suzy’s weirdness.”
Once they were seated inside the crowded café, Frankie and Clara forced themselves to read the menu and order lunch. Frankie selected a good bottle of sauvignon blanc. Their quiches grew cold as they both kept putting down their forks to pick up their iPhones. On the realty site, Clara found Suzy’s professional bio, which featured the same headshot that was on all her local ads. A list of her credentials revealed a BA from Rutgers, an MBA from Wharton, and an earlier successful career on Wall Street. “No dates,” Clara pointed out. “Looks like she’s hiding something, doesn’t it? There are dates for her awards though. See?” Clara held out her phone.
Frankie googled the most recent award. The newspaper announcement mentioned that Suzy Whitacre and her real estate lawyer husband, Bradley Clark, had resided in Princeton, New Jersey, for ten years.
“Seems like a miracle she could trust another man.” Clara poured herself a second glass of wine and topped off Frankie’s glass. “Does it say how long she and Clark Kent have been married?”
“It’s Bradley Clark. No, it doesn’t.” She put her phone down and pushed it away. “Let’s talk about something else,” she said. “How are you and Jason doing?”
Clara had moved in with the thirty-eight-year-old, never-been-married orthopedist four months ago. Initially, Frankie had chalked up Clara’s complaints about Jason’s rigidity and brooding silences to the normal adjustment of living with another person. But after a few dinners with the couple, she wondered if they were a bad match. The alteration in Clara’s personality on those occasions had been surprising. Her stepdaughter seemed subdued, her natural frankness and exuberance repressed in Jason’s presence.
Clara blew out her breath. “You know how he was always dropping hints I might be able to change his mind about not wanting kids? Well, he told me he’s made up his mind. No kids.”
Frankie grimaced with sympathy. “I’m afraid you have to take his word for it this time.” She had not taken Bruce’s no-kids decision seriously. In the early days of their relationship, she’d managed to change his mind about so many things, including beach vacations, house cats, and Greek food. Yet, he’d held disappointingly firm on the issue of children. If he had relented, she would be raising a teenager now. Not an easy or affordable thing to do on her own.
Clara pulled her braid over her shoulder and held onto it with both hands. “To tell you the truth, things have been sort of shitty with him. This might be the off-ramp I’ve been looking for.” She tossed her braid behind her. “Hey, did that Clark-Whitacre union produce any offspring?”
Frankie picked up her phone and skimmed the announcement. “Nope. Nothing on the realty site either.” It made sense now why Suzy had cut her off earlier when she’d brought up her stepdaughters. Perhaps, Suzy could not bear to bring another child into the world after her daughter’s murder. Or maybe by the time she’d met Bradley Clark, she had been too old to conceive—another kind of sorrow, one Frankie hoped Clara could avoid.
After they’d ordered dessert, Clara excused herself to go to the restroom. Frankie looked around the crowded restaurant. Most of the tables had big groups of professional people, men and women on their lunch breaks. Suzy had been a stockbroker, which Frankie imagined as a boys’ club. Not an easy field to advance in unless you played the boys’ game. When Clara returned, Frankie wondered aloud whether an affair had been the motive for the murder suicide. “You know Wall Street. Suzy’s an attractive woman, working long hours, entertaining clients—”
“What are you saying?” Clara looked disappointed. “It’s Suzy’s fault her husband killed her kid? Really, Frankie? Check yourself.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but closed it when the chubby young waiter appeared to set down their desserts: chocolate cake for Clara and for her, crème brûlée, which the waiter set aflame with a small propane torch he’d kept tucked beneath his arm. Frankie gasped. Clara clapped her hands. Heads turned at the nearby tables.
“I’m not saying it’s her fault,” she said, after the waiter had moved off, taking some of their dirty dishes and silverware with him. “I just want to know the story behind—”
“You want someone to blame,” Clara said. “It’s not that simple. If Suzy was fooling around, she probably had her reasons. Her husband was clearly unstable. Plus, who knows what their sex life was like.” She scraped her fork through the chocolate frosting on her plate. “People in good marriages don’t have affairs, do they? I mean, yeah, sure, it’s a fucked-up way to deal with marital problems but not as bad as murder.”
Their eyes met for a brief, uncomfortable moment. Bruce may have been oblivious to his wife’s affair, but a teenage girl, roiling with hormones, would’ve been tuned in. Frankie had managed to meet Kip Jones at least four times a week, partly by making sure the household ran smoothly: regular meals, bills paid, clean laundry. If Clara had caught on, she’d kept it to herself. Having lost one mother, she wouldn’t want to risk losing another. What an awful secret to keep, Frankie thought now.
She put down her spoon. The heavy sweetness of the crème brûlée unsettled her stomach. The waiter placed the check folder on the table next to Frankie, correctly assuming that she was the responsible party. She skimmed the charges. Clara offered to pay half, but Frankie pretended not to hear and reached into her pocketbook for her wallet.
“What I want to know,” she said, sliding her credit card into the little plastic holder, “is how you recover from something like that? How do you keep getting up in the morning?”
“You become a realtor, that’s how,” Clara said.
Frankie looked to see if Clara was being sarcastic, but she was serious.
“You take over strangers’ houses,” Clara continued. “You stage the rooms to look like some idealized domestic space. You bake cookies in their pretty kitchens. You borrow someone else’s life for a weekend. You become”—she made air quotes—“the perfect mom.”
Frankie smiled wanly at that impossible phrase. In a sense, she had borrowed Annaliese’s life. She had been a good enough mother to the dead woman’s grieving little girls. She’d done her best through Clara and Jean’s rebellious teenage years. She’d handled it all—meeting with their teachers, meeting their friends, finding them therapists, raiding their bedrooms when necessary. Their stickier offenses, like truancy, sex, and drugs, she’d kept from Bruce, sensing he’d overreact, make things worse for everyone. In those instances, she’d behaved more like an empathetic and responsible older sibling. But it had all worked out. Everyone had survived, including Frankie, who had managed to keep a part of herself separate and safe, like a roped-off room in an otherwise open house.
After lunch, as they walked across the parking lot to the car, she asked Clara how she felt about selling the house. “I should’ve checked with you sooner,” she said. “It’s your childhood home. All those memories.”
Clara didn’t answer until they were both inside, seatbelts fastened. “It’s your decision to make, Frankie. Your future. It’s sad to think about, but he’s not going to get better.”
They drove in silence. The rain had ended, and the streets were busy with cyclists and runners. Frankie asked Clara to drop her off a mile from home. The open house still had an hour to go. Clara pulled over to the curb, and with the car running, she searched the internet for Wi-Fi nanny cameras. Frankie agreed: they couldn’t wait for her son-in-law Wendell’s suggestions. They settled on one model that was disguised as a small phone charger; it would allow them to watch videos, both live and recorded, on their phones or laptops. “Buy two,” Frankie told her. “I’ll pay you back.” Clara sent her a questioning look. “One for the house,” Frankie said.
Frankie walked home, buzzed from the wine. She had the floaty sensation that she was outside her body, watching herself, attentive to what came next. The sky had cleared, and the late afternoon sun lit up the gold and green leaves arching over the street. Everywhere, the thunderous roar of leaf blowers and lawn mowers, the landscapers making up for lost time. The bright air shimmered with leaf dust. Her street, with its older houses, deep landscaped properties, and tall shade trees, had not changed much in sixteen years, though strangers lived in most of these houses now. Only a few people knew her as Bruce’s wife and Clara and Jean’s stepmother. Older people, Bruce’s age, some his Princeton colleagues. She’d see them out strolling with spouses or dogs, and they’d wave to each other like survivors on adjacent life rafts, drifting toward the falls that were, for now, only a faint roar in the distance.
She slowed her pace as she approached her house. The old place had never looked better with its fresh coat of gray paint, new roof, and the yellow chrysanthemums dolloped along the walkway. Suzy’s red Mini Cooper was still parked at the curb, a blue Audi station wagon and a black Lincoln SUV behind it. Through the open front door, Frankie spied shadowy figures moving about her living room. She checked the time on her phone: a half hour to go until the house was hers again.
She sat beneath the old tulip tree at the edge of her property to wait. The ground was uncomfortably hard, bumpy with roots. Dampness seeped through her jeans. Overhead, migrating Canada geese filled the sky with cacophonous honking. She tilted her head back to look through the yellow leaves, and spotted the frayed gray rope dangling from one thick branch—all that remained of the tire swing Bruce had hung years ago, back when Annaliese was alive. How could Frankie have forgotten the swing? Every time she’d visited Bruce, his girls would drag her outside, begging her to push them. Although she was younger then, it had taken all her strength to lift that heavy tire into the sky. That heart-stopping instant when she had to let go. Once, she’d ducked too slowly, or maybe in the wrong direction, and the hurtling tire had landed a glancing blow. Clara and Jean covered her throbbing shoulder with little kisses. Where was Bruce in this memory? Somewhere inside the house—in his study, probably—already receding into the background.
In January, soon after the house had been sold, Frankie put a deposit down on a two-bedroom condo, but the closings were still a month off. She found solace in watching the nanny cam videos. Bruce, alone in his room, listening to music, napping, or serenely gazing out his window. By this time, he was calling her Anneliese and sometimes Doris, his beloved deceased sister’s name. She minded less than she’d expected. On days when Frankie needed cheering up, she’d watch the video of Suzy recorded on the day she’d sold the farmhouse for twenty thousand over the asking price. The realtor entered Frankie’s kitchen like a boxing champ, chin lifted, punching the air with two fists. She plucked one of the wooden spoons from the ceramic holder and spoke into it like a microphone. “I’d like to thank everyone who believed in me,” she said. “My gorgeous husband, Brad, and all the kind, talented people I work with who probably thought I was a hot mess, but gave me a chance anyway—” she broke off, doubled over with laughter. Frankie could watch this video over and over again. It never grew old.