The End of the Day Read online

  On the lawn? Are you sure it’s ok? Philip asks nervously, as if he, too, knew the wrath of Edgeweather’s former, now long-dead, caretaker.

  Yes, she says plainly, trying to stifle her need to use the bathroom by focusing on the house as Philip steers the car onto the grass. From this angle, parts of the house match her memory—the six preposterously large white columns still evoking the Antebellum South; the slate roof the same high cold lid it always was—but the effect is altogether different, less convincing. Mainly, she has the impression, which she’d never had before, that the house does not belong where it is. That it’s no longer in harmony with the woods, river, and hills around it, and as a result appears less inevitable. And it was that inevitability, its hulking permanence—seeming to have forever been right where it was—which had always been its power.

  Late morning sun flames every window it faces. At first the light animates the house with what looks like life, an amused shimmer that could almost be mistaken for a warm welcome. But Dana knows that even before the sun inches past three o’clock and begins to hide behind the hills, the friendly glow will vanish and the house will return to its most enduring air: indifference.

  Dana gets out of the car and walks several tentative steps toward the river. Unlike the house, which seems altogether less than she remembered, the river appears wider and more robust. She closes her eyes and listens to the sound of rushing water. She imagines where it goes after it passes Edgeweather, along Undermountain Road, down past Cornwall and Kent toward one of those terrible lakes choked with vacation houses and motorboats. How she knows about these lakes she cannot remember, but she shakes the vision of oil-slicked water and sunburned families and opens her eyes.

  She walks to the rocky edge of the lawn where there had once been a small beach made from bags of sand Dana’s mother had Joe haul from a delivery truck parked in the driveway. The beach is long gone and in its place a chaos of river rubble—sticks and beer cans, a sun-bleached grocery store circular, half-buried rocks. She and Jackie spent so many evenings here, obsessively curating collections of river stones, sorting them by color and shape, pretending they were rare jewels from a fairy’s treasure. They’d embellished an old story Dana’s grandmother had liked to tell them about an enchanted family who lived in the woods called the Knees who’d cast a spell that disguised their jewels as stones and hid them in the river for safekeeping. Dana cannot remember the origins of the treasure, nor how it had come to the Knees for protection. Neither can she remember what had happened to all those stones—if they’d stored them each year between summers or thrown them back into the river—only that she and Jackie had been committed to the project and it went on for years.

  A smooth fist-sized rock bisected by a dull vein of quartz lies at her feet and she stoops to pick it up. It fits her palm perfectly, chilling her hand as she folds her fingers around its dark gray surface. She imagines her old friend stubbornly hiding behind her metal blinds. She wonders if she’s opened her front door yet, discovered what she’d left there.

  Dana squeezes the rock in her hand. It feels good to hold something sturdy and real and from the natural world. With her free hand she rubs a spot of dirt from the quartz vein but it still does not shine. The failed effort makes her both long for and pity the two girls who used to toil at the river’s edge and make up stories about fairies and enchanted treasure. She turns back to the house, looks up at the wide pediment atop the columns. Here, on the third floor of the house, is where she and Jackie spent the most time. It was what Jackie referred to as the “normal” part of the house, because the floors were covered in simple carpets and decorated with soft couches and chairs with modern fabrics. The white-carpeted, periwinkle-curtained room they’d decorated and then slept in most Saturday nights looked like one they might see on a television show set in a middle-class suburb. There were no delicate antiques to tiptoe around as there were on the first two floors, including in Dana’s bedroom which had a canopy bed that her mother claimed had been the bed of George Washington’s daughter. Who died of epilepsy, her grandmother liked to add. Dana’s parents never went up to the normal part of the house.

  Dana eyes the crescent window above the middle column. A memory of being shoved hard against the glass there begins to surface, but before she allows herself to remember more she notices tiny bits of dead vine still clinging to the painted wood beneath the window sash. And then, finally, she sees what is not there. The ivy. The entire house had been stripped clean of its old garment, vines and leaves that once swarmed the gutters and windows, frocked the brick with green in summer and red in fall. How had she not noticed right away?

  Of course it looked out of place. Of course it seemed less sure of itself. It’s naked!, she blurts out loudly and pictures an old Park Avenue matron stripped, hosed down, and sent into The Colony Club at tea time. Dana looks more closely at the house and sees many of the bricks are cracked and loose, chunks of mortar fallen to the lawn. She starts to laugh. The sound she makes is triumphant, cruel. She sees the house but at the same time she sees her mother without hair or jewelry or makeup. A vain woman without armor, three stories high. More than two hundred years old, powerless to hide her age or obscure her wrinkles, all the old tricks taken away or no longer effective.

  She is breathless, cackling, and it feels exactly right. She has come back for the first time in more than thirty years to stand before this house that is hers but not home—all the brick and glass and wood that a smitten rich kid could assemble in the middle of the nineteenth century—and with the same contempt it had shown everyone who had ever looked at it, she laughs, with such abandon and force that Philip approaches to see if she is all right. She waves him off without being able to make words but catches his eye and points to the house as if its disgrace were obvious. Look, she finally manages, and when he gazes on the place with palpable awe she turns her back on him. His reverence momentarily breaks the spell and she begins to breathe normally. She crosses the lawn and climbs the steps to the long wide terrace behind the columns. In the summers when she was young, there had been white canvas awnings that stretched over wicker sofas and chairs covered with green cushions and arranged around glass-topped tables set with fresh cut flowers. Now there is nothing but paint peeling from the moldings, the columns, and the steps. She sees a thick curl jutting out from the center left column and, slowly, she pulls the long sheet back and down until it reaches the column’s base. She yanks it free and drops it at her feet. She thinks of Joe Lopez again, almost wishes he was still alive to see how Edgeweather had decayed on her watch.

  She stifles a wicked giggle as she steps off the terrace and heads toward the side of the house furthest away from the car. She rounds the last column where a library had been added in the 1920s. It was built in the same late Georgian style of the main house and invisible on the approach from the road, but Dana’s mother always thought it looked ridiculous. Her complaint was that its proportions were wrong, suburban was her exact word.

  It is here, in the middle of the short glass hallway that connects the house to the library, where she sees the paint. Red letters, outlined in black, covering dozens of small glass panes and the white wood that frames them. The paint streaks beyond the glass windows onto the old brick where the hallway meets the house. Dana stops walking. She remembers her mother in the hospital during her last weeks, Maria Lopez painting her nails with red polish that looked garish against the white sheets and bedclothes, the top of the heart monitor lined with tubes of lipstick and powder. It was a scene so ghoulish and macabre, so far from resembling any recollection involving her mother in her prime, it had, to Maria’s horror, caused Dana to laugh. She is laughing now, though not from the memory of her mother, but in response to the riot of spray-painted profanity. From the other side of the house it sounds like choking and Philip comes running.

  When Dana sees him appear, she doubles over with what began as laughter but devolves to a soundless panting. She gestures at the vandalism be
hind her. But Philip does not look where she points, and it is not the graffiti that spells “ASSHOLES” that is responsible for the alarmed look on his face.

  Ma’am… I…

  Yet again he is spoiling her fun, but she cannot quite form the words to ask what is wrong. Dana follows his gaze which returns reluctantly somewhere in front of and below her. When she sees what is there she stops laughing. The entire crotch and front of her brown suede pants are dark, soaked through with the reason she had left Jackie’s driveway. In the abrupt vertigo of shock and embarrassment, she stumbles backward, her left heel lands hard on the toe-end of her right boot and in steadying herself she completely loses the thread of where she is, what is happening, who is standing in front of her. Overwhelmed, she squeezes her eyes shut, crosses her arms against her chest, and stands very still.

  After a minute, Dana looks up and sees Philip, the shiny black car parked in the grass behind him, and as if she’d vacated her body and suddenly returned, she remembers where she is and how she got here. Philip… Jackie… Wells. She turns to the house. Edgeweather, she mumbles, recalling her laughter just moments before. Her other heretofore immobilized senses follow and suddenly she’s aware of the wet suede chilling miserably against her thighs, the faint but specific and awful smell there reaching her nose. She does not look back at the paint-splattered windows behind her, but she feels acutely that the house has done this to her, ingeniously retaliated for her heckling contempt. She starts moving toward the car. She keeps her face down as she passes Philip since the only thing that could make the situation worse would be to see the pitying look on his face again. He calls to her from behind, Ma’am, I… should we see if someone is home to help?

  She stops abruptly. She doesn’t need help, she asserts childishly to herself, fleeing to the car now feeling like a declaration of failure. A cloud that had briefly obscured the sun moves on and light blazes again from every window. Even splattered with graffiti, the house suddenly looks pleased with itself, spectacular. Freshly provoked, Dana tightens her fists and in her right hand rediscovers the stone she had picked up before. Its cool surface, its weight, and the hard quartz crystals her fingers press into give it the feel of a divine weapon.

  It is only luck, not strategy or accuracy, that sends the rock into the crescent window above the terrace. If it had landed where she’d aimed, it would have hit the center ballroom window between the columns. But Dana hasn’t thrown anything more than a towel or a crumpled receipt since she was a teenaged girl and so her hand unclenches long before her arm has completed its movement and the rock flies up instead of straight, but with enough momentum to shatter the surface it hits. The bright, cracking sound on impact and the after-clatter of glass falling to the porch steps below is glorious. That she has inadvertently smashed Edgeweather’s highest window is victory enough to restore Dana’s equilibrium, and with it the welcome feeling that she is once again strong and in control.

  Unlock the house, Philip, she says, looking directly at him now. Or do I have to break more glass to get inside?

  Lupita

  Everyone is old now, or dead. This is what Lupita thinks on the sixth ring, the one that lets her know that the person on the other end won’t pick up, that the silence between them will go on a little while longer. She’d waited a week to listen to the second voicemail, careful this time not to erase it. If this is Lupita Lopez, please call me. This is your niece, Cristina. Ada’s daughter. She… I found your number by accident months ago… My boss… I wouldn’t bother you but… I’d rather we speak than just leave messages. It’s important. Please call me.

  Lupita lowers the phone away from her ear and holds it in her lap under the kitchen table where she sits. It is after eleven in New York and she figures Cristina is probably already asleep. For Lupita, it’s barely early evening, but she’s already heated up and eaten what was left of the lasagna she’d made for last week’s dinner with Jay, the neighbor she cooks for and eats with every Sunday night, a ritual that began more than a decade earlier after his wife Echo died of cancer diagnosed too late to treat. Whatever Lupita cooked—roasted chicken and potato salad, rice with ham and pineapple and peas, casseroles with hamburger meat and pasta—she always made enough so that when they split the leftovers they’d both have something in the fridge to eat through the week. Beyond this, there was little more to her diet than the yogurt she ate in the morning with her coffee, and the protein bars she bought by the box at the Harvest Market in Hanalei. It’s Saturday, and she’s already been to the Safeway in Lihue for tomorrow’s meal, a whole ham, half-price with the coupon she’d clipped from the weekly circular that shows up in her mailbox every Friday.

  She’d finished her shopping after dropping the family from LA off at the airport. They were as they had been a week ago, but looser, less exhausted. The father still a soft touch with his daughters, handsome; the mother expensively dressed, kind; and the two girls languid as they dawdled and moaned. The family was beautiful, but even more so now with the dark, gold glamour of a week in the sun.

  What Lupita had not seen seven days ago, in the center of the older girl’s face, were two red, raised scars extending between the top of her upper lip and the bottom of her nostrils. At first she thought the girl had been cut or hurt during her vacation. But she then saw more clearly that it was a cleft palate, something Mary and the other girls at Wells Center School once would have called a harelip. It had obviously been treated but had left what looked like a permanent disfigurement. Lupita couldn’t understand how she’d missed it a week ago. Perhaps because the girl had kept her head down at the baggage terminal after they’d landed, and later, as she’d slept on the ride to the hotel, only her forehead and hair were visible through the rearview mirror. Not seeing that particular buckle and fold of skin below her nose now seemed impossible given how profoundly it reshaped the girl’s face. Lupita did her best not to stare. As she turned the key in the ignition, she felt simultaneously relieved and ashamed of that relief that the universe hadn’t given with both hands to this girl, at least not in the way she’d first presumed; but she felt protective, too, imagining the taunts and averted glances she must have endured. She regretted her initial stingy thoughts as she peeked in the rearview mirror at the teenager who now sat straight-backed and awake next to her younger sister, as if she sensed Lupita’s surveillance. She remembered how the girl’s father whistled a week ago, his gentle tugging, Wake up, Sleeping Beauty… and she could feel a pinch of envy return. She watched now as the girl helped her younger sister with the seat belt, gently pushing the five-year-old’s meddling hands away from the strap as she pulled it across her chest and found the buckle. The young one huffed and puffed impatiently through it all, resisting the help much as her older sister had resisted her father the week before when he roused her from sleep.

  The age difference between the two girls appeared roughly the same as the one between Lupita and Ada, and with their long dark hair and light brown skin, the girls in the back seat of her van appeared like better-dressed, more polished actors playing a scene from her childhood. Ada taking care, fussing, Lupita pushing her away. She couldn’t help but picture Ada with a similar disfigurement. She imagined it on her own face and considered how it would have shaped who she was, what it might have prevented, if anything.

  She calls the number Cristina left on the voicemail again, but this time lets it ring a seventh, an eighth, a ninth time. She hangs up and calls again, letting it ring until she pushes the off button on the phone and reluctantly places it on the table next to her. She withdraws her hand and as she does notices the wreckage of dark spots swarming there. Wrinkled and sun-stained, her hand appears to her more like a claw or a talon. She tries to remember what the beautiful mother from LA’s hands looked like and wonders if she makes her daughters clip and file their finger and toenails every week. Did she pay extra attention to her older daughter, to the parts of her body she could control?

  Lupita tries to picture her hands and sk
in as they once were, when she came to Kauai, but she can only see what is in front of her. She rests her bare forearms along the tops of her legs and spreads her palms across her thighs. She surveys the many spots, pocks, wrinkles, scars, broken blood vessels and veins, and after a while the weathered chaos begins to look deliberate, like a set of meticulously arranged markers, or a map, showing her exactly where she’s been.

  Jackie

  Dana’s car is long gone by the time Jackie leaves her bedroom. It must be at least eleven and she’s still in her nightgown. She has not yet eaten and feels increasingly light-headed as she makes her way down the hallway toward the front door. After only a few steps into the foyer, she loses her balance and stumbles to the floor. It happens so fast that when she opens her eyes she knows she’s missed both the part that caused the fall and the fall itself. This has not happened before but it is the very thing Amy predicts when she makes her increasingly frequent cases for selling the house and moving to Noble Horizons.