Chapter 1
Jonas
On his way to the place that would be his new home, a nervous, mothy feeling beat its wings against the inside of Jonas Lake’s throat. His father had informed him that he could choose his own bedroom in the Lamplight Inn from three options, all suites with private bathrooms, and had texted him photos of the rooms in an attempt to elicit enthusiasm.
His mother said, “He’s trying. Just try back.”
Jonas replied with brief niceties like Cool and Looks nice and Will think it over.
Jonas’s mother drove them in her Jetta. The suitcase in the trunk held his clothes, and his laptop waited in his backpack. He’d left everything else he owned in his room at his mother’s house—“For when you come home,” she’d said. “It’s still your room”—though there wasn’t much to part with beyond the TV and video game posters he had taped and torn and re-taped to the walls, and Jonas didn’t know when he’d go back except to visit.
He would now be a guest in every house he stepped into.
The closer they drove to Lamplight, the farther they got from the Twin Cities. Cornfields replaced retail, and traffic thinned until not a single car was visible for miles. Static punctuated each line of music on the radio, and Jonas wondered what home really was: a place you loved or a place you lived, and what it meant when the two weren’t the same.
“Well, the houses down here sure have a lot of character,” his mother said.
To their credit, the houses were less uniform and dull than the subdivisions they’d passed earlier. “Yeah,” Jonas said. “I guess.”
When they pulled into the Lamplight Inn’s circular driveway, it too proved to have character. It was a large, squarish mansion with a nearby stone carriage house cloaked in vines. The building’s gray, green, and cream paint was caked with a darker green mildew, and the gables’ decorative embellishments had intermittently cracked or gone missing.
It looked odd and in need of some love, and Jonas appreciated that about the place. His father had explained that the building had been a home before being converted into an inn, before being abandoned, before being made a home again. Though it retained its business sign—a hanging wooden oval with a simple oil lantern carved into its surface—it now served only as a private residence. More or less. There were some boarders there who helped with cleaning and other household chores.
Matt Lake exited the house and stepped onto the front porch. His girlfriend, Cesca, followed. Less than a year ago, his father had informed Jonas that the two were moving in together. Matt had never offered to introduce her to Jonas, and Jonas had never asked. He was young when his parents had divorced, and he hadn’t expected he’d ever live with his father again, so there had been no reason that Cesca should matter. Now that Jonas saw her, he saw that his father had a full life that stood on its own without him.
Matt introduced everyone in an anxious, caffeine-enhanced rush of names. He even awkwardly shook Jonas’s hand, as though it were their first meeting. Cesca greeted Jonas and his mother cheerfully.
Both women were willowy, olive-skinned brunettes—glamorous, though Cesca’s glamour was of a different kind. Where Sara Lake wore sleek pumps, Francesca Amato bared her feet. Sara donned a pencil skirt and jewel-toned blouse, while Cesca had on a flower-patterned T-shirt dress so short that Jonas averted his eyes, trying not to stare too long at her legs. She had styled her hair into a messy bouffant and painted her eyes with winged, black liner. His father looked incongruously like an L.L.Bean ad in comparison.
Jonas let his mind smooth over, turning the small talk into a murmur of background noise he could tune out. Then, somewhat unceremoniously, his mother returned to her Volkswagen and backed out of the driveway and out of his new life.
Matt and Cesca gave Jonas a tour of the house, which smelled of rain-soaked wood and old wallpaper, and Jonas leaned through each doorway just far enough to feign attention. Cesca worked at an antique mall, so the building didn’t hurt for unusual decorations. The plants by the main stairwell grew from bald, ceramic doll heads, and a chipped, white rocking horse stood sentinel by the door to the sitting room.
For his room, Jonas chose the suite he thought other people would find the least desirable, which seemed the place best suited to a boy no one wanted. Dingy green wallpaper peeled away from the corners of the room, and a cage filled with colorful taxidermic birds hung from the ceiling. Cesca had decorated the walls with framed prints of insects pulled from old textbooks.
Matt and Cesca left Jonas alone in the room to unpack, shutting the door behind them, and it stayed closed in its warped frame without latching. Leaving his suitcase in the middle of the floor, he flopped onto the bed. From below, the taxidermic birds were just round, colorful bellies, a system of very small planets.
It was difficult to imagine his father living in this house. Matt Lake was quiet. Jonas liked loud music, rap and rock that he could feel lighting up his rib cage. Matt listened to white-noise sound files with names like “babbling brook” and “summer storm.” He assembled very large puzzles that, when he’d still lived at home with Sara and Jonas, had usually taken over the surface of half the dining room table. He flossed daily. Matt knew how to use a sextant, but Jonas doubted his father could adequately roll a cigarette. Cesca could probably roll a cigarette.
In the nightstand, where many functioning inns might have stored a copy of the Christian Bible, Cesca had The Complete Works of Hieronymus Bosch. Jonas passed hours reading the illustrations’ accompanying descriptions, and he absorbed exactly no information, the words wilting from his brain like a garden planted on a hill made of glass.
• • •
Lamplight had exactly seven bedrooms. There was Jonas’s, as well as the two he had not chosen, which remained uninhabited. Cesca and Matt shared the largest, and Jonas was not interested in seeing it.
There were two tenants, who helped with the cleaning and upkeep, utilities and property taxes—the extent of their rent—and each had a suite of her own. One was Audrey, a tattoo-covered hairstylist in her twenties who hugged Jonas when she met him, much to his dismay, for he was as friendly and pliant as a stray cat. The other was a tall dancer with frizzy hair named Diana, clearly older than Sara and Matt, though not quite old enough to strike Jonas as grandmotherly.
That left one more room for one more inhabitant. Jonas knew that Cesca had a daughter his age, or so Matt had said. Cesca appeared several years younger than his father, unlikely to have a daughter preparing for eleventh grade. Matt had assured Jonas that Noemi Amato would “show him the ropes,” as though he were unaccustomed to the concept of high school.
Noemi’s room was across the hall from his, and while the door had been closed when he’d first arrived, it was now open. Jonas folded his immense self-consciousness into as small an animal as he could and let it burrow into the back of his mind. Eager to establish an ally close to his own age, he knocked on the door, which was not ajar enough for him to assume entry. He noticed the doorknob, a white metal swan, and thought the person inside might be gentle, like a feather or a ballet.