Home > Horrid(3)

Horrid(3)
Author: Katrina Leno

And here is something she hadn’t anticipated: Every mile they put between themselves and California felt like it was bringing them further and further from her father.

Jane had loved her father—she’d been devastated when her mother had shown up halfway through second period on the second day of her senior year, reeking of cigarettes (a habit she only returned to on the darkest of days), somehow holding in her tears until they had made it back to the car, putting both hands on the steering wheel but not starting the ignition, staring straight ahead as Jane shrunk smaller and smaller in her own seat. Because somehow she knew what had happened. The details were fuzzy, unknown to her, but the truth was evident, loud, painful: Something had happened to her father.

“Mom?” she’d said, and when Ruth looked up at her, it had felt like her mother was returning from a long journey—her face was clouded over; it took her eyes a full minute to focus.

“Jane, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry, but something happened. Your father… Jane. Your father had a heart attack. Sweetheart. I’m so sorry. He’s gone.”

Ruth had said more, but Jane hadn’t heard a word of it; her ears were overcome by the sound of her own blood sloshing angrily through her veins, the sound of crashing waves, persistent and loud.

“What do you mean?” she said finally, interrupting her mother, her voice almost a shout. “What do you mean he’s gone?”

“I’m so sorry, Jane. I’m so sorry.”

It seemed like that was the only thing Ruth was capable of saying—I’m so sorry—and each repetition only served to make Jane angrier and angrier. She was aware that her emotions were confused, that she should be feeling sad, not angry, not resentful, not hateful, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it; she felt the way she felt, and she couldn’t do anything to stop it, to correct it.

“But what do you mean?” she’d screamed at her mother, and Ruth had stopped apologizing, Ruth had rested her forehead on the steering wheel and begun to sob.

Jane couldn’t help feeling a pang of that same resentment, now, that same anger, that same rushing in her ears, as she sat, listening to her mother trying not to cry. Because a few days after Greer had died, Ruth had come back from the lawyer’s office quiet, smelling like smoke again, and it took almost a week for her to finally tell Jane the truth: They were broke.

It seemed that lately it was taking longer and longer for Ruth to tell Jane the truth. Full minutes in the car to choke out what had happened to Greer. Days to reveal they were broke. Another week to mention the house in Maine, a house Jane had never heard of before, a house they were now barreling toward at sixty-five miles per hour.

What else had Ruth not yet worked up the courage to tell her daughter?

Greer Robinson (Ruth had kept her maiden name of North; Jane was a North-Robinson) had been a loving, devoted husband and father—but he had shared that one quality with his wife, that propensity for dishonesty. It had always been his dream to start his own business; their life as a family of three had been marked with financial ups and downs as Greer left steady, stable jobs to work for various start-ups that inevitably failed after six months or a year. Eventually, he’d taken their entire savings—apart from a few thousand dollars Ruth had in a separate account—and invested it in a business that had failed very quickly. All the money was gone. He had stopped paying the mortgage on the house months ago. He hadn’t told his wife about any of it.

So Ruth had come up with a plan: They would sell their house in California, barely break even, and move across the country to her mother’s estate in Maine. Emilia North had been dead for two years, and she had left the New England house to Ruth in her will.

“We’ll only have to pay property taxes and insurance,” Ruth had told Jane, like Jane had any idea what those two things meant or what they might cost. “We can manage that. I’ll get a job, and we’ll manage.”

“Why can’t we just sell that house and stay here?” Jane had asked.

“It needs too much work. It would never pass inspection. And there aren’t any mortgage payments. I know this sounds counterintuitive, but I just don’t have the money to sell a house like that.”

Jane glanced over at her mother now. Ruth had been acting stranger and stranger the closer they got to Maine, and now here they were, one hour in, and Jane wondered if she should offer to drive.

But then Ruth took a deep breath, a purposeful breath, and when she looked over at her daughter, her eyes were dry and wide.

“Ready for this?”

“No,” Jane responded bluntly. But she smiled a little. A sad smile that fooled no one.

“Me neither,” Ruth said.

She pulled out of the parking lot.

And when they got back on the highway, Jane almost wished she felt something—a jolt, a shock, a bolt of lightning—just as she wished she’d felt something when they passed the state line into Maine—but it was just the same as every single mile since California.

Just another mile marker disappearing into the distance behind her.

 

 

It took just over four hours from Kennebunkport, with a bathroom break and a stop for lunch and a gas top-off and two cups of cheap coffee so hot Jane couldn’t even take a sip for fifteen minutes.

They passed a sign that said: WELCOME TO BELLS HOLLOW. EST. 1680. “LITTLE PLACE IN THE FOREST.”

“Little Place in the Forest,” Jane read. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“A lot of these old towns have slogans like that,” Ruth replied.

“Weird.”

“There’s a Blueberry Capital of the World not far from here.”

“I don’t like blueberries,” Jane said, perhaps because she was determined not to like anything about Maine, including any of its seasonal fruits.

Ruth smiled. “Me neither.”

Another five miles down a quiet, tree-lined road and Ruth slowed the car and made a right-hand turn onto a street with no street sign. Jane thought maybe Bells Hollow was so small that it didn’t even need street signs. Maybe the postal workers knew everybody by name. Maybe they didn’t even have mail here.

They drove for a half mile more. There were only a few houses on the street, set far back from the road and from one another, big houses with big yards and big, long driveways. Each lot was cut out of dense woods, the dark trees skirting the edges of the property lines.

“Little Place in the Forest,” Jane whispered.

They were slowing down; Ruth gripped the steering wheel tightly, and gently eased the car to the side of the road. They were at the very end of the street. Jane looked past her mother out the driver’s-side window and there it was—North Manor, a house Jane hadn’t even known existed until her mother had slid an old Polaroid across the kitchen counter that night two weeks ago.

Like the other houses on the street, North Manor was set back from the road, a large colonial-style mansion with three gables at the front and four white columns supporting a white-railed balcony. The nine windows at the front had black shutters. There were two brick chimneys at either end of the house, and a faded brick path leading up to the front door.

In the Polaroid, the house had been pristine in its beauty.

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