Amanda ate French fries. Archie requested a grotesque number of little briquettes of fried chicken. He dumped these into a paper bag, mixed in some French fries, dribbled in the contents of a small foil-topped container of a sweet and sticky brown sauce, and chewed contentedly.
“Gross.” Rose did not approve of her brother, because he was her brother. She ate, less primly than she thought, a hamburger, mayonnaise ringing her pink lips. “Mom, Hazel dropped a pin—can you look at this and see how far her house is?”
Amanda remembered being shocked by how loud the children had been as infants at her breast. Draining and suckling like the sound of plumbing, dispassionate burps and muted flatulence like a dud firecracker, animal and unashamed. She reached behind her for the girl’s phone, greasy from food and fingers, hot from overuse. “Honey, this is not going to be anywhere near us.” Hazel was less a friend than one of Rose’s obsessions. Rose was too young to understand, but Hazel’s father was a director at Lazard; the two family’s vacations would not much resemble one another.
“Just look. You said maybe we could drive over there.”
That was the kind of thing she would suggest when half paying attention and come to rue, later, because the kids remembered her promises. Amanda looked at the phone. “It’s East Hampton, honey. It’s an hour at least. More than, depending on the day.”
Rose leaned back in her seat, audibly disgusted. “Can I have my phone back, please?”
Amanda turned and looked at her daughter, frustrated and flushed. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to sit through two hours of summer traffic for a playdate. Not when I’m on vacation.”
The girl folded her arms across her chest, a pout like a weapon. Playdate! She was insulted.
Archie chewed at his reflection in the window.
Clay ate as he drove. Amanda would be furious if they were killed in a collision because he’d been distracted by a seven-hundred-calorie sandwich.
The roads narrowed further. Farm stands—honor system: felted green pints of hairy raspberries, moldering in their juices, and a wooden box for your five-dollar bill—on some of the drives wending off the main road. Everything was so green it was frankly a little crazy. You wanted to eat it: get out of the car, get down on all fours, and bite into the earth itself.
“Let’s get some air.” Clay opened all of the windows, banishing the stink of his farting children. He slowed the car because the road was curvy, seductive, a hip switched back and forth. Designer mailboxes like a hobo sign: good taste and great wealth, pass on by. You couldn’t see anything, the trees were that full. Signs warned of deer, idiotic and inured to the presence of humans. They strutted into the streets confidently, walleyed and therefore blind. You saw their corpses everywhere, nut brown and pneumatic with death.
They rounded a bend and confronted a vehicle. Archie at age four, would have known the word for it: gooseneck trailer, a huge, empty conveyance being towed by a determined tractor. The driver ignored the car at his back, the local’s nonchalance for a familiar invasive species, as the trailer huffed over the road’s swells. It was more than a mile before it turned off toward its home homestead, and by that point Ariadne’s thread, or whatever bound them to the satellites overhead, had snapped. The GPS had no idea where they were, and they had to follow the directions that Amanda, adept planner, had thought to copy into her notebook. Left then right then left then left then another mile or so, then left again, then two more miles, then right, not quite lost but not quite not lost.
2
THE HOUSE WAS BRICK, PAINTED WHITE. THERE WAS SOMETHING alluring about that red so transformed. The house looked old but new. It looked solid but light. Perhaps that was a fundamentally American desire, or just a modern urge, to want a house, a car, a book, a pair of shoes, to embody these contradictions.
Amanda had found the place on Airbnb. “The Ultimate Escape,” the ad proclaimed. She respected the chummy advertising-speak of the description. Step into our beautiful house and leave the world behind. She’d handed the laptop, hot enough to incubate tumors in her abdomen, over to Clay. He nodded, said something noncommittal.
But Amanda had insisted upon this vacation. The promotion came with a raise. So soon, Rose would vanish into high school disdain. For this fleeting moment, the children were still mostly children, even if Archie approached six feet tall. Amanda could if not conjure at least remember Archie’s high girlish voice, the chunk of Rose against her hip. An old saw, but on your deathbed would you remember the night you took the clients to that old steakhouse on Thirty-Sixth Street and asked after their wives, or bobbing about in the pool with your kids, dark lashes beaded with chlorinated water?
“This looks nice.” Clay switched off the car. The kids released seat belts and pushed open doors and leaped onto the gravel, eager as Stasi.
“Don’t go far,” Amanda said, though this was nonsense. There was nowhere to go. Maybe the woods. She did worry about Lyme disease. This was just her maternal practice, to interject with authority. The children had long since ceased hearing her daily plaints.
The gravel made its gravelly sound under Clay’s leather driving shoes. “How do we get in?”
“There’s a lockbox.” Amanda consulted her phone. There was no service. They weren’t even on a road. She held the thing over her head, but the little bars refused to fill. She had saved this information. “The lockbox . . . on the fence by the pool heater. Code six two nine two. The key inside opens the side door.”
The house was obscured by a sculpted hedgerow, someone’s pride, like a snowbank, like a wall. The front yard was bound by a picket fence, white, not a trace of irony in it. There was another fence, this one wood and wire, around the pool, which made the insurance more affordable, and also the home’s owners knew that sometimes deer strayed into attractive nuisances, and if you were away for a couple of weeks, the stupid thing would drown, swell, explode, a horrifying mess. Clay fetched the key. Amanda stood in the astonishing, humid afternoon, listening to that strange sound of almost quiet that she missed, or claimed she missed, because they lived in the city. You could hear the thrum of some insect or frog or maybe it was both, the wind tossing about the leaves, the sense of a plane or a lawn mower or maybe it was traffic on a highway somewhere distant that reached you just as the persistent beat of the ocean did when you were near the ocean. They were not near the ocean. No, they could not afford to be, but they could almost hear it, an act of will, of recompense.
“Here we are.” Clay unlocked the door, needlessly narrating. He did that sometimes, and caught himself doing it, chastened. The house had that hush expensive houses do. Silence meant the house was plumb, solid, its organs working in happy harmony. The respiration of the central air-conditioning, the vigilance of the expensive fridge, the reliable intelligence of all those digital displays marking the time in almost-synchronicity. At a preprogrammed hour, the exterior lights would turn on. A house that barely needed people. The floors were wide-plank wood harvested from an old cotton mill in Utica, so flush there was nary a creak or complaint. The windows so clean that every month or so some common bird miscalculated, and perished broken-necked in the grass. Some efficient hands had been here, rolled up the blinds, turned down the thermostat, Windexed every surface, run the Dyson into the crevices of the sofa, picking up bits of organic blue corn tortilla chips and the errant dime. “This is nice.”