Chapter 2 - The Woman of the House

Three Months Earlier

“Rose!” Brian calls from the house.

“Be right there!” I yell from the window of the boathouse before returning to the half-opened box at my feet.

The boathouse smells like neglect. A quarter inch of pollen mixed with dust sits on the windowsills. The screens are black with the same mixture. An old wooden dresser and two wicker chairs are in the corner, long forgotten by the previous owners. I collapse into one of the chairs. Tiny pieces of splintered wood scratch at the backs of my thighs. There’s plenty for me to unpack in the house, but I pull an unknown box toward me and untangle the flaps of cardboard, feeling the rush of adrenaline from going through someone else’s things. The spike is short-lived. More dusty life jackets. My stomach tingles as I look up at all the unopened boxes stacked against the wall.

Our Realtor, Sonja, told us a family had lived here before us. With red lipstick smudged on her two front teeth, she explained how they were the ones responsible for the beautiful remodel. From what I can tell from the half-packed boxes in the boathouse, they left in a hurry and couldn’t be bothered with whatever remained. Maybe they didn’t need life jackets where they were going.

I rip open another box with the word keep scribbled across the top in black Sharpie. This one is full of plastic buckets and shovels. Beach toys and disappointment.

I know I should go help Brian, but peering into someone else’s life is more interesting than living in your own. The thrill of emotional trespassing forces me to push the two opened boxes aside and pull a third toward me. It’s heavy and promising.

Soon, I’m elbow-deep in mud-covered ropes, rusted fishing hooks, and other boating accessories I can’t place. Just as I’m wondering what boat all this equipment belongs to, my fingers find a folded piece of paper wedged at the bottom. When I pull it out, I see it’s not paper but a photo of a man and a young boy. The man is dressed in fishing trousers. The boy, who doesn’t look older than five, is wearing a miniature version of the same outfit. Their faces are full of bright optimism as they each hold a fishing line. Something similar to guilt gathers in my stomach. If this day meant enough to document with a picture, then how did it find its way to the bottom of a mold-covered box left in the back of a boathouse?

I open the back door to let some fresh air in. The balcony is big enough for one, but if it’s anything like the condition of the boathouse, I don’t trust it. There’s a rocky shore below and a pier that juts out into the water, but no boat. Not even a dinghy. When we toured the house, Sonja never said anything about a boat. A boathouse with no boat. I remember looking at Brian to have a conversation with our eyes about the irony, but his glance never met mine. It wasn’t that funny anyway.

A buzzing from my back pocket interrupts my prying hands. I check my phone. The number isn’t saved, but I know who it is. I stand still with my arm frozen midair, as if the person on the other end can see me. If I don’t move, maybe they’ll go away. Maybe they’ll forget about me altogether. The buzzing stops and I let out a sigh of relief, but then my phone buzzes again. This one is more final. It’s a voicemail and a reminder that the caller is still there, just on the other end of the line, waiting for me. I delete the message without listening to it.

I hoist the boxes back to their place against the wall before I walk up the hill toward our new home, which looks down on the small lake town. Houses just like ours surround the lake on all sides, hovering over the water, keeping it in its place. According to Sonja, most of the permanent residents who live in Lake Moss don’t live by the lake at all. They live about a mile away from the shore and survive on the tourism from the summer season. I drove through that side of town when I made a wrong turn on my way to the grocery store the other day. Ranch homes with carports instead of garages lined the street while chain-link fences separated the properties. A dog, some sort of pit bull mix, was tied to a makeshift porch and barked as I drove by. Farther down the road, a woman yelled at her three kids to get inside. Even though her hair was tied back in a ponytail, untamed wisps stuck out all around her face. When I passed, I saw that her eyes were wild with something more than just frustration. It was a look I knew all too well. After a right turn and a quick left, I was at the grocery store, where the sun seemed to shine a little brighter.

Blades of grass flatten beneath my feet. Somewhere out on the lake, a boat engine revs. Besides that, it’s silent. The deafening quiet is something Brian says I’ll get used to. It’s worse at night. After living in Chicago all my life, I’m used to sirens, bar fights, and shattering glass putting me to sleep. Here, our closest neighbors are an acre away, and most of them don’t even live here full-time. “Seasonal” is what the locals call them. They’re only here during the summer or the occasional winter weekend. As I walk up the lawn, I can make out the side of the neighbor’s house. It isn’t refurbished like ours; it was built new from the ground up. According to Brian, it has two more bedrooms and one and a half more baths than our three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath home. When he mentioned that fact the other day, he pretended like he didn’t care that the neighbor’s house was bigger than ours, but from the twitch of his eyebrow, I could tell it lit up every competitive cell in his body.

Compared to our neighbor’s house, ours was a steal. At least that’s what Brian had said when he first showed it to me online. We weren’t looking for a new house, or at least I didn’t know we were looking for one, but once I stepped inside during the tour, I began to understand what Brian had been going on about during the hour-long drive it took to get here. The house wasn’t the biggest on the lake, not by a long shot, but when we walked in it felt familiar and foreign all at once. It wasn’t like I knew the house, but like the house knew me.

The foyer has a large staircase that goes right up the middle of it. The kitchen and living room are an “open floor plan,” a term I hadn’t heard until Sonja said it when she gave us the tour.

“Open floor plans are all the rage these days,” Sonja had said with all ten of her fingers splayed out in the air in front of her. “You should have seen how many walls were in here before the remodel.”

Sonja was in her mid-sixties and couldn’t have been more than five feet tall without heels on, but what she lacked in height her voice made up for in enthusiasm. Her tweed skirt and matching blazer rubbed together in all the wrong places, making a scratching noise as she led us around the house, smiling as if it belonged to her.

“The main bedroom is down the hall to the left, and there’s two smaller bedrooms to the right,” she said as she looked between me and Brian. “I’ll let you two discuss.” With that, she descended the staircase in her patent leather kitten heels.

“What do you think?” Brian asked.

“It’s nice,” I said as I thumbed the wooden banister lining the hall.

“Just nice?” His head was cocked with anticipation, waiting for me to elaborate.

“It’s really nice,” I said. “But what about your job? You really want to drive an hour or more each way to manage construction sites?”

He shrugged like it was no big deal. For Brian, most obstacles weren’t a big deal.

“I’ll make it work,” he said.

“And my job?” I said.

He clicked his tongue, which I knew meant he was contemplating his reply.

“You could not work.”

“Not work,” I said, repeating his words back to him as they settled in my head. I walked the length of the banister to feign contemplation. I knew when we got married he wanted a house, a wife who stayed home, and a few kids. It was a traditional point of view, old-fashioned even, but it’s how he grew up. It’s what he knew, what he wanted for himself. With Brian, everything was always black or white, right or wrong, yes or no. There was no gray area. No middle ground. No maybes. He knew who he was and what he wanted his future to look like. Since I couldn’t say the same for myself, I was drawn to his certainty.

This wasn’t the first time Brian brought up the idea of me quitting my job, but I always had an excuse. The insurance company needed me. I’d worked there for over ten years and the man who owned it, Mr. Balboa, would be lost without me. The truth was, I knew agreeing to quit my job meant agreeing to have a baby, something I had deliberately been putting off.

Brian took a step closer to me and wrapped his arms around my waist. The air thinned as a tightness in my chest grew. He tried to suppress his excitement as he looked down on me. My pale lips ticked upward in a forced smile, and I did what a good wife would do. I said, “Okay.”