Chapter 8 #2
After she finished stacking my presents beneath it, she pointed out the ornaments that Ian made as a kid: Popsicle-stick snowflakes, salt-dough candy canes and snowmen. She and Brooke enlisted me to help with the Christmas cookies. They even shared the secret family shortbread recipe.
We stayed a whole week. By the end of it, I felt like I’d gained an entire family.
Jack invites us to follow him upstairs. Penny runs ahead. “My room’s this way,” she says when we reach the top, taking my hand and tugging me down the hall.
When she pushes open her door, I see that her walls are almost the precise shade of my blouse. “I told you coral was my favorite,” she says, flopping onto a white four-poster bed in the center of the space.
Her ceiling is wallpapered in an oversize floral print.
A low antique dresser sits beneath the window.
But I bet a changing table was there first. This must’ve been the cutest nursery.
Am I getting emotional? I blink away the tears before anyone can notice and redirect my focus to a photo in a gold frame on Penny’s desk.
“Is this Suni Lee?” I say, picking it up. Of course they wouldn’t let her Scotch-tape some tacky sports poster to the wall in here.
Penny and Jack both gasp. Ian, still in the doorway, lifts his eyebrows so that only I see.
“You know about her?” Penny asks, springing up from her bed to join me.
“Suni Lee is Penny’s idol,” says Jack, smiling.
“Heck yes, I know about Suni!” I say. “I was obsessed with her during the Olympics last summer. Did you see her stick the landing on the vault, even with her bad ankle?” (I’ve been doing some Wikipedia research on the women’s gymnastics team. Figured it couldn’t hurt.)
Penny’s eyes widen. “Yes! That was so cool!”
“Do you think you want to go to the Olympics one day?”
“I don’t know. My coach says I can if I keep working really hard. But there might be other things I want to do, too, once we move to London.”
“That’s very reasonable,” I say.
“You can see why we’re so proud of her,” says Jack, grinning.
“Didn’t you wanna show me your pictures of London?” I ask, remembering why we came up here in the first place.
“Oh yeah.” Penny retrieves a photo album from her bookcase. “Daddy made this for me after Papa told us he got the new job.” She pages through, showing me all the sights she doesn’t remember seeing as a toddler.
“Oh, look, the London Bridge.” I point to a photo of her atop Curt’s shoulders in front of it.
“That’s the Tower Bridge,” she corrects me. “I thought you’d been to London?”
“Remember your tone, please,” Jack interjects.
I laugh and wave him off. “Penny, you’re just too smart for me.”
Ian shoots me a look.
“Why don’t we go see Daddy and Papa’s room real quick before we go back down?” says Jack, ushering us back into the hall.
We pass a guest bedroom on the way. Jack leans in and flips on the light to offer us a look. The walls are a pale taupe. The space easily fits a queen, with nightstands on both sides. More than enough room for Ian’s parents.
Jack motions to a closed door across the hall: “That’s Curt’s study. Nothing very exciting in there.” But I’m doing the math, and including the primary, that’ll make four bedrooms, just as Ginny said. The perfect size.
Then we come to the grand finale. “When we built the addition, we spent even more time and money in here than we did on the kitchen, if you can believe that,” says Jack, pushing open the door for the big reveal.
It’s like we’ve been transported to a luxury hotel.
The walls, trim, and ceiling are all the same dusky blue.
A black canopy bed that I recognize from the Room the amount of storage in them could save any marriage, maybe end wars.
They’ve kept the finishes classic, with white marble on the floors and in the shower. A soaking tub sits beneath a window.
“Why would you ever leave this place?” I blurt out.
Jack laughs. “I know, right? I’m sure I’ll be a mess when the day comes.”
I spot another door. It has to be the closet. I have to get in there.
“And where does that lead?” I nudge.
“Oh, feel free,” Jack says, gesturing to go ahead.
I cross the marble, and turn the sleek, brass handle. I feel for the light switch. When I find it, the world momentarily halts. This must be heaven. My soul must have departed my body. What other explanation could there be for a closet that looks like this?
The perimeter is lined with custom storage, painted the same moody blue as the bedroom.
Each compartment of hanging clothes is lit from within, like in a high-end boutique.
One wall is reserved for shoes, tucked into perfectly sized shelves, and cubbies of folded items in crisp stacks arranged by color.
Like macarons in a pastry shop. In the center, there’s an island full of drawers and topped with Carrara.
A miniature version of what’s in the kitchen.
I’d be euphoric if I wasn’t terrified. If we can’t have this place, I will literally lie down and fucking die.
Ian comes up behind me in the doorway, places a hand on my shoulder. I hear him suck in a breath. “Holy shit,” he says, before remembering Penny.
“Shoot.” He turns back to Jack. “Sorry, man.”
“No sweat—I probably should’ve prepared you.” Jack laughs. “Shall we head back down before Curt finishes all the martinis?”
On the way, I lean into Ian. “This is it,” I whisper. “It has to be.”
It’s a spectacular evening, almost cloudless and still in the high sixties. Penny takes me by the hand again, guiding me to the backyard. She does cartwheels across the lawn and I pretend to be impressed. But my focus is on the tire swing.
Once she’s done showing me her splits, I point toward it. “Did your dads put that up for you?”
She shakes her head. “It’s always been there.”
I think back to the tax records I dug up for this place.
The owners before Jack and Curt had lived here since the seventies.
Which means the swing has probably been here my whole life, maybe longer.
All those mornings and afternoons, walking to and from my bus stop, staring pathetically at the tire swing that hung in the Satos’ front yard, I was wishing for the wrong one.
Alyssa Sato was a grade older, so even though we rode the same bus for all of elementary school, we weren’t really friends.
Her dad sold cars—every few months, they’d have a new one in the driveway—and her mom stayed home.
Unless it was raining, in which case Alyssa got a ride all the way to school, her mom would walk with her to the bus.
In the afternoons, she’d be there with a Capri-Sun, the straw already punched into its tiny hole, ready for Alyssa to enjoy.
Some of the other kids made fun of this, but I was transfixed.
I couldn’t fathom what it must feel like to be the center of an adult’s universe like that.
I made a point of sitting behind Alyssa on the bus so I could disembark after her and trail a half block or so behind on the sidewalk.
From there, I could pick out bits and pieces of conversation—her mom asking about such-and-such friend or how Alyssa did on the spelling test. Whether she remembered to turn in her homework.
The sorts of mundane things that my parents never brought up.
The Satos’ house was on the block before the town-house complex where I lived. It was the same street, but their stretch was greener and shadier, all single-family homes. By the time I reached their place, Alyssa was usually clambering up onto that tire swing, her mom watching from the porch.
Their life looked idyllic and I wanted badly to be a part of it, so one morning, when I was in third grade and Alyssa was in fourth, I worked up the courage to sit next to her on the bus.
I’d decided to invite her to come over to my house after school, figuring she’d have to return the invitation, maybe as soon as the next day.
Instead, she went quiet for several long seconds, before finally admitting she didn’t think she’d be allowed to—“because your parents are never there, right?”
I’d had no idea that other people knew this about me, let alone that the topic had apparently been discussed inside the perfect Sato home. My whole body flushed with shame at the realization that something about me wasn’t good enough.
But finally, after all these years, I can let that go. Because now I know this tire swing, behind a house far more perfect than the Satos’ ever was, has been waiting for me all along.
I take a few steps toward it. “Do you want me to push you on it for a bit?” I ask Penny.
“Nah, let me show you something cooler,” she says, running back toward the deck.
I have no choice but to follow. Around the side of it, she points out a short flight of stairs leading to a basement.
“One time, our neighbors’ cat Lunchbox got stuck down there,” she says. “He was trapped in our basement until almost bedtime when I heard him crying.”
“Really? But how did he get in?” I ask.
“Come look, I’ll show you.”
I follow her down the concrete steps.
“See?” With hardly any effort, she pushes open the top half of the door at the bottom.