6 Months Ago
In the spring, Great-Aunt Carolyn died.
“And you’re in the will, dear!” her mother said over the phone, throwing in uncommonly affectionate language. “Apparently our last-minute lunch did the trick. The lawyer will be in touch. Call me the moment you learn the amount. Well done, darling!”
Jane sat down and breathed, spending a few moments with the thought of the woman who’d loved Harold’s face, who’d wasted decades of loving, who’d ripped open Jane’s chest and laid out what she saw.
Jane hadn’t known Carolyn well enough to grieve, only to feel softened by her death and mystified by the strangeness of any ending.
And yet, Carolyn had thought of Jane enough to scratch her name into the will.
What would she leave a near-stranger relative?
Harold’s side of the family was large, and surely Carolyn would leave the bulk of the estate to his blood relations.
But the rumors of Harold’s seafood fortune were legendary.
Would there be enough to move Jane into an apartment with air-conditioning? Enough to retire?
On the subway ride to the attorney’s, Jane balked at that thought.
She didn’t actually love her job. She’d applied for it straight out of college, armed with that always-in-demand BA in art.
Commuting from Connecticut for interviews, she’d quickly realized how little traction a degree from a state college got her among New York City’s few art-focused jobs.
So when she was offered a position as Assistant to the Art Director at a publisher of illustrated nonfiction titles, she seized the noncompetitive pay and rock-bottom benefits.
At least she would be working in illustration!
Almost ten years later, there was still an “asst.” before her title, and her main tasks continued to involve scrolling through stock-photo databases.
I think I know what you’ve put your life on hold to wait for, Aunt Carolyn had said. Was her nowhere job yet another symptom of her obsession?
Hey, at least she had a job, she reminded herself. So what that it didn’t fill her heart with joy and satiate her creative yearnings. She couldn’t knock such a nice piece of stability, something (unlike men) that didn’t periodically rip the rug out from under her and send her sprawling.
Jane nearly missed the subway stop with wondering—if she was tempted with a huge sum, was she at risk of becoming some alternate version of herself? Would she quit working, buy a house in the Hamptons with a dedicated Pilates room, and adopt a miniature poodle named Porridge?
These questions (and alternate names for the poodle) kept her mind busy as she walked into the law firm’s sleek gray building, up into the conservative cream-and-tan office, and down into a stuffed leather chair to hear the extraordinarily pale lawyer say, “You’re not rich.”
“Sorry, what?”
“In fact, she didn’t leave you any money at all.” His every blink was slow and deliberate, reminding Jane of a frog. “People often hope, so I like to get that out up front.”
Jane laughed uneasily. “Oh, I wasn’t thinking that.”
“Of course.” The attorney sorted through a stack of papers with no wasted movement.
He was saying something in lawyer-ese, but Jane was distracted.
She was trying to figure out what besides the measured blinking made him seem so amphibious.
His wide-set eyes, she decided. And his pond-green tone. (Okay, he wasn’t actually green.)
He was still talking. “Our client was . . . eclectic . . . in her will. She made purchases for a few friends and family members and left the bulk of her money to charities. For you, she arranged a vacation.”
He handed Jane a glossy, oversized brochure. On the cover was a photograph of a large manor house. A man in jacket, cravat, and breeches, and a woman in an empire-waist dress and bonnet were walking in the foreground. They seemed awfully content. Jane’s hands went cold.
She read the elegantly inserted text.
Pembrook Park, Kent, England.
Enter our doors as a houseguest, come to stay a fortnight, enjoying the country manners and hospitality—a tea visit, a dance or two, a turn in the park, an unexpected meeting with a handsome gentleman, all culminating with a ball and perhaps something more . . .
Here, the Prince Regent still rules a carefree England. No scripts. No written endings. A holiday no one else can offer you.
“I don’t get it.” She really didn’t, and yet part of her was already hoping and humming and spinning forward into a blank but surely idyllic unknown.
“It’s an all-inclusive, two-week vacation in England.
From what I gather, you dress up and pretend to be someone in the year 1816.
” The attorney handed her a packet. “It also comes with a first-class plane ticket. The vacation is nonrefundable, my client saw to that. But if you do need cash, you could exchange the first-class airfare for economy class and pocket the change. I make such suggestions whenever I can. I like to be helpful.”
Jane hadn’t looked away from the brochure.
The man and woman in the photo held her gaze like a magician’s swaying watch.
She hated them and adored them, longed to be that woman but needed to stay firmly in the present day and pretend she had no such embarrassing fantasies.
No one guessed her thoughts—not her mother, not her closest friends. And yet Aunt Carolyn had known.
“Pocket the change,” she said distractedly.
“Just report it to the IRS.”
“Right.” It seemed odd that Carolyn would point out this flaw in her poor, pathetic great-niece and then send her right into the belly of the beast. Jane groaned. “I’m hopeless.”
“What was that?”
“No, I’m not hopeless, and that’s the problem.
I’m too hopeful.” She leaned against his desk, finding his vacant expression conducive to spilling her guts.
“If I were to tell you my first dozen boyfriend stories, you’d call me screwy for ever going out with anyone again.
And yet I have! I’m so thick-headed it’s taken me this long to give up on men, but even now, part of me can’t give up completely, you know?
So, I . . . I channel all my hope into an idea, to someone who can’t reject me because he isn’t real! ”
The lawyer straightened a stack of papers. “I think I should clarify, Ms. Hayes, that I did not mean to flirt. I am a happily married man.”
Jane gaped. “Uh, of course you are. My mistake. I’ll just be going now.” She grabbed her purse and split.
The elevator dropped her back at street level, and even after stepping through the doors, the ground still felt as though it were falling away under her feet.
She walked all the way back to work and into her gray roller chair, still falling and humming and spinning with .
. . something. Dehydration maybe. Or existential horror.
She’d almost been rich. But not really. Everything was back to normal, yet nothing felt normal.
Her phone buzzed, and her mother’s name popped up, landing another blow.
Porridge the poodle aside, part of her had wanted very much to get loads of money, for Shirley’s sake.
She let the call go to voicemail and whispered to herself the words of a former therapist: “There is nothing you can do to earn your mother’s love because she is not capable of truly loving you, so rejoice in letting go of—”
“Yo-yo!” Todd the manager popped into her cubicle, speaking in his oft-affected unidentifiable accent. “How you doin’, Jane?”
“Fine,” she lied.
And then she looked at Todd and briefly forgot every other horror.
He had a new haircut. His white-blond hair was spiked with an incredible amount of pomade, a do that could only be carried off with true success by a fifteen-year-old boy wielding an impressive glare.
Todd was grinning. And forty-three. Jane wondered if politeness required her to offer a compliment on something glaringly obvious.
“Uh . . . you, your hair is . . . different.”
“Hey, chicks always notice the hair. Right? Isn’t that basically right?”
“I guess I just proved it,” she said sadly.
“Super. Hey, listen”—he sat on the edge of her desk—“we’ve got a last-minute addition that needs special attention.
It may seem like your basic stock-photo array, but don’t be fooled!
I’d give this one to your basic interns, but I’m choosing you because I think you’d do a super job. What d’you say?”
“Sure thing, Todd.”
“Super.” He gave her two thumbs up and held them there, smiling and unblinking. What was he waiting for? Was she supposed to high-five his thumbs by touching thumb pad to thumb pad? Or did he just leave them there so long for emphasis?
The silence quivered. At last Jane opted for raising her own thumbs in a mirror of the Todd salute.
“All right, my lady Jane.” He nodded, and kept his thumbs up as he backed away. At least he hadn’t asked her out again. Why was it that as soon as she was giving up men, so many were so awkwardly single?
The moment Todd’s cologne faded down the hall, Jane booted up her computer to search Pembrook Park.
There were parks by that name scattered across the United States, but nothing Austen and nothing British.
The best she could dig up was a cryptic mention from an old blog named tan’n’fun: Back from Pembrook Park.
This trip was even better than my first, especially the ball .
. . but I signed a confidentiality agreement, so I’ll leave you to wonder.
No Wikipedia article about the elusive locale.
No photos. This was the Area 51 of vacation resorts.
If she did go, it would feel like jumping out of a plane with her eyes closed.