Chapter Three
A quiet “fuck” slips out when Aubrey sets foot on the sidewalk and takes in the towering white house before her. Followed by a laugh of disbelief.
“Don’t let her fool you,” Louise warns behind her. She’s pulling out their suitcases from the trunk and setting them down by the curb in a neat row. There’s a smile in her voice. Aubrey can’t pull her eyes away from the house. “It’s ridiculous,” she whispers.
The front door is a deep shade of red and the shutters a dark forest green, with little clover cutouts in their centres.
Two identical maple trees sway over Aubrey and frame the brick path that leads up to the porch.
The bricks are crooked and cracked in places, overtaken by weeds even this early in the summer.
On the left side of the house, a second door, white, leads to a long, narrow sunroom.
It feels surreal to stand there, like Aubrey’s not meant to be in a place like this, so big and old like it’s been there for fifty lifetimes.
She feels out of place. Her oversized shirt clashes.She should’ve bought a new suitcase.
“Classic revival?”
Louise shrugs and ventures, “I don’t see why not.”
Aubrey swears again, under her breath, and thinks she must remember to take pictures of the house to send to Maggie. Her breath wavers already when she thinks of her friend. It’s done now. She’s here.
She can’t believe Louise hadn’t thought to include this view in her sales pitch. Then again, Louise has never been the best at selling much of anything, herself or otherwise. She doesn’t tend to wonder what could appeal to eyes other than her own.
“You can go in if you’d like,” Louise says as she slams the trunk shut. “I’ve got the luggage.”
Aubrey’s aunt motions not at the house before them but at a different one next door, to the left.
It’s half the size of the inn and charming in a different way, with deep red panelling, dormer windows, and unkempt landscaping slowly overtaking its facade.
It sits in the shadows of its taller neighbour a little further away from the street, like an afterthought. Aubrey has so many questions.
“First, we take our things inside,” Louise explains, hauling the suitcases over the curb. “Then, we get to the fun stuff.”
The interior of the little red house is as light and breezy as the Lunenburg air, soaked in warm afternoon light and the familiar scent of a house left unoccupied for the past couple weeks—dust, a hint of humidity, sea air seeping in from the harbour.
Picture frames crowd the entry table and the walls: photos of Louise through the years with Aubrey’s mother and uncle Jeff, a smiling baby here and there that Aubrey recognizes as herself, and her brother, Ben.
It’s a surprise to see him there. As far as Aubrey knows, he and Louise have never been very close.
Ben is closest to their mother, the youngest baby Marie could never really say no to.
“Welcome,” Louise announces, more to the house than anyone else. “Kitchen’s back there, washroom under the stairs. Up on the second floor your bedroom will be the one at the back left, next to the bathroom. Baby blue walls.”
The layout is in full sight from the second you step into the house—a simple square with the staircase at its heart, the living room right off the entrance, then the kitchen, dining room in the right corner, and a library or office of sorts immediately to Aubrey’s right.
Aubrey’s attention returns to the picture frames, the memories of her own life reflected in this house so far removed from her reality. She can’t believe now that she’s never set foot here before. “Thank you,” she says to Louise, who’s already well on her way to the kitchen.
“What for?” her aunt calls in return. Already Louise vanishes behind the stairs like a ghost in her own home.
“Just, you know, this. Inviting me here and all.”
“Ah. You’re not forgetting I’m making you work for it, yeah?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Louise reappears with a towel in hand. “I think this’ll be good,” she says, in that sort of wise, knowledgeable tone adults take when they seem to know something you don’t.
“Yeah.”
“A lot can change in a year.”
“Okay.” Aubrey coughs a hesitant laugh as she hauls her suitcase to the stairs. “That’s enough cryptic comments for now, I think.”
A knowing, slanted smile passes over her aunt’s face. “Sorry. You’ll get into the habit when you’re older.”
Aubrey slows to a halt, a foot on the first step. “You know, maybe I will. I do do that sometimes, with Maggie. She’s called me a walking fortune cookie.”
“I find that people love to soothe the worries of what’s to come with vague inspirational bits. Then you can shape them into whatever you want them to mean.”
“Right.” Aubrey takes a beat, dragging her heavy suitcase along with a grunt. “You’re worried of what’s to come?”
“No, no, I just—well, I really do mean what I said. I’ve been where you are. Things went a certain way for me, a million times over, and every time I failed miserably at predicting where I’d be a year later.”
“Mm. It’d be presumptuous of me to make a prediction, then.”
“It would. But you wouldn’t be young if you didn’t.” Louise is looking up with piqued interest, a challenge of sorts.
What does she expect Aubrey to say next? That Louise is right, that surely life will surprise Aubrey in wild, unimaginable ways?
Being young is so easily shaped by the experiences of the older folks around her—not because they impart wisdom and lessons, but because people who’ve lived longer like to remind you of how little you know, especially when you dare to think you might actually have figured some things out about existing in a world everyone is experiencing for the first time.
The truth universally accepted seems to be that you’ll understand when you’re older, and until then you’ll be wrong.
Except there will always be older people, and things to be wrong about.
“I just think you might be disappointed,” Aubrey says finally.
“A year is a year. Until yesterday I was in the same spot I’ve been for the last—ah, decade, it feels like.
With the same friends, same bedsheets, same job, same everything.
Sometimes nothing changes. It doesn’t make for a very fun story, but it’s just how it is.
Moving away for a bit doesn’t change that. ”
Louise bows her head solemnly, but her lips twitch in a smirk.
“I see. But today you’re hours away from home, with a new job, a new everything.
I’d be surprised if anything is the same at all by the time you leave.
” Louise cuts herself off there, and something in her silence sounds almost like an if you ever.
“Okay,” Aubrey says simply, because she can’t think of anything else—of arguments or whether she should argue at all.
She’s used to disagreeing, to coming up with ways to fight back and prove her point.
It’s a familiar spot she crawls back to whenever she gets the chance.
But Louise knows better. Worse, Louise has been such an intrinsic part of the blueprint for most of who Aubrey is now, even from a distance.
“I’ll see you in a bit,” Louise says, waving her on with a jut of her chin. “Get settled in, unpack some. We’ll go around and see the house in about an hour, yeah?”
“Sounds good.”
Then Louise adds, as an afterthought, “It’ll be so weird not getting to read your emails anymore. I reckon I’ll miss them. You’ve got this way of writing—well. I guess I’ve got the real thing here, now.” Aubrey laughs on her way upstairs.
The walls in the corridor off the staircase are a soft shade of yellow.
When Aubrey opens the door to her entirely blue room, she finds the space flooded with light, casting long shadows from the window across battered old floors.
The roof is slanted at an angle and the bed is made with a quilt she remembers seeing before, though she’s not sure when or where.
There’s a small closet along the back wall and a dresser opposite the bed, which is a narrow double.
Aubrey lingers on the mattress size only for a second.
She doesn’t need that much space anyway.
She’d slept in a twin bed until she moved out of her childhood home in her early twenties, and it was never an issue, though in her teens she often worried it would be, if ever she invited someone over for the night. It never ended up happening.
The window latch is a bit old but gives in after a few tugs, opening just enough to allow the cool summer air to filter into the stuffy room.
Gauzy white curtains sway along with the wind.
Aubrey sits down on the bed to shoot a quick text to Maggie, a hello and confirmation that she’s made it in one piece.
They haven’t spoken much since the reunion, and it feels like Aubrey’s lived a whole life since then.
The tiny plane, the stale snacks, Louise’s rusty car.
Aubrey forgot to check in on how the night had ended when Maggie wished her safe travels this morning.
She does so now, with a picture of the view out of the bedroom window.
The inn is visible, along with other houses in the neighbourhood.
And trees—so many of them it feels like nothing exists beyond their leaves.
The air tastes like vacation, like transience.
Aubrey’s afraid she’ll blink and the year will have gone by.
It’s that sinking feeling when you know you’re staying somewhere just for a short while, and though you haven’t got much planned, it’s as if there isn’t enough time to get it all done. She breathes in deeply.