CHAPTER THREE
My House
By Thursday the east wing had become its own small household inside ours, and I kept discovering it by accident.
Grant had hired a nanny, a warm, gray-haired woman named Rosa who’d raised four children and seven grandchildren and who took one look at Mia and said, “Ah, a thinker,” which made Mia regard her with deep suspicion and then follow her everywhere.
I liked Rosa immediately. On Wednesday I asked her whether Mia had eaten lunch, and she said yes, and then added that she’d already sent Mr. Moretti the daily report.
“The daily report?”
“He asked me to text him every evening. How she slept, what she ate, whether she’s asked about her father.” Rosa smiled. “He’s very thorough.”
“He is,” I said. It was a sensible arrangement. It hadn’t occurred to him to include me in it.
On Thursday morning I went to let myself out through the garden door, the way I did most mornings to cut roses for the front hall, and the handle didn’t turn.
I tried again. Then I noticed that the old brass lock had been replaced with something matte black, with a small keypad above it and a red light that blinked at me steadily.
I stood there for a moment with my garden shears in my hand. It was my door. I had been using it for seven years.
One of the two new security men posted near the terrace came over, a young man with a buzz cut and an earpiece. “Sorry, Mrs. Moretti. They changed the codes on the garden side yesterday. I can let you through.”
“What’s the code?”
He hesitated. “I’ll have to check with Grant about adding you, ma’am. He’s doing the list today.”
“The list.”
“The authorized list. For the east side doors. Because of the...” He gestured vaguely toward the east wing. “I can let you through now, though.”
He punched in the code with his body angled so I couldn’t see it, and the red light went green, and I walked out into my own garden feeling, absurdly, like a guest who’d been shown to the powder room.
I cut the roses. I brought them in through the kitchen door, which still had its old lock, and arranged them in the front hall, and I didn’t say anything to anyone about it. It was reasonable, it was for Mia, and it would be fixed by the afternoon.
It was fixed by the afternoon. Grant came to find me personally, a tall, quiet man in his fifties who’d worked for Dante’s father before Dante, and apologized, and gave me the new code on a slip of paper.
He was entirely professional and entirely kind.
I thanked him. It was only later, putting the slip of paper in my desk drawer, that I thought about the fact that I’d had to be added.
That same afternoon, the florist who’d delivered to the house every Thursday for four years was turned away at the front gate.
I only found out because she called me from her van. “Mrs. Moretti, I’m so sorry, they won’t let me through. The man at the gate says I’m not on the list.”
“What list?”
“He said there’s a new delivery list. He said I need clearance.”
I went down to the gate myself. The man there was one I didn’t know, a new hire, polite and immovable. “Sorry, ma’am. All deliveries need prior clearance from Grant during the current period. I can take the flowers and have them checked.”
“Checked for what? They’re peonies. She’s been delivering them for four years.”
“It’s the protocol, ma’am.”
In the end he took the flowers, and they came up to the house forty minutes later, after someone had apparently inspected each stem, and the florist drove away looking embarrassed on my behalf.
I stood in the front hall arranging them, and my hands were not entirely steady.
I told myself it was reasonable. A little girl’s school had been watched.
Nobody could know who might come to the gate with a bouquet.
But no one had told me. The flowers came to my house every Thursday because I’d arranged it, and I paid for them from my own account, and I had not been asked, or warned, or even told there was a list until a woman I’d known for four years called me from her van at the end of my driveway.
* * *
On Thursday, too, Alessandra found the marks on the pantry doorframe.
I was in the kitchen going over the week’s menus with Ines when she came in looking for crackers for Mia and stopped dead in the pantry doorway. She put her fingers on the painted wood at about the height of her own shoulder.
“They’re still here,” she said.
I came over. I’d seen the marks a thousand times without really looking at them: a column of pencil lines on the inside of the frame, each with initials and a year, faded almost to nothing under three coats of paint.
D.M. 1997. D.M. 1998. Beside them, a little lower, another column. A.R. 1997. A.R. 1998.
“His grandfather used to measure us every Easter,” Alessandra said.
“Right here. Dante was always taller, and he never let me forget it.” She traced one of the lines with her fingertip and then took her hand away quickly, as though she’d touched something hot.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to... It’s strange, being in this house. ”
“It’s all right.”
“Is it?” She looked at me directly. “You’ve lived here seven years, and I walk into your pantry and start pointing at my childhood.”
“It’s your childhood,” I said. “It was here first.”
I meant it kindly. I think it came out kindly.
But after she’d taken the crackers and gone back upstairs, I stood in the pantry doorway for a while looking at the two columns of faded pencil, D.M.
and A.R., climbing side by side up the wood, and I thought about the fact that in seven years nobody had ever measured anything of mine against that doorframe, and that there wasn’t anything of mine anywhere in this house older than my marriage.
* * *
That afternoon I went looking for the rocking chair.
I had been building a reading corner in my office for more than a year, slowly, the way I did most things in this house that were only for me.
There was a window that got good afternoon light.
I’d found a small walnut side table at an estate sale and a lamp with a green glass shade, and I’d been meaning, for months, to bring down the rocking chair from the room at the end of the upstairs hall.
That room had been meant for a nursery. We’d never discussed it as a nursery.
It was simply understood, the way things were understood in this family, that the small room with the pale blue walls next to ours was where a baby would go, and in our third year Elena had had it painted, and in our fourth year I’d bought the rocking chair for it, an old Shaker rocker in cherry wood I’d found in Connecticut, because I’d sat in it at the shop and imagined myself there at three in the morning.
We never needed it. We’d tried for a while, and then stopped talking about trying, and then simply stopped.
There was no crisis and no diagnosis. It didn’t happen, and after a while I’d found that I didn’t mind as much as I’d expected to, and I hadn’t examined too closely why.
The door to that room stayed closed. I’d walked past it every day for three years.
I opened the door and the chair was gone.
I found it in the east wing, in the little room with the window seat, beside Mia’s bed, with a folded blanket over one arm. The gray rabbit was sitting in it.
I stood in the doorway for a moment. Then I went downstairs.
Dante was in his study with his laptop open, and he glanced up when I came in and went back to his screen. “Hey.”
“The rocking chair from the nursery is in Mia’s room.”
“Rosa asked for one. Mia’s been waking up at night, and Rosa’s back isn’t great. She rocks her back to sleep.” He typed something. “Ines said there was one upstairs nobody was using.”
“You didn’t think to ask me first?”
He looked up then, plainly confused. “It was sitting in an empty room, Vivienne.”
It was a room I had walked past with the door closed every day for three years because I didn’t want to look inside it. That chair was the only thing I’d ever bought for a child I wasn’t going to have, and someone had carried it down the hall and put a rabbit in it without anyone once asking me.
I didn’t say any of that. I didn’t know how to say it without it sounding bigger than a chair, and I didn’t know how to explain why it was bigger than a chair without saying things neither of us had said out loud in years.
“It’s fine,” I said. “Mia should have it. I just would have liked to be asked.”
“Okay.” He said it gently, the way you agree with someone whose point you don’t follow. “Next time I’ll ask.”
That night Rosa rocked Mia to sleep in my chair, and I heard it through the wall of the east wing when I went to check that the garden door was locked, the slow soft creak of cherry wood, and Rosa singing something in Italian I half recognized.
* * *
On Friday our standing Friday dinner moved.
We had kept Friday nights for four years, since the year Dante took over from his father and the rest of the week had gotten away from both of us.
Just the two of us, usually at home, sometimes out.
Ines left something in the oven, and we ate in the kitchen with the good wine, and he told me about his week, and I told him about mine, and nobody was allowed to call unless someone was dying.
At four o’clock Paula texted to say that Mr. Moretti would be in a security meeting at the house until late, regarding Ms. Romano’s situation, and that he sent his apologies.
At six Dante came to find me himself in the kitchen, still in his jacket, and kissed my cheek.
“I’m sorry. Grant has new information about the people who were watching Mia’s school. I need to go through it tonight.”
“Of course.”
“We’ll do Friday on Saturday.”
“We can’t do Friday on Saturday. It won’t be Friday.”
He smiled a little. “Then we’ll do it next Friday and I’ll make it up to you.”
“Go,” I said. “It’s fine.”
It was fine. A child’s safety came before a lasagna in the oven. I ate alone at the kitchen island and read a book about Flemish altarpieces and went up to bed at ten.
He came up at midnight. I heard him in the bathroom, the water running, and then he came to bed and I thought he’d fall asleep immediately. Instead he lay down behind me and put his mouth against the back of my neck and just breathed there for a moment.
“You awake?” he murmured.
“Mostly.”
“I missed Friday.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry.” His hand slid over my hip, slow, and stayed there. “Can I make it up to you now?”
I turned over. In the dark I could just see his face, tired and rough with stubble, and he looked at me the way he’d looked at me for seven years, as though I were the one uncomplicated thing he had.
He kissed me slowly. He knew exactly how.
He always had, since the night I’d knocked on his door at twenty-two, and his hands on me were patient and certain and entirely mine.
For a while nothing else existed. There was no east wing and no new lock and no chair in the wrong room.
There was only my husband, who still wanted me, who still said my name against my throat as though it were the only word he wanted, and who afterward pulled me against his chest and held on as though I might leave.
I lay there in the dark afterward, sleepy and warm, with his arm heavy across my waist, and I almost told him. The words were right there. The garden door, and the list, and Rosa’s reports, and the chair. Something about this week is making me feel like a guest in my own house.
His breathing slowed. His arm went heavy. The moment passed before I’d decided whether to use it.
I told myself there’d be another chance. He’d said next time he’d ask. There would be a next time. I believed that.
* * *