Chapter 7
7
Tom’s first impression of the reception area was that it was very cold. The second was that it was very dark. And the third was that it smelled bad: a damp, musty aroma of wet and creature.
Tom’s housekeeping was notoriously lackluster, but he didn’t think he’d ever been responsible for a smell like that. He winced and wedged the front door open to encourage more airflow. Rosie gasped and lifted the neck of her pretty silk blouse to cover her nose.
Tom couldn’t see an obvious source of the smell. But it was dark. He fumbled with the switch panel near the door, which didn’t turn any lights on.
“The power’s not still out, is it?” Tom asked.
“Richest county in the state. I’m sure it was back within a couple days,” Rose said. “Maybe a fuse blew in the storm.”
She coughed into her blouse. Tom suppressed the urge to rub her back, a thing that didn’t actually help her when her asthma was flaring up but had always made him feel better about it.
“Do you know where the box is?” Tom asked.
“No.” Rosie took several steps back, lingering in the doorway.
“Do you want to stay here while I go look for it?” Tom offered.
Rosie briefly closed her eyes, then cleared her throat. “No. Obviously, the monsters would eat you first.”
Tom wanted to squeeze her for her bravery. Rosie hated mess, hated bugs and dirt, and hated scary movies and the dark. Her music was pop, her entertainment upbeat, and her beauty routine lengthy. But her aesthetic preferences weren’t a personality trait—she crushed her foes in size-five heels.
The reception area was clear of storm debris except for the sheets of plywood nailed over the windows. The storm hadn’t been strong enough to break the glass, although the entrance was along the east side of the inn, and Tom would expect most of the damage to be on the south and west sides of the building. But there was evidence everywhere that people had picked up and left quickly.
“It’s giving low-budget horror movie set,” Tom announced as they investigated the sitting room. The decor hadn’t changed at all since he was last here: heavy, dark wood paneling, pictures of sperm whales, scented knickknacks. It looked like it was home to a nineteenth-century whaler who also made a lot of impulse purchases at the mall. Moby-Dick meets Yankee Candle. “You could always rent it out for nonunion productions. You know. Film students. Porn.”
Rosie didn’t laugh, but the corners of her mouth twitched. “I was actually thinking it reminds me of Pripyat. The city by Chernobyl. Where they have all the endangered animals wandering around the abandoned buildings because people can’t live there anymore?”
“I saw that documentary too!” Tom said, pleased. “ The Zone of Alienation . I kept hoping for a fox with two heads or something.”
“If we see anything with two heads, I’m burning this place to the ground,” Rosie said shakily.
Tom got the sense that she was avoiding the kitchen, but eventually they cleared all the other rooms. Rosie hesitated before pushing that door open, but she gathered herself and pulled it wide, ducking her head preemptively.
The smell assaulted them as soon as they looked in. The chill meant there were no bugs, but Tom winced at the sight of the countertops as the light of Rosie’s phone illuminated the area.
“Jesus Christ.” He coughed through the reek of trash. “Did Seth just leave everything here?”
It was hard to tell in light of the time elapsed, but it looked like someone had laid out breakfast for two dozen then simply walked away from it. There was the desiccated bone of a spiral ham on one counter and the rinds of several melons still visible amid a pile of what looked like fruit decay experiments.
“I guess they felt like they couldn’t come back after the storm shut it down?” Rosie half-heartedly defended her cousin’s company, though her face had fallen.
The trash cans were full and unemptied, and dirty dishes were moldering in the sink. When Tom turned a faucet, no water came out. He crouched to peer under the sink, but it looked as though the pipes hadn’t frozen at least, despite the lack of heat to the building.
Tom had worked in food service long enough to have a cast-iron stomach in the face of the worst of smells, and it would take more than a few mice and some rotten food to put him off, but Rose looked pale and green. She pressed her hands to her cheeks as she took in the piles of organic waste.
Even though they’d lived less than five miles away, Rosie hadn’t invited him home with her until Easter weekend of their freshman year. He’d thought she might be embarrassed of him, but her family home, with its full ashtrays and stained carpet, had done a lot to rewrite his idea of the kind of people who produced someone like his Rosie, who ironed her pillowcases and mended the rips in his blue jeans with embroidery stitches. She had to hate this.
“Hey,” Tom said, finally giving in to the impulse to rub her back. You can’t fool me, Rosie. He knew that the taller she stood up, the more vulnerable she felt. “I’ll toss a bucket of bleach on this and it’ll be fine. I’ve seen worse than this at kitchens I’ve worked in.”
“Which ones?” Rosie asked, voice wobbly. Her gaze bounced around the various health and safety violations.
“Don’t worry, I’ll only take you out to places that are too nice to hire me,” he promised. He held his breath, but she didn’t reject the idea out of hand.
Instead, she drifted toward the walk-in refrigerator as though planning to open it, but Tom intercepted her, seizing her by the shoulders and turning her toward the door. She didn’t need to meet whatever intelligent life had blossomed in a low-oxygen, high-nutrient environment over a few months with no power. He marched her back out of the room against her weak protests.
“I need to make a list of what needs fixing,” she said.
“Everything needs to be thrown out and all the surfaces need to be disinfected. That’s it,” Tom said firmly.
Rosie squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then nodded. Tom would have suggested they take a moment outside, but she turned and proceeded up the main staircase.
“Let’s just get it over with,” she said.
There were a dozen rooms on the second floor, all doors shut on either side of the long hallway. The first two rooms they checked were full of stale air and dust, but there was no obvious water damage until they checked one at the end of the hall. One pane of the original window had popped out, and the ceiling and floor were discolored where rainwater had flowed in from above and through the window.
She took out a checklist and handed him a binder of his own. “I don’t think anything structural needs to be fixed in the dry rooms. Can you check the rooms on the other side of the hall?”
Tom nodded, beginning to sing under his breath. Following Rosie’s lead was as easy as it had ever been. He poked through musty rooms, a couple of which had been slept in since they’d last been cleaned, but as everything in the whole place needed to be laundered, that wasn’t much of an issue. He wrote down clean everything on his paper just to look productive.
“Zombies,” Rosie said when they met back up in the hall.
“Hmm?” Tom said, having momentarily forgotten what he was doing.
“You’re doing three songs about zombies. You should have saved the Cranberries for last though. Dead giveaway.”
Her face was neutral as she delivered her verdict—and a pun he was sure she’d intended—but Tom barely suppressed a victorious smirk. There you are. Rosie was excellent at Three Songs. He bet she’d gotten it after “Thriller.”
“Anyway, let’s check the suite, then we can bring our bags in,” Rosie said, looking more settled. “You can pick whichever room you’d like. I figured I’d take the suite, if that’s okay.”
There was only one suite at the inn, which featured a kitchenette, a living room and dining area, and an en suite whirlpool hot tub. On their honeymoon, Tom had considered it serious luxury.
He was swept up in the memory of opening the door eleven years ago: trying to convince Rosie to let him carry her over the threshold, Rosie not sure her dignity and his upper body strength would allow it. God, he’d felt like a superhero. Twenty-two and married. He’d thought they could do anything.
The funky smell was stronger when the door opened, putting him back in the present, where their left hands were bare and Rosie was keeping a careful distance between the two of them.
“Oh no,” Rosie said, pulling her blouse back over her nose. “What are the mice even eating in here?”
The big four-poster bed was unmade, and there were mouse droppings visible on the turned-over bedspread.
Tom looked around for what had drawn the mice, but couldn’t identify anything amiss. There was a big dark stain in one corner near the door where the ecru shiplap was discolored, so he approached and put his hand against it. The damp surface felt almost warm to the touch.
“Is that where they’re getting in?” Rose followed up.
“I don’t see a hole,” Tom said. “And I don’t see where the stain is coming from. Weird that it’s not by a window. Maybe a pipe burst in the wall?”
Rose looked at him expectantly, and Tom remembered that he was supposed to be handy on this trip. He’d bought a multi-tool at a hardware store yesterday, and he took it out of his pocket as though he knew what he was doing.
I don’t perform traditional masculinity for just anyone, Rosie. Please be impressed.
“I’ll just open it up and take a look,” he said authoritatively, flipping out the penknife attachment and slipping it into a crack in the shiplap. The panel, floor to ceiling, lifted easily.
He was checking out of the corner of his eye to see if Rosie was turned on by this display of competency, so he heard her gasp before he turned back to the open panel and saw that he’d literally lifted the lid on an enormous, swarming hive of bees.
The entire wall was riddled with golden honeycomb and, more problematically, a moving carpet of brown bees, thousands upon thousands of bees. Bees that probably did not appreciate someone opening their hive up with a penknife. The faint sound of buzzing turned into a near roar.
Rosie and Tom both screeched and jumped away from the wall, which took them toward the middle of the room. The bees poured out, buzzing and pissed, the cloud growing and obscuring the exit. They’d probably just woken up and were, like Tom, taking a moment to figure out what had gone terribly awry. There was an imminent collision of two civilizations: Oh shit, people , thought one group. Oh shit, bees , thought the other.
Rosie made a wordless squeak of panic, a sound he would have found adorable under other circumstances.
“They won’t sting us if we don’t mess with them,” Tom said, repeating his mother’s advice by instinct.
“We just broke into their house while their kids were sleeping!” Rosie pointed out in a furious whisper. She pressed up against Tom, trying to get behind him as they scooted backward to the opposite wall. “Oh my God. If I die here, don’t bury me at Mount Auburn, because I swear to God I’m coming back from eighteenth-century Catholic hell to haunt the crap out of my dad for not helping.”
“Are you allergic to bees?” Tom demanded.
“I don’t know! I’ve never been stung.” Rosie hid her face between his shoulder blades. “But I’m allergic to everything .”
“Where’s your EpiPen?” Tom asked, frozen in place as the bees began to expand into the rest of the room.
“In my purse. In the car. God,” Rosie mumbled against his back.
The tightness and fear in her voice finally spurred him into action. He’d only seen her use her EpiPen once before, their freshman year, when she was caught unawares by the shrimp in her soup. The experience had been embarrassing for her, terrifying for them both.
I only get one Rosie, and if she breaks, I don’t get another , he’d said when she asked him not to call campus EMS.
Tom took a step away from her to strip off his parka. Then he turned and draped it over her, pulling the hood over her head as though he were dropping a cover over a birdcage. When he was sure he couldn’t see any skin, he wrapped his arms around her and hauled her out of the room, straight through the cloud of angry bees.
At least three of the little bastards got him on his fingers and the back of his neck as he rushed down the hall, pursued by some of the swarm. He didn’t stop when he got to the stairs. He lifted Rosie off her feet by the waist so they could stumble, slide, and fall down the spiral stairs to the main floor.
He carried her straight out the front door and didn’t set her down until his feet crunched on the gravel of the front drive. His chest ached from the effort and the sudden adrenaline, but exhilarated victory coursed through his veins as he pulled off the couple of bees that had gotten him.
It was dark and cold outside. They wouldn’t want to fly around out here.
Tom checked his parka’s sleeves and hood for stowaways before unwrapping Rosie. He was prepared to be celebrated for his daring and bold initiative, but when he pulled the fur ruff over her head, Rosie’s face was bright pink, and tears were streaking down her face. Her tight, bunched shoulders shook.
Tom instinctively looked around to see if anyone was nearby—Rosie hated anyone seeing her cry—but his brain quickly caught up with bigger concerns.
“Did one get you?” He gasped. “I’ll—I’ll grab your purse. You have your EpiPen? I’ll call 911. How far is the hospital?”
Rosie loudly sniffled and wiped her face on the sleeve of her pretty blouse before she answered. “No, I didn’t get stung.”
Noticing how cold it was outside, Tom used his grip on her shoulders to gently pull her a few steps closer to the car, letting go of her only long enough to open the door and guide her into the back seat.
Tom slid in next to her, heart hammering through his chest. She bent over with her forehead against the seat in front of her, shoulders shaking.
“Rosie?” he asked tentatively, pulling the door shut. “What is it?”
Tom curled his arm back around her shoulders, part of him exulting Finally! because she still fit perfectly there, although he hadn’t thought it would take this long or involve so many bees.
She didn’t answer, but she shook her head. Her breath came in tight gulps. “It’s such a mess.” She sat up, fumbled for her purse, then took a puff from her rescue inhaler. That was twice he’d seen her use it today; that wasn’t a good sign. “Maybe I should just burn it down,” she mumbled. “That would take care of the bees.”
“Sure. It didn’t look like the grease trap had been cleaned in a while,” Tom said, striking an encouraging tone. “I could make it look like an accident. Is there fire insurance?”
“See! You’re already thinking of bailing,” Rosie accused him, pulling away.
“I was trying to be helpful?”
Rosie’s face twisted in dismay. “I’m just—oh God. This is going to take so long. And I’m going to have to do it all by myself.”
“Um?” Tom said, mildly outraged. Here he was, and he thought he’d been pretty studly so far. But maybe that wasn’t the point. Maybe the point was that it was going to suck to fix everything. “You don’t have to. You could sell it, like your cousin said.” Rosie was quiet, apparently thinking about that.
“We could just go,” Tom urged her. “We could make the last ferry, get to Boston tonight. I have a key to Caroline and Adrian’s place. We could fly out of Boston. You wanna go somewhere else for a long weekend? Somewhere sunny?” Actually, the sun wasn’t Rosie’s friend. “Or snowy, now that I think about it? Anywhere. Boyd’s condo in Malibu?”
She turned to him, tears welling up. “You don’t have to stay,” she said. “This is—I know you can’t have this much spare time. You can’t have thought it would be this bad.”
“I’m not saying I want to go—babe, if you want to fix this shithole up, I’ll help you do it,” he insisted. “I said I would.”
“Don’t,” she said, voice still shaky. “It doesn’t actually help, you know? If you say you’ll do something and then you don’t. Don’t you have rehearsal? And, like, a life?”
He hadn’t spared a single thought for the godawful play since stepping out his door that morning.
“Not for months,” he said, unable to recall the exact date. “I’m just saying, is this what you really want? Why do you want to mess with this disaster site? You don’t even own it. I can’t imagine Max expects you to put your life on hold this long.”
She gave him wide, affronted eyes. “This is my whole family’s place. This is where we get together,” she insisted, despite the pressing lack of any other Kellys on site to provide any assistance. “I was going to bring my kids here.”
Tom froze. “What kids?”
Rosie made a wordless noise of hurt in the back of her throat and pushed the door open on the opposite side of the car. “The kids I was going to have.”
Well, that was a kick in the teeth.
At least you didn’t have any kids was a not-helpful thing people had told him after their divorce. Like he was supposed to be grateful for the nonexistence of people he’d planned on existing, tiny humans whose faces and names he knew Rosie had already imagined.
If she hadn’t kicked him out, they could have had kids by now. They could have done any of the hundred things she’d told him they’d do.
Why hadn’t she had kids, if that’s what she’d really wanted? She didn’t get remarried, didn’t have kids, didn’t even move out of New York, which they’d only lived in to support his supposed Broadway career. If she’d changed her mind, he couldn’t blame her—they’d been so young—but that wasn’t his fault. He’d been on board for all of it.
Before she could get out of the car, Tom reached out to cup the back of her head so that she had to turn and look at him.
“Look, I’m here ,” he said. “And I’ll stay till it’s done. That’s what you asked me to do, right? Let’s just do it.”
She sighed unhappily. “Tom. That’s what you said about our wedding. And I ended up planning the whole thing.”
“I—” He couldn’t really remember what had been involved in wedding planning to negate that proposition. It hadn’t seemed like a lot? There had been a ceremony in the college chapel, then lunch with a couple dozen family and friends at an Italian restaurant. Had she wanted more?
“This is different,” he protested. “I can get the roof done. And everything else. You know what? I can handle all of it. Everything the place needs. Babe. It’ll be okay. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll do the whole thing.”
“The whole thing?”
“Yeah. I’ll take over. You’ve got a real job, right? I don’t have anything I have to do until rehearsal starts.”
“ You are going to pick out carpet samples. You are going to make sure the wallpaper matches the linens,” she said doubtfully.
And why would she doubt his ability to do that, only because he never had? He wanted to do it all for her. He wanted to be the one who bravely ordered bolster pillows and paint swatches. He wanted to defeat the bees in her name. Knowing what to do for her was very fulfilling, a satisfaction that had grown rarer and rarer before vanishing from his life entirely.
“Fine. You got me. I’m already planning to half-ass the window treatments,” he said. “Like, do the middest possible job picking them out.”
Instead of laughing, which was what he’d wanted her to do, her big blue eyes searched his face as she transparently wondered whether he was going to flake out on her.
“Why though?” she said. “This is—I don’t expect you to understand. This is what I decided I was going to do with my life after you and I broke up. This isn’t anything you promised me.”
Answering that was easy.
“Because I meant everything I said.”
The way her eyes widened, the doubt on her face—that was hard.