Chapter 4
Chapter Four
One Week Later
I t had slipped Aria’s mind to tell her mother about the phone call from Dorothy Wagner.
Throughout her long nights at her parents’ place, swiping through social media and trying not to think about Thaddeus, Aria felt her mind like a pickled turnip: slightly gross and sludgy.
On the late morning her mother returned to the office for the first time, Aria knew she was meant to tell her something and searched her papers until she found Dorothy’s phone number.
She winced. Poor Dorothy! Did she feel forgotten, all alone in that big house of hers, wherever it was?
But before Aria could say anything, Hilary announced they were going out to lunch. “My treat,” she said.
Hilary knew the importance of this day but was mercifully not bringing it up.
As they walked to the little sandwich and salad place down the road, Aria’s eyes scanned the horizon, searching for some sign of the ferry boat whisking Thaddeus away from Nantucket, off toward Boston, where he’d take the plane to London.
Her eyes welled with tears, so much so that when they sat down at the bustling lunch place, she could barely read the menu.
She ended up ordering exactly what her mother did: a tuna sandwich with a bean soup.
“You don’t like bean soup,” her mother said after the server left.
Aria let out a sob, then clapped her hand over her mouth.
“Oh, honey,” Hilary whispered. “It’s going to be all right.”
Before he left, Thaddeus had wanted to see Aria one more time.
He’d wanted them to go out for burgers and talk about what the summer meant.
Aria wasn’t sure what it was he was after.
Confirmation that they could get back together after summer?
Confirmation that she shouldn’t get her hopes up about getting back together?
It felt too early for a relationship wrap-up, a list of what went wrong and who’d done the worst. Aria was still grieving.
So she’d told Thaddeus that she couldn’t see him. She’d texted: write me when you get back. She assumed she’d be ready then, although October felt like an eternity away.
Rather than talk about Thaddeus now, Aria told her mother, “I forgot to tell you about a potential new client. Dorothy Wagner? She called last week, and it completely slipped my mind. I’m sorry.
” She raised her chin and met her mother’s gaze because she wanted her mother to know she was the type of person to own up to her mistakes.
Hilary didn’t skip a beat. “I haven’t seen Dorothy in years. I was sad she couldn’t make it to the wedding. But a week is nothing to her, really. She doesn’t leave her house much. I’ll give her a call when we get back to the office.”
Aria breathed a sigh of relief.
Later, when the soup arrived, she could barely choke it down.
From her desk, Aria listened to her mother on the phone with Dorothy Wagner, arranging for them to swing by her home later that evening.
“That’s very kind of you,” Hilary said to Dorothy. “And we’re looking forward to seeing you as well. It’s been too long.”
Hilary hung up and scribbled something down on a pad of paper.
“Did she say anything about what she wants done?” Aria asked, remembering that Dorothy had left her with very few details.
“She said she’ll cover it in person,” Hilary said.
Aria had a flashing image of Thaddeus, probably at the airport by now, handing over his suitcase and printing his boarding pass. Did he have enough money to buy a coffee? A beer? Was he nervous about the flight? It occurred to her she didn’t know if he’d ever flown on a plane before.
Snap out of it , she told herself.
“Why doesn’t she leave her house?” Aria asked.
Hilary furrowed her brow. “You know, I’m not sure. I have a few memories of her at your grandparents’ place when I was growing up, before she sort of locked herself away. Maybe Mom knows something.”
Before Aria could respond, Hilary called Estelle at home. Estelle answered on the second ring, calling out, “Well, isn’t this a surprise?”
Hilary smiled at Aria. Aria had the sense that her mother and grandmother were being extra kind in the face of Aria’s relationship’s demise.
“Mom, you’ll never believe who wants us to work on her house,” Hilary said sweetly. “Dorothy Wagner!”
“You’re kidding me,” Estelle said under her breath, all the act gone from her voice. “She hasn’t had anyone over in years. Not that I know of, anyway. Maybe she has a cleaner come by. I’d imagine she does.” Estelle was quiet for a second. “She must be in her mid-eighties by now.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Hilary said. “I was just telling Aria that she hasn’t really left her house in a while. But I have memories of her, which makes me wonder when this all started. Why did she disappear from public life?”
Estelle took another few moments to think. “It must have been twenty years ago,” she said. “Maybe twenty-five.”
“She was younger than you when she quit coming out,” Hilary said.
“Yes.” Estelle made a sound in her throat. “I’ve missed her. You’re really going to see her?”
“Tonight,” Hilary said.
“Wow.” Estelle sounded breathless. “Sorry, this is just a lot to take in.”
Aria’s heart pumped with the mystery of it all. It seemed incredible—a woman, locked away for decades, calling Hilary and Aria into her midst. What was it all for?
Hilary drove Aria to Dorothy Wagner’s place at six thirty.
Throughout her life, Aria had driven past what she now understood to be Dorothy Wagner’s “estate” many times and had always been curious about the tall iron gates around the green lawn of the property, the mansion that seemed taken from another time, even another continent.
It evoked thoughts of the English countryside.
Hilary got close enough to the little kiosk to press a button to alert whoever was inside that she wanted to drive through the gate. A second after she buzzed, the gates parted to draw them deeper into the perfectly manicured estate, where they parked next to a flowing fountain.
“Wow,” Hilary said after a pause. “Here goes nothing.”
As soon as they got out of the car, a valet driver in his twenties hurried up to park the car in a separate area of the grounds.
Aria couldn’t understand why all this had to happen in a place where so few people came by to visit.
She wondered if Dorothy had hired the valet driver just for today, or if he always sat around, waiting for a car to come in.
Then again, maybe Dorothy had more visitors than she let on.
After their car disappeared, the front door opened, and a woman wearing all black appeared and beckoned for them to come closer.
The woman was very tan, maybe of Italian origin, and explained that she was the housekeeper of the estate.
“Mrs. Wagner will see you in the parlor,” she said, guiding them through the foyer, down the hallway, and into an ornate little room that strengthened Aria’s view that the place was like an old-fashioned English estate.
In a little rose-pink chair sat a very old and slender woman in a soft and lacy white dress. Her hair was as white as the dress, but her eyes were a startling blue color, not unlike the photos Hilary had shown Aria of their trip to the Mediterranean Sea.
“Mrs. Wagner,” Hilary said when they entered, sounding mystified. “It’s wonderful to see you.”
Dorothy smiled in a way that suggested she was mischievous and up to no good. “Mrs. Halton, I presume?”
“My professional name is still Hilary Coleman,” Hilary said with a soft laugh. “But I get a little gooey inside when I think of my last name as Halton.”
“He’s a handsome man, your new husband.” Dorothy winked. “And quite powerful. I read about his career out West.”
“He’s something else,” Hilary said.
Dorothy’s eyes slid over to Aria. Aria had the sense that the woman could see all the way through her, could even spot how busted and bruised her heart was.
“And Aria,” Dorothy said, “it’s a pleasure to meet you in person.”
“You as well,” Aria said. She considered apologizing for not passing along her call sooner, but thought better of it. She was tired of apologizing for the mess of her current life.
Dorothy urged them to sit. Hilary got out a notepad, and Aria set up her phone so they could record their conversation. Sometimes clients said something offhandedly that became central to the way they designed their space. It was important to document everything.
Aria tried to imagine what it had been like to live solely in this English-esque estate for twenty-five years and decided that here in the parlor, it was almost as if nothing in the real world existed at all. It was almost like they’d gone back in time.
Soon enough, it was clear that this was something Dorothy wanted to fix about the space.
“I need updates,” Dorothy said, clasping her bony fingers together.
“I need to feel like I exist in the twenty-first century. My late husband was the one who decided on everything in this house, everything from the furniture to the chandeliers, and I’m tired of it.
I want it to feel like mine. I want it to feel like a place I can relax in.
A place I can grow old in.” She giggled at her own joke. Obviously, she’d already grown old.
How much older would she get? Aria wondered. From her vantage point of twenty-three, mid-eighties felt ancient. But maybe it didn’t feel so ancient if you were in your nineties.
Aria knew everything was relative.
Hilary asked Dorothy a series of questions about her taste.
Although she’d been “locked away by choice,” so to speak, Dorothy had kept up with modern aesthetics and had a series of photographs and stills, which she’d arranged in a binder for Hilary and Aria to peruse.
As Hilary asked another stream of questions and jotted things down, Aria flipped through the pages and tried to imagine how they would display this particular aesthetic in the tremendous space around them.
It would be time-intensive, that was clear.
When eight p.m. hit, Dorothy invited them to stay for dinner. Hilary looked so surprised that Aria understood that this wasn’t something she’d expected.
“We’d love to,” Hilary said, although all Aria wanted in the world after this trying day was to go home and crawl under the covers and cry.
She imagined that Thaddeus was already up in the sky, zipping to his future. She imagined he was drinking wine and watching a movie on the back of someone else’s chair. She imagined that whoever was sitting next to him was painfully attractive and good at stuff.
Every person he met, in the future, was someone he hadn’t fought with recently in their home in Nantucket, which made them better than she was.
So immersed in her thoughts, Aria didn’t realize that Dorothy was talking to her. She cleared her throat and forced her eyes to the woman. “I’m sorry?”
“I asked if you’d like a cocktail, dear,” Dorothy said with a soft smile.
“Oh. That would be nice,” Aria said, although she was worried that a cocktail might make her sob and sob.
Dorothy continued to stare at her as though she were trying to figure something out. And then she said it. “You’ve lost something recently, haven’t you, honey?”
Aria was startled. She glanced at her mother, unsure of what to say.
And then she thought, whatever .
“My boyfriend and I broke up,” she said, delivering her heart on a platter to Mrs. Wagner. “He left Nantucket and moved to London for four months. I don’t really know what to do with myself.” She sniffed. “But this project will be incredible. I can’t wait to dive in.”
Dorothy’s eyes sparkled with blue. “Every ending is a beginning,” she said. “I know it’s hard to believe that in the moment.”
Aria let out an ironic laugh, although she didn’t want to make Dorothy Wagner angry or annoyed. Hilary put on a big smile, perhaps hoping to lessen Aria’s angst.
But Dorothy let out a laugh to match Aria’s, and she said, “Listen to me? I’m not a woman of wisdom.
I got old, yes, but I don’t know anything better than you, Aria.
Now, let’s get you that cocktail and put on some music.
If you want to talk badly about your ex-boyfriend, I have a great ear for gossip. Let ’er rip!”