Chapter 65 Hailey
Hailey
It was thrilling to hear the shrieks and murmurs that drifted out from the playground.
The tone of the girls’ voices was the same, but increasingly, Hailey had no idea what they were saying.
Their brains were young and elastic and they gobbled up vocabulary in a way that Hailey could not; they had racked up so many friends and produced so much laughter that it was as if they’d been here forever.
Hailey less so, but she would keep trying: she had her good old-fashioned flash cards and the Duolingo app and whole afternoons of soap operas that she mined for the smallest nuggets of understanding.
She would put in the work, and soon the four of them would be as good as local. After that, who knew?
Actually, Hailey did: She would find a job. Maybe teach. Maybe Mack could too.
She shifted her feet on the ground; it was so hot her flip-flops were melting into the cement.
She called the girls over and applied a fresh layer of sunscream, much to the amusement of two locals on a neighboring bench.
The school on the other side of the playground was small but popular, and in an out-of-the-way neighborhood with a reasonably camouflaging international population.
They had been lucky to get two spaces, the school administrator had told them.
Gigi squirmed, slipped through Hailey’s hands, and took off running with only one arm lotioned. Hailey wiped the excess cream on her shorts and brushed the sweat from her forehead.
Maybe not teaching. Maybe somehow, in some crafty, unofficial capacity, Hailey could get back to law. Or real estate. She’d be good at the contracts, once she learned the language, and that way she could get an early lead on a house, something with more room than they had now. Maybe even a pool.
The sweat was running down her back.
Mack would disapprove, she knew. He was wary of too many connections, and the only job he seemed interested in was giving golf lessons to European tourists.
Not exactly high aspirations, but they matched his outfit: he was wearing an old Hard Rock Café T-shirt and knock-off Crocs as he made his way toward her now, a big white envelope under one arm and Gulliver tucked into the other.
Hailey wept at the sight of the purple Kool-Aid packets, and she read her mother’s letter over and over until the sun started going down.
When they got home, they hung the delicate wind chime (which when assembled turned out to be a cardinal, the state bird of Ohio) on the scraggly tree outside the apartment door, and they talked about how they would see Grammie and Grandpa again before too long.
Gigi and even Mabel were forgetting; this kind of conversation no longer made them sad.
When they were all fed and watered and the girls were tucked in, Hailey sat in one of the plastic balcony chairs with a glass of cold wine and the copy of Cleveland Social.
She felt a firm, hard nothing inside as she flipped through the pages of Bratenahl real estate.
The two towers looked ugly to her now, the lake a murky brown even in the good photos.
Toward the end of the issue though, her heart fluttered to life: between the pages, she found a Marc’s receipt that Pammy had obviously intended as a bookmark. It flagged an article about Magpie Court. Hailey read it in less than a minute.
“Mack,” she called, and he came out holding the wine bottle. “Have you seen this?”
He had not; he read it at an infuriatingly slow pace and then reread it.
“Well,” he said finally. “I guess that’s the epilogue to our Bratenahl experiment.”
“It’s like we never existed there. Literally.
We’ve been wiped off the map.” Hailey closed her eyes, tried one last time to conjure up the view of Lake Erie from their bedroom.
It wouldn’t come; the house was like a mirage that vanished before her eyes.
Had it ever really existed? She thought of the handprints they’d left in the cement under the front porch, imagined them swept away and turned back to dust.
“You know who I feel sorry for?” Mack said as he switched out the lights to keep the mosquitoes away and came to sit down next to Hailey. “Betsy Wakefield. Wonder where she ended up?”
Cleveland Social
September 20**
The Bratenahl Issue
Magpie Megamansion
Local council members have faced heavy criticism from housing officials after approving a new plan to reverse-develop a controversial group of cluster homes.
The northern half of Magpie Court, which currently consists of five homes on six lots, has been purchased by a mystery buyer with plans to tear down at least two existing homes and build a 25,000-square-foot compound that would become one of the largest single-family dwellings in Bratenahl.
Dunlop & McConnell LLP, the architecture firm behind the new design, refused to comment on the buyer’s identity, but said that construction on the neighborhood’s newest estate will begin next summer.
Though questions have been raised about the social consciousness of reducing housing stock and nothing has yet been revealed about how this will affect residents’ beach access, one thing’s for sure: the view will be spectacular!