All I Want Read online

  Ben takes out his phone, scrolls till he finds the listing, and hands it to Emma.

  Emma swipes through the photos. “It looks like a set for a low-budget production of The Phantom of the Opera.”

  “Crazy,” said Ben. “Am I right?”

  Everything that might keep a sane person from considering the project is precisely what attracts them. The crazy idea makes them happy, grateful they’ve found each other. It’s partly why Ben loves her, and Emma wants him to love her. She needs him to love her and the baby. She’s read about men who feel excluded from the close bond between a mother and child. She doesn’t want that to happen to them. She feels certain—fairly certain—that it won’t.

  The lights dim, sparklers blaze, the waiters sing. Emma’s forgotten this part. The surprise cake. But it was inevitable. Embarrassing, but fine.

  Ben joins in. He can actually sing. Happy birthday, dear Emma. He grins at her, his eyes bright with love. Emma feels it all through her body. No one tells you that pregnancy will shoot you up with weird aphrodisiac hormones.

  “I love you,” says Emma. “Let’s check out the house. How soon can we go see it?”

  Chapter Two HOUSE-HUNTING

  June

  ROUNDING A SHARP curve, Ben clutches the steering wheel, and Emma sees, through a clearing in the woods, a girl standing in a field.

  She’s knee-deep in the wild grasses, near enough for Emma to see but too far away to see clearly. A few trees with yellow-green leaves fringe Emma’s view. The girl’s face comes in and out of focus. Emma probably wouldn’t have noticed her if Ben wasn’t going so slowly around the corkscrew curves in the rutted driveway.

  A baby straddles the girl’s hip. Seven months old? Eight? Emma’s been paying closer attention to babies lately, but she can’t always tell. Something about the way the girl stands—feet apart, hips swayed back—reminds her of Depression-era photos, those hollow-eyed moms and kids. The girl’s pale hair is lanky, ragged. Her shapeless white dress glows with a ghostly sheen. Her age is hard to tell: maybe a womanly thirteen, maybe a childish twenty.

  Their eyes meet across the distance. They see each other: Emma knows it. Even the baby seems to be staring at Emma, or maybe just at the moving car. Emma’s read that babies can’t see very far. But somehow she is sure that this one can.

  The road turns, and when it turns back again, the girl has disappeared.

  The car skids on a slick of mud, and they come heart-stoppingly close to running into a gigantic oak, growing right by the side of the road, directly on a curve. The branches overhang the blacktop, and the gnarled burls overhang the edge of the roadside.

  Emma says, “What an amazing tree!”

  Ben says, “That amazing tree almost killed us.”

  It would be easy to miss the curve and hit the oak. Really easy in winter. It seems like a bad sign. The road doesn’t want them driving up it. The tree is blocking their way. Emma thinks of saying that to Ben, but she hesitates, knowing he’d say she was being irrational.

  She can’t help herself. “Do you think this driveway is a bad sign? Like maybe the house doesn’t want us here?”

  “Of course the house wants us,” says Ben. “It knows we’ve come to save it.”

  How did the girl and the baby get here? There’s not another car anywhere around. The only way in or out is along this driveway. There are no neighbors, no one—according to Ben—for miles.

  Another sharp curve in the road pitches Emma against Ben’s shoulder.

  He puts his arm around her, then slips it out from behind her back and puts that hand back on the wheel.

  “Easy,” he says. “Hold on. Be careful.”

  “I… don’t know,” she says. “Are you… sure about this?”

  “Our own theater, remember?” says Ben. “Anyhow, we’re just looking, right?”

  They’re here to look at a house. Emma needs to pay attention. Forget the girl and the baby.

  They’re just looking.

  * * *

  ALL THE WAY up from the city, Emma and Ben have been so anxious it’s made them giddy. It’s partly because they suspect that buying this house would be a giant mistake. It is cheap, but it needs a ton of work, and they know there’s always more work than you expect. All that square footage and fifty acres in the middle of nowhere. That’s probably why they’ve been entertaining themselves by trying to remember every film about a happy urban family who buys a country house with an evil past, vengeful spirits bleeding through the walls, and a dead girl inside the TV. It turns out they’ve seen a lot of them, if they think back far enough.

  “The Amityville Horror,” says Emma.

  “Does The Exorcist count?”

  “That’s not a haunted house, it’s a demon girl.”

  “Worse,” Ben says. “You can get the demon out of the kid, but you can’t get the blood out of the walls—”

  “It can be done,” says Emma. “But it’s harder. You need a specialist exorcist.”

  She loves it that they can still amuse each other, even if their laughs sound a little hollow. A little forced. Well, sure.

  The traffic on Route 17 clears up, the stores and strip malls thin, and they’re on the road, in open country. There are trees to look at! It’s beautiful! They’re in nature!

  In the silence that falls, Emma is somehow sure they are both thinking the same thing.

  Buying the house would be a giant mistake. But there’s something weirdly sexy about making a giant mistake together. So what if Emma is pregnant? It’s as if they’re driving off a cliff, hand in hand, like two lemmings, like Thelma and Louise.

  They have enough money. If they hate it here they can flip the house and go back to the city. They would never admit this, but now that they are… comfortable, they need to believe they are still the brave young couple who met and fell in love. The slightly edgy rebels. Or maybe Emma needs to pretend to believe it. She needs to pretend for Ben’s sake, and sometimes for her own, that having a baby won’t change her from a person into a mom.

  Pregnancy has already changed her. She’s more fearful than she used to be. Also, more superstitious. She notices black cats, doesn’t walk under ladders, throws salt over her shoulder. Will she teach her child to be suspcious? It seems like bad luck to imagine that far into the future. Sometimes, like now, she can’t imagine. She just can’t picture how it will feel: another person with them in the car.

  Ben says, “I’d love to see The Shining again, wouldn’t you? Let’s see if we can stream it. We could watch it in bed. Like the old days.”

  Old days? It hasn’t been so long. Things only changed when Emma got pregnant and sleepy. So far Ben has been sweet about telling her, in the morning, what she slept through. But The Shining? Now? When they’re thinking about buying a house in the middle of nowhere? Ben’s got to be kidding.

  Emma says, “This might not be the ideal moment to watch a family moving into a giant house—”

  “Hotel.”

  “Fine. A giant hotel that drives the dad so crazy he tries to axe-murder his wife and kid.”

  “Sorry,” says Ben. “I thought—”

  “Plus. it’s terrifying. I’m not sure the adrenaline would be great for the baby.”

  “Forget it,” says Ben. “It was just an idea. There’s other stuff we could watch.” He sounds so disappointed. And surprised.

  “No, we could watch it. We could, Ben. We could watch The Shining… I didn’t mean…”

  This is exactly what she didn’t want to become, didn’t want to sound like: the cool person Ben married transformed into a quivering, pregnant wreck. Anyhow, she and Ben have watched The Shining a half dozen times. She wouldn’t want to watch it even if she wasn’t pregnant.

  “Never mind,” says Ben. “We don’t have to watch the goddamn Shining.”

  Emma wants a do-over. Can’t they go back to joking about The Exorcist?

  “Sorry, Emma. This driveway is a bitch. We’re going to have to get someone to plow t
his in the winter.”

  He sounds as if they’ve already decided to buy the house. Was that another thing Emma missed?

  * * *

  THE DRIVEWAY IS scary. Emma tells herself to stay focused. It’s as if she needs to keep them on the road by the sheer power of her concentration.

  How did the girl and the baby get there? And how did they disappear?

  “Who was that?” Emma says.

  “Who was what?” Ben is an excellent driver. Calm. It’s one of the things Emma loves about him. She hopes all this bouncing around isn’t harmful for the baby. She knows better than to say that.

  “We’d need four-wheel drive,” he says. “Or a pickup truck. A pickup! Finally!” He takes one hand off the wheel and fist-pumps the air.

  Finally? How could Emma not have known about his secret desire for a pickup? Maybe every man has it, like a late-onset gene. Don’t ask where they’ll put a baby in a pickup truck.

  “Didn’t you see her?” Emma says.

  “I saw us not slamming into that tree.”

  “A girl and a baby were standing out in the field.”

  “Now you’re scaring me, honey,” says Ben. “There was no girl. No baby. There couldn’t be. We’re beyond the middle of nowhere. You could scream and nobody would hear you. Joke. You do realize you dozed off for a few minutes?”

  She’s been doing that lately. Taking little catnaps. Her eyes get so heavy they close on their own. Dr. Snyder has reassured her that being tired is normal. Plus, she’s given up coffee.

  Another curve, then another. It seems unlikely that she could sleep through this. Could pregnancy make you hallucinate? That must be way down the list of symptoms. She’ll google it later, even though she swore to stop googling every twinge.

  There’s probably no internet service out here: another serious problem. Did Ben even ask the Realtor what fixing that would involve?

  As soon as the driveway straightens out, Ben takes his hand off the wheel and reaches across the console and takes Emma’s hand. She loves it when he does that, loves that he’s still doing that after five years of marriage, and now with her being pregnant and their maybe buying a house, settling down and growing up in all the ways they swore they never would.

  Before Ben decided that social media was a huge distraction and waste of time and closed all his accounts, his Twitter handle was PeterPan87. The house is part of that. Fixing up a huge old house is a young person thing. A never-grow-old thing. Ben’s three years older than she is. They’re on the cusp of middle age.

  Ben likes the house’s dark, theater-connected history. He’s talked about it almost nonstop since Emma’s birthday dinner. Despite the wife, the baby on the way, their newly easy life, it makes him think he’s still a pioneer, a bad-boy rebel. He still has the vision, the energy—the balls—to make this happen, to take a weird piece of theater history and make it his own.

  Fixing up the house would be the opposite of why most people move to the country—for peace and quiet. He wants things to be less peaceful, more complicated. As if a new baby won’t make it complicated enough. He wants the most difficult, magical thing. A haunted mansion with its own theater.

  Emma wants to be comfortable and safe. But despite the inconvenience and the risk of a major renovation, the idea of the house is exciting.

  She’s never stopped being interested in Ben, in how his mind works. In his Don Quixote pie-in-the-sky maleness, to which she feels a little superior, a little more… grounded. But she loves the feeling of surrender, of seeing where something takes her. It’s a little like sex. She trusts Ben. She loves him.

  They are in this together.

  * * *

  ONE LAST TURN and there it is, a gigantic three-story Victorian hunting lodge with a sweeping tiled roof and four triangular turrets, one on each corner. Dusty mullioned windows line the facade. In front of the house is a huge porch that curls around, above a foundation wall of rounded river stones, practically boulders. The house goes on forever with its slightly serpentine curves.

  “Can you believe this? Are you seeing what I’m seeing? That’s what I’m talking about,” says Ben.

  “Why are you whispering?” says Emma.

  The house is much larger and grander than in the photos. It could be magnificent. It is magnificent.

  Ben says, “We agreed. If we don’t like it, we fix it up, flip it. Ka-ching. It’s an investment.”

  A tree has fallen through the porch roof and crashed onto the floor. Emma sees that, and at the same time she sees what the house could be. What the house is now.

  For a moment she has the strangest thought: She’s glad her parents and Ben’s are gone. Buying this house is exactly the sort of thing your parents tell you not to do.

  And they’d probably be right.

  Is it bad luck to think that?

  Just because she’s pregnant doesn’t mean she isn’t brave. Her parents got that wrong. Maybe she wasn’t brave enough to hear some snotty art-gallery intern enjoy telling her that the gallery wasn’t showing work like hers, but she’s brave enough to move into a haunted wreck in the middle of nowhere.

  * * *

  MINUTES AFTER THEY arrive, Lindsay—Emma assumes it’s Lindsay—drives up in a new Prius. Slight and doll-like, with blond blown-out curls, Lindsay slides out of the car. Her filmy, short, flowered summer dress hikes up over her perfect tanned legs.

  She looks like a dandelion, thinks Emma, but a dandelion with a steel stem. Where does that thought come from? Why is Emma feeling mean-spirited? It’s not like her to distrust another woman just because she’s young and pretty.

  Halfway through her long, vigorous bony handshake, Lindsay catches Emma looking at the hiking boots that only a young person with great legs could get away with. How did Emma expect a country Realtor to dress? Like a weather forecaster at a local TV station.

  “I’m so glad you guys are wearing sneakers,” Lindsay says. “I meant to tell your husband, but I forgot? God knows what you’ll find. Mud. Raccoon poo. I know I don’t sound like a Realtor? But I believe in honesty. Saves everyone trouble in the long run, right?”

  Her voice matches Ben’s imitation, though not as high and reedy, and she speaks in sentences, not questions. Okay, half sentences, half questions.

  Lindsay flashes them a winning smile: a country girl trying to please. Emma and Ben try to make their faces do something appropriate.

  They appreciate her being up-front about the house’s problems. They believe in honesty too.

  “The house is a train wreck, but a supercool train wreck. Ridiculously beautiful if you like that grand-hotel/haunted-mansion horror-film kind of thing. Like, you know, The Shining. The scariest movie ever, right?”

  “That’s such a coincidence,” Ben says. “Emma and I were just talking about The Shining.”

  “Scariest movie ever? Nightmares for weeks? All right then,” Lindsay says. “I told your husband the background stuff, some anyway.”

  “He told me,” Emma says. “Thanks.”

  “So, okay, we’re all on board here? You can see what is there. And what isn’t. Can I be totally honest?”

  Ben and Emma nod. How can they say no?

  “Add seventy-five thousand onto whatever renovations you might be thinking. I’ll let you guys do the walk-through without me. I know it’s not like TV shows where the Realtor trails the couple, telling the camera how hard it is to make two people agree when one wants modern and one wants vintage, and the wife wants the double sink.”

  Emma says, more sharply than she means, “This is not about a double sink.”

  “Oh, no. Gosh, I didn’t mean you. You guys are way too cool for that. Just be careful. We really don’t want anyone, like, falling through a floor?”

  Emma says, “I’ll be careful. I’m pregnant.” Why did she say that? Maybe because it seems like something you say when you’re house-hunting. You’re not just buying a home for yourselves but for a growing family.

  “I know you a
re. That’s so great.”

  “You know?” Emma doesn’t show all that much under her baggy lightweight hoodie, but she looks down at her belly as if to make sure.

  “Your husband told me on the phone. He’s so proud and excited.”

  Emma’s supposed to smile and not be annoyed at Ben for blabbing their personal information to a stranger. She’s supposed to be proud that Ben is proud. And besides, Emma just blabbed it before she knew that Ben already had.

  “Then you guys need to be extra careful. Don’t trip over anything. Really.”

  “We’ll be cool,” promises Ben.

  “Go for it,” Lindsay says. “Take as long as you like.” She’s talking to Ben, in a low voice, as if she’s talking about sex and not a house tour. Take as long as you like. Corny, but whatever. Let her flirt with Ben. Lots of women do. He’s a rich producer, and he’s good-looking, though maybe not what a girl like Lindsay would think is movie-star hot. If they move here, they will never have to see her after the closing.

  Ben grips Emma’s elbow as they walk up the front stairs. They step lightly across the half-ruined veranda. By the time Ben unlocks the front door with the key he’d gotten from Lindsay (a good sign, the house hasn’t been standing open), they feel fairly sure that the floors won’t collapse, though the fallen-in porch roof doesn’t inspire trust.

  It’s like a house in a dream. In fact, it is the house in a recurring dream Emma has every so often. The houses in her dreams are always different, yet she knows she’s been there before. The rooms ramble on, long corridors open up into vast domed spaces, like the naves of churches, then into rooms like wood-paneled saunas, then into modern rooms with dazzling light.

  “I’ve dreamed about this house,” Ben says.

  “Me too.” Emma can’t remember if she ever told him that. She tries not to tell him her dreams. She doesn’t want to bore him.