chapter 1: thread
The first thing I noticed was that the house smelled. The air was thick with it; a sweatiness, like spoiled milk, but musty too, like mushrooms, and it made me think of something hidden, something that needed to be discovered and aired or scrubbed out hard with bleach.
The odor was stronger in the kitchen, where we’d entered, and followed us with a quiet persistence as we walked through each unheated room from the pantry into the dining room, where I got just a whiff at the front door. So that no matter how you entered the house, the smell would be here, waiting for you.
Nobody else seemed to notice.
“Oh, look, everyone. Now this is a view.” Mom switched Jackie to a fresh hip as she sidled past the pocket doors that led into the high-ceilinged parlor. “I love a sweeping view.”
“All this space will take some getting used to for us city folk,” said Father. “Isn’t that right, Helen?”
“Yes, sir.” Out every window, I saw nothing but whiskey-brown fields and pastures. Mother had grown up on a farm, and she always said that land had a pull on her. But it didn’t on me. All it looked to me was lonely.
“This furniture’s real elegant,” Mom added. “Mid-Victorian, I think. It matches the house. I’m surprised nobody’s come to claim any of it.”
I wasn’t, but I held my tongue. It was olden days furniture, bulky and square, and the winter sun seemed to cling to the parlor’s imperfections. The stained, celery-green silk sofa, the dusty piano top, the mottled glass mirror at the fireplace mantel. The house had been furnished in a grand style, and in its own way was just as fine as the house where my friend Florence Whitehead had lived, back in Bainbridge, Ohio.
The Whiteheads had been the first family at my school get a television. But I didn’t see any television in this parlor. Of course, the Whiteheads had the kind of money that flowed from a spigot. Any money that had washed through this house had stopped a long time ago. You could feel the drought in its dust and cracks.
“I thought our new address was 63 Pittypat Lane,” I said. “Where are the other houses? Shouldn’t we have neighbors?”
“Trust you to see what we’re missing, Helly-Nelly, instead of what we’ve got.” Father’s laugh was reproach as he removed his hat and creased the shape back into it. “I say good riddance to neighbors. Now I won’t have to hear Mr. Dorset coughing over the fence.”
I’d never minded Mr. Dorset coughing. Though it had been a long time since I’d made a fort or played hopscotch. Not with this leg.
My parents both knew how to soften a hard landing. Father would crack wise while Mom would find beauty. Every day that they’d come to see me at St. Ann’s, I could count on Father to teach me a pocket magic trick or a riddle, and Mom to have found a poem or brought me something—a pretty bookmark or a warm loaf of banana bread. In those visits, they could almost shelter me from the black-and-white truth of the doctor’s charts.
But 63 Pittypat Lane was a different truth. No neighbors, no charm, no valley dip or pony pasture, no apple orchard or pond ringed in weeping willows, no little red barn or mulberry tree for sneaking under with a book. The house itself was dark, vacant, too big and too grand.
And why did it smell so goat-butt awful?
“Helen!” Mom frowned. Uh-oh. I hadn’t thought that last part. I’d said it. “Really! Such a low expression. What’s the matter with you?”
