John Saul - Nightshade

In a week, Joan thought, she’ll be used to the house, and recognize Bill, and everything will be all right.

THE WEEK WENT by.

Bill Hapgood steered his Audi through the gates of Hapgood Farm, slowing the powerful car to a crawl as he made his way up the familiar curves of the long, graveled drive leading to the house. Until this week, this had been the best part of any given day of his life; the time when he left all his problems outside the gates and slipped back into the safe and familiar comfort of the only home he had ever known. It had always been that way: from the time he was a child this house had always been the final refuge from everything.

Once — just once — he had doubted the house’s ability to offer him sanctuary from the world. That had been the day he was in school in Hanover and received the news that the boat his parents had chartered out of St. Lucia had been found abandoned and washed up on Macaroni Beach on the windward shore of Mustique. His parents had vanished. At first he’d simply refused to believe it — he and his parents had been sailing on Penobscot Bay every summer for as long as he could remember, and his father was an expert sailor. But he must have accepted the fact of their disappearance, for when he’d gone home that day, he hesitated before going through the gates, certain that the place would have changed, that it would feel hollow and empty with his parents forever gone.

Instead, to his surprise, it seemed to welcome him even more warmly than ever, and far from finding the house filled with memories that intensified his grief, it gave him comfort instead. It was as if the house, having already known the loss of four generations of Hapgoods, now knew how to deal with death, and the moment he’d passed through the gates of the Farm, his healing had begun.

But over the last week he’d actually dreaded coming home, and as he slid the Audi into the space in the carriage house next to Joan’s Range Rover and shut off the engine, he hesitated before reaching for the door handle, as he’d once hesitated so long ago. Had the car, rather than his home, become his refuge? That was ridiculous! All that had happened was that his mother-in-law had moved in, and even that was only temporary.

Yet as he walked out of the carriage house — converted just over a century ago into a garage to hold the very first car in Granite Falls — he could feel the change. Not that there was anything tangible, anything visible. The house looked exactly as it always had. Lamps had already been turned on against the gathering dusk, but even the light that spilled through the mullioned windows seemed to have lost its warmth, and when Bill stepped through the French doors of what had once been the porte cochere, the change that had been creeping through the house all week was more pronounced than ever.

He called out to Joan and Matt. There was no answer, and as he hung his coat in the hall closet, he knew why: from the second floor he heard Emily Moore’s petulant voice hectoring his wife.

“Not there! It doesn’t belong there! How many times do I have to tell you?”

Taking the stairs two at a time, Bill had started toward the open door to Emily’s room when he heard the old woman’s voice again, and realized the sound was coming from the room next to his mother-in-law’s. He continued down the wide hallway to the door and pushed it open.

Except for the basics — the wallpaper, carpet, and upholstery — the room had completely changed. The four-poster bed, the Queen Anne chair by the window, the Chippendale chiffonier — all were gone, replaced by a cheap set of painted furniture that Bill didn’t quite recognize, though it looked vaguely familiar.

Then it came to him.

Cynthia’s room.

Everything that had been in his wife’s sister’s room — the room that his mother-in-law had always kept in readiness for her long-dead daughter’s return — was now in this room.

In this house.

In his house.

The pictures that had hung on the walls — three original Currier and Ives prints — were gone, replaced with the hodgepodge of posters and snapshots that had been plastered on the walls of the little house on Burlington Avenue.

The Winslow Homer — minor, but original — that had hung over the mantel of the room’s small fireplace had been replaced with the large portrait of Cynthia that in Emily’s house had hung on the wall opposite her beloved daughter’s bed.

And his entire family — his wife, his stepson, his mother-in-law — were all gathered in that room.

“What’s going on?” he asked, keeping his voice carefully modulated so it betrayed nothing of his suddenly churning emotions.

Joan, reacting as if she’d been stung, whirled to face him. The color drained from her face, and her eyes flicked back and forth between her husband and her mother, as if she were unable to decide where her safety lay.

Matt, who was standing on a stool adjusting the portrait of his aunt, dropped to the floor. “We were just helping Gra — ” he began, but Bill cut him off before he could finish.

“I thought we decided all of this would stay where it was,” he said to Joan, still managing to keep his voice from betraying his feelings.

“I know, but Mother — ” Again Joan’s eyes darted toward her mother, who was now glowering at Bill. When his wife spoke again, her voice was trembling. “She said she wouldn’t stay here without Cynthia’s things. They mean so much to her, and I thought — ”

“I see,” Bill said.

Matt, sensing the storm that was suddenly brewing between his mother and his stepfather, slipped out of the room, retreating to his own at the far end of the hall.

Joan tilted her head almost imperceptibly toward her mother. “Can’t we talk about this later?”

Bill hesitated. Fragments of conversations flicked through his head:

His wife’s voice: Nothing I do is ever good enough.

His own: She’s always been that way. That’s one of the reasons she can’t live with us — she’ll destroy this family.

His stepson’s voice: How come she’s so mean to you, Mom?

And once again, his wife’s voice: She doesn’t mean it. She’s just old. And she’s my mother.

Every night that week they’d waited until Emily — and Matt too — had gone to bed, and then tried to talk about it. Or, to be honest, they talked about it the first two nights.

Then they started fighting about it, and no matter how hard each of them tried, the fight had grown steadily more bitter.

This morning at breakfast the atmosphere had been so tense that none of them talked at all. Matt, pleading unfinished homework, had escaped from the house half an hour earlier than he ever left, and Joan, on the pretext of feeding her mother, had disappeared upstairs. But the simple fact was that what he feared had come true.

His home was no longer what it had been all his life, no longer offered shelter and comfort.

Not for him.

Not for his family.

Instead it had become a battle zone under the control of a woman whose disease had robbed her of any regard for anything but the preservation of her own delusions.

Hapgood Farm was no longer his home.

“Maybe we can talk about it a lot later,” Bill finally said, his voice reflecting the sadness and pain in his soul as he answered his wife’s question. “Maybe we can talk about it next week, or the week after. But not tonight. Not if it means going through what we’ve been going through every night this week.”

He left the guest room and went through the master bedroom to his closet. Taking out his suitcase, he began to pack. Twice, he almost changed his mind, almost took the clothes out of the suitcase and hung them back in the closet. But what good would it do? If he stayed, he wouldn’t be able to keep silent, wouldn’t be able to prevent himself from trying to protect his family from the wounds Emily Moore inflicted nearly every time she spoke.