Rebecca Makkai - The Hundred-Year House

“Or a tragicomedy,” said Zee.

Doug said, “I don’t know.” He was still thinking about Gracie, and didn’t trust himself to form a coherent sentence.

“Well, I think it was a tragedy,” Bruce said. “An absolute and gruesome tragedy. The whole damn century would’ve made more sense backward. Where we’ve ended is worse than where we began.”

Miriam said, “Maybe it was a love story.”

Doug was so busy watching Zee sneer at Miriam that he didn’t see Bruce collapse on the floor beside him. He heard Gracie scream, and there was Bruce, his right arm flapping, his face pale and wet.

Case ran to the phone, and for the five minutes it took the ambulance to get there, Gracie kept shrieking that someone should do CPR, and Zee kept calmly explaining that you could only perform CPR on a dead person and Bruce wasn’t dead.

Doug monitored Bruce’s pulse, which was weak but consistent, and tried to remember what other medical skills he’d been taught in his 1985 training for YMCA camp counselor. Hidalgo ran in circles and barked.

Miriam managed to let the paramedics in through the triple-locked doors, and as they carried the stretcher through the house Hidalgo lunged at it again and again with his front paws, until one of the men sent him flying with a knee to the sternum. Bruce was stable as they carried him out, conscious and wheezing and trying to lift his head.

Gracie rode in the ambulance. Once she was out the door, Doug suggested that Zee drive with Case in Gracie’s car, and he and Miriam follow in the Subaru. “Someone needs to put Hidalgo in his cage,” he said. The job would take twenty minutes of bribery and wrestling, and required at least two people. “We’ll come right behind.” Zee shot him a withering look he couldn’t quite interpret, but she grabbed Case’s elbow and steered him out the door.

Miriam held up her hand to show it shaking. If she’d been closer to her father-in-law he would have waited, but he couldn’t hold it in. “You won’t believe this,” he said.

As they turned off the TV (seven minutes to midnight) and the lights, and constructed a trail of Milkbones to Hidalgo’s kennel in the mudroom, he repeated what he could. He knew he was leaving things out, and he told her at least three times about the man named Max and the way he turned the newspaper pages.

“I was totally drawn in,” he said. “I couldn’t think straight. You’d have done a better job. Anyone would’ve.”

Miriam spun in circles, trying to catch Hidalgo’s red leather collar. “So basically her story is she can’t be seventy-four because she’s really some other person?”

“I believe that was the gist of it. She kept talking about ‘Grace’ like that wasn’t her. So allegedly Grace died , I think? In the car crash. And someone else died too. I don’t know if she said it was George, but that was what I got. She said 1955.”

“Hmm. Those are the principles of a good lie. Tell a big one, and throw in details. Hidalgo! Sit! Hidalgo!”

“Right. So you — you think she was lying.”

“She gave you one excuse for the papers, and when you didn’t believe it she gave you another, complete with tears and melodrama. She told you nothing about the files?”

Doug felt like an utter idiot. He’d become a dimwitted television viewer, sucked into a soap opera and too distracted by the amnesia and stolen identity and ghosts to realize he’d just watched five ads for laundry detergent. Gracie had warned him, hadn’t she? That she was smarter than she looked. But no, it had been real. It had felt real.

“She was crying,” he said. “I can’t explain — it wasn’t like she was making something up. She was letting something out.” He got Hidalgo straddled for one second, but in the next Doug was falling into the wall and Hidalgo was again circling frantically.

“It’s insane. I mean, for many reasons. Not one person in the whole town saw they weren’t the real Grants? Not one family member suspected something funny?”

“I didn’t tell that part right. The woman, Grace, she always had a black eye, because the husband hit her, and he was always out drinking. So they didn’t go into town. And the family didn’t visit.” He wasn’t sure if he was defending Gracie’s story, or only his own credulity, however fragile.

“I’m not buying it. Hidalgo! Biscuit!”

If Miriam didn’t believe it, Miriam , who believed houses had souls, who wouldn’t write anyone a letter when Mercury was retrograde, then was he the most gullible man in the world? But his narration was flawed. Nothing new there. He had made uninvited changes to the world of the story.

In one ninja-fast move, Miriam wrapped her fingers through Hidalgo’s collar and pushed his backside until he stood, stunned and whimpering, in his kennel.

“Impressive,” Doug said. He checked his watch. “In fact, that was officially the best dog-wrangling of the twenty-first century.”

“Of the millennium!” Miriam said. “Happy New Year.”

—

They sat with Zee a long time in the ER waiting room, watching Ricky Martin gyrate soundlessly on the overhead TV. Case came out at two-thirty to lead them to the ICU, where chairs lined the end of the hallway. Places for people to get bad news. Gracie was in one, her legs crossed at the ankle, her pocketbook clutched on her lap.

“He’s still stable,” she said. “It was a massive coronary. Doesn’t that sound dramatic? But they’ve got the best doctors in there. Bruce and I are big supporters of this hospital, and not for nothing. Douglas is going to help me get some coffee now, because in my nervous state I can’t pour a thing.”

She held his arm all the way down the corridor and around the corner. She stopped and clenched both his shoulders in her hands. She was sharply sober. “It should go without saying,” she said, “that what passed between us was privileged information.” He feared for a moment that she’d guessed what he told Miriam. But no, it was just a warning. “You do know which side your bread is buttered on. If this information were to get out at all— at all —there would be Devohr cousins descending on us in an instant. Like locusts. You ’d be homeless, among other things. Not to mention, it would kill Zilla.”

He said, “I wouldn’t dream of repeating—”

“Good. And I want you to know that while I wouldn’t cheapen our relationship by paying you off, I do guarantee that if you hold your tongue, I’ll make it worth your while in the long run.”

He wanted to ask if there was some medication she’d been neglecting, and he wanted to ask if she thought he was a moron, and at the same time he wanted to tell her he believed every word. But here was his opportunity. “All I need is the colony files in the attic. Just the key to the attic, really.” Doug saw dimly, through the fog, that he was demanding things from a woman whose husband was in Intensive Care. He was a bad person.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake. Of course. Run and get me coffee, though. Cream and sugar.”

Doug practically floated to the cafeteria, and although he told himself several times that he should be worried about Bruce, all he could think of was that key, and those files, and of how he’d relate Gracie’s vehemence to Miriam later.

He returned with a thin cup of scalding coffee. Back in the ICU corridor, they were all standing: Zee with her hands on her hips; Miriam clinging to Case; Case pale and thin; Gracie with her hand to her forehead; two doctors, one tall, one short. As Doug approached the group, Zee turned and glared. “He’s dead,” she said. As if it were Doug’s fault. As if Doug, in those five minutes, had betrayed them all.