summer!” Maya trilled. “I’ll bring the girls and we get sponsors and we make it a whole week get-a-way, like, spa retreat, yes?” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that there were no spas near Stonehaven, no SoulCycle studios, no restaurants serving avocado toast. But Saskia seemed to have figured that out on her own: At the end of the party she hugged me as if she was saying goodbye to me forever.
I couldn’t get away fast enough.
A moving truck arrived the next day and hauled my life away. I snapped a last photo as the truck lumbered off, rattling uneasily along the cobblestones, and uploaded this to Instagram: And so I begin a new journey! “Every great dream begins with a dreamer”—Helen Keller. #sotrue.
Later, I would discover that Victor had liked this image, and I would wonder what he liked about it: the positivity, or the departure.
* * *
—
Stonehaven was like a time capsule when I arrived. Nothing had changed since the day we left, years earlier: The furniture was still covered in white cloths, the grandfather clock in the foyer was stopped at 11:25, the tins of foie gras in the pantry had expired in 2010. There was no dust and the property had been well maintained, thanks to the caretaker and his wife who, until my father died and the bills began going unpaid, had been living in a cottage on the far edge of the property. Still, as I walked through the dark, lifeless rooms, I realized I’d moved into a crypt. Everything cold to the touch. Everything inert.
Sometimes, as I moved through the house—throwing off dustcloths, examining bookshelves—I thought I felt the ghost of my mother. There was a soft dent in the sofa in the library, on the cushion where she liked to sit, and when I settled myself into the groove she left behind, there was a prickle at the back of my neck, as if someone had blown gently on the hairs there. I closed my eyes and tried to remember what it felt like to have Maman’s arms around me, but what I felt instead was a cold knot in my belly, the grip of skeleton fingers rising from the grave to grab at me.
At one point I found myself in the guest bedroom where the Meissen birds still sat frozen in their cabinet, waiting to be set free. I picked one out—a yellow canary—and turned it in my hands, remembering how my mother tipped her hands and let that parrot shatter. I wondered if my mother identified with these trapped birds. I wondered if her suicide was a kind of escape, not just from the pain of her failed marriage and troubled child, but from a cage she’d felt locked inside.
I won’t let this house kill me, too, I thought, and then gave myself a little shake, to toss off this morbid thought.
It didn’t help that I was so alone. Tahoe City was not so far on the map, but it felt like a world away; I wasn’t sure how to go about making friends on this quiet stretch of the West Shore. People come and go in Tahoe; the lights in the vacation homes along the shoreline flick on one week and off the next. At the general store up the road, the locals buying their coffee and the Reno Gazette-Journal looked right past me, assuming from my New York clothes and the Mercedes SUV parked out front that I was just passing through.
And so I spent my days alone, milling through the rooms of Stonehaven, feeling increasingly like a bird in a cage myself. I’d pace the property, shoreline to road and back again, walking in circles until my calves ached, never seeing a soul. On warm days, I’d walk down to the end of the dock, where the water-skiers turned the glassy water into chop, and dutifully upload smiling bikini selfies: Loving my #lakelife! On bad days, I’d stay in bed, blinds closed against the light, scrolling through my own Instagram archive: thousands upon thousands of photos of a strange woman who shared my name. Social media feeds the narcissistic monster that lives within us all, I would think to myself. It feeds it and grows it