Dream House by Catherine Armsden Page B

Paul, with her sharply contoured face and dark hair, but her long, flat eyebrows were from Gina’s mother. Gina opened the window curtains to reveal six scraggly petunias still wearing a few anemic blossoms. She’d planted them in the window box to mitigate Esther’s view of the neighbor’s brown siding, four feet away, but lately she’d neglected to water them.
    She kissed Esther’s cheek. “Time to get up, Estie.”
    Esther’s eyes fluttered open. “Did you look for a photograph for my project?” she asked.
    â€œNot yet. But I will now.”
    Gina left her and went down the hall to the study. The room was lined with books—volumes of architectural theory and monographs on the lower shelves, and above, novels—upright, piled, lying, leaning—but also photographs of family: the inheritance of a photographer’s daughter. She’d returned from Maine with a box of childhood photos and in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep, she’d been looking through them obsessively, the way one looks for something lost. Like the novels, the photos were stories that had already taken place. She wondered when she would she begin to select which stories to keep and which to throw away. Did peopleever lose their fear of forgetting?
    Now, in more than three decades’ worth of photographs, she was determined to find a recent picture of her parents alone for Esther’s project. But so far, Eleanor and Ron had shown up only in groups, usually with one of Gina’s children: Esther with grandmother Eleanor sailing the Cape Dory in Maine, Ben and grandfather Ron rowing the dinghy, Esther—a year older—with Ron and Eleanor, standing on their dock. Their stage for all these activities was the luminous cove that had always made everyone their photogenic best. In the pictures, her parents sparkled with jubilance; they had been jubilant, as though with their grandchildren they were experiencing the joys of parenting for the first time.
    Finally, the perfect photograph appeared, taken on her parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary—the diminutive Eleanor looking cheerfully up at Ron, who held her hands in both of his. A picture is worth a thousand words, she thought, and can hide a thousand more.
    On the desk, the phone rang; Gina picked it up. “Dearie, it’s Annie Bridges. I couldn’t reach Cassie, and I bet you’re running around trying to get out of the house at this hour. But I wanted to tell you that the ‘for sale’ sign at your house is gone.”
    â€œWow—thank you, Annie, for letting me know. We all knew it was going to happen, but it still feels kind of strange.”
    â€œIt sure does! Well, I’ll let you go. We’ll chat at a better time.”
    When Gina hung up, she was buzzing; Annie’s news had triggered the memory of Cassie’s call about her parents’ accident two months ago. After that call, too, she’d been standing here in the study, trying to fathom the loss, feeling as if there were something she should be doing but rendered helpless by geographical distance.
    She turned to leave the study and glanced at the framed sixteen-by-twenty, black–and-white photograph of the cove that sat on the desk, waiting to be hung. As soon as she’d returned from Maine, she’dgone to look for it in the storage closet and had taken it to be framed. She resolved to put it up today, when she got home from work.
    In the bathroom, Paul shaved; Gina put in her contacts. Ben came in and pulled out the stool to brush his teeth.
    â€œI got a cancellation today, so I have a couple free hours beginning at eleven,” Paul said, rinsing his razor. “What’s your day like? Think you might be able to get away? We could go up to the property—it’ll be nice and warm there.”
    A year and a half ago, they’d bought a place north of the city, in Marin, that they were