Page 9 of My Favorite Lost Cause
“You sound like the naïve girl in a horror movie,” I warn her. “The one who dies first.”
After another thirty seconds, the house comes into view at last and that queasy guilt in my stomach worsens. What was once a stately old Southern mansion, complete with a broad front porch, is now…a relic. The kind of place you chance upon and wonder why the hell it’s still standing—the stairs are caving in, windowpanes are broken, the roof sags dangerously, and a massive tree branch juts out of its center like a flagpole.
This isn’t a house my mother abandoned a few months ago. It’s a house that seems to have been abandoned since I last saw it.
How could this much destruction take place over the course of twelve years?
My mother couldn’t have been living here.
God, Ihopeshe wasn’t living here.
A better son would have known what was happening. A better son would have come back to see her.
The last time she came to visit me, she prattled on about endless bullshit that didn’t matter—her friend Marianne’s granddaughter and the clerk at the Stop-n-Shop. Now I’ve got to wonder if it was just so I never got a chance to ask her about anything real.
I pull to a stop in front of the rotting stairs, ready to suggestwe just go find a hotel. Beaufort and Hilton Head aren’t far. The structural engineer will get here within an hour and condemn the place, and we’ll find a five-star hotel and be done with it. Hot girl with a Southern accent for me, while Maren spends the night on a call with her puppies or watching informational videos about microplastics in the water supply. We’ll get out of Charleston in the morning.
“Ohhhh,” Maren says, however—as if she has stumbled upon the Taj Mahal by accident. “Oh, Charlie, look at this place.”
“By which you must mean, ‘Charlie, yes, it’s just as terrible as you said it would be,’ yet I’m not hearing that in your tone.”
“Terrible?It’s an abandoned mansion surrounded by oaks! I feel like Odysseus, chancing upon the home of a god.”
“I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about, but I can promise you there aren’t any gods in there. I’d bet my ass there’s a family of squirrels, however.”
Maren is clearly experiencing something entirely different, as she’s out of the car andfuck?—
“Maren, wait!” I shout, darting out of the driver’s seat and lunging in her direction. My warning comes too late. She is already on the stairs, one of which promptly starts to crack underfoot. She flails and hurtles backward, like a tree pulled out at the root.
I barely manage to catch her before she hits the ground.
She swallows, staring up at me with wide eyes. “I didn’t expect that.”
“That the stairs were going to cave in?” I’m winded, and I don’t think it’s from lunging three feet. She could have broken her fucking spine. “Clearly.”
“No,” she says with a breathless laugh. “I didn’t expect you’d bother trying to catch me.”
Of course she didn’t. We probably ought to keep it that way.
6
MAREN
Charlie is full of surprises. If he was anyone else—meaning not my stepbrother, and also not Charlie Dalton— I’d say it was almost romantic, the way he lunged to save me.
He brusquely sets me on my feet like a misbehaving child. “Let’s get something straight,” he barks. “You don’t take a step on the property until we know it’s safe, clear?”
I ignore his tone, walking to the other side of the stairs. There is something about the house. It calls to me, pulling me inside it. From the instant it came into view, it’s felt momentous…a sort of promise that my life is about to change.
I can’t say this aloud—not to Charlie, who is inclined to ridicule me even when I am saying perfectly rational things. But…this place. The trees hang heavy with Spanish moss, and the warm air is soft as velvet on my skin. There’s so much noise, but none of it is manmade— a whisper against my ears rather than a bruise. I’d almost forgotten what it could be like, out of the city. I’d almost forgotten how much I’ve missed it.
I take a careful first step and find myself lifted by the waist and removed from the stairs entirely.
“Maren, it’s as if you didn’t hear me two seconds ago. I’m going first.” He releases an aggravated sigh as he starts to climb the stairs ahead of me. “I can already tell we’d be better off just burning the place down.”
Does he really not feel how timeless this is? These trees, this house, this magnolia-scented heat…all of it existed a hundred years ago. I could be Zelda Fitzgerald right now, a debutante enjoying one last dance before all the boys leave for the First World War. I could be Daisy Buchanan, pining for Jay Gatsby.
I take a deep breath and the house says,Come, take another breath and another after that. Let me put you back together.Which is yet another thing I can’t tell Charlie. He seems like the type who’d object to a talking house.
