“Why don’t you leave the old man alone and go back to wasting your time and his money?” he sneered at them on his way out of the house.
“When did the little prince become so pious?” his father had retorted. “You’ll know what it’s like when you fall out of favor.”
But Darlington never had the chance. His grandfather got sick. His doctor told him to stop smoking, change the way he ate, said he could buy himself a few more months, maybe even a year. Danny’s grandfather refused. He would have things his way or not at all. A nurse was hired to live in the house. Daniel Tabor Arlington grew grayer and more frail.
The Layabouts came to stay, and suddenly Black Elm felt like enemy territory. The kitchen was full of his mother’s special foods, stacks of plastic containers, little bags of grains and nuts that crowded the counters. His father was constantly pacing through the ground-floor rooms, talking on his cell phone—about getting the house assessed, probate law, tax law. Bernadette was banished in favor of a cleaning crew that appeared twice a week in a dark green van and used only organic products.
Danny spent most of his time at the museum or in his room with the door locked, lost in books he consumed like a flame eating air, trying to stay alight. He practiced his Greek, started teaching himself Portuguese.
His grandfather’s bedroom was crowded with equipment—IVs to keep him hydrated, oxygen to keep him breathing, a hospital bed beside the huge four-poster to keep him elevated. It looked like a time traveler from the future had taken over the dim space.
Whenever Danny tried to talk to his grandfather about what his parents were doing, about the real estate agent who had come to walk the property, his grandfather would seize his wrist and glance meaningfully at the nurse. “She listens,” he hissed.
And maybe she did. Darlington was fifteen years old. He didn’t know how much of what his grandfather said was true, if the cancer was speaking or the drugs.
“They’re keeping me alive so they can control the estate, Danny.”
“But your lawyer—”
“You think they can’t make him promises? Let me die, Danny.
They’ll bleed Black Elm dry.”
Danny went out alone to sit at the counter at Clark’s, and when Leona had set a dish of ice cream in front of him, he’d had to press the heels of his hands against his eyes to keep from crying. He’d sat there until they needed to close and only then taken the bus home.
The next day, they found his grandfather cold in his bed. He’d slipped into a coma and could not be revived. There were furious, whispered conversations, closed doors, his father yelling at the nurse.
Danny had spent his days at the Peabody Museum. The staff didn’t mind. There was a whole herd of kids who got dumped there during the summers. He’d walked through the mineral room; communed with the mummy, and the giant squid, and Crichton’s raptor; tried to redraw the reptile mural. He walked the Yale campus, spent hours deciphering the different languages above the Sterling Library doors, was drawn again and again to the Beinecke’s collection of tarot cards, to the impenetrable Voynich Manuscript. Staring at its pages was like standing at Lighthouse Point all over again, waiting for the world to reveal itself.
When it started to get dark, he took the bus home and crept in through the garden doors, moving silently through the house, retreating to his bedroom and his books. Ordinary subjects weren’t enough anymore. He was too old to believe in magic, but he needed to believe that there was something more to the world than living and dying. So he called his need an interest in the occult, the arcane, sacred objects. He spent his time hunting down the work of alchemists and spiritualists who had promised ways of looking into the unseen. All he needed was a glimpse, something to sustain him.
Danny had been curled up in his high tower room, reading Paracelsus beside Waite’s translation, when his grandfather’s attorney had knocked on the door. “You’re going to have to make some choices,” he’d said. “I know you want to honor your grandfather’s memory, but you should do what’s best for you.”
It wasn’t bad advice, but Danny had no idea what might be best for him.
His grandfather had lived off the Arlington money, doling it out as he saw fit, but the estate prohibited him from leaving it to anyone but his son. The house was another story. It would be held in trust for Danny until he was eighteen.
Danny was surprised when his mother appeared at his bedroom door. “The university wants the house,” she said, then looked around the circular turret room. “If we all sign off, then the profits can be shared. You can come to New York.”
“I don’t want to live in New York.”
“You can’t begin to imagine the opportunities that will open for you there.”
Nearly a year before, he’d taken the Metro-North to the city, spent hours walking Central Park, sitting in the Temple of Dendur at the Met. He’d gone to his parents’ apartment building, thought about ringing the bell, lost his nerve. “I don’t want to leave Black Elm.”
His mother sat down on the edge of the bed. “Only the land is valuable, Danny. You have to understand that this house is worthless. Worse than worthless. It will drain every dollar we have.”
“I’m not selling Black Elm.”
“You have no idea what the world is like, Daniel. You’re still a child, and I envy that.”
“That’s not what you envy.”
The words emerged low and cold, exactly the way Danny wanted them to sound, but his mother just laughed. “What do you think is going to happen here? There’s less than thirty thousand dollars in the trust for your college education, so unless you think you’d like to make some friends at UConn, it’s time to start reevaluating. Your grandfather sold you a false bill of goods. He led you on just as he led us on. You think you’ll be some Lord of Black Elm? You don’t rule this place. It rules you. Take what you can from it now.”
This town.
Danny stayed in his room. He locked the door. He ate granola bars and drank water from the sink in his bathroom. He supposed it was a kind of mourning, but he also just didn’t know what to do. There was a stash of one thousand dollars tucked into a copy of McCullough’s 1776 in the library. When he was eighteen he’d have access to his college fund. Beyond that, he had nothing. But he couldn’t let go of Black Elm, he wouldn’t, not so someone could put a wrecking ball through its walls. Not for anything. This was his place. Who would he be untethered from this house? From its wild gardens and gray stone, from the birds that sang in its hedges, from the bare branches of its trees. He’d lost the person who knew him best, who loved him most. What else was there to cling to?
And then one day he realized the house had gone silent, that he’d heard his parents’ car rumble down the drive but never heard them return. He opened his door and crept down the stairs to find Black Elm completely empty. It hadn’t occurred to him that his parents might simply leave. Had he secretly been holding them hostage, forcing them to stay in New Haven, to pay attention to him for the first time in his life?
At first he was elated. He turned on all of the lights, the television in his bedroom and the one in the den downstairs. He ate leftover food from the fridge and fed the white cat that sometimes prowled the grounds at dusk.
The next day, he did what he always did: He got up and went to the Peabody. He came home, ate beef jerky, went to bed. He did it again and again. When the school year started, he went to school. He answered all of the mail that came to Black Elm. He lived off Gatorade and chicken rolls from 7-Eleven. He was ashamed that sometimes he missed Bernadette more than he missed his grandfather.