Maeve opened the door a crack. “Too early?”
Now that it was morning, yesterday’s plan seemed utterly sensible, necessary. Maeve in the kitchen was her own bright self, making coffee, telling me how fine she felt like none of it had happened. (“I just needed a bath and a good night’s sleep,” she said). I could see that I would be home early enough to make amends. We were outside in the dark again just past four o’clock, Maeve locking the back door of her little house. We were ahead of the schedule we had laid out for ourselves. Nothing would be lost.
“Let’s go to the house,” Maeve said once we were back in my car.
“Really?”
“We’ve never gone over there this time of day.”
“We’ve never done anything this time of day.”
“It’s not like we’re going to be late.” She had so much energy. I had forgotten the way she was in the morning, like each new day came in on a wave she had managed to catch. The Dutch House wasn’t far from where Maeve lived, and since it was in the general direction of where we were going, and since we had gotten out so early, I didn’t see how there was any harm in it. The neighborhoods were dark, the street lights on. It wouldn’t be light until after seven. I had left New York in the dark and I would get home before it was light again. That wasn’t too bad.
The houses on VanHoebeek Street were never entirely dark. People left their porch lights on all night, as if they were always waiting for someone to come home. Gas lights flickered at the ends of driveways, a lamp in the front window of a living room stayed on through the night, but even with all these small bursts of illumination there was a stillness about the place that made it clear the inhabitants were all in their beds, even the dogs of Elkins Park were asleep. I pulled the car into our spot and turned off the engine. The moon in the west was bright enough to drown out any stars. It poured over everything equally: the leafless trees and the driveway, the wide lawn scattered with leaves and the wide stone stairs. Moonlight poured across the house and into the car where Maeve and I sat. When would I have seen this as a boy, up hours before dawn on the clear, cold winter night? I would have been like everyone else in the neighborhood, sound asleep in my bed.
“You’ll tell May and Kevin I’m sorry,” Maeve said.
We were in the car together, each of us deep in our separate thoughts. It took me a minute to realize she was talking about the ballet and the dinner after. “They won’t be upset.”
“I don’t want to think I ruined it for her.”
I couldn’t focus myself on May when everything around me was shimmering frost and moonlight. Maybe I was still half asleep. “Do you ever come over here in the morning, early like this?”
Maeve shook her head. I don’t think she was even looking at the house, how beautiful it was rising up out of the darkness. For the most part I had stopped seeing it a long time ago, but every now and then something would happen, something like this, and my eyes would open again and I would see it there—enormous, preposterous, spectacular. A brigade of nutcrackers could come pouring out of the dark hedges at any minute and be met by a battalion of mice. The lawn was sugared with ice. The stage at Lincoln Center hadn’t been made to look like the Dutch House, it was that the Dutch House was the setting for a ridiculous fairy tale ballet. Was it possible our father had turned into the driveway that first time and been struck by the revelation that this was where he wanted to raise his family? Was that what it meant to be a poor man, newly rich?
“Look,” Maeve said in a whisper.
The light in the master bedroom had come on. The master bedroom faced the front of the house, while Maeve’s room, the better room with the smaller closet, looked over the back gardens. Several minutes later we saw the light in the upstairs hallway, and then the light on the stairs, like the first time Maeve had brought me back when I came home from Choate, but now the whole thing was happening in reverse. In the car, in the dark, we said nothing. Five minutes passed, ten minutes. Then a woman was walking down the driveway in a light-colored coat. While logic would suggest that it could have been a housekeeper or one of the girls, it was clear to both of us even from a distance that it was Andrea. Her hair, pulled back in a ponytail, was a brighter blond in the moonlight. She kept her arms around herself, holding her coat tightly closed, the edge of something pink trailing behind her. We could see some slippers that might have been boots. It looked for all the world like she was coming straight for us.
“She sees us.” Maeve’s voice was low and I put my hand on her wrist on the off chance she was planning to get out of the car.
When Andrea was still a good ten feet from the end of the driveway, she stopped and turned her face to the moon, moving one hand up to hold closed the collar of her coat. She hadn’t stopped for a scarf. She hadn’t expected the early morning dark to be so clear or the moon so full, and she stood there, taking it in. She was twenty years older than I was, or that’s how I remembered it. I was forty-two, Maeve was forty-nine, soon to be fifty. Andrea took a few more steps towards us and Maeve slipped her fingers through mine. She was entirely too close, our stepmother, as close as a person on the other side of the street. I could see both how she had aged and how she was exactly herself: eyes, nose, chin. There was nothing extraordinary about her. She was a woman I had known in my childhood and now did not know at all, a woman who had, for several years, been married to our father. She leaned over, picked up the folded newspaper from the pea gravel, and, tucking it under one arm, turned away, walking into the frost-covered field of the front lawn.
“Where is she going?” Maeve whispered, because for all the world it looked like she was headed towards the hedge that bordered the property to the south. The moon hung on her pale coat, her pale hair, until she passed behind the line of trees and we couldn’t see her anymore. We waited. Andrea didn’t reappear at the front doors.
“Do you think she’s gone around to the back? That doesn’t make any sense. It’s freezing.” It hadn’t occurred to me until now that I was never the one driving when we went to the Dutch House, and that from this vantage point the view was subtly changed.
“Go,” Maeve said.
We stopped at a diner instead of going straight to the train station to pick up her car, and over eggs and toast, the same thing we’d eaten for dinner, broke down Andrea’s trip to get the paper frame by frame. Had she seen something out there we couldn’t see? Were those slippers or boots? Andrea had never gone to get the paper herself. She had never come downstairs in her nightgown, or maybe she had, when none of us were awake. Of course, she would be living in the house alone now. Norma and Bright, whom we always thought of as being so young, must be in their late thirties by now. How long had Andrea been there alone?
Finally, when we had exhausted every fact and supposition, Maeve put her coffee cup down in its saucer. “I’m done,” she said.
The waitress came by and I told her we’d take the check.
Maeve shook her head. She put her hands on the table and looked at me straight, the way our father would tell her to do. “I’m done with Andrea. I’m making a pledge to you right here. I’m done with the house. I’m not going back there anymore.”
“Okay,” I said.
“When she started walking towards the car I thought I was having a heart attack. I felt an actual pain in my chest just seeing her again, and it’s been how many years since she threw us out?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“That’s enough, isn’t it? We don’t need to do this. We can go someplace else. We can park at the arboretum and look at the trees.”