“Coming,” I say.
Later, when I carry a cardboard box of spatulas and bowls into the kitchen, this scene is all I can see: the father pressing his wife backward over the stained orange Formica counters, his hands around her neck, trying to wring the life out of her as if she were a dirty dishrag. When I go to my new school their little girl will turn out to be in my kindergarten class. She’ll have light brown hair cut in a pageboy and she’ll want to be a dentist and I’ll never be able to meet her eyes without wondering whether she watched.
But the school system is a good one, one of the best in the state. The house, marked by its past, is cheap, and with four kids and only my father’s salary as a government lawyer, cheap is what my parents need. There’s a lawn that unfurls like a carpet and upstairs bedrooms enough for all six of us: my parents will take the large one at the top of the stairs, while my twin brother, Andy, and my littlest sister, Elize, each get a smaller one pushing back into the house. My middle sister, Nicola, and I will share the bedroom farthest from the front. The house’s long corridors—perfect for playing catch—make the house seem grand. It was grand once, officers’ quarters in the Revolutionary War, when, my father tells me, the neighbor boy’s stone house was only the barn. I love imagining horses’ heads poking out from the little windows that dot the stone house, the horses’ jaws working their hay like the boy chewed his gum.
The big house is in disrepair. The feature in best shape is a wooden staircase that rises steeply out of the entrance foyer. After the officers left the house, my father tells us, a family moved in, then two more generations of families before us. One of those earlier fathers built the staircase from a kit out of the Sears Roebuck catalog. It is still well-preserved, shellacked, with its fine turned posts not even dented. A couple of years from now, when we finally get a black mutt with perky ears on the condition that my father be allowed to name him Cowboy, the dog will teethe on the staircase posts. Each time my father will pay to have a man in town with a lathe make a perfect copy of the damaged post. Years from now, when we’re adults, my sisters and I will each get a dog of our own, and when we visit my aging parents in this house, each dog in its puppyhood will chew through the posts. Each time my father will go back to the same man with the lathe, then elderly, and painstakingly replace each one. As though, having inherited the staircase from the fathers before him, it were his special duty to maintain it.
But the rest of the house has taken a beating. The roof has bald spots where shingles have fallen off like fur from mange. Some of the interior walls have holes, places you can see the house’s skeleton beams. Great bubbles of green linoleum rise from the kitchen floor. They crackle when I step on them, but even when I jump I can’t make them burst.
My father finds three boys from a nearby architectural college who need cash and aren’t afraid of a little sawdust. One of them, Greg, pleases my father by researching how to add gingerbread trim to the house, swirls of two-inch-thick wood he’ll cut out and tack to the rooflines, reminding me of icing. Greg has an idea. He will rebuild the house in the style known as Carpenter Gothic, handmade flourishes everywhere.
My father has always loved big dreams, and Greg is suddenly the group leader. Lanky and tan, Greg has a head of curls that turn blonder and blonder in the sun as the summer weeks go by. My twin brother had curls like that as a toddler. Now Andy’s hair has turned dark, he favors a crew cut, and when he takes off his shirt at the beach there’s a slash all the way across his stomach that I faintly understand and faintly don’t. He was sick when we were born; he is sick sometimes now. Even though we aren’t unpacked yet, aren’t set up in the house, my parents still have a blue duffel bag ready in the upstairs closet for when they have to take him to the hospital, for reasons I don’t know but, somehow, know not to ask about. With the crew cut emphasizing the fine bones of his face, and his ribs jutting out over the scar, my brother’s white suburban sneakers make him look like an adopted refugee from some forgotten war.
But the architect boys are beautiful. Greg scales the pitched peaks of the roof. His friends climb high ladders over the windows. They cut through the air like dolphins through water, not slowed by the tape measures and wrenches that dangle from the belt loops of their cutoffs. The tools trail behind them, as though they, like me, can do nothing but follow the boys. In the evenings I watch them from the lawn, the sound of crickets surrounding us. Sometimes when they stay late Greg cuts holes in the top of a jar for me, and when I bring him the fireflies I’ve caught he praises me. “That’s a pretty one,” he says. “Isn’t its light beautiful?” I love the fireflies’ glow so much that once, instead of releasing my catch, I keep the jar on my nightstand. But in the morning the fireflies are just bugs; they don’t give off any light.
One day, my father gives Greg a set of keys and claps him on the back. They review clipboard lists the boys suddenly carry, then nod and shake hands in the gravel driveway. My parents pack us all up to visit my mother’s relatives in France. By the time we come home, we will have a new home. The house will be wiped clean of its past.
Only one main road leads into Tenafly. It begins on the far end of town from our house, winding leisurely down a large hill. There, the road’s banked sides give generous lift to trees that yawn and stretch with plenty of room to bend. Beneath the trees’ canopies sprawl estates of elaborately landscaped lawns with white-pillared houses and iron gates. Tiny stone bridges arch artificial brooks.