The Homecoming Read online

  The laughter is over. Nothing of it remains. The forest has swallowed it whole. The man at the door waits, waxy, preposterous. Yet despite all this, the signs of things sliding from strange to wrong, we have no choice but to carry ourselves up the steps and slouch inside.

  3

  IT TAKES A MOMENT FOR our eyes to adjust once the door is closed. There are lights on—multiple bulbs set into a chandelier overhead, one that’s made of what looks like animal bones fused together into an ornate, alien rib cage—but they’re dimmed. For a time, all we can focus on with certainty is the man standing before us, a canine smile stretched tight above his chin. He’s got to be the lawyer. It’s the boastful accessories that give him away. The monogrammed cuff links, Ivy alumni tie, chunky Rolex. Evidence of decades spent tallying up the top-end billable hours.

  He introduces himself as Mr. Fogarty. A caricaturizing surname like a minor character out of Dickens. In fact, he looks like a minor character out of Dickens: silver reading glasses balanced on the end of his beakish nose, small yellow teeth, the navy three-piece suit with a vest he keeps adjusting but never unbuttons despite the humidity.

  He looks at each of us in turn.

  “This is all of you?”

  “Who else were you expecting?” Franny says.

  The lawyer spins on the heels of his leather oxfords to face her. “No one in particular.”

  “Okay. I know it’s not your fault or anything, Mr. Fogarty. But I think I can speak for all of us when I say we’re not totally comfortable with being dragged out here for something we could have done far more easily downtown,” I say, backing Franny up while attempting businesslike civility. “So can I suggest we get started?”

  He purses his lips as if sucking on a lemon. Let’s get started was supposed to be his line and I stepped on it.

  “You’re the surgeon,” he says. “I understand. Eager to return to work.”

  “I just don’t want to be here,” I say, and as soon as I do, I realize how deeply I feel it—a claustrophobic’s urge to escape despite the abundant space of the front hall we stand in.

  “Of course. It’s a difficult time,” the lawyer says vaguely, and starts off around a corner, leaving the rest of us to follow.

  From the front the lodge was impressive in its dimensions, but as we enter at one end of the great room, the building reveals its true magnificence. Across from us stands what must be an almost twenty-foot-high wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that frame the dappled woods, deepening as the trees rise up a gentle slope so that there is no sky to be seen, only variations of green leaves and brown deadfall. We traverse a raised walkway of varnished oak opposite the glass with steps down to a sunken living room of modular leather sofas and Turkish rugs laid over the wide floorboards, a stone hearth big enough to stand in, and finally, looking over it all at the opposite end from where we first entered, a banquet dining table made of recovered barn planks.

  This is where Fogarty stands behind a chair at the head, gesturing for each of us to sit. I stay close to Bridge, taking a place between her and the old lawyer as if to fend off a potential assault. Franny takes the spot across from us, and Mom sits directly to Fogarty’s left, her instinct for good manners and hospitality active even now, despite this not being her home nor the lawyer a guest.

  “Let me first express my condolences,” Fogarty begins, the last to pull his chair back and lower himself into it, fussily touching the papers and files laid out before him as if practicing a complicated piece on a piano keyboard. “I didn’t know Mr. Quinlan well—he was exact in his directions but a fierce defender of his time, as perhaps you’re already aware—but if I may say, he struck me as a remarkable individual. One of the privileges of my work is meeting highly varied people of accomplishment, and your husband and father had a way about him that will remain with me. I struggle to pinpoint the precise nature of his uniqueness, the aspect, in addition to his obvious intelligence, that I found so—”

  “He was a remarkable man,” Mom interrupts him. Her hand flutters to her mouth as if in an attempt to retrieve the bitterness of her words.

  “Indeed,” Fogarty says. He likes this scene—the Reading of the Will—and its demonstrations of emotion like this that he’s obliged to at least appear to subdue while allowing himself to savor at the same time.

  “Do you know what he did for a living, Mr. Fogarty?” Franny asks.

  “You didn’t?”

  “We took guesses sometimes. Thought he might have been a scientist. Sometimes we wondered if he was a spy. But he wasn’t really the double-oh-seven type. And do spies or scientists own places like this?”

  “I couldn’t speak to that,” Fogarty says, “and as for my knowledge of his occupation, I haven’t a clue, I’m afraid. I handled his legal affairs—well, some of them—but it wasn’t necessary to know the specifics of his business.”

  “That’s interesting. Because we all came to the same conclusion.”

  “Oh?”

  “It wasn’t necessary to know who he was,” Franny says. “Because, for us, there was nobody to know.”

  Fogarty waits for more of this, but when Franny sits back, fighting the new twitch at the top of her cheek, we all look to him.

  “Shall we pause a moment?” he asks, lifting an expensive-looking pen from the table and waving it in slow, hypnotizing circles. “Do we need a break?”

  “No break,” Mom says, her voice now froggy and thick. “Please continue, Mr. Fogarty.”

  “Very well. Now, the way this works is quite straightforward,” he says brightly. “You’ve been asked here to attend the reading of Raymond Quinlan’s last will and testament, and as executor of that will, I am responsible for its administration. There are a number of what might be considered unconventional codicils here, but at its heart, the document is—”

  “How much?”

  This question takes all of us by surprise not only by its abruptness, but by who asks it. Mom. Leaning forward so heavily her elbows rest on bloodless white pads of skin.

  “Mrs. Quinlan, a proper valuation would only be accurate once the assets have been liquidated, if and when that occurs.”

  “How much did he have?” she asks again, then looks around the table at the faces watching her, and only now hears the brusque tone of her voice.

  “Forgive me, Mr. Fogarty,” she continues, softer now. “My husband kept many secrets from me during his life, an arrangement I accepted, more or less. Even when we were young and first dating, he told me there were things about him I could never know. What did I care? There was love to make up for knowledge. I signed an extensive prenuptial agreement before they were common, or so I was later told. But now that he’s gone, I don’t want to live with secrets anymore. I couldn’t care less about the money—I have little use for it, God knows—but until today I was unaware this place existed. Quite something to keep from your wife of forty-two years, wouldn’t you say?”

  Fogarty replies with a lawyerly shrug.

  “So now there’s someone who is possessed of information sitting in front of me,” Mom goes on. “Now there’s you, Mr. Fogarty. So you can understand my eagerness to learn as much as I can, and in as specific terms as it’s known.”

  “Yes, I can see all that. I certainly can,” the lawyer says sympathetically. “Well, let me jump to the bottom line then. Mr. Quinlan’s holdings weren’t complicated. He had transferred his financial instruments—stocks, funds, etcetera—into a cash account only months before his death. The amount”—Fogarty glances down at his papers before looking up again—“is presently just over three million dollars.”

  “But that’s not all of it,” Mom says.

  “No.”

  “Because there’s this place. What did he call it?”

  “Belfountain,” Bridge says.

  “Quite right,” Fogarty says, glancing at Bridge with theatrical astonishment.

  “Belfountain,” Mom repeats distastefully, as if it’s the name of her husband’s mistress.
“How much of it is his?”

  “All of it. No partners, no mortgage.”

  “What’s it worth?”

  “Forgive the cliché, but a property of this kind is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.”

  “My mother might, but I don’t forgive the cliché,” I say. “You know the ballpark. So tell her.”

  I expect a dirty look from Fogarty, but he merely casts a cool smile my way. That’s when I see it. The reason I feel such hostility toward this man, and maybe why Mom and Franny feel it too: he reminds me of Dad. Not in his looks or attire, but the superiority, the withholding of information, the way he’d make you ask for everything and in the asking reveal your neediness. It’s a game I told myself I’d never play again, and yet here I am, perspiring with frustration, trying to intimidate this older man whose very posture confirms his control, the compiling of every weakness he’d detected in me.

  “It’s six hundred acres of pristine rain forest. One of the finest undivided tracts of its kind in the Pacific Northwest,” he answers at an unhurried pace. “The sleeping cabins are modest but well-built, and in entirely good repair. And of course there’s the main building we sit in now, an exceptional piece of contemporary architecture. So while the assessed value of the estate for tax purposes stands at twenty-seven million dollars, I expect it would attract offers significantly higher than that if listed on the open market.”

  No one replies to this, not right away. It is a Life-Changing Moment in the same way, I suppose, that hearing a terminal diagnosis or your newborn’s first cry is. Of course, in this case, it’s only money. But that can do it too if there’s enough of it. An amount that, even without doing the math, each of us hears for what it is. Safety. Freedom. Transformation.

  Mom is the first to eventually speak. A woman who is close to tears at the best of times, a four-decade state of weepy readiness, awaiting the triggers of nostalgia or affection or joy, but more often reminders of the long-buried disappointment in herself.

  “Why did he need it to be so big?” she asks nobody in particular. “Six hundred acres! Guest cabins. And this place, the size of a small hotel. What did he do here?”

  Fogarty tents his fingers and sets them on the table.

  “I appreciate how eccentric this must appear to you, Mrs. Quinlan,” he says. “But I was his attorney, not his valet. I’m not aware of—”

  “Did he have—were there friends who would come to stay? Were there parties? I mean, what kind of parties would they be?” she laughs, no longer addressing the lawyer, merely speaking her confusion aloud, questions that echoed up to the room’s timber rafters. “He didn’t have friends. We didn’t have friends! Not the kind who would come to a—to a private resort in the woods to—to what? Do what?”

  “These are undoubtedly legitimate questions, but they fall outside my—”

  “Seven and a half million.”

  All of us turn to Franny. And she looks back at us with the expression of someone who has spoken aloud without intending to.

  “I’m just saying,” she says. “Assuming the minimum sale price of the property, and the proceeds equally divided among the four of us.” She looks at Fogarty. “Am I right?”

  “I won’t hazard an estimation on the math,” he says, “but you are correct in your assumption of the will’s stipulating an equal division of assets. As I said, despite the specific nature of the holdings coming as a surprise to you, your father provided clear legal directions, if also some rather unusual conditions.”

  He lets this last part hang in the air, waiting for it to snag in our minds, a tightness to his lips that I read as a tell of excitement. He’s not just an arrogant old-school dandy, I see now. Fogarty is a closet sadist.

  “What conditions?” I say, and make a point of squeaking my chair closer to him. I’d like to make him uncomfortable if I can. But I also want to physically buffer Bridge from the strangeness I can sense is about to be unleashed upon us.

  “Your father assigns all his assets, in equal terms, to his wife and all of his children,” Fogarty pretends to read from the papers in front of him, then raises his head to speak directly to me. “On satisfaction of a single request that all of you stay on here at Belfountain for thirty days.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Which piece is giving you difficulty?”

  “Having to stay here for a month. Why don’t we start with that?”

  Fogarty takes in a long breath and billows it over the table in my direction, a hot gust carrying the scents of mustard and butterscotch candy.

  “Wills are expressions of wishes,” he says. “And your father wished for you, your siblings, and your mother to live here together for a period of time after his passing. I can only assume it was for the purposes of collective grieving, or perhaps reconciliation. Families are families, yes? In any case, to participate in the division of funds, each of you must remain on the property for the duration of the term. Naturally, the delivery of food and supplies has been arranged for, and you’ll find comfortable bedding has been—”

  “What if we leave?”

  This is Franny. Fogarty takes his time shifting around to face her.

  “You forfeit your share of the estate,” he says.

  “Even for a day? I mean, there’s things that need to be taken care of. We all have lives.”

  “The instructions are clear. The perimeter of the estate marks the extent to which you may travel.”

  “I’d like my phone back.”

  “That would violate the conditions. No phones, no internet. No outside contact of any kind.”

  “Is this for real?” Franny says, starting to stand and then sitting again as if against a swirl of dizziness. “You’re talking about a prison!”

  “Not at all. You’re free to go at any time.”

  “At a cost.”

  “A forfeiture.”

  “When does the clock start?” I ask.

  This provides Fogarty with the moment he’s been waiting for. He pinches up the sleeve of his shirt an inch to reveal the Rolex on his wrist and clicks a button at the side, starting the timer.

  “Now,” he says.

  4

  IT GETS NOISY AFTER THAT.

  Franny shrieking about calling the police, Bridge crying and me trying to comfort her while telling Fogarty where he could shove his gold watch. Most troubling of all is Mom. The unhinged sound of her hate-cackling at the last trick her husband had played on their marriage.

  Maybe it is the haunting amplification of our voices through the cavernous interior of the lodge or the long drive here only now taking its toll, or the questions in our minds jostling and demanding to be asked first. Whatever it is, we all go quiet at the same time. Blustering and aflame moments ago, now exhausted, leaning into the table’s edge or the backs of our chairs to hold ourselves upright.

  Fogarty lowers his voice to little more than a whisper.

  We listen.

  He tells us that he’s drafted notices to be sent to our respective schools or workplaces explaining our absences as a “family emergency.” If any of us have partners or companions requiring similar explanation, he’s prepared to do the same for them, but he believes none of us have significant others at present, and seeing how none of us correct him, it appears he’s correct. No one will contact the authorities. No one will come looking for us.

  In addition to regular deliveries of food, he’s arranged for clothes in our sizes and a pair of sneakers for each of us in duffel bags he deposited in the front closet. There is no television or radio or computer anywhere on the estate’s grounds, and no books or magazines to speak of, but we’re assured of an “impressive collection of jigsaw puzzles” for our entertainment.

  “You make it sound like a game,” Franny says.

  The old lawyer looks heavenward for an alternative phrase. “It’s merely a request of the deceased. It lacks the competition of a game. Although, I suppose, there is an element of endurance.
A test, then?”

  “What happens if we all walk?” I ask.

  “In that instance, Mr. Quinlan has arranged for his estate to be assigned to his alma mater.”

  “He’d give it all to his college?” Mom says.

  “They’d probably name a dorm after him,” Franny says.

  “The amount is more than sufficient for that,” Fogarty replies, taking Franny’s point in earnest. “But Raymond’s directions were for the donation to be anonymous.”

  “Of course,” Franny says. “The invisible man.”

  Fogarty informs us that while there is technically no reason to make a final decision now—we can leave anytime and use the satellite phone in a metal box just on the other side of the gate to arrange for a ride—he will linger a short while in case any of us wants a ride back this afternoon.

  “Hold on. Just hold on,” I say, keeping him there as he seems about to slip out of the room. It takes a second to catch my breath, and I realize how exasperated I am, a helplessness that has led me to the edge of vertigo, my toes and fingertips tingling.

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t think you understand. I’m a surgeon.”

  “I understand perfectly, Dr. Quinlan.”

  “There’s patients—there’s people counting on me.”

  “As I’ve already mentioned, your absence will be explained. You have colleagues who can cover your case list in such instances, do you not?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “What is the point?”

  I’m important. This is what I want to say. I’m a medical specialist, and these are difficult times. Some are calling it a national crisis, and who would argue otherwise? Emergency rooms across the country are over capacity with those who need to be patched, stitched, reassembled. But I say nothing. Partly because Franny speaks for me first.

  “The point is he’s a big deal,” she says. “He’s worked so hard to be one, to show his daddy what a good boy he could be, and he thinks he should be entitled to an exemption.”

  My sister looks at me without particular malice, only the fixed Am I wrong? expression of the aggrieved.