She loved architecture, Gregory loved dogs. In their early thirties they did what most people feel they can do only after they retire—live the life they want. Dessert at the end of the meal. In the case of the Meiers, it was not dessert. It was the only nourishment either of them could digest. They would buy something simple and sturdy way out in farm country where land was cheap. Over the years she would make it theirs. He would raise his beloved French bulldogs. If they were clever and hardworking they would make it. Neither used the word “luck” anymore. Luck is the poor man’s God. Both stopped believing in Him the day their child disappeared.
It gives me such pain to write this.
I pulled up in front of their remarkable home three thousand days after they lost the boy. I needed to look some more and collect my thoughts before ringing their bell. What would I say? Could I pull off looking them over, asking certain questions that had nothing to do with dogs, and still get away without their becoming suspicious? Do you people know a Lily Aaron? Do you know why she would know you? Have you ever been to Los Angeles or Cleveland or Gambier, Ohio? How about a man named Rick Aaron? Although I have a strong hunch he doesn’t exist—
“Hi! Are you Mr. Datlow?”
Unaccustomed to my made-up name, I still turned so quickly in the seat it must have looked odd. I’d been staring blindly at the road while thinking and hadn’t heard her come up from behind, although the driveway was gravel and her boots made loud crunches when she walked, as I heard later following her back to the house.
Whether it was the years of suffering, a hard and active life lived outside much of the time, or simply premature aging, Anwen’s face was beauty ruined. Deep sunken eyes and too thin all over; her cheekbones were as prominent as ledges. Still there was so much loveliness left in the face that you wished her head was a balloon you could pump more air in. Fill it up and shape it back out to what it must have once been.
“We’ve been waiting for you. Gregory’s back in the barn. Come on, we’ll go find him. Or would you rather have a cup of tea first?”
“Some tea would be great.” I thought it better to talk to her alone first, rather than take them both on at once.
“Fine, let’s go in the house. Do you mind if I ask how you heard about us? Did you see the ad in Dog World?”
I got out of the car and stood near. She was taller than I’d first thought. Five eight or nine, some of it from the boots she wore, most her natural height.
“Yes, I saw the ad, but I also heard about you from Raymond Gill.”
“Gill? I’m afraid I don’t know the name.”
Neither did I, having made it up a second before. “He’s a well-known breeder in the West.”
She smiled, and oh man, the beauty she once was was very plain to see.
“People know of us out there? That’s reassuring. Greg will be so glad to hear it.”
I followed her across the driveway to a thick wooden door which had a great number of different patterns running across it like an intricate parquet floor.
“That’s quite a door. It’s quite a house!”
She turned and smiled again. “Yes, you either love it or hate it. No one’s ever wishy-washy when it comes to our house. What do you think?”
“Too early to tell. First I thought it was a spacecraft from another planet, but now I’m getting used to it. Is it kooky inside too?”
“Not as much. But it ain’t down-to-earth either! Come in, see for yourself.”
We were in the living room when she mentioned the boy for the first time. Until then, her voice and persona had been that of a friendly tour guide. She was clearly used to showing either bewildered or astonished people around her house and had thus created an appropriate self for the role. The room was crowned by a giant cathedral ceiling, parts of which—like patchwork panels—were stained-glass windows through which different colors of light streamed down and carpeted the floor.
“Amazing. I don’t know what to say about your house, Mrs. Meier.”
“Anwen.”
“Anwen. One minute it’s enthralling. The next, or the next room we go into, I think I’ve had too much to drink. This room is extraordinary. The way you’ve combined the stone and metal and wood, the windows up there… It is an UFO. Otherworldly!”
“But the other rooms? Where you felt drunk?”
I shrugged. “You can’t win ‘em all.”
“I’m glad you’re honest. I’ll tell you why it’s like this. My husband and I have a little boy. He was kidnapped nine years ago. Until we find him, this house will be both Brendan and everything we want to give him in his life with us.”
There was no remorse or self-pity or stoicism in the way she said it. These were the facts of her life. She was telling them to me but asking for nothing.
“I’m very sorry. And you have no other children?”
“No. Neither of us can conceive of another child until Brendan comes home. So my husband raises dogs and I work on the house. One day our son will come back and we’ll have lots to show him.”
Right there, at the end of her sentence in those last four or five words, I heard the smallest hitch of pain in her voice.
“When we bought the place it was only an ugly old chicken farm. My original idea was to create something Brendan would like. Childlike but not childish, you know? A place with moods and colors and tantrums.”
“Tantrums. That’s a lovely idea.”
She surveyed the room with hands on hips. “Yes, but it changed after we’d taken away most of what was originally here. First I wanted it to be for him. Then I realized until he came home it had to be for us too. So I made more changes. More and more and more. I was studying to be an architect before we got married, just so you don’t think I’m completely nuts!”
She told a little of their history, leaving out the parts about her husband’s breakdown and her car crash. The way her version went, they’d lost the child, changed jobs a few times, finally got a strong urge to return to their home state and live life the way they wanted. I asked no questions. Her lies were gentle things; lies to a stranger who needn’t know more about their ongoing pain. I don’t think she wanted my pity so much as my understanding of why their house was so different. It was both her child and her art, for the time being. Like some kind of impossible and heartbreaking golem, she was trying to bring it to life with her care, love, and imagination. When the boy returned she would direct it back to him. Until then, all of the energy and emotion she had for her child would go into trying to make this inanimate thing animate.
Every room of their house was a different world. They had cut through some of the walls and ceilings so as to build bridges linking one to the next like surreal dream sequences. One bedroom was only crooked objects at cockeyed angles. Pictures in free-form frames and the only mirror were all mounted on the ceiling. A hole had literally been punched through the wall at foot level and filled with glass. It took a moment to realize it was a window. Another, called the Fall Room, contained only soft objects in two colors.
There are eccentrics who build houses out of Coca-Cola bottles or Wyoming license plates. Architects who design churches to look like melting candles or airports like manta rays. But the most singular and frankly exhausting thing about the Meier house was the raw obsession at work. Anwen said nothing about it, but it was plain she knew that if her mind sat down for a time to rest, it would realize the deadly hopeless truth of her situation and destroy her. So she never really sat down. She planned and built and tinkered with the only link she felt she still had to her lost child.