Hidalgo hadn’t met him at the door, and Doug assumed the beast was in his crate. There were clicks, though, and creaks, all around him in the hall, and he reminded himself about houses settling. He tried to recall which was the door to the attic stairs. It must be this one, at the north end: next to a closet, but not a closet, the brass keyhole made for one of those toothy old keys with a loop handle. He tried the elliptical little knob, but it just clinked tightly back and forth. He knelt, his eye to the inch of gap at the bottom of the door. It wasn’t dark — he remembered the dormers running along both the back and front of the house — but all he could see was tan. The riser of the bottom step.
Something crackled behind him. Doug’s back had been turned on the hallway for a long time, as if he’d never watched a spy movie in his life. He rose and turned, certain he’d see an angry Bruce or a frightened Sofia. But there was just afternoon light from a high window, magnifying a million specks of floating dust. Now that he’d become aware of his back, of the fact that he couldn’t turn his head like an owl, he was uncomfortable whichever way he faced. He wanted to flatten himself against a wall. Instead he walked calmly down the stairs and out the garage door.
19
After one more Long Island iced tea, Zee left her car at the club and Gracie drove her home, a Bobby Darin CD playing and the windows down.
“Aren’t we living it up?” Gracie said.
Sofia was unloading the dry cleaning from her van. Miriam, barefoot, sat on the bench by the coach house with a book in her lap. And, bizarrely, Doug was emerging from the big house’s garage, staring at everyone. As Gracie got out, Miriam rose and hopped across the hot gravel. They formed a little group of four on the driveway, which Zee watched from the car for a long, blurry second. Something was off. The pieces of the world were not where she’d left them.
Her mother waved her out of the car, and by the time Zee stuck her head into the heat Sofia was backing toward the big house. “You see! I get, I get!” Zee wanted to form a question, but she couldn’t decide which one, and her lips were asleep.
“Thought I heard Hidalgo freaking out in there,” Doug was saying, and “wanted to be sure he was okay,” but Gracie wasn’t listening.
Sofia returned, butter-yellow fabric in her plump arms.
“This is the one? I find it on the floor of the flower bedroom, behind the bed. This is whose?”
Zee blinked at the thing. It was her cotillion dress, shoulder pads and ruched waist, but wadded and wrinkled.
“I haven’t seen that in nineteen years,” Zee managed to say. And yet she felt she somehow had — but no, it was just that they’d talked about it so recently.
Gracie clapped her hands, as if chunks weren’t falling out of the universe and onto guest room floors. “Well, that’s just the luck of Laurelfield! Miriam, you need to know that this is the distinctive legacy of the house: ridiculous luck, whether good or bad. We’ve had tragedies here too, but then magic things like this happen! Now you have to make a wonderful mosaic out of it.”
Sofia held the dress out, but Miriam looked at the thing like it was tainted. “I don’t understand,” she said.
Sofia shrugged. “Maybe was the ghost.”
Zee took it from Sofia herself. It wasn’t dirty, just creased in a thousand places. The sun was too hot, and even the dress was hot, and she felt she might melt into it. “Maybe it was Doug,” Zee said, not looking at him. “Maybe he was trying to help Miriam find it.”
Doug made a startled, choked noise, a refutation and a laugh at once.
Gracie said, “Why on earth would he do that? And leave it on the floor? He’s not a raccoon, dear.”
Zee draped the dress over Miriam’s arm. “Here,” she said. “Clearly it was meant to be.”
She wondered if this would all make sense once she sobered up, but she doubted that. She wanted to stomp, to scream, to ask why things would rearrange themselves just when she’d got them straightened out. Instead she walked back to the coach house, trying not to sway. Doug caught up and whispered: “What the hell was that? Was that a joke?”
“Covering for Sofia. She probably went back to look, and it was on the closet floor. My mom would pitch a fit about the wrong hangers or something.” She wasn’t certain she’d made sense, but she hadn’t slurred. Doug stalked past and turned on the TV.
Could that have been it? Or could Doug really have snuck into the house days ago to find the thing, to present it to Miriam like a dog with a bone? And then, when he heard footsteps, stuffed the dress behind the bed. Then he’d gone back to retrieve it today, only it wasn’t where he’d thought it would be.
When Zee saw from the upstairs window that Miriam had gone back to her bench, the dress folded neatly beside her, she went down to Doug on the couch. She straddled him and unbuttoned her blouse and yanked his head back by the hair. She knew he wanted to be mad at her, and she knew he wanted to fall in love with Miriam, but for the next ten minutes he’d be unable to do either.
20
On the hottest day of August, Doug met up with the friend who’d gotten him started on Friends for Life and the lucrative but soul-sapping Melissa Hopper in the first place. Doug and Leland had taught high school together in Ohio, in the hazy few years between college and grad school — the same years when Zee was off on her Fulbright, saving the world. Leland had recently begun wearing black button-downs with the collars wide open, so now Doug was a little worried, meeting him in a Highwood bar, that they’d be mistaken for a gay couple. Leland taught poetry classes all over the suburbs, living not off the paychecks but off the wealthy women who preferred him to their CEO husbands.
“It’s on me today,” Doug said. “You saved my ass. You saved my pocketbook.”
“And they’re fun, right? You get to be the adolescent girl you never were.”
“I will never admit to that.”
There was a bowl of nuts on the bar. It was good to be out of the house, and it was good to be eating nuts and drinking and watching the Cubs. When they started tanking in the fourth, Doug filled him in on Case and Miriam. He described the scooter Case was now using to get around town — how he’d prop his bad leg up on a little shelf and push off with the other. He’d had a few job interviews set up in the city, but he’d canceled those, worried how he’d look showing up sweaty from the train and cab, on top of wounded.
“Tex and the crazy lady,” Leland said. “Tex and the Wreck. That’s a country song, right there. This woman, is she of the attractive persuasion?”
“Fortunately no. I mean, maybe a six. The craziness doesn’t help. Six point five.”
“This kid’s an asshole.” He was talking about the Cubs. “But then, your wife makes everyone look like shit, right? Tell me something: The Victoria’s Secret catalogue gets to your house, you even bother to look? Or is it like, hey, I got better stuff upstairs?”
Doug was glad there seemed no obligation to answer. Leland had met Zee only once or twice, and he hadn’t looked at her with any more interest than most men did. Doug knew what he was really saying, what everyone was really saying when they commented on her beauty: They weren’t sure how she’d ended up with Doug. He wasn’t shorter than her, or bad looking. He’d always gotten plenty of girls. It was more what people presumed about women as intense as Zee, about what they were after and what they could get. Women like Zee did not pick nice guys with average golf games who occasionally forgot to brush their teeth. They picked jackass publishing executives with famous ex-wives and ski houses.