If You Were Here: A Novel Read online

  When Mac finally composes himself, he takes my right hand. “Mia, this isn’t going to happen. We cannot in good conscience buy this house.”

  I begin to panic and speak almost exclusively in exclamation points. “But it’s huge, it’s close to the water, and you’d get to renovate! This house has great bones! Think of all the new tools you can buy! And the location! Come on, this is east Abington Cambs! You can’t get a better address than this! Yeah, there are a few cosmetic issues, but those will be fun to fix! If this house were fully operational and perfect, we’d never be able to afford it!”

  He appears wholly unmoved by my monologue.

  Then I do something I’m ashamed to admit. I try to get my eyes to water, knowing full well that crying is his Kryptonite. I generally follow Spider-Man’s aunt’s dictate of great power coming with great responsibility, so I rarely trot out the tears without due cause. Yet my eyes stay dry for some reason, so I surreptitiously snake my left hand up to the thin, sensitive skin beneath my armpit and I give it a solid pinch to see if that prompts the waterworks.

  It doesn’t.

  Damn it.

  “Mia, stop that. You’re going to leave a mark.” He pulls my left hand out of my cardigan. “We’ll find our house. But this isn’t it. There’s too much to do. I mean, maybe renovating this place wouldn’t be impossible, but it seems like an awful lot for a couple of first-time home buyers to take on. I don’t want to put that kind of financial or emotional stress on us. I mean, we are too important, and I worry that the strain might mess up what we have. Does that make sense?”

  Numbly, I nod. He presents a cogent case for his findings. I can’t argue with his logic . . . and yet I don’t understand how this can be. I’m supposed to live here. I feel like this place is my destiny, the manifestation of all my childhood dreams. When my sister and I were home at night while Mom worked her second job to give us a better life, this is where I’d imagine I’d be once it got better. The universe told me so; all the signs pointed to it. Then to be so close and have it not work out? I don’t get it. What are the odds another John Hughes movie house is going to open up in our budget (stretched though it may be) in the next couple of weeks? Walking away from this place feels wrong all the way down to my soul.

  Liz concludes our tour, saying, “I guess that’s everything. Why don’t we head up the back stairs, since we forgot to look at them last time?”

  Just as we’re about to ascend, we pass one more door. “What’s in here?” Mac asks.

  Bitterly, I respond, “Probably just another utility room full of ‘fire hazards’ and ‘red flags’ and all the other scary words that mean we don’t get to buy Jake Ryan’s house.”

  He pushes open a heavy steel door to reveal . . . nothing. We’re enveloped in darkness. “Let me see if I can find a light.” Mac feels the walls until he finds a switch, flips it, and illuminates a vast expanse of cement walls and wire shelves. There’s an exhaust system similar to the one over by the defunct hot tub, and in the far corner, there’s a low door with a dial on it. On the opposite side, I spy another junction box with a bunch of thick blue wiring coming out of it.

  “What a perfect area for dry storage,” Liz remarks.

  I’m not so sure about that. “Maybe. But I don’t like how there aren’t any windows. I feel kind of claustrophobic in here. Plus the door’s so heavy that I’d worry about getting trapped.”

  Confession time? Being trapped is a real concern, because I kind of get stuck a lot. It’s not because I’m fat—regardless of what that jerk Vienna says. I’m actually in fine shape, especially when you consider my deep and abiding love of butter. But I’m a bit of a disaster magnet. Things just seem to happen to me, like once when I was vacuuming in front of this huge antique mirror in the bedroom. Somehow the cord must have caught and the whole thing came crashing down on me. Luckily it didn’t shatter, but I spent half an hour screaming for Mac to get it off me, and he couldn’t hear me over the roar of my Dyson.63

  If a locked door’s going to break, I guarantee you I’m on the inside of it. One time Ann Marie and I were staying in her brother’s loft in New York and the bathroom doorknob fell off while I was in the shower. Fortunately Ann Marie is the unholy love child of MacGyver and Martha Stewart, so she not only had me out in ten seconds flat using nothing but items from the fridge and spice rack, but she also whipped up a miracle hair serum that kept me from getting the frizzies the whole time we were in town.

  “Anyway, are we ready to go?” I don’t want to leave, but I don’t really have a choice.

  I guess this isn’t, in fact, going to be my house. Mac and I are a solid partnership precisely because we listen to each other, so I’m not going to insist we buy this house just because I have some weird tie to a couple of movies made a quarter of a century ago. We function well as a couple because we make our decisions together. We’re a team. I mean, separately we’re both one hundred percent, but when we band together, we’re one thousand percent. That’s why we’ve come so far from our humble postgrad beginnings. If one of us makes our mind up based on rational thought and solid arguments, the other has to respect that.

  Liz and I turn to leave but Mac just stands there. “Mac? Mac? Honey? Are you coming?”

  “This room . . .” he says in a voice full of awe and wonder. “Do you know what this room is? This is a panic room.”

  “A what?” Liz asks.

  “Like that Jodie Foster movie?” I add.

  “Right, exactly.” He begins rubbing his hands together, almost as though in anticipation. “You see, over there, someone installed a ventilation system and a pumping system, and that over there is enough CAT5 fiber to support a government-grade surveillance system. There’s a ton of room to lay in supplies, and with a foundation like this, someone could easily survive any disaster, up to and including nuclear war. And over there? That’s a gun safe big enough to house an actual arsenal. You know what? I’d like to see ORNESTEGA try to breach this perimeter! Ha! This is . . .” He trails off again as he takes in every bit of the room.

  He touches the walls with quiet reverence, and it’s the first item he’s come into contact with in this place that hasn’t cracked, splintered, or crumbled. “This is . . .”

  “This is what, honey?” I prompt.

  “This is . . . our new home.”

  Chapter Six

  WE DON’T NEED NO STINKING SECOND OPINIONS

  “Tell me again why we’re doing this ourselves.”

  I can’t see Mac while he says this, save for the very top of his head, as he’s hidden behind a mountain of moving boxes and flanked by huge rolls of Bubble Wrap and both dogs. “Do you know how much it costs to hire someone to pack for us?” I ask rhetorically. “We’re totally capable of doing it ourselves. Plus I’m not forking out all that money for some company to come in here and parcel up all my free-range drawer pretzels.”

  What I don’t mention is that every minute I spend packing is a minute I don’t have to be working on my new book. Let’s just say the writing isn’t going so well. For some reason, the only scenes I can imagine go like this:Mose: What are your plans after the harvest?

  Amos: First, of course, I’ll thank the Lord for being with us during the long, hard autumn days. I’ll praise Him for keeping our backs strong and our hearts full. I’ll extol the glories of His bounty and the virtue of His grace and mercy. I’ll pray that our work proves fruitful and that the grain elevator will give us a fair price for all our toiling so that our families may enjoy a warm hearth and a full belly all winter long.

  Mose: Aye, the Lord is good indeed. But what of after we give thanks?

  Amos: My beloved Miriam has her sights set on a trip to the wicked city. She showed me some glossy photographs of what she calls her “heart’s desire.”

  Mose: Surely she doesn’t yearn to give in to carnal pleasures? Let her not be Eve to your Adam and lead you down the sinful path!

  Amos: Oh, but no. I wish that it were me who captured h
er attention so. She seeks not the glory of God, but the opportunity to visit a special barn for pottery. My forbidden love cannot stop speaking of her lofty desire for oil-rubbed bronze fixtures and granite-topped vanities for her en suite bathroom and . . .

  And it kind of rambles on like that for a while.

  The thing is, I’m not even sure the Amish go indoors.

  I should probably Google that sometime.

  Anyway, Mac and I hired packing help for a previous move and ... pack they did. Did they perform beautifully in protecting our delicate furniture and fragile mirrors and flat-screen televisions during the rigors of a crosstown trek? Yes. Did we lose a single lightbulb or a one-dollar wineglass over the course of the move? No. The problem was that their precision extended to each item they touched. The packing ladies gathered every single spilled Spree and Jolly Rancher still floating around my desk drawers from my ’07 Christmas stocking, each dried out rollerball pen, and nine thousand loose paper clips, grouping like items in tight brown paper packages surrounded by cushioning layers of Bubble Wrap. They devoted entire moving boxes to garbage cans stuffed with empty macadamia nut jars, junk mail, and dirty Kleenex. We opened packet after packet of chewed dog bones and rusty bobby pins and wine corks cats had batted under beds.

  To be fair, I wouldn’t have expected the team to take stuff out to the Dumpster, but I didn’t anticipate bringing the individually wrapped contents of my recycling bin to my new place, either. Every time we opened one of their boxes, it was like the worst Easter basket ever.

  On top of all of that, we had to give the packers an extra-huge tip, because one of the ladies ran across Mac’s box of army flash grenade simulators64 and almost had a heart attack.

  “We can weed out stuff this way,” I add. Although I’m not actually very good at purging, seeing how I just boxed up every single business card I received back in the nineties, when I sold medical supplies for a living. But hey, maybe Dr. Aparajita Gupta and Dr. Trip Wadsworth enjoy books about teenage Amish zombies in love and they’re waiting for my calls, which I can’t place without having their numbers, right?

  Obviously, we’re packing because . . . ta-da! We got the house! After an annoyingly expensive bidding war with another Hughes fan, we were victorious! Hooray, us! Hooray, universe!

  The shocking news was how well the place inspected. We an-ticipated being crushed by repair costs, but the patriarch of Angie’s List–recommended Sandhurst and Sons Home Services assured us the house’s problems were minor and primarily cosmetic. Mr. Sandhurst was so cute in his Mr. Magoo glasses and nubby cardigan, too. He kept calling us Mackey and Minnie and pretending we were his grandchildren—he was hilarious! I was surprised he filled out his report by hand, but I figured he’s been doing business this way for fifty years, so why fix what’s not broken?

  “Oh, I keep forgetting,” Mac says, grimacing at our collection of every cell phone we’ve owned since we met in 1994, “your grandmother called again. That’s what, three times? Why aren’t you calling her back?”

  “Because I’m avoiding her. Duh. All she wants to do is give me decorating advice.”

  After my folks divorced, my mother, sister, and grandmother migrated south. They live in Miami Beach now, and together they own Two Polish Ladies Maid Service, the East Coast’s largest residential and commercial cleaning operation.

  I know, right?

  I couldn’t be prouder of how they built their business from the ground up. Jess and I weren’t the only ones inspired by Hughes’s films. One night Babcia watched Home Alone with me and spent the whole time bitching about the state of the McCallisters’ house.

  “They rich—so why house not sparkle?” Babcia groused. She’d parked herself next to me on the old plaid couch with a mason jar of her homemade grain alcohol. Smelling strongly of gasoline and horseradish, Babcia’s mash was so potent I’d get a contact high just being around it. This stuff sparked my lifelong aversion to any liquor not best served with a tiny drink umbrella.

  “Babcia,” I explained, “Kevin McCallister is eight years old, and more important, he’s home alone. Things are bound to get messy.”

  “No! Is filthy before. Look hardwood! No shine! Look window! Is need clean with newspaper! Look rug! Is terrible crunchy. I make potion, clean whole house. Get lots rich people money.”

  “Babcia, you can’t ‘make potion’ and clean this particular house, because it’s a movie,” I argued fecklessly, fully aware that rational thought held no weight. I’d recently made the mistake of watching Field of Dreams and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with her, and for weeks all I heard was, “Why dead men play baseball? Why turtles eat pizza? You find and tell stop.”

  Point? Babcia’s threat about cleaning rich people’s houses turned into an obsession, which turned into a business, which eventually turned into an empire.65

  Since becoming entrepreneurs, Babcia and my mother lost their aversion to aesthetics, and they wouldn’t admit to having owned that shoddy old plaid couch on a bet. Between the two of them, they’ve filled their Ocean Drive penthouse with acres of claw-footed chairs, chandeliers the size of water buffalo, rich tapestries, and gilt-framed paintings. Even with twenty-foot-high south-facing windows, they’ve managed to make their place as dark, foreboding, and gothic as a medieval castle. Jess and I call their style “Eastern Bloc chic,” but Mac says it’s more like “Donald Trump Meets Count Dracula.”

  “You have to call her back. I can’t put her off again. Now.You should call her now,” Mac insists, a rising edge of panic in his voice. Mac fought in Desert Storm before he went to college—he saw real combat and experienced all the horrors of war, but the only thing in the world that scares him is my Babcia. He swears the mole above her left eye stares into his soul.

  Pfft. He should have seen it before she had the laser hair removal.

  Over the years Babcia’s upgraded her Stalin-era babushkas for Hermès scarves and stopped turning her tresses pink with at-home colorings, but she’s still got enough Old World in her that I get why she’d be terrifying to an outsider.

  I set down what I’m about to pack—a bunch of empty CD jewel cases—and reluctantly pick up the phone.

  “Hello, talk.” There’s something wonderfully imperious about how my grandmother answers the phone.

  “Babcia! Hi, it’s Mia.”

  “Ah, moja zabko! ”66 Her pleasantries don’t even last a second before she launches into me. “Why I call eleventeen times? Why? I tell call Babcia, you call Babcia now! I see, I spank! Bad girl!”

  Interesting side note—the family business didn’t really catch on until Jess took over all the customer interaction. Turns out most people don’t enjoy being yelled at—or threatened with a spanking—particularly when paying ninety dollars an hour. Now Mom does the accounting and deals with vendors, Jess is the face of the business, and Babcia commands her army of maids with an iron (curtain) fist.

  The only way to beat Babcia is to blithely ignore her threats. “So how’s Miami?”

  “Yellow,” which I take to mean “sunny.” At this point, I’m pretty sure her dialect is a ruse employed solely to lend authenticity to her business. I mean, she’s been living in the States for almost sixty years; it’s time to make “the” happen. “Listen, I buy something. You put in house.”

  Oh, this can’t be good.

  I try to sound gracious. “Thank you, Babcia. May I ask what it is?”

  “Is cross. Very big. Tall like man. Much gold.”

  “Wow, Babcia, that sounds awesome; I can’t wait to see it!” My tall-like-man gold cross will hold a special place of honor.

  In my new garage.

  “When move?”

  “We close on the house Monday and we head out the day after that. My friend Ann Marie’s coming into town tomorrow so she can see it before we go. Perhaps she can give me some ideas about where to put your beautiful gift.”

  Ann Marie and my grandmother have always been kindred spirits, but ever since Ann Marie downe
d a shot of Babcia’s jet fuel, they’ve had a particular affinity for each other.

  “She good girl, not like you. You tell her come work here.”

  “I will. I’m sure she’d be delighted to quit practicing law and move her whole family down to Florida to be a maid.”

  “YOU DON’T MOUTH-SMART.”

  “I’m teasing you, Babcia. Anyway, how’s it all going? What’s Mom up to? And Jess—is she going to start that grad school program?”

  “No more talk bye.” Babcia puts the phone down with a bang. She’s not rude so much as deeply efficient. After she delivers her message, she sees no point in hanging around for chitchat. Our phone conversations are like tearing off a bandage—painful and vaguely annoying, but ultimately over quickly.

  I return to Mac and his box stack. “Babcia needs to talk with you.” Mac instantly blanches. “Honey, I’m kidding. Why are you so afraid of her? She’s, like, eighty pounds!”67

  He stares into the distance while he appears to be shaking off a chill. “Evil takes many shapes and sizes.”

  I mentally snap my fingers. “Speaking of evil, we’re doing a walk-through with Vienna on Friday to assess damages for our security deposit.”

  “During the day, or is she going to pay us another middle-of-the-night visit?”

  “She said three o’clock, but a.m. or p.m. is anyone’s guess. Ann Marie may still be here, so I’m rooting for a.m.”

  “Have they ever met?” Mac wraps a portion of tape around a box containing manuals for appliances we had four apartments ago.

  “Nope. But I imagine if they do finally encounter each other, we’ll see it on the news.”

  “Mmm-hmm, that is indeed Jake Ryan’s house.”

  I cast a sidelong glance at Ann Marie, nodding to herself in the passenger seat. “You say it like there was a semblance of doubt.”