Page 30 of All These Beautiful Strangers
“What are you even doing here anyways?” I asked. “Didn’t you just graduate from college? Shouldn’t you be out there in the real world like a grown man?”
Greyson picked up an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter. He took a bite and answered me with his mouth full. “I did graduate,” he said. “I even have a grown-up job. But it’s hard to beat free rent and home-cooked meals.”
I rolled my eyes. “So, basically, you’re a man-child?”
“Not all of us have trust funds,” Greyson said.
I only shrugged in response. I never felt ashamed when people brought up that I came from money I didn’t earn, just as I never thought people who didn’t come from money should be ashamed of the fact that they didn’t have it. In my mind, you were dealt the cards you were dealt, but it was how you played them that mattered.
“Actually, do you have a flashlight I can borrow?”
“You can borrow it if I can come with you,” Greyson said.
“Fine,” I said. “Meet me in the car. You have two minutes, and then I’m leaving with or without you.”
In the car on the way to the lake house, I told Greyson about the pictures Uncle Hank had found. It was actually nice to tell someone about them, and Greyson was the perfect audience. He knew enough about my mother and me and my family not to need a lot of background, but he was also as impartial a party as I could find. It was probably a good idea to have someone come with me to the lake house, anyway. I was a little nervous about going there by myself. And it was better to have two pairs of eyes. There was a better chance we would find something.
“How are we going to get in?” Greyson asked when I told him where we were going. “Is this a breaking-and-entering situation? And is it really considered breaking and entering if it’s your own place? Should I google this?”
He smiled at me and ran his hand haphazardly through his hair again.
“Stop doing that,” I said.
“Doing what?”
I exaggerated running my hand through my hair and flipping it over my shoulder. “That,” I said.
Greyson laughed. “I’m sorry, am I distracting you with my beautiful man mane?”
“Hardly,” I said. “And don’t google it. Uncle Hank found a way in, and he didn’t have a key. We’ll figure it out.”
I signaled right and we started down the long winding driveway to the house. From the outside, the house looked just as we had left it years ago. My father had hired a groundskeeper to look after the property and you couldn’t tell from the outside that the house was unlived in. The lawn was neatly mown, the flower beds weeded, the bushes trimmed.
Getting in was a lot less difficult or even interesting than Greyson or I had imagined. The spare key was where we had hidden it when I was a kid: in the frog statue by the back kitchen door.
Inside, the house looked dark and forlorn: the floorboards were coated with a thick layer of dust, the curtains were drawn tight, and the furniture was sheathed in large white sheets. It would have been bright enough to see if we had drawn back the curtains, but we opted to keep them closed and used our flashlights instead.
The pictures still hung in their places on the walls. There was a picture of my mother at the Jersey Shore. She was dressed in a red bathing suit, standing ankle-deep in the water. She looked over her shoulder at whoever was taking the picture (my father?) and smiled, as if they’d caught her in some private moment. It struck me how young my mother was in some of these pictures—perhaps only a few years older than I was now. And the resemblance between us was striking—the same wide gray eyes and heart-shaped face. The same dark brown hair and pale skin. She had the same slightly crooked smile, the same dimple that peeked out of her right cheek.
There were so many pictures. Pictures of my mother and father in Grandmother Eugenia’s garden at the Greenwich house, pictures of my sister and me playing in the Fairchilds’ backyard on my mother’s old swing set. A candid shot of my father holding my mother in his arms and her looking up at him. Snapshots of who my family used to be.
Hanging next to these pictures was a family portrait in a heavy gilt frame. Seraphina was only a baby, and she was sitting in my mother’s lap. I stood beside her, in front of my father, Alistair Calloway. He was tall and lean and handsome in that Calloway way, with his blue eyes and blond hair and high forehead. It was strange, but except for his hair, which was now graying at the temples, he looked the same now as he did then, as if he hadn’t aged a day.
“It was the one reckless thing my father ever did,” I said. “Marrying my mother.”
“How’d they even meet?” Greyson asked, and it was a fair question.
“They met in the ballroom of the Carlyle Hotel,” I said. I’d been told this story a hundred times. “At some benefit my grandparents were hosting. My father was working at the Calloway Group. My mother was twenty-two.”
“So Grace was what—like, a cocktail waitress at the party?”
“No,” I said, glaring at him.
“What?” Greyson said. “There’s nothing wrong with being a cocktail waitress.”
I glanced back at the portrait of my mother on the wall—how elegant she looked there, how happy. It had never occurred to me as a child to ask what my mother had been doing in the ballroom of the Carlyle Hotel. In my mind, she appeared in a ball gown and my father danced with her, swept her off her feet. But now, I had to admit her presence there seemed strange.
“Your father always kind of scared me,” Greyson said, staring up at the picture. “I mean, he’s kind of an intimidating guy.”
