Coldbrook

The bus from Bliss went through Canandaigua and let me off at a gas station at 2:10, and the station had a pay phone and a rack of maps and nothing else, and I stood outside it for twelve minutes because I was early.

It was the third week of April. The road from the station ran along the west side of the lake, which is sixteen miles long and narrow: a strip of blacktop, a wall of gray limestone on the left, a narrow shoulder, and on the right, past a rail and a drop of about nine feet, the water, flat and cold and the color of a nickel.

The fence began before the house did. It was white, four rails, and it came up out of the grass and ran for a quarter mile, and at the end of it there was a gate painted the same white, standing open. I remember thinking that a fence that long on nine feet of ground is not a fence, it is a declaration.

Then the trees opened and there was the house.

I had made a picture of it on the bus and the picture was wrong, and I would rather write the actual thing. Coldbrook is three stories and gray stone with a slate roof, and it sits with its back to the hill and its face to the water, and it is shaped like an L, and the short arm of the L is the north wing, and the whole of that arm had its windows shuttered with gray planking that had been cut to fit and painted to match, which is a thing you do when you intend an arrangement to last.

There was a porch along the front with a rail and old wicker, and on the porch, at the top of the steps with her hands folded, stood a woman of about sixty in a cardigan and a watch, and she did not come down.

“You will be Ruth,” she said. “I am Bea Truitt. You made good time.”

Then the door behind her opened and a child came out sideways, all knees and elbows, and stopped four feet away and said, without preamble, in English with a French floor under it: “Bonjour, mademoiselle. Est-ce que vous parlez français? No, you do not, that is all right, I will teach you. I have been at this house since before Christmas and I have one friend and he is a dog.”

That was Mila Sorel, who was nine, and she was not pretty the way a poster is pretty, she was pretty the way a girl is who is growing faster than her clothes. She had a red bandana tied around her wrist and she talked in a way that moved between two languages like a person walking through a doorway and not noticing that they are.

Behind her, from the hall, came a dog, slowly, and he got down on his elbows in front of me and put his nose against the back of my hand and held it there and breathed. He was old and gray in the muzzle and one hip was worse than the other. Mila said his name was Otto and that he had been a working dog and that he no longer worked, and she said it the way you would say it about a general.

Bea Truitt gave me the tour, and Bea Truitt gives a tour the way a machinist reads a lathe, which is to say she tells you what matters and not what is pretty.

There are nineteen rooms. There are four clocks that run and one that does not, and the one that does not is the tall one in the hall and it is kept at 4:40 for a reason, and I did not ask, because I had already learned that a stopped clock in a house is either an accident or a monument.

There are rugs in every room that is used, and the wear marks in them are the most reliable map of a house there is, because people walk where they go.

There are door hinges that talk. This matters. At Ellerslie the doors were metal and the latch was in the middle and the whole building sounded like a drawer. Coldbrook sounds like a body. The floors give in four places, and the hinges on the west corridor have a note to them, and you can hear a person coming by the note and not by the steps, so that by the end of April I could tell Bea from Mila from nobody at all.

And there is a ballroom. It is on the first floor at the back of the north wing, and it is forty feet long, and it is full of furniture with sheets over it. There were eleven shapes under sheets when I first counted them, and ten of them I could name, and the eleventh I could not until I lifted a corner and found it was a harp.

The door into that part of the house was shut, and the shutters on the outside of that wing were the planked ones, and Bea walked past that door the way you walk past a wall.

My room was on the second floor of the long arm, and it was a real room, with a window facing the water and a bed and a dresser and a table. It was the first room I had ever had that had a door I could shut and a key to shut it with, and I put the key in the lock and turned it twice and then took it out and put it in my pocket, and I still have it.

I slept badly the first night, and at some point after two I heard it. It came from a long way down the west corridor and around the corner into the north wing, and it was two sounds and not one.

One was furniture. Something heavy, moving eight or ten inches across a floor, with a scrape under it, the sound of a chair being shifted by somebody sitting down or standing up.

The other was a laugh.

Here is what I want to say about that, because I have been asked about it by people who wanted the wrong answer. I did not think the house was haunted. I was twenty years old and I had grown up in a stone building in the rain, and I had lived in this world long enough to know that a laugh at two in the morning in a house with nineteen rooms is not the house. A house that is forty years settled and sits on a slope will make every sound in the register, from a knock to a groan, and it will make them on a schedule tied to temperature. I had spent a week already listening to the furnace and the water in the pipe and the rail fence ticking in the wind.

A house does not laugh. A person laughs, or a recording does, and a voice carries down a corridor in a way that is off by a wall from where you think it is. The north wing is a dead arm of a building with a shut door at the elbow. I lay in the dark and did the inventory the way I have done it since I was nine, and the inventory said: one shut door, one planked wing, one dog who came down that corridor at night and did not bark.

I got up at six and drew the house.

I did it on the back of the bus schedule, and I did it because a building is a thing you can learn the way you learn a book, and I wanted the floor plan in my own hand and not only in my head. I marked the nineteen rooms and the four clocks and the four floorboards that give and the door at the elbow of the L. I marked my own room with a small square and the stairs with two lines, and then I went down the corridor and checked the plan against the house, room by room, and corrected it in three places.

Then I folded it and put it in the front of the book with the cracked spine, and went down to breakfast, and Mila was already at the table with her elbows out and a notebook open, and she said, “Good morning, mademoiselle. Today we do French and then we walk to the water, and I will tell you everything about this house that is true and everything that is not.”