“We’ve had all of one morning to discuss it!”

  “What solutions are there, really, that you could help her with, child?” Madame Verrett said to Alex. “If marrying the father is out of the question.”

  “It is,” Libbie and Alex said together.

  “Yes,” Madame Verrett said. “So, you see, don’t you? Infinitely more complicated. All of this is not mad, as you put it, it’s fate. I see you at the fair yesterday when you’re trying so hard for me not to see you, and Harold sees you and understands at once what you are to each other, a living line from Sappho—and with Harold so in need, and you so in need. It’s fate. So we’ll sit together here until you listen, and I’ll try to find even one thing to eat. I’m so hungry, always, in this country. I hate it.”

  “I’m in a position to help you, Libbie,” Harold said. “We can help each other.”

  “I’m listening now,” Libbie said. “Please go on, Mr. Brookhants.”

  He nodded, seemed to gather his words again. “We’re alike,” he eventually said. “I think you know that already, don’t you?” He smiled at her, almost shyly.

  “I’m not sure I do know,” Libbie said.

  He gathered more words. “In the way we love, that is—our own kind. I love men as you love women.”

  “Well, at least one time she loved a man as you love men,” Madame Verrett said. Then she took a very loud bite of the very large lemon ice that had just been served to her in a sweating silver chalice and added, “Here we are, after all.”

  Harold ignored her. “I’ve always wanted a child, but—with the way I am, I didn’t know quite how. I didn’t want to marry, not even as a ruse. I don’t think you do, either. Am I right about that?”

  “You are,” Libbie said. “For now. Today I don’t.”

  “It’s much simpler for a man not to, of course. Not easy, always, for a man like me. But much simpler than for a woman.” You could tell he was building up to something: one eye had gone twitchy and he’d puffed up his chest a bit. “But if we were to marry—”

  “You could be her grandfather!” Alex said. “It’s preposterous.”

  “It does seem very unlikely,” Libbie said as if there were many other crueler words she could have chosen than unlikely.

  “It’s obscene,” Alex said. “If Libbie’s going to marry someone to hide this, she’ll find someone her own age. Or closer to. She’d have choices.”

  “Not many, in her condition,” Madame Verrett said, scooping another bite of her ice. “This I like,” she said. “It’s tart and cold.”

  “I don’t think—” Libbie said.

  “Please,” Harold said. “Please let me finish.”

  She nodded at him to go on.

  He did. “I have money. I have more of it than you could spend in twenty lifetimes. I have a beautiful house in Pittsburgh and one in New York and one in France, of course.” He smiled at the Madame, who was still looking at her ice. “But the one I’ve been building on the ocean in Rhode Island is the most special of them all. Or it will be, when I’m finished with it. It comes with land—it’s touched, this land. Madame Verrett led me to it and it’s full of the most magnificent vitality. It hums with it. I want to establish a school there, that’s what this land wants—I feel so sure of it—a school for young women, and now I know the woman to run that school. The women.” For the first time since he’d begun his pitch, he looked at Alex.

  She looked away.

  Harold didn’t let this deter him. “I don’t have much time left in this realm, Libbie. Or on this earth, if you prefer. You could let me do this for you before I leave. I could give you such a beautiful life in this special place. It’s a remarkable place, you’d need only visit once to know that. And you both could live so happily there. It would be private, entirely your own, and you’d soon be a very young widow with the protection of your husband’s name and could run it for years and years with the money I’ll leave you. Even with no students, you could stay open. But of course you will have students, too many even to take them all, I imagine.”

  “No need to imagine,” Madame Verrett said. “It would be so. For a time.”

  “Why would you do this for me?” Libbie asked him.

  “I like you,” Harold said. “I always have liked you. But this I’d be doing for me as much as for you. I told you, I’ve long wanted a child of my own.”

  “Yes, but I don’t and you’re dying,” Libbie said. She only seemed to realize the force of what she’d said once she had. “I’m sorry, Mr. Brookhants, I am. I don’t mean to be cruel, but you’re saying I’d be a young widow there in a house on the ocean, and now I’d be a young widowed mother.”

  “Her child wouldn’t be your child anyway,” Alex said. Unlike Libbie, she no longer cared how she sounded to either of them. She’d had enough of this nonsense. “It would be Simon Everett’s bastard.”

  “That is not entirely correct,” Madame Verrett said. She burped into her napkin and then added, “There are things that can still be done. Quickly, very quickly. You’re two months along?”

  “Yes, about,” Libbie said. Madame Verrett’s accuracy prickled her skin.

  “It’s not what we’d call ideal,” Madame Verrett said. “But it is still possible to effect a change. Possible.” She picked at her teeth and looked, frankly, quite bored with the three of them.

  “Yes, so here we are at the troubling bit,” Harold said.

  “Oh, is this the troubling bit?” Alex asked. “Oh good.”

  “It all gets rather complicated from here and I’m not sure how much you would even want to know about my beliefs, or where to start to help explain this in a way that you could understand. I have some books I might lend you, but for the purpose of—”

  Madame Verrett held up her hand. “Harold, Harold, Harold—no. No, no, no. Please. I did not come here for the food.” She pushed her sweating silver chalice away and now faced Libbie and Alex as their teacher, a position that suited her. “In the natural world,” she said, using her hands for emphasis, there in the air above the table, as she spoke, “there is energy that can be transmuted even as it is forming. This is common enough, if you know where to look for it. Harold is too old now to have a child without some form of assistance, anyway.” She looked closely at him for a moment or two. “Yes, I think so. It would be difficult. So now, instead, I will give the same kind of assistance to him after a child has already been conceived. It’s different, but the same, in the end it’s the same—it becomes Harold’s child, too.”

  “Assistance?” Alex asked like the word itself was rotten.

  “It is a single ceremony,” Madame Verrett said. “Only a matter of hours, at least at the start—to make the necessary change. It will be done at my house in France, with my sisters near. There are two nights we might choose from, though one is better than the other, for reasons you cannot understand so I won’t give them to you. And then you’ll hide your pregnancy there, in France. None but we would know. And after, you’ll come back to your new home, and school, on the ocean.”

  “After?” Libbie asked.

  “After you deliver the child,” Madame Verrett said, as if she should not have to do so.

  “This is preposterous,” Alex said. “It’s—”

  Libbie interrupted. “I don’t want a child. Whether or not you could do any of what you just said, whatever it is you just said.” She looked forcefully at Madame Verrett. “I don’t want to be a mother. I don’t want a child.”

  “I know!” Harold said. “That’s why it’s so perfect. She would be my child, not yours. Not if you didn’t want her to be.”

  “I don’t,” Libbie said.

  “She?” Alex said. “So now you’re certain of that as well?”

  “It would be a girl,” Madame Verrett said like she’d just told them it was a Wednesday, which it was.

  “This is a farce,” Alex said. “It’s a farce. That or I never woke up this morning. Maybe I’m still asleep on the train crossing Ohio.”

  “Aren’t they funny?” Madame Verrett said to her. “They don’t match at all.”

  “Aren’t what funny?” Alex said.

  “The things you say aloud,” the Madame said. “Compared to the things you think, I mean.”

  Alex stood with such force that her chair nearly toppled behind her. It rocked on two legs before settling. She touched Libbie’s shoulder. “I’m going. You stay if you want to hear more of this.”

  “No, I’ll come, too,” Libbie said. She also pushed her chair away from the table, but then seemed to hesitate over her decision, unsure.

  “Of course,” Harold said, standing. “We don’t have to cover everything in one luncheon, after all. Such big decisions. And I know it’s so much to think about when you’re already thinking about so much. I want you to know that I do understand your skepticism, dear girl. And your reluctance.”

  “I appreciate you—” Libbie said. She stopped, started again. “I don’t know quite—I—it’s very kind of you to have offered me so much, Mr. Brookhants.” She stopped again, shook her head. “I don’t understand your offer, I don’t think. But I can see how generous it is, under the circumstances, and I want you to know what that means to me.”

  “Please think carefully about this, Libbie,” he said. “Please? You still have time to consider what’s best for you.”

  Madame Verrett squinted her face in disagreement as her unstated objection, and then decided to go ahead and state it. “You have a little time. You do not have endless time.”

  “No one on earth has endless time,” Alex said as she took Libbie’s hand to pull her away.

  “Ahhh!” Madame Verrett said, smiling. “Now you see, this thing you do believe, and you’ve said it out loud. Good for you! This is progress. Unfortunately, this thing you believe isn’t true. There are some with endless time, both on this earth and elsewhere. And there are others, like Harold, who use their lives to make more time. But as you don’t know that, or didn’t until I just told it to you, at least it’s not yet another thing you were thinking while you said the opposite.”

  “I’d prefer it if you never spoke to me again,” Alex said.

  “Aha! Another true thing! I am indeed the miracle worker they call me in the papers!”

  Part Two

  The Happenings at Brookhants

  Now I will send my Portrayal into the wise wide world. It may stop short at the publisher; or it may fall still-born from the press; or it may go farther, indeed, and may be its own undoing.

  That’s as may be.

  I will send it.

  What else is there for me, if not this book?

  —MARY MACLANE, The Story of Mary MacLane

  Woodrow kindly said: “So, you’ve started writing again. Novel?”

  “A report. An account. Yes, I’ll call it a novel. If I ever finish it. Of course, I never do finish anything.”

  —TRUMAN CAPOTE, Answered Prayers

  What to Make of This Arrangement?

  Despite having grown up on and around film sets, Audrey Wells shivered as they rose over the crest of a hill and she caught her first glimpse of Spite Manor and its infamous tower. Even at this distance, there was something deeply disquieting about the way it shot up from the house like an arm raised in distress.

  It’s a mistake to be here, she thought.

  The more Audrey tried to sink that thought, the more buoyancy it gained, floating to the surface of her consciousness and bobbing there.

  I shouldn’t be doing this.

  Carl (the driver) had picked her up at T. F. Green airport in Warwick and they had been in the car together—one in a fleet of SUVs and vans that would be used by The Happenings at Brookhants production—for longer than she’d anticipated.

  At first, the traffic was dense (“Weekendas headed to the cape,” said Carl), but then, as they left the freeway for a two-lane road replete with tar snakes, the landscape turned to sections of shady woods that merged into lush farmland and back again, occasional glimpses of bay or bog throughout. Soon the road narrowed until farm stands cluttered along its side, bearing rows of cucumbers and squash, corn and potatoes. Patrons stood squeezing the tomatoes they would eventually purchase, place in their canvas bags, and take back to their coastal homes (or end-of-summer rentals).

  Eventually, the road cut through a town square that was part Currier and Ives, part Instagram bait: an ice-cream stand, a strip of antiques dealers, a deli housed in a renovated 1800s mercantile with patriotic bunting hanging from its windows and pots of geraniums flanking its entrance. Audrey recognized the deli from Merritt’s book. She’d interviewed locals there.

  When Carl turned again, it was onto a road with a security booth; a gate blocked their path. The gate slid open for them with only a wave to the guard working the controls.

  Now, and for the last several minutes, they’d been on this private road. Rhode Island was supposed to be a tiny state, Audrey knew, and yet the Brookhants property managed to feel quite isolated.

  And then they came through a copse* of trees and their view was dominated by the flashing blue of the water to one side and Spite Manor to the other. Audrey couldn’t help herself. She let out a wow. If not for the production equipment trucks parked beneath the shade of a spread-limb maple tree, she might have let herself believe that Carl had been tasked with driving her into the past.

  “Not bad, huh?” he said.

  “Yeah, no, definitely not bad.” She smiled at him.

  “It’s a pretty spot.” Carl, Readers, was most adept at understatement.

  Audrey rolled down her window. The wide view of the water was lovely, but she was a California girl and had seen similar a time or two. But the house, Spite Manor, was what Carl might call really something. Charming in a glimpse, perhaps, at least until you really looked at it and realized its various components added up to something slightly off: the wiggling worm in your farm stand tomato.

  The house was clad in weathered shake siding, a skin of gray scales, its many windows and doors trimmed in crisp white and deep green. It wore its enormous shake roof like a straw hat, eaves extending to shade its low porches entirely, as if those porches were the house’s face, its window eyes hidden under the roof’s brim. The porches held antique wicker rocking chairs and hanging ferns. Spite Manor was anchored, on one side, by an impressive, vine-covered fieldstone chimney, and on the other by its even more impressive tower.

  As they pulled up the driveway, the expanse of the house filled the windshield, and Audrey noticed a distinct shift in the noise beneath the wheels. They were now driving on crushed seashells, thousands of pieces slipping and spraying over each other.

  “Just put these down and they stink like it,” Carl said.

  He was right. The shells smelled like dead fish in a dirty ocean. But Audrey fixated on their sound, the way they chimed as they fell against each other, like someone gathering a sack of broken dishes. It’s true she was drowsy from lack of sleep, and from the flight, and from the drive in the summer heat, but Audrey felt certain this sound could hypnotize her if she let it.

  She tried to focus on something else, looking up into the row of glinting windows at the top of Spite Tower. She flinched, startled. There was a person standing behind one of them.

  Audrey squinted and decided the dark outline belonged to Elaine Brookhants, still as a stuck scarecrow and staring, watching the advance of this Hollywood invader from her perch. Audrey held up her hand as they neared the base of the tower. She couldn’t tell if Elaine acknowledged her or not, because the window kept glinting and they kept on driving.

  They continued on to the back of the house, the trees soon dense around them, canopied above them, their roots stretching across the road, which was no longer shell but knobby dirt.

  “Bet you’re gonna like these, too,” Carl said as the SUV bounced in the ruts. “They’re cute. That’s what Pete said when I brought her, anyway.” Carl had already told Audrey that Pete was his nickname for Harper Harper, apparently his refashioning of the joke I’m Pete and this is my brother Repeat in recognition of her double name.

  The cute things Carl had been referring to were the tiny houses production had hauled onto the property. And Pete was right: they were cute. They were also strikingly modern when compared to the house they’d just passed. Three in a row, identical, tall and narrow and abundant in black metal windows; each was capped with a small roof deck that fit two Adirondack chairs and a shade umbrella. The drop down to the bay was not more than twenty yards from their front doors.

  They were also—and this was the second time in less than twenty minutes that Audrey had considered this word—isolated.

  “There’s Pete now,” Carl said. Clearly Harper had won him over.

  She was hanging half of her body out the front door of the tiny house nearest to where they’d parked, her arms braced hard against the doorframe to keep from falling into the grass. She smiled and squinted in their direction. Then she went back into the house and when she popped out again she wore purply-teal sunglasses with mirrored lenses. She was down on the grass and approaching them as Carl opened his door.

  Along with those sunglasses, Harper was wearing pale pink swim shorts spread with green alligators and a green bikini top, her stomach flat and one shade tan. And she was barefoot with the requisite cigarette behind her ear. Audrey felt suddenly overly attired, even in her simple white-and-blue summer romper.

  “Surprised you didn’t get her lost,” Harper said to Carl.

  “Who told you I didn’t?” His grin was now the size of his face.

  Harper came around to Audrey’s door. “I’ve been in there waiting on you,” she said, pulling Audrey into a hug. “How was your trip?”

  “It was good,” Audrey said to the back of Harper’s neck, which smelled of sunscreen and cigarettes. “This place is unreal.”

  “I know, right?” Harper said. “And you haven’t even been over to the school yet. Or have you?”