“We’re going to our lake!” she screamed, with all the intensity and joy and frenzy and ecstasy she had been waiting for.
Eve pulled her body back into the car, slapped Hazel squarely on her bottom with a maniacal laugh, and then stuck her head out the window once more.
“We’re going to the lake!” she joined in.
Silas pressed his hand into the horn for three short beeps and then held it there for a fourth long, reverberating honk. Without slowing down, Silas ripped the wheel to the left into a narrow clearing between trees. A tremendous cabin, wrapped with porches and ivy and chirping animals, emerged in front of the car.
“We’re here,” Silas said, bringing the car to a slow stop. “Welcome to your getaway, girls.”
There was a pathway of once carefully laid stones, now bulging in places, leading toward the door. Eve rushed out of the car and leaped through the front door, feet not even touching the ground on her way. She made it inside before Silas could even open the car door. As Hazel began approaching the cabin, Eve poked her head back out the front.
“Oh my god, this place is cool!” Hazel yelled, to Silas or Eve, or to no one at all.
Hazel looked at Silas. He raised his eyebrows, which grew unexpectedly coarsely. “Uh, is that a word that’s fine to say?”
Eve popped her hip out to the side and leaned against the doorframe. “Yeah, totally.” She winked toward Hazel. “Give Hazel the tour!” she demanded.
“Yes, yes, of course,” Silas said as he walked toward the front door, bags already assembled effortlessly on his back. He pressed through the door and Hazel followed closely behind him. The door wobbled loose in its bracket. Hazel could tell the doorframe had been recently painted, but she could still spot the vestiges of bumps and dings.
Silas ushered them from room to room, the first a dining room that appeared to have not been used in a decade. Three gold-toned branching chandeliers hung from the ceiling, their reflections duplicated in an enormous spiderweb-lined mirror spanning one of the walls above an ornate fireplace mantel. A long, dark wooden table, covered in a membrane of dust, sprawled from one end of the room to the other. Heavy velvet drapes caressed the window frame in a swirling pattern of jewel tones. The walls were covered in a thick but worn wallpaper with a blistering rash-like texture that appeared to be caused by an unattended leak. Each room they walked through thereafter was a variation of the one before, full of things in various phases of disrepair. There was lopsided furniture, dented pots and pans, peeling wallpaper, discolored rugs, dusty armoires, tarnished doorknobs and chipped doorframes. But there was something about the way the light came so respectfully through the windows or the way Eve rushed to inspect every cranny, that obscured the line between treasure and junk. Especially because Silas narrated a story for every last thing in every last room. His words and his voice felt wise and paternal.
When they reached the living room, Hazel bent down and grazed the edge of a beautifully crafted coffee table, a stack of books in place of one of its legs. Her fingers slowed at the broken corner, feeling for flaws.
Silas crouched down next to her. “It’s just that if you spend all day working on other people’s furniture, sometimes you just don’t have that much energy left for fixing your own.”
His face was so close to Hazel’s. His green eyes looked straight into hers. Hazel smiled. And Silas did, too.
“Let’s head on over to your room, huh?” he suggested, nudging her with his shoulder lightly.
Silas, Hazel and Eve walked together down a long hallway with creaking, undulating floors. Eve dragged her arm along the wall and hummed a song Hazel didn’t recognize. There were several closed doors along the hallway and Eve twisted the knob of each one as she passed by. Each door opened with a poof of an ephemeral cloud of dust. It didn’t seem to surprise Silas that Eve wanted to generate a little chaos. He just chuckled, and Hazel followed behind him. But then the whooshing rhythm of doors flying open was interrupted by a tense clicking sound. Eve couldn’t turn the doorknob. Silas’s jaw tensed and he rushed toward the door. Eve tried turning the knob again, but there was no movement. She whipped her body around toward Silas, who was already right behind her, chest puffed up and shoulders pressing toward his ear. “Ugh, this annoying one that doesn’t open!” she said familiarly.
“That’s right,” he said firmly, but with a faint indication of melancholy. Eve didn’t seem to notice the melancholy.
“Well, I’d like to remind you that I don’t think you should call it a door if it doesn’t open. Doors open. And if it doesn’t, you should just call it a wall.”
Eve popped her hip out to the side and raised her eyebrows, as if to challenge Silas. The exchange amused Hazel, but Eve surprisingly seemed more interested in the semantics than what lay behind the door. Hazel felt differently.
“Keep it moving.” Silas pressed his hand into Eve’s back gently and smirked, ushering her away from the door.
Eve kept walking without ceremony or protest. She was quick to shift her attention, her green eyes darting around. Silas stood with his feet firmly pressed into the floor in front of the door, his left hand pressed into the doorframe. His body took on the shape of an X. It seemed instinctual. “You’ll both stay in that room this summer,” Silas said and pointed down the hallway to the last door on the end.
Silas followed Eve down the hallway and Hazel trailed behind. As she did, she slowly and quietly twisted the knob of the locked door. She wanted to see for herself. Still locked. She pressed her ear into the door and closed her eyes. No sound. She wanted to know what was behind that door, but it wasn’t only out of curiosity. It was something about the way Silas had stood in front of that door when Eve tried to open it. As if he were protecting it. Or himself.
Before Silas could turn around, Hazel rushed back to meet him and Eve toward the end of the hallway. Silas had already started pressing open the paint-chipped and creaky-hinged door to their room.
“Voilà.”
As soon as the door opened, Eve leaped inside. Hazel took deep breaths and stepped as calmly and as slowly as she could behind Eve.
There was a majesty in the sum of the parts of the rooms in Silas’s house, but no room was as majestic, as personal, as this one. The room was bright and fresh and smelled like paint and wood and wax and something special like sweat or love. The floors were old but must have been recently refinished. Light poured in through the grand window at the other end of the room and reflected a sheen on the floor.
Against the wall to the left were two queen-size beds, each with its own four towering bedposts and sheer canopies draped open. The bedding and the pillows were all varying shades of pastel pink and paisley. The light colors and delicate patterns were in sharp contrast to the rest of the house. It was as if the entire room stood for the concept of daughters rather than Eve and Hazel themselves, but it felt sweet and honest between those four walls.