The moving truck could not make the turn at the head of the lane, and in the
end that was Adam Reyes's first lesson in how Wexford Lane worked:
everything that arrived there arrived on the lane's own terms. The driver
stood in the April sunshine with his hands on his hips, looking at the
farmhouse, looking at the narrow mouth of the cul-de-sac, and said what two
other drivers had said to Adam in two other towns. "We'll have to dolly it
from here, friend."
So the furniture came down the lane piece by piece on a hand truck, past
fourteen mailboxes, past the forsythia going off like yellow fireworks in
every yard at once, and Lily rode escort on her bicycle with the seriousness
of a motorcycle cop, bell ringing at each driveway whether anyone was
coming out of it or not. She was nine years old and she had the whole street
to herself, because it was a Tuesday and the lane was empty, and because a
cul-de-sac, Adam understood watching her, was not a street at all but a room
— a long green room with a door at one end — and his daughter, who had
spent four years in a third-floor apartment above a bus route, rode the length
of it as if she had been waiting her whole life for a room she could cross
without asking the world's permission.
"Wexford Lane," the realtor had said. "Fourteen houses. Built seventy-eight,
seventy-nine, on the old Wexford farm. The farmhouse is still there at the top
— that's Mrs. Wexford herself, the developer's widow. Quiet as a held
breath, Mr. Reyes. For your girl, with her lungs — I don't say this to every
buyer. This is the one."
Carla Jiménez had said a number of things, some of them even in the right
order, but the held breath had been the truth of it. The house at the far end of
the lane — number 14, though the numbers on Wexford Lane ran the way
2
Ernest Wexford had whimsically laid them out in 1979, odds and evens
facing each other like dancers — was a brick ranch with a deep porch and a
maple in the back yard old enough to have opinions. It was not a grand
house. It was a house with room in it: room for a nebulizer on the kitchen
counter without apology, room for a girl to grow along the grain of her own
life, room for a man who worked nights to sleep in the daytime dark behind
blackout curtains while the street outside stayed mercifully, contractually
quiet.
He had signed the papers in Carla's office in Goshen Falls on a Thursday,
with Lily drawing houses on the back of a disclosure form, and now it was
real and the truck was dollying his dead wife's piano — no, not a piano,
Alma had never played; it was Alma's bookshelf, the tall pine one, that came
down the lane like a dignitary, and Adam stood at the foot of his own
driveway with his hands empty for the first time in months and watched his
whole portable past file into the shade of the maple, one hand-truck load at a
time.
The farmhouse watched too. He was aware of it the way you are aware of a
face at a window in a house you pass every day: not spying, exactly, but
attendant. The farmhouse was older than the lane by eighty years, white
clapboard, a porch that ran around two sides, and a widow's-walk railing on
the roof that no widow had ever walked on, and it sat at the head of the
cul-de-sac the way a hen sits — everything on Wexford Lane arranged in the
curve of its regard. Between the farmhouse and the mouth of the lane there
stood a sign, handsome, routed oak on two posts, the letters picked out in
white: WEXFORD LANE — PRIVATE — RESIDENTS AND GUESTS
BY PERMISSION. Somebody kept the sign weeded. Somebody had planted
pansies under it in a row as straight as type.
3
"Dad." Lily had stopped her bike at the mailbox, one foot down. "Is it a real
private street? Like, ours?"
"Like, ours to drive on," Adam said. "The sign's older than you are. Older
than the house, probably."
"It says permission." She read it again, lips moving. "Whose permission?"
He looked up the lane at the farmhouse, at the lace edge of a curtain in an
upstairs window that was, he would swear later, not quite as still as a curtain
ought to be when nobody is behind it.
"I expect we'll find out," he said.
The movers left at four. By five the kitchen was a country of boxes; by six
Adam had the fridge running and the first of the house's true arrangements
made, which was not the beds and not the television but a single laminated
sheet he fixed to the refrigerator door with four magnets, square and level,
the way he had fixed it in every kitchen since Lily was four. ASTHMA
ACTION PLAN, it said, in the calm block capitals of the county clinic.
Green zone, yellow zone, red zone. Inhaler: two puffs, may repeat.
Nebulizer: albuterol, fifteen minutes, then reassess. If the lips go blue, if the
words come one at a time, call 911 first and treat while you wait. He had
written the last line himself, in marker, along the bottom, because the clinic's
version had left it in the passive voice and the passive voice had no place in
that particular document. FIRST, THE BREATHING.