Half of What You Hear

Prologue

Susannah

Even with the windows rolled down, the air feels thick and hot. Like drowning in chowder, Teddy used to say, although he didn’t know humidity like this. New York could get warm in the summer, even unbearably so, but it wasn’t Virginia. Susannah had forgotten just how bad it could get.

She’s sweating in a way that a lady should never admit—that was something she might have said once, in her old life, winking to her well-heeled friends to indicate that she didn’t really buy into the stodgy rules she’d been raised with—and her palms are slippery against the steering wheel. Its perforated leather reminds her of the one in the Cadillac that her father had driven. She leans into the open frame of the window and pushes her foot on the gas, encouraging the breeze.

She’d wanted a truck like this her whole life. It’s red, a Chevy Fleetside pickup. She’d first seen it in an advertisement in the back of the New York Times in 1967. She was nineteen then, living in the Barbizon Hotel on Sixty-Third Street. Occasionally, over the years, she’d mentioned the truck to Teddy, not in any serious way, just in passing, daydreaming aloud, the way you might say that it could be fun to climb the Great Wall someday, or see the northern lights. But because he was Teddy, he filed the nugget away (he was always listening, even when he seemed like he wasn’t), and on her sixtieth birthday she found it parked in the circular drive of their summer house, a bow the size of an inner tube tied over the hood.

She remembers the shock of it, the first time she saw the truck and how it filled her with good feelings—warm feelings, loving feelings. This is what he could do to her. It was as if she were one of the precious crystal water pitchers she’d received as wedding gifts, and his actions could fill or empty her, depending. She’d turned to him in the driveway that day, shocked and elated, her fingertips pressed against her lips, and then ran and wrapped her arms around his starched shoulders, just like he knew she would. Her friends commented on how fortunate she was to have this doting and generous husband, but they didn’t know the half of it.

That was ten years ago now. Teddy is gone, his body buried in Connecticut beside his horrible mother last year. The summer house is gone, too. She’s back in Virginia, living in the house she grew up in, a move some people might describe as full circle. She takes a deep breath, the thick air in her mouth like  . . . well, like chowder. So much in her life has changed. And yet, she’s realized recently, so much hasn’t.

Like the radio, for instance, still playing Patsy Cline all these decades later. I Fall to Pieces. She chuckles to herself, noticing the sick irony of it.

And this lazy stretch of asphalt, Whippoorwill Road. The pines are still densely packed on either side, soldiers marking a path. The mottled metal mailboxes are familiar, the wooden plaques carved with house numbers and nailed to the trees. Even if she doesn’t know the people inside them, she knows the little houses in her blood. Eyelet curtains hanging in the windows, porches jammed with rusting furniture, the occasional horse slapping at something with its tail, blackberry brambles, the sharp scent of someone burning something in their backyard.

Gone for more than fifty years, she thinks. With all the land and the expansive blue sky, the breeze in her hair, the mountains beyond, she should feel free, released, but she doesn’t. Instead, she’s anxious, a single leaf floating aimlessly through the air.

She sticks her hand out the open window and feels the liquid warmth of the wind through her fingers. Her eyes dart toward the trees. Even when you’re by yourself out here, you’re never really alone, she thinks, imagining all the things she can’t see in the woods, the way she used to when she was a girl, squinting out the window in the back seat of the car. The bears, the deer, the snakes, the foxes. The ghosts.

She rubs a sweaty palm against her skirt—pink, Norma Kamali, bought in 1983 after she saw it on the runway. Her eyes dart from side to side. She realizes she’s swerving, kicking up gravel on her right side. Jesus, she mutters, shaking her head at herself, and then takes another deep breath, her hands at ten and two. Maybe it’s time to turn around.

She reaches for the radio dial. She’s losing the signal. When she looks up, there’s the slightest bend in the road, easy and gradual, like the curve of her hip. A bead of sweat rolls down her temple. She flicks the heel of her hand against the side of her face, runs a finger across her upper lip. There is no AC in the truck. The wind is hot. The sun is beating down on the hood. It’s one o’clock in the afternoon, August in central Virginia. What was she thinking?

The static on the radio is getting worse. She reaches to turn it off, and when she looks up—the bend in the road—there’s another car. A sort of goldish beige, sleek. Barreling fast.

She hugs her side of the road, but the car is coming faster, right toward her, in fact, the glare from the sun a white streak across the windshield. She lays on the horn, pounds at it, but it barely whimpers. She always meant to mention it to Teddy, how it never worked. The car! It’s crossing . . .

She opens her mouth and screams.

The wind stops. The air is still. Searing. The locusts buzz in the trees around her, the sound unforgiving, an electric singe that feels like it’s coming from inside her. She tastes blood in her mouth. She hears the trill of a bird in the distance—a pine warbler, she thinks, remembering. She opens and closes her eyes and wonders if this is the end. She thinks to herself, tries to say it again, over and over (how many times has she said it?): Help.

One

TWO MONTHS LATER

OCTOBER

GREYHILL, VIRGINIA

So, Martha, how many people did you turn away today?

Martha Brown swallows a sip of her third chardonnay and tells herself that it is her final glass. Take a guess, she says, yelling across the bar to where her godson Tom is mixing a whiskey sour.

How about seven? he guesses, draining the cocktail shaker into a glass.

"The final count was eleven," she says.

Tom whistles, deep and low.

Eleven wives! repeats Jenny Perkins from her usual Saturday-night spot at the bar, wiping ketchup from the side of her mouth with her pinky.

"E-lev-en," Martha repeats, lifting her glass again.

They play this guessing game at the bar in Dahlia’s restaurant every week. Martha is the owner and sole proprietor of Brown & Brown Realty on Maple Street. Her grandfather and great-uncle founded the office, but now that they’re both gone and her parents are, too, she’s the only Brown left in Greyhill.

Fall and spring are her busiest seasons, but not because she sells any houses. Instead, she puts aside her usual workday activities—reading her paperback mysteries, watching CNN on the little TV she keeps on her grandfather’s desk, maybe sipping an occasional afternoon glass from the bottle of wine she keeps in the office fridge—and fields questions from the DC and Richmond women and their husbands.

They come to town in droves this time of year, when the leaves are at their peak, the town seemingly outlined in a garland of reds and oranges and yellows, the scent of wood smoke and cider in the air. They walk up and down Maple in their quilted vests and designer jeans, darting in and out of the delightful little shops, pointing at the hand-painted signs above each storefront and the brass plaques on the brick facades of the buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, and it doesn’t take long for the wheels to start turning in the wives’ heads. We could start a simpler life here, they think, hobbling in their high-heeled boots on the cobblestoned streets. We could open one of these little shops! We could get horses! Chickens! We could garden! By the time they walk into Martha’s office, they’re practically panting. I’m interested in some property, they squeak, looking down their perky powdered noses at Martha, the gold bracelets clink-clanking on their wrists. They all wear those big bangles now, Martha has noticed. All the way up to their elbows. They look to Martha like handcuffs.

She explains, as she always does, that there is nothing currently available.

"Nothing at all?" they say, their mouths open in little O’s like in that famous painting The Scream. The husbands, in contrast, are barkers—lawyers and lobbyists, she’s sure. Little terrierlike men. You have nothing? they say, eyes narrowed, not believing her.

Nothing at all, she coos, placating them by turning to the dusty Dell monitor on her desk and offering to add their names to a wait list.

The wives all want to be reincarnations of Jackie Kennedy, whose escape from Washington was a horse farm an hour from here, on Rattlesnake Mountain near Middleburg. What they don’t understand is that while Greyhill has all the charm and timeless beauty of those hunt-country towns farther north—Middleburg and Upperville and la-di-da—Greyhill is no-vacancy. It has never been a weekend-country-house kind of place. Martha, and everyone she knows in town, would like to keep it that way.

She can tell you, having sold just a single property in the past six months, that the vast majority of homes in Greyhill proper are true family heirlooms, passed down from generation to generation or sold by word of mouth to close friends. The last one she sold was the Ammandale house, to Cole Warner and his wife, the chubby woman who used to work in the White House. It’s nice for Cole to be back in his hometown, across the street from his parents.

Would you believe that I had somebody ask me about Esperanza today? she says. Her voice feels loose and slurry. She pushes her wineglass away.

You’re kidding, Dahlia says from behind the bar.

It happens once in a while. Lately, more than ever. Everyone wants to know what’s happening up in the house on the hill. Dear old Susannah.

I can’t blame them for asking, says Dahlia, stretching to place a clean wineglass on the rack above her. Her tight T-shirt rides up, revealing her navel, and Martha watches, amused, as Tom’s eyes travel over her curves. Oh, to be young and naive and not realize that everyone knows you’re sleeping together.

Susannah’s brought all that attention on herself, says Jenny. That’s the way she operates, always has. I still don’t understand why she came back here after all these years.

Hal, her husband, shifts in his seat. He puts a hand over his mouth, pretending to clear his throat, and says, "Carpetbagger."

"Oh, Hal," Jenny says.

What? he says.

Martha laughs. If the shoe fits.

I don’t know, though . . . Tom starts, putting a hand on his hip. He has that squinty look on his face like he thinks he’s about to say something insightful. Martha rolls her eyes.

Is what she’s doing really ‘wrong’? he says, making little quotation marks with his stubby fingers. If Susannah Lane has all this property to sell, why can’t she sell it to whomever she wants? Isn’t that her right?

"Hell no!" Hal says, leaning across the bar, a finger pointing to the boy’s face, making Martha giggle.

Tom rears back. Well, why not?

Because, Tom, Hal says, "the woman is a Greyhill, the last living one, and that land of hers is Greyhill land. She has a responsibility to all of us who’ve been raising our families here for generations to continue the tradition of this town, not turn it into a playground for outsiders. I mean, damn! The buses that come through town on the weekends, carrying in all those drunk Northern Virginia housewives for lunch after they’ve been around to the wineries—that’s bad enough."

Jenny pats his arm.

I heard she listed that plot up north of Little Comfort Road for almost three million, Dahlia says.

Tom whistles again.

That true, Martha? Hal asks.

She throws a hand up. "How the hell would I know? You know I refuse to have anything to do with any of this. When she came to my office after she moved back, asking whether I’d be her agent, I told her exactly what I thought of that idea."

And that’s why she brought in that guy from New York, Jenny says.

He flies down whenever it’s time to show some land, Martha says. He got licensed in the state just for this.

Well, he knows what kind of commission he’ll make, Hal says, spitting as the words come out of his mouth.

Now, now, Jenny says, patting his shoulder.

He shakes his head. I’m sorry, he sputters. This infuriates me. It should infuriate all of you! How she can just come back here after decades, thinking she’s the queen bee and that she can just start shaking things up!

Times change, Mr. Perkins, Dahlia says. We might not like it, but—

Times change! Hal screams back. Dahlia, if your father heard you say that! I mean, come on, you were raised here. And here you are, running the restaurant your parents started. Is nothing sacred?

The way you’re riled up, Hal, I might start to believe you’re the one who tried to run Susannah off the road over the summer, Martha says, laughing and reaching again for her glass.

Martha! Jenny scolds.

"Don’t think there’s not a part of me that didn’t wish it was me!" Hal says.

Hal! Jenny says.

Oh, I don’t mean it, he says. I saw the pictures the sheriff took afterward. You should have seen the way Susannah’s truck was wrapped around that tree. He whistles.

It’s amazing she lived, much less came out basically unscathed, Dahlia says.

Martha nods and looks around the bar. Nine lives, that one.

That’s for sure, Jenny mutters, her eyes on her plate as she drags another fry through her ketchup. "That’s for damn sure."

Anyway. Martha clears her throat. I told the woman who came into the office today that Esperanza wasn’t for sale and probably never would be. I said the owner is very happy to stay where she is.

"Well, did you tell her about all the land she does have for sale?" Tom asks.

Martha smiles. Forgot that part.

Hal laughs. Here’s to ya, Martha! He raises his glass.

You think she’s really happy being back here, up in that house all alone? Dahlia asks, rubbing the rim of a wineglass with a white bar cloth.

I can’t imagine she would be. Jenny shrugs. I almost feel sorry for her.

Her husband huffs and steals a fry off her plate. Almost, he says. That’s the key word. I, for one, hope she leaves just as quickly as she did when she was seventeen.

Two

Bess

The invitation from Greg and Mindy Barker arrived in the mail weeks ago, just after Labor Day. I pick it up off the stack on the kitchen counter, flicking the black paper with my finger. It is heavy Crane cardstock, five and a half by seven and a half inches, the same size I’d used for the First Lady’s less formal events. Concerts in the East Room. Garden teas on the South Lawn. A televised tour of the White House kitchen for the Food Network.

Mindy had chosen a sparkly silver spiderweb design. Nice. A little cutesy, but it was hard not to be on a Halloween invitation. In silver script, it announced that this would be the twentieth anniversary of their annual masquerade party.

Tell me this isn’t standard invitation etiquette around here, I turn and say to Cole, fanning myself with the card.

What? He puts out his hand to have a look.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice and all, but they could have just done Paperless Post and saved themselves a few hundred dollars.

Well, it’s the twentieth anniversary of this party, he says through a mouthful of potato chips. It’s a big deal to them.

I grab the envelope off the counter and run my finger over the return address printed in letterpress on the back. 46 HONEYSUCKLE LANE. I know that street. Big, green lawns and manicured boxwoods. Gorgeous oil lanterns flanking the front doors. Ever since the kids went back to school last month, I’ve been driving around a lot, trying to get my bearings. Most of Greyhill’s population lives just outside downtown, on wide swaths of land that in many cases were once working farms. Now, they showcase beautifully renovated homes with equestrian barns, hobby animals, and carefully plotted formal gardens.

I thought finding my way around Greyhill would be easy compared to driving around DC. How could it not be—it’s a town of barely seven hundred, with a main drag called Maple Street that runs less than a mile from end to end. Plus, I’m not entirely a stranger. I’ve been coming here for years to visit Cole’s parents.

How naive I’d been. The minute you leave Greyhill proper, everything looks the same. Idyllic, with rolling pastures crisscrossed by old stone fences, the purple-gray peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains framing the view but also distracting for that very reason, and it’s impossible to navigate. It is so expansive, so empty, and so different from what I’m used to that sometimes, when I take a moment to really notice it, I feel my breath catch, the space almost startling me. It is hard to believe that we are just eighty miles from DC.

I fling Mindy’s envelope onto the counter and reach for the chips. So this party’s a big deal? I repeat, my hand digging into the bag.

What? Cole says, a touch of defensiveness in his voice.

Nothing. I look across the room and smile at him. He thinks I am criticizing his friends, and he’s right, I am. But it’s not that I don’t like them. I simply don’t know them yet. And the problem is that they all know who I am, or they assume they do—I have cable news to thank for that—and that’s what makes me nervous.

I turn and open the refrigerator. What do you want for dinner? I ask, scanning the contents of the shelves as I lick the salt from the chips off my fingertips. Another new thing since we moved: I’m cooking again. There is no more sloppy takeout eaten at the kitchen counter while we scan emails, no more bullshit slow cooker gruel, no more racing by the store to pick up something quick in the twenty-minute window between leaving work and grabbing the kids from their after-school program.

Anything, he says, wrapping his arms around my waist. He kisses my neck. Maybe that? He points to a parchment-wrapped package I bought at Bully’s, the local grocery store, this morning. A cut-up whole chicken. Heritage breed, the butcher had said proudly from behind the counter. Killed it myself yesterday.

Cole starts for the door.

When we agreed to take over the inn that’s been in Cole’s family for generations, Bradley and Diane, his parents, warned us over champagne and cake that the business might surprise us. You know, this could be every bit as busy as your lives back in DC, Bradley said, a line neither of us really believed, even while we knew there was a steep learning curve ahead of us.

So far, we’ve been right. It’s not that the work isn’t hard—Cole’s at the inn seven days a week and often heads back in the evenings after dinner just to check on things—but it’s different. It’s happy work, catering to people, coddling the guests—a welcome change from grinding it out for fifteen hours a day on a laptop or in meetings, the way we used to do.

And the business is stable . . . I think. Let’s say I’m 80 percent sure. The only other hotel option nearby is a terrifying motel fifteen miles down the highway that’s begging to be a crime scene. It’s reassuring that we’ve been the only game in town for decades, ever since Cole’s great-grandfather decided to turn his childhood home into an inn after he returned home from the First World War. Back then, Greyhill was a stop on the C&O Railway, a pass-through between the coal mines of Appalachia and the ports in Newport News and Norfolk, so there was actually a need for a place for people to stay when they were passing through on business. But the railroad is long gone, so now the inn quietly caters to couples on weekend getaways and to guests of Greyhill residents, and occasionally to people who have business in Charlottesville, about thirty-five miles away. It would be nice if it were a bustling business, but Cole assures me that his parents have never had a problem making money. Still, I insisted on seeing all the income reports and spreadsheets before I agreed to jump in with both feet, and I keep reminding myself that I’ve visited enough over the years that I’d know if we were making a mistake.

I hear Cole collecting his keys, the rustle of him putting on his coat. Hey, I yell. You’ll be home . . . ?

The normal time, he says. Five thirty or so.

I chuckle.

What? Cole says.

I just can’t believe you’re home for lunch and then home again at five thirty, I say.

Are you complaining about it? he says, laughing down the hall.

Of course not, I yell back. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?

Yes, he says. But if you’re going to get sick of me . . .

Go to work! I yell, laughing.

Bye.

* * *

We decided when we moved in that Cole didn’t need an office at home, not with the inn just two miles away, so the sunny room at the front of the house, with a big bay window overlooking the yard, is mine.

The Ammandale house, Martha Brown, the Realtor, had called it, after some long-ago former owner. I’d always known the white Dutch Colonial that sat across the street from Cole’s childhood home as the Millers’ house. They were distant Ammandale cousins, Ms. Brown explained to me, a knowing in her voice that smacked just slightly of condescension.

I’d always loved the house and its pretty white facade, the crisp black shutters framing the windows, the tawny cedar shingles on the roof, an old oak tree just to the right of the house in the front yard, exactly where it should be, a rope swing hanging from one of its limbs. Mr. Miller had put the swing up years ago, for Cole. They’d never had their own children, Mrs. Miller had wistfully told me once, but Cole had been a joy to them, growing up right across the street, like a beloved godson or nephew who always obliged when they asked if he could haul their Christmas tree out to the curb after the holidays or help Mr. Miller clear the gutters.

I don’t want to say that my husband had an ulterior motive when he told me last spring that Mr. Miller had finally convinced his wife to move to a golf community in Sarasota, but he knew that he was starting a conversation. We were sitting in maddening traffic on the Beltway, a panorama of brake lights in front of us, on our way back to DC from Easter brunch at the inn. Livvie and Max were in the back seat, trading candy from the baskets we had given them earlier that morning, and I could feel my body tensing as our car inched farther into the crush of Northern Virginia, a bottleneck of noise and people that made bucolic Greyhill feel like something I’d imagined.

Earlier that day, Diane and I had stood in the archway of the main dining room, watching as Cole’s father, dressed as the Easter Bunny, posed for pictures with the guests’ children. She mentioned, once again, that Bradley would love to retire, saying it in a hushed tone like this was a secret rather than something she’d expressed a dozen times before. I pretended not to hear her and watched Bradley hop a loop around a crowd of mesmerized toddlers. If I were him, I’d work until the day I died if it would give me a reason to be out of the house and away from Diane.

She’d never liked our lifestyle in DC. When she and Bradley came to visit (which wasn’t all that often, because of the inn and also because Diane preferred that we come to her), she complained that it was too noisy, too busy. Our place was too small. The restaurants were too crowded. In the past couple of years she’d become more vocal about her desire for Cole to take over the family business, but Cole and I had made a practice of ignoring her hints. He hadn’t been able to picture leaving his job as in-house counsel at the National Wildlife Federation any more than I could imagine leaving the White House. But when I got fired and started wondering aloud, especially after my sessions with Dimitria, my therapist, whether the hustle-and-strive we had in DC was the life we still wanted long-term, Cole revealed that there was a small, secret part of him that actually liked the idea of stepping in for his dad at the inn. He said he’d never mentioned it before because he didn’t want me to have to give anything up. But now, he started, measuring his words, maybe things are more flexible. . . . He graciously left out the fact that because of what I’d done, nobody in Washington—at least, none of the good people in Washington—would consider hiring me any more than they’d consider employing one of the pandas at the National Zoo.

I looked out at the traffic that night and told Cole what I’d said to him many times before: I had fallen in love with Greyhill the first time he took me there, and had long harbored fantasies about what life could be like for us in his sweet hometown. They were unrealistic, never-gonna-happen fantasies, on par with my dreams of a cottage on the Maine coast and a flat in Notting Hill, but they existed nevertheless.

And the Millers’ house: not only was it triple the square footage of our place in DC and easily half the price (Cole had to ask Mr. Miller to repeat himself when he’d offered a number out on their driveway earlier that day), it was also the House, a home like the one I’d held in my dreams since I was a little girl growing up in a forgettable saltbox with peeling paint and rusting gutters in a down-at-the-heels suburb of Burlington, Vermont. I’d gazed longingly at the Millers’ house every time we came to Greyhill, and even referenced it when we were house hunting near Capitol Hill: I’ll know it’s the right place when I feel the way I feel when I look at the Millers’ house.

That night, we crawled through the traffic. We parked the car. I started the laundry, checked to make sure we had milk for the morning, and looked at my appointment book while I chewed the ears off the chocolate bunny Cole had given me earlier that day.

And then, right before bed, I walked out of our bathroom and announced to Cole through a mouthful of toothpaste that I wanted to make an offer on the house. He looked up from what he’d been reading, looking as stunned as if I had emerged with my hair dyed hot pink. He made me insist that the move was truly what I wanted and continued to repeat the question, dozens of times, over the next few months, right up until the morning the moving truck pulled up to our curb. I assured him, over and over and over again, that I was sure. I wanted the house, the adorable town, the backyard for the kids, the promise of a new start—not just for me but for all of us. Our family. This would be our next chapter. This would be our home.

I sit down at the desk and click open my email, scanning a forwarded article from my dad about the lineup for this Sunday’s Patriots game, which I’ve started to believe he sends more out of habit or superstition than a belief that I might actually read it or watch the game. It is so quiet, and I start to feel a familiar uneasiness rise up inside me. It happens all too often lately, when I’m in the house alone. I think of Dimitria and what she said in her gloriously ornate Greek accent during our session when I told her we were leaving Washington: What if people think you’re running away?

I miss our weekly appointments more than I thought I would. I never pictured myself becoming the type of person who not only needed weekly therapy but craved it. Then again, I didn’t picture a lot of things that have happened in the past year. Weekly. I play with the word in my head like it’s a riddle, a tongue twister I have to practice to understand. Weekly. Weakly. Weekly. Weakly. I feel weak. Like a weakling.

Before the move, those appointments had become the highlight of my Monday through Friday, the one thing that broke up the hours after Cole and the kids went off for the day and I sat alone in the house, my teeth unbrushed, watching the Today show. (Often all four hours.) Those commercials they play during morning television? The ads for stain remover and cereal? I know them all now. I catch myself singing along to the jingles when they come on, or mouthing the dialogue. The ones that really got to me, though, were the personal-injury lawyer ads that started showing up around ten o’clock, after the rest of the world had turned off their televisions and moved on with their lives. Have you been hurt on the job?

Well, yes, actually, I’d mutter to the empty room. Yes, I have.

Every time I walked into an appointment with Dimitria and slung my bag down onto the pristine Oriental rug, I said the same thing, the thought that railed at me all day long, neon red letters screaming at me inside my head: I should be at work.

I know how that makes me sound. Workaholic. Ego-driven. Selfish. All of which was true, to an extent, but you could say the same thing about