The Gulf by Rachel Cochran

Author:Rachel Cochran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

My day at Parson House stretched on as I thought back over this scene, surprised at how vividly Cass’s words returned to me. The memory didn’t give me the answers I wanted—Cass hadn’t brought up the abuse Seth had mentioned—but her words that day gave me an unsettled feeling. I got the sense that Cass was holding something back: there was a bitterness in her conclusion, a boundary line she was drawing between her mother’s life and her own, that had made me uncomfortable even at the time. You ought to be grateful you have a mother at all, I’d wanted to tell her.

I need a little more, I begged her now. A silent prayer, as if she could hear me.

Before long I’d finished the panes in the kitchen, and my work brought me into the parlor. Miss Kate and I had never worked on the parlor, which she’d said was the room in the worst shape, one we’d tackle after we’d addressed more pressing problems in the house. Years ago, just before they moved out, the museum folks had used the parlor as a garbage room, piling up the furniture not good enough to store or sell, leaving behind their stacks of boxes instead of renting a dumpster.

I hadn’t entered this room in decades. My last memory of it was from childhood, back in the museum days, wandering past the wall-length curtains, looking up at the play of sunlight in the facets of the crystal chandelier. Now, as I stood at the door, the thought of the room behind it frightened me for some reason.

I was hoping the knob wouldn’t turn in my hand, that Miss Kate had locked it and Joanna never found the key. But the door swung open with a loud, relieved creak.

Until I stepped into the parlor, I thought I hadn’t been here since grade school, when the space was all tufted sofas and marble-top tables. But now that I saw it, a graveyard of skeletal chairs and moldy cushions, I realized that, no, I’d been here more recently, I’d seen the parlor much like this before. We’d come here the night we broke in, the night of the car wreck, right at the start of my freshman year. Cass, Danny, Thomas Wick, and me.

But wait, not all of us came to the parlor. It was just Cass and me by that point. We’d lost Thomas and Danny somewhere else in the house.

Cass had a lighter. And we’d sat on that run-down love seat, the one over there across from the window. It was in better shape then, no mold spotting its legs, no water damage. The upholstery was flat enough that I could feel the springs in my seat bones. While we sat there in the dark, Cass had lit up a joint from her Black Cat cigarette tin, its flame end the only light between us.

What did we talk about? I knew we’d talked about something. But all I could remember was what

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