Arrowood by Laura McHugh Read Free Book Online

the house, passing the staircase without glancing up the stairs, the pinching in my chest like fingers reaching through my ribs to probe my heart. I flew through the front door and out to the street. Aunt Alice and my grandparents had been dead a long time, and now the Sister House was gone, too. It had been a mistake to go inside. I didn’t want what I had seen to take root in my head, to ruin the carefully curated pictures in my memory. I jogged back toward Arrowood—fully understanding, for the first time, why Nana and Granddad had gone to such extreme measures to keep the house in the family and to ensure that it stayed exactly the same.
    —
    Back at Arrowood, I set to work unpacking and making the place feel lived in. Whomever Heaney had sent to clean hadn’t done a very good job, and my first priority was to tackle some of the dust and cobwebs. I dug around in the laundry room cabinets looking for cleaning supplies. This back part of the house had once been servants’ quarters, and there was a separate stairwell that led up to the second-floor hallway so that the help didn’t have to use the main stairs. The laundry was a bright, serene space with tall windows on two sides to let in the sun. The plank floors and cabinets were painted a glossy white, the walls papered a soft dreamy blue, my great-grandmother’s enormous French serpentine armoire the only dark piece in the room. A musty odor lingered in the air, like wet laundry left to mildew, though I doubted anyone had done laundry here in a good long while.
    I found a can of furniture polish and some rags and carried them to the entryway. It was one of the few parts of the house that was not wallpapered. Growing up in a house rich with nineteenth-century character, my mother had longed for shag carpeting and beige drywall and popcorn ceilings. Arrowood was even more ornate and old-fashioned than the Sister House, and as soon as Nana and Granddad retired to Florida, leaving my parents and me alone in the house, Mom set out to update the décor. She vowed to peel off every shred of wallpaper, starting with the entry. It didn’t take her long to give up once she realized how difficult it was to remove the glue—she grumbled that the Arrowoods had probably boiled a horse in the front yard to make it—and the plaster walls were mottled gray and brown, like damp stone, where she’d angrily scraped them bare.
Looks like the inside of a crypt,
Mom had said. When Mrs. Ferris from next door saw it, she thought my mother had hired someone to apply a faux finish and asked how much it had cost.
    I sprayed Old English on a rag and smoothed it over the wainscoting and the banister, moving on to the study to wipe down the bookshelves, which were still filled with Granddad’s anatomy and physiology texts, medical journals, and leather-bound encyclopedias. My mother used to cram her paperback romance novels into the empty spaces, though none of her books remained. After a moment of uncertainty, I retrieved one of my boxes of books from the foot of the staircase and placed the volumes one by one next to Granddad’s.
Lee County, Iowa: A Pictorial History; Keokuk and the Great Dam; Indian Chief: The Story of Keokuk; The River We Have Wrought: A History of the Upper Mississippi; Legendary Keokuk Homes.
    Among my history books was
The Illustrated Book of Saints,
which Nana had given to me as I prepared for my First Communion. Nana knew which saint to pray to in every situation. Saint Erasmus for abdominal pains. Saint Jude for lost causes. Saint Agatha to protect you from fire. I had been fascinated by the gruesome stories and pictures
.
Agatha, who had been assaulted and tortured, was depicted with her severed breasts on a plate. Saint Apollonia’s teeth were broken and knocked out before she was burned to death. Saint Florian was sentenced to be burned alive, though when he proclaimed that he would ascend to heaven on the flames, he was drowned.
    I had noticed, despite the