The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai Page A

her secrets are under there!”
    Miriam’s neck turned red. “Oh. Behind the materials,” she said. “After I’ve outlined my shapes, and before the mortar, I write a secret in paint. People like knowing it’s there, I think. If a buyer asks, I’ll sometimes tell what it said.”
    Case said, “Secrets about me, right babe?”
    “I didn’t know it myself, till we read that article last year,” Bruce said. “Miriam, have they seen the article?”
    Zee said, “It’s amazing the secrets people can keep. Isn’t it.” There was something wrong with her. Doug put his hand on her knee and she jerked away. “I used to think I could tell when someone had a secret. I really did. And it turns out—”
    But Gracie shrieked and they all turned to her. “There was a ladybug!” she said. “Right on my plate.”

30
    Z ee rose from bed like a heavy animal, her legs slow and numb.
    Out at the table, the two of them giggling over breakfast. “Happensack—the luckiest town in New Jersey!” Miriam could hardly get her breath.
    Doug: “It’s the karma that gets you stuck on the turnpike!”
    Zee couldn’t look at them.
    Miriam: “It’s a sack full of four-leaf clovers!”
    “It’s when someone accidentally kicks you in the nuts!”
    Doug’s book bag lay on the floor. He was headed to the library, he said. She wanted to tear the zipper off, to see what was really inside. Books about adolescent girls, love letters to Miriam, a hundred bags of cocaine. The possibilities were endless.
    Instead she said, “Miriam, why don’t you meet me for coffee this morning? We haven’t had a chance to talk much lately.” They’d had nothing but chances to talk: right now, for instance, and the million times Zee swept past the sunporch pretending to be absorbed in the mail.
    Miriam said, “Oh, lovely,” and Zee said, “There’s a chance I’ll be waylaid by the dean.”
    And at ten o’clock, with Miriam waiting at Starbucks, with Case off at the doctor, chauffeured by Sofia, Zee drove back to the house and slammed her way into the silent, cold porch. Finished canvases leaned three deep against the walls, but the piece centeredon Zee’s yellow cotillion dress was still in progress, laid out on the floor like a corpse. The black swirls around it were finished—river stones and coffee beans and checkers and an old Escape key and barrettes. The dress was only half covered, in yellow but also orange and little spots of brown and green. The green: It took a minute to realize why the green looked so familiar. Here were the shards of her mother’s celadon vase, the one Case had knocked to pieces. Had Miriam even asked to keep these? Had she stolen them that night? Zee wiggled her thumb under the bottom of the hemline and yanked up. Stones and scraps flew off, skittered across the floor. Some of the fabric tore. It was only half a dress, really, as Miriam had cut the back entirely away. But here were the words, the secrets, just as Bruce had said. Zee left the dress attached by the left shoulder and read what she could of the black painted script below, obscured by glue, bitten around the edges by the mortar and stones.
The hair just below
Your navel
Curls to the left
Let me untwist it
    That was near the top. Farther down, below an unreadable swath:
Lick the scars
Up your knees
Taste what
You drank
    And down by the hemline:
I forget to look
In mirrors
My guts have all
Sprung loose
    She slapped the dress back down. There was an ugly satisfaction in finding what she’d known she would, despite the sudden light show behind her eyelids that was like the beginning of a migraine, but with a drumbeat.
    Zee dragged Hidalgo from the big house. She got saltines from upstairs and sprinkled them all around, behind Miriam’s trays of beads, under her papers. Then she shut him in. He might get free, but not before doing a lot more damage and clawing up the windows. He watched her leave, his eyes black and questioning. “Be bad,” she