I’m working on revising my novel, which I first drafted a few years ago. Soft, formless ideas for the novel started floating to the surface of my mind in late 2019; once they began to calcify into settings and people, I had to write them down. Over Labor Day weekend in 2020, I booked a room at an Air BnB for a solo retreat in the Palisades.
On Friday, I left my midtown office early. Getting to and from the house I’d booked required a train, a bus, and an Uber, but it was only one weekend, so I wasn’t hauling too much. The heaviest things I brought along were books, several poetry anthologies and a few new collections I’d been excited about. When I’m deep in writing fiction, I find reading poetry is the easiest way of unsticking any doors that close on me. But aside from that I didn’t really need anything – a toothbrush, pajamas. I even used a three-in-one body wash, shampoo and conditioner.
A couple owned the house – for privacy, I’ll call them George and Jane. When I arrived, George was there, tinkering in the garage, and came to greet me. We wore masks, still common everywhere I went in fall of 2020, as he walked me through the house. The bottom floor was a communal space, with a sitting room and kitchen. My room and bathroom were on the second floor, and George and Jane had their private quarters upstairs, accessible through a steep, narrow staircase behind a locked door. It was easy to settle in. The tuxedo cat, Mr. Chripy, looked a lot like Dottie.
The downstairs sitting room was filled with dolls. So was my bedroom. Glass collectors’ cabinets held neat rows of smiling vinyl. Jane collected vintage Barbies and worked as a nurse at a hospital in uptown Manhattan. George told me they had taken a break from hosting Air BnB guests for several months while Jane’s unit was temporarily repurposed as an ICU overflow for Covid patients. It was only in the last few weeks that things at her hospital had calmed down.
Once I’d unpacked my things, I went downstairs to meet George outside, where he’d poured us each a glass of white wine. In rocking chairs on opposite corners of the porch, we talked about our lives and careers while we waited on Jane to get home. Occasionally, we’d stop mid-sentence to watch a deer cross the quiet road. Celebrities lived in the area – George and Jane had bumped into Chris Rock several times since he lived just ten minutes up the road.
The garage George was in when I had arrived was full of vintage muscle cars, and paraphernalia from his racing days. In the early nineties, George worked in software development, and thanks to his incredibly lucky timing, he was able to retire early and well. All the years since had been fun.
He loved sailing and the water. After a bad accident years before, he’d given up racing cars and took to yachts instead. He was very good, but his success drove Jane a little crazy. For every vintage doll in their home, he had four or five trophies or cups from a yacht race. The garage was stacked with them. When Jane pulled into the driveway, I was sitting on the porch, on my second glass of wine, with three silver yacht racing cups piled in my lap.
“This is Hattie,” George shouted from across the yard. “I gave her some of my old racing cups! She’s going to take them home and use them for pens!”
Jane shouted back, “Give her more. Give her all of them!”
While Jane showered, George finished his wine, then made a drink for his wife. She came downstairs and we stood on opposite ends of the kitchen, summarizing the introductions George and I had already given each other. They drove to the next town over for dinner, but directed me to a little market down the street for food.
I walked down 9W in forest silence and arrived at a restaurant-bakery-grocery. I asked the cashier for her favorite meal. She smiled and rang me up for a lamb ragu with thick noodles. As I ordered an iced coffee and bulky muffin for the next morning, I explained why I was in town.
Liz, the woman at the market, told me to explore the area. She knew exactly where I was staying. “I live right next to the cemetery,” she told me. It was just a few minutes’ walk from where I was staying. If I headed toward the post office, I could hang a right down a path and go look at the graves. I thanked her, and on my way home with my food, I saw one car and two more deer.
I gobbled the pasta in the sitting room, then sat next to Mr. Chirpy and read for a while. In my notebook, I strategized, deciding what to write when. I blocked off chapters in my own Google calendar. When George and Jane got home from supper, they stood in the front hallway for a while, chatting with me. After a bit, George said goodnight and started up the stairs. Jane and I were happy for the chance to talk – she hadn’t yet heard the book spiel I gave George on the porch.
We had been speaking for only a minute when there was a horrible crash. Jane and I raced upstairs, to my floor. Around the corner, the door to the third story was open. George was sprawled along the landing at the bottom of the stairs. He heaved and cursed, his head against the wall, his legs still on the bottom step. Blood and tears splattered his face and shoulders.
“A stair gave out or the railing came off or something,” he said as Jane and I stood over him. His chest moved in and out in shuddering gasps, and every time he blinked or spoke, he winced. “I don’t think I can move,” he said. “I don’t think I can get up.”
Jane called 911. I checked George’s body for lacerations; there was a small gash on his temple and another cut on his neck, where the blood came from. Neither of them was gushing, but they must have stung. George closed his eyes while a string of curses poured out of his mouth: fuck, oh my God, oh my fucking God, shit, holy fucking shit. At one point, he almost tried to sit up on his elbows, but even the tiniest movement of his arms made him scream.
Jane asked me to help move him. I wasn’t sure about this – if he had a neck or back injury, would we make it worse? But George insisted, too, that we at least get him to a wider part of the hallway. Folded up against the wall, he was in excruciating pain from the pressure, and he was anxious about a stretcher getting through this narrow part of the house.
Jane retrieved a small, flat, twin mattress from a spare room. She took George’s shoulders and neck and hoisted him onto it, while I gingerly lifted his legs, surreptitiously running my hands over his legs to check for swelling. Based on the angle of his feet against the stairs, I’d worried he might have broken an ankle, but they were fine. Once he was partially on the mattress, George howled and shook free of us, crawling onto it the rest of the way, sobbing in pain all the while. He laid down and laid still, then asked Jane and me to drag the mattress – with him on it – into the bare spare room down the hall from the guest suite I was staying in. As I moved to shut the door to the third-floor staircase, something stopped it from closing. Reaching down, I found an enormous splintered hunk of wood. The railing along the stairwell had snapped off in George’s hand.
“Maybe they won’t even want to take me to the hospital,” he reasoned. “I could just rest in the spare bedroom for the weekend.” Still in shock, my first thought was whether I was strong enough to help George to and from the bathroom if he ended up lying on a floor mattress in the room next door all weekend.
Jane went downstairs to wait for the ambulance. I sat in the dark with George, who kept trying to catch his breath, failing, and cursing. “I usually don’t swear like this,” he insisted to me, panting. “I handle pain very well. I’m normally not like this at all.” I assured him that I knew, that I knew this wasn’t normal. When I heard the emergency services team coming up the stairs, I went down the hall to my room and hid. For some reason, I was embarrassed to be seen when I didn’t actually know this couple. I felt like I had walked in on something too intimate for me.
I emerged after I heard the men, the stretcher, and George all parade down the stairs. I listened: the ambulance was outside. I slipped back to the porch, looking out at the red and blue lights. Jane spoke to her husband, then came back to the house. “I’m going to go up to the hospital,” she told me. “I’m going to drive up there and follow them, and I might not be home until tomorrow. I’m so sorry about this.” She told me to get comfortable, take anything I needed, then apologized again before she was off. Standing on the porch, I watched them go, then locked the door behind me and walked very carefully up to the second floor.
When I returned to my room, I wasn’t sure what to do. My heart was racing, but it also felt wrong to linger on this series of events that weren’t mine – I hadn’t suffered, but I worried. Restless, I paced a little, read a little, then hopped into bed with my books and a journal. I didn’t tell my family what had transpired. Instead, I said I was getting to bed early, set the alarm clock next to the bed, and fell asleep to the sounds of trees, dolls, and empty beds.
Jane wasn’t home when I got up the next morning. I ate my muffin and drank my iced coffee. While I was downstairs in the kitchen cleaning up after myself and thinking about lunch, she pulled into the driveway. Since she was freshly home from the hospital, I made myself scarce and let her freshen up before I waited in the sitting room for an update on George. When Jane came downstairs, she sighed and told me George had fractured his spine – two different vertebrae. Later, she would go back to the hospital while George got a full-torso cast. He wouldn’t come home until after I left. I wouldn’t see her again during my stay. I went back upstairs and back to work.
The weekend was uneventful after this. Everything had a strange, watery quality to it – the sort of irreality that touches everything after you wake from a nightmare. On Saturday, I went back to the cafe, said hello to Liz, bought more pastries and more pasta and a big salad. On Sunday morning, I wandered through the cemetery fog and saw six deer, mothers and babies. I stopped by the house I knew belonged to Liz, and left a note on the door with my phone number and a thank-you. We keep in touch on occasion.
Over that weekend, I wrote most of my book. I took an Uber, a bus, and a train home to Queens. I finished the remaining chapters back in the city. I gave Jane and George five stars on Air BnB, and sent them a message – wishing George good health, thanking them both for their generosity – but never heard back. The three silver cups came home in my duffel bag, clanking all the way. I use them for pens, scrunchies, odds and ends. When I work on my revisions, I think about Jane, and I think about George. On the porch, I had promised him a signed copy of the published manuscript. When it’s ready, I hope he’s fully healed and back on a boat and too busy to read it.