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Waterloo Station
Chapter One
Though it's often said that old people possess a certain wisdom, Carrie Benedict suspected that her grandmother had been born wise. There was an uncommon intelligence in the elderly woman's eyes and words, a quality that seemed to have been there forever. So it was really not so unusual when, in the last days of the summer before she was to go off to college, Carrie Benedict chose to spend her final weekend in Longwood Falls, New York, helping her grandmother clean out her attic instead of choosing to go off with her boyfriend of six months, Rufus Cowley, a drummer in a local rock band, to an all-day picnic at the nearby falls. Rufus was astonished that Carrie had said no; they would be alone in a mossy grove, really alone, he'd told her, with a hamper of food and a cooler full of beer, and, of course, each other. What more could she possibly want? But Grandma Maude needed her this weekend, and that was that. Besides, Rufus could be demanding, calling the house several times a day, speaking to Carrie in his seductive, meandering cadences. They weren't in love, Carrie knew. Instead, at age eighteen, it seemed as though some sort of moondust had been tossed upon them, allowing them to enjoy their slow, tenuous time together, knowing it would most likely end when the summer did. When it came to the notion of actual love, the genuine article that she'd read about in magazines and had seen depicted floridly in movies, Carrie's attitude was one of doubt. Maybe, she thought, such love didn't even exist in the real world. Maybe what she felt for sweet, handsome, uninspiring Rufus was the most she could ever expect to feel for anyone.
Spending a day away from Rufus Cowley and these troubling questions was actually a bit of a relief to her. At 9 a.m. Carrie rang the doorbell of her grandmother's large, rambling yellow frame house on Cheshire Road. Carrie's grandfather had recently died after a lingering struggle with cancer, and it was clear that Maude could no longer stay on alone in the house; there was too much for her to take care of -- a roof that leaked in the lightest rain, and a temperamental plumbing system -- not to mention the fact that Maude was frail. If she fell, who would know? Carrie's parents had discussed the matter at length and had finally convinced Maude to come and live with them. Which she was about to do, as soon as Carrie went off to college in a week. But before then, a formidable task needed to be accomplished, for Grandma Maude's house was like some kind of wild, overgrown museum in which nothing has been cataloged correctly, but everything, somehow, has been preserved.
When Carrie was small, she had loved coming to stay overnight in her grandparents' house. There were collections of snow globes and miniature doll furniture and post cards from just about every capital city of the world she could think of, as well as beautiful paintings on the walls, with their own little lights that illuminated the canvases. Her grandparents weren't collectors, exactly, and had never made a single purchase for investment reasons, but simply because they liked the looks of a painting or a knickknack on a table at someone's yard sale. Now Carrie's grandfather was gone, and her grandmother was suffering greatly. It had been three months since he'd passed away, but probably it only felt like three hours to Grandma Maude. She was a woman who felt everything deeply, freshly, nearly unbearably, it seemed at times. Carrie, at age eighteen, shared this trait with her.
"Come in, come in," said Maude at the screen door, and she kissed her granddaughter with great affection. "You are such an admirable person to spend the weekend with a creaky old thing like me, when you could be off doing dangerous and reckless teenage things instead."
Carrie laughed. "Personally, I think danger and recklessness are way overrated," she said.
"I certainly can't give you much in the way of excitement around here," Maude said, "though I can promise you some cheddar cheese sandwiches on toast and an icebox cake. That is," she added slyly, "if you do enough work for me."
"Sounds like a reasonable bribe," Carrie said, and she walked into the cool front hallway of her grandmother's house.
At age eighty-one, Maude was fragile but beautiful, with a head of striking white hair that she pulled back off her face in a single, slightly bohemian braid. Still, a few strands managed to float out, perennially giving her the appearance of someone in a hurry, someone who's been dashing somewhere and is afraid she's going to be late. These days, though, she had nowhere to dash to. She stayed in the house most of the time, mourning its imminent loss and still mourning the loss of her husband, unable to find any real interests with which to keep herself occupied. Friends called, inviting Maude out to dinner at one of the local restaurants, or to be a fourth hand in a card game, or to go see a movie, but she always said no, that she didn't have the time, or the energy, or something. Yet the task of going through an entire lifetime's worth of memories this weekend, poring over all the objects that she had once held so dear, had given her a new liveliness, and as Carrie followed her grandmother up the wide front stairs and along the hallway to a smaller set of stairs that led to the attic, Carrie had to struggle to keep up.
Unlike the rest of the house, which kept an ideal temperature throughout the summer months, the attic was broiling hot on this August day, but soon she and her grandmother had turned on an ancient fan ...
Waterloo Station. Copyright © by Emily Grayson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
