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by-forty-foot swimming pool that was Calvin's ideaa yearning since a childhood of poverty. |
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But what made the place exceptional was Magog Woods. It created the illusion of quintessential rural living though Carleton was just ten miles west of Boston. Who could ask for more, and on an English professor's salary? |
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And yet, she was relieved to be leaving. The memories of two stillbirths in the last three years were hauntingly bound to the place. The first was far enough back for time to have dulled the sting. But the second, last November 11, to be exact, still gnawed at her. She was nearly eight months into term when the staining began. While taking a shower on the morning of the tenth, she started hemorrhaging; before she had passed out, Calvin rushed her to Emerson emergency. Two days later she was sent home without a baby. For the second time in three years she had stripped a nurseryshelves stuffed with animals, pictures, mobiles, Matty's repainted crib, even the wallpaper she had hung herself. She had not entered the room since. Like the first, that fetus was severely deformed. |
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Six months had passed, yet she was still beset by the hundred painful reminders triggered by the merest detailthe slant of the sunlight through the window, the musty odors of spring-damp woods, the hum of the shower. |
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Calvin said she was being irrational. Lots of women had miscarriages but they didn't scapegoat their homes. Terry knew that. Yet she felt as if they were sharing the place with an unseen malevolence, like that house in that Amityville Horror movie. No midnight screams from the cellar or rats in the walls or footsteps on the roof. Nothing so dramatic. Nor the occasional bouts of murky water, funny odors, or horticultural blight. It was the more subtle signs: what was happening to them as a family. As if the internal rules had been altered; their son Matty's extreme, even violent, mood swings, Calvin's sexual alienation, and those awful miscarriages. Even these migraines. Until recently she never got headaches. Were she given to such beliefs, which she was not, she would swear their house was cursed. |
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Then out of the blue came Calvin's job offerand, with it, release, escape. . . . |
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"Mrs. Manning," Terry said when they reached the front door, |
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