Free Dream House by Catherine Armsden

subject matter where their two professions—architecture and medicine—intersected. Walden Pond had been a black, still clearing in the forest with no sign of life except the racket of peeping. The immediate connection she and Paul had felt with each other had been breathtaking.
    Those years, that intimacy, felt too distant to her now. Recently, she suspected that Paul probably barely recognized the confident, spirited Gina he’d married. Challenges had always made her energy rise, her eyes shine brighter. “I’m movin’ to crazy California!” she crowed from Paul’s ’64 Mustang as they crossed into Kansas, heading away from the East Coast for good. Her entrepreneurial zeal had saved her from continuing to draw elevator cores for a corporate firm, and within a year she’d hung out her “Gina Gilbert, Architect” shingle. Moments after delivering Esther, she’d cried, “Let’s have another one right away!” Paul was cautious and made moves slowly; her vigor had always been enough for both of them. Now, she feared her malaise was threatening the balance they’d come to rely on.
    The car hugged a sharp curve, and she felt the cliff’s plunge in her stomach. This famous winding road had never before made her uncomfortable, but now she saw how close to the cliff’s precipice the passenger was, how blind the curves were. Anything could happen: a bicyclist, a deer, a car from the opposite direction swinging too wide.The road might not be swept away today in a mudslide because it wasn’t the rainy season, but at any moment an earthquake could send it tumbling into the sea.
    Paul swerved around a bicyclist, and Gina felt her lunch rise in her throat. “Paul, pull over!” she rasped.
    He stopped the car in a turnout. Gina got out and stood shivering in the bracing wind.
    She stared up at the restless, gray expanse of sky where gulls drew invisible lines, then down at the restless, empty gray expanse of ocean; sky and water together were like an impossible jigsaw puzzle in which every piece looked the same.
    The nausea receded, Gina returned to the car, and they began the descent into the valley of dripping redwoods and eucalyptus. When they left the trees and turned onto the straight lane of freeway, she was relieved.
    â€œSweetie, I’m excited about the house,” Paul said after a while. “But I don’t want you to feel pressured about the plans for it. Give yourself a break; you’ve been through a lot.”
    Gina was silent for a few moments. Finally, she said, “Nothing feels right.”
    They’d reached the Golden Gate Bridge where people on the walkway clowned for cameras; others clutched their jackets closed against the wind. Tourists, everywhere. She felt like one, too.
    â€œYou’re not yourself now. It takes time,” Paul said.
    Gina let her head fall back on the seat. Why did people say that, she wondered, as if it were the flu? Since her parents’ accident, everything had changed somehow. And yet, certainly not the day-to-day. She’d only seen her parents one or two weeks a year during the past decade. Still, the idea of her parents at the house in Maine, drinking Lipton tea at the kitchen table or touching up the paint on theporch, animated by the occasional phone call with her and the kids, had admittedly provided more comfort than the reality of being with them. This is the way it is, she’d always told herself about their family dynamic, which even Paul conceded was dysfunctional. But buried in that resignation was a kernel of hope: as long as her parents were there, there was the possibility her relationship with them could change. Now, it was frozen stuck; the way it was felt like a kind of failure, a colossal waste of human potential for growth and acceptance.
    Paul was right; it took time to mourn. But it wasn’t only loss she felt. Her parents’ death was a period at the