Page 2 of The Treasure House

“Zoe does.” Eva leaned her head on my shoulder affectionately. “She’s what you’d call a pathological nester. She also has champagne tastes on a beer budget.”

“Not even a beer budget.” I sighed as I swiped through glossy real estate photographs until I found what I was looking for. “I’m on a tap water budget.” And I wasn’t a nester, not in real life anyway. My actual home looked like temporary student accommodation. Every piece of furniture I owned was secondhand.

“Me too,” Caitlin commiserated. “I should probably even be rationing tap water these days.”

“Here.” I stopped on a jewel-bright listing for a place in Palm Beach. “This is our house.”

The listing had the heading, Your Once in a Lifetime Dream House. Eva gave a low whistle at the sight of it. I laughed as I read the property description, because the word fantasy wasn’t enough to cover this one. Delusion might be a better word for it.

“Thirteen-bed, fifteen-and-a-half-bath single family house.” I laughed in disbelief. “Which single family is this exactly?”

“One of those billionaires who has been divorced fifteen times and has summer custody of all his kids,” Caitlin suggested as she reached over my shoulder to scroll through the photos.

The place had a saltwater fishpond, an infinity pool, three waterfalls in lush tropical surrounds, and a yacht at its own private mooring.

The three of us looked up from the phone to regard the pedestrian sight of Pittsburgh out of our lunchroom window. In unison we sighed.

“That’s not a home, it’s a resort,” Caitlin said, straightening up and returning to her lunch with the air of someone resigned to reality.

I made an involuntary noise when I saw the listing price.

“That bad? How much? Fifteen million?”

“Thirty,” Eva guessed.

“Uh…” I cleared my throat. “Try a hundred and thirty-six…”

“No way. Wait. You mean million?”

I tilted my phone so she could see. She swore.

“I need to win the Mega Millions.” I sighed, putting my phone facedown on the table and reaching for my wilting salad. If I could win the lottery, I could move Flo out of our now unaffordable one-bedroom apartment. I didn’t need three waterfalls and a mooring for a yacht. I just needed somewhere large enough for two people, maybe with a garden, and a good school nearby. Somewhere we could make a home.

But I knew a pipe dream when I saw it. I had just as much chance of buying a house as I had of winning the Kentucky Derby on foot.

Even so, I loved fantasy house hunting. I got a steady feeling when I imagined living in those houses, particularly the simpler places—little homes in flowering gardens, on quiet streets, in suburbs and small towns beyond the rippling wake of the cities. Ordinary homes.

Homes like the last foster home I went to.

I was thirteen the third and final time I went into foster care. When the announcement came over the school PA calling me to the office, I knew what I’d find there. Another case worker with bags under her eyes and a practiced kindly smile on her face. I didn’t need her to explain why she was there; I’d been expecting her. I don’t remember this case worker’s name. She took me back to Mom’s apartment to pack a bag, and then she drove me to a care home, where I waited for somewhere to go. The care home is a blurry still life in my memory: a bunk bed and the smell of cheap laundry detergent. I was so sick with guilt I couldn’t sleep. I knew this time it was my fault I was there. There was a kid with a Pokémon pillowcase she used on her plasticky care home pillow, and she cried all through my sleepless nights. I don’t think I cried. I think I was past crying by then.

When I left the care home a week later, I was driven to a ranch house in Bradford Woods, in the far north of Pittsburgh. I remember it was May, and the driveway we turned into was lined with lilacs in full bloom. There were shade trees and a lawn so green and perfect it didn’t seem real. Later I learned that Wayne Overbeck, my new foster parent, was obsessed with his lawn. His year was scheduled according to scarifying and seeding, mowing and fertilizing. His favorite summer pastime was pacing the lawn with his hose, beer in hand, listening to baseball on his headphones. Life was simple for Wayne. All he needed was his home, his family, and his lawn.

His wife Suni was a little more complicated, but not by much. She worked in student admissions at one of the colleges in town, and she never sat still. Suni always had some new hobby to keep her busy; sometimes she was scrapbooking, sometimes making mosaics out of little glass stones, sometimes foraging for wild foods, sometimes bird watching.

The Overbecks had two kids of their own—Lance and Alison—but they also took in foster kids, because, as Suni said, “There was no reason to let two perfectly good bedrooms go to waste.” Their house was balanced between order and chaos, full of people and noise: the sound of Wayne’s baseball games on the TV; Lance’s guitar and punk pop music; Alison and her friends practicing for glee club; and their corgi Arthur’s excited barking as he skidded back and forth between people’s rooms. During my time there, which was all of my high school years, I occupied the eggshell-blue bedroom while a series of other foster kids were given the mauve bedroom: Thad, who was seven and stayed only a few months; Leanne, who was a year older than me and stayed for a year and a half; and finally Bethany, who was so shy she couldn’t look people in the eye when she spoke to them. Suni and Wayne treated us all the same, like part of the family.

I liked life at the Overbecks’. But I still wished for Tina to get out of Muncy State Correctional, where she was locked up on possession charges. I wanted her to come get me, to feel her hug enveloping me in sunshine. Nothing is as good as your own mother, even when your own mother is a junkie. When I showed Flo The Wizard of Oz for the first time and Dorothy said, “There’s no place like home,” it was still Tina that I thought of. My feeling of home was a person, not a place. And it still is, only now that person is Flo.

As I ate my salad on that prosaic Thursday at work, I thought about all the places I had lived after the Overbecks’. Dorm rooms at college, a series of rented rooms in share houses. And then, after I got pregnant, there was a brief window of time when I’d lived with Tim…

“Forget the billionaires in Florida,” Eva said, disgusted. “Find us a house we can actually believe in.” She pushed my phone toward me.

“I believe in the mansion,” Caitlin said fervently.

Eva threw her balled-up napkin at her. “Well, I don’t. I want a dream that might come true.”

I tried to think of the most normal place I could, somewhere school buses stopped on suburban streets and kids rode their bikes through long summer afternoons. Ohio maybe? I scrolled through bungalows and split-levels in Cleveland, looking for lawns and a bedroom Flo would love. She’d spent her whole life sharing a room with me—wouldn’t it be something to give her a room of her own?