For the last time, Tova boils water for coffee on her stove. Its lacquered top gleams, avocado green against the black coils, polished last night. Spotless. Could it possibly matter? It will almost certainly be ripped out, replaced by one of those sleek new ranges. No one wants a decades-old appliance, even if it works perfectly well.
Tova had been approved for accelerated check-in at Charter Village, something she’d lobbied after for weeks. Her premier suite would be available next week. She left them a telephone message first thing this morning, at whatever absurdly early hour she awoke, assuming she slept at all last night. The whole thing is a blur. Charter Village has yet to call back, but most likely it’s simply because their office isn’t open yet. It’s only just past seven.
Regardless, Tova has no intention of going.
She’s had a busy morning. Dusted all of the baseboards. Wiped down the windows. Polished the hardware on the cabinets, scrubbed every last doorknob. She should be exhausted, but she’s never felt more energized in her life. Without curtains or furniture, every sound she makes echoes against the naked walls and floors, and even the hiss of her spray bottle seems too loud. But keeping busy is good. Cleaning is always good. It’s something to do.
Where will she go? She’s supposed to be out of the house by noon. The movers who took most of the furniture yesterday have already been notified that there will be a change of destination. Thankfully, someone answers their phone at the crack of dawn. But what will that destination be? A storage unit, perhaps?
As for herself and her personal effects, Janice and Barbara both have spare bedrooms. At a decent hour, she’ll call Janice first. Perhaps she might alternate between them until other arrangements can be made. Her floral-print canvas suitcase, the same one she took on her honeymoon with Will, is packed and ready to go. The thought of spending the night in a bed that isn’t her own thrills and terrifies her, in turn.
When something rustles on the front porch, she startles. She sets her coffee cup down.
It can’t be Cat. Barbara sent a photo last night of Cat. He’s doing all right, although at first Barb had tried to keep him exclusively indoors and this agitated him greatly. So he comes and goes as he pleases. Tova still isn’t sure how to respond to photos she receives on her cell phone, but seeing Cat’s whiskered face, his yellow eyes with their hallmark look of mild disdain, had made her smile.
Then the doorbell rings.
When she opens the front door, she can’t believe her eyes.
Cameron’s eyebrows are creased anxiously, like Erik’s when he was nervous about a school exam. For a quick moment, something nostalgic catches in Tova’s throat, thinking of how many times she wished Erik would somehow appear on her doorstep like this. Tears spring to her eyes.
“Hi,” Cameron says, shuffling his feet.
All Tova can manage is “Hello, dear.”
“Um, sorry I was such a jerk the other night. You were right. I shouldn’t have left.” Cameron jams his hands in his pockets. “And sorry to show up here so early. I would have called, but . . . well, bizarre story there.”
“It’s quite all right.” Tova holds the door open with an arm that feels like it belongs to someone else. Like she’s out of her own body.
“I realize you owe me absolutely nothing.” Cameron’s voice is like a live wire. Buzzy. “But can you tell me what time Terry normally gets in? I need to talk to him. In person.”
“Around ten, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Ten. Okay.” Cameron lets out a long breath. “How mad do you think he is at me right now?”
“Not mad at all, I’m quite sure.”
Cameron gives her a confused look.
Tova shuffles across the foyer to where her pocketbook hangs on the otherwise-empty set of pegs by the door and pulls a folded paper from the front pouch. A conspiratorial smile overtakes her face as she hands it to him.
“My note?” His jaw drops. “You took it?”
She inclines her head. “Mind you, I shouldn’t have. But I did.”
“But . . . why?”
“I suppose some part of me didn’t believe you when you insisted you were the type of person who would shirk a job.”
“So then . . . Terry doesn’t know I left?”
“I believe he is none the wiser.”
Cameron’s cheeks flush. “I don’t know how to thank you. And I don’t know why you’d have such faith in me. Not like I’ve earned it.”
There’s something else she must show him, of course. Something far more important. And where have her manners gone? “Please, come all the way in.” She ushers him through the foyer. “And I’d invite you to sit, but . . .” She sweeps an arm around the empty den.
“Wow. This is a nice house.”
Tova smiles. “I’m glad that you think so.” Regret stabs at her. The boy’s great-grandfather built this house, and this is the only time he’ll ever set foot in it. “Wait here a moment. I have another thing to give you,” she continues, before hustling off to the bedroom and her suitcase.
A minute later, she returns. She holds it out to him, then drops it in his upturned palm. He turns it over, and confusion knits his brow. That engraving, the one that flummoxed him. He thought it meant eels, like the sea creature. Why on earth would anyone put that on a class ring? At the thought of this, Tova suppresses a smile. Even the most brilliant minds are mistaken sometimes.
“His full name,” she says, “was Erik Ernest Lindgren Sullivan.”
Cameron’s lips part, soundless. Tova waits. She can almost see the wheels turning in his head. Erik was just like that, how it showed on his face when the gears were grinding in his brain, which they always were. There is so much about Cameron and Erik that is alike, but not everything. Not his eyes. Those must be his mother’s. Daphne’s.
They’re lovely eyes.
Tova has never been much of a hugger, but when Cameron’s face starts to break apart, she finds herself pulled to him like a magnet. His arms wrap around her neck, squeezing her against his chest. For what seems like a very long time, she rests her cheek against his sternum, which is warm. She can’t help but notice that his T-shirt appears to be stained and smells oddly like motor oil. Perhaps that’s intentional? Never again will Tova make assumptions about a T-shirt.
He stands back and says with a dumbfounded grin, “I have a grandmother.”
“Well, how about that?” She laughs, and it’s as if a valve inside her has been released. “I have a grandson.”
“Yup, looks like you do.”
“What happened to California?”
He shrugs. “Changed my mind. You were right about not quitting. I’m better than that.” Surveying the den, he gives an appreciative nod. “This really is a cool house. The architecture . . .”
“Your great-grandfather built it.”
“No shit?” A look of astonishment crosses Cameron’s face. He walks over to the fireplace mantel, the one that once held the row of frames featuring his father, and touches it tenderly, almost hesitantly, the way one might lay a hand on a sleeping animal’s flank.
Tova follows. “I’ve been fortunate to enjoy it for sixty-plus years.” She lifts her wrist, inspecting her watch. “And three and a half more hours.”
“Holy crap. That’s right. You sold it.”
“It’s okay. I need to let it go. Too many ghosts.” Tova isn’t sure she believes the words, but she’s becoming accustomed to them, at least.
Cameron studies his sneakers. “I guess I’m glad I caught you here, then. Before you moved to that retirement home.”
“Oh,” Tova says, swatting the air as if to clear away his words. “I’m not going there.”
“You’re not?”
“Heavens, no.”
“Where are you going, then?”
An unfettered laugh escapes from deep in Tova’s chest. “You know what? I don’t know. To Barbara’s. Or Janice’s. For a while. Until I figure out what comes next.”
“Good plan,” says Cameron. “I mean, that’s coming from a guy living in a camper.” He grins, and the heart-shaped dimple on his cheek indents, and for a moment he looks every part the impish grandson. Tova glances down, checking to make sure her slippers are still contacting the floor, because it feels like she’s aloft, floating, unfurling toward the ceiling with unwitting elegance, like Marcellus in his old tank. Her heart is full of helium, lifting her skyward.
She chuckles. “I suppose we’re both homeless, then.” She gestures to the hallway. “Would you like to see where your father grew up?”
ERIK’S OLD BEDROOM had been the most difficult to clean. Three decades, it sat empty. She swept the room regularly over the years, and even changed the linens on his bed occasionally, but after the men from the secondhand shop hauled the furniture away, she found herself balking at the ancient dust bunnies gathered in the corners. As if one of them might contain some fragment of him, still.
The hardwood floor is discolored where Erik’s throw rug once sat. Sun slants through the naked window. A sea breeze gently sways the branches of an old shore pine outside, and the light casts a wraithlike shadow on the opposite wall. Once, on a full-moon night when young Erik had forgotten to shut the curtains, he caught sight of that shadow and bolted across the hallway into Tova and Will’s room, dove under their covers, convinced he was being haunted. Tova held him until he slept, then continued to hold him all through the night.
Cameron’s eyes rake over every inch of the room. Perhaps he’s trying to commit it to memory, to scan it like Janice Kim’s computer. Tova has begun to retreat from the room to give him a measure of privacy when he says, “I wish I’d met him.”
She steps back in, placing a hand on his elbow. “I wish you had, too.”
“How did you, like, go on?” He looks down at her and swallows hard. “I mean, he was here one day and gone the next. How do you recover from something like that?”
Tova hesitates. “You don’t recover. Not all the way. But you do move on. You have to.”
Cameron is gazing at the floor where Erik’s bed once was and biting his lip thoughtfully. Suddenly, he crosses the room and jabs at one of the floorboards with his sneaker toe.
“What happened here?”
Tova tilts her head. “What do you mean?”
“Your whole house is red oak floorboards. But this one piece is white ash.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Tova shuffles over and adjusts her glasses, scrutinizing the floorboard. There doesn’t seem to be anything remarkable about it.
“See, the grain lines are different. And the finish, it almost matches, but not quite.” He produces a cluster of keys from his pocket, kneels, and starts working a key chain that’s meant to open bottles into the crack between the floorboards. Moments later, to Tova’s shock, the board pops up, revealing an open space underneath.
“I knew it!” Cameron squints into the cavity.
“Good heavens. Who would do such a thing?”
Cameron laughs. “Any teenage boy who ever lived?”
“But what would he need to hide?”
“Uh . . . well, my friend Brad used to steal his dad’s magazines, and—”
“Oh!” Tova flushes. “Oh dear.”
“I don’t think that’s what we’re dealing with here.” Cameron pulls out a small parcel. Its plastic wrapping crunches when he hands it to Tova, who drops it once she realizes what’s inside. Snack cakes. Or what were once snack cakes. They’re hard and gray as stones now.
“Wow, Creamzies. These are old-school,” Cameron says, picking the package up and studying it. “You know, I saw a show on some science channel about them once. Urban legend says they’ll survive a nuclear holocaust, but it’s not actually true, see, because the diglycerides they use as stabilizers don’t—”
“Cameron,” Tova interrupts quietly. “There’s something else in there.”
“In here?” He holds up the petrified cakes, squinting.
“No, in there.” Her focus is fixed on the floorboard compartment.
It’s one of Tova’s mother’s old embroidered tea towels, wrapped around something the size of a deck of cards.
Cameron takes it out and hands it to Tova. Her fingers tremble as she unravels the towel. Inside is a painted wooden horse.
“My Dala Horse.” Her whisper comes out like gravel. She runs a finger down the figurine’s smooth wooded back. Every last splintered piece is glued back into place flawlessly. Even the paint is touched up.
The sixth horse. Erik had fixed it.
Cameron leans over, peering at the artifact. “What’s a Dala Horse?”
Tova clicks her tongue. The boy is full to the brim with random knowledge about floorboard grains and snack cake stabilizers and Shakespeare, but how little he knows about his heritage.
She holds the Dala Horse out to him.
He takes it, and she watches him study the delicate carved curves. After a long moment, he looks up. “How did you get the class ring back?”
She smiles. “Marcellus.”