Kathleen had done some work on the basement, but otherwise, it was exactly the room I remembered. The steps to the basement had been recarpeted, and the handrail, always a rickety metal affair, had been replaced with mahogany so polished and smooth it was almost slippery. At some point, she must have lugged away the foosball table, which through one enthusiastic tournament or another had accumulated a number of players on the injured list. But the couch was still there, covered in the type of scratchy plaid upholstery that made it unpleasant to sit on with any bare limbs. I recognized the end table and the antique lamp that worked by inserting a small key into a hole on its thick trunk.
Kathleen had left a set of sheets on the couch, and I set about the task of piling up the cushions on one end of the room, pulling out the hideaway and making up the bed. I was almost faint with déjà vu, the scene both natural and bizarre at once.
That first summer when Kathleen had brought me home from Northwestern, we’d given her parents only a day’s notice. Better to surprise them, Kathleen had said; Owen and Barbara Eberle were the sort of people who handled unexpected visitors well. They had been immediately welcoming, making the subtle rearrangements to their lives that were required for the accommodation of an entirely new person for an extended period of time. Barbara offered to reorganize her guest room, which had doubled as a sewing and hobby room, but I’d insisted that the basement was fine. I could almost hear the sigh of relief—it would be much easier to keep an eye on me if I were sleeping two floors below Kathleen.
We’d kept this same arrangement three summers in a row. Kathleen’s brother, Jeff, recently graduated from college, was working for Owen, and we’d developed an easy friendship. If the family had been initially wary of me—the boy from Chicago with parents neither they nor Kathleen had ever met and whom I never referred to—this was forgotten soon enough. I was Kathleen’s boyfriend, sure, but they treated me almost like a prodigal son, as if I had been away for far too long between visits. Owen took me to the lake in his boat on Saturdays, and we caught next to nothing, smoked too many cigars—which I can only remember guiltily in retrospect, since it was lung cancer that would kill him—and returned home sunburned and sated. Jeff had gotten me the roofing job, and most weekdays I woke to the alarm at four-thirty, rolling off the hideaway bed, climbing the stairs quietly to shower on the main floor without disturbing anyone. By the time I was dressed, though, Barbara had breakfast going; when my ride pulled up curbside, she handed me a mug of coffee, a Coleman jug filled to the brim with ice water and a paper sack packed for my lunch. It was easy to think of them as my parents, too—the long-lost parents I never had, the type of parents I would have wished for as a child, if I could have believed they existed.
Over the years, Kathleen and I hadn’t been back as often as we’d promised that day we’d pulled our packed-to-the-gills Datsun out of the driveway and left for California. I remembered the way they’d stood on the porch, waving goodbyes—Owen puffing away on his signature cigar, Barbara wiping tears on the sleeve of her sweater. Each time we’d returned, it was to signs of their gradual decline. Owen’s breathing grew wheezy first, then was aided by a pull-along oxygen machine. He’d refused chemotherapy and radiation, insisting that he would go how he wanted to go—which was only six weeks from the date of his diagnosis. Barbara’s quaint forgetfulness rapidly became more than absentmindedness, and she died a year later in an Alzheimer’s ward. So young, both of them, so seemingly healthy and vibrant and productive. Their deaths had been devastating for both of us, but I was, in a way, relieved that they hadn’t outlived Daniel, hadn’t lived to see what a mess we’d made of things.
I was sitting on the bed, remembering this, when Kathleen came down the stairs. “I moved some of the old things into the garage,” she explained, as if we’d been in the middle of a conversation. “I’d like to save as many things as I can, refinish them one by one, but between that and all the work at the store...”
“You want to sit?” I asked, gesturing to the end of the bed. I’d heaped my suitcase on the old armchair with the matching scratchy fabric.
She shook her head, leaning back against the wall. Had it been strange for her to come back here, to live in her childhood home? She’d exchanged one house of ghosts for another. But she’d thrown herself enthusiastically into the renovations, a seemingly never-ending project.
She continued, talking fast to fill the silence. “I’m thinking of renovating the whole basement, maybe making it a separate apartment for some income. But I’d have to figure out the access. There’s that old door off the laundry room, obviously, but it’s just about impossible to reach from the driveway, so not such a grand entrance. I’d like to knock down a few walls, put in a little kitchenette and one of those stackable washers and dryers....”
“That’s a good idea,” I said.
“You think so?”
But I hadn’t really heard her. I was amazed by how she was handling her life, baffled and envious, not angry like I’d been in the immediate wake of Daniel’s death. Kathleen could move on. She was strong; she was resilient. She didn’t know that Robert Saenz was out, walking free in the world—but would she have acted any differently if she did?
“Curtis?”
“Yeah,” I said faintly, trying to focus on her words. I was noticing that she’d let her hair grow long, that there were a few gray hairs at her temples. She looked trim, healthy. I let my gaze drift across her face—skin so pale it was almost translucent, that slight bluish vein visible on her forehead. I was aware of how rumpled I looked after a day on the road, the soda stain that bloomed on one cuff.
“Of course, Jeff says most of the house should be gutted. But he doesn’t have an understanding of the bones of the house, of the architecture. You should see where he lives—you will see it, if...” she trailed off. “How long are you planning to stay, exactly?”
I cleared my throat. “There are some things...” But I couldn’t go any further. The full weight of the day descended on me, like a heavy cloak of X-ray armor.
Kathleen stared at me. “What is this about, Curtis?”
I couldn’t answer. Despite days of rehearsing the words in my head, I couldn’t actually say them.
“I’m glad you’re here, and Olivia,” she said, when it was clear I wasn’t going to contribute. “But I can’t have it like it was, where you refuse to talk to me. That was killing me. I can’t do it. I can’t put in all the effort.”
“No,” I said, my voice thick. “I don’t want you to. You won’t have to. I’ll—” I stopped, as if I were trying to find my place in the script.
Kathleen waited, her posture uncomfortably straight, chin slightly forward, bracing herself for the bad news.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “I’m hardly thinking right. Maybe we could have this conversation tomorrow.”
She nodded, tucking a loose curl behind her ears. “Tomorrow, then.”
“Tomorrow, then,” I said, and she nodded.
That was all I had—one more day.