That next day, Monday, Mark could barely concentrate on his work. His anger at Connie Pelham had intensified overnight—curdling, it seemed, even during the spare two hours of sleep he’d finally managed. Once he was up and dressed, her own ghost seemed to hover just outside the house, threatening him with its story. He skipped his usual midday coffee break at the Cup O’Joe—Connie, after all, might be waiting for him there. He clenched his jaw every time his phone rang. All afternoon, as he typed at the computer, he felt the open curtains at his back.
I’m not afraid of you, Connie Pelham. You’re not real.
Yet he kept probing her words, like a sore inside his mouth he couldn’t stop touching with his tongue.
The little boy who used to live here.
He couldn’t help himself: he imagined a shadow-boy, a shape cut out of the air, standing silently in Brendan’s old bedroom, gazing down at Connie’s boy.
You’re not real.
The very thought of Connie Pelham and her son, living in the old house, alarmed him. He had never gone to visit Margie Kinnick, when she’d lived there; when he thought of the old house at all, his only comfort was to imagine it as a place he and Chloe still inhabited. A place where the three of them still lived, happy, safe. Their usual clutter on the floors and counters.
How could Margie have sold the place without telling them? This, above all, felt like a betrayal.
When Mark and Chloe had been vulnerable, they’d trusted her—with the house, with the memories of Brendan there. I’ll take care of it, Mark remembered her saying, as they’d signed the papers. Don’t you two worry. But what had she done, instead? She’d sold the house without telling them, to the worst possible family. Because of this, Mark would have to tell Chloe, at Brendan’s birthday dinner tomorrow night, about Connie, about her son.
Chloe, I’m marrying Allison. Also a crazy woman thinks Brendan’s haunting our old house. How’s Steve?
A vision began to preoccupy him. In an hour he would be meeting a client only a few blocks from the building where Margie Kinnick worked. He imagined himself, afterward, marching into Margie’s office, confronting her, making her hear the same words he’d heard. Making sure she understood the consequences of what she’d done.
And then, as he was putting on his coat to leave, he knew: He would really do it. He’d trusted Margie, and she’d betrayed him, and Chloe, and even Allison. Connie Pelham had caused so much suffering—why shouldn’t Margie Kinnick suffer, too?
An hour later, heart beating too fast, Mark climbed the steps of the two-story brick office building in Grandview—no more than a mile, in a straight line, from the old house, and closer than he liked to go—that housed Margie’s agency. Not a thing had changed since he and Chloe had walked inside almost sixteen years before, clutching a flyer for their house at 156 Locust, hearts in their throats. The same reception desk squatted past the vestibule; the same spotless green carpet swallowed up his footsteps. The same troubling smell of money filled the air. In 1992 he and Chloe had come into money—much to their surprise—but it had terrified them, as though instead of an envelope full of bank statements, they carried a bagful of snakes.
No, he didn’t have an appointment, he told the receptionist now. But he needed to talk to Margie urgently. And he’d be happy to wait right here. The receptionist, a young man wearing suspenders over a pale blue shirt, frowned and told him to have a seat.
While he waited Mark looked through a binder of available houses, organized by neighborhood. The past year, it seemed, had been just as brutal for real estate in Victorian Village as anywhere else; the houses weren’t going for much more than they had six years ago, when Mark and Chloe had gotten out.
He waited a long while. A man with silvery hair, wearing an expensive overcoat, walked past him, greeted the receptionist jauntily. He was followed by a black couple in their early thirties, trim and handsome. They were buying for the first time, Mark thought—the man spoke too loudly; the woman kept her hands in the pockets of her long coat and looked straight ahead. Both of them wore dazed, frightened smiles. They had seen their dream house. They were in love.
Mark watched them with a deep, tricky pain. The woman reached out and stroked the man’s shoulders, through his coat. They were dressed in expensive clothing; the man carried a leather briefcase. They’d earned their good fortune. They were lucky—but nowhere near as lucky as Mark and Chloe had been, when they’d first walked through these doors.
A month before they bought the house, neither of them had dreamed such a thing could be possible. They were each twenty-three, newlyweds, living in a tiny apartment in Clintonville, together pulling in a little over fifty thousand dollars a year. They’d planned to rent and save for five years at least, maybe more; then they figured they would look for a little ranch house in the northern suburbs and put in five years there. And so on. A big house in Victorian Village, they would have said, was for bankers, executives. People born into money.
Then one night Mark’s father had called and told him, in the same chatty tone with which he might tell Mark about the rain, to be on the lookout for a check arriving from his attorney.
When Mark asked what it was, Sam said, Well. Your mother left you some money.
Mark’s mother hadn’t been dead a year, then; his father still held the words your mother in his mouth too long, like he’d learned them in another language. Mark didn’t know what to say. It seemed wrong to admit Sam had said anything at all, let alone that what had happened to his mother had been of any benefit to anyone.
But he and Chloe, then, were eating most of their food out of cans, and spending too much time listening to their neighbors scream at each other through their apartment’s too-thin walls. Sniping at each other over the length of time the other spent on the toilet.
How much is it? he asked.
A little over two hundred and twelve thousand dollars, Sam told him.
In answer to Mark’s stunned silence, Sam explained: Some of the money had come from life insurance; Mark had been his mother’s sole beneficiary. The rest had come from investments. Molly, Sam told him, had gotten an inheritance from Mark’s grandparents, the last of it some ten years before, and had played it on the stock market. She owned a little bit of Microsoft, Sam said, a smile in his voice—I didn’t know, myself, until just before she died.
Mark’s mother had been small, still, quiet; she’d been the head librarian at the old Carnegie library in the little town of Westover, three miles from the farmhouse, and Mark had never imagined someone more dispositionally suited for the job. When she’d met Sam, Molly had been a San Francisco hippie; in the library she wore glasses and long shapeless dresses and her hair in a braid. At home her favorite place was a papasan chair on the back porch, where she’d sit through dusk in the warm months, books spilling from her lap. Mark couldn’t remember his mother even holding money in her hand. The idea itself—his mother, wealthy!—seemed crass.
He had just been freed—from his debt, from his youth, from his tiny apartment, from a hundred different limitations on his and Chloe’s future. But he could think of nothing better to say than: I can’t.
Your mother wanted this, Sam said. What else would she do with it? Give it to me? When I kick the bucket you’d get it anyway.
Incredibly, his father laughed. Mark realized: Sam was happy. He’d loved calling up his only son, saying, Two hundred and twelve thousand dollars.
You want my opinion? Sam said. Buy a house. Your mother would have liked knowing you did.
When Mark hung up, he didn’t tell Chloe about the check. In fact he couldn’t bring himself to say a word about it until it arrived—that preposterous number confirmed, grooved into the check beneath his shaking fingers—until he’d deposited it, after an ever-friendlier chat with one of the bank managers, in their joint account. And Chloe, then, was so worried about money that he had to argue even to take her out to a fancy dinner, in order to give her the news.
At the restaurant he slid the deposit slip across the table to her, saying, Surprise.
Chloe stared at it for a long time in disbelief. Is this a joke?
No. He was still shaking as he explained. And then Chloe was shaking, too.
Oh Molly, Chloe said. Oh sweet God, thank you.
Before dessert arrived they’d agreed with Sam: They would use part of the money on a down payment toward a house. Then for weeks afterward, they took long walks at night through neighborhoods they liked: German Village, Dublin, Bexley, Old Town East. Victorian Village, just south of campus, especially—as poor students they’d both rented here, had dreamed of its big rambling homes. On a recommendation from Chloe’s principal they called Margie Kinnick, an agent who had worked the neighborhood for years.
You’re lucky, Margie had told them, smiling, not long after they first walked through these same doors and told her their story. If you choose wisely, you can buy the home you’ll have all your life.
By the time the receptionist called Mark’s name he was near tears. Don’t do this, he told himself.
But he climbed the stairs anyway. He found Margie in the same office, seated behind the same big oak desk, in front of a window that overlooked the bare whipping branches of a tree—when he and Chloe had been here, those branches had been thicketed with lush green leaves; the office had glowed emerald. Margie had gained weight, and had quit dyeing her hair; she was gray now, square, her face almost craggy. A deeply shadowed line formed between her eyebrows at the sight of him. Bangles and charms hung in a tangle from her wrists; her arm tinkled when she offered her hand.
“Connie Pelham called me yesterday,” she said, right away. “She told me she’d talked to you. I was going to call you this afternoon.”
Margie was lying about that last part, he was sure. “She… confronted me last night,” he said. “She’s been to my house.”
Margie briefly closed her eyes. “I wish she hadn’t done that, Mark.”
“Did she tell you what she told me?”
Margie kept her voice neutral. “She said the two of you… discussed Brendan?”
Margie spoke like his former therapist, Gayle, used to, with a little curl upward at the end of her words, tossing the statement back to him as a question. Making him say the crazy stuff aloud.
“She says the house is haunted.”
Margie sighed. “She told me that, too.”
Mark sat down in one of Margie’s plush visitor chairs. He made a gesture: Go on.
Margie only pursed her lips. She was giving him nothing—like someone guilty. Fine, then. “I was a little surprised to hear you’d sold the house,” he said.
“It was time,” Margie said evenly. “The market’s been brutal. There was a lot of turnover in the neighborhood after you left. Sally Watson sold the apartments next door, the new guy rents to students. The Upchurches’ place was foreclosed on. I look up, I’m surrounded by strangers. If I wanted to get out with a profit, I had to do it right then.” She frowned, maybe seeing the disturbance in his face. “I’m sorry if you’re upset, but I made the right choice.”
“You could have told us.” He shook his head. “You could have told her.”
Margie’s eyes narrowed. “No, I couldn’t have. You know that better than anyone.”
He opened his mouth, but shut it before anything came out.
She said, “You said it yourself, back when you were trying to sell the place. It’s not the house’s fault. And it isn’t.”
“Even so—”
“Come on, Mark.” She lowered her voice. “What was I supposed to do? Let you and Chloe screen the buyers? It wasn’t your house anymore.” Anger filled her voice—a tone he’d never heard from her before. “Do you really think this was the first house I’ve sold where—something unfortunate happened? People die in houses.”
“I know that—”
Margie waved him off. “In Victorian Village? Those houses are eighty, a hundred years old. Everyone wants to buy there because the houses have character. But you know what character is? It means a hundred years ago people got laid out on a table in the parlor for three days before they were buried. I’d bet you Brendan wasn’t the first—”
“Margie,” he said.
Her eyes were wide. She tapped her nails on the desktop, but swallowed the rest.
She said, “I see why you’re upset. I can only imagine what you’re thinking, now. But I bought your house because I saw it as a good investment. Okay? And yeah, because I felt for you and Chloe. But I’m not Mother Teresa, Mark. I’m not sentimental. I never told you I’d live there forever. I just took it off your hands. That’s all.”
It’s in good hands, she’d said to him and Chloe, as Chloe had begun to weep.
Mark, his face burning, said nothing. Margie wasn’t wrong, but he’d be damned if he said so aloud.
She pushed her chair back from the desk, but didn’t get up. “Look. I’m sorry Connie felt the need to find you. A reasonable person wouldn’t have. I told her so on the phone. If it’s any consolation, I didn’t tell her nicely.” Margie shook her head. “She threatened to sue me.”
“Can she?”
Margie screwed up her face, then shook her head again and stood. The meeting was over.
If he’d gotten to her at all, the effect had been momentary; she was as business-like now as when he’d arrived. He tried to remember the happy, joking woman who’d come to dinner with them after they’d first moved into the house. Who’d rubbed her nose against baby Brendan’s when they’d brought him by her office. Who’d left them a poinsettia on their porch steps, in the first week of every December. Several other houses in the Village got them on their porches, too.
But he knew: Margie was no different now than she’d ever been. She’d never had to be different.
“Mark, I’m sorry, but I have an appointment coming up.”
“I’ll go,” he said.
“Connie Pelham’s a crazy woman. Put her out of your head.”
He could only nod.
Her face softened, a little. “Mark, I’m sorry. I hope you’re well?”
“I am,” he said. Then: “I’m getting remarried. In September.”
“Good,” she said, and smiled. There was warmth in it. “Oh, that’s very good.”
A few minutes ago he’d been shaking with anger, and now he was lingering.
Margie dropped her voice to a whisper. “So I probably don’t have to say this, but I will. In all my time in the house, I never—”
“I know,” he said, quickly.
She walked around the desk and took his arm. She accompanied him out her door, down the hallway, all the way to the front doors.
“You deserve better than what you got,” she said. “I hope you know.”
She smiled at him, then leaned forward and kissed the air next to his cheek.
Mark was too ashamed of himself to mention his meeting with Margie to Allison that night, but she certainly sensed his mood. After watching him stare silently at the television for a while, she suggested they go out for Chinese food for dinner.
When they’d taken their seats at the restaurant, she watched him gravely for a while before asking, “So what can I do? Tomorrow?”
He was surprised, and then doubly shamed. Of course Allie had been aware of Brendan’s birthday—she knew why he was having dinner with Chloe, and he’d told her often enough that the day could make him a little crazy. Somehow he thought he’d been keeping that a secret from her, too.
“I’ll be all right,” he said, meeting her eyes. Tell her about Margie, he urged himself, and didn’t.
“I was thinking I’d go out tomorrow night,” Allie said. “See some friends while you’re out with Chloe. But only—only if you—”
“That’s fine,” he said. “I’m going to be okay. I’ve been through a few of these.”
Allie smiled and squeezed his hand, and—for the first time that day—he allowed himself to smile back.
After Allie went to bed, Mark went to his office and shut the door behind him. He woke up the computer. It was now eleven thirty at night, December 17, 2007. Mark didn’t much care for ritual, but he’d developed one for Brendan’s birthday. He could follow it in the morning, he supposed, but he also knew sleep was a long way away, tonight. He could stare at the television, still stinging with the afternoon’s embarrassment, or he could do this.
He waited until the clock on his computer screen turned over to midnight. Then he retrieved supplies from his big metal file cabinet on the far wall: a large sheet of paper from a sketch pad and a box of charcoal. He taped the paper onto the drawing table beneath the window, then turned to his computer and spent a few minutes deciding on music. Once he’d tried to listen to songs Brendan had liked, but he didn’t have many of them on his hard drive anymore. His boy had had good taste, though; he had liked folky stuff, men and women with acoustic guitars: Nick Drake, Neil Young, Tracy Chapman. Had been crazy about “Pink Moon,” for kid reasons—he’d liked the idea of a moon that was pink. Mark’s serious, introspective boy had thought poor, suicidal Nick Drake was funny.
None of that now. Mark settled on something droning, contemplative—Lew had gotten him hooked a couple of years back on music that let him sink out of his own mind, into his work. He liked—according to Lewis—post-rock, and ambient electronica. Obscure stuff. That idea pleased him too, just as it had in college, when he and Lew used to skulk around Used Kids Records, buying punk and grunge. Now he listened to bands with names like Tortoise. Godspeed You Black Emperor. Mogwai. Explosions in the Sky.
If he were alive, and fourteen years old, Brendan would be hip to post-rock. It pleased Mark to think so—that Brendan would share his music, just as Mark shared music with his father.
Mark upped the volume as much as he dared, then turned to the drawing table, picked up a piece of charcoal, and closed his eyes. Spindly guitar prickled out of the speakers. He took a breath, two, and tried to pull Brendan’s face from memory. Brendan at seven.
His son, alive.
He had a favorite memory, for this exercise. One night not long before Brendan died, Mark and Chloe had rented Searching for Bobby Fischer, and Brendan had stayed awake and attentive throughout, fascinated by the chess-playing kid, by his ever-more-harrowing matches. When the movie was over Brendan had turned to Mark and asked, Do we have a chess set?
They did, upstairs in the guest room. Mark and Brendan had gone upstairs to get it, Brendan—as he usually did—scrambling bug-like ahead of Mark up the steps.
The narrow staircase at the house’s exact center, hairpinning at a landing barely big enough to hold Brendan, let alone Mark.
His son, sprawled at the foot of the steps. Mark hovering beside him, his cries—No No No—vibrating between the narrow walls as he waited for the paramedics, aching to cradle Brendan’s head but fearful of his kinked neck. Touching only his warm upturned palm—
This way: Brendan sitting across from him at the dining room table. The chessboard set up between them, made of thick good wood, the pieces glossy like rich chocolates. Mark taught Brendan the moves, they played one practice game, and after that Brendan made his moves without help.
Brendan approached chess the way he approached any problem—his face a knot of fear and supreme concentration. And while he focused on the board, eyes darting among the pieces, Mark had watched him.
His hair had been a dusty straw color, the exact muddy middle ground between Mark’s own dark brown and Chloe’s yellow-blond. His face a long oval, with a surprisingly pointed chin. Lips parted and full. Cheeks pale enough to show the blue vessels just beneath. That quality, peculiar to children (but surprising, to him anyway, in boys), of not just fragility but impermanence—as though, if he brushed a finger across Brendan’s cheek, he could wipe the skin away, like dust from a moth’s wing.
Brendan’s eyes a deep oceanic blue (Chloe’s, exactly), narrow, elongated—a touch longer and they’d have an almost Asian cast. A long narrow nose, a smallish mouth. An aristocratic face, Mark often thought—Sam’s face, maybe even more than his own, and Mark had always thought that when Brendan was in his forties he’d lose his hair, have that same high forehead full of ponder. Sam had seen this, too—he and Brendan had, that last year, started calling each other “Professor Fife,” nodding, solemnly, over and over, as though endlessly acknowledging each other in the hallway outside their offices, until, always, Brendan cracked up and collapsed.
Brendan’s eyes sweeping across the chessboard. Eyebrows drawn slightly together. Lower lip pouched out. Tiny, even teeth.
Looking up at last, perplexed. Saying, Dad, I don’t think I’m a chess prodigy. Mark hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry.
Mark opened his eyes and began to sketch. He tried not to pause, not to consult memory. That wasn’t the point, was it? No. The point was to remember well in the first place. To keep Brendan from becoming a black hole in his mind. A shadow in a darkened room.
Forty minutes later he thought he was done. He allowed himself to pull his eyes away from the particulars, to see the entire drawing. And there was Brendan, looking up from his game, ready to speak.
Mark swiveled back to the metal cabinet. A thick pile in the bottom drawer comprised the accumulated drawings he’d made of Brendan before he died. But a smaller stack, in a manila folder on top, held all the sketches he’d made since.
He hadn’t begun this ritual until two years after the accident. By the time of Brendan’s first birthday, after, Chloe had just left him; Mark was living with his father, barely alive. On the second birthday he had been dating a graduate student at OSU with the unfortunate name of Harriet Martin. They had spent the night of December 18 at an antiwar rally on campus—Mark had insisted; this was in 2002, he’d been in therapy for months, and the ever-escalating stupidity of the Bush administration had helped to rouse him from his long, numb stillness.
That night he was trying his best to be alive, to do something, anything—but in the middle of the rally his mind had kept sliding to thoughts of Brendan; he’d thought, clearly, that maybe it was better his little boy hadn’t lived to see this future. When he and Harriet returned to her apartment, the guilt that had flooded him in that thought’s wake had broken him down; he’d fled without much apology, had left a message for Chloe—they weren’t speaking, then—that had shamed him, and had stayed up for a long time, awaiting a call that never came. In the middle of that long night he’d panicked, wondering—with a wrenching, shivering fear—whether he could even remember his son’s face.
Mark now laid out the sketch he’d produced that night—and the four he’d produced, once a birthday, thereafter—side by side on the drawing table. At the bottom of the pile was a photo he’d taken of Brendan on his seventh birthday, glancing up from a book at the camera, surprised. His face was fuzzy around the edges, but it was still a shot that got the kid, that caught him unawares, unguarded. Six Brendans, now: one real, the others echoes.
Not much had changed in this new drawing. A narrowness in the bridge of Brendan’s nose, but that might just be a slip of his hand, a too-thick shading. The eyes were too long. But apart from these minor flaws, Mark could look down and recognize his son.
He flipped through the drawings, then again, quickly. He’d made enough, now, for an animation; as the pages whickered by, Brendan’s expression changed, his eyes opening wider, as though he’d been startled.
Mark stacked the new drawing with the others and shut them all away in the drawer.