Ten

The next day, a Saturday, Mark spent alone. Allison left him in the morning to go shopping, and then to meet a friend for coffee; she wouldn’t be home, she told him, until dinnertime or after. He was at his computer, pretending to work, pretending he wasn’t still lost in the old house, trying his damnedest to die.

Allison kissed his forehead, frowned down at him. “Do you want me to stay?”

“I’ll be fine,” he assured her—though when she was gone he felt a sudden, vertiginous loss.

But he had work to do. A life to lead. He didn’t call her phone and beg her to come back. He settled in at the computer, opened up his files.

Calling for his daddy.

Don’t do it, he told himself.

But he did: He poured himself more coffee—if he’d gotten more than an hour’s sleep last night he wasn’t aware of it—and returned to his office. After a glance out of the window—no sign of Connie Pelham—he closed down his work files and opened up his web browser. He typed the word ghost into the search field and hit return. Then he began to click some of the links that had popped up—over one hundred and sixty million of them.

There were a lot of people out there, he discovered, who believed fervently in ghosts.

Almost all the sites he visited were amateurish. Two separate addresses, each claiming to lead to galleries of “ghost photography,” set off the virus protector on his browser. One page showed a “ghost investigation team” gathered around a table in a conference room, all of the members white and doughy and middle-aged, smiling with tremendous good cheer and innocence in identical blue polo shirts. Like some sort of outing from a group home.

Other sites—the people in them, behind them—tightened his heart.

People who’d posted pictures of themselves in graveyards at night, glowing lights hovering above them. Pictures of people standing next to mirrors that seemed to have extra figures reflected in them (NOT Tommy, who was taking the picture, he looks like THIS, so who is it in the MIRROR!??); shots of wedding ceremonies with an extra shadow floating in a line with the groomsmen (i believe that to be Will’s grandpa Joe who was invited but had a heart attack and passed in May, look close the shadow has a hat on like Joes favorite—thanks for coming Grandpa Joe we miss you and pray for you); pictures of blurred faces reflected in television screens.

The desperation, the loneliness and need, leaked out of the screen like the smell of ozone. The modern photos all seemed to have been taken in trailers; on the steps of dilapidated houses in the country; in small, flat, treeless graveyards. The weddings were in VA halls and country churches. A few of the photographs were of famous or public places, but almost none were taken inside mansions, in homes supported by money.

Nearly all of these testimonials, these pictures and blurry YouTube videos, were obvious frauds. One old photo, in black and white, showed a woman sitting on a gravestone—a living woman, clearly, her head bowed in grief. And yet the website claimed that because her legs were faintly transparent, this was evidence the woman was a spirit. Historical records claim the photographer was sure he was alone in the graveyard. His chance composition produced one of the clearest shots of an apparition we have.

His father had a technical term for this: bullshit.

History, Sam had once told him, is ninety percent bullshit.

When had his father told him this? Maybe in his office at Butler—Mark had to have been young enough, still, to be shocked to hear that kind of language from him. Nine or ten. But he’d snapped to attention, as his father intended.

All I do, his father said—and that was it: Mark had asked what his father did all day, at his big wooden desk in his big building full of big-kid college students with frightening beards and breasts and bare legs—All I do is mine other people’s bullshit, and try not to create any of my own.

By the time Mark’s mother died, Sam probably would have phrased things a little differently. But he’d had a rough patch in his early years at the school, some trouble that Mark still understood only dimly. His father had been angry all the time, then. Some nights he had come home and poured himself a drink and put on his headphones and sat in the living room, his eyes closed, having never taken off his jacket and tie.

What would Sam think of him, now? Huddled frightened in front of his computer, chasing ghost stories? Again Mark was torn—he wanted to call his father, be comforted by him, but he could not imagine how to tell Sam any of this. He’d already made Allison promise not to say a word about it when Sam and Helen came to visit over Christmas.

Even so, Mark now clicked on another link: Real-Life Ghost Stories.

We were playing with a Ouija board our friend Will brought back from his stepdad’s house. We contacted a spirit who said his name was Frank. I asked Frank to prove he was real, and the light over the table flickered on and off and the planchette went crazy. It spelled out KILL YOU and KILL THEM, and then we put the board away and prayed. But I believe we opened a portal for Frank; my house has not been the same since. I later discovered that a previous occupant of the house, one Francis Hagen, had murdered his wife and son in it in 1946, and then hanged himself in the basement. My husband and I hear coughing in the night which I believe either to be due to Francis Hagen’s emphyseema and or to the fact that he hanged himself.

…

In 1977 my wife Elizabeth and me bought a house in Hackensack, a little bungalow. Well we took a bunch of photos of it, of course, showing us moving in our things, the empty rooms filling up and such as that. We didn’t develop the photos for two months, but when we did we had quite a start realizing that there was a third person in some of them, an old woman. Just visible through the curtains in one. Sitting in a chair, not ours(!), in another one. We believe after talking with neighbors that she is a woman named Jocelyn Krebs, who lived alone in the house for many years, and who died of lung cancer in 1974. Whoever our old ghost is, she sure does smoke, we can smell it all the time even though my wife and I do not ourselves smoke.

…

In 1985 my young daughter Leesie drowned in the aboveground pool in the back yard of our house in Mobile AL. She was four. Needless to say I was devastated, and my husband too. She was our only. Our little angel. But with strength from Jesus we persevered and had another angel, our baby girl Polly. I took this picture of Polly when she was four, playing in the back yard with her dolls, and if you look close you can see a shape over her that is another child playing with her. Its Leesie I know it is. I have often “felt” Leesie in the house. Like a breeze in my hair. Sometimes I hear her laugh. Before Polly was born I was sometimes woken up at night sure I heard her calling for me—

Mark clicked other links, as quickly as he could.

—Email me if you have had a similar experience, I know your out there.

—Would you like to consult with a spectral investigator? Click here for more information.

—What To Do If You Are HAUNTED—

He clicked on this one. A page full of text appeared, white letters on black, in a tiny, crowded italic font. His head immediately began to throb.

I know you, read the first line.

I used to be you. I used to think it wasn’t possible.

But it is possible. And if I can tell my story, as clearly as I can, maybe I can save someone else all the heartache I suffered, denying what in my heart I always knew to be true.

I grew up not believing in ghosts. My father and mother are scientists who work at the University of Oregon. Once, a group of my school friends set out on an expedition to find Bigfoot, but I stopped them at the edge of the woods and explained to them how Bigfoot was just a hoax. This was me. Up until I was twenty-eight years old.

That was when a ghost changed my mind…

Mark leaned closer and closer to the screen, scrolling down.

The writer and his wife had purchased a house and began to hear noises in the attic; simultaneously, they heard from neighbors that a long-ago flood of the nearby river had trapped two young children in the attic, had drowned them even as rescuers tried to break open the roof with a pickax. The writer put off going upstairs as long as possible, but the noises persisted.

… then, finally, I went into the attic and encountered something I can’t explain.

I had a camera with me, and a flashlight. When I entered the attic, the pounding had stopped, but I was filled, from deep inside me to the surface of my skin, with a feeling that I wasn’t alone. I saw nothing, but began to aim my camera deep into the corners of the room, and took pictures at random.

When I developed the pictures I was amazed to see what I’d captured.

I don’t want to prejudice your viewing of my photos. Click on the link below and judge for yourself what appears there.

Mark clicked the link. A black-and-white photo advanced slowly down the screen. It showed the inside of a small attic with a low, peaked roof, filled with a jumble of boxes and draped pieces of cloth, each splashed luridly by the flashbulb. In the center of the frame was a tiny circular window. Mark saw nothing out of the ordinary. He stared into the shadowed corners.

Then an earsplitting shriek filled the office, just as a horrible skull-face popped into the center of the screen. Mark only registered what had happened after he’d pushed his chair backward, slamming his shoulder into the corner of his file cabinet.

On his screen the skull-face was now spinning, above the blinking words: AND NOW I BELIEVE IN GHOSTS! The skull began to laugh, its lower jaw jouncing like a ventriloquist dummy’s.

Mark didn’t know whether to laugh or weep. He closed the browser; the vibrating, crazy-eyed skull vanished, and was replaced by his desktop picture: the sun glistening, serene and warm, from the surface of Lake Tahoe.

When Mark’s phone rang, three hours later, and he saw Lewis’s name on the screen, he answered gratefully, guiltily. Lew told him he’d had dinner plans with his girlfriend, but she’d canceled—did Mark want to keep him company for a while? “I haven’t talked to you in ages,” Lew said, not bothering to hide the complaint in his voice.

Mark had in fact been avoiding Lew, in the same way he’d been avoiding his father. He’d been hiding from everyone in his life since Connie Pelham had found him. He thought of the grinning skull on his computer screen.

“I’m glad you called,” he said. “Something—something’s been going on.”

Lew was immediately on point. He’d forgotten that, in Lew’s eyes, he was still fragile, damaged, requiring constant care.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m fine,” Mark said. “It’s—not over the phone.”

“I can take off now,” Lew told him. “I’ll come right over.”

“No,” Mark said. He looked from the computer screen to the drawn blinds behind him. “Let’s get me the hell out of my house.”

They agreed to meet at six, at a bar Lew had just discovered in the Short North, but Mark ended up leaving early; he truly couldn’t sit in his office, stuck in his head, a second longer. With an hour to spare, he could sit at the bar, collect his thoughts, calm himself down. He could do what he used to, when he was grieving Brendan: walk among ordinary people, so he could be forced to act ordinary, too.

If he’d been thinking more clearly, he could have insisted Lew meet him closer to German Village. He avoided the Short North—only half a mile or so from his old house, and the scene of much of his life with Chloe and Brendan, and of its dissolution—whenever he could. Coming here tonight, especially, was the wrong choice, and yet here he was, driving north on High Street, through downtown and out, across the 670 overpass, the shapes of the brick buildings on either side of him familiar and hurtful.

The neighborhood had been a slum when he was in college, but during the time he and Chloe lived nearby it had undergone a startling gentrification; now it was a mile-long stretch of trendy bars and galleries and bookstores, and the sorts of restaurants two well-off thirtysomethings like him and Allie got invited a lot to visit. When he and Allison came here he often—crazily, he knew—asked Allie to drive; he’d sit in the passenger seat with his eyes focused on safe places and sights. Otherwise he might be too tempted to see himself and Chloe and Brendan, as they used to be: walking the streets, ducking in and out of shops, eating ice cream on a wrought-iron bench.

Iron arches over the streets glimmered with braided Christmas lights, and the light poles were wreathed in plastic holly. Tonight the sidewalks were bustling with young hip people wearing expensive overcoats, packs of college students who had not gone home for the holidays. Two parents walked slowly down the sidewalk to his right, holding the hands of a young boy who swung between them like a monkey.

Did Connie Pelham and her son walk here, too? Mark’s heart beat too fast as he nosed the car beside an empty meter—as though Connie’s face would be waiting for him when he turned to his window.

The pub Lew had chosen was dim, narrow, with brick walls, polished wood, brass rails. Mark liked it immediately; the meat-market crowd seemed to have passed the place by, anyway, and the jukebox was playing Tim Easton. A row of booths with high-backed wooden seats ran parallel to the bar, and Mark slid into the last one, next to the swinging kitchen doors. After only a slight pause, he ordered a beer—a by-God Guinness, how long had it been? He pretended to watch the talking heads on ESPN, on the last of a row of televisions that hung behind the bar.

He told himself not to worry. He could tell Lewis his story, and Lew would take him seriously, no matter what he said. Even a few years ago, when Mark had been at his most desperate, Lew had never once wagged a finger, never told him how he ought to grieve. So tonight Mark would start where he ought to: by apologizing for being such a hermit. He would then lay out, simply, what had happened. And Lew would tell him—

He didn’t know what Lew would tell him. What advice could Lew—anyone—give?

Lew would take Mark’s side. He would be angry, too, at Connie Pelham. That was why Mark had come, wasn’t it? To be reminded he was not alone? That Connie was the crazy one, and not him? Yes—but as he watched the game, finished his beer and ordered a second, a worry whose shape he could not quite perceive nagged at him.

Lew walked into the bar a few minutes before six, a hulk in his overcoat and black watch cap. Mark was still nursing his second beer; his face flushed when he saw Lew looking at it. How had his life gotten so suddenly compromised?

“That’s a by-God Guinness,” Lew said when he’d reached the table. “When did this start happening again?”

“It’s nothing to worry about,” Mark said. But his excuse sounded just like a drunk’s—he felt caught, like he was taking a test he hadn’t studied for.

Lew took off his coat and hat and slid into the booth. “You’re going to drink again, you should let me come along, you know? Or else what’s the fun in it?”

Mark let out his breath, smiled sheepishly. He’d been right—Lew couldn’t judge him; he didn’t have judgment in his genes. The waitress came by and Lew said, “Another one of those.”

Lew was growing out his hair again; the stubble on his head was as gray as it was blond. The detail made him seem, suddenly, old. He dug into his pocket and removed a flash drive, which he pushed across the table to Mark. “Merry Christmas,” he said. “It’s music. Almost all pirated, but I didn’t say that.”

Mark hadn’t even thought to buy Lew a present. “I’m an asshole,” he said.

Lew shrugged, let his eyes flicker to Mark’s. “I asked Santa for beer.”

Mark smiled. “I owe you more than that. How’ve you been?”

Lew waved him off. “None of that. I’m worried about you.” He glanced at Mark’s glass. “Tell me you’re not single.”

“No,” Mark said. “It’s not that.”

The waitress brought Lew’s drink and set it in front of him. “Tell me,” he said.

“I don’t—I don’t know how.”

Lew’s face bunched with worry. Again Mark felt a rush of odd misgiving, but he told himself this was what he’d come to do. He remembered what his therapist had once asked him: How long has it been since you’ve told anyone a secret?

So Mark took a breath and did just that. Instead of Lew’s face, he stared at his clasped fingers on the tabletop. He started at the beginning, with Connie spying on him through the window. When Mark told him what she’d revealed in the bookstore, Lew erupted: “Fucking hell!” When Mark told him about what Connie had said to him yesterday at the coffee shop, Lew slumped back in shock. He told him everything he’d been thinking—almost everything. Lew knew he’d nearly drunk himself to death, once, but not what Mark had seen in the old house, along the way.

“Jesus,” Lew said, when he’d finished. “Jesus fucking Christ, buddy.”

“Yeah.”

“You should have called me.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Wait, I guess.” Mark said. “Hope the letter does the trick. Threaten to sue her if she keeps it up.”

Lew drained his glass, held two fingers up to the waitress. He thought for a moment, then said, “Shit, does Chloe know?”

Mark shook his head. “She didn’t handle the news about the engagement all that well.”

Lew let out a long breath.

“You know her,” Mark said. “What should I say?”

“I don’t know. But, man, you can’t let this woman find her. The news has to come from you.”

Mark nodded glumly.

Lew slowly shook his head. “Okay. The lawyer was a good call. But—what does this woman want you to do?”

“I don’t know,” Mark said. This question had been bothering him, too, since Allie had first asked it. “I think she wants me to come to the house, though to do what, I don’t know. If there was such a thing as ghosts, I would. But—”

Lew was watching him intently. The waitress returned with their drinks. Lew took a gulp of beer, then said, “You’re probably right. It’s probably just her kid.”

“But?”

The left side of Lew’s mouth curled up, but not in a smile.

“Say it,” Mark said.

“I don’t know if I want to.”

Mark’s unease grew.

“I’m just going to say it. Since we’re just sitting here talking.” Lew stared at him. “Any chance there’s something to this?”

Mark’s mouth was dry. “No.”

“Let’s think about this. You’re positive? There’s a one hundred percent chance she’s lying?”

Mark said, slowly, “There’s a one hundred percent chance her kid is lying.”

“Okay,” Lew said. “I think you’re right. I think her kid is lying. It’s the most logical thing to think, here. But you know I don’t—I don’t know if I can just dismiss the whole idea out of hand.”

“What?”

Lew gave him an odd, sidelong look. And then Mark remembered; the source of his unease came flooding back to him. Lew believed in ghosts. He thought he’d seen one, once.

How could Mark have forgotten?

He remembered Lew telling him the story for the first time in college—they’d been sharing an apartment, then. Chloe had been with them; they’d just watched a scary movie with Lew and whatever girl he was seeing. They’d passed around a joint, told scary stories. Then Lew had just announced: So yeah, I’ve seen a ghost. While Mark held Chloe beneath a blanket on the couch, feeling her body flex and squirm in response to the tale, Lew told them what had happened.

The story, as Mark remembered it, went like this: When he was sixteen, Lew had gone camping in Montana with a cousin. Deep in the mountain woods, they’d set up their tent inside the walls of an abandoned, roofless log cabin. In the middle of that night Lew had woken up—It was a feeling, Lew told them, a kind of command, I guess—and had seen, out the mouth of the tent, a figure on the far side of the cabin: an old, bearded man crouching, rubbing his hands, his face dully illuminated, as though lit from below by a campfire. The man glanced over at them, opened his mouth to speak, then vanished.

Lew’s cousin, he claimed, had woken up, too, had seen the same thing. That’s how we knew it was real, Lew told them. When he and the cousin compared notes they realized they had both noticed the same details: The man had been wearing a red flannel shirt. He had a gold tooth. He wore a feather in his hair, above his right ear. The firelight had gleamed in his eyes.

Lew’s cousin later found out that a hundred years before, a fur trapper had gotten lost out in those same woods. The trapper had frozen to death, or been eaten by wolves—something horrible like that—but he had died alone, and Lew and his cousin weren’t the first people who’d claimed to see him, still, crouched and rubbing his hands by his nonexistent fire.

Chloe, shivering beneath the blanket, had asked Lew, You’re serious?

Mark had expected Lew to roar out a laugh, to give them, finally, a punch line. But Lew had answered with a soft seriousness: Chloe, I’d swear it in fucking court. This was real.

Mark hadn’t thought of this story in what, fifteen years? If Lew had been a fucking Methodist, Mark would have remembered that. But not that Lew had seen a ghost.

Lew started to tell him the story again, now, but Mark stopped him. “I remember. So you still—”

“I still do,” Lew said, quietly. “I know what I saw.”

“Jesus, Lew, I don’t—”

“You want me to shut up?” Lew asked. He meant it. “Tell me what you need here, and I’ll do it.”

But before Mark could tell him, I need you to say it’s all bullshit, Lew kept talking: “Okay, forget I said it. But, man, I know you. You’re not just worried about telling Chloe. This is eating at you.”

Mark shook his head.

“Look,” Lew said. “I’m going to ask a hard question. You can tell me to fuck off if you want. But—what if you’re not a hundred percent? What if you’re only ninety-nine percent sure?” He held up his hand. “Bear with me. I’m only asking because I loved Brendan. You know that, right?”

Mark’s anger was sudden, sharp, overpowering. “So if I don’t run right over there, I’m a bad father? Is that what you’re saying?”

Lew’s face darkened. “Do you think there’s a chance in fucking hell I mean that?”

Mark couldn’t answer.

“What I’m saying is, if there’s any chance in your mind—any—like, even a one percent chance—that there’s something to this, then do you have to go and see?”

Mark shook his head.

“Because I’m looking at you and I’m thinking it’s ninety-nine.”

“It’s not,” Mark said, hoarse.

Lew ran his hand across his head. His gray hairs glimmered like pelt. “Man—if it’s ninety-nine, you can say it to me. You can always say it to me. You know that.”

Mark was close to panic, now. This wasn’t what he’d wanted, what he needed. Never mind his sleepless night, his searching on the net. Never mind the ache of Brendan’s name in his throat.

“Look,” Lew said, hunched forward. “I don’t know what it’s like. I can’t imagine—”

“You can’t.”

“No. But I watched you go through—I watched you tear yourself up. About Brendan, about Chloe. I know what you can do to yourself. You should, too. I can see it on your face, Mark.”

“It’s not true. That’s not what this is about.”

“Just be sure,” Lew said, very quietly. “We could go over there together, even.”

Mark closed his eyes; almost imperceptibly, the room swayed. “I can’t do that.”

“You don’t have to—”

He sounded so awful, so false. “You think I do.”

“You asked me, I answered. Buddy, all I’m doing is asking what if.”

“And I haven’t been?”

Lew’s eyes were soft and wounded. “How could you not?”

And here Mark heard, truly heard, the judgment he’d been sure he never would—not from Lew. Not from a man who thought ghosts were real because he’d smoked a bunch of fucking pot when he was a teenager.

Not from a man who’d never had children, never had a son, never climbed up a flight of narrow stairs forever, toward that broken little boy.

“I have to go.”

Lew’s voice was thick. “Mark. Take it easy, I was just—come on. Sit.”

Mark had stood, was reaching for his coat.

Lew stood, too. “Mark, man, I’m sorry. Just tell me what I can do.”

“There’s nothing to do.” Mark pulled on his coat. If he wasn’t outside in moments, he was sure, he was going to begin sobbing.

The weight of Lew’s big hand fell on Mark’s shoulder, as he squeezed between Lew and the bar, and he was tempted—more than tempted; he was compelled—to stop, to let Lew embrace him, to take care of him again, as Lew used to, when he’d show up at the door of Mark’s apartment in the early-morning hours when Mark was pacing and frantic, his worst thoughts snapping and ravening at the door of their pen. Because he had called, and Lew had answered.

“I’ve got to go,” Mark said. He buttoned his coat and hurried through the door, into the frigid evening.

Mark sat for a long time behind the wheel of his car. He wiped his eyes and watched through the fogged windshield as Lew appeared at the corner, his coat open, his head uncovered, looking quickly left, then right: searching for him. Lew pulled out his cell phone, and then walked south, holding his hand over his free ear. Mark’s phone buzzed in his breast pocket, and he ignored it until it stilled.

He checked his watch. It was nearly eight; he should go home. He’d forgotten to leave Allison a note, though she was likely still shopping. She’d call him when she found him gone.

But the world was all wrong. He was all wrong. He’d just drunk three beers—more than he’d allowed himself in a long time. His movements were thick, his thoughts furred over. He might not even be legal to drive.

What he needed to do—had to do—was take a short walk. The night was cold, crisp. He could clear his head.

And not only that. This neighborhood had gotten to him—spooked him, and not just tonight. He’d been letting the place command him for years, now. If he walked for a while, he’d see there was nothing here—anywhere—for him to be afraid of. Maybe then, when he felt better, he could call Lew. Apologize for the way he’d just treated him. And tell him—firmly, absolutely—that he was one hundred percent sure.

Mark got out of the car and walked slowly back to the corner. Lew was nowhere in sight. He looked right and left. Every storefront, every bar and gallery, was new to him. All his old haunts were gone.

Haunts.

He couldn’t go on like this. Jumping away from every dark corner, every diseased implication. He reminded himself: He was a successful man. He was engaged to Allison Daniel. Only two weeks ago he had been happy. Was it really Connie Pelham’s fault that he wasn’t anymore?

So what if the old house was less than a mile west of where he now stood? He was one hundred percent sure that it was, simply, a house he’d once lived in, but didn’t any longer: Wood and stone and brick and the air they contained. And a man who was one hundred percent sure, who didn’t lose himself playing silly what-if games, could walk anywhere he damned well pleased.

So he would.

He headed north on High Street, mingling with the crowds. So many people, happy; they smoked, drank, laughed; women pressed close to men. Mark passed the open door of an Italian restaurant, and the line of chattering people waiting for a seat; he smelled the rich garlic, the pillowy warm bread. He passed an art gallery; without thinking too much about it, he ducked inside, nodded to the cadaverous man in the bolo tie who sat at a desk beside the door, and looked at the terrible, terrible abstract art. He had half a degree in art; he liked art. So here he was: a man living his life. A member of this world. He had desires and opinions. His stomach growled.

He left the gallery, walked on down the sidewalk. What was there to fear? Every last shop and restaurant he remembered, from his old life, had changed. And he had changed with them.

Then he walked past the side street where his and Chloe’s apartment had been. He glanced to his right, saw the building—now dingy, shabbier than he remembered. His old window dark, a cramped emptiness, a shadow above and behind High Street’s bustle. It was the place a sad and lonely man would live, blocking his ears against the happiness outside.

That man was not him. Not anymore.

Mark walked on. And here was the old alley. The steps leading down from the sidewalk, beneath the brick arch. Beyond had been Dougie’s Bar, where he and Chloe and Lew used to spend so much of their time. A student dive, favored by punk bands. Now it seemed to be an upscale jazz club. Mark leaned against the rail and listened to a rubbery, walking bass line rise up the stairs. He remembered his younger self—newlywed, safe and secure in his happiness—walking down these same steps. Chloe’s hand in his hand. Lew on stage, face slicked with sweat, roaring, gripping his bass like an ogre’s club.

Mark walked down the steps, into the bar. A combo was playing in a brick alcove cut into the east wall. The musicians were all men who looked like his father; his father would love them, their music. Of this Mark was one hundred percent sure—so sure he glanced suspiciously around, making sure Sam wasn’t here, watching him.

Sam wasn’t, so Mark went to the bartender and ordered another Guinness. The first sip slid easily down his throat. He followed it with another, and another, shutting his eyes, while his head filled with music.

An hour and two more beers later Mark climbed the steps back to the street. His feet seemed to float above the steps; he felt less like himself than he had before: a good thing, indeed. The night was much colder, but he did not walk toward his car—and why would he? Driving was out of the question now. Instead he kept strolling north. A crowd had assembled on a corner up ahead—some kind of formal event, everyone young and dressed up, maybe a fraternity party from OSU—and he turned down one side street, and then another, to avoid the mass. A heavyset woman, smoking in the doorway of a gift shop—a woman closer to his age than any of the women in the bar he’d just left—smiled and said, “Good evening.”

“It is,” he said, as Dr. Fife the heart surgeon.

And then—he couldn’t believe it—he was at the corner of Buttles and Wall, at the exact dividing line between the shops of the Short North and the looming brick houses of Victorian Village.

At this corner, on this bench—the stone one, right here—Mark had once taught Brendan right and left, based on the way the cars turned onto High at the next intersection.

The blue Bug, he’d say. Which way’s it going?

Left, Brendan would say. Then, with more certainty, his face tightening, as though being correct required courage: Left.

Good, Mark would say. Let’s go for five out of six. He’d want to ruffle Brendan’s hair, but that would mess up his concentration, annoy him.

If Brendan got it right often enough, the deal went, Mark would take him to his favorite place, across the street: Fitz’s Old-Time Ice Cream and Soda Shoppe. Mark turned, lifted his eyes. Fitz’s was still there, its windows brightly lit. Inside were adults, children. Fathers and sons.

Mark sat on the bench. He listened. Even though the Short North was to his right, dozens of people milling on the sidewalks, he heard only the cold wind moving across the roofs and treetops of the Village, the creak and sway of the trees. He was one hundred percent sure of this.

He stood and walked west, into the neighborhoods, mansions on his right and Goodale Park a black hole on his left.

Mark had only gone partway down the block when his shoulder bumped, painfully, the metal shaft of a stop sign. He counted, again, the beers he’d drunk. He’d have to call a cab soon. But he didn’t want to spend the money, or explain to Chloe—Allison—what he’d been up to—

He’d just mixed up their names. He hated doing this. Allison was Allison and Chloe was Chloe. There was no mistaking one for the other.

A little while longer. To clear his head.

He walked on, past house after house, taking care with the cracked and upheaved sidewalk stones in the dark. Above him bedroom windows glowed orange and seemed to drip with heat.

When he’d walked four blocks, he was standing across Neil Avenue from Giant Eagle—which, when they’d lived here, used to be the Big Bear grocery. The Big Ol’ Bear, they used to say. You had to say it in a certain voice—Baloo’s. The big ol’ redneck singing bear.

You went to the Big Bear for those bare necessities of life. Cheerios for Brendan and cases of Fresca for Chloe and Coca-Cola for himself. Countless boxes of diapers and rolls of toilet paper and the frozen pesto pizzas they all liked. Guinness, sometimes, and Merlot for Chloe. Once, humiliatingly, condoms, when Chloe’d had a reaction to her pills. Nothing like a box of rubbers to remind a man how much sex his wife wasn’t having with him. He’d had to put a magazine in Brendan’s hands to keep him from picking up the box and reading its contents aloud.

Brendan humming when he was allowed to push the cart.

Brendan singing tunelessly to himself on the living room rug, walking one of his action figures step by uncertain step.

Calling for his daddy.

No.

Mark turned north on Neil. Four blocks, then five. The appearance of each house as familiar as the ache of an old wound. The traffic murmuring by—Neil Avenue busy enough that, until he turned six, Brendan had always been required to hold Mark’s hand alongside it.

His hand was empty, now. Fisted and cold in his coat pocket. And here was the old turn, onto Fourth. The way home.

A choice. Allie would be in the townhouse by now, and he hadn’t called to tell her where he was. She’d be worried. He could call a cab and go home. Tell her he’d had too many with Lew. Apologize.

Or: He could turn left, and continue walking his familiar path home from the store. Within five minutes he’d be on Locust, and he’d see the house, his old house, their old house, which was not haunted, because there was no such thing as ghosts.

He was one hundred percent sure.

So left it was.

The streets here were darker, the sidewalks even more treacherous. He zigzagged across Harrison, then left again, into the stretch of streets named for the flyover states. The pavement soon gave way to cobblestones. He crossed Iowa. Pennsylvania. He was like a jet plane, speeding silently through the dark skies.

Then he was turning left onto Michigan. Another block and the big houses began—he was in the heart of Victorian Village, now, surrounded by the century-old homes, their small grassy front yards sloping past old oaks and maples to the sidewalk and the cobbled streets. Squared intersections gave way to manicured roundabouts. Here was quiet and stillness and old money.

One more right turn, onto Locust. And here was the little nameless park: exactly half a block in size, with seesaws and saddled ladybugs on big metal springs, and several lovely young birch trees and wooden benches. He took the diagonal path through it, past the rusted, quietly crying chains of the swings, past the sandbox, past the curving slide, and then: He was there.

Here. Standing on the sidewalk, looking across a roundabout at the house.

It had changed. Had become smaller in life than it remained in his head, less grand, less—less what? Welcoming? Maybe so. Sadly so.

Its shape had not changed. The house was still two stories high, still walled with dark brick. The wide turret still curved out from the corner of the house facing the roundabout and the park; the front porch was still made of concrete, on top of a stone foundation, its roof supported by square brick pillars. The front steps still descended from the porch to the sidewalk, between the two bare oaks that still rose from the narrow, banked yard. The two gable windows extending onto the porch roof still looked like eyes; the pillars of the porch still gave the whole the look of a gap-toothed, smiling mouth.

Happy house, Brendan used to say—though in the dark, like now, when he was afraid, he wouldn’t have.

Several windows glowed. The tall chimney smoked. Connie Pelham was home.

Mark huddled close to the trunk of one of the birches. He couldn’t tell, here in the dark, but he was fairly sure that Margie or Connie or both had repainted the shutters and trim. He and Chloe had painted all the wood dark green, with deep crimson accents. Christmas colors. Now the wood seemed lighter, the color probably garish—but that had always been the trend among the other owners in the neighborhood, painting Victorian houses in period colors, lavenders and pinks and lime greens.

The house’s dimensions settled. His eyes adjusted. Yes. This was still his house. Theirs.

A car drove slowly past him and down the street; Mark turned his face from the headlights. He wondered if the driver had noticed him: a man in a dark overcoat standing next to a playground at night. What would he have thought, years ago, when he was a father in this house? If he’d looked out his study window and seen a man lurking in the trees?

He’d have called the police. He’d have kept his family safe.

He remembered any of a hundred nights: waking in the dark, beside Chloe in their bedroom, his breath and heartbeat suddenly quick, alert, even as his mind struggled to catch up. A vibration in the air, in the cells of his skin—had Brendan cried? And there, again—the barest tendril of sound, winding past the thick walls and the doors left ajar: Daddy!

Because in the night, in the dark—when he was afraid, when he’d been woken from a dream, when he feared the ghosts or worse—Brendan would only ever call for his father. He would not sleep until Mark tucked him back in, had told him a story.

When he glanced back at the house, a movement drew his eyes up, through the branches, to what had been Brendan’s old window. A light had come on inside. The shade was up; the room’s walls glowed whitely.

A silhouette appeared in the window. A boy’s.

The hair rose on Mark’s arms. The shadow of a boy, not very old—Brendan’s age, maybe—standing in front of the window, looking out.

Mark knew he must be invisible, down in the park, but for the life of him it seemed as though the boy in the window was regarding him. Staring into him.

He turned and walked quickly away. His breath came very quickly, now; he could hear himself panting. He exited the park, onto Michigan Avenue. Don’t run, he told himself. But he ran anyway. Up ahead the houses gave way to an intersection lined with businesses—a corner market, the liquor store, a yoga studio, all closed. The nasty all-night laundromat was still in business, too. Mark slipped inside. The air was slick, warm, smelling of detergent, wet mildewed cloth. One dryer tumbled forlornly in the back, but he was alone.

A pay phone hung on the wall just inside the door; a phone book in a plastic cover was attached to it with a braided cable. He flipped to the cab companies and called the first listing.

He’d have them take him to his car. He could drive home. He’d been very very stupid, but he wasn’t drunk, not now.

He had not seen the ghost. He’d only seen Connie’s son. Jacob—his name was Jacob. Jacob who slept in Brendan’s old room. Jacob who had lied. Mark was sure of it.

He continued telling himself this. As the cab drove him through the darkened Village. As he carefully steered his car along the back streets toward home. As he unlocked the townhouse. As he told Allison—waiting for him, anxiously, in the living room—that he’d been out with Lew. As he apologized for not checking his messages. As he assured her that he’d been fine, driving like this. As she asked him, before climbing the stairs, if he was coming up to bed, and then again after he’d told her, Soon.

He had seen a living child, he told himself. Nothing more.