The following week passed in a haze. The trip with Sam and Helen to see Allison’s family went off without incident; in fact Mark found himself happy, during, caught up in the bustle and company.
But no sooner had Helen and his father left for Indiana than Mark came down with an awful flu. He spent three days moaning and sweating in bed. In the worst moments of the fever he dreamed scratchy endless dreams of the old house, of Brendan, of Brendan’s body on the stairs. He dreamed of Chloe and Connie Pelham giving the infant Brendan a bath together. Sometimes Brendan called out for him—Daddy!—and each time Mark woke with a jerk, at once glad that he hadn’t heard such a terrible sound, and—as he’d always been—grieving anew that he couldn’t run down the hall and comfort Brendan, couldn’t kiss him and say, It’s all right, I’m here.
More than once, after he woke, he stared blearily into the dark and thought of Connie Pelham, and her son; he wondered whether they were asleep, or if, in their big, dark, creaking house, they had suddenly been wakened, too.
On New Year’s Eve, Mark and Allie took Lew up on his invitation to meet him and his girlfriend, Heather, at a bar downtown. When they arrived Lew was, already, deep into his cups, and Mark was grateful; this was the first call of Lew’s he’d answered since fleeing him in the Short North, and he’d hoped he wouldn’t have to explain himself. Lew hugged Allie, and then Mark, and as they pulled apart he said, “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Mark told him. “Really.” Lew looked askance at him, but said nothing.
He nursed a glass of wine while Allie allowed herself to get trashed. Mark was happy for her—he owed her a good time more than Lew—but even so he spent the evening standing still and quiet, watching Allie and Heather dance. At midnight Mark held Allie as the ball dropped on television, kissed her when it touched bottom—her breath was sharp with lime and tequila—and then they swayed together to “Auld Lang Syne.” As always, he had to push down the song’s creaking, maudlin sadness. Mark saw Lew watching him; he wondered if they were thinking of the same old acquaintance. Then the bar spilled into the street. Through gaps between the downtown buildings they watched fireworks arc lazily up, burst, and shed their cinders into the ink-black Scioto.
At one Allie tugged on Mark’s hand, murmuring “Home, home,” and they said their goodbyes. But Lew didn’t let Mark leave without pulling him into an embrace. “Call me, okay?” he said. “No matter what.” Mark assured him he would, his stomach tight.
Back at the townhouse, even though his fiancée was negotiating the front steps in a little black dress and heels, Mark was the one who slipped on the patch of ice; he fell on his side hard enough to knock the wind out of him. He managed to limp inside, to put the two of them to bed, but the following morning, the spectacular bruise on his hip was the least of his problems—when he tried to lift himself from the mattress, his lower back seized with wiry white pain.
Allison helped him downstairs to the couch, and he remained there, almost completely immobile, for two days, watching bowl games and reading. Allie tried to hide it, but he knew she was losing all patience with him.
“I’m sorry,” he kept telling her.
“It’s okay,” Allie kept telling him.
But instead of talking to Allie, he brooded. One of the dreams he’d suffered during his flu took root in him, began to take on darker implications: the one where he’d watched, invisible, as Chloe and Connie Pelham gave Brendan a bath.
Chloe had believed Connie—or, at least, had not dismissed her. That meant that she would probably, by now, have gone to the old house, to see if Connie was right. And Mark had told her never to speak to him again. Chloe was in the place they had lived without him; whatever happened to her there, whatever she remembered, she was alone.
She did not need him. She did not want him there. He wouldn’t have gone with her if she had asked. He told himself this.
For weeks he’d been avoiding the corner of the living room where a few pictures of Brendan still hung. But as he lay on the couch, his back pulsating, he felt those photos behind him; he would long to look at them, would sometimes twist himself painfully in order to make sure they were still there: Brendan on the front porch swing. Brendan dressed like a sailor and toddling toward an Easter egg. Brendan, five, pointing at the camera, his mouth open in a snaggletoothed grin.
Calling for his daddy.
Everything’s wrong with you, Chloe had said to him. Everything.
A few days after New Year’s, on a Saturday, Allison’s sister, Darlene, called. Mark heard Allie’s cry of alarm through his office wall—he had been trying to work—and he hobbled to their bedroom, where Allie sat on the edge of the bed. Allie took his hand while she talked. “No!” she kept murmuring into the phone. “Oh, honey, no.”
When she had hung up, Allie told him: Darlene’s boyfriend, Tim, had just moved out. They had been fighting for weeks, and on New Year’s Day he finally told her he’d been seeing someone else.
Allison was in tears. “I really thought she’d marry him,” she kept saying. Mark had, too. On Christmas Day, Tim—scruffy, dreadlocked, smelling of patchouli—had talked earnestly with Sam about his and Darlene’s incipient business while wearing a present Darlene had made for him: a hand-knit sweater with a line of reindeer running across the chest.
Allison fretted for hours; Mark at last realized that the only reason she hadn’t dashed to her sister’s side was because of him and his injured back. “Go,” he told her. He had finally agreed to see a doctor that morning; with his muscle relaxants he could feed himself, haul himself to the toilet, work. He could drive, if he had to.
“You’re sure?” Allie asked.
“I’m sure. And Darly can come stay here, if she needs.”
Allison pressed her forehead to his. “Thank you.”
“No problem,” he told her, and stroked her neck.
“Things need to be better soon,” Allie said. “They will be, right?”
“They will be,” he assured her.
Allison was in such a hurry to leave they neglected to check the weather. Almost the moment she reached her sister’s house, a bitter snowstorm blew across the northern half of the state, burying everything, and closing most of the major roads, including I-75 between Toledo and Columbus. Allie called him early in the evening and told him Darlene’s long driveway had drifted over, that she might or might not be able to drive back home in the morning. Mark sat in his office, the curtain pulled aside, watching the snow spiral wildly through the glow of the streetlight, and assured her over and over he would be all right.
After half an hour of listening to the wind howl, he called his father; Sam answered sleepily. “Oh, I’m fine,” he said. “I’m at Helen’s apartment. We went to the store and got all my staples.”
Saltines. Coca-Cola. Gin and vermouth and olives.
“I was thinking of the first blizzard at the farmhouse, after we moved,” Mark said, which was true; one of his earliest memories was his father holding him up to the windowsill, to see the drifts outside. “I keep thinking we should be there now, playing Monopoly.” With Mom, he almost said. With Chloe and Brendan, too. All of them together, as they had never been, safe and sleepy and warm.
“I’d be very happy if we were,” Sam said, after a pause, in such a way that Mark knew they’d both found their way to the very same thought.
The phone beeped, then, with an incoming message. Mark ignored it—probably Allison, calling him back.
Soon Mark bid his father goodnight. The streets outside were now blanketed; the snow was whipping past the streetlight in sheets, dense as rain. He turned on the news: twelve to sixteen inches by morning, and another eight before noon Sunday.
He thought to check who’d called him, then. The number was Chloe’s.
Mark walked downstairs. Set his phone on the coffee table and lay back, away from it.
He had to admire her timing. She had picked exactly the moment he was lonely, nostalgic, Allison far away. Chloe, he thought, must be a fucking psychic—she had always known when he was weak. Whatever she had to say—whether it was about Connie Pelham, or an apology, or even more venom—it could wait for tomorrow.
Everything’s wrong with you. Maybe he’d erase it.
He went downstairs to make himself dinner but found, to his dismay, that he was out of everything, especially his own staples: canned tuna and coffee beans and something salty he could eat by the fistful. The cold was getting inside of him; his back was stiffening. And he was stir-crazy. And Chloe had called him.
Just three blocks away was a little all-night convenience store. He could stock up there, before the worst of the overnight storm. A walk might be good for him—after days of immobility he could stand to stretch his muscles. He gingerly dug his backpack out of the depths of the coat closet and put on his boots.
The air outside was terrifyingly cold. It wasn’t so bad as he tromped along the sidewalk along Erzelbach, his street—the rows of townhomes shut out the wind—but the moment he’d turned the corner he was leaning forward into a brutal, icy torrent. His cheeks, above his scarf, numbed and stiffened. His eyes leaked ice in horizontal streaks. He could have been the last man on earth; the other houses and apartments were all dark, seemingly vacant.
Like a ghost, he thought, a lonely ghost haunting a dead city.
The clerk in the convenience store, a college-aged guy with barbed wire tattooed around both his wrists, looked at him with outright anger when he lurched through the door. “Dude,” he said, holding out his palms. “I’m closing down early.”
Mark was panting. His back had not stretched at all; something in the angle of his walk, the resistance of the snow, had started a dull throb that traveled all the way to the backs of his knees. He was impossibly fucking stupid. “Please,” he said. “Two minutes.”
“If that,” the guy said, narrowing his eyes.
Mark grabbed what he could: Coffee. A bag of frozen pizza rolls. Bread. A box of sugary cereal. A bag of Doritos and cheese dip in a can. And then—the shop had a little annex full of liquor—a bottle of whiskey. Maker’s.
He shouldn’t. He knew he shouldn’t. But once he saw that bottle, he could have left everything else behind. A couple of shots, the warmth growing in his belly. His back loosening. The pain had been keeping him awake—this was what he needed, to knock him out until morning. He waited to hear his father’s admonishing voice. The tickle of guilt. But he heard only the wind, shaking the front doors of the store.
“Goddamn,” the clerk said, when Mark brought his haul to the counter. He picked up the bottle. “Now, this is a party.”
“Got a glass?” Mark said. He couldn’t believe himself. “I’m serious. I might need a shot to get me home. My back’s killing me.”
The clerk nodded several times, as though he was listening to thumping dance music, then reached over to a spinning rack by the counter and pulled down two shot glasses, each emblazoned with a scarlet Ohio State O.
They cracked the seal on the Maker’s with the clerk’s alarmingly large pocketknife, and Mark poured them each a shot. The clerk picked up his glass and stared at the liquor with something like love. They clinked glasses. “To Monopoly in a blizzard,” Mark said.
The clerk shrugged and said, “To my girlfriend’s big warm bed, in which I will shortly be.”
The clerk’s was better. “Salud,” Mark said, and they drank.
On the walk home Mark faced away from the wind; that fact, plus the embered warmth of the whiskey in his stomach, made the return more bearable. Alcohol, he remembered, thins the blood. Old Mr. Sorley, at Westover High, had taught him this. The warm feeling provided by alcohol in cold weather is a dangerous illusion. Saint Bernards with little oaken barrels on their collars? Lies, all lies. Alcohol gave you the illusion of safety, when your heart should be racing with panic.
He made himself stomp home faster. He thought of Chloe’s message on his phone. His heart thumped in his chest.
When Mark reached the townhouse he discovered he’d locked himself out. He patted himself down, over and over, for his keys. For a moment he feared he’d forgotten them back at the store, on the counter. But he’d left the front hall light on, and through the long vertical window beside the front door, he could see his keys in a jumble on the hall table. He’d set them down to put on his gloves and hadn’t picked them up again. His phone was beside them.
Good Christ, he was a fuckup. As if in response to the thought, his back flared dully.
He circled the ground floor, trying the windows. They were all locked. He walked to the back of the building and was just able to reach over the wooden fence that protected their small patio, to unlatch the gate. His fingers were as responsive as twigs. The snow on the patio was thick, protected from the wind; the kitchen door spilled out light. The stillness here felt colder, with that warmth so close.
But the kitchen door was shut fast, deadbolted.
He was shivering uncontrollably now. The phone and his keys were inside; there was nothing left to do. He dug through the snow until he found one of the decorative rocks Allison had put down to line her flower beds last summer, a hundred years ago. He considered the panes of glass on the back door. He threw the rock at the one nearest the deadbolt. The sound of the breaking glass was surprisingly loud, as though the air the stone passed through were breaking, too.
His aim was off. His throw took out not only the glass, but a part of the wooden frame. A spidery crack split the nearest pane to the right.
Fuckup.
He wrapped one of the straps of his backpack around his knuckles and cleared the shards of glass from the frame. He could almost see the warmth spilling out of the house and up the sleeve of his coat. He reached through—his back shrieked—and undid the bolt.
Mark spent the next half hour, once he could feel his hands, securing the house—sweeping up the glass from the kitchen floor, hanging a towel across the hole in the door, cutting a piece of cardboard to fit the hole, and duct-taping it in place.
When he was done he poured himself another shot. He took the shot glass and the bottle into the living room. He picked up his phone, saw Chloe’s message again, and snapped it shut.
He watched the weather from the couch, wrapped in a blanket; the weatherman informed him the wind chill was twenty below. Whatever you do, the weatherman urged, stay inside! Mark switched channels until he found one playing Dirty Harry, which he’d never seen. Turned out it was pretty terrible, and he was sure he’d think so sober. But he sank back into the couch and watched anyway.
When it was over he poured another shot and lifted it into the air. It was midnight. He hoped the clerk was in his girlfriend’s big warm bed. Salud.
He missed Allison. He missed Chloe. The townhouse was drafty at the best of times; now it was frigid. He shivered with the blanket pulled to his chin. Underneath the whiskey’s fuzz and gloss, his throat was sore. That was all he needed, now—the return of his flu.
Mr. Sorley, from health class, told him: That’s a myth. Cold weather doesn’t correspond with susceptibility to illness. That’s an old wives’ tale.
There are no old wives here, Mr. Sorley. One wife in the past, another in the future, but presently? No wives in sight.
Mark sat up, opened the phone, and dialed his voicemail.
“Mark,” Chloe’s voice said. She was crying—he could hear it right away. And he heard something else, too, beneath her tears: something that alarmed him, that closed his eyes. She said his name again: “Mark, I—”
A sound, a smear of static that might have been her gasping.
“I’m at the house—”
He forced himself to breathe in, to breathe back out. Chloe had gone to the old house.
She’d sat down with Connie Pelham. They’d talked about Brendan. Maybe Chloe had talked with Jacob, too. And then what had happened? She’d gone upstairs? She’d looked around? She’d visited Brendan’s old room?
Whatever it was, she had then called Mark, crying.
He forced himself upright, poured another shot. How much had he drunk already? A good bit of the bottle was gone. But this was all right. He lifted the phone, turned it off, all the way off. There. Chloe couldn’t call again. The roads were too dangerous for her to drive to him. No one could reach him tonight. He could do and think whatever he wanted.
Something had happened at the old house. Chloe had called him in tears.
He knew Chloe. Knew her inside and out. He had heard her cry dozens of times. He had heard her cry at weddings and he’d heard her grieve, from her bottomless depths, for her lost and broken child.
He’d also heard her cry when he proposed to her. As she spoke her vows. As she held their newborn son in her arms, while he sat at their bedside, watching her gaze down at Brendan, as she said He’s so beautiful, he’s so perfect, Mark—
She hadn’t been crying, on the phone, out of sadness.
He’d heard it in her voice: A vibration, a richness. A wonder. Whatever had happened to her in the old house, Chloe had called him, crying—he knew it—out of joy.