Mark woke to Allie sitting beside him on the bed. The sun was up; Allie was already showered, dressed in a hoodie and jeans and sneakers, smelling clean and sweet. But her face was swollen, sickly with worry or pain.
“Can you wake up for a minute?” she asked. “I wanted to say goodbye.”
For a long, terrible moment Mark was sure she meant she was leaving him for good. But then he remembered making love the night before. The way she’d gripped his shoulders, during, after. Allison was leaving for an overnight visit to Darlene’s; that was all.
“Be careful,” he said, sitting up. “Give Darly my love.”
Allison looked down, for a long while, at her hand atop his.
“It was weird, last night.”
Had Allie discovered what he’d really done before coming home? His cell phone—it was downstairs, on the table by the door. Had she checked his outgoing calls? She’d never been the sort of person who would. But then he had never before given her cause to suspect him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am.”
“I’m glad we—that we made love. That we could.” That stung him. “But we didn’t fix anything, did we?”
“I thought we did,” he said, but the words sounded sulky, childish.
“I don’t want to go to Darly’s. I want to stay here and figure out where we are. We’ve got—there’s a lot we have to think about.” She lifted her eyes. “When I get back, can we talk? Seriously talk?”
“Of course we can.”
Allie brought his hand to her lips. “I’ll believe you, if you say so.”
Which meant she still did not believe him.
“We’ll get through this,” he said. “I promise.”
“You’re just sitting there,” Allie said, her voice shrunken and thin.
She was right: He was sitting still, watching the woman he loved as she began to cry. He pulled the blankets aside and sat up and held her. “I’m so sorry,” he said.
He rose from bed and saw Allie to the door. The skies outside were surprisingly blue and clear. In the doorway he embraced her once more, kissed her chapped dry lips. Then he watched through the window as she loaded her duffel bag into the trunk of her little Honda, looking smaller than she ever had.
The parking lot at the conservatory was already crowded when Mark arrived, half an hour before noon—he had left the townhouse early, to keep himself from checking and rechecking his clothing too often, from trying to talk himself out of going at all. He parked at the far edge of the lot, next to a wide swath of the artfully kept Franklin Park grounds, its crisscrossed paths overlooked by leafless swaying trees, coated in yellow grass and sagging, dirty whitecaps of snow.
He was here; he’d done as Chloe wished. He sat in the car for a while, his hands still warming in front of the dashboard vents. Before he’d left the house he had re-read Chloe’s letter. The urgency he’d felt the night before had dissipated; maybe this was because of how he’d treated Allie, but he didn’t think so. He was nervous, now, and a little afraid. Our son is still here. Last night he’d lost himself in Chloe’s letter, her voice, her promises of happiness. This morning he could only think of the rest of the letter: about the shadow-boy who called for him in his dreams.
The one he might have spoken to, six years before. Who—if Chloe was right—might have been in the house ever since.
Please believe me.
Mark got out of the car, ducked into his collar, and walked toward the entrance.
This place always used to cheer him up. He loved the conservatory’s sprawl, its elegance. The main building dated to 1895—only ten years older than the house on Locust—and had been modeled after the buildings at the Chicago World’s Fair: It was a grand hall, a latticework of iron and glass with lofty curved ceilings, flanked by symmetrical rounded towers. A crystal castle, glowing now in the rare winter sun. Every artist and photographer and designer in the city came here—just as Mark used to—to take pictures, to take inspiration. Every parent brought his or her children.
They still did so. Children and parents were flowing in and out of the double main doors like the building’s breath. Kids, especially little ones, loved the place—just as Brendan had, when Mark and Chloe used to bring him. Brendan had taken great pride in being able to read the names of each plant from its plaque. He loved the fish and the birds and the big flowers. One room even contained a long and intricate model train set; the engine chugged a complicated winding path among trunks and stalks, and Brendan had watched it, mesmerized.
Surely, Mark thought, this was part of his fear. He had completely avoided the conservatory since Brendan’s death—and already, now, the old hurt was near to overwhelming him.
Still he kept going, through the doors, into the heat—into that old, familiar smell, of moisture and pollen, cut grass and sugar—and paid his admission.
He slipped by the attendants handing out brochures and up a flight of wide steps, then past the gift shop and through a room with a series of long tables set against its walls, where polo-shirted volunteers were teaching children how to plant their own seedlings. Mark closed his eyes, listened to the kids’ high-pitched chatter, like the calls of gulls. Brendan had stood where those children stood, laughing, fascinated, his little white hands dirty with earth.
Coming here had been a mistake.
But what did that word even mean, anymore? Since last night, nothing that had happened to Mark felt accidental. The world, instead, seemed to be turning its gaze to him, its sequences forming a kind of pattern. Letter. House. Call. Shadow. Yes. These words seemed ready—as he entered a soaring humid vault, dense with flower and vine—to snap into a gridwork as precisely structured as the one now arching high above his head. But what did the pattern mean?
He walked down a long cylindrical hallway, a familiar one; he was surrounded on all sides by plant life indigenous to the Himalaya. Pine. Juniper. Tall rustling grasses. Rhododendron—a word Brendan had learned to say as Mark’s finger paused beneath each syllable on the plaque. Rho. Do. Den. Dron.
He was starting to sweat beneath his coat. He passed through a room full of Japanese plants and arched wooden bridges and richly-stinking pools of koi as colorful as marbles. He took a seat on a bench in a two-story atrium full of palm trees, giant tiered trunks, exploding ferns. Two staircases curved down from the main floor to the tiled floor of the chamber; from this seat he’d likely be able to see Chloe at the top of them well before she saw him. It was eleven fifty. His brow and neck were damp.
Shadow. House. Letters. Mark. A meaning began to cohere; he could almost grasp it.
But before he did, Chloe appeared at the top of one of the staircases, then walked slowly, dreamily down. Mark knew her shape, her gait, even before he recognized her features. She wore a blue sweater, a tan skirt, knee-high brown boots. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. A long cream-colored wool coat was slung over her forearm. She hadn’t yet seen him; she stopped, her hand on the rail, and gazed out across the room.
He followed her eyes. Pieces of Chihuly glass were hung throughout the conservatory; directly across from Chloe, suspended from an alcove in the ceiling, was a twisted purple-and-blue piece. Its long, pointed tentacles swirled down nearly ten feet from a smooth jellyfish dome, like a flame burning upside-down.
All that had happened between them, to them—all that had happened in the last weeks, and what it must mean—and Chloe still could be stopped short by a pretty sculpture in her favorite colors. This meant something, too.
Mark waited for her eyes to leave the sculpture, to pass over the rest of the room. And so they did. She saw him, and her face softened.
How long had it been since she’d looked at him like this? Happily—with relief?
She’d told the truth in her letter. In front of him now was not the woman who had divorced him. Here, again, was the Chloe who had loved him so much, the woman with whom he had made a child.
Maybe Chloe wasn’t part of the pattern. Maybe, instead, she was its answer.
Mark walked to meet her. At the base of the steps she threw her arms around his neck and pressed her cheek against his. Held it there. The muscles in her back flexed as she squeezed him. His mouth open and closed, millimeters from her ear.
“You came,” she said. After all that had happened, she’d assumed he wouldn’t.
Her body, against his. Her breath.
“I’m here,” he said, and in that moment he would have agreed to anything.
They sat together on the bench in front of the giant palms. Unbelievably, Chloe began to make small talk. Did Mark want lunch at the café upstairs? She’d be happy to buy him a sandwich, if he wanted, or a coffee. How had he been?
How had he been? The question made him laugh; she laughed, too.
The past month had taken a toll on her. The lines at the sides of her mouth were more pronounced. Her skin was sallow; acne had broken out along one of the creases of her nose. Her hair, he was sure, was much more gray than it had ever been.
Chloe was probably thinking the same of him. He hadn’t been to the gym for nearly a month, was eating poorly when he ate at all. His weeks of insomnia had put bags under his eyes, roughened his skin, loosened his jowls.
Chloe was saying something about the last time she’d been to the conservatory, about the board’s purchase of a lot of the Chihuly glass—but then she must have seen the questions in his eyes. She exhaled, shook her head. “Listen to me. Mark, it’s really good to see you.”
He didn’t say, You too. “It’s strange, being back here.”
She gave him a surprised, glancing look.
“I haven’t been in years,” he said.
“This used to be a happy place for us,” Chloe said. “That’s all I thought.”
Her tone was just spiky enough to draw him back inside himself. Mark had loved this woman down to her molecules, and he had to remember how smart she was, far smarter than him; how she was—still—better than anyone at bending his will. Maybe all this was a ruse. Maybe she’d chosen the conservatory, really, because she wanted to talk to him while he was remembering. Grieving.
“I come here a lot,” she said. “I mean, I remember him everywhere, but here…”
She didn’t finish. Even that simple sentence was more personal than almost any other she’d spoken to him in the last five years. He pushed down his suspicion, but still he wondered: Which of them was crazier—the man who avoided the sites of his grief, or the woman who couldn’t stay away from them?
“You’re upset,” Chloe said, watching him.
“This is hard,” he said. “All of this. You, me. The reason we’re here.”
“I know. I do know that. I know I haven’t made it easier. But when I tell you, it’ll be better. Will you trust me that much?”
Trust her? When she spoke like this he wanted to hug her.
“Okay,” he said.
Chloe dropped her eyes from his to her hands. Gathering herself.
“It’s hard to say where to start,” she said. “Maybe I should say that this—none of this was a surprise to me. Not really. I mean, not deep down.” She still wasn’t looking at him, but rather across the tiled floor to the next cluster of palms. “I’ve always had dreams about Brendan. I know, that’s normal. Or whatever passes for normal, for people like us. My therapists all told me stuff like, ‘Dreams of abandonment are common.’ ” Chloe shook her head. “I even had one tell me it wasn’t unheard of—her words—for parents like, like us, to have hallucinations.”
Gayle had never spoken to Mark about hallucinations. But then he’d never given her any reason to. He’d made sure of that.
“People kept saying it would get better,” Chloe said. “They kept telling me I’d go on, that after a while I’d be able to get on with my life. But all along it’s been as though I knew differently.” She lifted her eyes. “And I’ve had such vivid dreams.” The corners of her lips turned down. “That I’d left him someplace. Lost him in a crowd. And then after we moved out of the house… I had a lot of dreams about him being there. Calling for us.”
Mark’s heart pushed mercury through his veins instead of blood.
She said, “I—I’ve read about people who’ve lost limbs, who have phantom pain? I sometimes think, I have a phantom son. I feel his weight sometimes—like he’s a little baby, and I’m holding him on my hip. I smell him.” She nearly whispered: “Once or twice I could feel him nursing.” She lifted a hand to her breast, then dropped it, quickly. “It was worst in the old house. Before—”
Before they moved out. Before she divorced him.
Chloe nodded sorrowfully, as though he had said the words aloud.
“That’s what made me so crazy,” she said. “It wasn’t just that I was sad—it wasn’t just that I missed him, or that I was grieving. It’s that, down deep, I didn’t ever feel like he was gone.”
Mark could have told her what Gayle had told him, what any of Chloe’s therapists had likely already said: That’s what grieving was.
Chloe said, “Given what’s happened since… I think, back then, I did feel Brendan there, at the house.” She glanced up. “It makes sense. Now.”
“Tell me,” he said.
In front of them people were milling back and forth. A solitary ponytailed man with a camera, who knelt to take pictures of the sunlight through the palm fronds. Parents, alone and in pairs. Grandparents. Children. Bowlegged toddlers, babies in strollers, little boys.
Chloe said, “It’s like I wrote in the letter. Connie had me over to the house. I talked to her and to her son—Jacob—about what had happened. And then they let me stay, there, alone. For an hour or two.
“I went and sat up in the room where they’ve been… encountering him. Brendan’s old room.” She gave him a significant sideways glance. “That first night I took along some of his things—pictures of him, some of his clothes. When I was alone I sat on the floor—they moved Jacob out of the room; it’s empty, now—and I spread his pictures out. And then I—I talked to him. I told him that if he was really there, then he could come and see me. I told him we both missed him, and loved him.
“And then after a while… it happened.”
She took a bottled water out of her purse and drank from it. When she was done she offered it to him. Mark took the bottle from her, drank a swallow, and handed it back.
Chloe said, “I’ve tried and tried to figure out how to say it, and I never can. It’s not—there aren’t words for it.”
“Try.”
She took a deep breath. “One second he wasn’t there. I was just me, you know? The sad woman who’d lost her baby, looking at his pictures. And I was even sadder, because I was there. In our house.” Her eyes lifted to his. “Alone. I—I started to get angry, at myself, at Connie. At you. I was feeling like this terrible fool who’d grasped at straws—I was crying and mad and wishing all kinds of things, and feeling sorry for myself, and I think—I think I remember saying, Please come back to me.
“And he did. He did, Mark. All of the sudden, I felt him. I smelled him. It was like he walked right through me. And then I heard him, too—a whole jumble of things he used to say: Mommy. I’m thirsty, I’m hungry. But not in—it wasn’t scary, it wasn’t sad. It was kind of like he’d hugged me, and we were remembering it all together.” Her eyes were wide open, astonished. “Remember when we’d be doing something else, and he used to come in and hug us, out of the blue?”
The sudden grip on his pant leg. Brendan’s toddler-face, round and gleeful, peering up at him. Surprise!
“It was like that,” Chloe said. “I was sad, and I called for him, and he came. And when he was with me, I knew: He was happy to find me. He loved me.”
Her eyes were closed; she was smiling.
“And then it was over. He was gone.
“It was like the wind was knocked out of me. I spent a little while, I don’t know, coming to. Trying to get him to come back, but he didn’t. Not that night.
“After a while I got up and I called you. It was all I could think to do.”
Chloe’s lashes were damp. She dug in her purse for a tissue and wiped at them.
She asked, “Do you believe me?”
Mark wanted to. So much of what she’d said reminded him of the feeling he’d woken from, those years before, in the upstairs hallway.
But he couldn’t open his mouth, he couldn’t say yes. Chloe had told him the same story she’d written him, and she’d made goosebumps rise on his arms. He wanted to put his arms around her, to rock her back and forth, to comfort her, to share in what she felt.
But that wasn’t the same as belief, was it?
Chloe herself had given a possible explanation: She’d had a hallucination. She’d gone, for the first time in years, to a place guaranteed to tear her mind and heart to pieces. She’d concentrated on Brendan. She’d wanted to believe. She’d wanted it to happen. And then it had.
Mark had drunk himself nearly dead once, wanting that much.
He said, “I believe you believe it.”
Chloe slumped forward, anguished. “Mark—you, you have to see for yourself. I know he’ll come to you. He’s—”
“Asking for me?”
She said, slowly, “Jacob heard him.”
She shook her head. “But I don’t know if it means anything. When I’m with him, it’s—it’s intense, it’s focused. On us.”
“Do you trust Jacob?”
“I’ve had a long talk with him. He told me everything he could. He’s—”
“Tell me exactly what he said.”
She did. When this had all started—the visitations was Chloe’s term—Jacob had been woken up in the middle of the night, over a period of a week or so. He’d told Chloe he heard quiet noises at first: footsteps in the hall, around the perimeter of his room.
Then one night he’d heard a voice—a little boy’s, speaking just outside his door, though he couldn’t make out what the boy was saying. Jacob thought he was dreaming, but night after night the voice kept waking him up. Coming closer and closer. Finally one night Jacob heard the voice in his room. He turned over in bed and saw someone standing next to his bed.
“In the dark?” Mark asked.
“He said it was like a shadow, between him and the window. But in the shape of a boy.”
The shadow of a boy in the window. Chloe’s silhouette on the living room drapes. The pattern, threatening again to cohere.
The rest of Chloe’s story matched what Connie had told Mark about in the bookstore: Connie had accidentally frightened Jacob, and then had learned what he was seeing. Connie and Jacob moved his things out of his bedroom and into the spare room next door. But a few nights later Jacob heard the boy’s voice again: through the walls, at first, speaking quietly, sometimes crying. And then Jacob had heard him call out Daddy!
Mark kept his gaze steady. “Does he still hear him? Since you’ve been coming?”
“Less and less. But I’m—” She paused, as though embarrassed.
“What?”
“I’ve been staying there, some nights,” she said. “Connie’s convinced a cousin of hers in Gahanna to take them in on weekends, and when they’re gone, I watch the place.”
“And it’s happened again? What you—what you experienced?”
“Not every night,” she said. “But a lot of them. And my dreams are different, too. Happier. Instead of looking for him, now… now sometimes I find him.”
She shut her eyes languidly, as though she was being caressed.
He said, “Okay. Let’s say it happens like you want. I go to the house. I have an experience, too. Then what happens?”
Chloe smiled, but thinly, nervously. “Then we’d try to help him.”
“How?”
She took a breath, as though convincing herself she could say what she had to. “I’ve been doing some research. I think I found someone who can help us. Her name is Trudy Weill. She’s—she calls herself a medium.”
When he didn’t respond, she said, “Don’t think what you’re thinking. Who else would I go to? The police? A priest?”
“I’ve looked up some of those people,” he said. “They seem like con artists to me.”
“I did my homework. I made calls everywhere. She’s as legitimate as they come.”
And how legitimate was that? he wanted to ask. Was she on file with the Better Business Bureau? Written up in Consumer Reports?
“I’ve met her,” Chloe said. “I’ve talked with her. I’ve talked with people she’s helped before. And I trust her. She’s—she’s not like those horrible people on TV. She’s just a woman, up in Michigan.”
A medium. Mark pictured candles and scarves and knocking on the walls. Holding Chloe’s hand in the dark. Even as a boy Jacob Pelham’s age, Mark had read about how mediums faked their business.
“And the medium would do… what, exactly?”
“She would visit the house. And try to talk with him.”
“So why doesn’t she?”
“She said she needs to have both parents there, for this, this ritual, to work. She says, since you’re—since you’re being called, that you need to be present, too. With me.”
Insane. Not a few minutes ago he’d been close to agreeing to everything Chloe wanted.
“Mark,” she said. “One of the reasons I’ve been trying so hard to reach you—we’re kind of on a deadline. With Trudy.” Chloe was reddening. “She thinks she can do her job best on—on an important day. To us, to him. And the next big day…”
Chloe didn’t have to finish. The anniversary of Brendan’s death was January 23: only four days away. Christ almighty.
“So what happens? She comes to the house, we’re there—”
“She talks to him. She tells him…”
The medium would tell Brendan to go away. To be at rest. Wherever that was, whatever that meant.
Chloe slipped her hand over his. “Mark.”
His name, a piece of silk. He thought of Allison saying, We need to talk.
“I have to think this over.”
“What is there to think about?”
“Chloe, I’ve never believed anything like this. Never. This is hard.”
Her eyes narrowed—and here, at last, was a glimpse of the Chloe who had hurt him, the Chloe who might have picked the conservatory for a meeting because of its capacity to make him weak.
“I can’t give you evidence,” she said. “Not unless you come with me. Then either you’ll see or you won’t.”
A tour group—a conservatory volunteer trailed by a pack of twenty or so elementary schoolchildren—walked into the room. The young woman began talking loudly, gesturing with her hands. The children laughed.
Chloe slumped, her face wan.
“Come on,” she said.
She stood and led Mark up the nearest curving stairway. He watched the tender backs of her knees, just below the hem of her skirt, and the scuffing on the soles of her boots—boots he’d never seen before, yet old, worn.
Chloe turned down a narrow pathway, into a new chamber, smaller, lined by shoulder-high fragrant green shrubs and flowers in yellow and blue. Dozens of butterflies flitted among the blossoms, across the path. She sat down on a bench and patted the seat next to her. Mark sat. An elderly Japanese couple walked by, hand in hand. Water was trickling someplace he couldn’t see.
Her eyes were huge, blue, direct; the cruel Chloe had vanished again. “I know why you won’t come. It’s because you don’t trust me.”
He was about to protest, but she kept talking. “You have every reason not to. I know that.”
“Chloe—”
She touched his knee, as delicately as if one of the butterflies had landed there.
“It’s wonderful to be with him,” she said. “But it’s also sad. And not just because he’s there, and he shouldn’t be. It’s sad because I sit there with Brendan and I feel him, and—and I’m his mother again. I can almost convince myself that when I open my eyes, I’ll have gone back in time, and everything will be like it was.”
Mark began to realize, then, what Chloe was about to say.
“But it feels incomplete,” she said. “I love to be with him, but sometimes I just can’t stop crying. Do you know why?”
He shook his head.
“Because you’re not there with us,” Chloe said, her eyes wet. “Because I know—I can tell—he wants both of us.”
He wanted so badly to take her hand.
“I did this to us,” she said. “I understand that now.”
“Chloe, no.”
She said, very quietly, “It won’t surprise you to know I blamed you.”
She’d told him this, more than once, at her angriest. Maybe she’d forgotten. But even though he knew, hearing the words now was a blow.
“Everyone—my therapists—kept telling me not to. But I was sure. I convinced myself: If I’d been in the house with him, instead of you, it wouldn’t have happened. If—”
He could recite the rest by heart: If she had been home. If they hadn’t been fighting. If Mark had not been drinking while watching basketball. If he hadn’t had so much to drink, the night before, and the night before that. If he’d been a good husband, a good father.
If he had loved them, Chloe and Brendan, the right way.
“But I always missed something important,” Chloe said. “Something obvious. I wasn’t in the house because I chose not to be. I was mad from the night before, and I went out to lunch with friends, and that wasn’t any different from whatever I was mad at you about. Maybe it was worse. Maybe if I’d been there, the same thing would have happened. But I wasn’t there.” She swallowed. “If it was anybody’s fault, it was mine. And I’m sorry it took this—Brendan coming back—to show me. To make me realize what I am, and all the things I’ve lost because of it.”
His throat had closed. She took his hand between both of hers and squeezed. God, how he had longed to hear this.
“Even before, it was my fault,” she said. “Ever since I left you I’ve been asking myself what happened. We were so happy, once. Weren’t we?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I don’t know what it was,” she told him, softly. “How we got to be so cold with each other. Maybe we were just too busy. Maybe if Brendan had lived we would have figured it out. But I want you to know. I want you—”
He waited, breathless.
“I want you to know I never stopped loving you,” she said. “Even when things were so bad. Even after I left. I just couldn’t hear you. I was too selfish, too mad. You kept telling me we could fix ourselves. You kept asking me to believe you, and I didn’t, and I know what I’m asking you now is harder, but—”
He was crying now. They both were.
She said, “Please don’t let what I did keep you from believing me now. I’m sorry I left. I’m sorrier than you could ever know. But please—”
He was sure she wanted to sob into his chest, in his arms, just as he was sure that he wanted her to, that he wanted—
To do what he had always done: to make it better.
She had forgiven him. All these years after the accident, and he had at last been absolved. All these years, and she at last wanted him to help her. She had never stopped loving him.
He could not help himself. No force on earth could stop him from encircling her with his arms. He held her and apologized to her, too. Told her again the story of his own blame, even as she shook her head.
When he’d finished she fell against him, pressed her wet cheek against his. “Please,” she said again, but he shushed her, bent forward and kissed her hair and closed his eyes and smelled her and felt the pressure of her rail-thin arms, her ribs beneath the thin wool of her sweater—Chloe wasting away, like a cursed woman in an old story, Chloe, his Chloe, calling for him, needing him—and he nodded, his cheek pressed tight against her skull.
“Take me to the house,” he said. “Show me.”