They made plans as they walked out of the conservatory to the parking lot. Chloe told him that Connie and Jacob were leaving for her cousin’s that very night. “We can go to the house tomorrow,” she said. “If that’s all right.”
Mark was surprised by his disappointment; he was ready to go right now.
“What about later tonight?”
“I wish I could. I’m leaving here for Mom and Dad’s. One of my uncles is in town. Plus Mom’s worried—worried about me. I have to show my face.” She smiled at him. “Tomorrow’s okay. We can take our time, then.”
“Your parents don’t know?”
She shook her head. “They wouldn’t understand.” And it was true, they wouldn’t. The Rosses were deeply devout; for their own reasons, they would find talk of a medium just as disturbing as Mark’s father would.
As though reading his mind, Chloe asked, “Did you tell Sam?”
“No,” he said. “Would you?”
She let out a tiny, frightened laugh.
There. They were alone in their knowledge, their plans. How else could it be?
“Tomorrow,” he agreed, feeling dizzy. The same day Allison wanted to have a serious talk with him.
They were standing beside his car. A cold breeze blew Chloe’s hair across his face. She squeezed his hands, then stood on tiptoe and hugged him, and before she let him go she kissed his cheek. “Thank you,” she said.
She crossed the parking lot, got into her car, and drove away. The damp spot where she’d kissed him cooled until it stung.
He was in his warming car, just ready to leave the lot himself, when his phone buzzed: Lewis.
“Christ, finally,” Lew said, when he answered. “Where are you?”
“Noplace,” Mark said.
“So Allie called me last night—”
Mark winced; he’d forgotten that part already. Lew must have been worried sick about him. “Things are weird over here,” he said, marveling at the inadequacy of the words. “What we talked about before, it’s—”
“Come over,” Lew said immediately. “Or I can meet you at your place. Doesn’t matter.”
Mark was nodding, even though Lew couldn’t see him. He would rather do anything than return to the townhouse, to evidence of Allie and her sadness, past and future. “I’ll be right there.”
Lewis’s apartment building, fifteen minutes away in Grandview, was a two-story U-shaped brick block he proclaimed to hate, but which he could never seem to bring himself to leave, as it was only a short walk both from the studio and from his favorite bar. Lew had lived here ten years, and Mark had always thought—unless Lew, somehow, got married—that he might happily stay another ten.
Lew opened the door even before Mark could knock. “Sit. You hungry? I’ll order us sandwiches.”
Lew kept the blinds shut in winter to trap heat; they let in only a dirty orange glow, and no air at all. Lew was a neat man, but not a clean one—his living room and his kitchen were free of clutter, but the air was thick with old smoke and beer and Lew’s own animal-den funk. Even so, Mark was glad to be here. This place felt old, powerful. Safer in its familiarity than anyplace else he’d been of late.
“I owe you an apology,” Mark said. “For running away, that night.”
Lewis already had the phone in his hand; he waved Mark away, and then called a deli down the street. Mark sat in a chair at the kitchen table and closed his eyes. After the last twenty-four hours he was relieved to sit still, head empty, letting someone else make decisions.
Lewis’s voice, ordering their food, was a little too insistent, a little too loud. Mark knew that tone as intimately as he knew the smell in the air: Lew had been putting back beer since the little hand hit twelve.
Lew hung up and sat down across the table. He gave Mark a long look. “You want to tell me what the fuck’s been going on?”
Mark said, “You got a beer?”
Lew didn’t answer.
Mark said, “Come on. This isn’t easy.”
Lew pushed himself up from the tabletop, rummaged in the refrigerator, and returned with two bottles of Amstel. He uncapped each of them against the edge of the tabletop, where the metal binding had gapped out from the Formica top. He slid a bottle across into Mark’s hands.
Mark took a long, grateful pull. He’d begun imagining this as soon as he’d hung up the phone.
“Come on,” Lew said. “Tell me.”
Mark told him all he could bear to, from Chloe’s last visit to the townhouse to her letter to the talk they’d just had. He left out only the most private details: How he’d imagined Chloe’s voice instead of Allie’s, last night. Chloe’s cold, wet kiss on his cheek.
When he was done Lew said, sickly, “You don’t need this. You of all people.”
Here, again, was talk about what Mark deserved. After his meeting with Chloe the word seemed no longer to apply to any part of his life, past or present. He repeated a favorite phrase of Gayle’s: “The world owes me nothing. It never did.” He remembered the way Chloe had felt in his arms. “I’m no saint, Lew. You know that.”
“Still—”
“Doesn’t matter,” Mark said, though Lew’s sympathy—not to mention his beer—was warming him.
Lew stood and circled the kitchen and then sat back down again. “Okay. Let’s think, here. It’s still probably the kid, right? Making up a story. People have talked themselves into stranger shit than this, and Chloe’s… Chloe’s not exactly a stable person. Right?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t anymore. Lew, if you’d heard her—”
“You’re really going to the house?”
“I have to,” Mark said. “You were right. If I think there’s a possibility, I need to go. I owe Chloe that much.”
“Maybe there’s a possibility. But you don’t owe Chloe shit.”
“She’s—”
Lew’s eyes narrowed. “Chloe can apologize all she wants. But she still divorced you, and she’s been fucking you over ever since. I loved the girl, too, Mark, but come on. If you go, go because of Brendan. Not because Chloe finally had a moment of fucking clarity.”
Mark felt himself flush. “You didn’t hear her. This was the old Chloe.”
“Think about it. Chloe’s your weak point. She sends you a letter—to your house, where Allie might see it, we should discuss that—and then all of a sudden you’re running to meet her? You’re engaged.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Mark said, his face burning. “I promise you, this is about Brendan.”
Lew was silent for a long time, looking at his beer. He was agitated—this was a very different Lew than the one he’d run away from, weeks before.
“Can I ask you something?” Mark said.
Lew nodded, his eyes still agleam.
“When you saw your ghost—how did you know it was real?”
The question seemed to take Lew by surprise. As though he’d forgotten the story himself.
“It’s hard to explain,” he said at last. “You know, I tried to talk myself out of it at first. But I couldn’t. For one thing, my cousin had seen our ghost, too. We compared stories; they matched up.” He looked contemplatively down at his bottle. “I was a kid, too. And stoned. You know, I was the age where I wanted it to be real. There’ve been a lot of nights since where I tried to tell myself it wasn’t.” He shrugged. “But I can’t talk myself out of it. It was real, and I knew.”
“But how?”
“I didn’t just see it,” Lew said. “I felt it. I looked at it—at him—and I knew I was in the presence of something important.” He took a drink. “I saw this guy, this figure, crouching by a fire, and—I didn’t think, A strange man is over there. I thought—I felt—that Over there is a soul without its body.”
Mark had never heard him say any of this. Probably because he’d never taken Lew seriously enough to ask.
Lew said, “I’ve been thinking about this, for weeks. That last time we talked—I can’t stop thinking about what it means. If. Everything I come up with terrifies me.”
Mark didn’t like the watery trouble in Lew’s eyes.
“Whatever it is,” Mark said, “tell me.”
Lew stood and got two more bottles out of the refrigerator; he uncapped Mark’s and set it in front of him. “You know I was raised Baptist? I used to think that when you die, you go to heaven, you’re at peace, you know?” He lifted his eyebrows. “I mean, I’m sure not a Jesus freak anymore, but you don’t lose sight of heaven that easily. Even after I saw my ghost I didn’t stop believing in it, not for a long time. But it just doesn’t fit. That guy I saw—wasn’t—isn’t—in heaven. Or hell, or wherever it is we’re supposed to go. And if I accept that, well—it opens up all kinds of nasty doors, right?”
Mark’s neck prickled. “Like what?”
Lew’s voice was very soft, and as sad as Mark had ever heard it:
“If Brendan’s in the house,” he said, “doesn’t there have to be some kind of reason? And doesn’t that reason have to be really bad?”
The doorbell startled them both. Lew got up and paid the deliveryman while Mark stared up at the yellowish ceiling, at a brown water stain that had spread slowly out from the corner above Lew’s sink.
Lew handed a wrapped sandwich to Mark. “You should eat something.”
Mark had never been less hungry in his life, but for Lew’s sake he opened the sandwich and ate a few bites. The food was nearly tasteless in his mouth, but his stomach received it gratefully. Lew opened his sandwich, stared at it, and didn’t eat. He got up and rummaged around on top of his desk in the next room.
He returned with a legal pad and sat down. He wrote down Brendan at the top. Lew circled the name, then wrote, Ghost?
“If he’s in the house,” he said, “there are a couple of ways to look at it, I think. One way is to say he’s here because some accident happened.”
“An accident did happen.”
“I mean after death,” Lew said. “Whatever was supposed to happen to him got disrupted. Brendan didn’t go where he should have. Or he got lost, trying to find it.”
Lew wrote Accident on the left side of the page. “Maybe that’s all this is. A cosmic fuckup. He’s lost and he needs someone to show him where to go. We leave aside the implications for now—which are pretty fucking plentiful. But if he’s there for this reason then maybe—maybe—this medium Chloe found can help.”
“But.”
“But,” Lew said, his voice dropping low, “we’ve only got a million stories floating around about ghosts that aren’t accidental. Ghosts that have a purpose.”
Why hadn’t Mark thought to ask Chloe these most basic questions? Why is Brendan still here? What does he want? Did he tell you? He’d stumbled over each of them, these last weeks, staring into the dark. Surely Chloe had been mulling them over, too, in her own sleepless nights. She hadn’t volunteered him any answers. Only that she was happy. That Brendan had seemed happy, too.
“So let’s start with the most unlikely reasons,” Lew said. “Nobody killed him, so we can cross vengeance off the list. But.”
He wrote: Bones/body not at rest.
Mark and Lew had both been Brendan’s pallbearers; Mark had watched, held at each elbow by Lew and his father, as Brendan’s small coffin was lowered into the ground. And it had been Brendan’s body in the coffin—Mark and Chloe had agreed on a closed-casket funeral, but between the service and the burial Chloe had asked to see him one last time, and Mark had gone, too, despite his misgivings, and they’d seen him, lying nestled against the velvet, so still and quiet in his navy-blue suit. Mark had had to wrap his arms around Chloe to pull her back from trying to pick up Brendan’s body. He could still feel, if he closed his eyes, the way she had thrashed against him; the way she’d seemed full of lightning.
“No,” he said to Lew.
Lewis nodded, then wrote: Unfinished business.
“An important task left undone,” he said. “An important duty to fulfill. Anything like that.”
Brendan had just turned seven. His concerns had been a child’s. The last desire he’d expressed was not to clean up his toys. He’d wanted, instead, to play a fucking board game.
Brendan had badgered Mark all that morning: Can we play just one? Parcheesi? Just that one? Please? Dad, please?—his voice ratcheting up in pitch with each question, until finally he hit that whiny register that always made Mark squeeze shut his eyes.
Finally Brendan had kicked at the side of the couch, balled his hands into fists. I want to play a gaaame!
That’s it, Mark had said. And then out came the last words he’d ever said to his son:
You get your ass upstairs and don’t come down until your room is clean.
“He was seven,” Mark said. “His whole life was unfinished fucking business.”
“Sure.” Lew’s voice was as even, as reasonable, as a parent’s. “But it might not have to seem important to us. Didn’t you tell me something happened at school, around then? He was in a fight?”
Brendan had indeed been in some trouble the day before the accident. Brendan’s second-grade teacher, Beth Reilly, had held Brendan off the bus, and called in Mark and Chloe to speak with her after school. Outside her classroom Beth told them: That afternoon, on the playground, she’d had to separate Brendan from a group of other boys.
He was fighting? Mark asked, stunned. Through the small square window inset high in the classroom door he peered at Brendan, tall and ungainly, making a Lego house beside a small blond girl at one of the play tables inside. His lips were pursed, his face composed, but—Mark could tell—his boy’s shoulders were stiff with shame and misery.
No, Beth said, they weren’t fighting.
She was a lovely, idealistic woman, fresh out of college, her glossy black hair pulled tightly back and tied with a ribbon at her nape. Her eyes were nearly spilling over with concern. She might have been Chloe, nearly a decade before.
She said, I’m sorry to tell you this, but Brendan was being bullied. The other boys were taunting him. He was very upset.
Chloe peppered her then with furious questions; Beth answered each carefully. No, she didn’t know the cause, not yet; none of the boys was talking. Yes, she had reprimanded the other boys, and had asked to meet with their parents, too. And—she had to tell them this—she was concerned for Brendan. This sort of thing might not pass quickly. She knew Chloe, a teacher, would understand.
Chloe was livid, but she nodded.
Beth said: He’s such a little gentleman, I don’t know why the kids would do that.
Mark offered to drive Brendan home, while Chloe stayed behind to talk to Beth some more, teacher-to-teacher.
In the car Mark said, Rough day, huh, buddy? and Brendan sniffled, nodded.
Instead of going straight home, Mark detoured to Fitz’s. They sat in the back corner and split a sundae, Brendan hunched forward over the table in his gray sweatshirt—his favorite, the one that showed Brutus Buckeye rearing back, ready to charge into action. Brendan, Mark saw, wasn’t sad—he was furious. His mouth was pursed too tightly, and he held his spoon in a white-knuckle grip.
Mark tried to see an outcast in him. A boy who could be mocked. But Brendan, apart from his hectic color, seemed as normal as ever. He was tall, handsome. He didn’t smell; he wore nice clothes, he had a cool haircut. A quiet boy, yes, a serious boy, but a loving boy. A boy who knew to hold the door open for the person behind him, to say please and thank you.
Gradually Mark got Brendan’s side of the story. There’d been a contest out in the playground. A lengthy strip of ice had formed in the bottom of a ditch at the playground’s edge, and, out of sight of the teachers, some of the boys had begun doing baseball slides along its length. One boy had even gone headfirst. Someone had asked Brendan to slide, but he didn’t want to—he was afraid of hitting his head or scraping his hands, as others had done. And then—
And then David Helton called me a name, Brendan said.
Mark had been taunted, himself, on the playground, back when he was a serious, shy little boy, preferring to draw superheroes in a sketchbook instead of playing touch football. He’d been called a faggot and a gaylord and a pansy.
What name?
It’s a bad word, Brendan told him.
You can say it.
They called me a pussy. Brendan quickly added, And I said not to say bad words, and then they laughed at me.
If Brendan had just brushed off the word, Mark was sure, nothing would have happened. But Brendan had reacted like a goody two-shoes—like his mother—and then someone had laughed at him, and Brendan had done the absolute wrong thing, which was to start crying. After that it would have been blood in the water.
Mark could imagine the ring forming. Several other kids taking up the shout. And Brendan—with his father’s tendency to hide, to panic—would have covered his face, his tears. Mark ached for him, because he knew the truth: Brendan was a pussy. He was, after all, his father’s son.
You know they’re wrong, Mark said. Don’t you, buddy?
No, Brendan said, and for a moment Mark had the eerie feeling Brendan was denying Mark’s own thoughts: I am one. I cried.
All that night, and into the next morning, Brendan had been sullen, withdrawn. He wanted to stick close to Mark. And Mark—
Unfinished business? A wrong left unrighted?
Mark had fought with Chloe the night before the accident, after Brendan was in bed. They’d argued about the taunting. Whether Beth Reilly had acted appropriately—whether she’d been fast enough to break things up, whether she’d been paying attention at all. What they should do next. Chloe—a fellow teacher, a mother—was a growling she-bear; she wanted to call the other children’s parents herself. Mark tried to downplay things: A playground taunting, he told her, wasn’t that big a deal; he’d been through plenty himself. He told her Brendan would have to learn from the pain, as he had. That he would grow up a lot, having to go back to class. But Chloe would have none of it.
Their fight wasn’t unusual; they’d had plenty, that last year. But this one was especially hurtful. Chloe the popular girl, Chloe the fighter, would never understand. Mark couldn’t make her. He couldn’t tell her the damage was already done.
She went to bed angry, and Mark—as he had done so often, those last two years—stayed up late, drinking one whiskey-and-Coke, and then another. The next morning he woke late and hungover. When he joined Chloe and Brendan at the breakfast table, Chloe, still grim, said, You smell like a bar.
Pretty gross, Brendan agreed, pushing one of his cars along the edge of the tabletop, and it took all Mark’s strength not to snap at them both.
When Chloe announced she was going to have lunch with her girlfriends—when, after her chilly goodbye, Mark wanted to sulk and watch basketball in silence—he instead found himself stuck with a clingy, traumatized Brendan. Brendan kept coloring at the kitchen table; Mark kept telling him to go clean up his room, reminding him of their standing Saturday deal: If Brendan cleaned his room first thing Saturday morning, then and only then could he watch sports with his father.
But Brendan couldn’t be moved. Daddy, he kept asking, can we play a game? Please please please—
Brendan! Go clean your room. Otherwise we won’t do anything.
Yesterday’s problems still echoed in both their heads, and what had happened? Mark could only do a slow burn as Brendan lost himself to a tantrum. He followed Mark into the living room, first crying, then squalling; then he dropped face-first onto the couch, kicking his legs, and Mark, in his pain and frustration, could only stand and watch.
Thinking: This wasn’t what he wanted.
Thinking: You little pussy.
He raised his voice—which he almost never did. He sent Brendan upstairs. Brendan had looked at him in utter betrayal before stomping away.
And then Brendan was upstairs, angry, slamming the door, throwing his toys, before finally—finally!—he fell silent. Mark could have gone to him, but he didn’t. He poured himself a drink, finished it. Told himself, Fuck it, then poured another. He watched the game, his eyelids heavy. He thought about Beth Reilly, imagining her naked. He rehashed his argument with Chloe. He sulked, as silent as his boy.
He could have checked on Brendan. He could have called up the stairs: I don’t hear you cleaning! Anything would have worked, except what he’d done, which was nothing.
And then those heavy, sodden thumps; that lone, sharp cry, suddenly cut off.
Unfinished business? A wrong left unpunished?
Mark had sent Brendan to his room before. They disciplined him this way a lot—if he couldn’t act like a grown-up, he got a time-out. Mark hadn’t beaten him, hadn’t put him in harm’s way. He’d yelled, yes, but that was no crime. Brendan had died only because he’d disobeyed. Because he tried to run away. Because he had an untied shoelace. Because he’d packed a backpack too full of toys and books.
All the while surely telling himself, I’m not a pussy. Throwing a stuffed animal across the room, thinking, I’m not I’m not I’m not.
Thinking: I’ll show them.
I’ll show him.
“Mark.” Lewis was staring at him, his eyebrows knotted.
“No,” Mark said. “Nothing.”
Lewis wrote a question mark after Unfinished business. He said, “I don’t guess you’d mind if I lit up a smoke?”
Mark shook his head. Lew reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He shook one out and lit it. He kept his eyes on Mark for a long second, then bent forward and wrote: A warning? A message?
“Ghosts sometimes carry messages,” Lew said. “This is where it gets tricky, because there’s so much we don’t know. You know, about the rules. Has he been there all along? Or has he been, like, dormant? Or did he just now come back?” Lew exhaled through his nose. “Is there anything he’d want to tell you? To warn you about?”
“I don’t know.”
But then he remembered holding Allison to his chest. Telling her, It’s not you.
“Because I can think of something,” Lew said, watching Mark carefully.
And here, at last, was the pattern he had feared, revealing itself. He saw it clearly, horribly.
“I got engaged,” Mark said.
The timing was almost perfect. Just as he’d begun planning to ask Allie to marry him, Jacob Pelham had woken up in the dark—
“It can’t be that,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”
Lew tapped his pen against the pad. “I don’t like to think about it, but it was all I could come up with.”
Mark closed his eyes. Something Chloe had said, that afternoon—
He wants both of us.
Mark stood and circled the kitchen. If the story was true—if Brendan was a ghost—then Mark lived, now, in an entirely new world. One governed by its own meanings, its own logic. And that logic could lead down paths like this one.
His boy, come back to warn him.
About what? Marrying someone new?
Marrying someone he didn’t love? Marrying someone he didn’t love as much as Chloe?
Mark sat back down. “It can’t be.”
“It probably isn’t,” Lew said. “Which would be a problem, too, now. It’s just that I wanted you to be prepared.”
“It just can’t be.”
“Can you think of anything else?”
Mark, after a long while, shook his head no. Lew, his face soft and mottled with pain, looked away.
Lewis insisted that Mark stay with him, crash on his couch. He was right: What would Mark be going home to? So he went with Lew to the studio, sat silent beside him while the speakers, over and over, throbbed out a jingle for a furniture store’s no-money-down Mondays.
In the studio he went over the same looping sentences. If-thens, what-ifs. He came to no answers. Either Brendan was in the house, or he wasn’t. Either way, Mark himself was trapped. Either way, he would hurt Allison or Chloe.
If he was a good man—if the last seven years of pain had meant anything—he had to call Allison and confess everything: He’d been talking to Chloe. He’d agreed to go to the old house tomorrow.
But would that be enough? Allison didn’t believe in ghosts any more than Mark did, and he’d been keeping the truth from her too long already. She might accept what he told her, or she might very well not.
This is crazy, she might say.
She might say, We’re done.
He remembered Chloe in his arms, her lips on his cheek. The ways she had made him know she still loved him.
In the dark studio, Mark wasn’t so sure Allison would be wrong.
When they walked back to Lew’s apartment, the sun was setting; the sidewalks were glassy with the day’s iced-over snowmelt. They didn’t speak; Lew, for the last few hours, had been as quiet as Mark, his face almost as weary. Inside the apartment Lew preheated the oven for a pizza. Snow began to tick at the begrimed window above the sink. “This fucking winter,” Lew said. He glanced at Mark. “Do you need to call Allison?”
When Mark didn’t answer, Lew opened up a small cabinet above the refrigerator and produced a bottle of Maker’s Mark, one shot glass. He glanced at Mark, then took down another.
“I shouldn’t offer,” Lew said. “Right?”
“Probably not.”
“What would your dad say?”
“He’d tell you not to.”
“Why’d you quit?” Lew asked. “Why, really?”
For the first time, Mark told him: “Right after Chloe left me, I got really drunk at the old house. In the middle of it I thought I heard Brendan. Maybe I saw him.”
Lew looked at him pie-eyed.
“So,” Mark said. “I guess I didn’t trust my judgment. Do you?”
Lew looked at the bottle in his hand. “I trust you more than just about anybody,” he said. “I wish you’d told me that.”
Lew laughed at that. He poured the shots.
Two hours later—it was now past nine—Lewis went to the kitchen, poured himself one last drink, then capped the whiskey and put it away. They’d each had two shots, and several more cans of beer, and by now Mark’s head was pleasantly insulated, his hands still and heavy on his thighs. He listened from the couch while Lew did the dishes. When Lew was done he stopped beside the kitchen table and looked at the legal pad upon which he’d written earlier, and shook his head.
They’d been quiet, watching television, for an hour. Watching Lew now, Mark wanted to keep it that way. “Maybe it’s time we crashed,” he said.
Lew nodded slowly—he’d drunk enough to be thick-lidded, too careful—then went to the hall closet and returned with sheets, a blanket, and a pillow, and dropped them on the couch beside Mark. He sat back down in his recliner and puffed out air. “I just don’t know,” he said.
“Don’t know what?”
“I mean. I mean I can’t stop thinking. I didn’t tell you everything, before.”
Mark spread the sheet out onto the couch cushions and lay back down. His own head was light, airy. He thought he just might be able to sleep, if Lew shut up.
“There was one idea I didn’t write down,” Lew said. “I figured it didn’t count. But now I don’t know. And—it’s maybe the worst one.”
Mark didn’t answer him.
Lew said, “Ghosts want things.”
“What—”
“Selfish things,” Lew said, as though confessing to a sin of his own. “It’s in so many of these stories. They want things they can’t have anymore. What they had when they were alive.”
The little shadow-Brendan, crouched in his empty room, listening for the voices of his parents through the walls.
“They get lonely,” Lew said. “Desperate.”
“Lew—”
“Listen. All these stories—so many of them end up with somebody dead.”
“No one’s going to die.”
Lew was blinking furiously. “You’re not listening. Ghosts want company. Except ghosts can’t come back to life, right? But living people can always become ghosts.”
Mark thought of Chloe, so thin she was nearly worn right through.
“This is Brendan we’re talking about,” he said.
“I don’t know anything.” Lew was slump-shouldered, his face slack, sad all the way down to his bones. “I mean, you’re different, these days. Do you know that? This has changed you. You look sick.”
Mark didn’t answer.
“I was with you,” Lew said, “all these years. I watched you live through it, and I didn’t always know if you would. And now you’re right back there again.”
He knew Lew was right. Hadn’t this been Mark’s own fear, these past weeks? The one he’d been trying so hard not to admit to himself?
“You’re my oldest friend,” Lew said. “I just want you to be careful. That’s all. That’s all I’m trying to say.”
“I’ll be careful,” he said. “I promise.”
“You’re still not getting it,” Lew said. “It’s dangerous for you. No matter what you do. No matter if it’s true or not.”
“What do you mean?”
“Allie’s a good girl,” Lew said. “She loves you. You love her. Don’t fuck with that.”
Mark said nothing.
Lew stood, then walked to him and hugged him. “So here’s the deal. You have to check in with me tomorrow, or—”
“Or what?”
Lew drew himself up. “Or I’ll call your father.”
Mark was tempted to laugh, but Lew’s face was grim.
“You think I’m kidding,” he said, then lumbered down the hallway to his bedroom and shut the door.
When he thought Lewis might be asleep, Mark put on his coat, went out to the walkway overlooking the courtyard, and called Allison while there was still some chance of catching her awake.
While Allie’s phone rang he watched an old woman on the other side of the courtyard leaning against the iron railing and smoking a cigarette. She wore a housecoat and a white knit cap, and held a cell phone to her ear. She was smiling and shaking her head—as though listening to a long, elaborate joke.
Darlene answered: “Allie’s phone.”
“Darly,” he said. “It’s Mark.”
Darlene said, not in a friendly way, “Allie’s in the bathroom.”
Mark tried not to think about what Allie had been saying to her sister, these last few hours. “Can she call me back? When she has a minute?”
The old woman in the courtyard suddenly cackled, then spoke in what sounded like Russian.
Darlene said, “Look. I know it’s not my business. But Allie’s not real happy, right now.”
“I know,” he said.
“I don’t know you that well,” Darly said. “I’m taking Allie at her word, you know, that you’re different.”
“I love your sister,” Mark said. “Very much. That’s what I called to tell her.”
Darly’s voice was now even colder. “Talk’s cheap, Mark. My sister’s been through a lot.”
“This is different,” Mark said, gritting his teeth. “Look, I’m not—I’m not cheating on her, okay? I’m not Bill. We just have to figure some things out.”
Darly’s volume increased: “Well, hurry it up. You don’t even know how—”
Mark heard Allie’s voice, then. Both sisters spoke, muffled; one voice rose, sharpened. Then Allie said to him, “Hey, sorry about that.”
“Hi,” he said. The cold had penetrated his jacket, and he was shivering.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Lew’s,” he said. “I really am this time. I can put him on if you want.”
“I—Okay. Thank you for calling.”
“I’m sorry it wasn’t earlier. Lew and I have been talking.”
“Okay.” Then she said, “About me?”
“Only good things,” he said, and tried to smile when he said it.
“Well. Thanks.”
A stone blocked his throat. He could tell her nothing, not yet. But her voice was so small, so hurt. So many people in this world gave him love he didn’t deserve.
“I just wanted to say goodnight,” he said.
He heard her breath, drawn quickly in, and felt shame. He’d shocked her with a kindness.
“I miss you,” Allie said.
His eyes stung.
“I’m going to fix this,” he told her. As always, the sound of his voice, spoken through tears, made him sound like a child, like a liar.
“Okay,” Allie said—cautiously, as though she’d just heard a lie.
They told each other I love you before hanging up. When Mark looked again, the woman across the courtyard had vanished, as though she’d never been there at all.
Mark turned off the living room light and lay still in the darkness. His head swam. Right away he knew sleep would be impossible. He wanted Allison with him. When he remembered the conservatory, he wanted Chloe, too. He wanted not to think of the words Lewis had written on the legal pad. Unfinished business. Warnings.
Selfish things.
But if Chloe was right, what choice did he have?
I’ll call your father.
Lew knew exactly how to make him feel guilty. Sam still had heard nothing of Mark’s troubles. If Mark had his way, Sam never would. He’d gone, these last weeks, to a place where his father could not help him.
He was lying to himself. He had gone to a place like this before, and his father had not only helped him, he’d swooped in for a rescue.
In fact, the only other time Mark had ever come close to thinking what he now thought, he had asked his father’s opinion.
After Sam had found Mark, alone and nearly dead, they had lived together for a while. Sam had taken a semester off from school, and had moved to the small apartment in Columbus. For weeks he stayed with Mark, caring for him, watching over him. Sam had only let Mark live alone after he made—and kept—an appointment with a therapist.
But just after Sam had rescued him, for almost a full month, Mark had gone to live with him in Indiana. Surrounded by his boyhood house, lying in his boyhood bed, the fact that for seven years Mark had been a father, and a husband for longer, seemed less definite, more a theory than a fact. Sometimes he could even allow himself to believe that he was, really, a teenager again, waking from nightmare visions of a terrible future. At other times, however, he was wholly, painfully himself—Sam’s house, after all, was filled with pictures of their losses: Mark’s mother, Brendan, even Chloe.
Mark and Sam spent every evening together. Some nights they talked on the stone porch; others, they watched baseball or football in the living room. But even when they were seemingly comfortable, Mark could feel that his father was alert, ready to agree to whatever Mark might say he needed.
But what did Mark need? He didn’t know. He was sober, yet his dreams from the house were still close, still red and painful. They robbed him of his sleep; they followed him through his long and logy days. The world around him seemed inconsequential. Flimsy, not worth trusting.
One evening, he’d said, Dad, can I ask a question?
They were sitting on the porch steps, watching the woods and the newly harvested field across the road, rawly black, smelling sweetly of rot and chemicals. His father set down his book, turned to him, expectant.
Do you ever think about where Brendan is? Mark asked.
His father smiled tightly. If there’s a heaven, he said, I’m sure it’s populated by children.
But you don’t believe in heaven.
Sam sat up straight. No, I really don’t. Last I checked, you didn’t, either.
No. But this—it’s different.
Sam’s voice was very soft, and surprised him: How could it not be?
So what do you think happened to him? Mark risked this, too: What do you think happened to Mom?
Mark, I don’t know. Ask a priest. A philosopher. Ask a biologist.
He’d expected a more vehement denial. His father’s voice: Think about it, Mark.
I know what they’d say, Mark said. I’m asking you.
Sam sighed.
Mark said, We have to think of them as somewhere, right?
His father thought for a moment, then said, Thinking doesn’t make it so. Gone doesn’t mean gone someplace. But I suppose I do imagine them in a place. A nowhere-place, where they can’t think of us. Which is the same difference, maybe.
His father stared across the field. Mark was aware, as never before, of the deep lines in Sam’s face, the jut of his knuckles. How his hair had almost entirely gone gray. He was fifty-three then, closer to his death than his birth. Soon he would be an old man.
I guess what I’m asking is whether you think—
But he couldn’t finish. Sam did it for him:
You want to know whether I think I’ll see Molly again. And Brendan.
Yes.
I don’t think I will. But I wish I could.
Mark’s disappointment tightened his throat.
Sam looked sideways at him. I really do imagine my death as an end. As a blackness. The deepest of sleeps. A sleep without dreaming.
But does that comfort you? Mark asked.
It does, now. Very much.
Why?
Sam spoke carefully, as though the words were spilled coins he was picking up, one by one:
I do not know what purpose there may be to my life, beyond what I see of it here in front of me. But it is very difficult for me to imagine that we die, only to go to a place that allows us to remember our lives. Even if there is a heaven. Even if death is a sleep filled with dreams—only happy dreams—I would dream of Molly, and of you, and of my brother. Of Brendan. My job. My house. What I’d left behind.
Mark could say nothing.
His father said, Even if I was to die tonight, and be reunited with your mother and Brendan in a heaven, I would miss you. I would miss sitting here on the porch, talking with my boy. So I ask myself, if this is true, would heaven be heaven?
Mark closed his eyes.
His father said, The only happy death I can imagine is one that severs me entirely from this life. Annihilates me. I think any other would be too cruel. For me and for the living.
His father took a sip of tea.
That’s what comforts me.
Mark reached over and put his hand on his father’s shoulder. Sam lifted his own hand, set it over Mark’s. Maybe his father was right, but even so Mark, had he been offered it right then, might have chosen to live forever in that moment, to have it serve as heaven.
Me too, he said.
The pattern had grown out; it was too big now, with too many variables. Either there was an afterlife, or there wasn’t; either ghosts were real or they weren’t. Either Mark would keep an appointment with Chloe tomorrow, or with Allison. Either his son was suffering, or he was not. Either Brendan was a ghost, or he was not. Either he wanted Mark to come, or he did not. His son was trapped on this earth, or had long ago traveled to another, or he had been erased.
So many visions in front of him. A different man seemed required to believe in each one.
So which man was he?
Please believe me, Chloe had said—her voice the possibility of something like heaven.
Mark opened his phone; a picture of Allison was his screensaver. In the picture she was dressed up for Halloween, like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, wearing a simple ponytail and a blue gingham dress and red slippers. She held a stuffed dog in a basket.
Mark had gone as the Cowardly Lion.
Words rose from a far corner of himself in a playground voice: taunting, cracked with contempt:
You’ll never figure it out. You know why?
Because you’re a pussy.
A solution came to him then. Sudden and whole and thrilling:
He didn’t have to wait until tomorrow. He could find out tonight. Right now.
The old house on Locust was, at the moment, empty. Chloe had said so, hadn’t she? The Pelhams were staying with relatives tonight, and Chloe was at her parents’ house. Mark—if he could stop being a fucking pussy long enough—could go to Victorian Village, and he could see for himself what was inside the house. And he could do it without Chloe beside him. Touching him. Influencing him.
He could find out what he really wanted. Who—or what—really wanted him.
Mark sat up on the couch, his heart pounding. He reminded himself he’d been drinking. He reminded himself that people who’d been drinking often had very unwise ideas.
He told himself that in the kinds of ghost stories he’d liked as a child, a man in his position—drunk, too reckless—would be almost certain to end up dead on the landing of the old house, his neck broken and his skull caved in, just like his son’s. He would be doomed, then, to live in the dead gray house, to roam its halls, the companion of his mad little child. The living would become the dead. He knew what Lew had meant, in his warning.
But Mark had come up with a plan. After all these weeks, he could do something. And how hard would breaking into the house be? At worst it meant a broken pane of glass, and at best—
At best he would understand. The pattern had been pointing here—he saw this now—for much longer than he’d supposed, maybe ever since he had last stayed in the house, that long week alone.
He had to go to the house, and he had to go alone.
At the kitchen table, by the light of his open cell phone, he wrote Lew a quick note on the legal pad: Couldn’t sleep. Talk to you tomorrow. Don’t worry, and thanks for everything, M. Then, quietly, he pulled on his shoes, his coat.
He should call a cab, he knew—but he couldn’t very well ask a taxi to drop him off at the house he wanted to break into. He’d be all right, driving, if he went slowly, if he kept off the main roads. His plan had focused him, made him move with a purpose.
He was nearly out the door when one last idea came to him. He went to the kitchen and, by the light of his phone, found the bottle of Maker’s just inside the cabinet on top of Lew’s refrigerator. The big side pocket of his coat was just spacious enough to hold it. Mark dug in his wallet and left a twenty on the countertop, and then, before he could stop himself, he slipped out the door and away.