The air inside the kitchen was sweetly, thickly warm. Mark listened carefully, trying to still his breath, but the house was quiet, hushed. No alarms sounded; no one cried out, Who’s there?
Except for the light leaking down the hallway from the living room, the kitchen was dark. Mark’s hand, by old habit, felt to the side of the door for the light switch there. But he stopped himself from lifting the switch.
The house felt odd. More different, even, than the yard. He was afraid to see its new strangeness revealed.
Still the differences assailed him. Mark smelled, still—in gratitude and in grief—the house’s familiar odors of old varnish, paint, plaster. But it was missing their smells—his and Chloe’s and Brendan’s.
When Chloe had cooked here the kitchen had smelled of tomatoes, of garlic, of coffee; they grilled most of the meat they ate outside. Now the air smelled slightly of grease—of cheap hamburgers, of food gone bad in the refrigerator. Meat left in the garbage.
The house smelled of different people, different lives, different skin and sweat. Connie and her son, and Margie before them, had erased from the air a decade of Fifes.
Or had they?
Mark’s fear rose up in him again: the reminder of what he had come to do. What he might find.
Brendan?
The hum of the old refrigerator. The clicking of the furnace in the basement. If he cocked his head right—if he let himself—he could almost detect a sense of movement in the walls, the house gathering itself: a drawing in of breath, as if to answer.
The furnace clicked, rumbled, roared into life. Warm air from the hall vent rushed past his neck, his hands, caused his scratched and warming hands to sting.
Mark took the bottle from his pocket, drank a swallow.
Throat still burning, heart still thumping, he walked down the hallway, past the doorway to the half bath and into the living room. Here a tall lamp shone in the corner, casting long shadows up the white walls. Mark stood beside the base of the stairs. The stairwell was narrow, steep; the landing was inky with shadow. It seemed—he was sure of this—to pull at him.
Not yet.
The living room—like the yard—was too different for him to ignore. The furniture was wrong, arranged at different angles; their old sprung couch, buried in multicolored throws, had been replaced by a low, gray cubist sofa. The walls, formerly light blue, were now stark, eggshell white; they held no pictures or artwork, and so caught the shadows and stretched them longer, higher. The glass-topped coffee table was empty of toys, of coffee mugs and old rings where they’d been careless; on top was only a stack of magazines in a bamboo tray.
In this room, where the light was on, he could only see the Pelhams’ house, not the Fifes’. Here, Mark Fife was himself: a man who lived somewhere, somewhen, else; a man who was no longer Brendan’s father, or Chloe’s husband. In this room he was the man who loved Allison Daniel—which made him a liar and maybe a fraud.
Or was he? Once—in this very room—he’d taught Brendan about how vision worked. They’d sat on the couch, blinking one eye and then the other; Brendan had been awed by the way the picture of his grandparents on the wall shifted back and forth.
Maybe it was the whiskey, but Mark thought the house might be shifting this way, too; his heart shifted with it. If he concentrated he could see the old couch, the old stuffed chair, the bookcases, the braided rug, made of concentric ovals, where Brendan spent so much of his short life: playing his games in the center of a bull’s-eye.
Old house, new house; husband, fiancé. At any time Connie Pelham’s house could blink away, leaving Mark and Chloe’s exposed. If that happened, he could step out of this life and into the old one, where Chloe and Brendan were both asleep, upstairs; where he was only coming home late. He could wake them, hold them. Promise them, I am here for you both.
He could say to Brendan, I’ll never take my eyes off you again.
He walked, unsteadily, to the fireplace mantel. Across its top stood candles, a whole line of them at different heights, and several photographs in metal frames. Hanging on the wall above the mantel was a painting, a hazy Parisian street scene, anonymous and horrible.
The first of the photographs was of Connie. She wore a swimsuit and a wrap skirt, standing on a dock in front of some mountain lake. Beside her, holding on to her thigh with both arms, was a boy in swim trunks. Jacob. In this picture he couldn’t have been older than five or six, but he had Connie’s round face, her curled dark hair, a natural pudginess. He was smiling with such force that his eyes were squinted shut.
The next photo showed Connie and a younger Jacob, sitting on a couch, reading together from a picture book.
A third photo showed Jacob, probably close to his present age, pudgier than before, sitting on the front steps of this very house beside a man who was surely his father. The father had dense black hair, both on his head and on his forearms, and big square glasses. One of his hands was draped across Jacob’s shoulder.
This was the boy who had seen Brendan. An awkward little boy who missed his father.
Mark’s throat was dry, constricted. He walked back to the kitchen; at the sink he ran cold water over his dirty hands, then cupped them and drank several swallows. When he straightened the darkness swayed.
He couldn’t leave. Couldn’t pussy out. The boy was one thing. Chloe was another.
Chloe. The woman he’d married. With whom he’d made a child.
Before Brendan was born they used to have quickies here in the kitchen, Chloe braced against the same counter Mark now gripped with his hands. The angle was good for both of them. Everything had been good for them, before he’d pissed it away. Before they had.
I never stopped loving you, she’d said, and kissed his cheek.
Allison hadn’t stopped loving him, either. Not yet.
Mark took another swig of whiskey. He was already here, inside. He’d already broken laws. If he turned around now he’d have proven nothing except that he was a coward: That he didn’t want to face what Chloe was asking him to. That he didn’t owe Allison his courage. That he still, after all these years, wasn’t prepared to do what a father must.
We have a job to do; we’re gonna do it.
He listened again, stilling his breath, and heard nothing—the house was empty, he was sure, of anyone else living. It was time. He walked slowly to the stairs.
The stairwell seemed to darken unnaturally as Mark entered it. His own breath echoed wetly back from the close walls, like the panting of an eager, pursuing bully. The steps groaned beneath his feet.
He stopped at the landing, that dark knot of air where the stairs turned back on themselves. This place. He sat on the bottom step of the upper flight. The landing, four feet to a side, was at almost the exact center of the house. The house’s gullet, he’d always thought, or its heart.
He tried not to see. But here was Brendan in a tangle, sprawled across the space where Mark’s feet were invisible in the shadows. One arm trapped beneath him, the other splayed out beside his face. His neck kinked to the side. His chin pressed to the landing. One blue eye staring out from beneath a wild tangle of hair.
The house seemed to contract, to tighten its throat.
Was this it? Was this how it had happened to Chloe?
“Brendan,” he whispered. “I’m here now.”
Mark knelt, pressed his hand down against the empty floorboards. He looked up at the steps, the yellow square of light at the top. He was sure—so sure—that a silhouette of a boy would step into it. But he saw nothing.
“I’m alone,” he said, so shockingly disappointed he nearly began to weep.
He stood. He tried to tell himself: It’s a hoax. A story.
But the house did not feel empty to him. It felt sly. As though someone was hiding, watching, as Mark muttered in the dark.
He tightened his fist around the railing. The stairs above him seemed to steepen.
“Are you here?”
No answer.
You come to your mother. But you’ll call for me and then hide?
Because your mother’s not with me? Because I’m marrying someone else?
Because you want selfish things?
“Selfish,” he whispered, and then waited, his ears straining. He heard nothing but the house’s restless shifting, his own sandy breaths.
He climbed, his heart a stone.
The stairs opened just to the right of the crook in the L-shaped hallway that divided the second floor. Directly in front of him—he faced the house’s prow—was the wide, dark archway to the circular turret room: his old office. Enough light spilled down the hallway from the open doorway to Brendan’s room that Mark could see inside. Connie Pelham, like him, had made it a workroom, but instead of a desk and computer, it was now mostly filled by a heavy wooden table topped by a sewing machine and haphazard piles of fabric: swath after swath of patterned silks.
Did her son stand sometimes in the doorway, watching her while she worked—like Brendan had sometimes watched him—deciding whether or not she could be bothered?
Did Brendan still watch?
The shadow-boy might stand in the hallway, bewildered by the strange woman in his father’s office. Or, maybe, he couldn’t see her at all. Maybe he only knew someone was in the room where Mark had used to be. Maybe, then, he called out Daddy.
Mark turned. The doors to the other upstairs rooms were all firmly shut. For a long moment he thought about opening the door to the master bedroom. But he couldn’t—he couldn’t bear to see it missing its big bed, the rocking chair in the corner, the long scratched bureaus. Even when he and Chloe were trying to live here, after, they had not used that room.
He stared down the hall at Brendan’s doorway, the warm light stretching out from it across the floorboards.
Ghosts only want things to be like they were before.
“But they’re not,” Mark said.
Even though he knew he wouldn’t see Brendan’s room as it had been—his unmade bed jutting out from the wall beneath the Ghost-Killer switch; the low shelves to either side of the window, stacked full with books; the National Geographic maps of the moon and earth tacked to the walls they’d painted a rich, flecked gold—Mark was still surprised by the room as it was: harshly lit, the floor bereft of furniture but full of clutter: Boxes. Draped clothes. A long chest flush against the right wall, stacked high with more clothing and pairs of women’s shoes. Everything cast deep, broadening shadows toward him, because of the lamp, its shade yellowed by age, that glowed on a wooden crate just beneath the window.
But no sign of Brendan.
Mark crossed the dusty floor and stood next to the window, beside the lamp. Here the boxes had been pushed aside. Right below the windowsill was a large cushion. On the floor in front of it was a stack of folded clothing and a neat pile of photographs. He saw right away what they were: These were the things Chloe used to concentrate on Brendan, to make him appear.
The room was chilly. The window was barely cracked open below the pulled shade. An ashtray sat on the sill. Chloe’s? She hadn’t smoked, apart from the occasional joint, since before he’d met her.
Chloe had come here after leaving him at the conservatory, and had sat on the cushion and smoked, thinking of Brendan. Of him.
If Mark had come here tomorrow, he knew, these things would have been put away. He was looking now at something private. Intimate. Chloe’s most secret self.
He sat down beside the cushion, leaning against the wall. Icy air dripped down from the windowsill. He pulled the whiskey bottle from his pocket and set it beside him on the floorboards. He was here. This was what he’d come for.
Brendan had appeared to Chloe when she turned off the lights and concentrated. When she talked to him. He would do that, too.
But not yet. First he wanted to see what Chloe had brought.
The stacked clothing was Brendan’s. He’d known she saved some, though he had not seen it since they had divvied up Brendan’s things. On top of the pile was a pale blue T-shirt—the color Chloe had most liked to dress him in. Beneath it were a pair of jeans and what Mark guessed was probably Brendan’s old gray Buckeyes sweatshirt, the one he’d died in. Beside the stack was a pair of Brendan’s sneakers.
He stroked the fabric of the T-shirt. Smelled his fingertips. He could detect no trace of his boy. He picked up one of the shoes: a Nike trainer, white with red and black detailing, its seams and wrinkles still traced with grime. These had not been the shoes Brendan had been wearing—the ones that might have killed him. Those they’d thrown away.
Mark lifted the shoe to his face. Its smell had faded, too. But there—an old tang. A wisp of little-boy stink. The hair on his forearms lifted.
He closed his eyes, held his breath. But nothing else happened. Nothing entered him. Visited him. Mark set the shoe down. His hand was trembling. Carefully he opened the bottle and drank a long swallow.
He willed his hand to pick up the stack of pictures. There were maybe twenty of them. He was sure he’d know them—they’d had multiples printed of nearly every photo of Brendan they’d ever taken, to send them to his grandparents, and Sam had returned many of them, once Chloe left, without Mark having to ask.
He flipped through the stack:
Brendan, a toddler, submerged to his waist in the kiddie pool at the water park in Clintonville. Beside him a kneeling, bikini’d Chloe, her hair dampened to the color of honey.
Brendan grinning, showing his few teeth, in the hall outside his kindergarten classroom, his good citizenship certificate held just beneath his chin.
One of his school portraits, from that same year—the photographer had told him to fold his hands in his lap and smile, but Brendan had pressed his lips together, and turned up the corners like the Mona Lisa’s. Mark had loved this photo; in his tan buttondown shirt, his neatly combed and parted hair, Brendan looked serene, older and wiser than his six years.
Brendan a toddler at the zoo, leaning forward in Mark’s grasp, across a curving red rail, toward the extended trunk of an elephant.
The next photos surprised him.
Chloe had brought along photographs of him. Of him and Brendan, of him and Brendan and Chloe—their whole family, together.
He wants both of us.
On top of the stack was a picture Mark hadn’t seen in seven years, one nearly too painful to consider: he and Brendan napping on the couch, side by side. Mark, bearded, wearing a white T-shirt, one arm flung up to expose the pale underside. His other arm cradled the toddler Brendan, who pressed his cheek to Mark’s ribs, smiling in his sleep.
He and Brendan, sitting on the porch swing, reading a book Mark held between them.
And then, at the bottom of the pile, another surprise: a single photo of Mark, alone.
In it he was a college boy again, shockingly young and skinny, wearing a jacket and a white shirt and a narrow punkish tie. His hair was longer, grown out nearly to his shoulders. His glasses were owlishly round. A dark goatee covered his chin.
This had been taken during his last year of college. Chloe had convinced him to emcee a bachelor auction to benefit the elementary ed program. Just before he took the stage Chloe had said, Turn around, handsome! and then had snapped the picture.
He put this photo on his left knee, and the one of him and Brendan sleeping on his right.
He saw, then, crumpled up beside the pillow, a pile of pale blue denim: a jacket of Chloe’s, dating to college, that was as comfortable to her as a baby blanket. She’d worn it on their first date. She’d worn it the first time they went out to dinner after the divorce; it had broken his heart—this jacket, he’d thought, had remained closer to her than he had.
He picked it up. Pressed it to his face. Smelled her detergent, her soap, her sweat, a hint of her occasional perfume. Cigarette smoke.
He took a long drink from the bottle. Looked again at Chloe in her bikini, the dark wet drips of her hair crossing her cheeks, her bare shoulders, the swell of a breast.
But he hadn’t come here because of Chloe. Not just because of her.
And not just because of Brendan. He’d come because he was engaged.
He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and called up—after two or three fumbling tries—all the pictures he kept saved on it. Allie’s face glowed up at him. Dark-eyed Allie, in her spaghetti-strapped black dress, kissing Lew’s cheek on New Year’s Eve. Reading a book at the coffee shop, one hand lifting her hair from her neck. At the airport just before their spring vacation to Seattle, wearing her travel outfit—sweats and tennies, a pink ball cap—and sweetly smiling.
He was marrying her in September, and she was only a picture on his phone. If he died right now, she would be appalled and hurt to know that he’d been here, pictures of Chloe at his feet.
As he thought this, the house seemed to clench, to hover over her image, like a giant with its brow furrowed, having finally discovered a tiny, hated intruder.
He picked up the stack of photos again. Brendan, two, tearing open a Christmas present beneath the tree; Mark and Chloe sitting cross-legged on either side of him, smiling; Mark holding a pre-made bow above Brendan’s head.
A professional portrait, in black and white: Mark and Chloe lying down with infant Brendan, chubby and close-fisted, his face agonized and squalling between their own.
Mark had shown Brendan this picture, once. Brendan had been what? Five? Six? Brendan had picked up the photograph carefully, by the edges, staring down with pursed lips and a kind of suspicion.
That’s you, Mark had told him. That’s you as a baby.
Brendan reached out a hand to touch his own face.
I look so mad, he said, and giggled.
All babies get mad, Mark had said. But see how happy Mommy and me are?
Mark closed his eyes, but still saw the photograph. Smiling Mommy and Daddy.
Little bitty baby boy.
The house, close. Attentive.
Yes, he thought. Yes. Lew had been right. Chloe had been right. Brendan wanted what he’d known when he was alive: Mommy and Daddy. Mommy and Daddy who were always there for him; Mommy and Daddy who slept together every night in their big bed; Mommy and Daddy, sun and moon.
Chloe came here, day after day, with these pictures. She sat here and cried and told Brendan exactly what he wanted to hear—which was Yes. Of course Mommy and Daddy would help him. Both of them would. She told him she wished she could go back in time.
Of course he could have both of them, as they were, as they had been. Perfect, whole.
But they hadn’t been perfect, he and Chloe. They hadn’t loved each other perfectly. They hadn’t loved Brendan perfectly.
Or else he would be alive.
Don’t you know that?
You’ve had enough time. You should have figured it out, by now.
Mommy and Daddy have argued about it for years, and both of us were right. It was our fault.
It seemed like an accident. Your big backpack. Your untied shoe. Your sneaking.
But it wasn’t. Not really. You were trying to run away, but that was only because, that morning, Mommy and I were worth leaving.
Because we didn’t love you the right way. Because I wanted to drink and watch the television more than I wanted to teach you. Because your mother wanted to punish me with you.
But we loved you, little man. Oh we loved you. When you were gone we knew how much.
It nearly killed us, finding out.
Mark was crying, now. He drank more of the whiskey and lay down, his head nestled into Chloe’s jacket. The room rocking, rocking, rocking. He reached for the lamp and pulled its cord.
Like a light, turned out.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Do you know that? It’s true. I’m sorry and Mommy’s sorry. We’re so sorry, little man. You have no idea how sorry we are.
And oh he wished for another chance, then. He wished it with all his might. He would give anything. Yes. Anything. The thought went from his brain into his tingling fingers: He would trade, if he could. He would walk away from Allie and his new life, if only he could return, if he could walk through the front door of this house and into his old life again. If he could replace the Mark who sat at his chair in front of the basketball game, his second drink in his hand, his head empty of anything except his disappointments. He wished with all his might that he could stand up and walk to the base of the stairs; he wished he could walk up them and into Brendan’s room; he wished he could kneel in front of his surprised and guilty little boy, his cheeks streaked with dried tears, his hands shoved deep into his backpack; he wished he could say I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Yeah, we were mad at each other, but it doesn’t matter. We get tired of each other but it doesn’t matter. Life’s not like we want it to be sometimes but it doesn’t matter. It’s so much better than being dead. Than being without each other. He’d take Brendan’s face in his hands and look into his son’s deep blue eyes, his eyes like the sea, and he’d say, I know this. I know it in ways you never will. I love you, I love you more than life, and you can never leave my side, I hope you know that, because if you do, if you die, then I will die too.
I know this, little man: Without each other we’ll all be gone.
And if Mark could have said those things—he knew it—then downstairs, right then, they would hear Mommy coming home: opening the door, setting down her keys. Calling out their names. Searching for them.
Mommy’s home, he would say.
Let’s go tell her, too, he would say, and then he and Brendan would stand, the two of them, and they’d descend the stairs to her, Mark walking in front of his son all the way down.
I’m sorry, he was saying, he was thinking, I’m sorry.
The room was close, spinning.
And then something touched his hand.
Mark sat up. His breath came in pants. His hand still tingled; he clutched it with his other. Something had reached out of the darkness and touched him, feather-light and fleeting.
The word was too big to say, but he gasped it out:
“Brendan!”
His smell. His laugh. His syrupy chirp: Daddy!
A hole in him, opening up, like a crack splitting quickly across a sheet of arctic ice. His skin crawling with light.
Oh God oh God Brendan it’s you, it’s you—
His stomach and his head whirled around each other. The smell was still in his nostrils: Boy-sweat. Dirt. But a sweetness, too, that last lingering baby-smell that Mark used to inhale when Brendan fell asleep against his chest.
He reached out his hand, expecting to touch the cotton of Brendan’s pajama top, but instead knocked it against the lamp shade. The lamp creaked, then toppled; the lightbulb shattered.
Across the room he heard a sound.
He stared, straining, into the dark. He heard only the wind and the subtle creaks of the house and—
And there—
By the door, a delicate thump, like a pile of clothing falling to the floor.
“Brendan?”
And then, clearly: footsteps. Quick, pattering, leaving the room, fleeing down the hallway. Footsteps, heading for the stairs.
“Brendan!” he called, and then he was lurching forward. He plowed into a stack of boxes; they fell; the crash turned into fireworks exploding before his eyes. He stumbled, scraped his hand on something sharp, and then he was in the doorway. He ran by memory to the top of the stairs, turned the corner, grabbed for the smooth railing. His balance was still off; he swayed forward, fell, had to catch at the railing with the inside of his elbow.
With his other hand he clawed at the air in front of him; he was sure, as sure as he’d ever been, that his fingers would catch on Brendan’s backpack, that he could reel his son back to him. But he toppled, and only his grip on the rail kept him from falling all the way down.
Mark pulled himself upright. He was trembling, crying. His side was sore where it had jounced against the step. He had never felt before what was in him, now—an excitement as bright and sharp as lightning. It was all true. Everything he’d hoped and feared was true.
Mark had told him the truth, and Brendan had come to him. He had apologized, and Brendan had touched his hand.
Brendan was here.
He could only do, then, what Chloe had done. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed her number. It was now two thirty in the morning; she was at her parents’ house in Marysville. She’d probably have the phone turned off. If she didn’t answer, he’d leave her a message; then he’d go outside and down the street to the laundromat where, those weeks ago, he’d called himself a cab, and he’d do so again. But he wished for her to answer. He wished it with all his might.
Chloe picked up. Her voice pure, kind, good, said his name.
“Honey,” he said, his own voice breaking. “It’s me.”