Trudy stood, then, and went to the kitchen, leaving Mark shrunken into the corner of the couch. Chloe emerged from the kitchen only seconds later; she saw the look on his face and immediately sat close beside him. He lifted his arm, pulled her close without thinking; Chloe’s cool fingers slid around his own.
Before he could tell her anything, Trudy and Warren returned; Trudy sat where she had, and Warren leaned beside the fireplace.
Trudy asked, “So I understand you’re going to sit down with the Pelhams, Chloe?”
“Yes,” Chloe said. “Tonight.”
“Mr. Mark,” Trudy said—she was now all stagy smiles again—“I also understand you’ve had some… difficulty… with Ms. Pelham?”
He nodded.
“Then I have an assignment for you, an important one. You’re going to have to apologize to her.”
“I—”
“You threatened to have her arrested, didn’t you? In front of her child?”
He couldn’t deny it.
Trudy told him, “The circle through which we contact Brendan must be one of positive energy. One utterly free of strife. I’ve talked to Connie; she is a good soul. So clear the air. Capiche?”
To Chloe she said, “Don’t take Mark to meet her at the house. We must make sure all is clean and pure when we enter Brendan’s space again. We can’t risk any discomfort, before.”
“I—Okay,” Chloe said, unable to keep the disappointment from her face. “We’ll go get pizza or something.”
Trudy smiled. “Jacob will like that.” Then, to Mark, she said, “The boy will likely be terrified of you. Be his friend. We will ask much of him, these next few days.”
He nodded.
“Trudy,” Chloe began, her face troubled.
Trudy held up a hand, looking first Mark, and then especially Chloe, right in the eye. “Avoid the house until the ceremony. This is how it must be. Brendan may only reach us through a struggle. Withhold yourselves from him, just for a while, and he will come more readily when our circle is assembled.” Trudy walked to Chloe and embraced her—more intimately than Mark would have guessed Chloe would tolerate from anyone but a lover—wrapping her long spindle-arms around Chloe’s chest, pressing her palms against Chloe’s head from behind, and squeezing their cheeks together. “Remember. He does not suffer as you think. I promise you, Chloe. I promise.”
Chloe’s eyes flickered, almost panicked, to Mark’s. Then a sob convulsed her, and she went limp in Trudy’s arms.
“It’s all right,” Trudy said. “All will be well. Your son is loved. Your son is loved.”
Mark wanted to pry Chloe from Trudy’s arms. To hold her himself. To be held, to sob as she sobbed.
Warren cleared his throat. “The boy’s death anniversary is on the twenty-third, yes?” That phrase, in Warren’s mouth, seemed horrifyingly uncouth, but Mark nodded assent.
And that was that. On the twenty-third—two days from now—the Weills would drive down to the Locust house for the ceremony. Trudy gave them instructions: Mark and Chloe were each to bring with them a memento of Brendan—something that brought him easily, powerfully to mind. Each of them was to think of a happy memory, one that moved them to feelings of great love, upon which they could meditate when the ritual was under way. Apart from making peace with the Pelhams, this was all that was required of them.
Then they were standing, and both Trudy and Warren embraced first Mark, then Chloe—but before she released him, Trudy whispered in his ear, “Remember, now,” and when she embraced Chloe she whispered into Chloe’s ear, too.
Whatever she’d said, Chloe seemed awed, at once happy and sad beyond words.
Ahead of them was a three-hour drive back home, but Mark and Chloe barely spoke until they were back on the two-lane state road, ten miles from Trudy’s house. The snow was swirling all around them. Every few moments Chloe sniffled.
Finally she asked: “So what did Trudy say to you?”
He’d been wondering how to describe his experience. Haltingly, he gave Chloe as full an account as he could, leaving out only his own special instructions—Trudy’s worries about Chloe, now his.
Chloe seemed satisfied by what he told her. Much of it, she said, was similar to what she and Trudy had talked about during her previous visit. Mark wondered whether Trudy had given Chloe special instructions about him, too.
Chloe was telling him how strange she’d found Warren. “He says he’s actually the minister of their church. Which makes sense, I guess. He handles the preaching and Trudy handles the spirits themselves.”
Something had been nagging at Mark since they’d left Trudy’s house: a question he should have asked, but didn’t. “What do we do if the ritual doesn’t work? Did you ask her?”
Chloe gripped the wheel. “Trudy told me it might take one session, or it might take many. It depends.”
“But if not on the anniversary—”
Chloe glanced quickly sideways; the car jerked. “She said we wait for another big day. His birthday, or—”
“That’s almost a year from now.”
“She said we just have to be careful. If we do everything the right way, we should be fine. But she said none of this is certain.”
“God’s will?”
“Mark… you do believe her?”
When Trudy had spoken to him, all he could do was believe her. But now that the visit was behind them, Trudy’s words were clattering against the insides of his skull.
“She said you made—a donation? To her church?”
Chloe nodded—warily, he thought. “Yeah.”
“How much?”
“It doesn’t matter.” She stopped at a light and flicked the wipers; they scratched across a sheening of ice. “I took care of it. And I’m taking care of the Weills’ motel room, too.”
Chloe had misunderstood his question, but now guilt flooded through him. “Let me pay half. It’s the least I can do.”
“This isn’t a competition. I’ve got the money. And—”
“And what?”
Her voice was barely audible. “You’re planning a wedding.”
They stopped for a late lunch at a Wendy’s near Toledo. Mark stood in the vestibule to check his messages while Chloe ordered. Lewis had tried to call him. Allison hadn’t.
He called her before he could talk himself out of it; he was sent immediately to voicemail. Allie had said she was headed back to Darlene’s sometime today, not fifteen miles from where he stood; he wondered if one of the cars he could see crawling along the interstate was hers.
“Allie,” he said, “I know you don’t want to talk to me. But I just wanted to say I’m thinking of you. I don’t even know if you care, but—” He was botching it. “Look. This isn’t anything I ever wanted. I do love you. I do. I’m sorry I’ve been so terrible, but I couldn’t know—”
His voice had flattened. He pulled the phone away from his ear and saw it had gone dead. He counted back; he hadn’t charged it in three days—since before he’d gone to meet Chloe at the conservatory. The charger was still on his desk in the townhouse.
He was relieved. He hadn’t known what to say to Allison, and now he couldn’t say anything at all.
He joined Chloe at their table, let himself be lifted by her gentle smile. He remembered, when they’d first begun dating, how he’d been astonished, over and over, to find her smiling whenever she caught sight of him, even if all he’d done was go to the next aisle in the record store and return to her.
“I called Connie,” she told him. “We’re meeting her for dinner tonight. If that’s all right.”
It had to be, didn’t it? Mark had his orders. He certainly owed Connie an apology, but that didn’t mean he wanted to go to dinner with her. He wanted—
He wanted to go home with Chloe. To spend the evening in her apartment. His phone was dead; no one could reach him. He and Chloe could be truly alone.
“You okay?” Chloe asked.
She had a tiny shred of lettuce clinging to her lip. He reached over and plucked it away; she blushed.
“I’m fine,” he said.
Because of the snow, they arrived at Chloe’s apartment late. Right away she began to ready herself for dinner. Mark lay back on the couch, rubbery with exhaustion.
Both of them had retreated into their thoughts for the remainder of their drive home. Mark couldn’t stop himself from returning to what Trudy had said—all of it so strange, so new. He found himself puzzling more and more over the reunion—with Brendan, with his mother—that Trudy had claimed awaited them. He thought of his father, and their long-ago talk on the front porch, and the vision of death Sam had described to him: a sleep without dreams. An annihilation.
Mark had shared this vision with his father for years. Trudy Weill had—smiling, teary-eyed—told him to abandon it.
If Trudy was right, his mother and Brendan could, finally, know each other; his mother could take care of Brendan, love him as Mark knew she would.
Let it be true. Please let it be true.
Because if it were true, then Mark would see them both, again. And his father. And Chloe, soon enough. They could all be reunited as something other than memories.
Trudy was right; this was a comfort—imagining it, now, he could barely stand the rest of his life, the heavy burden of his own body.
He lost himself in this vision for a while, until Chloe’s phone buzzed forlornly on the kitchen table. He started guiltily, and that was when he realized he’d made no room, in his heaven, for Allison.
The pizza place Chloe and Connie had agreed upon, Pagliacci’s, was across town in Clintonville, a low brown rectangle of a building with shuttered windows and a red neon clown grinning over the doorway. He had not objected when Chloe told him where they were going, even though he’d always disliked the place. Pagliacci’s was aimed at children—Brendan had celebrated a couple of his birthdays there—and they were going to be talking about a séance with a little boy; they had damned well better entertain him beforehand.
The hostess led them past wide windows into a kitchen where chefs wearing suspenders and puffballed clown hats, dots of rouge on their cheeks, tossed and spun disks of dough high above their heads. Even on a Monday night in a snowstorm, the place was noisy with the shrills of children: a honed trebly blade.
Connie was sitting with Jacob at a corner booth. When she spotted them, Connie slid out from behind the table and stood. For one fearful moment her eyes found Mark’s; then she met Chloe in a fierce embrace. Connie’s hair had been straightened, was now molded into stiff feathers around her circular face. She wore a sensible black suit over a cream-colored blouse. When she released Chloe she looked back to Mark, her mouth tightening.
Jacob Pelham remained behind the table, a small, frowning, dark-haired shape, his glasses reflecting the dancing candlelight. Mark had a hard time matching him to the picture of the wet, happy little seal he’d seen in the pictures on the mantel.
“Connie.” He held out his hand. “It’s good to see you.”
“Hi, Mark,” she said. “I’m—I’m glad to see you, too.”
He might as well get the worst over with. He lowered his voice, though he was sure Jacob wouldn’t hear him over the din, and put his hand on her padded shoulder. “Listen—I feel really bad about how I’ve been with you. Obviously I didn’t know better. I’m sorry—”
“No!” she said. “Oh, Mark, don’t. I’d have been just as upset. I did it all wrong—”
Even this reaction made him a little angry: She wouldn’t have been just as upset. But he pushed this down. “I’m sorry, regardless.”
She put a hand to her chest, let out a fluttery laugh, then turned to the table. “Jakey! Stand up and say hello to Mr. Fife.”
Jacob came to stand beside his mother, his shoulder against her hip. The candle-reflections in his lenses blinked and darted.
“Mark,” Connie said, “this is my son, Jacob.”
Jacob’s face was round—naturally plump, like Connie’s—and his skin had the same glossy, olive tone. Genetics hadn’t done Jacob any favors. He had a weak chin; his eyes, behind his glasses, were close-set and a little squinty. His bowl-cut hair was lank with oil. He wore faded blue jeans and a brown sweater that clung to his thin upper arms and the small bulge of his stomach—he looked, Mark thought, like a half-inflated balloon.
He reminded himself that this boy had spent nearly a month of his life confronting a ghost in his bedroom, and made himself smile and hold out his hand. “Do you go by Jacob or Jake?”
“Jake,” the boy said. His voice was high-pitched and a little raspy. His palm was hot and damp.
Connie said, in a chipper singsong: “Well! Let’s all sit down and have some pizza!”
Mark slid into the booth beside Jacob. The boy would not meet Mark’s eyes, and for a quick, uncharitable moment, Mark remembered the picture of him on the mantel with his absent father. He wondered if Trudy Weill had held Jacob Pelham’s hands, too. What she had found deep in Jacob’s heart.
The waitress came; Connie ended up ordering for all of them. When she had gone, Chloe began to describe their trip to see Trudy. Connie nodded and exclaimed and pressed her hands to her breastbone in a way that, Mark was sure, would never fail to annoy him.
Chloe and Connie, Mark came to realize, weren’t simply speaking out of convenience. Chloe’s voice had happily lifted in volume; Connie laughed with genuine delight. The two women had become friends.
Why was he surprised? Two nights ago, they’d been the only people in the world who understood an inkling of each other’s troubles.
Connie seemed to have been prepared for the date of the ceremony. But she asked, “Did Trudy say… what was involved?”
While Chloe explained what they knew of the ritual, Mark watched Jacob. The boy seemed uninterested, even though he was going to take part. Each table had been provided with a jelly jar full of crayons and placemats featuring an outline of Pagliacci the clown. Jacob reached for a brown crayon, then turned over his mat to the blank side and began to draw. He bent myopically close to the paper, his fingers pinching the crayon so hard his nails turned purple, and quickly sketched two stick figures, ovals for fists and heads, each in an action pose.
Mark smiled. Jacob was good. He was nine—unpracticed and clichéd—but he understood depth and movement and perspective.
“Ease up on your grip,” Mark told him.
Jacob started: “What?”
Mark was aware of Chloe and Connie turning to watch them. “Don’t press so hard. You’re very good, but a light touch is always better.”
Jacob blinked at him. “My art teacher told me that, too. I forget sometimes.”
“You’re going to Parkhurst?”
Jacob nodded.
“Is the art teacher still Ms. Kyle?”
“You know her?”
“Sure. She was my son’s teacher, too.”
“Oh,” Jacob said.
Connie said, “Jake wants to be an artist. Isn’t that what you do, Mark?”
“More or less.” To Jacob, he said, “You want to draw comics?”
Jacob didn’t redden so much as darken. “I want to work for DC or Marvel. Dark Horse, even. But mostly DC. Like, my dream is I want to pencil Batman someday.”
“I was strictly a Marvel guy,” Mark said. “I wanted to draw the X-Men.”
“Really?”
“Yep.”
Jacob turned a crayon between his hands. “So why didn’t you?”
Connie said, “Jakey.”
Mark waved her off, but still he was surprised at his embarrassment.
“I wasn’t as good as you are.” Mark tilted the placemat toward him. “I got into graphic design, then computers. I mostly make websites now.”
“Making websites takes art?” Jacob asked.
No, Mark almost said.
“Sure.”
“Do you like doing it?”
“It’s all right.”
“My mom and dad are both bankers,” Jacob said.
Connie put a hand on Jacob’s shoulder. “Your dad’s a banker. I’m a teller.” To Mark she said, “That’s how his father and I met.”
Jacob was drawing again, adding a cowl and cape to one of the figures.
“Honey,” Connie said, “did you hear what Ms. Ross and I were just talking about?”
Jacob didn’t look up. “Ms. Weill’s coming to our house.”
“Yes,” Connie said. “Do you remember what we have to do?”
Jacob glanced at Mark. “We’re going to make the ghost go away.”
Mark winced, to hear it said like this. Chloe’s throat worked; she picked up her soda. Connie said, “That’s not what we say, Jacob. We’re going to put him to rest, remember?”
Jacob lifted his head from his drawing, but only for a second. “I’m sorry, Mr. Fife.”
On the placemat Batman was punching out a man wearing a business suit and a bandit mask. The businessman’s head was tilted back, motion lines indicating the force of Batman’s punch. In one of his hands was a sack of money with a dollar sign on it.
“Don’t you worry about it,” Mark said.
Soon their pizza came. Jacob offered Mark the now-completed drawing of Batman; Mark took it solemnly, folded it in thirds—careful not to crease Batman’s middle—and tucked it into the interior pocket of his coat.
Mark couldn’t take his eyes off the boy. Jacob would have fascinated him even if he hadn’t been Connie’s son. The boy went after a supreme pizza with the gusto of a dog; twice Connie reached over to pull strings of cheese from his chin. Between bites he told Mark the storyline of a Batman comic he hoped to begin drawing soon.
Mark kept up his end of the conversation, but he couldn’t get over how nonchalant Jacob had sounded: We’re going to make the ghost go away. He might as well have said, We’re going to the grocery.
Jacob had been frightened of Mark, but not of the word ghost.
The pizza was mostly gone when Jacob turned to Connie. His voice was suddenly imperious: “Mom, I’ve got to pee.”
Connie looked at Mark, who slid obligingly from the booth. When Jacob had gotten out he looked at all three adults and bowed. “I take my leave.”
Chloe smiled into her napkin, but Mark was pretty sure Jacob had seen it.
The kid was acting. Enjoying the hell out of all this attention. Mark’s stomach boiled.
It couldn’t be. Not after what he had felt, not after hearing those footsteps on the stairs.
Stay away from the house until the ceremony, Trudy had told them. Now, sickly, Mark wondered why.
He cleared his throat. “Connie, I have a request, and I hope it doesn’t offend you.”
Connie turned to him and took a deep breath. “Um. Okay?”
“I was wondering if I could maybe talk with Jake alone, a minute?”
Chloe shot him a look—almost identical to the one she’d given him when Trudy asked her to go to the kitchen with Warren.
“I believe him,” Mark said. “It’s not that. But I’d really like to hear him tell me about Brendan.” He seized on an inspiration. “Just a man-to-man talk.”
Connie laughed, too loud. Then a sly look crossed her face. “I am kind of dying for a smoke. Chloe, you want to come with me?”
Chloe hesitated.
“Just a few minutes,” he said.
“Sure,” she said, unblinking.
When Jake came back, and saw both Chloe and Connie headed away from the table, his bravado left him; he began to gulp like a fish on a line.
“They’ll be right back,” Mark said. “Have a seat, and let’s polish this bad boy off.”
Jacob sat. Mark put a slice on each of their plates. “I’m pretty full,” Jacob said.
“Really?” Mark picked up his slice and took a bite. “If you’re anything like I was at your age, you could literally eat a horse.”
Jacob made a sound like a laugh and ducked his head. “I guess I could find some room.”
They each ate a bite. Mark swallowed queasily, decided he’d steal a tactic from Trudy Weill. “I really just wanted to give you a chance to ask me some questions.”
“Questions?” Jacob said, around a thick mouthful of cheese.
“Sure. If I was you, I’d be curious about all of this. It’s got to be confusing.”
Jacob nodded and rolled his eyes.
“Is there anything I can tell you?”
Jacob picked up his fork and set it on its end, tines up, and began to twirl it slowly back and forth. Then he asked, “Why did you guys ever move out of the house?”
The kid might as well have stabbed Mark’s hand with the fork. “That’s complicated.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
Was Jacob being sarcastic? The boy wasn’t smiling.
“There were too many memories for us. After Brendan died, the house wasn’t the happy place it was before. For us.”
Jake said, “I think it was probably the same for my mom.”
“How do you mean?”
“Once Dad left, the house got different.”
“I bet it did,” Mark said.
Jacob said, more quietly, “Mom said Brendan died by an accident?”
“Yeah,” Mark said.
“What happened?”
Mark told him. Jacob listened without looking up, then asked, “Why did he have his backpack on?”
The kid was a lawyer. Or maybe he was repeating questions of his mother’s.
“He was in trouble, and was supposed to be cleaning up his toys. But he sneaked out. I think he was trying to run away.”
The fork in Jacob’s hands stopped spinning. “So he was being bad.”
“Yes,” Mark said, carefully. “But he wasn’t a bad kid. Not at all.”
“Are you mad at him?”
The question had come out of his therapist’s mouth often enough. Out of Jacob’s it sounded strange, cruel. But Jacob had asked softly, simply, with real curiosity.
“No,” Mark told him. “But I have regrets. Brendan was sad about something, and didn’t tell me. Maybe if he had, he wouldn’t have tried to sneak away. But yeah… since he didn’t tell me, it sometimes feels now like he lied to me. Sometimes that makes me mad, but mostly I’m sad he didn’t think he could trust me.”
Jacob was quiet for a long time. Then he took a sip of milk. When he set down his glass he had a small mustache. “Wipe up, buddy,” Mark said, and was shocked by the tenderness in his voice.
Jacob reached for his napkin, obediently, and wiped his lip.
“Can you tell me what you see?” Mark asked. “When Brendan comes?”
Jacob looked at the table.
“I’d really like to know,” Mark said.
Jacob nodded. “He’s just this dark shape. He usually stands by my bed.”
“You don’t see his face?”
“No. It’s too dark. But I can hear him, sometimes. He’s mostly crying.”
Mark kept his gaze steady. And there: There. Jacob’s eyes darted to Mark’s, and then back to the fork in his hands, like a mouse into a hole.
Mark’s throat was as dry as his crumpled napkin. “But sometimes he—calls for me?”
“Yeah,” Jacob said. “Sometimes.”
Mark wished himself back in time, back to the floor of Brendan’s room, to that last moment, to the jolt of truth that had coursed through him, searing his doubts to smoke. The patter of footsteps on the stairs—he wanted to be seized by that sound again. By the certainty in it.
But here, now, was a different truth: Mark was the father of a little boy, and his every instinct told him that Jacob Pelham was lying through his teeth.
Mark said, “Can I tell you something? A secret?”
This word secret—as it always had with Brendan—caught Jacob’s interest, like a shiny coin in front of a crow.
Mark looked up, theatrically, to make sure Chloe and Connie were still gone. “Both Chloe and I have gone through a lot of trouble, because of—of Brendan coming back. We’re both spending a lot of money. We might lose our jobs. The woman I’m about to marry is really mad at me. This is very, very serious, Jake. I need to make extra double-sure you’re telling the truth.”
Jacob drew back, offended. “Chloe and Mom have both seen him. You’ve seen him.”
“I heard him,” Mark said. “But—look. Brendan used to get woken up by sounds in the middle of the night. He’d hear a branch on the window, or he’d hear a board creak, and then he’d think it was a monster. It’s harder for grown-ups, but we can make ourselves do that, too. Especially if we want something to be true.”
He couldn’t believe how easily this explanation had come out of him.
“It’s true,” Jacob said—louder, now. “I saw him.”
Mark had one more card he could play. If Jacob was telling the truth, he had nothing to fear. But if he was a liar—if he’d made them all suffer for nothing—then he deserved what Mark was about to say.
He leaned forward. “Jacob. Trudy Weill told me today that I needed to make sure. Because if we try to do the ceremony, and there’s really no ghost, something very bad could happen.”
Jacob had been jabbing the fork at the tablecloth; now his hand stilled.
“She wouldn’t tell me what. All she said was, we had to make sure. She made me promise. For our safety, she said.”
Jacob’s voice wobbled; his eyes, rising to Mark’s, shone with hurt.
“It’s okay,” Mark said, too quickly. “I just had to make sure. Thank you for being honest.”
Jacob folded his hands in his lap and sniffled. He said, with no small measure of affront, “Sure.”
“Are you all right?” Chloe asked Mark in the car, moments after they’d bid farewell to the Pelhams in the parking lot. She had to be deeply curious about his talk with Jacob Pelham, but he couldn’t begin to explain his new and unnerving doubt to her, and he wasn’t about to try.
Chloe, at the wheel, was drawn—thin, tired, hollow-eyed. A woman held together with fragile loops of thread. Yet she was as lovely as he’d ever seen her, her eyes soft and gentle. Worried for them both.
“I’m okay,” he said, trying not to think of Jacob’s guilty face. He reached for her hand. She took it and squeezed.
They were stopped at a light; Chloe was signaling a right turn, onto the entrance ramp to 315. She was taking them, without discussion, back to her apartment in Dublin.
Mark could, if he wanted, ask her to turn south instead—to take him to his car, still parked near the Locust house. He could drive home to the townhouse, now empty. All he had to do was ask.
Chloe’s thumb brushed his knuckles. “Do you mind if I turn on the radio?”
“No,” he said, and she did: the Cocteau Twins again, ethereal and sexy.
The light changed, and Chloe pulled carefully through, up the ramp and onto the highway.
Mark leaned back into his seat, closed his eyes, and listened to her sing.
It was almost ten when they entered her apartment. Mark sat down on the couch. Chloe walked to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water.
“We should have stopped at Target,” she said. “We could have gotten you some other clothes.”
So she had been thinking about his real home, too; he had clothes there, but she didn’t want him to go get them.
“I’ll be okay.”
“I can wash those for you tonight,” she said. She must have seen the alarm on his face; she laughed. “Don’t worry. I’ve got a robe that I think will fit you.”
Chloe went to her bedroom, then returned with a fluffy white bathrobe. He was relieved to see it was a woman’s—he’d been worried she was going to hand him some leftover of Steve’s.
He went to the bathroom to undress; it really was a relief to strip out of his two-day-old clothes. He hastily showered, then put on the robe. Chloe wasn’t much shorter than him, but her bathrobe only covered half his thighs, and he could barely close it around his belly. When he returned to the living room she covered her mouth.
“Don’t,” he said.
She held up a laundry basket, smirking; he put his clothes into it. “I can’t help it.”
Chloe carried the laundry away to the building’s basement. When she returned she told him she was going to take a shower, too—and Mark knew, then, what was going to happen; when they were married, the only time they both showered at night was when she wanted to make love.
Mark watched television, listening to the water run, smelling Chloe’s soap. Two sportscasters barked at each other about the topics of the day. He turned to the news, found it full of wailing and flame.
He couldn’t do this. No matter how angry Allison was with him, no matter if they were no longer a couple, the circumstances in which Mark was caught were tenuous, wild—he couldn’t make a decision of this magnitude, not now.
The water shut off in the bathroom.
But he had decided already, hadn’t he? He’d decided the other night, at the old house. He had remembered there how much he’d loved his family. Brendan—he was sure of this—had wanted him to remember.
Did Mark love Allison? He did.
But not like he had loved Chloe. Not like he had loved Brendan. That was what he had been shown. That was the truth glowing in his heart.
Chloe emerged from the bathroom, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, a towel turbaned around her head. Her legs gleamed in the warm, close light. She glanced at him. “What’s wrong?” she asked again.
“Nothing’s wrong.”
She walked to the couch and sat down at the far end of it, smelling of lavender, then pulled off the towel and began to dry her hair. “Are you sure?”
He wanted to bury his face into her neck, to hide, which meant the answer to her question was—had to be—no. But he made himself talk. All these years he’d missed her face, her sex—but he missed this too, maybe the most: Looking into her eyes, revealing his secrets. This kind of intimacy had been lost to them longer than any other.
“Something happened at dinner,” he said.
The towel paused in its rubbing. “What do you mean?”
“For a while there I—I couldn’t shake the feeling that Jacob was lying to me. When I talked to him about Brendan, he got pretty shifty.”
“He doesn’t know how to talk with people. Plus it’s a tough situation for him. I mean, would you know how to act?”
“No. I just—I had an intuition.”
“So what? We went and saw for ourselves, Mark.”
“Yeah.” She was right, but he forged ahead anyway: “Chloe, I’m forgetting it. What happened the other night. I remember that it was wonderful, but—”
“You told me all about it, when it happened,” Chloe said, firmly. “And what happened to you was just like what happened to me.”
“I was drunk,” Mark said.
“You felt what I did. I could see it all over your face. And I wasn’t drunk.” Her eyes were clear and sweet, staring into him. “I went through this, too,” she said. “I kept looking for reasons to deny it. But it happened. It’s happened for me, over and over again. It will happen again to you.”
Chloe moved closer, her knees tucked beneath her, her hair stringy and damp on her shoulders. “Hasn’t it helped, to know it’s true?”
“Yes.” It had. His problems were greater, now, far greater than they’d been before—but he was working to fix them, instead of running away.
Chloe whispered, “I was happy, today. I know we haven’t made anything better, yet. I know we haven’t done what we need to do. But it feels so much better—to know—than it did before.” She let out a long sigh. “God, Mark. Tell me feeling like this is—is a mistake.”
She mistook his silence, and leaned back.
“I’m sorry. You and Allison—”
“It’s all right.”
“Have you talked with her today?”
“I don’t want to talk about Allison.”
Chloe’s eyes darted across every part of his face. He held his breath. Then she did exactly what he’d wished and feared she would: She scooted close to him and put one arm around his shoulders, then pressed her other hand to his chest. She tilted forward, her forehead leaning on his shoulder, her cool wet hair stinging his ear, his cheek.
“Is this okay?” she asked.
He breathed in the scent of her hair. “It’s okay.”
“Does this make you happy?” she asked. “Even a little?”
Her mouth only inches from his. Her breath sweet and warm.
“More than a little.”
“Are you happy with Allison?”
“She’s a good person, Chloe.”
He lifted a hand to her shoulder. Stroked her there with his thumb.
“Were you happy with me?” she asked.
“How could you think I wasn’t?”
He knew exactly how she could think it. Because he’d spent the year before Brendan’s death sullen and sulky as a little boy. Because he’d spent his nights drinking and staring at the Internet instead of trying to explain to Chloe how he felt. Because he’d been a pussy.
“I always wanted you to be,” Chloe said.
“I was,” he said. “Were you happy with me?”
“As happy as someone could possibly be.” A corner of her mouth twitched. Maybe she was thinking of her own lost time, her own failures. How little, at the end of every day as Brendan’s mother, she’d had left to give him. “I wish you knew that.”
He pushed a strand of hair from her cheek. “I knew.”
She said, “Please don’t doubt I loved you.”
But he had. He’d doubted happiness, he’d doubted fatherhood—all his loves. He knew, now—he knew painfully and completely—how much of all three he’d wasted. Maybe this was what Brendan had come back to tell him: Don’t waste it again.
He opened his arms and turned sideways; Chloe did the same, and they held each other tightly.
She said, “Do you think we’ll ever be happy again? As happy as we were?”
“I don’t know. I hope so.”
“I keep telling myself that if I can help him, I’ll be able—finally—to open my eyes. To live like something other than a crazy woman. But do you think that’s really true?”
“I want both of us to be happy,” he said.
“Do we deserve it?”
The question stunned him—maybe because he’d spent so much of his time apart from Chloe asking it of himself, every damned day.
“You tell me.”
Chloe cupped his cheek in her palm, stared directly into his eyes.
“If we help him. If we do that, we might.”
He inhaled her scent. Put his hand over hers, on his chest. His skin tingled; his blood surged.
She lifted herself, blotted out the overhead light. Her mouth opened and moved forward and pressed against his.
He thought this: Maybe they wouldn’t ever be happy, he and Chloe. But whatever they were, whoever they had been, in the end they deserved each other.