Before Mark could answer, Sam said, “I understand. I think I can. If I was in your shoes—if you had died, and I heard you were back—I’d go and see for myself. I’d want to know. I’d want that story to be true, no matter how much I doubted it beforehand—”
“My mind is made up,” Mark said again.
“That is exactly why someone whose mind isn’t should be with you.”
“Dad—”
Sam leaned forward. “This wouldn’t be the first time in history that a group of otherwise rational people decided, en masse, to believe in a falsehood,” he said, before beginning to count them off on his fingers. “There’s gold in them thar hills. A prehistoric monster lives in the lake. My neighbor is a witch. The Jews are vermin.”
“Christ, Dad. I’m not about to—to commit genocide.”
“No,” Sam said. “But consider the larger point. What concerns me most is this, this psychic. She’s a fraud—I’d stake a lot of money on that. And if Chloe’s paying money to her church, then I am very concerned. Do you know how much she’s handed over?”
Mark could only shake his head.
His father said, “There has been no more reliable source of fraud and confidence scams throughout history than those people who claim to speak to the dead. And do you know why? Because no one is more gullible than a person in grief.”
Mark rubbed at his eyes. “I got it, Dad. Thank you. But I have to do this. I’ve come too far, and I’ve given up too much—”
“There.” His father jabbed a finger at the air. “We agree. You have. That means they have you right where they want you. You ask this psychic what happens if her ritual doesn’t work. You’ve got the ideal night, all the arrows lined up. But if it doesn’t work? What’s next?”
Mark didn’t want to say that he’d already asked that question. That he’d already heard it might take more than one session.
“Would you have to keep, what, making donations?”
“I don’t know,” Mark said.
“You would,” Sam told him. “I’m sure of it. Once you’re on the string, they’ll keep getting their money.”
“Dad—”
“Let me come along,” Sam said. “Let me observe.”
Mark could tell Trudy: This is Brendan’s grandfather. He’s the memento I brought.
But what would Chloe say, if Sam came along? And if he brought a stranger—someone who might be an obstacle—Mark could imagine the way Trudy’s objections might run.
“No,” Mark said. “I can’t let you.”
His father, just as Mark did, worked his jaw when he was upset; his muscles pulsed below his cheekbones.
Mark said, “I’m on top of things. You didn’t raise an idiot.”
Sam’s eyes were hard now. “I know I didn’t. All right, let me ask you this. You’re in love again, fine. But what happens to you two, you and Chloe, if this turns out to be a scam?”
Mark had no answer, and Sam could see it.
“Chloe loves you. But she loved you before—and she abandoned you. She needs you to help Brendan. So you meet with her, full of doubt—and just three days later you’re both desperately in love, and you’ve left your fiancée, and you’re meeting with a psychic.” His father swallowed. “I could interpret that story a couple of different ways.”
Mark stood up. “I can’t even begin to tell you how wrong you are.”
His father said, “So what’s Chloe going to say when she hears about Allison? The baby?”
Mark had no answer for this, either. “I need to help Brendan,” he said. “Everything else is secondary.”
His father pinched the bridge of his nose. He bent forward. When he lifted his head again, Mark saw that his thin lashes were damp. Mark was stunned; he had only ever seen Sam cry twice: at his wife’s funeral, and at Brendan’s.
Sam stood, poured himself more coffee, and sat down. He wiped again at his eyes. “May I tell you a story? It has relevance, today, that I hoped it might never have.”
Mark’s anger dissipated into a sour vapor. No, he thought. Whatever it is.
Sam said, “I once tried to leave your mother. And you.”
For a moment the words didn’t register.
“I promised your mother I’d never tell you,” Sam said. “But now I think I have to.”
“Dad—”
“Shush.” His eyes slitted, and Mark saw that his father’s tears had risen from anger, not sadness. “I promised her when she was dying. But now might be a good time to say I don’t believe the dead give a ripe shit about our promises.”
Mark could only stare. His father stared back—maybe defiant, maybe frightened, maybe both—then began to speak.
His mistress’s name, Sam would not reveal.
He first met her in 1980, when Sam was thirty—married, a father—Mark was ten—and a junior professor at the university, his first book in the process of being written. The woman was twenty-five, a PhD candidate in history at Indiana University. They first spoke over the phone—she was a friend’s student; she had called him about a research question—and thereafter they began corresponding about nineteenth-century American politics. Sam sent her books and articles. He invited her to submit a paper for a panel he was chairing at a conference; the paper turned out to be exceptional. Sam thought its author was probably a genius.
When he met her in person, at the conference—when she was no longer a student but a kind of colleague—he was smitten. She was a tall redhead, very much unlike his wife, and though she wasn’t classically beautiful, she was pretty in a way that seemed to speak intensely, privately, to him. She was interested wholly in the very same tiny niche of human knowledge that interested him; she admired the parts of his mind that his wife didn’t pretend to understand. They each, he came to think, saw the best in the other, in ways others did not. The woman had just broken off an engagement. And Sam—
“There’s no mystery to it,” Sam said. “Your mother and I, we were—”
“Were what?” Mark asked, hoarse.
“In a rough patch. She was involved in the raising of you and I was away, a great deal. She wanted more children and I didn’t.”
Mark had never known this. He’d asked his mother a hundred times during his childhood why he’d never had a brother or a sister. Oh honey, she’d always told him, you’re more than enough for us.
Sam kept talking. His work demanded all the time he could give it, and some he could not. He had just grown old enough to realize, for the first time, the full range of his promises. His marriage and his career: Till death would he part from each. And each, in turn, had become troubled, harder by far than he’d ever supposed.
Even through his shock, Mark couldn’t believe how similar much of Sam’s story was to his own—to the way he’d felt with Chloe when, before Brendan’s death, they’d begun to grow apart. He’d barely seen his wife, then; when he did see her they spoke only of Brendan, of bills and deadlines and schedules. His professional ambitions had led him in a circle. He worked harder than he ever had, yet looked forward to nothing.
Sam told him he’d begun to correspond more and more with the woman. Their letters turned to phone calls. Then she began to appear at his office door—she had family in Indianapolis; she had every reason to make the drive from Bloomington, and then to stop in for friendly chats. They had long talks about her dissertation, his book. They traded each other’s work and offered comment. Once Sam asked her if she’d like him to serve as an outside member of her dissertation committee, and she blushed.
I think we’re too close for that, she told him. I don’t want to be afraid of you.
Sam was surprised, but he did not contradict her.
“And then, one afternoon,” Sam said, “she surprised me again. She appeared at my office door after my last class and, without much preamble, told me she loved me.”
Sitting in the plush chair in front of Sam’s desk, she told him she knew he was married, and assumed he was married happily. She told him she didn’t expect the response she really wanted. But, she said, she couldn’t keep silent about it, and she hoped he understood. She was prepared never to see him again.
“She risked everything to say this to me,” Sam said. “I was in a position to make her career very difficult. I could have, and should have, told her to stay away. But what she’d done, in telling me…” He stared at the front of the refrigerator as though it were a television screen. “That morning, driving in to school, I would have said I was happily married. I wouldn’t have admitted any boredom or trouble. But then she was in front of me, saying what she said, and I was helpless—” He stopped himself, lifting a hand. “I was sure I was helpless to stop myself.”
Sam gave no details, but Mark could imagine well enough what had happened: Sam shutting the big wooden door of his office. Turning back to the redheaded young woman who was maybe, probably, crying in front of his desk.
What his father meant was this: They’d fucked right then and there. On the rug, on the desk, maybe in the big chair in the corner where Sam did his grading, in the soft yellow light cast by the Tiffany lamp.
The same chair where Mark had spent many an afternoon, at that age, reading his Hardy Boys mysteries, his Troll paperbacks—his ghost stories—while his father did paperwork at his desk. His father sometimes taught in summer; Mark often went with him and spent the day at Butler. He read there, drew pictures, or even napped, alone, while Sam taught a class or attended a meeting.
Sometimes people had knocked on the door while Mark was alone in the office: colleagues, students. Almost everyone in the building knew Mark, knew he liked to come to work with his father. The students were charmed by him. He remembered several women—tall and beautiful and threatening—who’d stood in the doorway, smiling down at him, asking for Professor Fife.
One woman, whose face Mark could not remember, had asked, You’re Sam’s son? I’ve heard a lot about you.
Had the woman’s hair been red? Mark thought perhaps it had.
Tell him——stopped by.
I will, he’d have said, and then he’d have written down the woman’s name on the yellow notepad on his father’s desk.
His father kept talking:
He and the woman, he said, grew obsessed with each other. Sam began working late—he lied to Molly, told her he’d taken on a night class—in order to meet the woman for an hour or two in a motel, two nights a week.
His father told him: Each time he left the motel, and this woman’s arms, and drove the long forty minutes into the country, to the house where his wife and son slept, he found time to despair.
“I wanted everything,” his father said. “Her. And Molly, too. And my life before I was married and had a child, before everything I did took on life-and-death importance. I wanted impossibility.” Sam smiled ruefully. “And, of course, I wanted you.”
His father carried on his affair with the woman for well over a year. She was coming up on the end of her degree, and, because of her brilliance, she was guaranteed to find a university job, somewhere—but likely far away from Indianapolis. The closer her graduation and departure drew, the more Sam promised her things he shouldn’t have promised: That he loved her too much to let her leave him. That he would leave his wife and his child. That he would marry her, that they would have children of their own. That they would be professors together, king and queen of some campus far away.
“All my life,” his father said, “I thought I had integrity. I prided myself on my word meaning something. Having value. But suddenly I heard myself saying things I couldn’t make true. That had no value at all.”
He stopped. Considered his words. He hadn’t yet looked Mark in the eye.
“Molly caught me,” he said. “An old, banal story. The woman had slipped a note into one of my pockets that I didn’t find. Maybe she was trying to get me caught. Maybe she knew I had bullshit spilling out of my ears and needed to be put to the test. In the end it doesn’t matter. Your mother found out and confronted me.
“I would like to say I gave in easily. That I dropped to my knees and swore love and devotion and apologies. That I cried in regret. But I didn’t.”
Mark remembered this time, now—the period during his childhood when his father had been unaccountably angry, distant; when he’d often as not grunted at Mark as answered his questions. Trouble at school, was the story his mother and father both told.
He wondered now if he’d gone to work with his father so often because his mother had been suspicious.
Tell your father I stopped by.
Mark remembered another night, from that time. One summer night his mother roused him from bed and asked him if he’d like to go for a late dessert at the Dairy Queen, fifteen minutes from their house, on the outskirts of Westover. Of course he’d said yes. They drove down the dark dirt roads in his mother’s little brown Monza, the windows down, the air smelling of fertile earth and kicked-up dust. Before they’d left the house, he’d asked her, Is Dad home? And she’d said, No. He’s staying at his office tonight. Her voice mild—she was always mild—but her lips tight around a cigarette.
At the Dairy Queen they both drank milkshakes at a picnic table on the edge of the parking lot, the air still warm enough to make their plastic cups sweat. They didn’t speak; instead his mother watched a group of teenagers—many of whom Mark knew from the school bus—laughing and punching one another’s shoulders at another table.
When their shakes were done, his mother had asked, Do you mind if we keep sitting here? And he’d said, No. He was mystified by her behavior, by being allowed to be awake and out of the house, to be eating sweets at ten in the evening, but he didn’t dare question it. The DQ closed even as his mother smoked and watched the cars rolling by. Finally she seemed to remember herself. Tell me about the book you’re reading, she said.
His belly full, his veins surging with sugar, he happily recounted to her the story of Taran, an Assistant Pig-Keeper, and his slow rise to becoming the savior of Prydain. How Taran came, over the course of many adventures, to love Princess Eilonwy—a development that, at the time, had made him thrill in secret. He’d known of Taran’s love even before Taran had.
When he’d finished, his mother said, Boys don’t often get to have adventures like they do in books. You know that, right?
I know. That’s why I like books.
She reached over and brushed his hair from his cheek. That’s right, she said. Don’t forget, okay?
Sam said, now, “I told her I wanted to leave her.”
“Dad,” Mark said.
“Here’s your mother for you,” Sam said. “She said I couldn’t. Just like that. We had a terrible fight, but she stuck to her guns. She told me I was a fool. She told me—your tiny mother told me—that she’d rather kill me than have our son grow up with a father who’d left him. She said at least then you would know you were loved.”
Mark covered his mouth.
“None of this meant I didn’t love you,” Sam said, watching him carefully. “None of it meant I didn’t love Molly. But I fought anyway. I had a vision, and I fought for it.
“Your son, your mother kept saying. Don’t do this to your son.
“And you know what? I never left. I gave your mother a list of grievances, and she pointed out that all of them were foolish. And I stayed to argue. The woman I’d been seeing called the house, and your mother told her not to call anymore. And I stayed.
“The woman I’d loved stopped calling. I stopped calling her. Your mother and I spent a summer frozen, each of us watching the other. And that was my time, Mark. I could have left, I could have asserted myself. But I didn’t. One night I told your mother what she already knew. I announced I would stay, if she’d have me. And she said she would.”
Sam’s eyes were wet. “None of this meant I didn’t love the other woman. I did. I loved her desperately. But I called her one last time and told her what she’d already figured out: that I could not leave my family.”
“Dad,” Mark said again. He could have kept saying it.
He saw his father in his mother’s hospital room, bending over her wizened body—suddenly, unnaturally still—and pressing his lips against hers, and then Sam’s living body shuddering and shuddering, his fists gripping the sheets of the hospital bed into bunches, before Mark at last went to him and put his arms around him and pulled him back.
His father, giving a kiss to his dead wife as though he expected her to wake to it.
“I stayed,” Sam said. “And you never knew, did you? But even now, I regret the betrayal of you. The time I lost with you. The reasons I found to ignore you. I want you to know that. When I decided to stay, I told myself I was going to relearn you. To see you through to the man you would become. This was what I lived for. And watching that happen—watching you learn, and meet Chloe, and have a child of your own—”
Mark should be moved by this, he knew, but now he was angry; he felt a child’s need to swipe away his father’s outstretched hands.
Or maybe he was angry at Allison, for being pregnant, or at Chloe, for loving him again. Or at Brendan, for bringing these problems to him. For sneaking down the stairs; for forgetting to tie his shoe.
His father seemed to be waiting for Mark to say something. To judge him, maybe.
Mark asked, “What happened to the woman?”
Sam said, “She’s married, now. She’s a professor at a more prestigious university than mine, and she publishes more frequently than I do, and we see each other once a year or so, since we know all the same people and go to the same conferences. She never lets me forget that I’m a liar. She hates me, hates me utterly.”
Sam regarded him. “But that’s not what you want to know, is it? I still love her. I do. What I promised her was a lie, but what I felt was real.” He shrugged. “The worst part is that she knows. She thinks of me not only as a man who broke her heart, but as a coward.”
With this, Sam let out some final reserve of air he’d been holding in. “Well. Those are my sins.”
He held out his hand on top of the table. Mark didn’t swipe it away. He reached out, almost against his will, and held it. Sam returned his grip tightly.
“Last night, and on the drive out here, I fought with myself. Do I tell you? Do I not? Do I give you advice? Do I not? I had no answer, and I still don’t. I don’t know what to tell you about Brendan. You’re right—I don’t think I can make myself believe in a ghost. But I know that if Allison is pregnant, and has a baby, I will have a grandchild again. You will be a father again.
“It’s a long and strange life,” Sam said. “I have regrets. I miss two women now. But in the end I know this.” He looked Mark right in the eye. “I didn’t leave my son for a fantasy.”
“A fantasy?”
His father did not drop his gaze.
“I’m not leaving my son, either,” Mark told him. “You have to understand that.”
After that there wasn’t much more to say. Sam stood—older, now; deflated—and told Mark he’d stay in a hotel. Mark offered him the townhouse, but Sam refused. Still, he said, he wanted news. He wanted Mark to call him. He wanted Mark to promise him, and finally Mark did.
Then his father was standing, was pulling on his coat, disappointed and slow.
At the front door he told Mark to take care. He held out his hand, and Mark shook it—then pulled him into an embrace. “I hope someday I can make you understand,” he said.
Sam didn’t answer. But at the bottom of the snowy steps he turned and said, “Give my love to Chloe.”
When he was gone, Mark walked upstairs, to gather as quickly as he could what he needed for the evening. He pulled a zippered portfolio bag out of his office closet, then retrieved his sketches of Brendan and slid them inside. After a moment’s thought, he returned to the closet and, from a box far in the back, removed a few pieces of Brendan’s own artwork: a Christmas card that opened onto a crayoned, bulbous Santa; a creased piece of construction paper upon which Brendan had, for the first time, scrawled his own name.
Mark held this piece of paper in his hand for a long time. Now he was overcome by the idea of himself with another child—a daughter. He saw her clearly: brown-haired, brown-eyed, pudgy-faced. A real child, a living child.
Mark tucked the zippered case beneath his arm, then walked down the hall to the bedroom, to pack his clothes.
The bedroom was a mess. Allie had packed her own bags, today, and had left what she didn’t need strewn across the floor and bed.
Mark tried not to think about Allie’s curses, his father’s arguments, but both reverberated. Mark was a bad lover, a bad son. Without ever quite meaning to, he had become the worst of liars.
He remembered Jacob Pelham’s sly, guilty face.
Mark sat down on the edge of the bed and closed his eyes and cast his mind back to Brendan’s old room, to the faint, flickering touch that had roused him, to the footsteps running from him, away and down the stairs.
Brendan.
I felt you, didn’t I? You called for me and I came to find you. You came to me, and you ran through me, and I heard you and felt you and then your footsteps were on the stairs. You were real.
You have to be real. You have to be.
Mark could see Allie’s last minutes in the room; he watched her throwing clothes into her suitcase; sitting, maybe, where he now sat; crying and crying.
You have to be real, little man.
Because if you aren’t, neither am I.
Mark was almost to the stairs, carrying his suitcase, when he remembered his phone charger. He dropped the bag and returned to his office. The charger was plugged into the same power strip as the computer; he freed it, then tucked it into the inside pocket of his coat. Then he stared at his desk. He might not be back here for several days—as much as he didn’t want to think about work right now, he should take his laptop with him, at least, to be safe. He turned on the desktop computer and began to sync his calendar, to transfer some of his smaller project files to a portable drive. He still had bills, deadlines—though they had come to seem more surreal to him than the memory of Brendan’s bedroom had been.
Especially if he and Allie weren’t going to be splitting the rent anymore. Especially if he was going to be the father of a child again.
A father, a father—Christ, Brendan, did you know? If you know so much, how come you couldn’t know this?
Maybe Brendan didn’t. Maybe he couldn’t. And maybe that was because Jacob had lied, and Brendan wasn’t real at all.
Witches in Salem. The Jews at Birkenau. The dead at Jonestown. The men and women and children who walked into crowded squares in Israel and Syria and Iraq, strapped to nail bombs. The men who’d carried box cutters onto those airplanes, certain of an eternity populated with virgins.
But those were the extremes. What about the more mundane people Mark had always pitied, mocked: the audiences at televised sermons? Every time he flipped through the backwater channels of the television he saw vast seas of them in their megachurches, their arms outstretched, their eyes closed, speaking to the unseen while their pastors exhorted them to give, give. Were he and Chloe any different from them?
He remembered Trudy Weill, his hands in hers. Isn’t that a comfort?
The computer was running, now. For the first time since meeting Trudy, Mark was alone with an open Internet connection. Given what he’d done, what he still planned to do, he could afford to spend a few minutes checking up on her. Couldn’t he?
He decided he could. He owed his old life that much.
His first search, for “Gertrude Weill,” turned up only one credible hit: a crude website for a Church of the White Light, in Kent, Michigan. The site’s main graphic was a photograph of the church itself: a single-story stone house, sandwiched between a bean field in sprout and a gravel parking lot.
Below this was a mission statement: The Church of the White Light is a spiritualist haven, open to all seekers who would find peace in true knowledge of Heaven and Christ. The CWL does not discriminate against any color or creed. Our only interest is in seeing the acts of Jesus Christ inspire as many of our brethren as possible. The CWL is founded on a positive principle: that the spirits of those who have passed, and whom He holds close, may offer our flock guidance in His will.
Farther down the page was a picture of Trudy and Warren, maybe taken at a Sears portrait studio—the background was mottled brown-and-white drapery. Trudy’s scar had been turned away from the camera—the picture showed only two plain, pious, white Midwesterners, each attempting a beatific smile. The caption beneath it read:
Pastor, Warren Weill; Medium, Gertrude Weill. “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” Rom 13:10.
Other than a listing of service times—Sunday morning and Wednesday night—and directions to the church, the site contained little information, and certainly nothing about Trudy’s private work.
He searched again, for “Trudy Weill medium.” This time over a hundred hits came back, almost all of them linked to posts on message boards. By far the board with the largest number of links was one titled SpiritualistNet.
Trudy Weill’s name first appeared, here, in a post titled: HELP Looking for reputable mediums? The poster believed his mother’s ghost was still present in her apartment. How do I find someone worth my time + who wont take my money??
Someone from Waukegan, Illinois, had replied: Trudy Weill works through a spiritualist church in Kent, MI, and can be reached through the website for the Church of the White Light. She also works in private consultation, either to reach lost spirits or to cleanse homes with resident spirits. My sister and I contacted her in 1997 to help us reach the spirit of our father, who remained in residence in our home after his untimely death in 1985. We went to a number of so-called mediums before Trudy was recommended to us. She is very kind and good, and traveled a long distance to our home and helped lead Dad to rest. You’re right to be wary of frauds, but believe me, Trudy is the Real Deal.
Someone in Las Vegas answered immediately:
—What does she charge?
The original poster:
—A donation to the CWL (her church). But you might be too far away for her.
—How much did you donate?
—That is between me and the church. I donated what I felt was right. I was told what past clients had donated and did not feel pressured to match that. The amount was four figures I can say that but I was happy to pay it.
Another poster, from Indiana:
—Sounds like a lot.
—Not for what she did for us.
More testimonials piled up, almost all of them from people in Michigan or Indiana or Ohio.
A poster from Flint:
—Trudy Weill was a godsend to us. After three sessions we were able to communicate with Harold. We told him, through her, to go forward into the tunnel (what she says They see), and he finally did so. This was traumatic for us and for Trudy too but in every case she was professional and kind and counseled us before and after our sessions. Our house has been at rest since, just as Harold has. I did indeed make a donation to the CWL. I want to support the Weills in all they do. And if you live in MI go to the CWL and attend a service. Trudy will ask the spirits about Jesus and His Will and they answer. I wish her church was in my town; It is the only one I’ve been to that makes sense.
—My child Marcy passed from encephalitis in 2003. Since she has gone I have been sure I felt her in the house. We contacted Trudy, and she was great. We are very poor and we didn’t donate much but I felt I should thank her and would give her more if I could.
Finally, near the bottom of the thread, Mark saw that someone named KLovell, from South Bend, had posted under the title BEWARE THE WEILLS!
—I know this comment will be flagged or even deleted as it has been before. I just want everyone here to hear our story. My husband and I paid over 10,000 dollars to the Weills via the CWL and had agreed to pay another 5000 for a new session before we realized we were being scammed. After two sessions without results I saw that what Ms. Weill does is clearly an act. Basically these people tell you everything you want to hear. We fired them in effect. Ms. Weill’s husband contacted us and put the hard sell on us for that extra five K and he was unpleasant to say the least. I am sorry to have been talked into this and feel very stupid and would urge anyone who is thinking of letting the Weills into their home to contact me at the following address: klovell365@gmail.com. I am thinking of filing suit to reclaim my money.
A response, from someone named pray2king, had been posted right away:
—So why isn’t your husband on here with his side of things? I find that suspicious. Did you both agree or did you decide for him? The Weills helped me and my wife! You have given up too soon on giving your loved one her peace.
KLovell had replied:
—I will not comment except to note this type of statement is typical of my phone conversations with Warren Weill.
A slew of postings had followed, almost all of them pro–Trudy and Warren.
Someone from St. Ignace, Michigan, replied:
—I donated something similar. Warren asked that I donate according to my means. I do not miss the money and feel at peace with what has happened. Klovell, I’m sorry you had a bad experience but as Trudy says you can’t have a successful session with so much negative energy in your heart. I would suggest you try again only with a more open mind. Love knows no walls.
Fifty happy people. One doubter, shouted away.
Mark remembered something he’d once read in a book of true crime: The best con artists never leave anyone feeling taken. None of their victims ever knows there’s been a crime.
He powered down the computer and left the townhouse for good.
The roads had improved, but even so it was nearly two o’clock when Mark parked in front of Chloe’s apartment building. The apartment, when she opened the door, smelled oddly of Christmas, of mulling spice. Chloe wore faded jeans and a red T-shirt; she was barefoot, and her hair was pulled sloppily back. She smiled, her eyes sad and sweet, and kissed him in the doorway.
Only his repeating thoughts—Allie’s pregnant, Allie’s pregnant—kept him from pulling her down to the floor right there.
She said, “I was starting to get worried.”
He dropped his suitcase. “Allison was there.”
Chloe was instantly wary.
“I told her,” he said.
On the way over he’d decided—in the interest of confining any negative energy to himself—to say nothing yet about the baby.
“It was bad,” he said. “I’m not a good person, Chloe.”
She took his hand and led him inside, to the couch. “You’re not going to convince me of that.” She kissed him again. Her breath tasted of cinnamon gum, and behind it, maybe, a cigarette. “You did what you had to. Allison will survive this.”
For the first time since he’d come back to her, Mark heard a coldness in Chloe’s voice: She’ll get over it.
He said, again, “She doesn’t deserve this.”
Chloe said, “Neither did we, honey. But here we are.”
Honey. Would Chloe call him this when he told her that, in eight months, he’d be spending half his time with a child who looked like Allie? That this child would play on their rug, would sleep in a bed down the hall?
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Tomorrow, maybe,” he said. “Let’s get through tonight first.”
“It’s okay. Really.”
Her shoulders fell. “They tried to talk you out of it, didn’t they? Sam tried.”
“Yeah.”
“Goddamn it—”
“Don’t be angry. What else would you expect?”
Chloe was shaking her head. “They don’t know. They just don’t.”
“No.”
“You really told her?” Chloe asked.
“I did.”
Chloe kissed him again. Hard. She dropped her hand to the front of his jeans. He’d wondered, on the drive back, whether he’d be able to hide his news, let alone feel desire—but those thoughts were destroyed, now, as he pulled at Chloe’s shirt, at her belt. Today he had earned a good woman’s hatred, and yet here was Chloe, her body, her mouth, her wide cornflower eyes, blinking and soft, only inches from his own. Urging him on. Thanking him.
Rewarding him for his trust, his faith.
In the bedroom, once they’d finished, Mark couldn’t stop himself: “Chloe? Can I ask you something?”
Chloe lifted her head from the hollow of his shoulder and nodded.
“What happens when he’s gone? When he’s there, and we’re here?”
Chloe rolled up onto an elbow. “We go on. You and me.”
“You’re sure?”
She held his gaze. “I told you. I can’t do without you. Not again.”
He wanted to ask her more: Will you still love me if it turns out we’re wrong? Will you still love me when I’m a father to Allie’s child? Yet despite all that had happened between them, he was afraid.
Chloe said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s just an idea,” she said.
“Say it.”
She sat up and pulled the comforter around her shoulders. Then she told him, hesitantly, her plan. She had a lot of money in the bank. She’d always been good about saving money—in the seven years since Brendan’s death she’d bought almost nothing beyond necessities, had taken no vacations, and she still had half her share of the money from the sale of the old house. All told, she said, she had a little over a hundred thousand dollars in the bank.
“That’s a little less than half of what the house is worth now,” she said. “Connie and her ex are desperate to sell the place. And he’s a bank executive.”
Mark began to understand.
Even without Mark’s money, Chloe told him, she thought she might be able to get financing; Connie’s ex would help the loan along. But—if Mark wanted to—the two of them together would be a snap to get approval for a new mortgage.
She stroked his hand. “What I’m saying is, we could start over. You and me, again. In our house.”
He breathed in and out.
“It’s ours,” Chloe said. “I’ve never stopped thinking that.”
“But,” he said, finally, “wouldn’t it be too strange? Being there when he’s gone?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But it was happy for us once. It could be happy again. That’s up to us, isn’t it?”
Mark saw Allison standing in the front doorway of the Locust house, bouncing a dark-eyed toddler on her hip. Saying, Hi, Chloe, like poison.
“It’s ours,” Chloe said, and rested her cheek against his chest. “It feels wrong without us there. That’s all I was thinking.”
Chloe slept. Mark wasn’t tired at all. The day’s events, the unguessable future, began to sway and loom. He got up and walked naked down the hall to the bathroom, then went to the kitchen, where he leaned against the sink and downed a glass of water.
The old house, theirs again: A future as inconceivable to him, right now, as a heaven. As being a father once more.
He had just put his glass in the dishwasher when he saw that Chloe’s purse was open on the counter, not far from the cooling spice cake she had whipped up to take with them to the Pelham’s. Just visible inside was a leather checkbook.
As far as he could tell, Chloe still slept soundly. Carefully, he lifted out the checkbook and flipped quickly through the last carbons.
He didn’t have to look far to spot the check she’d written to the Church of the White Light. Chloe had filled it out yesterday—she must have given it to Warren in the kitchen. It was for five thousand dollars.
He flipped back farther—rent, Verizon, Kroger—but saw nothing else made out to the Weills. Chloe had made only one payment—one donation, rendered in advance of tonight’s session. Five grand, just like that.
When he opened her purse again, to drop the checkbook back into place, he saw a small brown pill bottle with no label. He lifted it. The pills inside were oddly shaped, odd-sounding. He uncapped the vial and tipped the contents out into his palm.
Teeth, clicking together like yellowed pearls. Brendan’s baby teeth. Five of them, tiny and impossibly smooth and cold. Chloe’s talismans, for the ritual to come—he was sure of it.
He dropped them carefully back into the vial, capped it, and dropped it back into her purse. Then he crept down the hallway to her bed and held her tightly while she slept, and he did not.