At four thirty he roused Chloe. They prepared for their evening in silence.
Mark sorted through the jumble of clothing in his suitcase, trying to decide: How might one dress, in order to attend a séance for one’s son? He ended up choosing black slacks and a buttondown shirt. He put on a dark sport coat, too, and wondered idly whether Brendan would recognize him.
Chloe dressed in a long black skirt and a white blouse, a dress jacket too, and black boots. “Ready?” she asked him, when she’d done her hair and her makeup. She was lovely, he thought, achingly so.
A piercing premonition racked him. Their time together, he was sure—despite their promises—was coming to its end.
“We can do this,” she said, smiling, after a glance at his face. “Mark—It’s going to be all right.”
Mark drove them to the old house in the Volvo. The night sky spit handfuls of sleet at the windshield, and with each explosive patter, Chloe—who had never been a relaxed passenger—let out a gasp. They held hands but did not speak.
Halfway to Victorian Village, Warren Weill called Chloe’s phone. She answered and relayed the message to Mark: Warren and Trudy were having trouble on the roads, and would be late. He’d suggested everyone have a glass of wine, to ease themselves.
Mark thought of Sam, frowning, insisting he should come along.
Chloe slipped her hand over his knee. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” he told her.
When they parked in front of the old house, almost every light in the place was blazing, including the one in Brendan’s old room. Mark saw a shadow moving there, behind the drawn shade, and tightened his hands on the wheel.
He opened Chloe’s door for her; without saying anything more they mounted the slippery porch steps, leaning against each other.
Connie opened the door before they knocked. She had dressed up, too; she wore black slacks and heels, and a tight gray sweater. Large silver hoops dangled from her ears. “Chloe, Mark! Welcome. Or maybe I should say, welcome back.”
Her line fell flat. “Thank you,” Chloe said, smiling anyway. They walked past Connie into the house.
Mark followed Chloe into the family room, and glanced around him; he hadn’t visited it, the other night. Connie had decorated it as a library; several tall, dark-stained bookshelves hugged the walls, which had been repainted a dark, coppery brown. A love seat and two deep chairs were arranged on a rug in the room’s center. Behind him Connie was accepting the spice cake from Chloe. Mark glanced at one of the shelves nearest to him, saw Dickens, Austen, and even Wilkie Collins.
He had been misjudging Connie. She wasn’t stupid. The more likely story—one he hadn’t allowed himself to see—was that she was just like Jacob: bookish and shy, blinkered by the world as it was.
Connie appeared beside him. “I love this room,” she said. Her voice was still nervous, tentative, as though she was afraid he might snap at her. “I can open the windows to the porch in spring. And we wanted—I wanted—someplace with no television, you know?”
They’d had the television in this room when they lived here; this was where Mark had been sitting, seven years ago today, when Brendan fell.
“I like what you’ve done with it,” he told her.
Chloe filled Connie in on the Weills’ progress as they walked through the living room—lit with scented candles, as well as the floor lamps—past the stairwell and to the kitchen. In the full light, the house seemed to have expanded out and up. As he’d been the other night, Mark was struck by the lack of artwork, the unfinishedness of the house; lit and inhabited, it seemed even emptier than it had in the dark.
In the kitchen Connie said, “Well, we should do what Mr. Weill asked, right?” and produced a bottle of wine from the pantry. She held it out for Mark to examine: an expensive-looking Pinot, filmed with dust.
“I’ll be fine with water,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, taken aback. “Well, I have club soda?”
He thanked her. Connie poured his drink first, and was nice enough to slice a lime for him, too. Then she and Chloe wrestled the wine cork.
“Where’s Jacob?” Mark asked.
Connie adopted a clownish, sour frown and said, “But Mom, I just got my new comics.” She shook her head, walked to the stairwell, and called: “Jacob! Come down!” Then she sighed to Mark and Chloe. “I don’t get him. Yesterday he was excited, asking me all these questions: Mom, are there going to be candles? Mom, are we going to sing? But he’s been moping today.”
Mark’s stomach shrank on itself. “It’s got to be a scary thing for a kid to think about.”
“Well, sure.” Connie lowered her voice. “I think meeting you was part of it, Mark. He’s so weird about male figures, you know. His dad and all.” Then she smiled. “He asked me a bunch of questions about you.”
“Like what?” he asked, as Chloe slipped her hand into his.
“Do you think Mr. Fife is nice? Do you think he really liked my picture? That sort of thing.” She shouted again: “Jacob Pelham!”
His entire day bore down upon him: Allison’s pregnancy. His father’s talk of con artists. And now Jacob Pelham, in hiding.
Mark put on what he hoped was a warm smile. “Tell you what, Connie. Do you think it would be okay if I went upstairs and got him?”
Chloe squeezed his hand; he squeezed back.
“Oh!” Connie said. “Would you? He’s got all his drawings up there—he’d be thrilled to show them to you.” She sighed again. “He’s such a complicated little guy.”
“He reminds me a lot of myself,” Mark said.
He walked slowly up the stairs, trailing his hands across the old, textured wallpaper. He’d been here only a few nights ago, but the steps seemed strange again, the weird echoey meld of Chloe’s and Connie’s voices fading behind him. He stopped on the landing; now, in the brighter light, the spot of Brendan’s death seemed much smaller, much more innocuous than it had been the other night in the dark. Stepping through it, however, still left him light-headed, his palms damp.
Give me a sign. Brendan, anything. Don’t make me do this.
Mark closed his eyes; his fingertips touched the walls. But Brendan did not come to him. The house—which just a few nights ago had felt like a pulsing, breathing, secretive beast—remained straight and warm and silent.
In the upstairs hallway the overhead light was blazing. The door to Brendan’s old bedroom was shut. This time the only open doorway led to what had once been the guest room, but which now had to be Jacob Pelham’s bedroom.
Jacob appeared then in the doorway, in jeans and a too-tight T-shirt and stocking feet. When he saw Mark standing in the hallway he drew back in fright.
Mark said, “Hi, Jacob.”
“Oh!” Jacob said. “I didn’t see you there.”
Mark said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Jacob nodded, still blinking.
“Can I come see your room? Your mom says you’ve got a lot of artwork up.”
“Um,” Jacob said, “Sure.” He pointed behind him. “It’s—it’s this one.”
The room was a cramped mess: a riot of color and books and heaps of clothes. A pile of comic books were fanned out beneath a desk lamp, clipped to the top of a small drawing table abutting the foot of the bed. Along the other wall were a child-size bureau and several deep shelves that held long boxes full of comics. Jacob had papered the high walls with posters and drawings of superheroes—including, above his bed, a horizontal poster of Batman, crouched on the edge of a rooftop, his cape billowing out behind him like a storm cloud.
The air smelled, unpleasantly, of little boy—of unwashed clothing and grime and old, congealed soda pop.
Jacob said, “You can sit in the desk chair.” He flopped on his bed; his jeans rode down on his hip, exposing a strip of elastic torn away from the rest of his underwear.
When he dropped down, what Mark had thought to be a small pillow on Jacob’s bed turned into an enormous orange-and-white piebald cat, skittering sideways in alarm. It crouched in the corner, beside Jacob’s jumbled pillows. The cat’s eyes glowed like Batman’s.
“That’s one gigantic cat,” Mark said, sitting.
“Oh. That’s Bigwig. Here, kitty-kit.” Jacob held out his fingers and made a took-took-took sound with his tongue. The cat rose right away and crept to Jacob, trilling. “I’ve had him since he was a kitten.”
“Watership Down?” Mark asked. “That Bigwig?”
Jacob smiled, but only with one corner of his mouth, and rubbed the cat’s buzzing throat. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s basically my favorite book of all time.”
“One of mine, too,” Mark said. “I even read it aloud to Brendan one summer.”
“Really?” Jacob thought about this, and then asked, “Did he like it?”
Brendan had loved it. In fact, Mark doubted Brendan had loved anything in the real world as much as Hazel and Fiver and Bigwig. In that way he was a lot like his father.
Mark had forgotten that the book ended with the appearance of God. He’d had to explain that to Brendan, hadn’t he? What had happened to Hazel, and the identity of the strange rabbit that had come for him in his last moments.
He’d said, Look at the rabbits Hazel left behind, all safe and happy. That comforts him. In the end Hazel’s happy, even if we’re sad.
“He liked it very much,” Mark said.
They fell quiet. Jacob began to poke at a scab on his wrist. He was nervous. No—he was scared.
“Jacob,” Mark said, “the Weills will be here in a few minutes.”
“I know,” Jacob said.
“Your mother says you’ve been a little nervous today.”
Jacob shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Have you—have you been thinking about what I asked you the other day?”
Jacob nodded, so slightly Mark could barely see it.
“Do you have anything you need to say?”
Jacob dropped his chin to his chest, then shook his head.
Oh Brendan, he’s lying, he’s lying. Look at him.
Jacob said, “It’s like I told you.”
“You mean that? Even though we’re about to start the ceremony?”
Again the tiny nod.
Mark scooted his chair closer. “Jacob. Can I tell you something?”
“Sure.”
“Do you know that I’m a liar?”
Jacob blinked, with a look of stubborn incomprehension Mark hadn’t seen in a long time: Adults couldn’t have flaws. It didn’t compute.
“It’s true,” Mark said. “I didn’t used to be, but since Brendan died, I’ve lied all the time.”
How simple it sounded, when he told it like this. How awful.
“About what?” Jacob asked.
“Lots of things,” Mark said. “But mostly I lie to make people like me. If I say something they like, I keep saying it. Mostly because I’m afraid that if they don’t like me, I’ll be alone.”
“Oh,” Jacob said. Air escaping a punctured tire.
“The hardest part,” Mark told him, “the worst part, is when a lie keeps building on itself. I tell one, and then I have to tell another one to cover up the first one, and then another one, and another one. That’s taken me a long time to learn—lies seem like they solve problems, but they don’t. They never do.”
Jacob stared at his fidgeting hands.
“I lied to Chloe, when she was my wife, and just this week I lied to a woman named Allison, who I was going to marry. And neither one of them liked it very much at all. And so I had to apologize.”
Jacob said, without lifting his head, “Chloe must have forgave you.”
“She did,” Mark said, carefully. The boy was smart, so smart. “But not until I told her I’d lied. And even then it took a long time for us to trust each other again. Years and years.”
Jacob furrowed his fingers through the cat’s pelt.
“I want to let you know that if—if you’re not sure about what happened, you can say so. I’ll forgive you. I’m pretty good at it. Of all people, I have to be.”
“I told the truth,” Jacob insisted.
“Jacob. Look at me.”
Jacob did so, but only for a moment, before his eyes jerked back to his cat.
“If you’re not telling the truth, a lot of people will be hurt. Hurt in ways you don’t understand, yet. But very seriously hurt.”
“Mr. Fife,” he said, “I know. I swear I’m telling the truth.”
He stared at Jacob stroking the cat, avoiding his eyes. Mark hadn’t raised a son for seven years not to recognize how scared Jacob was. But maybe he wasn’t scared enough.
Mark said, “I talked to Trudy Weill again today. I asked her again what would happen, if there wasn’t really a ghost. And she told me something that really worries me.”
Jacob swallowed, but didn’t answer.
“She has to open a doorway,” Mark said. “And if Brendan’s on the other side, he’ll come through and talk to us. But if there’s no Brendan there, Trudy says something else might.”
This was language right out of some tattered comic book that—for all Mark knew—was sealed in a plastic bag in Jacob’s collection.
Mark said, “The thing that comes through will be stuck here, then. We could end up haunting this place with something a lot meaner than a little boy. And it’ll be you and your mom who have to live with it.”
Jacob bent close to Bigwig, whose tail switched back and forth. “Oh,” he said.
“So be sure,” Mark said. “Are you?”
Jacob’s voice was a salted whisper: “Yeah.”
“If you change your mind, you have to tell me before we get started. That’s very important.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll tell me? If you change your mind?”
Jacob nodded. “Sure.”
The boy seemed right on the verge of opening up—of collapsing, spilling out every one of his secrets. Mark waited, waited—but Jacob said nothing.
Finally Mark had to admit he’d lost. “Okay,” he said, heavily. “Go downstairs and see your mother. And tell her I’ll be down in a minute, okay?”
Jacob nodded and stood. Carrying his cat, he walked out of the room, past Mark, down the hallway to the stairs.
Mark walked down the hall, to the doorway of Brendan’s old room. Halfway there he paused and listened carefully to Jacob’s thumping descent of the steps. It sounded—he had to admit it—nothing at all like the sounds he remembered the other night. Nothing like Brendan running.
Please. Please.
Brendan’s old room was different than when Mark had last been inside: Chloe’s cushion and lamp were still arranged beside the window, but now a card table had been set up in the cleared-out center of the room, ringed by six folding chairs. In the middle of the tabletop stood two tall, unlit taper candles. Beside the candles was a book, and Mark didn’t have to approach closer to know it was a Bible.
Of course they’d do the ceremony here, where the visitations had occurred. But these things, here—they felt like a violation. Unreal and untrue.
Mark crossed the room and pulled one of the folding chairs beside the window. He sat, pushed aside the blind, and looked down onto the street. The cobbles under the streetlight were silvery, brushed over with new snow; they looked like the scales of an enormous snake.
Jacob was lying. Mark’s every instinct told him so. In the space of a day Mark had become suspicious of everything they were to do, everything that he’d cast aside his life to accomplish. Chloe was right: His father had gotten to him. Allie had gotten to him. His old self, too.
But he was suspicious, even, of this suspicion. How quickly, how easily, it had come. Here in this room, and in Chloe’s apartment, he’d been suffused with belief, with a happiness and purpose he hadn’t felt since—
Since Chloe had first loved him.
Chloe wasn’t conning him, using him. His father was wrong about that; she couldn’t be. Chloe had believed, heart and soul, in Brendan, in what they were about to do tonight. She had given herself to Mark. She’d offered him her future.
This had all happened because she thought Brendan was here. Because, for two days, Mark had told her he thought so, too.
So what did it matter, whether Brendan was here, now, or not? If both of them, in their way, had talked themselves into him? If Mark said nothing—if he let the ceremony go on, if he acted his part—what was the harm? Wasn’t it worth five grand—more—to let the Weills give Chloe her peace?
To allow Chloe to stay with him? To give them both, at last, another chance?
Outside he heard a sound: an engine winding down, the whine of brakes taking hold. He peered out and saw a black SUV parking just in front of his Volvo. The driver’s-side door opened, and Warren Weill emerged, wearing a black overcoat. He stepped stiffly across the ice in order to open the passenger door and offer his hand to Trudy. She wore a black coat, too, and a long black skirt.
Mark saw it, now: All of them had dressed as though they were attending a funeral.
He released the shade. He should go downstairs, present himself. Act his part. Down below he heard the muffled exclamations of Connie greeting the Weills. He closed his eyes.
Brendan.
We don’t have much time. I need a sign. I need you.
Mark remembered how happy he’d been, the other night. How he’d suddenly filled, nearly to bursting; how he’d heard laughter; how he’d flung himself heedless down the hallway and the stairs, chasing after Brendan and his pattering footsteps. He’d been so happy. He’d felt such love.
He’d been so sure, so goddamned sure as he ran, that when he reached out his arms he would grasp the skinny wriggling body of his boy.
Now he could only think: Just before hearing Brendan laugh, just before hearing his footsteps, he had reached out his arms, and closed them on empty air.
Brendan. Please.
Chloe’s voice, calling up the stairwell: “Mark! The Weills are here!”
Mark stood, near tears, and shifted the chair back to the table. Its rubber-tipped legs skidded harshly across the polished wood of the floor.
And then he heard it. The hair on his arms rose.
The patter of footsteps, in the hall.
“Brendan?”
He walked around the table and to the doorway.
Oh, Brendan. Please.
He peered out the doorway, toward the corner and the stairwell. A moan left him—because even though he’d prepared himself for the sight of an empty hallway, or even for the figure of his son, he saw, instead, two green-gold gleams: two lambent eyes, staring up at him.
Jacob’s giant cat was crouched in the center of the hallway, its tail puffed straight out.
He took a step into the hall. The cat immediately turned and ran from him, around the corner, then into the stairwell and down.
Mark heard every step of its quick, bumping descent.