The last steps were the worst. My head was hurting so bad, I pulled back my hood and right away I wished I hadn’t. The sweat on my forehead froze the second the wind touched it. When I wanted to pull the hood back up, my fingers wouldn’t move anymore.
I thought I’d never reach the house. Cole said it was haunted just to scare the kid, but I know there’s nothing wrong with it. I go by it as often as I can, but I never tell Benedict. He won’t take us there, he won’t even talk about it. He’s made a holy shrine or a cursed place of it, something like that. But it’s not a crypt, it’s just a house. A house asleep. It’s no different from the day he left, with the dishes put away above the sink, the bed made. There’s nothing lying around. The books he read as a kid are on a shelf in his bedroom beside a family photo, the only one I’ve ever seen since I got here. Magnus and Maud standing behind their two sons, with the glowing faces of people who have it all. The two boys sitting side by side with the same plaid shirt that their mother must have sewn them. Benedict almost a carbon copy of his father, Thomas taking after his mother down to her almond eyes and her complexion, which stands out even in a faded photo. He could have been a girl with his crossed legs and his long, thin fingers resting ever so carefully on his thighs, while his brother’s got his arms crossed over his chest, the palms of his hands tight under his armpits, a bit of swagger there even though he can’t have even been ten yet.
Besides that sole proof of an era that’s totally gone now there are some toys, probably handmade by his pa and with the paint peeling off over time, a little round wooden box with baby teeth, and another with a glass lid holding a lock of blond baby hair tied off with a ribbon. Who’d have thought a man could be so sentimental? Maybe he didn’t even know that he was leaving for good when he walked out of his house. Maybe he thought he’d be back soon. Benedict said that it had been too long now for him to ever come back.
At first, I thought that maybe he wasn’t actually gone—that he might have had a bad fall and that his body was buried somewhere, under rocks that slipped under him, pine needles getting into the folds of his clothes. But Benedict said that he’d left the Interior, that some cousins had seen him at the Anchorage airport. His car was in the parking lot. He must have taken a plane somewhere.
Benedict never told me where. Why should he? I’d never met Thomas, after all.
But I know something about him that his own brother doesn’t. Since I came here whenever I needed an escape, I’d gone through everything: closets, drawers, jars. I looked under rugs, linens, anything I could lift up.
Maybe it was uncalled-for, but it was an old reflex. I did the same thing when I was still living with my mother. Turning the house upside down, looking for Valium, Prozac, Xanax, Vicodin, anything that might have explained why she was the way she was. When I finally found her cache and flushed everything in hopes that she’d stop using, she only got worse. She was tearing out her hair, wringing her hands like she wanted to break them, scratching her arms until she drew blood. It wasn’t long before she was throwing anything she could lay hands on in my face. She said things I don’t ever want to remember. It hurt so much not to be loved, and I deserved it.
In Thomas’s house, there’s nobody to call me all the names under the sun. A ghost of a man can’t hurt you the way a woman who’s not herself anymore can. A woman who’s been a child, a girl, then a mother, and who, when I left her, was just a husk, practically a corpse, with only rage and pain keeping her going. I went through Thomas’s house from top to bottom, and because everyone has at least one secret, I finally found a little notebook with a red cover. It was wrapped in a bit of leather, hidden up high, on top of a rafter, and inside it were truths about Thomas’s life that Benedict had no idea about.