FIVE

Gloria awoke late since Benny had not barged in, begging for breakfast the way he usually did, and when she checked on him after going to the bathroom, intending to wake him up, she found him lying on his bed, covers kicked down to his feet, eyes wide open. His eyes were always open when she walked into his room, but he was usually awake and smiling at her. This time, however, his face was frozen, his mouth slack, and the breath caught in her throat as she realized with a sudden flash of horrified comprehension that Benny had died sometime during the night.

The scream that escaped her lips was loud enough to wake the entire neighborhood. She fell upon him, wailing. It was an instinctive reaction, a primal cry from her shattered heart. She had lost her son again, and the feeling of his cold skin against her cheek burned a bottomless hole through the center of her being. She took his hand in hers, held it, squeezed it.

At some point, she sat up, wiping the tears from her stinging eyes. Practicality took over from emotion, and as guilty as she felt for thinking it, Gloria wondered how she was going to report his death. As far as the world was concerned, he didn’t exist, and if she called 911 and explained what had happened, he would suddenly be on the authorities’ radar. Gloria knew nothing about autopsy protocol, but she assumed that when a medical examiner attempted to find out why and how he had died, fingerprints would be taken for identification purposes. Once those fingerprints were on file, they would probably be automatically matched with those of the killer who had murdered Myron and Jean. And since it would be clear that Benny had been living with her, she would be implicated in their deaths.

The whole thing was a nightmare, and Gloria was just starting to think through possible scenarios, when she heard a knock at the door. Her instinctive reaction was to pretend she wasn’t home, but she knew that her screaming must have frightened the neighbors. One or more of them had probably called the police, and it was probably either a cop or a concerned citizen who was trying to check up on her and make sure she was okay.

The knocking continued.

She was going to have to answer the door.

“Mommy!” a girl’s voice called.

Jean?

Numbly, Gloria made her way through the living room. She wanted to believe that she’d misidentified the voice and imagined what it had said, but she knew it was Jean, and she opened the door, and it was.

Except that Jean was four years old, the same age she had been when Benny drowned. She was even wearing the same bathing suit she’d had on that day. And she was holding the hand of a much older woman.

Gloria’s grandmother.

Who had been dead for twenty years.

“Grandma?” Gloria said.

Her grandmother fixed her with a disdainful look that cut straight to her core and that she remembered perfectly, though it had not been turned upon her since she was a junior in high school. “Are we going to have to stand here forever,” she said archly, “or are you going to let us in?”

****

Gloria felt like Alice, either in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass, stuck in a crazy world where nothing made sense. She was shocked and surprised to find her long dead grandmother and a younger version of her deceased daughter on her doorstep, but was neither incredulous nor disbelieving because she had been through this before, and her resurrected son was lying dead in a room down the hall.

Only he wasn’t.

When she left her grandma and Jean in the living room to check on him, his body was gone, as were his clothes. The bedroom looked as though no one had lived in it for years.

Gloria’s head hurt, and she could feel blood pumping through her temples in time to the accelerated beating of her heart. She stared for a moment at Benny’s empty bed, then stormed back out to the living room. “What’s going on here?” she demanded.

She’d addressed the question to her grandmother, but it was Jean who answered. “We’re going to live with you.”

There was another knock at the door, louder this time, more forceful. The police had arrived. Someone had clearly called the cops after hearing her scream, and while Gloria hadn’t heard any sirens, two uniformed officers were standing on her front porch when she opened the front door. They were both fairly young, her own age, she guessed, both Hispanic, though it was the taller and heavier of the two who did the talking. He met her gaze, his eyes flat and unreadable. “Is everything all right here, ma’am? We’ve had a report of screams coming from this residence.”

“Everything’s fine,” she told him.

“So there were no screams?”

“That was me. I was just…surprised,” Gloria said. “I haven’t seen my grandma in years—”

“Decades,” the old lady said.

“—and it was a shock to find her on my front porch when I opened the door.”

The officers looked at each other skeptically. “Do you mind if we come in, ma’am?”

Gloria stepped aside. “Not at all.”

She led them through the house and even into the garage, until they were finally convinced that she was not hiding anything and nothing untoward was going on. “Sorry to bother you,” the bigger man said.

She couldn’t resist. “Well, next time I rediscover a long lost family member, I’ll do so quietly and try not to show any emotion so my neighbors won’t have to call the cops on me.”

Both officers looked embarrassed.

This time, the shorter officer spoke up. “We’re sorry,” he said. “Have a nice day.” His apology seemed more real, less obligatory, and he nodded toward her grandma and Jean. “You too.”

Gloria waited until they had walked back down the driveway and gotten into their patrol car before closing the door.

“So what are you two doing here?” she asked, turning to face her visitors. This might be her grandmother and her daughter, but she felt completely disassociated from both of them. It was as if the familial connection they had once shared had been severed and they were now strangers meeting for the first time.

“You tell us,” her grandma said.

“That makes no sense,” Gloria told her.

Jean shrugged. “We’ve come here to live with you.”

“But where did you come from? How did you get here? You’re both…You’re supposed to be…You’re dead.”

“Not anymore,” Jean said. She smiled, and that smile made Gloria shiver. She remembered clearly her daughter standing in front of her on the beach looking just like this, wearing the same exact bathing suit, while in the water behind her, Benny was knocked over by a wave and drowned.

Her grandma stepped forward and put a bony hand over Gloria’s shoulder. She remembered the parchment feeling of that wrinkled skin, the overstrong smell of Tabu perfume. “It’ll all make sense in the morning.”

“I’m not going to bed until I find out what’s happening. I need to know what’s going on here.”

“You need to get some rest.” Gently, her grandmother led her out of the living room toward her bedroom. The old woman seemed to already know the layout of the house.

“I’m tired, too,” Jean said, yawning.

“I’ll fix up a bed in the guestroom,” Gloria’s grandmother told her. “You can sleep with me.”

Although she had not acquiesced, Gloria was no longer putting up any resistance. She was tired, she realized, and a small logical part of her mind was hoping that this was either a dream or the product of an overtired mind, and that if she went to sleep, everything would be back to normal in the morning. Allowing herself to be guided to her bedroom, she thought that there was something nice about having her grandma back again, something comforting about having an older person in the house.

It was nice having her daughter back, too.

Her grandma kissed her forehead. “Sweet dreams,” she said. It was what she had always said when Gloria stayed overnight at her house. “Now kiss your mommy goodnight,” she told Jean.

The little girl stood on her tiptoes, lips puckered, and, smiling, Gloria leaned down and presented her cheek. Her daughter kissed it, and then she kissed her daughter back. “Night night,” she said.

“I’ll put her to bed,” her grandma offered. She put an arm around Jean and steered her toward the door. “We’ll see you in the morning.”

Gloria sat down on the edge of the mattress, feeling exhausted. She usually took her shoes off in the living room and left them under the coffee table, but she wasn’t about to expend the energy to go all the way back out there. She pulled off her shoes and socks, pushing them under the bed with her foot, then stood and took off her pants and shirt, throwing them over the nearby chair. It was a warm night, and rather than going over to the dresser for her pajamas, she pulled down the comforter and lay on the bed in her underwear. The sheet felt cool against her skin, and she closed her eyes.

Before she knew it, she had fallen asleep.