Closer Home
Authors: Kerry Anne King
P
RAISE FOR
C
LOSER
H
OME
“A quick read with emotional depth you won’t soon forget.”
—Kathryn Craft, author of
The Far End of Happy
and
The Art of Falling
“
Closer Home
is a story as memorable and meaningful as your favorite song, with a cast of characters so true to life you’ll be sorry to let them go.”
—Sonja Yoerg
, author of
House Broken
and The
Middle of Somewhere
“Kerry Anne King’s tale of regret, loss, and love pulled me in, from its intriguing beginning to its oh-so-satisfying conclusion.”
—Jackie Bouchard,
USA Today
bestselling author of
House Trained
and
Rescue Me, Maybe
“Kerry Anne King’s prose is filled with vitality.”
—Ella Carey, author of
Paris Time Capsule
and
The House by the Lake
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 by Kerry Anne King
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503951259 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1503951251 (paperback)
Cover design by Danielle Fiorella
First edition
To my brother, Warren, who kept my secrets, taught me the art of climbing trees, and always loaned me his books. To my mother, who allowed the climbing and encouraged the reading.
And to my father, who loved and shaped us all.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
It’s amazing what a little makeup can do to make a body look normal.
Except for the fact that she’s lying in a coffin, Callie looks just like the last picture I saw of her on the cover of
Stars Now
. Same curly, artfully mussed-up hair; same porcelain-perfect skin. The pout is missing, but under the circumstances this one small oversight can be forgiven.
On closer inspection, I discover the thing that can’t. “Her fingernail is chipped.”
The hovering undertaker startles visibly. “Pardon?”
“Her fingernail is chipped. There. See? The right ring finger.” I point at the irregularity that mars the otherwise immaculate nail. My own unmanicured finger is perilously close to hers, and I dare to touch her, lightly. Her skin feels like Silly Putty—cold and stiff—and I jerk my hand away.
The undertaker moves in closer, reeking of breath mints and hair gel. Dandruff speckles the shoulders of his black suit jacket. “I see,” he says, but clearly he doesn’t. His manufactured sorrow grates against my skin, and I’m tempted to elbow him in the ribs to see if he gasps for air like a real boy.
“You’ll have to fix it,” I tell him. “She’d never be caught dead out in public like that.”
There’s a moment of shock before I hear what I’ve just said, and then I start to laugh, a wild, uncontrolled sound on the border of hysteria that blows in out of nowhere and catches me off guard. Tears lie just behind the laughter, pricking my eyeballs, closing off my throat, and I don’t know what to do with them.
The undertaker is not amused. “Considering the circumstances, I feel that we’ve done a highly professional job of restoring her—”
“Restoring?” I turn on him. “Like a car that’s been in an accident? Or a piece of furniture, maybe? You can’t restore her unless you can get her breathing again, and I’ll tell you this right now: if she wakes up in that coffin and notices you’ve put her on display with an imperfect fingernail, she will crucify you, no matter how good the rest of your work has been.”
His mouth opens and then closes again, and a dark flush rises up his neck and into his face. The veins in his temples bulge a little. It makes me feel better to see him experiencing real emotion, and my tears recede.
“It’s too late to fix a fingernail,” he says. “Nobody will notice.”
“I’m warning you. Ever see
Poltergeist
? She’ll come for you.”
He swallows, the flush giving way to a sudden pallor born of fear or anger. Maybe both.
“I’ll see what I can do before we bring her out. Let me take you to the relatives’ room.” He puts a hand on the small of my back and shepherds me toward the door. I let him steer me, turning my head over my shoulder for one last glimpse of my baby sister. She looks like she’s asleep, and I take care to close the door quietly so as not to disturb her rest.
Dale is waiting for me in the hallway. With his hair all trimmed and a sports coat on, he looks strange and unfamiliar. My throat tightens. I feel lost and very much alone.
“All right?” he asks, and he’s just Dale again, solid and familiar.
I nod, although I’m far from all right, repressing a mad impulse to fling my arms around his neck and burst into tears. We fall into step behind the undertaker, side by side, not quite touching. My right heel slips in and out of my shoe with the sort of friction that is already rubbing into a blister. I can’t remember what possessed me to buy high heels. They clop unevenly on the floor, and I feel ungainly and off-kilter.
“How does she look?” Dale’s voice sounds matter-of-fact, like we’re talking cars or building projects, but his jaw is clenched tight.
“One of her fingernails is chipped.”
“God forbid.”
“I told the guy to fix it.”
Dale stops. I carry on a few steps under the force of momentum before my feet figure out what to do and I turn to face him. His eyes lock on mine, level and insistent. “A horse, Lise. A fucking horse kicked her in the head.”
I drop my gaze, unable to meet the naked intensity of his. “She looks like Callie. Go see her for yourself.”
“I’ll pass.”
A silence stretches between us, broken only by the uneven clicking of my heels on the tile and Dale’s even tread. A runnel of sweat caterpillars from my armpit down my side and under my breast. Where there’s sweat there may be stink, but I don’t dare sneak a sniff test, not here, and I wish myself miles away.
Not much longer,
I tell myself. We’ll be seated in a few minutes, and everybody’s attention will be on Callie’s coffin and off me.
But the instant we step out of the hallway and into the foyer, all hell breaks loose. It’s jammed with people, and it seems to me like they all have cameras. Small handhelds, smartphones, movie cameras, professional cameras with giant lenses. There’s even one of those movie cameras on wheels.
Every one of those lenses points in my direction and I’m assaulted by flashing lights. My head spins. Beneath the onslaught, my last shreds of self-confidence flee, leaving me feeling frumpy and countrified. The little black dress that seemed so perfect when I pulled it off the Dressbarn rack is clearly inadequate. My hairstyle is outdated, my makeup all wrong. I curl my close-bitten fingernails inside my fists so nobody will see.
And then Dale’s fingers close around mine, warm and strong. Grounded. He bends his head and whispers, “Smile and keep moving.”
Contorting my face into something that may or may not resemble a smile, I cling to his hand and move along beside him. Unlike me, Dale has made little concession to the fact that this funeral is star-studded and infested with paparazzi. He’s wearing blue jeans with his sports coat but manages not to look out of place. Most likely because he doesn’t care what anybody thinks.
One of the photographers plants herself in our path. Corkscrews of brilliant red hair frame cheekbones so sharp they could slice a steak.
“Friends or relatives?” she says. “What is your connection to Callie?”
“She’s my sister.” The words spill out of my mouth before I remember my resolution to keep my mouth shut.
“
Ohhhh.
You’re her.” A hunger flares in her eyes. She takes a run of pictures, her camera click-whirring as punctuation to the run of questions she throws at me. “Annelise, right? How long has it been since you saw Callie last? Why did she say you were dead? Are we going to discover any other long-lost family members?”
“Move.” Dale’s palm covers the camera lens and shoves it away.
“Pardon me?”
“You’re in the way.”
“But we’re all just dying to hear from Annelise. The fans will go crazy.” Her voice modulates into a throatier register as she lays one manicured hand on Dale’s sleeve. “Did you know Callie? Did you go to school together? Ooh, did you maybe date her?”
I close my eyes, clinging to Dale, braced for the coming storm. He doesn’t anger easily. But when he does get pushed over the edge, I don’t like to be anywhere nearby. In my head, I’m already playing out what he’s going to say, how she’s going to react. Maybe he’ll yank that camera off its strap and smash it on the floor. She’ll take offense and wreak vengeance in the tabloids. There will be a terrible headline.
REDNECK WRANGLING AT COUNTRY STAR’S FUNERAL
Maybe she’ll even press charges, and he’ll end up in jail.
Dale surprises me. He lowers his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, leaning in toward the photographer. “Have a little respect for the dead. Catch me later and I’ll tell you everything I know.”
His arm circles my waist, warm and steadying, and he steers me around her. She lets us go. I believe, for a moment, that I’m done with the media and will be allowed to sit down.
No such luck.
We’re ushered into a small room, meant to be private. Three photographers squeeze in behind us before the door clicks shut. Bright flashes nearly blind me.
When I can see again, I realize the room already has two occupants. One is a teenage boy dressed from head to toe in black. He’s got a black piercing in his nose, and another in his lip that pulls it into a permanent sneer. His fingernails are painted black, and I’m pretty sure he’s wearing eye shadow. Despite all of this and the sulky expression on his face, he’s a pretty boy, the type that teenage girls find irresistible and parents hate.
Beside him, holding his hand, is a girl who must be Ariel.
I haven’t seen Callie’s daughter since she was six. Back then, she was a bouncy, talkative little thing, with a fuzz of blonde curls and a vocabulary way beyond her years. She’d peppered me with questions, hung out in my studio, begged me to teach her how to play a song on the piano and the guitar.
At sixteen, she is completely unrecognizable as that bubbly little girl. Her hair is still blonde, but straight now, and pulled back in a severe ponytail secured by a simple black band. She wears no makeup, no jewelry. Her black dress is cut on classic lines that do nothing to soften a body that’s all narrow angles. My eyes search her face for a hint of family resemblance—my father’s chin, my mother’s eyes—but come up empty. She must look like her father, but since Callie refused to tell anybody who that is, Ariel just looks like a stranger.
And not a friendly one at that.
“Annelise,” she says. An acknowledgment, nothing more. A sense of lost time rocks me. Somehow I’ve been expecting she would still be six. That she would call me Auntie Lise and run into the shelter of my arms. Maybe even sob while I offer comfort.
Her gaze is direct, a challenge, and my stomach does its sinking thing again. The boy releases her hand and drapes an arm around her shoulder.
Mine,
the gesture says, in a way that makes me want to snarl at him to stand up straight and wash his face.
It’s Callie’s funeral,
I remind myself. Ariel is an orphan who never even had a father to lose. So I summon up a polite smile and hold out my hand to her friend.
“I’m Annelise.”
He looks at my hand for a little too long, as if he doesn’t know what to do with it, and then he offers me his paw, fingers only. His skin is damp, his grip flabby.
“Shadow,” he says.
“Seriously?” I bite my lip to hold the word in, but it slips out anyway.
“It’s a statement,” he says, looking bored. “Most people don’t understand.”
What he means is, most people are stupid. Including me.
All the while the flashbulbs are going off, recording the moment for Callie’s public, and I’m thinking I should kiss Ariel, or give her a hug, but the glare she gives me warns me away.
Her gaze shifts to Dale, and I draw a breath of relief. He’s good in social situations, much better than I am. Or at least he always has been in the past. At the moment, he and Ariel are locked eye to eye with a level of intensity that makes my skin tingle. Neither of them says a word, and I’m casting around for an icebreaker when Ariel beats me to it.
“I see you brought your boyfriend to the funeral.” Her voice drips with contempt.
“I see you brought yours,” I retort. Blood rushes to my face. I can feel the heat, a toxic mix of anger and embarrassment. Her lips curve in a slight smile, as if my response is exactly what she was looking for. I remember too late that the room has ears.
The instant the words leave my lips, the photographers home in on Dale, flashbulbs popping, cameras clicking and whirring. His face is tight, and I see his eyes cut toward the door. For a heartbeat, I think he’s going to jump ship and make a run for it, but I know better. Dale has never run away from anything in his life.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I blurt out, trying to repair the damage. “Dale was friends with your mom. The three of us grew up together.” I’m not sure if she even hears me. Her gaze has gone back to Dale. The camera people certainly aren’t listening.
When the undertaker glides into the room with his I’m-not-really-here steps, I want to kiss him for rescuing me from a sixteen-year-old girl. Maybe it makes me a coward, but I’m more than happy to take his arm and let him lead us back out into the foyer, and then down the chapel aisle to the very front row. My knees are wobbly, and an electric zing keeps running through the fingers of my left hand, a nervous buzz that always hits me when I’m wound up too tight.
My guide eases me into a seat, and there I am, safe as I can be for the moment with my back to the crowd and Dale’s solid strength beside me. I suck in a deep breath and try to relax. There’s nothing expected of me right now. Nothing I need to do but sit back and watch the show, because Callie’s funeral is more of a stage play than a service to honor the dead.
The venue itself reminds me more of a theater than a chapel. Crimson carpet, plush black theater seats, a high arched ceiling painted with blue-and-gold cherubs. Callie’s open coffin is on display at the center of the stage. Artful overhead lighting illuminates her face and golden hair in a soft glow so that she looks to be sleeping. Scarlet rose petals are heaped all around her body, spilling into drifts on the floor, startling and dramatic against the white of the coffin. I wonder whether the damaged fingernail is still visible.
Mourners walk up the steps singly and in pairs, pausing by the coffin to pay their respects and look up at the cameras. I recognize many of the faces from TV, album covers, movies. Some I have never seen before. One and all, I figure they could show up at the Grammys without bothering to swing by home to change their outfits or fix their hair.