Silverware clattered against plates. Diagonally across from Aidan, Laura took up a corner of the tablecloth.
The dinner guests clamored past Troy, and his hands relaxed.
Darcy followed behind Nick. “You never listen to me,” she told Laura, and slipped out the door.
“Not helpful,” Laura wanted to say in her defense. Instead, her shoulder muscles bunched, and she inhaled through her nose. She had to admit, sometimes she didn’t listen to her daughter.
“Grab the other side,” Aidan told Troy.
Troy stared at the tablecloth through tear-dazed eyes and blinked. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and then helped Laura and Aidan fold the mess into the center. Aidan scooped up the tablecloth.
Troy took a watery breath. “Um, I’ll help you.”
“Really appreciate that.” Aidan aimed a smile straight at Laura, and she allowed herself a full breath.
Laura followed Aidan and Troy into the kitchen. A year after Jack’s death, Troy was responding to a man with a temperament the polar opposite of Jack’s. Jack would’ve loved the irony.
Troy was responding to a father figure.
Tears clogged Laura’s sinuses, and she blinked them back. At the sink, Maggie was scrubbing a serving dish and Elle was drying a wineglass. “Did you see that?” Laura asked her friends. She hugged Maggie around the shoulders, steadying herself so she wouldn’t cry.
Elle leaned in and whispered loudly in Laura’s ear, so Maggie could hear, too. “Yeah, I know. Nice ass.”
Laura shoved her away. “Shhh! You’re impossible,” Laura said, glancing toward the guest bathroom’s open door. “I was talking about—”
“Told you he was a nice guy,” Elle said.
Maggie shook water from the serving dish, then placed it in the draining rack. “Very peaceful aura, lots of blue.”
The click of the washing machine shutting echoed into the kitchen. Laura put her finger to her lips and cocked her head toward the bathroom. Aidan’s voice, then Troy’s, but she couldn’t make out the words. The washing machine hummed to life, and Troy walked into the kitchen. He stood up straight, arms relaxed, features smooth. Still, Laura suspected his fit had evidenced the tip of an iceberg.
“How you doing?” Laura said.
“Sorry about the tablecloth.”
“And Cam?”
“I owe him an apology.”
“Yes.” Troy’s paler than usual skin sharpened the blue of his eyes. For the millionth time, Laura marveled at the beauty of her son.
“Heading upstairs.”
“Okay. Do you—”
Troy race-walked from the room.
“Need me?” Laura shook her head. “Excuse me,” she told Maggie and Elle, and headed in the opposite direction of her son.
“Hey, there,” Aidan said when Laura stepped through the guest bathroom door. He dragged a rag over detergent splatters atop the rumbling washer. “Just finishing up.”
“You’ve done more than your share already. Really. You’re officially exempt from any more cleaning. And thank you, thank you so much for distracting Troy.”
“I could do more.” Aidan scrubbed a hand across his five o’clock shadow and widened his eyes at Laura. “I’d be glad to share my shaving expertise with him.”
Troy could easily get a friend to show him how to shave. She’d seen Michael sport pieces of facial tissue stuck to his face, newbie shaver wounds. Troy’s problem went deeper.
Her son worried who would teach him how to be a man.
“Troy’s little display. It wasn’t really about grooming.” Laura met Aidan’s gaze, and she hoped she wouldn’t have to explain further.
Aidan nodded, and he firmed his jaw. “He’s just a boy missing his dad.”
“Yes,” Laura said, and her voice hitched.
Only that wasn’t the truth, either, not exactly. If Jack had been alive, Troy’s uncharacteristic behavior would’ve snagged his attention. Jack would’ve questioned Troy. He would’ve encouraged his son to delve into his emotions, for all the wrong reasons. Jack would’ve interviewed Troy the way a reporter interviewed a subject. Coldly. Objectively. Relentlessly. Jack would’ve used Troy’s pain as research material for his next great work of fiction, because Jack Klein’s real-life family wasn’t half as important to him as the characters that inhabited his prize-winning imagination.
Jack hadn’t always acted selfishly. He’d played the attentive boyfriend and husband until Darcy was born. The precipitating event that changed Laura from a girl into a woman had set off Jack’s first manic-depressive cycle, leaving Laura the only adult in charge from that day forward. Leaving Laura with the understanding that in a flash good fortune could turn on you. No need to overanalyze the situation. Celebrated writer Jack Klein was simply good at writing and bad at life.
“Hey, hey there. You okay?”
To Laura’s horror, her face was heating, but not from grief. Like Troy, she wasn’t missing the husband she’d known and loved, the brilliant man with all of his weaknesses. Laura was missing the man Jack had shown her during the honeymoon phase of their relationship. For fifteen years, that husband had lurked, popping up on holidays.
A strange new sensation swirled through her chest. Jack would’ve asked her what she was feeling, and she would’ve told him, “Not a thing.” He’d felt more than enough for the two of them.
Aidan tossed the rag in its bucket. “I get it. You told me to stop cleaning. House rule number two. Listen to Laura.”
She laughed. “It’s true. I do like when people listen to me.”
Aidan mirrored her smile. The overhead light reflected off his dark eyes, that peculiar sensation in her chest deepened, and its meaning came to her.
For fifteen years she’d loved and cared for a sick man, enduring his changeable moods, the quirks of his self-indulgent personality. Now she was standing inches away from Aidan Walsh, a man who was simply good at life. How did that make her feel? In a word?
Cheated.
Chapter 9
T
he desk lamp Laura had taken from Jack’s studio directed oblong gray patches against her bedroom walls, casting the collage of relocated black-and-white photographs into darkness and dimming their entire family history. Laura paused at the threshold, clutching a stack of books against her nightgown to balance the research material’s heavy weight. She squinted through the dimly lit room until she reached her bed, and then let the books tumble from her hands.
She slid out a notepad from beneath the rubble of books. Using all capital letters, she filled the top margin with one word: TROY.
After Troy’s dinner performance and the Aidan save, and after she’d kicked Elle and Maggie out of the kitchen, she cleaned up the rest of the mess herself. By the time she’d made her way upstairs, Troy was standing in the bathroom doorway, wearing plaid sleep pants, and working winter mint toothpaste into blue foam. Her son was desperate for sleep and was smart enough to listen to his body. How could she tell, how could anyone tell, whether one fit on the anniversary eve of Jack’s death meant her son was sick?
She’d read every single manual on bipolar disorder, known as manic depression when Jack was diagnosed, and had memorized most of the symptoms psychiatrists used for diagnosis. Depressed mood, feelings of guilt and worthlessness, and recurring thoughts of death pointed to depression. On the flip side, pressured speech, flights of fancy, and Jack’s favorite, hypersexuality, highlighted mania.
She couldn’t imagine her son succumbing to a lifelong illness with no chance of a cure, just an endless array of hills and valleys regulated by doctors and tiny beige tablets. Even the supposed miracle drug lithium required constant monitoring of kidney functions as the therapeutic dose easily crossed the line into toxicity. Jack didn’t mind the weight gain and hand tremors. It was the foggy thinking that he couldn’t brook, the memory loss, and the overall mental sluggishness.
Please, Laura, let me finish this novel on deadline, and I promise I’ll be good.
She saw not her late husband, but Troy, down on bent knee before her, begging for her help. Her belly trembled, signaling the feeling of helplessness she abhorred. From the foot of her bed, she took the red knit throw, another transplant from Jack’s studio, and wrapped it around her shoulders.
She didn’t need Jack, not now. She’d taken care of their children pretty much on her own for their entire lives. Her husband had chosen to kill himself and take the easy way out of a tough situation. This wasn’t the first time she’d nicknamed him Slip-Out-the-Back Jack.
Where had that come from?
Unsympathetic, for sure, possibly even downright meanspirited. She fisted her hands, squeezing hard in a vain effort to squelch the negative energy. A restless sensation weakened her left arm, shoulder to wrist. “Four, two, three, seven. Eight, seven, six, three.” Laura spoke the last four digits of Elle’s phone number, and then Maggie’s, like a whispered prayer. Earlier this evening, before Maggie and Elle would agree to leave, they’d made Laura promise to call if she needed them, and she loved them for it. But she wouldn’t want to alarm them with a midnight call.
Besides, it wasn’t so much soul emptiness she was experiencing as a mild hunger centering in her belly. She hadn’t managed more than a few bites of dinner when Troy had initiated his sideshow, cutting the meal short. She touched her son’s name at the top of her jam-packed worry list, then added Jack’s psychiatrist’s name off to the side. She wouldn’t wait until things grew worse. She wouldn’t repeat the mistakes she’d made with Jack. One appointment didn’t mean a thing; Dr. Harvey could set her mind at ease.
She plucked her satin robe from the closet and slipped it over her nightgown. The garment delivered an all-over twinge of cold instead of the warmth she’d expected. A floorboard creaked under her weight. She clicked the closet door shut. The latch popped, the door creaked open on rusty hinges, and she startled.
It’s just a room, Laura. Relax.
After all, she didn’t believe in
that
sort of thing. Ghost stories were the living’s overintellectualization of what happened when a person died, myths to keep the fear of death at bay. You were alive, and then you were dead, so why worry about it? The dead didn’t walk around mourning themselves. They left misery to the living.
How many times had she wished misery would release its grip on her husband? She’d sail into the kitchen on an updraft of joy, only to find Jack sulking over his coffee, unaffected by the sunshine blazing through the windows.
Laura padded down to the kitchen. No sounds came from the studio, but the knowledge another stable adult was living in her house eased the edge off her worry.
Laura thought of the leftover gingersnaps and discovered their freezer container, empty save for a few crumbs. Instead, she slid three frozen chocolate chip cookies into the microwave for a quick defrost and gazed through the behind-the-sink window, searching through the night for the tranquil distant hills. Instead, the eight-by-eight panes reflected blue-black darkness. Troy was not sick.
She yanked the microwave door open before the third annoying bleep and released her cookies, her only visible moral support. She stood over the sink and bit into the biggest cookie’s chewy moistness, crunching salty roasted pecans. Rich chocolate melted on her tongue. Troy was not sick.
She never did find out where Jack had disappeared to after Troy’s birth. Jack had dropped her at their off-campus apartment with their toddler and newborn son. She spent the week in a blur of diapers and feedings, convinced that he’d never return, that at twenty-two, she’d become the sole parental support for her two children. Even after Jack had returned at week’s end, she held fast to her assertion, never letting down her guard. Tensed and at the ready. Troy was not sick.
A full glass of ice milk, transparent bubbles peeking over the rim of green-tinted hobnail, never failed to please her. She sipped through the tickly froth, and then sucked down the frosty liquid without pausing until she reached the transparent emerald bottom. An immediate brain freeze scraped across her forehead. She held her hands against her temples, trying to contain the pain. She had to smile. Worse than the kids.
The ceiling moaned above her head. Troy’s room. She counted five steps, not enough to take him to the hallway bathroom. A rumbling told her he was rolling his desk chair across the floorboards. If Troy couldn’t sleep, they should at least endure wakefulness together.
She nuked three cookies for her son and poured a brimming glass of milk. No ice this time; she’d learned her lesson. She carried the offering atop a hand-painted floral bed tray, careful to keep the surface steady as she climbed the stairs toward Troy’s bedroom. No sound through the barrier of Darcy’s closed door, although Laura couldn’t shake the conviction Darcy was wide-awake, staring at the ceiling.
Troy’s door stood open a crack, and a skinny line of light trickled across the hallway. Laura paused where the beam faded to nothingness, as though waiting to ford a stream into unknown territory. Ridiculous, for sure. Almost as irrational as the shudder splashing down her neck and washing over her shoulders.
She nudged the door with her hip and stepped into the dim room. “Troy, sweetie.”
Hard to tell if her son heard her or, really, how loudly she spoke his name, if she spoke it out loud at all. Troy sat at his desk, the twitching of his bare shoulder blade evidencing his swift jotting. He ran a hand vertically through his pillow-molded hair, and then continued on his writing rampage.
“Troy.” Laura was reasonably sure she’d said his name out loud this time. “I brought you some cookies and milk. Thought it might help you get back to sleep.” Okay, that was dumb. Her son was in no way interested in sleep tonight.
Laura slid the bed tray atop Troy’s waist-high bookshelf. “Do you want to talk? It helps when you say your worries out loud. I mean, in my opinion.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “That’s very funny.” Troy returned his attention to his desk, leaning over his work and shifting his back toward where his mother stood.
Troy chuckled to himself, as if he’d already forgotten Laura was standing behind him. He slouched over his work and blew gently across and down, setting the fresh ink before turning the page with exaggerated slowness. He ran his hand over the stark blank page, as if memorizing the territory he planned on desecrating. Another chuckle, and he fell upon the page like a lion on its prey.
In Jack’s most agitated manias, he’d plunged into the bottomless waters of hypergraphia, thinking he was writing a best seller. But Jack’s so-called inspiration, when under the magnifying glass of his mood disorder, produced pressured writing, copious pages of nonsense.
Troy was not—
The undigested cookies churned within their milk bath in her belly, threatening to revisit her throat.
Laura tiptoed to the desk and peered over Troy’s shoulder. Her son had inherited her notoriously impossible to read cursive. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t make out a single word.
“Do you think you could tell me what you’re writing? I’m just so curious.”
Troy swiveled his chair around and regarded her with the deliberate eyes of a pundit. The tips of his ears glowed scarlet; a telltale sign of her son’s extreme exhaustion. Charcoal pools rested beneath his black velvet lashes, making him appear like an older version of himself, one she hadn’t expected to see for another decade.
A smile flickered over his face. He nodded, coaxing the words, and his speech flowed at a normal rate. “I’m writing about Dad for the anniversary thing tomorrow. I keep waking up in the middle of the night remembering stuff I’d forgotten, like about watching him shave, and tapioca pudding, and camping, and even how we connected all those rubber bands end to end and stretched them across the house. All the good stuff I’d forgotten because I was always so pissed off at him.” He shook his head, and his voice thickened. “I’m still pissed off, Mom.”
“Oh, honey, it’s okay to feel angry.” Thank God! Troy was finally talking to her. Aidan was right. Nothing was the matter here, just a boy missing his dad. She breathed into her belly, then sighed.
She could smell him then, the unmistakable body odor of an adolescent who exercised without showering, and then added a second layer of sweat. Troy usually showered
twice
a day.
Laura rubbed his bare back, getting a moist palm for her efforts. Now she was perspiring, too, judging by the prickly heat needling the back of her head. “Can you read it to me?”
“Sure.” He hung his head and stared at the page, his back muscles tightening beneath her hand. “I can’t. I can’t read this. Stupid lousy handwriting.” He shook his head, and his gaze flitted around the room. “Fuck,” he whispered.
Her breath caught. “It doesn’t matter. Everything, all your memories are inside of you. Your dad’s inside of you.”
Troy looked at her as if he’d never seen her before. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you get it? I don’t want Dad inside of me! That’s the point. That’s the fucking point!”
Her chest jounced, and she pushed down the useless panic. She reached for Troy, and he stood to avoid her touch. “I’m so stupid! What an idiot!” he said.
“Troy. Stop that. Give yourself a break.”
“Imbecile, moron.” Troy zigzagged across the room.
Laura raced to block the doorway. “Troy!”
He spat out a slew of profanities, daring Laura to make him stop. Maintaining eye contact with Troy proved more challenging than listening to his self-abatement. Her son didn’t really hate her.
Behind Laura, Darcy’s voice rang out like a shot. “Quit it!”
Troy’s jaw worked, but no sound came from his lips. His face contorted, evidence of internal turmoil boiling not so far below the surface.
Laura’s gaze focused on her son, maintaining a measure of restraint, and she reached for Darcy’s hand.
Laura waited until his breath settled into a steady cadence. Agitated mania begged for assistance, the barest suggestion of support, although it rarely looked as if it desired company. “It’s okay. I’m right here with you. Your whole family’s here,” she said and squeezed Darcy’s hand.
Troy stared at Laura through downturned eyes.
“Your family,” Laura repeated, and Troy fell into her arms. His sobs broke against her chest. Hot tears pooled in her neck, and Darcy hugged her from behind.
Laura stroked Troy’s perspiration-damp hair. “It’s okay, sweetheart. Let it go.” She’d make that call to Dr. Harvey first thing Monday morning.
“Why don’t you lie down? Hmm, Troy? Put your head on your pillow? You’ll be more comfortable.” Laura couldn’t tell if Troy heard her through his sobs, but he let her guide him to his bed. She helped him slide beneath the snug covers, a letter in an envelope, just the way he liked it, and he took a breath. “Do you remember the time Dad started that pillow fight?” Troy said.
“Sure I do,” Laura told Troy, and his sobs began anew.
Darcy leaned against the doorframe, her hair curling around her face. Her hazel-brown eyes glowed like amber under water.
“Bring me some tissues and a glass of water, please?” Laura asked Darcy, just like Laura had done countless times before when Jack had been in the midst of a crying jag, and she couldn’t leave his side. Petite powerhouse Darcy nodded and slipped from Laura’s sight.
Laura kissed Troy on the forehead, and her lips registered a low-grade crying-induced fever. Déjà vu all over again. She may not believe in ghosts, but she couldn’t deny Jacob Abraham Klein was haunting their son.