Stay Away

by Ike Hamill

  “Jim Saunders,” Officer Green said. “He’s able to speak again.”

  “Get the fuck out.”

  # # #

  For once, Jessie was upstairs before midnight. She could tell because of the obnoxious volume of his radio. Lily sat on the couch with the TV on and a mug of tea that had gone cold in her hands. The news was about to come on. Her mother had been the news junkie of the house. After dinner she would watch Walter Cronkite in order to learn what had happened in the world. Before bed, Zinnia would watch the local news, complaining because half of it was usually dedicated to high school sports. Reynold had always responded, “You should feel lucky to live in a place where nothing happens.”

  Eric came down the stairs fast and then paused when he saw her there.

  “What are you doing up?” he asked.

  She took a hand off the mug and pointed a finger upwards.

  “You can barely hear that in the wing,” Eric said with a wave.

  “It’s not the music. I’m worried about him. That business with Mom’s car. This isn’t just acting out, you know? He really is giving no thought whatsoever about the future. It’s all about what he wants right this minute. I know he went to the lawyer to try to find a way to get the money out of the trust. Now I wish I had set it up for him to get when he was twenty-five instead of twenty-one. I think he’s still going to be too immature.”

  Eric moved closer and leaned over the back of the armchair. His fingers were covered in bandaids. While he listened, he idly picked at one of the tabs.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You want to though. What are you not saying?”

  Eric looked at his own hands for so long that Lily was pretty sure he wasn’t going to speak his mind. The local news came back from commercials and the sportscaster started talking about high school hockey. Apparently, several games had been delayed because of a wind storm. It would have been funny to hear her mom’s reaction to that. They were busy talking about the fact that nothing had happened. They should all feel lucky.

  “Maybe there’s nothing you can do,” Eric said.

  “Eric, I have too. I’m his guardian.”

  “He has a job. They’re paying him to clean up and do chores at Gray’s Mufflers. Maybe he’ll get some tools and start to do some piece work. He’s smart enough to eventually realize that manual labor is not what he wants to do, but you might have to let him figure that out on his own.”

  “I’m supposed to force him to do the right thing until he gets old enough to make his own decisions,” she said.

  Eric looked her in the eyes.

  “Says who?”

  Lily wanted to throw her mug at him. Instead, she set it down on the table and folded the blanket that had been across her legs.

  “Eric, you could be helping me with him.”

  “You name it and I’ll do it. You told me to not tell him what to do so he would continue to talk to me and trust me. If you want me to change tactics, just say so.”

  “I can’t be the only one looking out for his wellbeing.”

  “Some people only learn on their own, Lily. I’m one of those people. I had to wander around for a year before I realized that I could come home.”

  “I wish you would stop giving out shitty advice on the basis of your magical journey of being a bum for a year. I was on my own too and I didn’t come back with all kinds of fake wisdom that I would trot out every few seconds.”

  Eric pushed up. “I have work to do.”

  “What for, Eric?” she asked as he started to walk away. “We own this house, if you didn’t notice. The policy paid off the mortgage and I set up a fund to take care of the taxes. Nobody is asking you to keep working on it.”

  “I have an inspector coming to look at the replaced framing on Monday, and it’s what your father wanted. The second reason is why I’m still working on it.”

  He started walking again.

  “Nobody is asking you to,” she said. “We don’t care.”

  The man on TV started talking about the snow up at Sugarloaf. If her father had been there, he would have been talking about how the snow at Sugarloaf hadn’t been any good since 1966. For a while, they had gone at least once a year up to the mountain to ski. Lily would ski the easy slopes with her father while Zinnia stayed at the lodge with her little brothers. Reynold seemed to know everyone who worked there. They were all his old friends and greeted him by name whenever he took off his goggles. In the 70s, it seemed like the snow was never any good. They had even installed big machines in order to make snow. Her father had always said that it wasn’t nearly the same.

  “It’s like skiing on icy oatmeal,” he had said.

  The boys had learned to ski at the Camden Snow Bowl. The snow was even worse there, but it was only half as far away.

  The news went to commercial again. Soon, Saturday Night Live would be on if she mustered the energy to get up and change the channel. Lily sighed. Everyone said the show was no good since Chevy had left. Nothing was as good as it used to be. The world kept changing and each time it did it got a little worse.

  The music seeping through the floor from Jessie’s room diminished a little. Eric passed through the living room carrying a bunch of lumber on his shoulder. Making the turn to the stairs, he was incredibly careful not to bump any of the walls. Lily felt bad for what she had said before, but it felt like it would take too much energy to say anything in apology.

  She listened, wondering if he would start hammering again.

  He did.

  A moment later, the volume went back up on Jessie’s music.

  Lily pressed her fingers to her temples.

  # # #

  The kitchen was dark. Lily dumped the rest of her tea down the drain and felt for the sponge. It lived in the mouth of a ceramic frog that her mother had bought at a craft fair. She put the mug in the drying rack and turned around to lean against the counter. Her father had always complained about the kitchen.

  “There’s nowhere to lean,” he always said.

  Every time he had positioned himself in a good lean, someone would come along and need access to the drawer or cabinet directly behind him.

  Lily closed her eyes. In a way, her parents still lived in every corner of the house. They were like a song trapped in her brain. Whenever her thoughts idled, her parents would crop right up. They watched everything she did, always silently judging her. The lawyer told her that she would never get the value out of the house if she tried to sell. Even Susan at work said so. Locally, the market was down. Even if all the work was finished, it was a terrible time to sell. It would be much better to wait. If it were only hers, she might just take the loss and get away from all the ghosts. She couldn’t do that to Jessie though. Eventually, when he was mature enough, he deserved every penny of his inheritance.

  Lily let her feet carry her through the kitchen and then down the back hall. The door to the master bedroom was wide open. Eric had been storing materials and tools in there. Lily hadn’t been in since she picked out the clothes her parents would wear in their coffins.

  The air felt colder in there when she reached in to turn on the light.

  Eric’s stash of construction paraphernalia was gone. He had cleaned up thoroughly behind himself, of course. His fastidiousness could be maddening at times. There was a thick layer of dust on the dresser and the nightstands. The light looked yellow—maybe the lightbulbs needed dusting too.

  In her first memories of the house, the whole back part had been unfinished. It had been the land of bare beams and spiders. The door from the back of the kitchen had always been locked for fear that she might step on a rusty nail or tumble between joists and fall into the cellar.

  As their family grew, so did the living space. There was always a project—always another piece of the house to be colonized and brought to order. Lily remembered when her mother brought the new baby home and, for a brief stretch, the five of them were a
ll cramped into two bedrooms. She had been nine before she got her own room again. Her parents moved downstairs into the newly finished master bedroom. The room had been off-limits to kids, with the exception of baby Wendell.

  Lily sat at her mother’s makeup table and saw herself reflected in triptych. Her mother’s lipstick, Amber Suede, had a film of dust on the tube. Lily regarded the chiseled tip and then twisted it away and capped it again. Everything would have to be thrown away, but not today. A future version of herself, a stronger, colder Lily, would have to deal with all that mess.

  She pushed back and went to the door to her mother’s office. The bedroom had been off-limits, but Zinnia’s office had been absolutely top secret. Lily didn’t even have a good idea of how the desk was oriented or where the windows were located. Flipping on the light, she dispelled her ignorance and took it all in. Every surface had notebooks and papers. There were maps annotated with green circles and red Xs. Zinnia’s handwriting called out from every page.

  Lily went to the desk and sat on the edge of the seat.

  She caught her breath and covered her mouth with her hand. There was a note in the journal dated February 22nd, 1976. That was the day Zinnia and Reynold had drowned.

  “Jim at hospital jolted at mention of Trader—he knows about him? On car trip back to house, denied knowledge. Afraid of surveillance? Get him away from house to talk again.”

  Lily reached out and touched her finger to the letters. Her mother’s pen had made the ridges in the paper. Her personality was etched into the surface. Flipping back in the journal, the notes were all about Wendell. All the people she had interviewed and all the clues found. This journal didn’t contain the evidence, just her mom’s thoughts. She always said that she thought best when she was writing. It helped her turn the compost of her subconscious. Lily pushed the journal aside and turned instead to the book of interview notes.

  She read the transcript of the questioning of Mrs. Riday. The old woman had taken a walk on the day that Wendell had gone missing. Her walk took her by the library and then up to the fairgrounds before coming back down Elm Street. No, Mrs. Riday hadn’t seen Wendell. Zinnia assured her that even the absence of a sighting was useful. It told her the places that Wendell had not been that day. Flipping back, Lily saw that several of the interviews were like that. Her mother had truly left no stone unturned. Still, she had found nothing at all.

  At the sound of the knock, Lily jumped up and gasped.

  “Jesus, you scared the life out of me,” she said.

  “Sorry,” Eric said. She caught the little roll of his eyes. She had held some idea that she owed him an apology. When she saw his eye roll, she changed her mind.

  “What?”

  “Can you help me for a second?” he asked. “I can’t hold the header and nail it at the same time.”

  “What about Jessie?”

  “He’s… busy, I guess.”

  “Fine,” she said. She made no attempt to mask her own eye roll. “Wait. While you’re here.”

  She waved him over behind the desk. Eric looked down at his feet before he walked in. He felt the same way that she did—this area was off-limits. There might be some kind of trapdoor in the floor and he needed to see his own feet to make sure that he didn’t fall through. That idea made Lily smile. At least there were still parts of the house that were mysterious to Eric as well.

  While he came around behind her, she flipped the journal to its last page.

  “Jim,” he said when he saw where her finger was pointing. “So she did know him.”

  “Yes,” Lily said. “He was the one who helped Mom pull Jessie from the ice.”

  “Oh,” Eric said. “That whole day is pretty foggy for me. I remember Jessie coming home and being in bed all day, and then… You know.”

  “Right,” she said. It was foggy for her too. Still fixed in her mind was the relief she had felt when she arrived to the hospital. Her mother had been so vague on the phone when she called Lily at work. Lily’s heart had been pounding when she asked if she could leave early. Mr. Anderson had been amazing—“Oh, my, of course! Get to the hospital and take the rest of the day. We’ll see you back when everything is in control and not a moment sooner.” She could even remember the tie her boss had been wearing. It was blue with little red lobsters. He only wore it in the winter because in the summer every vacationer had a lobster somewhere on their clothes. He said that only a true native would wear one in the winter.

  Lily could remember all of that perfectly, but all the stuff that had happened at home was vague, like it was a movie she had seen while she was falling asleep.

  “That’s not the part I was wondering about though,” she said. “Who is ‘Trader’?”

  “Oh, that’s what it says? I thought it said ‘Tiode’ or something.”

  “Please, her handwriting isn’t that bad,” Lily said.

  Eric reached out and turned back a single page. Lily had skipped right by that. There were other entries there about Trader.

  “Water filter,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “See right here? She mentions ordering a water filter? That came in. I put it in the cellar but I never hooked it up. I wasn’t sure if your father meant for it to be on the drinking water or what.”

  “Why would she want a water filter? We still have well water and its fine.”

  Eric shrugged.

  “The town is supposed to extend the water lines down this way next year. Maybe she thought that it would be good to filter until then? Your mom was smart. If she thought we needed filtered water, maybe we did.”

  There was an idea in the back of Lily’s head that she couldn’t get her brain around. The idea was damp wood that wouldn’t take a flame.

  She shook her head.

  “Show me where you need help.”

  ERIC

  WITH A SIGH, HE shut the water off again. The coffee can of copper fittings was running low, and now he had to cut out the coupler that he had just installed. Eric found an old chair and dragged it under the pipes. His arms were exhausted from reaching up to do the work on the pipes overhead. After he cut the pipe and arranged a bucket to catch the falling water, he sat down on the chair. It swayed and creaked under him.

  The cellar was like a second home to him now. When he had first helped his uncle down there, he had felt dirty all the time. There were cobwebs everywhere and probably countless mice and snakes. Anything could fit between the gaps of the stone foundation. There were even places where little fingers of roots came in from the trees to explore the open air of the cellar.

  When he heard the footsteps cross overhead and then heard the door at the top of the stairs creak open, Eric knew what would happen next.

  Jessie came halfway down the stairs and spotted him sitting there.

  “What the fuck, man?”

  “Leak,” Eric said, pointing.

  “Just, like, out of nowhere?”

  Jessie came down the rest of the way. He was barefoot—apparently not squeamish about the cellar at all.

  “No. Your mom bought a water filter for the house. I was trying to install it but I can’t get a good joint because the water keeps steaming out of the pipes whenever I put the torch to them,” Eric said. “I’ve tried to braze that elbow twice and it leaks worse each time.”

  “I wanted to brush my teeth. No water came out.”

  Eric looked down at his watch. According to Lily, Jessie had actually been behaving since his run-in with the cops. Eric didn’t bother to ask why Jessie was at home, trying to brush his teeth at noon on a school day. Uncle Reynold always used to say, “If you know you won’t like the answer, don’t ask the question.”

  “I had to drain the pipes the best I could. I suppose I’ll have to bleed them all when I’m done.”

  “Do we have any bread?”

  “I’m sure. There’s some roast beef for sandwiches, too,” Eric said.

  Jessie was crossing the floor to look up at the pipe. He pi
cked up the flashlight and examined it.

  “No, man, bread for the pipes,” Jessie said.

  “Huh?”

  “After you drain them, you shove bread down in there. It soaks up the water and that way you can… I’ll do it.”

  Eric sat there, trying to puzzle out what Jessie was talking about, while Jessie went back upstairs. A few minutes later, Jessie returned with slices of bread. Eric just sat there and watched him work, certain that he wouldn’t be any more successful. It wasn’t until Jessie was almost done soldering the joint that Eric stood up and began to move closer. His skepticism was eroding quickly, almost making Eric feel like he was falling.

  “Wait—it didn’t sputter like it…”

  “I told you,” Jessie said.

  A moment later, Jessie was cleaning up the pipe with a wet rag. It steamed and then sparkled. The pipes looked clean and new. Jessie hadn’t even had to throw away the couplers for new ones.

  “Huh,” Eric said.

  Jessie hunted for the valve to turn the water back on. Eric pointed it out instead of reaching for it. The honor belonged to Jessie.

  They could hear the water flowing into the filter and then rushing into the rest of the pipes. Not a single drip escaped.

  “I left the tap open,” Jessie said and then he was gone.

  # # #

  Eric found his cousin still in the bathroom, combing his hair in the mirror.

  “The water tastes awesome now,” Eric said. “I thought it was good before, but now it’s so… I don’t know. It’s so pure. Where did you learn that trick with the bread?”

  “At work,” Jessie said.

  “That’s cool,” Eric said.

  “Yeah.”

  Jessie slid past him and returned to his room. Eric followed and leaned in the doorway, watching Jessie rummage through his dresser, looking for something.