by JA Huss
“What did I have on there? Did I have court?”
“No, no,” Eileen replies. “It was just some paperwork today. I have your paralegal on it. No need to worry.”
I slump back in my chair. “Thanks.”
I think.
Like what is going on with my father?
My phone buzzes in my coat pocket, so I take it out and look at the screen. Augustine.
For a moment I hesitate. Because I don’t really want to talk to them. I don’t think this is working. I mean, I like them. It’s fun and it feels good, but… seriously, where do I think this is going?
And for that matter, where am I going?
I let Augustine go to voicemail and instead press the contact for my real-estate agent, Lawton Ayers.
“Hey,” he says, unceremoniously. “I was just thinking about you.”
“Yeah, why’s that?”
“That house you have? The mansion everyone’s so keen to know more about these days?”
“What about it?”
“I have a buyer.”
“It’s not for sale. Unless it’s Ixion. Is it Ixion?”
“No, it’s a corporation.”
“What corporation?”
“Something called…” There’s a shuffling of papers on the other end of the phone. “Standard License LLC.”
“So a shell corporation?”
“Looks like it.”
“Why is everyone so interested in this house?”
“I was gonna ask you the same thing. I mean, it’s a cool house, no doubt. But it was on the market for over a month last year before you bought it. So why now? Why didn’t they swoop in when they could get it at foreclosure pricing?”
“I have no clue,” I say absently. Weird.
“So what’d you want?”
“Oh, well. Ironically, I was calling about the house. So… Evangeline told me what happened to that family.”
“Yeah, that sucks, right? So sad.”
“Yeah. Sad.”
“Uh… and?” Law says. “What about it?”
“I dunno. It’s just weird.”
“I can’t say I disagree, but… I can’t say why I feel that way, either.”
“Find out who owns that shell, can you do that?”
“Probably not.” He laughs. “I mean, they have a shell for a reason, right? Better get one of your guys on that if you need that kind of digging.” And then he pauses. “Everything OK with you?”
“Yup,” I say. “Thanks.” And then I end the call.
But something is not OK. I just can’t figure out what it is.
Everything seems just a little out of whack. Like the world has tilted. Shifted while I wasn’t looking.
Augustine and Alexander came back this year. Right after that game I set up with Evangeline and Ixion.
So really… Augustine and Alexander came back at the same time as Ixion.
Yeah. Didn’t really put those two things together before now. I was avoiding Augustine last winter. Didn’t want anything to do with her. With them.
But how did they get here? I mean, I get it. Sort of. They were having trouble, they said. Thought I was their answer.
But why now? After all these years? Because they were having trouble long before now. They separated years ago. Got back together years ago. So what’s been going on between then and now? That’s something they never shared with me.
I call Law back and when he picks up and says, “What now?” I say, “Get that contract ready for the sale of the old Turning Point. I’m buying it in about…” I check my calendar to see when my three-week deal with Augustine is up. “Ten days.”
Law laughs. “Uh… well. I don’t know what to say to that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s not for sale.”
“Yeah, but you said Augustine and Alexander own the shell. And we’ve got a deal in place. So in ten days they’re selling it to me. No questions asked.”
“OK,” Law says, still hesitating. “Do they have an agent?”
“Shit. I dunno. Just be prepared. I want that deal done the second I’m eligible. I’ve got cash saved so it should go quick.”
“What are you gonna do with it?”
“Open it back up.” I laugh. “What the fuck else would I do with it?”
We say goodbye and hang up and then I just sit there for a second.
Because… am I going to open it back up?
Suddenly I’m not so sure.
So I just sit there in my office thinking. Nothing to do today except think.
I go back eight months to the house. Because for some reason everything goes back to that house.
I call Evangeline.
“Hey, Jordan, what’s up?” She sounds out of breath, like she’s been running.
“Am I interrupting something?” I ask.
“No, not really. I’m walking the treadmill as I play the violin. It’s a training exercise. I have a show planned for late fall and I’m trying to step up my game and… you know, do something kinda flashy. I’m tired of classical music and why should I have to sit down or stand still while I play? You ever see fiddlers, Jordan?”
“Fiddlers?” I ask, suddenly lost.
“Yeah, you know how they go crazy on stage and do these little dances and shit? I think I want to be a fiddler. I’m putting the band back together.”
Which makes me huff out a laugh. I thought Evangeline was kinda stuffy and uptight when I first met her. But I was wrong. She’s kinda… funny. And weird. But in a cool way.
“What band?” I ask. Because I can’t not ask.
“That was a joke. I don’t have a band. But I’m gonna get one. I’m having auditions and I’m gonna put together a fiddler band. You know anyone who plays the banjo?”
This time I don’t hold in the laugh. It comes out like a guffaw. “Oh, my God. You just made my day. But no, I don’t know any banjo players.”
“I know,” she says. And I can almost hear her smile. “I just wanted to throw you off balance today and make you happy because Ixion came home last night and… wow. Whatever you guys did, it made him happy. I wanted to make you happy back. So what’d you need?”
“You know my house?”
“Yeah?”
“You never told me their name. Who was that family?”
I write down the name, tell her good luck with the fiddler band, and hang up.
A few seconds later, my phone buzzes. It’s Augustine again.
But I let her go to voicemail as I walk out of my office and tell everyone I’ll be back tomorrow.
Because I’m dialing Darrel’s number.
At six forty-five I’m sitting in my car down the street from my parents’ home, waiting for Darrel’s call. I feel sick. Like… wanna-throw-up sick. I don’t know why. It’s just that feeling you get in your gut when someone unleashes a secret you didn’t see coming. Some terrible thing, only it didn’t just happen. It’s been happening for a long time and you never knew about it.
A girl cheated on me once. I was in college at Stanford and I was like, I dunno. Nineteen. And we’d been going out for a while. Like all through freshman year and into sophomore year. A pretty long time for college. And I really thought I loved this girl. Like couldn’t eat kinda love, ya know? The kind that just stops your life and you feel like you can’t go on without them. Can’t work, or pay attention to anything. Can’t imagine living without them. Or you can, it just looks like misery.
And she’d dodge my calls. Not show up for dates. Shit like that. And I’d ask her, “Are you seeing someone else? Do you wanna break up?” Because that’s how I deal with conflict. I just want the truth.
And she’d always say, “No, of course not. I love you.”
And that was all I wanted to hear. All I needed to hear. OK, she loves me. And she’d stick around for a week or two and everything would be great.
But it always happened again.
She’d just ghost me. Just disappea
r and forget about me.
And then I wound up in this downward spiral of depression. I lived in this stupid apartment off-campus in sophomore year and I can remember so clearly sitting in bed listening for the sound of her shoes on the metal stairs outside that led up to the apartment.
Like… I knew that sound. I knew it. And every time someone else would come up the stairs, like a neighbor, I’d hope it was her, but I knew it wasn’t.
And it wasn’t.
I almost failed two classes that fall semester. That’s how off my game she had me. And looking back, God, why? Why did I act that way? I don’t miss her. So that love wasn’t real.
But she consumed me. She ate me up from the inside out.
Because I knew she was cheating. I knew it. I just let her lie to me because it made me feel better. Made the food go down. Made me able to study for a few hours. Made the day pass.
And after she ghosted she’d always come back. Why? Like just why did she come back?
That’s the part that fucked me up so badly.
Because the truth is she was using me. It was a plan. It was plotted. She needed me. For money, for a place to live every time she couldn’t pay her rent and asked to crash at my place. And I’d be like, “Just move in. Then you don’t have to worry about it. Just move in and be with me. Use my car, here, take my credit card and buy whatever you need.”
And she stayed that last time. Said OK and took everything I offered her.
But she didn’t stop. And she didn’t start loving me either.
Instead of me calling her obsessively, or driving by her apartment to see if she was there with someone else, or asking my friends if they’d seen her, I just… I just stayed home in bed, listening for her footsteps on the stairs.
Waiting for her key in the lock.
Hoping she’d come back because somehow she’d made it so I couldn’t live without her.
How do people do that?
It’s weird.
She disappeared for good after that.
And then one day at the end of senior year I saw her with this guy at a park just a few blocks off campus. And there was a kid there. A little baby, like… I dunno. Less than a year, for sure. They were taking turns pushing him in one of those baby swings and he was laughing, and smiling, and having a good time.
So I got out of my car and walked up towards the playground. And she saw me, and then he saw me, and she picked the baby up and turned her back, and he headed straight at me, hand out in front of him. One of those stay back gestures.
And he said, “He’s not yours. So don’t start no shit. We did the DNA test a long time ago, Jordan. Just leave her alone.”
And it hit me.
That feeling in my gut.
When I realized that he knew me. He knew all about me. And it didn’t even matter if it was lies. Because of course, whatever he thought he knew, it was all lies.
I just felt violated because he knew me.
And I knew nothing about him.
Because he was the real boyfriend and I was the other man.
I just never knew it.
Even though I don’t think about her, I do think about him. I wonder… did he ever figure out who she really was? Did he ever figure out that everything she told him was a lie?
And I feel really sad for him. For that kid, too.
Because people who lie like that… it’s a psychosis. It’s a mental illness.
And people like him… like me… we just live with it.
Because it makes the food go down.
My phone buzzes on the seat next to me, drawing me out of the past. I reach over, pick it up, and accept Darrel’s call.
“Give me something,” I say.
“Shit, I had to pull favors for this one. Someone really wanted these people to stay unknown.”
“What? Why? Why do you say that?”
“Because, OK, look. I got their names. Nathan and Marie Thompson.”
“OK?”
“And the kids are Chris, he’s the teen boy. Then Rylee, the small girl. And Abbey, the baby.”
“Right.”
“But it’s Marie Thompson I had trouble with.”
And this is when that feeling comes back. “Why?” I ask.
“Because I couldn’t find her real name. Like, she changed her maiden name before she got married. But I had a hunch her new maiden name was her old middle name, because it was Sara. Marie Sara. So I went digging for Marie Sara’s old name. And bingo. Got her.”
“Who is she?”
“A very troubled girl, from what I can tell. Sealed juvenile records. Like sealed up motherfucking tight, ya know?”
“Shit,” I say.
“But I got a judge to open them,” he says. “And I got a picture. Sending it now.”
I stare at my phone, waiting for the ding of a message.
I know what she looks like. At thirty-five, anyway. Because I saw the pictures before I dropped them off at Law’s office weeks ago.
But what I really need to know now is… what did she look like at seventeen?
“There he is!” my father says as I walk through their front door. I can smell dinner. Smells of my childhood. Roast chicken, and potatoes, and a hint of spicy seasoning that’s probably my mother’s homemade salad dressing.
He claps me on the back and says, “Did you have a nice day off?”
“Well,” I say, walking into the large open kitchen area where my mom is cooking. She turns and looks over her shoulder at me, smiling as she wipes her hands on her apron.
My mother is classic upper class. By that I mean the old-school kind. Not modern-day I-can-have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too. Not at all. Janet Wells made a choice back when she was twenty-two, and that choice was to be wife to Jack Wells and mother to yet-to-be Jordan Wells. That was her choice, and even though I’d often look at Ixion’s mother and think, God, she’s different—always going places, always involved in things, always… missing when it came to Ixion, which is why his house was the perfect place to hang when we were smaller—I used to think, That’s not my mother. She doesn’t look like my mother in any way.
My mother is Barbara Bush classy. She wears tailored suits and dresses. Pearls and subdued makeup.
Ixion’s mom… let’s call her Melania. She was flashy. Maybe a little bit slutty, if I’m being honest. Not that she wasn’t a lovely lady. She was. Just not the same kind of lovely as my mom.
Ixion’s parents were always loud. They argued like it was a sport. Like the winner got prize money at the end. It was a lot of swearing, and arm-flailing, and dramatic accusations.
My parents… I don’t think I’ve ever heard my parents argue.
“It’s so nice to see you, Jordan,” my mom says, placing both hands on my cheeks and giving me a kiss. “What have you been up to?”
“What have I been up to?” I mumble, looking at my father. He’s got his back to me, grabbing us drinks from the bar.
“What’s that?” my mom asks.
I look down at the folder in my hand and wonder…
“Here,” my father says. “Come sit down and have a drink while your mother finishes with dinner. Leave the boy alone, Janet. He’s working hard, that’s what he’s been up to.”
I’m looking at my mother when he says that, her smile falling a little further with each word. But then she rallies and the smile is back. “Go have your drink. Dinner is almost ready.” She rubs my arm and then the smile is real. Just for a moment, it’s real.
She turns and goes back to her meal prep.
So I take my attention to my father, who is already sitting in his oversized wingback leather chair, sipping his Scotch.
“What is that?” my father says, nodding his head to my folder.
I toss it down on the coffee table in front of the couch, then pick up my drink from a coaster and take a seat in the matching wingback chair that faces his. “There’s something I need to ask you,” I say, looking down into the glass of dark amber liquid. I cons
ider taking a drink, but then decide not to, and set it back down on the little side table to my left.
“Shoot,” my father says. “What’s on your mind, Jordan?”
I glance at my mother, who is all the way across the large room, still busy doing something with dinner, not paying any attention to us, and then take my full attention back to my father. “How long?” I ask.
He smiles at me. “What? How long what?”
I glance at my mother again, making sure she’s not listening. “How long did you keep Marie Sara Claiborne as one of your little sex slaves?”
His eyes narrow as he calmly tracks them to the kitchen. To my mother. To make sure she’s not listening. “Keep your fucking voice down,” he whispers.
“When did you get her?” I ask. “How old was she? Because when you sent her to me that night in the cabin, she was definitely not eighteen.”
“We can talk about this later, after—”
“Fuck that,” I say. My voice is low. Even. But very clearly angry. “Fuck. That. We’re talking abut it now. Did you kill her? Did you kill that family last year?”
“What fucking family?” my father growls.
“The Thompsons. Because Marie Sara Claiborne turned into Marie Sara Thompson. Funny how you never mentioned that I bought the house they used to live in. Seeing as how…” And I have to stop here. Because this… this was the hardest thing to hear. Of all the revelations Darrel told me on the phone ten minutes ago, this was the hardest. But it needs to be said. “Seeing as how her oldest child was my half-brother.”
That poor fucking kid. He looked like such a good kid. Such a normal fucking kid.
And it kills me now. Knowing I had a chance to… I don’t know, look through his room? Find clues about who he was? And I just threw it all away and sold the rest off in an estate sale.
I sold my only sibling off in an estate sale.
My father glances at my mother again. She’s in the kitchen humming. And I’m not sure if that’s just something she does these days, or if she’s deliberately trying to drown out the conversation going on in her living room. “It was an accident.”
“Fuck you it was an accident. Was bringing Marie up to see me when I was twelve an accident? Was telling her to fix me an accident too?”