by Megan Hart
room's dimness. He reached at once to turn on the table
lamp when I entered, but not even his smile could convince
me nothing was wrong.
I didn't spil the coffee, but I did set it down so hard on the
corner of his desk that I sloshed it over the rim. I went
around the corner of the desk and knelt in front of him as
he turned in the swivel chair to stare at me. I reached for
his hands before I knew it, and he took them, his fingers
strong and warm and heavy in mine.
"What's wrong, Paul?"
"I can't make these figures work," he said calmly. Solemn.
His fingers tightened briefly, a twitch.
I squeezed back, gently. "Do you need me to take a look
I squeezed back, gently. "Do you need me to take a look
at them?"
"No," he said. "I just need to sit here for a few more minutes to get them straight. Okay?"
Whatever this was, it wasn't normal, but it didn't feel
wrong. He trembled briefly, the twitch of his fingers
echoing in his entire body before he stiled. I saw the effort
in his eyes, what it took to stop himself from shaking.
I had known since the first week I worked for him that
Paul needed more attention than any other boss I'd ever
had. I'd been warned, but for the wrong reasons, and we'd
gotten along more than fine. Great. We'd made an
understanding. I didn't know what was wrong with him
right now, but it didn't realy matter. I had to take care of
him.
"Do you want me to cal your wife?"
He blinked and sighed. His shoulders hunched. "Paige, I'm
just so very, very…overwhelmed."
I looked past him to the computer, where a few windows
spread out across the screen. I stood and reached past
him to click them al closed, one by one, until al that
him to click them al closed, one by one, until al that
remained was the plain blue walpaper and tiny icons of his
desktop. Paul didn't move until I moved back to lean
against the desk. Then he swiveled his chair away from
me.
In profile, he looked older than he had before. He was a
man who wore his age in the lines of his face and his
frown, and in his heavy sigh.
"I just need a few minutes," he said quietly.
"How long has this been going on?"
He looked at me then and managed a smile. "A long time.
My whole life."
"Do you take meds for it?" I kept my voice soft, and if the intrusive question offended him he didn't show it.
"Yes."
"Aren't they working?"
Paul sighed, but smiled a little broader. "Not today, I
guess."
"Can I help you?" I asked without reaching for him again,
though I wanted to run a hand over his hair and cup his
cheek. Something smal and soft to comfort him. The way
my mom used to touch me when I was upset.
"You've helped me so much, you don't even know." Paul
took a deep, long breath and squared his shoulders. "Just
having you here has been such a…pleasure, Paige."
I smiled at his hesitation. "Uh-huh."
He rumpled his hair, and some of his tension eased with
that simple act. He took another slow breath and let it out.
He looked at me with naked eyes. "I find, sometimes,
knowing that you're there with my coffee is enough to
keep me on the right track. You never balked, Paige. Not
at anything I asked you. You never made me feel like a
tyrant for needing things a certain way."
"Of course not."
He half lifted a brow. "Others did."
"I know they did."
We shared some silence.
We shared some silence.
"You realy know me, Paige," Paul said finaly. "I'l be sorry when you leave."
This time I did reach for him, if only to give his tie a gentle
tug. "I'm not going anywhere."
The cough interrupted us, and we both looked toward the
door. I didn't drop his tie, not at first. Not when I saw it
was Vivian, her blond hair freshly styled and her brows as
high as her heels. I let Paul's tie slide from my fingers as
slowly as I stood.
"I brought those files to go over, Paul." She didn't come
into the room.
"I thought you were going to cal me first," he said.
She and I both looked at him. I couldn't see her face, but I
knew my mouth had dropped a little. Paul, as a rule,
wasn't mean. Not even close. And he'd pretty much just
spanked her, and not in the good way. I wanted to laugh,
but settled for a smile he returned.
"I can come back in fifteen minutes," she said cooly.
"Would that suit?"
"Would that suit?"
"How about twenty? Paige and I were in the middle of a
meeting."
She left without saying anything, and his shoulders tensed
again, but he took another long, slow breath. When she'd
gone he ran a hand over his hair again and let it cover his
eyes for a minute. When he looked at me, though, his smile
seemed genuine and the horrific blank look in his gaze had
faded.
"She's going to think we're fucking," I said in a low voice.
It was perhaps an inappropriate thing to say, but we'd
moved beyond the pretense of formality.
He nodded. "She might."
"Is this going to be a problem for you?"
Paul didn't even look at the photos of his wife and family,
though his mouth tightened. I wondered if I'd been wrong
about him and Vivian. "It might be a problem for her. But
not me, no."
He paused. "It could make a difference when she's your
He paused. "It could make a difference when she's your
boss, though."
"I already told you, I'm not applying for that job."
I went to the bathroom to get a wet paper towel to take
care of the coffee dripping on the desk. When I came
back, Paul had moved the mug, contents half gone. He'd
puled out a pad of paper and his pen rested on it, though
he wasn't writing. I wiped the spots and tossed the paper
in the trash, then leaned over his shoulder to look at the list
as yet unwritten.
"Start with your e-mail," I said. He wrote it down. "Then sort through the mail in your in-box. Take care of what
needs done with those things."
He wrote that down, too, and the rest of the instructions I
gave him.
"Send me home early," I added, and he looked up, the
scratching of pen ceasing. "I have to be able to pick up my
little brother from the after-school-care program every day
this week. I'l need to leave by three, al right? I'l go
without a lunch break and come in earlier if I have to."
Paul slowly wrote down, Paige leaving early, and looked
Paul slowly wrote down, Paige leaving early, and looked
up at me again. "No, you don't have to. Just make sure
your work's done." Another pause. "As if I need to tel
you."
I leaned closer, just a bit, to say in a low voice, "Write it
down in a list for me. It wil make you feel better."
I left the office with Paul's chuckle ringing in my ears.
Chapter
32
"Can we have macaroni and cheese for dinner? Please?"
Arty clung to my hand like the monkey I'd always caled
him, then lifted his feet off the ground, so I staggered from
his sudden weight.
"Cut it out." I shook him off and set down my overnight
bag.
The living room smeled like my mom's perfume and
something else. Old Chinese food, maybe. I'd have to do a
search. My mom had been known to set down a container
or plate next to the couch while she watched TV and
forget about it. Arty tossed his shoes, coat and book bag
onto the floor by the front door in an amazing one-two-
three slingshot move I wouldn't have believed possible had
I not seen it in front of me. He was already off and running
toward the kitchen when I caled him back.
"Pick that stuff up!" I pointed.
"I need a snack!"
I happened to know they fed him at his after-school
I happened to know they fed him at his after-school
program, because my mom had told me how great it was
not to worry about him being hungry when she picked him
up. "Have a piece of fruit."
Arty stopped in midleap, so fast he skidded on the worn
carpet in the kitchen doorway. "Fruit?"
"Mom doesn't make you eat fruit?"
He made a face like I'd asked him to eat dung. "But I
wanted a Doodle."
I had no fucking clue what a Doodle was, but it didn't
sound pleasant. "Fruit. Or some crackers. I'l make dinner
in about twenty minutes, just let me get settled in."
Arty grumped and groaned and stomped, but came back
out in a minute with a box of cheese crackers. He hurtled
himself into a beanbag placed close enough to the TV he
could have read Braile on the screen, and turned on
cartoons loud enough to make me wince. He wasn't happy
to scoot back or turn it down, but he did. I tried to ignore
the crumbs spewing from his mouth with each guffaw.
I took my bag up the narrow stairs and down the dark,
close hal to the room at the back of the house. My mom
close hal to the room at the back of the house. My mom
had taken the front room, overlooking the street, with a
panel of four large windows. Arty's smaler room was
between hers and the bathroom. The room at the end
should've been a nice den, a sewing room, a playroom, but
for some reason nobody in the house used it.
There was a bed, at least, a creaking twin bed that
matched one of the dressers I'd inherited from my
grandma. The sheets were clean, and the bedspread, and
my mom had laid out clean towels for me, too. I set my
bag on the rickety, spindle-legged chair I'd never have
dared sit on, and I colapsed onto the bed. The ceiling had
cracks in it, and water damage. One high, narrow window
had a blind but no curtain. That would be pleasant in the
morning.
"Paiiiiige! I'm hungry!"
The wail drifted up the stairs and I heaved myself out of
the bed to holer, "I'l be right down!"
When I yanked the door opposite the foot of the bed,
though, al I did was chip a nail on the knob. The door
stayed stubbornly shut. Not the closet, then. It must have
been the door to the attic. I tried the one next to the
been the door to the attic. I tried the one next to the
dresser, revealing a set of wire hangers I used to quickly
hang my work clothes for the next couple days. Then it
was downstairs to the kitchen, which looked as if it had
been cleaned in preparation for my arrival.
Which meant my mom had wiped down the counters and
cleared out the sink, but the floor was a little sticky in front
of the fridge and crumbs coated the table. When I was
younger, it had never occurred to me that other people
stored leftover food in the fridge or the freezer. When we
got pizza it often stayed out on the counter until it was
gone. Sometimes she put it, stil in the box, in the oven until
we remembered to take it out and throw it away. My mom
cooked but haphazardly, so spaghetti sauce had always
made Rorschach blots on the stovetop and stiff noodles
stuck to the ceiling where she'd tossed them to see if the
pasta was done.
When I was in elementary school, I'd come down with
food poisoning. To be fair, it wasn't my mom's fault. I'd
spent the day with my dad at his country-club pool, where
they fed me extravagantly on fries and hot dogs instead of
making me eat the peanut butter and jely sandwich my
mom had packed for me. I brought it home and ate the
sandwich later that night for dinner. An hour after that, the
sandwich later that night for dinner. An hour after that, the
world began to spin. An eternal half hour after that, I
started to puke.
I had a morbid fear of food gone bad after that. I wouldn't
eat anything I suspected, even vaguely, of having turned.
When I opened my mom's fridge and saw the containers
and jars, al potentialy swimming with bacteria, my
stomach clenched tight in protest.
"Let's go out to eat, okay?"
I didn't have to say it twice. My arms filed with squirming
little boy as Arty tried to squeeze the breath out of me and
mostly succeeded. I put the kibosh on McDonald's, but
conceded to Wendy's, where he thought he tricked me
into letting him get a Frosty, when realy I just wanted an
excuse to get one for myself.
Inside the restaurant, Arty launched himself across the
room. "Leo!" Arty seemed incapable of using a voice at
anything less than a shout, but Leo didn't seem to care. He
patiently let Arty leap al over him, then looked at me over
the top of Arty's head.
"Hey, Paige."
"Hey, Paige."
I stuttered for a second. "What…hey. What are you doing
here?"
He lifted his bag of food. "Getting dinner."
Arty had settled back down to the toy he'd found in his
kids' meal bag. Leo was hesitating, but I gestured at the
table, and he sat. "It's good to see you, Leo."
"You, too. What's been going on?"
Of al my mom's boyfriends over the years, Leo was the
one I liked the best. He'd never tried to be my dad, and he
hadn't forced friendship on me, either. Maybe it was
because I was already grown up and moved out of my
mom's house when they started dating.
I glanced at Arty, lost in his own world of ketchup-firing
French-fry cannons. "I thought you and my mom were
going away together."
Leo's eyes never left mine, though his mouth set into a hard
line centered in his bushy, biker beard. "Obviously, we
didn't."
"So where did she go?"
He shrugged and looked away. "That's between you and
your mom, Paige."
Another guy? It had to be. Why else would Leo look so…
lost? And on a man his size, with that beard, the tattoos
and the denim biker vest, lost wasn't a look I'd ever
expected to see.
"I gotta run," Leo said and l
eaned across the table to ruffle Arty's hair. "Take care of the kiddo."
"Of course." I watched him head out and turned back to
Arty. "Where did Mama say she was going?"
"To a spar," he said.
"A spa?"
"Yeah, that's what I said. A spa. She's going to get a
message."
I sighed. "A massage?"
He grinned, showing the gap between his teeth where he'd
He grinned, showing the gap between his teeth where he'd
lost one. "Yeah."
"Alone?"
"I guess so." Arty shrugged.
It wasn't like I could realy expect him to know more, but
why had she lied to me?
I woke, disoriented, when a smal hand tugged my arm.
Expecting Arty, I sat up and fumbled for the light next to
my bed, but there wasn't one. I blinked until my eyes
focused, but my brother wasn't hovering over me. The
touch I'd felt had come from nothing.
I sat straight up, the blankets I'd tucked so carefuly
around me fighting against me now. At the foot of my bed
stood two smal children, both about Arty's age, clutching
each other's hands. Pale, white children I didn't need a
lamp to see because they both gleamed in the darkness.
Pale children with empty black holes where their eyes
should've been and blood dripping from their ragged
fingertips. Behind them, the attic door gaped wide.
I waited for the blood to start pouring out of the door like
it did in The Shining, but al that happened was they
it did in The Shining, but al that happened was they
stared. And stared. The pounding of my heart became a
roar and I did the only thing I had the courage to do. I
closed my eyes, then clapped my hands over them, too.
Nothing happened until I heard a smal voice whisper,
"Take care of us."
Then I screamed, and screamed and screamed…until I sat
straight up in bed to the sound of my phone ringing. The
attic door was stil closed. No ghostly children were
begging me to adopt them. The room wasn't even that
dark, lit as it was by the light from an outside streetlamp
through the window.
I stumbled out of bed and dug in my purse for my cel. My
heart had started pounding again, but for a different
reason. I got al kinds of texts and cals in strange hours,
but this one felt wrong, and I didn't recognize the number.
"Ms. DeMarco?"
"Yes, who's this?"
"This is Dr. Philips at the Hershey Med Center. I'm sorry
to cal you so late, but your mother's surgery has had some