It took a long time, but finally he blinked and registered my presence, brow furrowing.
“Myron?” he said.
“Dad,” I said, “do you know what’s happened?”
“Where’s Eleanor?” he asked. He scratched at the stubble on his face, his long fingernails leaving red streaks. “Where’s your mother?”
“What?” Mom said. “What do you mean? I’m right here!”
I sighed. “He can’t hear you.”
“Who can’t hear me?” Dad asked.
“Well of course he can hear me,” Mom said indignantly. “I’m sitting right here, aren’t I? He’s just being stubborn. Just like your father. He wasn’t happy with the soufflé I made tonight and he’s decided to punish me. He wanted steak and eggs and he knows what the doctor said about that.”
“Where’s Eleanor?” Dad asked again, the panic rising in his voice “Where is she? She was here just a minute ago.”
“How dare you be so rude!” Mom shot at him. “You may be unhappy with me, Henry, but I don’t appreciate this sort of behavior!”
“Dad—”
“Eleanor!” he shouted suddenly, and both Mom and I jumped. “Eleanor! Eleanor!”
As unresponsive as he’d been before, he was just as agitated now, a coiled spring of tension, his body alive with spasms and twitches. He made a move to rise, and I clamped a hand on his knee. The cotton pajamas collapsed around a joint so bony and small it frightened me. I’d known he had been losing weight, that he’d become a bit more gaunt over the years, but this person was hardly more than a skeleton.
He tried to overpower me, rising against my will, but there was so little strength in him that he didn’t manage more than to jerk his leg a little. His eyes flared with animal-like rage. He leaned forward and I pushed him back toward the couch. I’d meant it to be only a gentle push, but he was so light he crumpled like a sheet of paper.
“Henry!” Mom cried.
“Where—where—where—” he stuttered.
“Please, Dad,” I said.
“Where—where—where—”
“Dad, she’s gone,” I said.
“Where—where—where—”
“Gone?” Mom said.
“Where—where … What?”
He stopped fighting me, his body stilling, a bit of sanity returning to his eyes. I squeezed his hand. It was cold and leathery, like a baseball glove left out in the snow. Outside of being a cop, that had been his big love, baseball, and he’d drag me outside to play catch all year round. I’d never liked it as much as him, never liked it at all, really, but it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment how much I missed tossing the ball around with him. When was the last time? Even as an adult, every time I’d be over he would ask me to play catch—until recently. A year? Two?
The signs were all there and I’d missed them. Or if I hadn’t missed them, then I’d surely ignored them, which was a far worse crime.
“Dad,” I said, keeping my voice as calm and measured as I could, “I want you to listen carefully to me. This is going to be hard, but I need you to hear it. Are you listening?”
“Why are you talking to him like he’s a child?” Mom said curtly. “Don’t talk to your father that way. Henry, tell your son. Tell him he can’t talk to you like that.”
Dad nodded to me. It was a barely perceptible nod, a slight tilt of his head, but there was something about the deliberate nature of it that told me he was fully present. My throat was tightening on me and my face was burning hot. I didn’t know how to do this, so I just went ahead and blurted it out.
“Mom is dead,” I said.
If the news reached Dad in any measurable way, he didn’t show it, but Mom gaped at me as if I’d slapped her.
“What?” she said. “What kind of nonsense is this?”
“Mom is dead,” I said again, keeping my attention on Dad. If anything, he seemed to be receding from me, his eyes turning as flat and unresponsive as the eyes in a painting.
“That’s quite enough, Vinnie,” Mom said. “I don’t know what kind of silly game this is, but—”
“Mom is dead,” I said, a bit more forcefully.
“How dare you talk about me in such a—”
“Mom is dead!”
“I am not! I’m right here! Why are you both ignoring me?”
“Mom is dead!”
Fueled by all of my own pent-up grief and petty resentments, all my years of failing to live up to her expectations, I bellowed it at the top of my lungs. I hadn’t meant to lose control. It wasn’t an intentional ploy to break through Dad’s mental fog. Yet my emotional outburst did get him to flinch.
His eyes focused on me, his pupils wide and dark enough that I saw the vague outlines of my own reflection kneeling before him. His face was still pink and raw from the crying. The lines on his face were etched deep. This was an old man, somebody who’d been through the meat grinder of life and was trying to hold on, but there was no question that this was my father. He was here. He was here and he saw me.
Then he did something I didn’t expect. He reached forward and cupped that rough hand of his around my neck.
“It’s going to be okay, son,” he said.
Mom was crying in her usual way, a silent trickle down a stone cold face, her body as stiff as a mannequin’s. Even in this, as in almost everything with her, there was an undercurrent of passive aggressiveness. It was a way of crying that said, You did this to me, look at what you did. As for me, it took everything I had to bottle up my own tears. That Dad would try to comfort me, after losing the only woman he’d ever professed to love, was so unexpected that it very nearly blew apart the carefully constructed tough-guy persona I’d spent years building and fortifying.
I would never be as tough as Dad. He was as tough as knotted wood. He didn’t have to try. He just was. The hybrid-driving, love-song-listening, sensitive, needy, artsy-fartsy Myron that was the real me, despite my best efforts to change it—that guy could never be as genuinely tough no matter how hard he worked at it. But I wasn’t about to lose it now. Not now, for God’s sake.
Mom took a long, shuddering breath. “I just don’t understand why you’re being so needlessly cruel,” she said, sniffling. “Why would you say such a thing? Hank, tell him how cruel he’s being. Hank, listen to me. Why aren’t you listening to me?”
Dad, of course, said nothing. He didn’t see her. Unlike me, he would never see his beloved wife again. I rose shakily to my feet, feeling like a burnt-out husk of a man, ashes held together by static that a strong wind might scatter. When I looked at Mom, all prim and proper and entirely contained, despite her tears, I felt neither anger nor resentment. I felt a sympathy for her I hadn’t felt in years—maybe never. I realized now how much she’d been compensating for Dad’s weaknesses, how she’d managed to fill in the ever-growing gaps in his mind with the force of her own will. The very stubbornness about her that I’d so long hated was probably the one thing that had helped him the most.
Outside, a dog explained his loneliness to the night in one long, mournful howl. I tried to think of a way to explain to Mom what had happened to her. I tried to think of a way to soften the blow, to make it easy for her just this once, but my mind froze. I just couldn’t do it.
“Hello, Eleanor.”
It was Billie, approaching from the front door. I’d never been more grateful for her and all her many contradictions than in that moment. She’d died her hair bright orange, crayon orange, and cut it short and spiky. She was dressed in a black leather jacket and leather chaps over blue jeans, a black motorcycle helmet under her arm. When she stepped up next to me, I could smell the gasoline on her. So real. So real I always had to remind myself that if I reached for her, nothing would be there.
Mom eyed her the way she might eye a dog that had just crapped on her driveway. “What’s she doing here?” she said.
“I’ve come to help you,” Billie said.
“Well, isn’t that big of you. Vinnie, plea
se kindly tell your wife that I don’t need anyone’s help. I especially don’t need the help of someone who can barely help herself.”
“Mom, please,” I said.
Dad glanced at me, his attention lingering between me and somewhere beyond, though he didn’t say anything. I realized I was going to have to be careful. Dad was confused enough. I didn’t want to add to his burdens.
“Eleanor, listen,” Billie said, “I’m just going to tell you how it’s going to be. I don’t care if you don’t want to hear it. You’ll figure it out eventually, we all do, but if you go on denying the truth you’ll just make it tough for Myron. And he’s had it tough enough already. You’re dead. That’s it, plain and simple. You died and you’re not among the living anymore.”
The whole time she spoke, Mom pointedly kept her gaze fixed on me. “Vinnie, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask your wife to leave. I don’t understand why you all keep saying this foolish thing about me dying. It’s cruel. I can understand her being cruel, she’s always been cruel, but you, Vinnie … I’m so disappointed.”
“Nobody’s being cruel, Eleanor,” Billie said. “We’re just trying to tell you the truth.”
“Vinnie—”
“Myron, he goes by Myron.”
“Vinnie, as I was saying—”
“Haven’t you wondered why you can see me?” Billie asked.
“—I really must ask both of you … both of you …”
This last question finally got to Mom. I could see the realization blooming in her eyes, that the woman she was talking to was currently dead. There was no way for her to deny it. She’d been at Billie’s funeral! And if Mom was talking to a dead person, what did that mean about her? She swallowed hard, and her fingers, clasped in her lap, twitched a few times.
“But Vinnie can see me,” she protested.
Billie glanced at me, her eyes asking permission. I gave it to her with a nod.
“Myron can see you because he’s different,” she said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Myron can see ghosts.”
“What? Don’t be absurd.”
“He can see both of us because we’re ghosts. It started to happen after he got shot. You remember he got shot, don’t you?”
“Well, of course I do! That doesn’t mean I believe all this nonsense.”
Billie folded her arms, coolly staring down at Mom the way a teacher might stare down a misbehaving pupil. “Touch your husband,” she said.
“What?”
“Touch him. On the leg. The shoulder. Something.”
“I will do no such thing!”
“I’m not asking you give him a hand job—just to make some physical contact, for God’s sake.”
“How dare you!”
“Touch him.”
“Stop saying that!”
Mom’s face blushed bright red and she glared at Billie with rabid intensity. With a frustrated groan, Billie looked at me, raising her eyebrows. I knew what she wanted me to do. I also knew that what she wanted me to do would undoubtedly work. It would sever the last cord Mom had with the world of the living. It would be painful and cruel and Mom would resent me forever for it.
I took a few timid steps in her direction, slowly raising my arms. I had to swallow a few times before I could speak. It felt as if I had a tennis ball lodged in my throat. “Mom,” I said.
“What?” she said.
“I want to give you a hug.”
She hardly moved, but still it seemed as if she sank into the couch, deflating, becoming as small as she could.
“No,” she whispered.
“Just one hug.”
“We don’t—we don’t do that. We don’t hug.”
“Just this once.”
“Vinnie … Myron … please …”
She started to move, a feeble attempt to turn away from me, and I bent over her and swept my arms through her.
I expected to feel nothing more than a slight tingle, what I often but not always felt when I passed through a ghost or a ghost passed through me. Yet this time I felt something more, a lot more, not just a tingle but a painful jolt that was like an electrified needle jabbed straight into my heart. It was an injection of fear and giddiness and remorse and a lifetime of other emotions all packed into one wallop, everything my mother had ever felt, good and bad, everything she’d never shared with me, or probably anyone, laid bare to me for one fateful second.
She knew it, too, based on her startled expression. I knew her better in that moment than I’d ever known her. If she would have been embarrassed to be seen in her nightgown, this was far worse, an exposing of her soul that was a total violation. I knew, despite the brave front she’d put on all this years, how small and scared she really was. She was such a scared little person.
I stood. The moment lasted a few seconds, the two of us staring at one another. I heard Billie exhale slowly. Dad started crying again, but they were silent tears. Mom’s face, naked in its fragility, suddenly hardened, the walls coming down, the eyes turning to steel. She brushed off her pants and stood, glaring at me, the two of us nose to nose.
“How could you,” she snapped.
Then she swiveled on her heels and marched out of the room, walking even more stiffly than usual, a marionette without the strings. I watched her go. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I wanted to tell her I loved her.
I wanted to, but I couldn’t make myself say the words.
Chapter 13
When I finally crawled back to consciousness, I was greeted by the mother of all headaches.
Ever since the shooting, I’d become intimately familiar with every variety and breed of head-related pain, but this one tested even my own elevated tolerance level for the stuff. There were almost as many words to describe headaches as the Eskimos had to describe snow. Throbbing. Earsplitting. Head-pounding. Piercing. Pulsing. Crippling. The always excruciating migraine, which stepped up the sufferer to the expert level. All those words and more couldn’t have described the eyeball-stabbing, skull-vise-squeezing, ice-pick-penetrating utter agony that paralyzed me for a few minutes on the hardwood floor of Karen Thorne’s condo before I finally gathered up enough strength and courage to rise, groaning, to my knees.
The room was dark and quiet. Only the faintest moonlight rimmed the curtained windows. How long had I been out? My eyelids felt as if they were coated with sand. I touched the back of my head and winced at the pain, but at least I didn’t feel blood. I heard the hum of the fridge in the other room, and there was faint glow from down the hall, probably the oven light. The left side of my face, which had been pressed against the floor, was numb.
Taking the Glock out of my coat, I crawled to the desk and used it for support to climb to my feet. A digital clock in the corner read 8:05 p.m. I released the safety and took my time searching the condo, the rooms, the closets, even under the bed, always keeping my Glock at the ready. There was nobody there.
By the time I finished, my headache had subsided to a dull ache behind the eyes. I was in the kitchen, massaging my pulsing temples and trying to understand what somebody thought they might find in such a sterile place, when I heard the distinctive click of heels from down the hall. I stepped back, deeper into the kitchen, and pointed the Glock where I knew the person would be in seconds.
It was Karen, dressed in a long black overcoat, dark nylons, and black sequined shoes that matched her sequined handbag. Her blond hair had been brushed into luxurious, gleaming curls. She set her handbag on the counter, and when she finally saw me, her eyes flew wide and her hands fluttered to her throat.
“Oh,” she said.
“Surprise,” I said.
“What—what are you doing—”
“Detecting,” I said.
“Detecting?”
“Sleuthing. Looking for clues. You know, my job. Hope you don’t mind. I would have asked first, but, well, I didn’t.” I holstered the Glock. Pointing a gun at somebody had t
he undesirable effect of making them jumpy—even with ghosts. “So where were you? You look dressed for a night on the town.”
She blinked at me a few times, her eyelashes long and dark, the kind of eyelashes that took a woman a lot of effort to produce. “I was … I was just out with some friends. Some old friends. People I hadn’t seen in a while.”
Her voice was a little slurred—not a lot, but enough that it was obvious she’d been drinking. It was another one of those things that continued to amaze me. A ghost had no reason to show any signs of inebriation, or any physical effects of alcohol or drugs, but they still usually carried on as if it was so.
“Did any of those old friends die of liver failure?” I asked, having a hard time hiding my irritation.
“What?”
I motioned to the living room. “You want to sit down for a minute? I’ve got some questions.”
I turned on a side lamp and the two of us took our seats, her on the couch, me on the loveseat. She brought her handbag with her, clutching it against her chest as if she was afraid I might snatch it from her. Her eyes were wide and shiny, like saucers full of water, and she continued to blink rapidly.
“So when were you going to tell me about your drinking problem?” I asked.
“What?”
“I spoke with your father. He said you were basically an alcoholic.”
She blushed. “I’m no such thing. I like—I like a drink now and then, it’s true, but I never … I mean I haven’t …”
“He said that when you died, your blood-alcohol level was through the roof. He said that’s why nobody even suspected foul play.”
“I told you, that’s not why I died. It was the brakes. It doesn’t matter how much I … It was the brakes. They just didn’t work.”
“I’m not saying I don’t believe you. I’m just saying that when a client starts lying to me about little things, then I start wondering if they’re lying to me about bigger things.”
“I wasn’t lying! I just didn’t … I didn’t think it was relevant.”
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