“Where?” Dodie asked.
“None of your business.” This meantI don’t know, but I didn’t tell her that. Instead, I walked out the front door.
A breeze was blowing, warm and surprisingly gentle, carrying the scent of dying vegetation and asphalt. No cars passed on the street. I stood in the driveway with my keys in my hand and closed my eyes.
Images came back to me, moving behind my closed eyelids like snippets of film. Vail at thirteen, lying on his bed reading a book on a winter afternoon, his brow furrowed, his legs impossibly long, sprawled over his comforter in the snowy gray-blue light. Me bickering with Dodie as I braided her hair, the dark strands sliding over my fingers. My mother’s perfume, the scent of which lived in the satin lining of her best wool coat. My father putting his hand on the top of my head when I was small, the only memory I had of him touching me with affection. Walking to school in the rain. Scraping my knees in a playground somewhere—school? A park?—and watching drops of blood soak into my torn tights. Sleeping next to a noisy fan in the heat of summer, waiting for the sun to come up again. The cold shock of a Popsicle on my tongue.
Sister wasn’t the only memory that made up my childhood. There were other memories, too.
I opened my eyes and looked back at the house. A bird was perched on the roof, large and plump, its silhouette black against the sky. As I watched, it ruffled its inky feathers out, then preened the feathers with its beak. Was it a raven? A crow? I didn’t know the difference. Maybe it was something else. I wondered if it had a nest up there, if it was part of a flock or if it was alone. If it lived there or was just passing through.
I had never seen the ghost of an animal, I realized. Not ever. Maybe they knew better than we did how to let go.
—
Gus and Bradley Pine’s house in Evergreen Heights was just like every other house on the street, an unremarkable box made of bricktopped with shabby aluminum siding. The shutters had been painted blue over a decade ago. Cedar trees—plants of the lowest possible maintenance—lined the sides of the yard, with a maple tree in the center. The leaves on the lawn, I noted, were in a pile. Bradley had done his assigned raking.
When I rang the front doorbell, Gus answered. He wore old army pants and a gray sweatshirt. He grinned at me, showing his yellowing teeth through his bushy beard. Without a greeting, he shouted back into the house: “Violet’s here!” Turning back to me, he said, “You could have called.”
I rolled my eyes in answer. “Just let me in.”
“Gladly.” He stepped aside and waved me into a well-worn living room, complete with deep sofa upholstered in plaid with matching chair, both aimed at the TV. He may as well have hung a sign that saidbachelor’s residence. It smelled weirdly of man in here, a sweaty, mustardy miasma I wasn’t used to. Vail only smelled like soap.
Bradley appeared from the hall, buckling his belt and pulling his shirt over it as if he’d just dressed. “Thank God,” he said to no one, jamming his feet into his shoes and taking my elbow. “Dad, Violet and I are going out,” he announced, hustling me toward the front door.
“Stay for a coffee.” Gus was still grinning as if he’d said a joke.
“No way, old man.” Bradley pushed me onto the porch and slammed the screen door in Gus’s face.
“Don’t let him eat yogurt!” Gus shouted after us through the screen. “It goes straight through his guts!”
Bradley opened his car door and folded me in bodily, like a cop arresting a dangerous suspect. “Hurry up.”
“Okay, okay. God.” I leaned away from the door when he slammed it and waited for him to get in the driver’s seat.
Bradley backed out of the driveway at top speed, twisting to see out the window behind him.
“Where are we going?” I asked when we were at the stop sign at the head of the street.
“Fuck if I know,” was the answer.
So he wanted to escape his house as much as I had wanted to escape mine. We drove in silence for a while, and I found that I didn’t mind his company, the quiet, or our aimless route. I turned off my thoughts and watched the scenery out the window.
No one would call Fell beautiful—laundromats and variety stores were no one’s concept of urban utopia—but it was familiar to me. We passed the Fell College of Classical Education, which looked like a leafy visitor from another world, its elegant Victorian buildings clustered around a cobblestoned square, out of place among the squat, ugly buildings that made up the rest of town. A rich man’s long-ago dream. It looked peaceful, but I also remembered the poltergeist in the library and Gus’s story of the girl who disappeared from her dorm, her cup of tea left cooling on her desk.
When we came to the South Overpass, I remembered that it was the place where Cathy Caldwell’s body was found. “We’re leaving town,” I said.
“I just want to drive,” Bradley replied.
We turned onto a two-lane road lined with trees. After a sign that said we would eventually get to Albany if we drove long enough, there was no other indication of where we were. Bradley’s shoulders relaxed. I wondered what had happened, whether he’d argued with Gus or had a disagreement with his ex-wife. Maybe living with his father wasn’t going well. Maybe one of the kids was sick, or maybe he was worried about money since he was out of a job. I was uncomfortable with the idea of Bradley Pine having feelings.
He ruined my momentary softness toward him by saying into the silence of the car, “I think we should have sex.”
I couldn’t help it—I laughed. “Where?” I asked him. “My house,which is haunted as shit? Yours? You want to do it on the plaid sofa with your dad in the next room?”
He swore in frustration, his knuckles white on the wheel. “There’s a motel.”
“Have youseenthe Sun Down?” I asked. “It’s the creepiest place in town, and that’s saying something.”
