B008J4PNHE EBOK (48 page)

“I did not!” Elsie objected.

The boy, whose name was Josh, explained that they had been contacted by a ghost named Sarah. Sarah had said she was waiting for the bingo to start, and it was sweet of them to say hello, but she hoped they understood that she would rather just sit quietly and read her James Michener novel. After that the pointer had gone still. “And by still,” said Josh, “I mean that was when Elsie stopped making up random stuff.”

Elsie protested. “Don’t be a shitnose! I didn’t make up anything!”

Everyone at the table offered an opinion on the legitimacy of the Sarah ghost. The general consensus was that it was awfully mundane; haunts were supposed to be, well, haunted, not waiting for bingo. Bea asked Sam where he stood.

He had been thinking the opposite, that it made more sense that a soul might get stuck in a habit as opposed to turning into some window-rattling, mirror-breaking poltergeist out for vengeance. If he imagined himself as a ghost, Sam couldn’t picture himself doing anything except what he usually did—eat, watch television, fantasize about women. “I guess if I believed in ghosts, yeah, I could believe that they were hung up on bingo,” said Sam. “People get in ruts, right? They get stuck.”

They drank tea and joked about their hang-ups. Josh said he couldn’t sleep without a fan; he was a slave to his fan. Elsie said she was addicted—no, seriously, addicted like a crackhead is addicted—to ChapStick. For Bea, the problem was her boyfriend’s butt: “I just have to pinch his ass. It’s so lowbrow.” When it was Sam’s turn, he said it was difficult to pick a single hang-up, he had a whole bunch: he found it difficult to think of his sister as a young adult; he was hung up on an accident that had happened years ago, still felt it almost every day, like fingers on the back of his neck; there was a friend he had a hard time saying no to; his father drove him so nuts that when he actually didn’t drive him nuts, it was confusing; and there was this girl, Sam wasn’t sure what that was about, but he couldn’t stop thinking of her.

In Tom’s driveway, he listened to 1010 WINS—“Give us ten minutes, and we’ll give you the world”—until the news wrapped around. The economy was teetering, the polls were negative, football players were injured, the weatherperson hoped they had enjoyed the official last day of summer because real fall weather was on the horizon, and after that the economy again. Wesley had said to him once that when 1010 WINS flipped over, he suffered a pang of existential sadness. “Like, that’s everything. I’m abreast of everything of significance. I can fit the whole planet in my pocket.”

Sam found reassurance from the compaction and aggregation—here was all the important stuff, nothing but important stuff, selected and pruned by professionals. And the news could be worse; the economy wasn’t definitely sunk, and fall weather was better than summer weather. He would take it.

His own uncertainties—whether Tess was going to give him one more shot, or when it would be safe to go back to his apartment, what he might do tomorrow—remained uncertain. But just admitting out loud that he wasn’t doing so wonderfully made him feel like maybe he was already doing better, or about to. The urge to call Tess to share the feeling was not easy to resist. Had she remembered the answer to his question yet, the reason why it was okay for Kenneth Novey to die again and again, and for viewers to take pleasure from it? Sam really wanted to know, wanted to “really talk” about it. She had to give him another chance, didn’t she?

The only lights he saw on in the house were from the second-floor hall. Somewhere behind the rental, out in the street, a car rolled past making those growling, popping, barely restrained sounds that racing-type engines make.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Inside, he removed his shoes and started up the dark stairs. He assumed everyone was in bed. A few steps up, however, Sam heard a thumping. There followed a terrible hacking, as if some animal were fighting to regurgitate a large chunk of meat. Sam went back down the stairs. It was a busted-dishwasher sound; he wanted to be sure that nothing was running broken and making a mess.

The kitchen was empty, the lights off, nothing running. The noises grew closer, wetter, and more disturbing. “So wrong,” someone half-spoke, half-moaned. Sam identified the voice: Mina.

Off the kitchen, a wide hall ran the right wing of the house: first there was a room with nothing in it but an armchair and a dead fern, then a room with some boxes and a pretty window seat, then Tom’s bedroom, then Tom’s study, and finally, a door that led out to the redwood deck. Sam poked his head around the doorway of the first room. The fern’s withered leaves were briefly electrified by a splash of headlights from out in the street, but there was nothing living in the room.

His sister said, “So, so wrong.” The sounds were coming from the study.

“Hm-hm-hm.” This noise of assent belonged to Tom.

Several quiet paces carried Sam by the next two rooms and to the entryway of the study. The door was half open. Sam spied his sister, his godfather, and his father seated side by side on the leather couch. Because they were facing the plasma screen in the entertainment center, his view was of the back of their heads: on the left, Mina’s jagged, glossy shoulder-length hair; in the center, the trim yellow-gray reverse beard at the bottom of Tom’s skull; and at the right, Booth’s bushy white curls.

Who We Are
was playing on the television.

Roger is on the footpath to the parking lot. He is talking to his father on a cell phone. “What are you talking about?”

“Your mother. There was an accident.” The voice-over takes a harsh breath. “She is . . . She’s gone.”

Roger lowers the phone and scratches his temple, considering. When he raises it, the cell is a newer, smaller model. “Nice try, fatso. You nearly had me.” He hangs up before his father can reply.

“Who was that?” asks Claire, catching up to him.

There is a cut to the forest.

The late Costas Mandell, in his hooves and leggings, is on his knees, in flagrante delicto; he is ramming a hollowed log. His ass is very pale and loose-skinned. It slops up and down in time to his thrusts. He huffs and snorts. Around him the greenery is verdant, punctured here and there by pipes of sunlight winding with motes. An oblivious sparrow perches on a birch branch and preens its wing.

When the satyr speaks, his delivery is full of foreboding, cracking
with strain. “I am—your—darkest hour, my friends. I am—your—hardest feelings—come to flesh.”

God, he was good. It always startled Sam, momentarily made him forget and just marvel, Mandell was so damned good. He was otherworldly and brokenhearted, and his commitment was incontestable. He was fucking a dead tree.

There was another thump—Booth’s shoe pounding on the floor. His hands flailed upward, waving and flapping, like a sinner’s at some old-time tent revival, reveling in the glory. The breathless regurgitate sounds were coming from him; they were the sounds of laughter. The laughter was the kind that looked like agony: turning the face purple, accompanied by tears and kicking and thrashing. It was the kind of laughter that felt like agony, too—suffocating—and also felt wonderful, untethered, mad in a way, mad-happy. That was how Booth was laughing, like he was nearly choking on his mirth.

Sam edged away.

 ■ ■ ■ 

The sense of betrayal, the simple horror of the scene—of the three them watching it and Booth laughing that way—numbed him. He was angry, but somehow too angry to inhabit the feeling. He could see it, though, his anger, tall and burning and growing taller.

He retreated through the kitchen, continued on to Tom’s massive living room, and sat on the couch in the dark. His vague thought was that he could sit there, concealed, and bide his time. When Booth eventually came around the corner, he could jump out and confront him. Whether Sam was going to hit him, or yell at him, or simply stare at him without speaking—stare and stare and stare—he couldn’t know yet.

Framed photos hung on the walls: of Tom and Booth on a beach in California; of Booth dressed as a buccaneer; of adolescent Sam in an apron, playing baker at the Coffee Shop; of Mina wearing sunglasses; of Allie grimacing with her hands on her hips and a licorice string dangling from a nostril. Moonlight through the picture window spilled emulsion across the images and made ghosts of the figures.

The living room stretched the length of one side of the house, like a bowling alley. Another picture window spread the far wall, opening onto the deck and the woods. Darkened branches hatched across the view.

Sam had known better, or he ought to have. That was what he kept thinking, what his anger said. Hadn’t it happened over and over again? Why should tonight be unlike any other time? Why should it be different than when he was ten and Booth had turned on him on the train? Why should it be different than when he was eleven and Booth said he was coming home and didn’t? Or when he was thirteen, or fifteen, or sixteen, or twenty-three? It dawned on Sam that Brooks had just been a stand-in for Booth. Brooks had wrecked the movie nearly as well as Booth wrecked everything else.

Sam sat on the long couch under the street-side picture window. The room smelled like vacuuming.

Headlights raked across the wall: Tom and Booth had sand in their chest hair, and the ocean in the background was indigo; there was a gold hoop in the buccaneer’s ear; frosting streaked the front of Sam’s apron; Mina’s movie-star sunglasses covered almost half her face; and what looked like a grimace before was, in the headlights’ beams, clearly a smile that Allie was trying to hold at bay until the shutter snapped.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Sam rose, raised a forearm to shield his eyes, and looked out the picture window. A GTO idled on the lawn, perhaps twenty feet away. The vehicle’s headlights insinuated the barrel of a shotgun. The combination of the glare and the dark reduced the driver, Jo-Jo Knecht, to a vague, blurry shape behind the windshield.

The headlights flickered high-low-high, causing Sam to jerk and twitch involuntarily. The GTO’s horn yelped and the engine revved.

He was telling Sam to come outside.

Sam thought about Jo-Jo, and about Jo-Jo’s thighs, and about the detailed description Jo-Jo had given of his “special trunk.” Sam thought, Certain death. He thought, There is no way I am dying until I tell Booth whatever it is I need to tell him. He thought, Tess.

High-low-high, the headlights flickered for a second time.

Sam shook his head slowly back and forth:
No.

The car leaped forward a few feet and stopped, like a frothing attack dog brought up short by its chain.

They were causing his eyes to water, the GTO’s headlights. In an automatic reaction, Sam put up his other hand and gave Jo-Jo the finger.

The GTO shot ahead—chain snapping—and Sam dove left.

A torrent of glass, wood, and chunks erupted behind him as the GTO exploded through the picture window, accompanied by a monumental tinfoil rip and the prehistoric roar of a V-8 engine. Sam, asprawl near the sitting room’s entrance, twisted to see the sports car shoot past, and saw the couch he had recently been sitting upon melded to the fender like a plow. For a second Jo-Jo was perfectly profiled in the driver’s-side window, and then he was gone. White dust snowed down. Reams of plush beige carpet, torn from the floor, shot out and up in the wheels’ wake, scrawling through the air like streamers. The pictures dropped from the wall, their breaking glass muted by the engine’s backwash. Only one picture stayed—Allie, holding back her smile—dialing around on its hanger by some trick of centrifugal force. The pin-stripes on the car’s flank lingered a moment on the surface of Sam’s vision in faint waves of distortion.

The GTO blew the length of the room, coated in debris, echoed by the undulating carpet fragments. There was a shrieking of brakes, but it lasted a quarter beat at most before the car hit the far picture window and went through, out into the night. An immense crackle followed, the thudding of heavy objects falling from heights, tinkling glass, and last, a short, impotent burp of horn.

Exhaust and dust mingled in Sam’s nose and mouth. Bits stung his face. The room stormed, and Allie spun.

The GTO was netted in the crown of the great sugar maple, thirty or so feet off the ground. In the wash of the deck’s powerful floodlights, the car was plainly visible, suspended at a slight front-end-up diagonal, its single working headlamp beaming a fuzzy white cone into the night sky. Resting in the branches a few feet below the car, on the other side of the maple, was the couch. It was broken in the middle but evidently held together by its fabric covering. Pieces of siding and tufts of insulation littered the branches. In Sam’s eye, the scene inspired an unending stream of images: a woman with a bat in her beehive hairdo; a Christmas tree decorated with garbage; a fearful boy hiding up a telephone pole from bullies searching below; and so on.

As far as Sam could figure, what happened was this: as Jo-Jo’s car exited the picture window, shooting outward from high on the hill, its downward arc had been swiftly interrupted by the lofty maple, which rose from the bottom of the slope. There was a faint, plopping drip. The GTO’s engine was mortally pierced in the smashup, and the maple’s trunk was coruscated with black ooze.

Sam and the others clustered on the flat ground near the tree. The overcast summery day had faded to a cool fall night. Above and to their right, around the deck pilings and on the slope that led down from the house, chips of broken glass lay everywhere. Where Jo-Jo had made his exit was a roughly star-shaped puncture in the side of Tom’s house.

Mina had taken a spot on the grass with her knees drawn up, hugging herself and rocking against the chill. Booth was leaning on his cane, periodically shaking his head, and then rubbing hard and deep at his beard, as if he meant to flush out a gnat. Tom, characteristically, had reacted without heat to the attack on his house. Once he had inspected the hole, he announced rather cheerfully, “Okay, I can fix this,” and went to fetch a beer, which he stood drinking.

Sam yelled up to Jo-Jo: could he hear them? The vehicle’s body was hammered and veined, stretched in places like taffy. The driver’s-side door creaked open, and Jo-Jo Knecht—World Series hero, proud Yankee, cuckold—leaned out.