Salvage (25 page)

"You know I love it when people talk about me, Gerald."

His mother turned with moist stuffing stuck to her bare hands. The pork roast rested in the large roasting pan, tied and dressed with sprigs of rosemary. "Owen, be a lamb and turn on the sink for me." Gerald reached the sink before he could, and she washed her hands thoroughly. Owen stood beside her, waiting to give her a hug.

"Ginger ale, Owen?" Gerald asked, ice clinking as he raised his perspiring glass.

"Is that all that is?"

A scowl flashed on the old man's face, then softened. "How about you, Margaret? Something to drink?"

"I'm fine, thank you." Her hands dried, she allowed Owen to hug her. She was just skin and bones under the apron, her sweater, and pleated pants. He thought that, if Lori had hugged her with the same enthusiasm she'd showed him, dear old mum might have broken something.

"Can I help you with anything?" Owen asked.

He turned to Gerald, who seemed to be eyeing him queerly.
Probably thinks I'm sucking up
, he thought. He had been surprised to smell nothing but pop in Gerald's drink. Maybe he really was off the sauce, like Lori had said.

"We're fine," Margaret said. "Spend time with your sister. Never know when you might see her again."

Not such an odd thing to say, considering Lori's constant globetrotting. Owen kissed his mother on the forehead and shuffled back to the living room, where Lori was watching the grease-painted winged monkeys attack the gang. Toto barked as they flew off carrying a screaming Dorothy with them.

"You ever feel like Dorothy?" Lori asked suddenly, looking over.

"I usually feel like Toto."

"The dog or the band?"

Owen chuckled. "That reminds me, where are you off to next? If you're heading to Africa, maybe you could—"

"
Bless the rain
," they said in unison.

"Oh, you've heard that one," he said, grinning.

"Once or twice." She turned back to the TV, fidgeting with the drawstring of her Baja hoodie—avoiding the question, he noticed. Typically she'd go into great detail about her next destination: the culture, the food, the sights, and the indigenous people.

"I'll zip it if you think it'll upset Mom," he said.

She turned to him with her lips pressed flat, then back to the movie. He decided to drop it. If she wanted to tell him, she would tell him. They watched the rest of
The Wizard of Oz
in silence.

"How's the roast?" Gerald asked during dinner.

"Porktastic," Lori said. She'd been off meat for a few years, but had come back with gusto.

"It's a little dry," Owen admitted, making his mother scowl. "But good," he added, pouring on more gravy.

"It's the white meat," Gerald informed him. "White meat is always dry." He patted Margaret's hand, who smiled thinly. Then he lumped mashed potatoes onto a bit of meat from the gristly end, and forked it into his mouth.

They ate in silence a few moments, the only sound the clink of cutlery on dinnerware, and the occasional smack of lips.

"How's that… uhh… What is it you're working on again, Owen?"

Owen finished chewing, sure Gerald was only faking interest and had deliberately waited for him to have food in his mouth, like an overeager server in a restaurant.

"He's doing the new wind farm, up past Streetsville," Lori said for him.

"Right, the turbines." He sipped his ginger ale, probably wishing he'd added scotch to it. "Aren't those things supposed to be dangerous? I heard something about that."

"Don't believe everything you hear, Dad."

"Wind-turbine syndrome," Owen said. "It's only been documented by a handful of scientists going under the assumption that infrasound is damaging to the brain. Chronic sleep loss, headaches, etcetera. I mean, who knows? The ones we're using are sound-dampening, so we're hoping to cut down on these incidents, whether they're real or just perceived."

"I'll tell you what the real headache is," Margaret said. They all awaited her next words, while she scraped up the last of the corn from her plate. "Shop talk at the dinner table."

They finished in silence. When Margaret brought out the pumpkin pie, she spotted Lori fiddling with the necklace Owen had bought her twenty-some-odd years earlier. She dropped the pie plate on the table. It struck heavily, rattling the salt and pepper shakers, the undercooked pie filling sloshing in its crust.

"What on earth is that…
thing
?"

Owen took a closer look, wondering what had troubled her. She'd known about the unicorn pendant since a few days after Christmas that year. Lori hadn't been able to keep it a secret for long. But the faded unicorn dangled from its chain. Between her fingers was a new pendant: this one a shiny crucifix.

"You don't like it?"

"I most certainly do
not
."

Lori wore a smirk, baiting their mother. He remembered the last time they'd played Lori's game, finding the Bible in their mother's closet. It was the last time he'd gone into his mother's room when she wasn't home. Something about that closet had both intrigued and repelled him, but he'd never been quite sure what had made him so ill at ease, considering the contents of the shoebox had been just a water-damaged Bible and a bunch of old pictures of people he didn't know. He'd wanted to forget all about it, and though it had often nagged at him when he'd passed her room on the way up the stairs to his own, or the bathroom, he'd successfully pushed it out of his mind elsewhere.

"Maybe I've had a religious awakening. Anyway, it's just a symbol. What's so bad about it?"

"Just take it off at the dinner table!" Margaret's thighs struck the table, shaking it again, startling everyone seated around it. She composed herself, smoothed the tablecloth, and sat. "I've put up with your silly Rastafarian hair and your incense burning; I should at least be able to eat in my own house without feeling uncomfortable. There. I've said my peace."

"Better listen to your mother," Gerald muttered, and sipped his ginger ale.

"Fine," Lori said, lifting her "Rastafarian hair" to unclasp the chain. She tucked the necklace and both of its pendants into her hoodie pocket.

After dessert, while Gerald and Margaret sat silently, watching an old black-and-white movie on Turner Classics, Owen followed Lori upstairs. "Why were you baiting Mom like that?"

She turned at the top of the steps. "She'll get over it."

"That's not the point. You know she hates that stuff."

"
Does
she?" She lowered her voice, peering over his shoulder at the stairs. "Don't you ever wonder why Mom has a Bible? About who all those people were in those pictures Mom keeps in her shoebox? Why she never talks about anything that happened before I came along?"

He made note of that: how she'd said "keeps," in the present tense, and decided to leave it alone. Accusing her of going into their mother's closet would only exacerbate the rift that had formed between them in her latest absence. "Mom's old life is her own business. If she doesn't want you dredging up her past, you should probably just leave it alone."

She fixed him with a look of concern. "Don't you ever wonder about your dad?"

Of course he wondered. All he'd ever known of him was what his mother had told him over the years, and it hadn't been much: that he was a strong and determined man, a "great mind," that he'd loved them "fiercely," but he'd "wandered off" when Owen was five. He'd wondered why his father had left them, left
him
. He'd wondered what he looked like now. If he was still alive, or dead, or had run away from the law. It was hard to know how not to grow up like his deadbeat father when he knew so little about him. "No," he said. "I don't think about it. It doesn't concern me."

Lori gave him a hard look, her blue eyes glistening so that Owen thought she might be about to cry. "Don't lie to me, Owns." Her voice was unnaturally quiet.

"I don't
care
, Lori. Honestly, I couldn't give a shit if the man was dead."

Her lower lip quivered. She turned from him, storming off to her bedroom and slammed the door. After a moment of indecision, Owen followed.

"What's all that racket up there?" Margaret called from below.

"Nothing, Mom!" He thumped softly on Lori's door. "Lori, I'm sorry, okay? I don't even know what I did, but I'm sorry."

"Forget it," he heard her say, her voice muffled.

He leaned his forehead against the door, wondering why things couldn't be like they'd been when they were kids. Wondering why they had drifted apart. But he knew it had probably been his fault. He'd always been distant and indifferent. Lori had brought the best out of him, but that had been a long time ago, in a different life. They were adults now. They were very different people.

Owen pushed himself up from the door. He turned from her room, about to head back downstairs, when Lori's sniffle brought him back. "Do you remember that ghost you saw when we were kids?" she said, her voice tremulous. "You always called it my ghost, but it was never mine."

He answered weakly, "That was a long time ago, Lori."

"No. No, it really wasn't. He's been following you your whole life, you see, and you don't even know it. You don't even care enough to wonder what that means."

"No," he said. He felt something close to tears. "I don't."

Lori said nothing more. A moment later, she came out with her giant backpack slung over her shoulders, cinched at the waist.

"Where are you going?"

She scowled at him. "I thought you didn't care." She pushed past him, heading for the stairs.

"Don't leave, Lori."

Her footsteps thudded down the steps.

"Lori…" He stayed put, having followed Lori and her crazy whims too many times in the past. "Come on, Lori."

She reached the first floor, and disappeared around the corner into the living room. Owen, still standing at the top of the stairs, heard Gerald protest her leaving.

"I've got somewhere I need to go," she said. "The bus leaves in an hour."

"Where are you going?"

"I'll call you when I get there. Love you, Mom, Dad."

She stepped out through the archway, blowing them kisses from the foyer. Owen hadn't moved from the top of the stairs when she looked up from the open front door with a forlorn expression.

Owen merely shook his head.

Lori's shoulders sagged. She pressed her lips together, resolute. Then she turned and walked out the door, pulling it shut behind her. He let her go.

HOLY GHOSTS

1

OWEN WOKE WITH THE SUN
in his eyes. He'd slept through the night with no two o'clock wakeup call, and he felt well-rested for the first time in months. Rolling over, he expected to find Jo asleep beside him, but the other side of the bed was empty and cold, the sheet flipped back like the dog-eared page of a paperback.

Must have left while I was sleeping. I guess I should be glad she came inside at all, considering the way I found her
.

She'd led him by the hand to the bedroom, where they'd lain in each other's arms, two desperately lonely souls enjoying the warmth of each other's bodies, the rush of blood in their veins. They'd breathed, without speaking, to the night music drifting in through the window—the lonely cry of the loon, the chorus of frogs, the far-off drone of a motorboat echoing across the lake—and had eventually drifted asleep.

Owen drew his arms behind his head and lay in a warm place on the pillow for a moment, thinking about everything that had happened the past few days. The stories, the mysteries, the revelations, the friends made and lost, friends found again, the sudden, tragic departures. He'd lived more in the last week than he had in the last several years. If he made it out of Chapel Lake alive, he'd be sure to make a lot of changes back home.

Maybe Jo could come with me
, he thought. Then again, maybe not. She hadn't even been willing to spend the whole night.

Smiling, Owen climbed out of bed and got dressed. The lake had washed away their sweat. He thought he'd be fine without a shower, and he didn't want to step into the bath anyhow. Twisting the sink handle warily, he brushed his teeth, spat into the sink, rinsed out his mouth under the tap.

He smiled at his reflection in the mirror. All the sun he'd gotten on the lake and reading on the deck had given him a healthy look. Lori was still dead, but the smile felt right on his face. He felt born again, not quite in a spiritual way—more that he felt like a new person. A
different
person. Someone whose decisions and actions might surprise even himself.

The smile remained as he peered down into the living room to find Jo in the recliner, but faltered when he saw the book in her lap. It was Lori's journal, her letters to him. To find Jo reading his sister's words felt like a terrible violation, like someone listening in on a private conversation.

Yesterday, Owen would have reacted in anger. Today, he managed to shrug it off. "You're still here," he said.

Jo raised her head from the journal, closing the book quickly and straightening up as if she'd been caught in the act of something. "I guess you hoped I'd be gone, huh?"

"I'd hoped you'd stay in bed. Make up for lost time." He crossed to her, planted a kiss on her forehead. It occurred to him the last person he'd kissed on the forehead was his mother, after Lori's funeral, but he didn't let the memory sour his mood. "I see you found my sister's journal," he said, sitting beside her on the armrest.

Jo tilted her head up to him with a guilty look. "I hope you don't mind…"

"Why would I mind?"

"I don't know." She set the book on the table beside the unplugged lamp. "It's like reading someone else's mail."

"You probably know most of it anyway. The stuff you don't, what she said about me—"