TRENTON
A sister. Trenton had—or used to have—a sister. He wished he’d known earlier.
He was alone in the dining room. The woman, Adrienne, had gone to wash her face in the bathroom. The ugly cop, who had skin just as bad as Trenton’s, was waiting outside in Adrienne’s car. Everyone agreed she was in no state to drive; there was talk of getting her a place to stay the night, until a relative could come and get her. Caroline had gone to change her clothes, and Danny was waiting outside her bedroom door, like Caroline might shimmy down the drainpipe and make a break for it. Trenton thought Danny was enjoying himself, even if he was pretending to be sad and apologetic. He probably didn’t get to arrest people very often.
Poor, lonely Eva. Trenton had always wanted a younger sister—had dreamed of it, especially after Minna moved out and went off to college and left Trenton alone with his mother. He would not have tortured her, as some older brothers did, or locked her in the bathroom after he’d used it or put her in headlocks until she screamed for mercy.
He would have showed her how to catch toads by making a cup of his hands, as Minna had done with him when he was very small. He would have taken her to the creek behind Mulaney’s so they could root out newts together, shrieking over a sudden flash of orange belly; he would have told her stories at night, saving the scary ones for when she was older.
Adrienne emerged from the bathroom. Her shirt clung to her shoulders where it was damp. Trenton got quickly and clumsily to his feet. He hadn’t expected to see her; he had assumed she would go out the way she came in, through the hall. But of course she didn’t know the house.
He felt embarrassed in her presence—embarrassed that he got to live, when he had wanted to die; that her daughter had died, when she had wanted to live. He wanted to say he was sorry, but the words felt insufficient. What would that mean, coming from him? From anyone?
Instead, they stood there in silence. Trenton was aware of the slow drag of time, the air in the house stifling, thick with funeral smells.
Adrienne spoke first. “You have her eyes,” she said. “Beautiful eyes.”
Trenton didn’t know how to respond. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked her.
She smiled, but it was the saddest smile he’d ever seen. Trenton remembered the first time he had seen Eva’s ghost in the greenhouse—the dry rustle of her voice, like autumn leaves tumbling over a barren riverbed. He was as sad now as he had been then—sadder, even, than he had ever been for his father.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Am I?”
“You will,” he said, although he didn’t really know. He felt a subtle shift, as if the air had suddenly begun rotating in the other direction. This was why people lied: sometimes, it was only the stories that mattered.
After Adrienne had gone, Trenton stood for a while in the quiet, listening hard to the familiar sounds of the floors creaking and the house settling minutely on its foundations—listening, too, for a voice, a whisper, a word of forgiveness, maybe. But there was nothing.
He cleared his throat. He knew his mother and sister couldn’t hear him, but he still felt embarrassed speaking out loud. “Eva?” he said, and then, a little louder, “Eva?”
There was only silence. He wondered whether she was upset at him, because he hadn’t gone through with killing himself. But no. The silence was dull and complete—not even the faintest rustle or whisper or creak. The ghosts were gone, or he had stopped hearing them. He wondered if it had been like a virus, and he had gotten it out of his system when he puked.
Was it because he had refused them? Because at the last moment, he had refused to cross over?
“I’m sorry, Eva,” he said. “I let you down.” He hated to think of the ghosts trapped in the walls, with no one to listen or hear.
But the problem with death was that you could never get tired of it and go home. No one would ever come and put a jacket around your shoulders, as Detective Rogers had done with Vivian, and put you in the backseat of a warm car and send you back to being alive. If only bodies were like rooms, and people could pass in and out of them at will.
He wondered whether Minna was almost finished digging. The hole didn’t have to be very deep to bury an urn. He moved to the window to check, but his view was obstructed. There was a white work van parked in the driveway. Connelly Roofing was stenciled in black on its side. Connelly. The name seemed familiar somehow.
“Hello?” a man called out. Before Trenton could go to the door, he heard it open; heavy footsteps came down the hall.
“Can I help you?” Trenton said, when the man passed into view. He was old—at least sixty—and dressed in gray work pants and a T-shirt saggy as a loose skin. But his shoulders were wide and his arms still roped with muscle.
“Who’re you?” the man said.
“Who’re you?” Trenton fired back.
“Joe Connelly,” he said. “I got my guys working the job upstairs.” His skin was webbed with burst capillaries, and Trenton smelled beer on him. But he must have been okay-looking, back in the day. Joe seemed to register the food on the dining room table for the first time. “Sorry. I didn’t know you were having a party.”
“It isn’t a party,” Trenton said. He didn’t feel like explaining what it was. “Anyway, it’s over.”
“You Caroline’s kid?” Joe asked, and Trenton nodded. “One of my guys left a ladder up there. We need it for another job. You mind if I go up?”
“I guess not,” Trenton said. Why, he wondered, were they even bothering to fix the roof? Would they ever come back? He couldn’t imagine it. It wasn’t their house anymore—it wasn’t his house—no matter what the will said. They should leave the roof open and give the birds a place to nest.
Joe didn’t move right away. He stood there, sucking on his lower lip, like he was debating whether to say something else. Trenton thought he might not know where the stairs were. “Straight down the hall,” he said.
Joe nodded. “Yeah,” he said, but still didn’t move. “Yeah. I remember this place. Did some work here years ago. It was a lot different then. Smaller.” He shook his head. “Time flies.”
Then Trenton remembered: Joe Connelly. Joe Connelly was the name of the man who’d found the dead woman, the one with her brains blown out—Sandra.
“Wait!” Trenton took two quick steps forward, nearly tripping over the rug. Joe stopped, turned to face him. “Wait. You—you were the one who found her. The woman who died here.”
Instantly, Joe turned guarded. “How’d you know about that?” he said, wetting his lips with his tongue.
“My sister dates a cop,” Trenton said. He could never explain what had really happened: the voices, the visions, the sense of touch whenever Eva came near—like a cool blade running through his very center. It was all true. There was an invisible world; there was meaning gathered like clouds on the other side of a mountain.
“Oh.” Connelly was clenching his fists and unclenching them, like he was squeezing an invisible rope. “Yeah. Wrong place, wrong time. That was a bad winter. Lots of snow. Poor lady’s roof caved in.”
“Sandra,” Trenton said, watching Joe carefully.
“Something like that,” he said. “Screwy the things you forget. She didn’t have a face by the time I got to her. That I remember.”
“What happened to her?” Trenton asked. “The police—I mean, they never found out who did it, right?”
“No,” Joe said hoarsely. He turned away. “No, they never did find out.”