Trenton grasped for another question, something that would keep Joe in the room and talking to him. His pulse was going wild. He didn’t know why it was important for him to know about some stranger who’d died here decades ago, only that Joseph Connelly’s arrival seemed like a sign. There was something he was missing, something he’d forgotten. Eva had told him that the ghost Sandra had been shot; there had been an important letter, too, which was stolen.
“What about the letter?” he blurted out, and Joe stiffened like Trenton had just reached out and electrocuted him.
“How—how’d you know about the letter?” Joe asked. When he turned around, his face was awful: white and frightened, older than it had looked just a minute earlier. “Who told you?”
Trenton didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Joe stood there, still trembling like a wire, his eyes like two dark gashes in his face. Then he pulled out a chair, abruptly, and sat down.
“Are you all right?” Trenton said cautiously.
But when Joe spoke, it was in a normal voice. “Blood pressure,” he said. “I’m an old shit. You got any water?”
Trenton went to the sideboard, where Minna had lined up pitchers of ice water for their guests. He poured a big glass of water and passed it to Joe at the table. Then he sat down.
“Thanks,” Joe said. But he didn’t drink. He just spun the glass between his hands. After a minute, he said: “I got rid of it. I thought it was the right thing to do. Seeing her like that . . . There was blood everywhere.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t help to know the reason. People say it helps. But it doesn’t.”
“Know the reason for what?”
Joe looked up, frowning. “For why they do it in the first place.”
Trenton suddenly understood. He’d been chasing this story of an old murder, feeding on it like carrion birds did, but it was a sadder story than that: digging up the old, dry bones of someone’s misery.
“So it was suicide,” Trenton said.
Joe put two hands on the table and pushed himself to his feet. “My dad roped himself when I was a kid. My mom told everyone he bust an artery in his brain. Aneurysm. She was embarrassed. Even changed our name back a few years later, from Houston to Connelly. Connelly was her maiden name.” He shook his head again. “It doesn’t help to know. It doesn’t make it easier. Still, I shouldn’t have burned the letter. It wasn’t my business.”
Trenton sat there for a long time, thinking of his father’s many conferences and Adrienne’s letters, unanswered; thinking of a man hanging from the ceiling and his wife lying about it because she was embarrassed. He thought about faceless women. He thought about time coming down slowly around their ears, like a roof under the pressure of snow.
It was time, he thought, to bury his father. It was time to put the ghosts to rest.
ALICE
“Don’t go.” I’ve been trying to ignore Sandra for the length of her death, trying to expel her; and now I’m begging her to stay, like a child. “Please don’t go.”
“The jig’s up, isn’t it?” Already Sandra sounds fainter, as if I’m hearing her from a distance. “It’s about damn time, too.”
“Don’t leave me.” I hate myself for saying it, but I can’t help it: she’s my other, my boundary. Now there will be no one to hear me. It’s almost the same thing as not-existing, but worse. Lonelier. The Walkers will go home, and I will remain here, alone, openmouthed and silent in the doorways; frozen in the ice box; full of the darkness of empty closets and rooms that no one enters.
“You need to let go, Alice. That’s the whole trick. Let go of everything.”
“Tell me how,” I say. “I’m ready to learn.” Silence. “Sandra? Are you there?”
The only answer is a hole, a deep bottoming out, as if I still had a body and all the bones had suddenly vanished. Then—a sudden sickness, a reverse nausea, the sickness of something good and necessary going out.
Everything comes up in the end.
Sandra was right: old crimes expiated, truths revealed, curiosities satisfied.
How could I have been so blind? Sitting, watching, waiting, like a fat cat in a patch of sunlight, for years before she came along—but seeing nothing, really, feeling nothing but the slow crawl of time and minutes hardening like plaster in my veins. I remember Sandra’s death, vaguely. I saw the last fight she ever had with Martin, and the twenty-four hours that followed: the glass refilled and refilled, the stumbling and vomiting, the crust of blood on her lips.
I saw her load the gun, of course. How could I not? We can’t choose what we see.
But afterward . . . was I happy that she came to join me? Was I secretly pleased when she elbowed her way through the soft folds of my new nonbody, like a splinter beneath a surface of skin? Probably. And so I barely noticed the cleanup, the police, the sad small group of strangers who came to haggle over her pots and lamps and sofas when they were put up for sale.
I didn’t notice little Joey Houston, all grown up to become Joe Connelly, whom I had last seen sitting next to his mother at his father’s funeral service. I didn’t see the resemblance in the proud, hooked nose and determined chin, in the ears that stick out just a little more than usual.
Joseph Houston. Thomas’s son.
I’ve been so wrong—so wrong about everything.
I want to tell Sandra. You were right.
And Thomas: I forgive you.
And our little baby girl, the small promise that grew inside me like a flower under glass: I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
But those are just words, and words are just stories, and eventually, always, stories come to an end.
Caroline has changed into old jeans and a nubby sweater, and she returns to the dining room with her makeup scrubbed off and her hair tied in a ponytail. She must have snuck a few drinks. She is brighter eyed than she was just twenty minutes ago.
“Trenton, are you ready? Do you have the ashes?”
“Minna has them,” Trenton says. “I was just going to check—” Trenton is cut off. The kitchen door bangs open, and a second later Minna appears in the dining room, breathless, her hands covered with dirt.
A shadow moves across the sun; the house, my rooms, my mind goes dark. The end is very near.
“Come quickly,” Minna says, speaking not to her mom or brother but to Danny. “I—I found something. Holy shit.”
“What kind of something?” Trenton says.
Minna’s hands tighten on the door frame. I feel as if every single door in the house had been slammed shut at once—tight with expectation and terror. “It’s a kid.”
“A what?” Danny says.
“A baby.” Minna swallows and pushes her hair back, leaving a smudge of dirt on her cheek, like a single tear. “In a box.”