I looked behind me and saw a black dress laid out on the second bed.
“I’ll see you outside,” he said. “Be on your good behavior, now. You see what I can do.”
His face went gray and for some reason I reached out and touched the screen softly. But it wasn’t warm, and fine dust came off on my fingertips. The laptop wasn’t even on. I raised my face: Lena and Will were standing in the doorway. Will wore a suit and Lena’s eyes were puffy.
We weren’t in the motel at all but in my parents’ house; I stood in my old bedroom. There was a rush of confusion that was almost a thrill, almost velocity. Then it stilled. Here was my corkboard with its colored pushpins and ribbons. PARTICIPANT. The air was humid and close; my parents had never had central air. I heard my father’s voice: they never “held with it.” I was wearing the black dress now, I saw, glancing down—no memory of changing into it—and toe-pinching black shoes with heels so high I could barely walk on them. I’d never have picked out those shoes.
I wouldn’t struggle. Don’t fight it, Ned had said sleazily. But it did hurt more if you struggled.
Prey animals had the sense to play dead.
So I leaned down and picked Lena up, though her weight made me stagger on the too-thin heels. But she was real and solid. I knew from her red eyes that she’d been crying and I squeezed her hard, maybe too urgently. Had all of us been frozen there? Had we all been suspended on Ned’s whim, or only me? I tried to see if Lena looked older . . . I was flailing. It was possible, faintly possible that her face was more angular suddenly, but whatever slight change I might imagine wasn’t obvious like my long talons. I tried to keep them from scraping her back as I held her; I’d rip them off. They were like parasites on me.
“Mommy, I’m hot,” complained Lena.
I put her down and as I turned away bit at the longest nail, ripped the white edge of a thumbnail off with my teeth. But then—they weren’t long anymore.
And the hairs on my legs? I leaned down to look beneath my tights. They were black tights, semi-sheer, and I could see no hairs through them. The skin on my calves was smooth. I straightened up again and was holding out my hands, looking at them dazedly, when Ned appeared behind Lena in the hall. He wore a black suit, true to his word, and a silver-gray tie, and looked like he’d stepped off the pages of a magazine.
“My father,” I said, and it hit me whose death this was—I wasn’t the ghost after all.
It had happened without me. He was all gone, and I’d missed him. I’d been absent. There was a picture in one of my mother’s photo albums: my father as a tiny boy in a white suit, sitting on the back of a horse. Or maybe it was a donkey. It was a blurry, black-and-white picture.
That little boy, I thought.
How would my mother ever forgive me for missing it? How would my brother?
Had my father lain in bed, had he grown thinner, the way the dying do? He might not have missed me. I hoped he hadn’t but I would never know.
“You were always a daddy’s girl,” said Ned.
“You were a rotten son-in-law,” I said, as though it was news.
He kept smiling, as always. His smile never wavered now. It was a rictus.
“You took his money and you even took his dying,” I said.
“Mommy?” said Lena. It was as though she hadn’t heard me; I was glad and ashamed, ashamed for speaking that way in front of her. “Can we go now? Nana says they’re going to play a pretty song for Grumbo at the funeral. She said they’re going to play ‘The Skye Boat Song.’”
“Take my arm, kiddo,” said Ned, bowing his head in Lena’s direction.
She clung to Will for a second, she would much rather have walked with Will, it was awkwardly obvious, but finally she lifted her hand up to Ned’s.
I walked right behind them, fearfully close; as I stepped into place at their heels, I clutched Will’s arm for a moment where she’d let go of it.
“Let go of that thing right this fucking second,” said Ned through gritted teeth. But he was facing away from us. As though he had eyes in the back of his head. “You’re my wife. You remember it.”
“How did you know how sick my father was?” I asked weakly. “How did you know before we did?”
“Whatever you need to know, I’ll fucking tell you,” ground out Ned. Then he turned and whispered over his shoulder, almost tenderly, “Bitch.”
My stomach flipped but Lena was looking elsewhere and waving at someone: she hadn’t heard the tone or the words. Again she seemed to be immune. She was usually so observant—it was as though Ned had a wand.