“You should totally blog about this,” said Raven, coming to sit beside Claudia.
She looked at her daughter. She still had raccoon eyes, her eyeliner from last night smudged into the valleys there.
“Don’t think I’m going to let this drama distract me from what you did last night,” she said. “We have a lot to talk about today. And I have to call your father.”
Raven picked at the black nail polish on her fingernails.
“I know,” she said. “And we are going to talk about it. But didn’t you say that the next time Troy or Dad was here, we were going to ask for help with the basement?”
“You think that’s where it might be?” said Troy.
“Where else?” said Raven. “It’s the only place we haven’t really explored.”
“It’s not safe down there,” said Claudia. “The beams need support.”
Raven and Troy got to chattering about it. And Claudia tuned them out. She got up and moved toward the window over the sink. That’s when she saw him, Scout. He moved from the woods and loped along the tree line, just a shadow. Raven and Troy didn’t even notice him; they were already on their way down to the basement. The whole house thundered with the sound of them on the stairs.
Scout turned to look at her, his fur silver in the morning light. Then he was gone.
Claudia followed the kids. It was past time to explore the basement. Raven was right; the only place in the house she hadn’t tackled. And with the kids here, it didn’t seem so scary after all. The engineer said that he didn’t think there was immediate danger of more collapse. But that building a support structure should be a priority. That’s what she’d have Josh do first.
“Be careful down there, kids,” she said, heading down after them.
? ? ?
A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER, they were all sneezing from mold and the filth kicked up by moving boxes. There was just the dim light of a few hanging bulbs. And enthusiasm was waning.
“What is all this junk?” complained Raven.
Books, boxes of them, old clothes, a man’s, a woman’s—old bills, tax documents, Social Security statements, magazines, more books. There were tools, old furniture, posters, cheap décor art. All of it belonging to the Drakes. Everything important must have gone to the girl, and all the rest of it was left behind, trash, the detritus left when a life concludes. Claudia’s dad was lazy. He probably just had someone box it up and store it in the basement. Or he hadn’t even known it was still there. As far as Claudia knew, he’d never set foot on the property after buying it. He was like that, always acting on whims. Leaving someone else to clean up the mess. Now she’d have to do it. Who would she even call to help her get rid of this stuff? Josh. He’d know what to do.
“Maybe it’s in one of these boxes,” said Raven. They’d opened almost every one; there was just one more stack that they hadn’t reached yet. That’s what it took to motivate a teenager: the prospect of a million dollars.
“Maybe someone already found it,” said Troy. He issued a startling loud sneeze.
“Or it was never here,” said Claudia. With the kids down here, sneezing, joking, the lights on, illuminating most of the darkness, the place didn’t have the energy of murder or terror. It was just a space, cluttered, dank. Maybe Raven was right. Maybe she should blog about it. After all, it was relevant to her journey. And monsters lived in the dark. Once you started shining light, most bad things withered and shrunk away, even memories.
“What would you have done?” she asked her daughter who had sunk down onto her haunches, looking exhausted. “I mean, if you felt some kind of connection to at-angry-young-man.”
It was fine to do that. They always leapt between open topics of conversation.
“I don’t know,” Raven said.
“Maybe I’ve never said this,” said Claudia. “But in my deepest heart, I believe that you are Ayers’s child. He is your father. That’s the biggest reason why we didn’t get the test.”
Raven bobbed her head thoughtfully. Claudia probably had said it, a million times or more. It was the truth. Or it had become the truth over time.
“I didn’t feel anything, though,” Raven said. “I didn’t feel a connection to Drew. I didn’t even like him.”
Claudia saw Troy smile a little behind Raven. Claudia felt the energy of a smile, too.
Claudia rested on a large workbench. It was tall, attached to the concrete wall. When her hand settled on an old flashlight, she knocked the item against her palm and was surprised when it turned on, casting a bright beam on the cinderblocks all around them.
Raven heaved a sigh.
“Let’s forget it,” she said. “There’s nothing down here but junk.”
Claudia wasn’t looking for the money, though. There definitely wasn’t a million dollars of stolen drug money in her basement. Her life did not work that way.
The kids headed up the stairs, but Claudia stayed a minute in the dim quiet, surrounded by the mess. Raven’s and Troy’s heavy footfalls upstairs caused a light shower of dust from the ceiling—not a good thing. If the beams were unstable, did that mean that the floor above was, as well? It was the dining room above her, the room that probably got the least foot traffic. Would the next sound she heard in the night be the table crashing through the floor?
All around her was debris, old junk that no one wanted piled high, the piece of beam that had fallen tilting in line with the staircase. It was an exhausting mess, something that seemed utterly beyond her abilities to fix or clean up. She tried not to see it as an allegory for her life. But, of course, it was. That was the whole point of the blog. She took her phone out of her pocket and snapped a few pictures. Then she headed upstairs to write it all out.
twenty-three
When I got to the hospital, the room was dark and Paul was on oxygen still. Mike wasn’t there, but a slim nurse stood over Paul’s bed, her fingertips resting gently on his wrist. I moved inside and waited for her to finish writing in his chart.
“Are you his daughter?” she asked.
She was young with caramel skin and a pile of curls tied up on the top of her head, deep-brown eyes. The whirring of the machine, the beeping of the heart monitor was a strange, sad song.
“Yes,” I said. What was the point in trying to explain when that was as close to the truth as I could get?
“He’s stable,” she said.
“Better?”
“Stronger,” she said. “Yes. He’s fighting.”
I looked at him, narrow in the sheets, still. The most important battles are fought within.
“He was awake earlier?” I asked.
“For a little while,” she said. “Your friend said he would get in touch with you.”