“What kind of dog?”
“Mutt,” she’s quick to answer, and I’m prone to believe her. Monica had three of them in the time we dated. For all I know it’s one of the three.
“So how about that tour?” I rock back on my heels, trying to convince her I’m up for a good time if she’s looking. I’m not, but my father’s sick clue, that ball I found in the yard, her sketchy, skittish behavior—none of it sits well with me.
“How about you’re drunk? I can smell the beer on your breath.” She turns me toward the door. “Get yourself home to that little wifey of yours. She’s probably worried sick about where you are. You should be down on your hands and knees together praying that little angel of yours gets home safe.” There’s a sarcastic inflection in that last sentence when she says the word angel as if she were mocking Reagan’s innocence.
Her hand reaches for the doorknob, and I flatten my hand over the glass. “You’re right. I’ve had one too many.” I’ll go with it. “Let’s play a game.”
Her affect drops. That I’m-so-concerned-for-you look in her eye quickly turns to anger. “What kind of a game?” Her voice shakes just enough to let me know she’s running scared.
I lean in close, my nose just a millimeter from hers. “Hide-and-seek.” I bolt toward the back, toward that room with its flickering light. The blue glow of the television looks outright hypnotic.
“Stop!” Her voice fills the house with its horror. “James, stop right there!”
The hall bleeds into a family room, just big enough for a couple of sofas, a fireplace in the corner. The sound of moaning fills my ears, and I flick on the lights and a chandelier explodes overhead like the sun. Another sharp groan comes from my left, and then I see it on TV. The larger than life, very up close and personal view of the anatomy of a woman being penetrated by the world’s longest dick.
“James!” Monica jumps over my back, trying to cover my eyes, and dances me in a circle while laughing off her shame.
“Some like it hot.” I storm out of the room and head for the stairs. So what? Monica likes her porn. I would have never figured it, but people change. Ideals drift, and before you know it you’re cheating on your wife, watching men with dicks the size of butcher knives eat up your living room. “How about up here?” I stride right onto the second floor with her hot on my heels. “You hiding any more dirty little secrets? I’m betting the answer to that is a long, hard yes.”
“James, stop before I call the police.”
“Be my guest. I’m sure Rich would love to join me. Kink it up a bit.” I open the first room I come across and flip on the lights. Old school décor, dated, too frilly and peach. Allison would want to burn it. A twin-sized bed sits in the corner, and I head over and run my foot underneath it. I open up the closet and find it stacked with shoeboxes and a few coats that smell like mothballs.
“Would you get out of here?” She slaps me over the back as I hit the exit.
“How about this one?” The door to the next room is open, with nothing but a sewing machine, some bolts of fabric leaning against the wall to show for it. The closet doors have been removed and inside sits a bookshelf laden with yarn and heaps of abandoned fabric. “It’s nice to know old habits die hard,” I tease. Monica used to attempt to sew her own clothing. The seams were always crooked, the fabric too cheap, but I never had the heart to tell her.
I hustle down the hall and come across an office. No closet, but I check the desk on both sides just in case. “I could never cram my body in there.” I give a heavy wink as I blow right past her. A set of double doors sit open, and a pink fluffy cloud of a comforter greets me on the oversized bed set in the middle of the master bedroom. A television sits above the fireplace with the news playing, volume on mute. At any moment, I half-expect my face to pop up on the screen. America’s most wanted. Worst father in the nation. Shoot on sight!
I head into the bathroom, a gaudy gold and glitter covered mess, a bathtub deep and wide enough to qualify as a swimming pool with a dark ring around the periphery covered in stubble-like hairs. She wasn’t joking. The place isn’t exactly hygienic. But I won’t hold it against her. I float back out, only to find her on the mattress. The robe slipped open down over one shoulder, exposing a low lying tit, that dark purple nipple peering out to see me once again for itself. And it’s in that moment I wake up from this self-induced nightmare.
What in the hell am I doing here? I glance at her closet and step inside, nothing but a forest of clothes packed too tight, no room for another pair of jeans. Monica always did live by the diatribe more is more.
“Find what you’re looking for?” Her voice strums smooth and seductive. I step out to find her bare legs gliding over the newly exposed sheets. Her white silk pants sit in a puddle at the foot of the bed. “Come on, James.” She pats the spot next to her. “You and I both know why you came.” Her lips invert before she licks them clean. “You needed to come. And so do I.”
A sick feeling penetrates me right down to my bones. Not because I’m in any way tempted, but I’m wondering how fast Allison will slap me with her knowledge of the event.
“I’d better go.” I duck into the hall and stop cold when I spot a small patch of wood on the ceiling down on the other end. Hide-a-stairs. Of course, the Ghost Ship has an attic. I race over and hear Monica’s bare feet padding from behind.
“James!” Her voice pitches into a fervor as I sling the ladder down so fast I nearly decapitate her. “You can’t go up there!”
“Why? Is that where the dying dog is?” I race to the top and pull out my cell phone to use it as a flashlight. A long cord dangles from the ceiling, and I don’t hesitate to pull the damn thing, exposing the room in a blast of bright light.
“Shit,” the word stumbles from me as I take it all in. “Monica.” I fall to my knees, tears swelling in my eyes.
“I knew you’d think I was a freak. I can’t believe your father told you.” She climbs up and falls next to me, her robe still flapping open in the front.
Strewn over several feet are boxes and boxes of all that old crap I thought my father tossed into a dumpster. Boxes and boxes of my mother’s precious scrapbooks, picture frames he plucked from the wall. Macaroni art my mother saved from her children’s precious years that went by far too quickly.
I pull out a dusty old album covered in quilted brown fabric, microscopic white dots that give it a gingerbread appeal, and open it up. A smiling Aston is the first to greet me, and my chest bucks with a sharp hiccup of relief. His toothy smiles says I love you, I forgive you, all rolled into one. It’s a day that unexplainable forgiveness has been shed my way, so I don’t see why not.
I flip through a few more and find Wilson and Rachel hugging, my mother in her Sunday best. Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays. The Price family lives to see another day. At least in the form of faded photographic memories.
Monica blows out a hard breath. “I drove by one day a few months back and he had the entire street lined with box after box. I couldn’t bear the idea of this stuff getting thrown out. I figured I could give it back to you one day. Probably after your daddy died.”
I take a hard sniff, trying to hold it together, but I catch a glimpse of my mother’s silk scarf and I pull it under my nose and lose it. Her scent is still there, alive and present with or without her. It’s as if in some small way she reached out through the great beyond to reassure me miracles still happen. She’s still with me. It’s going to be okay.