Page 45 of Haunted

Tomorrow at nine she finds out whether they got all of it. She won’t let me come in with her.

I sit down at the desk. I open the laptop and start typing.

Dear Alice,

can you please tell me who you think my father is?

Too blunt. I clear it.

Dear Alice, I have so many questions, starting with…

And where does he start? I take that out too.

Dear Alice,

Thank you for writing. I have a great many questions and I don’t know where to begin with any of them.

Tuesday, then. The boathouse.

With kind regards, Jonny (Bishop)

I send it before I can think about it anymore. Then I sit in the dark of my aunt’s spare room and wonder what I have just asked for.

The streetlamps are on along Flint Street. I get up and go to the living room window. I stand where I can see the building across the road, and count up.

Fifth floor. There’s a light on.

I watch it for a long time. It doesn’t go out.

Chapter seventeen

Lance

The apartment on Flint Street is too quiet after the noise of Captain Eddie’s.

I don’t turn on the lights. I sit on the edge of the mattress with my boots still on and let the dark settle. On the nightstand, Parker’s sketchbooks are stacked where I’ve kept them all week—three of them, hardcover, full of a boy I loved drawing a boy I used to be. I haven’t opened them since the basement. I had them in my hands in her doorway this afternoon and I couldn’t do it.

Fuck off, Broussard.

He said it holding a bag of catfish, and somehow it went in deeper than anything I heard in two years of marriage.

The knock, when it comes, is three raps, evenly spaced, and I’m already across the room with my hand on the door before it lands on me where I’ve heard it before.

I open the door.

Nash is leaning against the frame with his hands in his jacket pockets. Brown hair, aqua-blue eyes, and a passing resemblance to Parker that once fooled me into thinking he had some of Parker’s goodness in him too. He gives me the smile he used to give me across the mess hall, and everything in me goes quiet and careful. “Broussard,” he says. “You look like hell.”

“Nash.” I don’t move to let him in. “I thought you went back to Connecticut.”

“I was in the neighborhood.” He tips his head, easy. “Say again—that’s the greeting? After I drive six hours?”

“I didn’t ask you to drive six hours.” Six hours. I’m already triangulating it. That’s not Connecticut. Philadelphia to the north, Charleston or Asheville to the south, maybe Knoxville. I don’t remember him ever mentioning friends or family in any of them. So he’s not passing through. He’s sending me a message.

“No,” he agrees. “You never ask for anything.”

“That’s how they trained us.”

“Corps forever.” He smiles. I don’t.