“Really?”
Her hands felt good on my shoulders, like they were holding me to the ground. She nodded. “On the river.”
“On a boat?”
“No.” Her lip quivered and steadied. “Just … just standing there.”
She brushed some dirt off my shoulder and started to stand up, but I didn’t want her to go. I blurted, “What does the River Man do?”
She froze in place. “Calls me. He calls me. He wants my soul, and then once he gets it, he’ll feed on it; he’ll be so powerful, baby. He’ll leave the river and walk into town and everything … everything will be gone.”
Alan brings me home, and it’s a ten-minute ride of awkwardness. We talk about Courtney. Neither of us mentions Blake. I thank him and scoot into the house as quickly as possible.
At dinner I want to tell Dad about Alan and Courtney, but I can’t because Benji’s yammering away about Cheetos and baseball and Gramps dating some woman named Doris, which is where he is now, and how disgusting girls are. I try not to be annoyed at Benji because I know he’s just psyched that Dad’s actually having dinner with us and not working late, but it’s hard.
“How do they run with those … those things on their chest?” Benji moves his hands and totally inappropriately shows what he’s talking about.
“Benji!” Dad acts horrified, but his eyes are laughing.
“You call them breasts, Benji,” I say really slowly. I poke my fork in his direction. He scoops up some spaghetti.
“Well, they’re disgusting,” he announces, then shoves way too much spaghetti into his mouth. It dangles out.
“You’re disgusting,” I say. He shakes his head back and forth so the spaghetti flaps all around, flinging this way and that. “At least we don’t have penises and scrota. That’s what’s really disgusting.”
“Aimee!” Dad scolds.
“What? Like ‘penis’ is a bad word?”
“I was more worried about scrota,” he says, and takes a sip of his wine. His eyes sparkle like he’s not really mad.
“It’s the plural of scrotum,” I explain in a teacher voice.
“I know what it is,” he says.
Benji’s just looking at us, figuring things out. It takes him a minute to compute. Finally, he asks, “Is that the health class word for balls?”
We all crack up. My father almost snarfs wine out his nose, but he eventually manages to nod.
Benji starts chanting, “Scrota. Scrota. Scrota.” We giggle for a good minute, but Benji’s in fourth-grader overdrive and he can’t stop it, he just keeps going. “Scrota. Scrota. Scrota.”
My father has had it. “Benjamin. That’s enough.” Benji keeps chanting and Dad has to use his authority-figure voice. “Benjamin. I said no more.”
He stops. He sulks. He stabs his spaghetti and twirls it around like a madman before saying, “Why not? It’s not a bad word. It’s not like the f-word or something.”
“Any word is a bad word when chanted incessantly at the table,” Dad says. He looks to me for help. I can’t really give him any.
“It’s a pretty weird word,” I say.
Benji pushes his plate away, sad faced, feeling betrayed or something. “Can I be excused?”
My father and I look at each other like one of us should be the parental figure but neither actually wants to be. I scrape my fork around the plate. My dad sips his wine. Footsteps whisper across the floor upstairs.
Benji’s back straightens up and his voice perks out, “What’s that?”
My father holds his glass in midair. My fork stops by some clumped spaghetti. Dad puts the glass down slowly while Benji stands up. “It sounds like footsteps.”
He races out of the dining room, smashing past the bookcase. A tea candle drops off and spins across the floor. Dad barrels after him. “Benji!”
His chair bumps up the Oriental rug, but I don’t fix it. I just get up, too, rushing up the stairs into the hall. Benji’s hopping in place, looking around. Dread fills my throat.
“I heard footsteps!” he bubbles out. “There’s nobody up here. You guys heard it too, right? You heard the footsteps? And it smells. It smells like vanilla!”
I cross my arms over my chest and turn the hall light on. I force my throat to swallow.
“Did you hear it, Dad?” Benji keeps going, eyes big. My dad nods. “I think we’re haunted!” Benji paces back and forth down the hall. He stomps to make footstep sounds. “It sounds like someone walking, like a woman.”
I whisper out all my hope. “Like Mom?”
“Your mother is not haunting our house.” Dad says it like an edict, like a judgment. “Aimee, why do you fill his head with this nonsense? What’s wrong with you?”
I gasp, can’t even think of what to say because I’m so shocked that my dad is talking this way to me. He never acts so mean.
Benji’s eyes go big. “Then what was the noise?”
Dad waves his hand in the air. His eyes look to the left like he’ll find the answer there. “The house settling.”
Benji rolls his eyes. “Yeah. Right. Gramps thinks Mom is haunting us, too. Did you know that?”
He stomps off to his room and slams the door.
“Benjamin Avery! We do not slam doors in this house!” Dad yells after him, but his voice is defeated. He turns and goes back downstairs to the kitchen. I trail after him and we return to our places at the table.
“Dad—” I think about those footsteps, Courtney, Alan, and my dreams, and change direction. “Do you know anything about the man in the river?”
He stands up, giraffe-leg strides across the wide wood floor planks to the kitchen counter, and grabs a bottle of Glenfiddich. Scotch. He’s switched to scotch, which means he’s stressed. “What?”
I push my piece of garlic bread around my plate in a great big circle. “Mom saw him before she died.”
“This is not a discussion that I’m going to have with you, Aimee.”
“Why not?”
He pours his scotch into one of his special glasses that rounds out like a pregnant woman and has a pattern etched into the glass. His hands are steady, like mine. He could be a surgeon slicing into people with hands like that. He could paint.
“Because.”
“Because why?”
He swirls his glass. “Because I can’t.” He takes a sip. His Adam’s apple moves down and up with the swallow and release. Something inside me burns hot and hard, the way I know scotch burns hot and hard when you swallow it. Some sort of vital organ falls into itself, lost, lost, fire, burning into itself.
“Please, Dad …”
His voice comes out flat and dull. “Your mother lost a baby. She was very early on in her pregnancy and it … well, it pushed her over the edge, Aimee. She became obsessed with protecting you and Benji from some delusion she had. She’d stay up all night and say she heard footsteps, like you, only they were heavy, and there were scratching mice noises. She said she smelled dead things, not vanilla.”
“I don’t say that,” I blurt out.
“No. But you are hearing footsteps.”
“So is everyone!”
“The house was settling.” He rubs his hands across his closed eyes. “She twisted things so they were frightening. She was crying out for attention just like you.”
“Dad! It wasn’t even me. It was Benji!” I push my chair away from the table. This day could not get worse. Courtney is sick. Blake and I broke up. According to my dreams, someone is in danger and I have no idea how to help. I had an awkward ride with Alan, and now this? This? He’s comparing me to my mother. My voice is wood-plank hard because I am not crazy and I am not the only one who heard footsteps and it’s unfair.
“Fine, then. You clean up. I made dinner.” My feet take me away from the table.
“Aimee …”
“Dad?” The word comes out before I can stop it.
He swirls the amber liquid in his glass again. He is so tall and strong looking. Why is he acting so wea
k? “Don’t make Benji think your mother is here.”
“It was Gramps.”
“I will talk to him, too.”
“We aren’t going to be Mom, Dad. We aren’t her. You aren’t going to lose us, too.”
“Don’t go there, Aimee.”
My hands turn into fists but I nod. I will let him believe what he wants to believe, what he needs to believe. Even though my heart is heavy fire burning, I cross those wood planks of our kitchen floor and lift myself up on my toes. I kiss his cheek. I will pretend I do not need a dad to save me. I will pretend to be normal. He is weak. He can’t help it. He is more like Blake than Alan. I think the whole world is more like Blake than Alan.
“I love you, you know,” I whisper, because I do. I do love him, no matter what.
“You, too,” he says, and that’s when I notice the knife on the stove.
It’s the big serrated-edge knife I used to slice the garlic bread. I point my finger at it, but my hand is not like my hand. It shakes.
He turns to see what’s got my attention. His free hand wraps around my waist. He pulls me close. His words are more a curse than a prayer. “Holy God.”
The knife, the foot-long bread knife, is standing up on its tip, perfectly balanced and slowly spinning around.
• 10 •
ALAN
I slow the truck to a crawl as I approach Aunt Lisa’s house—home. Aimee caught it during the car ride, called me on it, so now I’m calling it home. Aunt Lisa’s Chevy Tahoe is in the driveway. Lots of lights are on. I stare hard at Courtney’s window, wondering if I’ll see the shape of a man behind her pink curtains. Her light is on, but I can’t see any shadow-men.
Pulling into the driveway behind the Tahoe, I turn off my truck. I can’t help but look up at Courtney’s window again. There is a shape. A dark form stands there, looking down at me. But the curtain is parted a little and I can see that the shape is female. Aunt Lisa. The front door opens and there’s Mom, waiting for me, so I get out and go up to her.
“Alan, are you okay?” she asks, coming out on the porch.
“Yeah, I’m fine. How’s Courtney? Is she okay?”
“She will be. A few stitches and a mild concussion. What happened?”
I study Mom for a minute, wondering why she’s asking me about it. “What did she say happened?”
“She doesn’t remember,” Mom says. “Someone at the school told Lisa you carried her to the nurse.”
“Yeah, I did.” I pause and look around, stalling, wondering what to say, and finally just tell her what happened.
When I’m done, she steps forward and hugs me. “No more skipping classes, Alan Whitedeer Parson. Okay?” I nod. Mom sighs. “She’s upstairs. We have to keep her awake until midnight, the doctor said.”
“Let’s go see her.”
Courtney and Aunt Lisa are sitting on the bed. “Hi, Alan,” Courtney says.
“Hey. You okay?” I ask.
“I have a headache. Thanks for carrying me to the nurse.” She smiles at me. I guess she’s done being mad about me barging into her room the other day.
“No problem,” I tell her. “Aimee’s pretty worried about you.”
“I should call her,” Courtney says.
“Later,” Aunt Lisa tells her. “You can call her later.”
“Hey, listen, the truck cost quite a bit less than I expected,” I say. “I have money left over. How about if I take us all out for supper? No lobster, though. That’s just gross.”
Aunt Lisa puts up a mild protest, but I wave it away. Finally she turns to Courtney and asks, “Are you up for it?”
“Sure,” Courtney answers. “I want onion rings.”
I send Aunt Lisa and Mom downstairs, promising we’ll be right after them. I turn back to Courtney. “You really okay?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. I study her face. There’s no sarcasm. No meanness. She looks like a normal girl. Well, a normal girl with a stitched-up gash on her forehead and some bad acne, but at least the sores aren’t raw and leaking like they were earlier.
Carl’s Cone Corner is kind of an old-fashioned place. Like something you see in movies from the 1950s. They have a big jukebox in the dining room and the waitresses—two of whom I recognize from school—bring the food on roller skates and wear pink uniforms with short skirts. The food is really good, and no dead lobster eyes stare up at me while I eat.
Conversation about the framed pictures of celebrities on the wall dies down after a bit and there’s a long pause. Courtney is sitting across from me, next to her mom.
“Do you go to church?” I blurt out. Nice. I meant to be subtle about it. I’m not real good at subtle.
Courtney actually seems to shrink away from the question. It’s her mom who answers. “No, we haven’t been in … I don’t know. A long time. Why?”
“Alan?” Mom warns beside me. She holds a french fry just outside her mouth and the two syllables of my name start low and end higher, threatening.
“I was just asking,” I say. “Do most people go to church up here?”
“Quite a few do.” Aunt Lisa looks suspiciously at Mom. “Do you guys go?”
“No,” Mom says, nudging me with her elbow so I’ll be quiet. Aunt Lisa sees it.
“If Alan wants to go to church, we can find him one. What kind of church are you interested in?” she asks me.
“He’s not,” Mom says. “Not like you think. Alan follows the Indian gods.” She puts air quotes around “Indian gods.”
Courtney sits quietly, staring at her food.
“One god,” I correct her. “Manifested in several forms. But that’s not why I’m asking.”
“Why are you asking?” Aunt Lisa asks. She’s stirring her drink with her straw, uncomfortable. I know I have to kill this subject.
“I was just wondering.”
“No, you have a reason.” Aunt Lisa won’t let it go. She is like her sister in a lot of ways, I guess.
“I was just thinking of the noises we’ve been hearing. You know, the scratching?” I poke a fry into my mouth like what I said is no big deal.
“The mice?” she asks.
“Yeah. Sort of. I mean, what if it isn’t mice?”
“What do you think it is?” Her fingers are still pinching the top of her straw, but now she’s not stirring. She’s looking me in the face.
Mom wipes ketchup from her lips and slaps her napkin onto the table near my hand.
“I’m not sure,” I say. And I’m not.
We get home around eight. There are no shapes silhouetted against the light of Courtney’s bedroom. I almost start to wonder if I imagined it before. Aunt Lisa kills the engine and I start to open my back door.
“Just a minute,” Mom says. I stop, my hand on the door handle, looking at her while she looks at Aunt Lisa. “We might as well tell them now.”
Aunt Lisa twists around to look at me and Courtney in the backseat. “The mill is adding a shift,” she says. “They asked for volunteers to work half the new shift until they hire new people. We agreed to do it.”
“It’ll be a lot of overtime,” Mom adds. “Extra money.”
“Okay,” I say.
“We won’t be home until nine tomorrow night and for a while,” Aunt Lisa says.
“You won’t be home?” Courtney squeaks.
Aunt Lisa runs her hands through her hair and her fingers get stuck in a tangle. She pulls at it distractedly. “Maybe I shouldn’t do this. Not now.”
She looks to Mom, who looks back at me. I know what she wants. We’ve never had much money. It took all Mom’s savings to move us up here.
“It’ll be okay,” I say. “Me and Court can handle it. I’ve got the truck in case we need to go anywhere. We’ll be fine.”
“Court, you think so?” Aunt Lisa asks.
Courtney shrugs. It’s a motion so small it would be easy to miss it. “I guess,” she says. “I know we need the money.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” she
says, but her voice lacks conviction.
“I’ll take care of her,” I promise, and pat her knee. Aimee would say that’s condescending. I smile because I’ve already learned that about her. But at the moment, it seems appropriate, and Courtney doesn’t object. Nothing else is said, and after a minute we all get out of the Tahoe and go to the porch, where Aunt Lisa unlocks the door.
The smell of decay rolls out at us like a fist when the front door swings open. We all back away gagging, except Courtney, who stands completely motionless in the doorway. I cover my mouth with one hand and throw the other arm around her shoulders and pull her away.
“What is that?” Aunt Lisa asks between coughs.
“Maybe your mice died.” It’s mean of me to say it, at least to say it as sarcastically as I do, but it just pops out that way.
Aunt Lisa nods with her whole upper body. “That’s probably it. I put out some traps and poison this morning. I bet we got one.”
“A dozen, based on the smell,” Mom corrects.
I bet we never find a single dead mouse.
“I’ll start opening windows.” Aunt Lisa keeps her mouth covered and runs inside like a kid running toward the end of the high diving board. Mom goes after her.
“I don’t want to go back in there,” Courtney whispers. “He’s there.”
“Who is it, Court? Tell me.”
She turns her pale face up to me and I see a deep sadness in her eyes, like she’s just completely hollow behind her eyes.
“Not Daddy,” she says.
I shake my head. “No,” I agree. “Who is it? Do you know?”
“Not Daddy.”
I hug her shoulders against me. “No, it’s not your dad. But we’ll be okay,” I promise. “I’ve got some stuff in my room that’ll help.”
The house gets pretty cold with all the windows open. The smell goes away really fast, though. Too fast. It isn’t natural. Aunt Lisa checks traps and cabinets where she left poison, but doesn’t find any dead mice.
“They must have eaten the poison and died in the walls or something,” she says. Mom agrees with her. I keep quiet, but stay close to Courtney.