Jack knew those groceries in the drive were paid for by three hours of collecting cans after school. He remembered buying them from a supermarket owned by Orrie Aberfoyle.
Will was a caricature of good manners. “Jack. Welcome home.” He swept his arm toward the door, a cartoon maître d’, still not looking anyone in the eye. “Why don’t you go upstairs?” Will never had any real idea what he was doing when it came to the human race. He had gotten better as time went on, but it still beggared belief. The poor bastard.
Jack Joyce, aged fourteen, got between the two wide-bodies and his brother, hair hanging in his eyes. “What’s the problem?” The size differential was shocking. The eye lines of Princess and the second-in-charge dropped toward this kid like two safes being lowered from a twelfth-floor window. The kid met their gaze unflinching. He raised his eyebrows helpfully-can I assist you?
Princess looked right at the kid, and said: “That smart mouth is gonna get your little brother hurt, Will.”
The kid’s eyebrows dropped. His voice was very level. “If I was being smart with you, dickhead, you’d never know it.”
Jack laughed, his hand slapping over his mouth. His eyes prickled.
Princess snapped his fist skyward-intercepted by the second-in-charge. “Dude. He’s a kid.”
Princess hesitated, eyes beaming death. Then he lowered that broad fist. “We’ll be back,” he promised.
“I’ll be here,” the kid said.
You magnificent little shit, Jack thought.
The goons exited stage right and literally vanished. The kid watched them go.
Vibrations took hold of the kid’s legs, and Jack watched as he hit the dirt-first those shredded knees, then his hands as well. They curled in the gravel, hard. The kid’s breath was staccato. He was shaking.
Will said, “Foul language is unacceptable, young man. Mom and Dad would have been appalled.” It sounded as if he were talking in his sleep.
The kid’s head snapped toward Will, wild-eyed and furious. Will didn’t move. He was doing that fiddly thing with his fingers, eyes on the gravel, or the trees. The kid’s fury shaded to fearful, to outraged, then to disbelieving. Then contained. Then the kid was coping. Business as usual.
Will’s tics were subsiding, but he still wasn’t moving. “Appalled…”
The kid got to his feet and slapped white-dusted hands against his serious-business jacket. Looping Will’s arm over his shoulder the kid turned his brother toward the house.
“Privileges revoked, mister,” Will mumbled.
“You’re right, Will. I’m sorry.”
“Your grades are suffering. Bad grades are unacceptable. Your education-”
“Is my future. I know, Will. Steps.”
The brothers climbed the steps to the porch.
“Let’s get you to bed,” the kid said.
“No, too much work.”
“Let’s get you to bed.”
“All right.”
The kid moved his brother to the front door and then opened it for him. “How much do we owe?”
“Owe?” Like he was talking in his sleep again.
“Mr. Aberfoyle.”
“How do you know Mr. Aberfoyle?”
The kid escorted him into the house. “Let’s get you to bed.”
“All right.”
The ghost door closed behind them, and the world came back into focus.
Nick was looking at Jack weird. Which was fair enough.
“I guess you’re wondering…”
“Pretty much.”
“A lot of memories.”
“My grandmother used to do that. Talk to the air. God, specifically.”
“Did she get answers?” Jack said it as a joke.
“The good Lord told her when she was gonna die, right down to the minute. Were you communing with something just then?”
Communing. Man, everybody in Massachusetts had some story about the life beyond. Jack had called an electrician out, years ago, to fix a light socket that wouldn’t stop flickering. The guy hadn’t been able to fix it and had advised Jack that it was most likely a spirit thing and to just make friends with it.
There was no point complicating things. “No. It’s just been a bad night.”
Jack climbed the bowed porch steps. He fished out his keys, looked for the one he never used. There it was, still stamped with the name of the shoe repair place on Ducayne where he’d gotten it cut when he was fifteen. “You know, Nick,” Jack said. “Ghosts don’t hang around because they can’t let go of us. They hang around because we can’t let go of them.”
“You’re a surprising man, Jack.”
“That’s not one of mine.” Jack turned the key, the lock clacked. “Something an electrician told me.”
The door opened, shoving aside a loose bank of uncollected mail. The cold air inside was stale, faintly rancid. Nick commented that it smelled like his old dorm room.
The date stamps on the mail were at least a week old, some dating further back. “The power might be off.”
The door opened straight into the living area, staircase angling up and behind the fireplace. The kitchen was through an entry to the right, and before that was space for the dining table and china cabinet. A bay window looked onto the drive and sycamore trees.
When Jack lived here he had managed to keep back Will’s piecemeal encroachment onto a house that was a memorial to his parents. So much of the interior character existed because of choices their mother and father had made; echoes Jack wanted to keep hearing for as long as he could. They were silent now. The place had changed.
Minor things remained as they had been: powder-blue walls, framed pastoral oils by some anonymous gas station artist, and homemade shelves where Jack had often set up action figures to be blasted down with dart guns. He smiled for a moment, before the memory of the previous few hours and the ghost-weight of a real gun in his hand fouled the recollection.
Atop that base layer Will had made the place his own. A whiteboard balanced on top of the mantle, gone smudge-blue from countless scrawlings and erasures. The china cabinet had been cleared and the dishware replaced with haphazard arrangements of scientific periodicals. The dining table was a work space, piled with papers and correspondence, the four chairs stacked in the corner, replaced by a single threadbare ergonomic saddle seat on four casters.
It hurt to see the place like this, faded and dusty and wrong.
“Your brother really believed in taking work home with him.” Nick crossed to the plastic-sheathed sofa-moving with a pronounced limp-and rested there.
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“I’m fine. Busted my knee a few years back, is all.”
“Hockey?”
“I was… in a car accident.”
It clicked: the ignition in Nick’s cab, slaved to a Breathalyzer. Nick “The Prez” Marsters. Jack knew this story. It had made the news a year or so before Jack left Riverport.
The realization must have been all over Jack’s face because Nick rolled his eyes, laid his head back, and said to the ceiling: “It wasn’t like the news reported it. I wasn’t drunk.” Shooting Jack a glance: “I wasn’t. Drinking, yes. Drunk, no.”
Jack went looking for coffee, found the kitchen had been used more often than cleaned. The fridge was empty, save for four small cartons of milk, a jar of pickled ginger, two bottles of sterilized water, and a decaying clutch of rubber-banded shallots. Coffee was in the cupboard, the milk was barely decent, and the sink held a stack of plates textured with outcroppings of dark green mold. That would have been the musty scent that Nick found so familiar.
The faucet juddered and spat. He rinsed the kettle, lit the burner, set the water to boil, then wandered back to ask Nick how he took his coffee.
“It was a pedestrian,” Nick said. “They popped up in the middle of the road, I swerved and the car I was driving barrel-rolled through a fence and destroyed a gazebo.”
Jack hooked a thumb back toward the kitchen. “Black?”