Page 47

47

The Skeletons

Jake

It’s the deathly quiet of early morning after Christmas. I spot an Uber through the front door’s side windows, idling outside.

She emerges from the dark hallway, her steps slowing for a moment, just a moment, as she notices me come down the stairs into the dim foyer. Maybe she thought she could sneak off before I caught her.

“I was just saying good-bye to Bill and Laura,” she explains.

“Were you going to say good-bye to me?”

“No.”

“Will you now?”

“No.”

She stares at me, and I look at her. Lips the color of holly berries, her hair spilling around her shoulders, rumpled and unbrushed. I don’t want to say good-bye to her either, and we don’t have to. This won’t be the last time we see each other. We’ll cross paths, randomly, when we least expect it. We’ll connect eyes across a parking lot. We’ll find ourselves walking toward each other on a downtown sidewalk. She’ll shank me with a sarcastic smile and say, Still stalking me? and I’ll say, Until the sweet grip of death takes me , and she’ll say, Something to look forward to, then , and we’ll stand there for a few seconds, our eyes saying something completely different. She’ll keep spotting me, until one day the sightings stop. I wonder how long she’ll hold out for another.

Cat appears from behind her, Princess lumbering along at the end of a flimsy leash, snorting and puffing enthusiastically.

“Shoes, Cat.”

Cat scrabbles with her Mary Janes and Dodi slips on her boots. She passes the little red peacoat to Cat, who takes it.

“Shoes, Jake,” Cat says around the collar of her coat in the same bossy tone as her mother.

“I still have some cleaning up to do,” I say.

Dodi and I exchange one last look. The Uber honks. The door opens, and all the warmth of the house swirls out into the cold morning with them.

The house is dead and empty now. A floorboard creaks, and I turn to see Laura.

“Did you two quarrel?” she asks sympathetically. “I won’t pry. You’ll work it out. It’s obvious you two love each other very much.” She fiddles with her snowman necklace for a minute. “Or…you could go after her. I’ll hold down the fort…”

I prop up a fake smile and try to look confused— Dodi and me, fighting?— but Laura sees through me. I learned all my fake smiles from her, after all. She gracefully drops it.

We gravitate to the kitchen, our default, and she pours coffee and restlessly picks up crumbs off the surface of the kitchen table with the pad of her finger.

“I’m going to have to turn my phone on at some point.” She laughs hollowly. “How many missed calls do you think there are?”

Andrew would have come home to an empty house yesterday, expecting us to be cowed and conciliatory. I can picture him now, checking that tracking app, useless with Laura’s data turned off. Firing off text after text, calling over and over, face getting grimmer and grimmer.

I want to reach across the table and place my hand on Laura’s. Don’t go back.

She twists her hands, and her face twists too.

“I need to talk to you, Jake. It’s been eating me up inside, what I said the other night. I should never have worded it like that, like I stayed because I had to. Because I could have left. I had my bags packed when you showed up—there was a reason I hadn’t bothered with Christmas that year. But I chose to stay. I chose it. I would choose it again. It was all worth it. You were worth it.”

I freeze. “What do you mean?”

She places her hands on mine and squeezes, and the pins and needles in the tips of my fingers start.

“I finally had my proof of the affair—well, one of the affairs—and I had my exit plan figured out, but then the social worker showed up with walking, talking proof of a completely separate affair, and his dog in tow, and—”

She stops for one second, emotion catching up with her. It catches up with me, too. I remember that day clearly, this strange woman standing in her front door, staring at me like she’d seen a ghost.

“You weren’t anything like Andrew. I could tell that at a glance. You would never have survived growing up with that sociopath—I knew that instantly . And then after what he did to that poor old dog—” Laura cuts out again for a second. “Jake. I was never going anywhere .”

My fingers are blocks of ice.

I stare at Laura—the large, dark doe eyes, the heart-shaped face—so much like my mom, who I look like—my mom, the youngest, prettiest teacher at school—a little public school, because she’d left the Catholic school system after having me out of wedlock—who had never in my entire childhood spoken of her estranged sister, Laura. Never had so much as a photo of her in our apartment.

Because they’re not sisters. They’re not sisters, but Andrew has a type .

Laura squeezes my hands and her mouth moves, but I don’t hear a word. My mind is skipping like a stone over still water from ifs and thats to thens. It was easy to fabricate a redirection of the public’s speculation—I look like my aunt . An easy, sleazy lie. A way to keep squeaky clean the reputation of my uncle, the Catholic school superintendent—my uncle, who always bristled when anyone mistook me for his son. My uncle—

My father . I could be sick.

I remember that dinner on my birthday. How dare you tell her I’m your father…

Laura thought I knew. Of course she did. What normal person wouldn’t have put it all together? Andrew’s family did. Those wary, disapproving stares at family dinners, those probing, uncomfortable questions about my parentage in those early years—

Laura’s been talking this whole time—saying what, who knows—and now she pulls her hands back from mine for a moment, and my fingers aren’t just white, they’re blue at the tips. This is a new symptom. I’m getting sicker. My nerve cells falling apart, myelin disintegrating. I feel nauseous—my heart starts thudding—the well-trodden physiological circuit of an anxiety attack starting—

And it’s the missing step on the stairs at night. I lurch as I find my mental footing.

I’m not dying.

In my mind’s eye, Andrew’s parents— my grandparents —doing their ridiculous dance classes at their retirement home, rudely spry and physically able. Disgustingly healthy. Showing no signs of slowing down as they close in on a century on this planet.

“When did this start? Poor thing,” Laura says, taking my blue fingers into her warm hands. “Raynaud’s syndrome. Capillary spasm. Looks so much scarier than it is. Andrew gets that too, in his feet. That’s why you never see him without a pair of socks. Triggered by cold or stress. Have you been stressed?”

Have I been stressed. My heart’s been eating itself in my chest for eight years. It’s empty now—quiet and still inside.

Laura comes into focus in front of me, her lips moving, words forming, but I’m in my own head. Of course she didn’t take me away with her. Of course we didn’t leave Andrew in the dust. I wasn’t hers. I was his .

I always thought she was weak, but she was so strong. Not the sort of strength that stood up to force, but the sort that quietly bore great pressure. What was that like, always rolling over, giving way, placating, placating, placating your psycho husband so you could stay put in a horrible marriage and keep an eye on his kid? The kid you had no legal right to?

“Oh, honey,” Laura says, squeezing my arm, seeing something on my face I can’t tuck away and hide. “Don’t be stressed. Talk to her. It’s normal for new relationships—”

This is peak Laura right here, calming, soothing, a steady drip of encouragement. She’s always been the best. The absolute best aunt a lonely, grief-stricken boy could ask for.

She’s not my aunt, though.

I look her in the eyes, finally. She smiles. “It’s going to be okay.” She consults her watch. “I have to go soon.”

“Where?” I ask.

Her face is cheerful again, and it’s not all forced. “I’m babysitting Cat. I offered. Dodi has to wrap up that school assignment.” As you know, of course, her tone suggests. “Cat and I are going to give that horrible white monster a bath.”

She pulls out her phone and turns on the data, all her message notifications and missed phone calls populating the screen. Andrew, Andrew, Andrew . She swipes it all away, taps out a text to Dodi, and sends it. She already has her in her contacts.

She squeezes my hands one last time, but I hold on when she tries to pull away. She smiles at me, eyes misty.

“I’m glad we got to have this Christmas together. I think you should keep the decorations here. No point in taking them back. Where would I keep them?” And then she drops her bombshell. “I’ve decided to leave him.” She ducks and pecks me quickly on the cheek before she leaves.

Alone in the kitchen, I stare at the obituary photo of the handsome man with the glasses, the man my mother named me after. Maybe because that’s who she wished my father was. I look around the room, at all the things, all the clues about who I am and where I come from, and none of it connects to me after all. I spot two empty water glasses on the counter, one of them with Dodi’s bright red lipstick on the rim, and it calls something to mind. The water glasses Bill wouldn’t let me wash.

I find Bill on the collapsed old velvet sofa Dodi and I slept on the other night. He grips the top of his cane with both hands and rests his chin on top of them, gazing at the tree.

“It’s been a while since you’ve had a Christmas tree,” I surmise.

“Longer than you think,” he says humorously. “I’m Jewish.”

I notice it in his hand, the envelope from the lab that came in the mail before I left for Laura’s Christmas lunch. He sees me looking at it. He touches the cushion next to him, and I sit. Across from us, Dodi’s skeleton slouches in his armchair, grinning toothily. We’re silent, all three of us.

“There’s been…” He trails off, and starts over. “I did a DNA test…” He falters again.

There’s a hollow in my chest, deep and bottomless. If you stuck a hand inside, you’d lose your watch. My sentence has been commuted, but at the cost of a kind-faced father who loved my mother; a wise old grandfather, sardonic and gruff; and the gentlest, kindest aunt anyone ever had. None of them belong to me. I’m no one to any of them. I’m a stray. All I got out of this was Andrew, the one person on this planet I would happily fire into the sun, and if Laura is leaving him, she won’t be around to sweeten the bargain.

I don’t know how I’ll ever get up from this sofa.

Bill clears his throat, opens his mouth, and then abruptly folds the envelope in half and tucks it into the pocket of his robe. “Just so you know, I’ve got a liver enzyme problem,” he says at last. He clears his throat and frowns. “You’ll have to watch out when you get older, since it runs in the family.”

He avoids my eye as I stare at him. I can’t think why he’s lying to me. Don’t you know I thought I was dying? He didn’t. I told him the neurologist said I was in the clear. He has no idea how this misunderstanding has affected me.

“I have a great-granddaughter,” he says suddenly, and I start. He spent two weeks telling me stories about all the dead, broken-off branches on our— his family tree. There is no great-granddaughter.

“Two weeks ago I had no one,” Bill continues, “and now I have a great-granddaughter. And a grandson and a granddaughter-in-law—are you married? I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to sound like some old idiot. It’s fine to not be married.”

It’s the first time he’s uttered the word “grandson.” I don’t know what to say to any of this, so I just say, “We’re married.”

“And Laura?”

“She’s—” I swallow, mind whirling. “She’s not related to me by blood, but she’s always been like an aunt.”

“You don’t need to be related by blood to be family,” Bill argues gallantly on Laura’s behalf.

“Cat isn’t related to me by blood, either,” I say numbly. “She’s Dodi’s daughter, by her first husband.”

“And she’s ours now.”

Ours. Bill’s and mine. How has that letter from the lab not burst into flames in his pocket already?

“You don’t need blood relation to justify a family,” Bill repeats. He hasn’t looked me in the eye this whole time. We’re silent for a beat.

“This is a big house,” he says unexpectedly. “My granddaughter-in-law seemed to like it. That little waif seemed to like it, too.” He lets it hang there.

I can’t make any sense of this.

“And there’s that school, just down the street.”

The weird, artsy little private school, the sort of place that would probably let Cat bring mutilated Barbies for show-and-tell. I don’t follow.

“There’s no reason for me to be living here all alone, with all this space going to waste,” Bill continues, and I finally get his meaning.

I look around. It’s a huge old house, and Bill doesn’t even step foot in the entire upstairs. The two weeks I spent here were the easiest living arrangement I’ve ever had. Bill and I get on together. He likes my cooking and my help, and more than that, he likes talking to me. I like listening to him.

“I could use the company—and the help,” he says with dignity. “I don’t want to get moved into some facility by a social worker. I’d like to die in my own home.”

I answer automatically, without thinking. “Of course I’ll help.” If there’s one thing I understand, it’s the desire to be in control of the end. It’s all spun around so quickly, and now here I am, offering the advocacy I always wanted.

Next to me Bill’s shoulders relax a little. I hadn’t realized how tense he was. He’s been barely hanging on to independence for so long.

That secret in his pocket—his lie by omission—his motive for concealing the results—

He thinks he’s conning me.

The sneaky, daft bastard. I don’t even mind.

He continues. “And you may as well make use of the place now as later. You don’t need to wait to cash in on your inheritance before moving in.”

This takes a minute to process. “My inheritance?”

“It has to go to someone.”

I look at it all—the old wood and the discolored curtains that need to be replaced, the abundance of molding and carving ripe for collecting dust, the floors that need to be waxed—my fingers twitch. I love messes. I love taking care of things—and people. It’s my MO.

There’s an offer here: be my grandson, and I’ll be your grandfather.

Dodi’s skeleton still slouches by the fire, staring at us with empty eye sockets, grinning humorously at his skeleton friends tumbling out of closets, attempting to crawl back in. I’m used to living in a family full of lies, and I’m over it. Bill and I will come clean with each other. Later. And I think I’ll accept his offer.

Right now, it’s Dodi I need to talk to.