Summer Sons(116)
Andrew broke the brittle silence: “I’m here.”
Sam said, “Fuck, shit,” and closed the door again.
“Halse,” he croaked. He banged on the frame again. “Sam, c’mere. Let me set this right.”
A muffled, “Go home.”
“Talk to me first.”
Seeing the bandages for a second time dropped his stomach to his toes. Sam flicked the storm door latch and pushed it open, forcing Andrew to step to the side. He stood in the frame with the door propped on one arm. Thin scabs ringed his wrists. He favored his right leg, another bandage peeking from under the hem of his basketball shorts. The bruises on his ribs matched Andrew’s. He said nothing, but his stare made demands.
Andrew said, pouring his conflict and longing into it, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t give me that,” Sam said. He sounded unbearably exhausted. “Not after what we had to do, both of us. Don’t be fucking sorry about it.”
The nip of fall skittered past in a gust of storm-tasting wind. Andrew stuffed his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall to watch Sam sidelong. The specter scratched inside his skin, inches too big in all directions for his body to hold comfortably. For the briefest flicker, Sam’s attention cast around as if he saw the same smoky presence Riley did. His frown turned rock-solid.
Andrew asked, “Can you see it?”
“Yeah, at the corners,” he said. “So, that, be sorry for that if you’ve got to pick something. I didn’t want to join your cursed-haunted-bullshit club.”
They’d comingled blood, Andrew remembered in a vertiginous swoop of guilt. He hadn’t spoken the words or finished the ritual, but he’d done enough with his fingernails under the handcuffs, the desperate hook of connection he’d cast. “That was an accident.”
“I bet you say that to all the guys,” Sam said without much humor.
Andrew reached across the distance between them but hesitated halfway. Sam made no motion to close the gap. The limp flop of Andrew’s hand back to his thigh went unacknowledged, until he said, “What are we doing?”
The question loomed.
Sam said, “Nothing, at this minute. That all right with you?”
“No,” Andrew forced himself to admit.
“Give me some consideration, Blur. If you’re going to be married to a fucking ghost, I’m not going to be your affair,” Sam said. His jaw clenched, one visible eye blazing at the challenge. The dead man abiding in Andrew’s bones hissed, displeased, and it drew a violent shudder across Andrew’s own nerves. His response stalled out as he regained control of his flesh. Sam said, “The debt’s clear, between me and Ed, and the thing with you and me has nowhere to go. With due respect and all, fuck off for a while. You already got what you wanted from me.”
The door swooshed open, caught in the breeze when Sam shoved it free of his bracing arm. Andrew stood dumb on the porch as the main door slammed shut, lock turning with a clack. The haunt chittered sympathetic nothingness at him and took clumsy control to maneuver him to the car. He was miles from the house before he regained himself enough to skip the on-ramp and pursue the route in the opposite direction of Sam’s place, following the track of the hills toward the swollen-bellied sun on the horizon.
One time. He and Sam had managed one night together. His whole being remembered the stretch of his jaw and the grip of broad fingers on the base of his skull, thighs solid under his palms, sheets tangled around his knees. An abyssal gulf opened in him at the thought that he had wrecked the potential for that to happen again. The endless taunting text messages and the raw late nights, fistfights and firelight, the one bright savage thing he’d gained from all the loss since the turn of summer—nothing else kindled him to human, eager life. Sam Halse wasn’t going to be another almost. He’d made that mistake over and over in total ignorance for almost a decade, and he wasn’t going to do it again.
He whipped a U-turn, returning to the house on Capitol in the gloaming hours. His roommate sat on the couch where he’d left him, buried in homework, fanning himself with a book in languid flaps while he typed one-handed on the laptop at his side. Three crushed cans of High Life cluttered the coffee table alongside a discarded lighter and pair of sunglasses.
“I need your help,” Andrew said.
Riley dropped his book, bolting upright from his slouch. The leftovers of Eddie Fulton roiled, toneless and agitated and dead. Andrew swallowed against the lump in his throat, choking off the bitter curiosity about what he and the revenant could become together, as he waited for an answer.
Then Riley said, “Of course.”
31
The lock at Townsend had rusted through. Andrew fought the creaking grind of the key against the tumblers. Exerting so much torque strained his stitches. Riley thumbed his baseball cap higher on his forehead as he watched. Tall grass rustled in the overgrown field of the Fulton yard, swishing and swirling, topped with grains. Despite the burnished gold light of afternoon, bleak shade crept at the corners of the porch and behind the age-grimed glass of the house’s tall windows. The lock gave abruptly with a shower of corroded metal. Andrew swung the door open on its hinges. The fourth board past the old welcome mat croaked with his weight, as it had when he and Eddie were kids playing hide-and-seek. His heart soared and crashed all at once. Sheets eaten through in patches hung over the abandoned furniture. Haphazard packing revealed gaps, losses, the final lingering pieces of the family’s life from a near-decade before.