Summer Sons(37)

“Okay, message received.” Sam slapped his thighs and got up, pushed his chair in with his heel, then unlocked the porch door and opened it. “Y’all ain’t dead, I’ll head out. Good to see you, Blur.”

Riley let out a tea-kettle-like whistle of a sigh when the other man clattered from the porch into the yard without shutting the door. The kitchen filled with the smell of grass and dog shit. The neighbor’s mutt barked at Sam along the fenceline as he left.

“He just shows up sometimes. Thinks he’s my fucking dad, swear to god,” Riley said.

Andrew snorted. Standing tense and coiled had made the pulse in his temples vicious, almost powerful enough to provoke vertigo. He collapsed on the chair. For a second, he felt grateful to Halse for interrupting them. Impeccable bad timing.

“But seriously,” Riley said.

Andrew said, “I’m not going to talk about it, no matter how much you ask. It’s just things, happening, that don’t concern you.”

“I can’t sleep, Blur.” Riley’s hands moved in an abrupt, agitated arc. “That thing came back with you, and you’re not—” He paused, then plowed on when Andrew began to speak. “You’re not doing anything about it. I didn’t sign up for a haunted house.”

“And you think I did?” Andrew said.

“I think you don’t know what you’re fucking doing.”

That flensed him. Riley hit the nail on the head; he was talking ghosts, but he’d covered Andrew’s sloppy investigation without trying. Clumsily staggering from one confrontation to the next, strung out between a campus he kept avoiding and a handful of men with questionable intentions he kept being drawn to—none of that had organized intention behind it. He was acting on one impulse after another, hoping he’d find the right direction while dodging the shit that he’d rather ignore. Andrew grabbed his phone as he stood. The floor swam. He tipped his chin and blinked at the pattern on the tile. Riley had exposed him on multiple levels, like he’d stripped off his topmost layer of skin. Andrew wasn’t prepared to see himself, let alone show someone else.

“Please,” Riley said as he approached the table. “Your ghost is like nothing I’ve ever felt before, my whole life, and I’ve seen my fair share of weird shit. You’re dragging around a second shadow on your heels, I feel him all the time. It’s awful. How can you stand it?”

“Because it’s not really him,” he said. “They never are.”

“Then what is it?”

The juxtaposition of the dirty breakfast dishes on the countertop, their naked feet on the sun-warm tile, and the total lack of air in the room made for a claustrophobic pressure. Andrew’s phone buzzed in his fist. He crammed it into his back pocket and winced at the drag on his scabbed fingers.

“It isn’t Eddie,” he repeated. “So ignore it, just—ignore it. There’s nothing you can do that won’t make it worse.”

“That’s so stupid. Ignoring it isn’t going to make it stop. Doesn’t he, doesn’t it, need something from you or me or…” Riley yanked on his hair and let out a frustrated half-yell, spinning to face the wall instead of Andrew. His back flexed. “I hate this.”

“It’s not him,” Andrew repeated. He swallowed the taste of souring milk and blood from the back of his throat. “It’s a fucking copy of a copy, leftovers. The more of us it gets, the more it’ll take, because it’s dead and we’re alive. Fucking forget about it.”

“How are you so certain?”

Andrew said, “A lot of fucking experience, Riley,” and pushed past him in a brush of shoulders.

He took the keys from the table and walked out barefoot to the sound of Riley calling after him, “Stop running off, goddamnit!”

Andrew walked as fast as his unsteady feet allowed, but Riley didn’t chase after. Asphalt burned the soles of his feet, and the Challenger’s textured rubber pedals flattened his toes out oddly under the pressure. He drove Eddie’s car to the outskirts of the suburbs and beyond, found the highway from his sole race with Halse, and pulled off to the side. The engine ticked, cooling, as he sat surrounded by dim sun and nature noises, smelling the humidity like a rotten blanket. His phone hung lax in his fingers.

come home

i’ll be waiting

He read it again, again. Halse had texted him to say Put some ice on your face. Riley had too: why are you avoiding this when i already know your secret? and then, a half hour later, sorry.

When he returned home, the television was the only light in the living room, washing out Riley’s pale skin and two-tone hair into a ghastly blue-grey mask. He paused on the threshold. Riley said, “I don’t get it. Eddie said you’d never talk about your … your spooky shit, whatever, but how do you not want to understand it? I do.”

“I don’t want to understand, I want it gone,” he said.

And when he thought about the other half of the conversation, the things he didn’t need to understand that had the magnetism and threat of a man’s thumbs against the divots of Riley’s lower back, his brain stalled out like a hung transmission. The research and his roommate’s psychic bullshit weren’t the only things Eddie hadn’t mentioned getting closer to. The cavernous space of the house pressed all around them. Riley didn’t push any further.