The Dead Romantics (62)

“Mom!”

“I said what I said. That boy’s body would still be buried on the Ridge if you hadn’t said something.”

And his ghost would probably still be badgering me about trying out for the debate team. He was adamant that I could argue my way out of trouble if I had to. And I proved him right my junior year of high school when Officer Saget caught me one too many times doing something slightly illegal for very good reasons.

Halfway back to the house, Mom said with a sigh of remorse, “Oh, what are we going to do when Carver and Nicki get married? It isn’t quite like I can dance with your father’s corpse.”

I nodded seriously. “You don’t have the upper arm strength.”

“I couldn’t carry that sort of deadweight!”

Gallows humor.

I missed it. I missed talking about death like another step in the journey. Lee Marlow hated my humor. He thought talking about death was gross and immature. And the guy before Lee—Sean—thought I was weird when I joked about death. William didn’t much care. And Quinn absolutely would not hear of it.

I missed my family.

I missed this. Mairmont’s quiet evenings, and the black dots that were palmetto bugs skittering across the sidewalk, and the moths fluttering around the streetlights, and the sound of the evenings buzzing with insects and the wind through the trees. I missed the certainty of Mom, and the defiance of Alice, and the middleness of Carver, and the steadfastness of Seaburn, and the slow bloom of Mairmont.

It seemed like New York was changing every time I blinked. One way one moment, and then completely different the next—a chameleon of a city that never fit into one box, that never clung to one descriptor. It was always something new, something exciting, something never before seen.

I loved that for a long time, the steady march to something impossible, the ability to reinvent itself again and again despite hurricanes and pandemics and elections. And I loved everyone who I met on those streets, the Williams and Seans and Lee Marlows . . .

But the sky was always dark, and only the brightest stars shone through the light pollution of the city that never slept.

Dad said that I’d miss the stars too much, and their permanence. In New York, it was hard to pick any out, but here in Mairmont, I could see them from horizon to horizon, and the spring thunderstorms that bubbled up on the southern edge of town.

The kind of thunderstorms Dad loved.

The ones that never made it into Lee Marlow’s book, and with a sudden realization I understood why I had felt so uncomfortable here. Coming home was one thing but—ever since I’d been home, I’d kept Mom and Carver and Alice at arm’s length. It wasn’t because I didn’t love them, or didn’t miss them.

I was ashamed, but talking with Ben helped me realize that I had no control over what Lee Marlow wrote. That it wasn’t my fault.

I couldn’t shoulder every burden, and especially not his.

“Mom?” She stopped on the porch, and turned back to me with a raised black eyebrow. I took a deep breath. “I have something I have to tell you. Before—before you find out from someone else.”

“You’re pregnant.”

“No!” I quickly replied, repelled. “No—no absolutely not.”

She breathed out a sigh. “Thank god. I don’t think I could bury my husband and welcome a grandchild all at once. My range of emotions is not that flexible.”

“Mine neither,” I said with a laugh. I motioned to one of the rocking chairs on the front porch, and she sat in one, and I in the other. “I . . . remember that man I dated? Lee Marlow?”

“The asshole who kicked you out onto the street?”

I hesitated. “There’s more to it than that.”

And then I took a deep breath—and I told her. About Lee Marlow, and the stories I told him about our family. I told her about his book deal, and how I found out, and the last conversation we had before I found myself outside in the rain. It had been my choice to walk out. My choice to leave.

But really, what was the other option? Staying?

“I think what’s worse,” I said finally, “is that Marlow wrote Dad wrong. He wasn’t weird or cryptic or terrifying. I think that’s the worst part about this entire nightmare—Dad’s immortalized by that asshole, and he did it wrong.”

Mom crossed one leg over the other, and took out a pack of cigarettes from her back pocket. “Fuck him,” she quipped.

“Mom!”

“No, truly,” Mom repeated, lighting her cigarette. “Fuck that son of a bitch for twisting every good memory you told him into some deranged Twilight Zone. We aren’t a gothic horror novel. We’re a love story.”

I . . . never thought of myself, my story, my life, as anything more than a boring book shelved in a boring library in a boring town. But the more I thought about my family, about the summers I and my siblings ran around in the sprinklers, and played hide-and-seek in the cemetery, and the Halloweens Mom dressed as Elvira and Dad hid in a coffin and popped out to scare every poor kid who came trick-or-treating, and the years Alice and I played dress-up with the vintage clothes we found in the attic, and the summers collecting animal bones, and lighting candles for midnight waltzes through the parlors, and sitting so quietly in the kitchen with Dad to listen to the wind sing—

There was nothing but love in those memories.