Page 20 of Haunted

I don’t answer. I go to the window and watch Parker and his aunt on the bench. She’s talking and he’s listening, his hands clasped between his knees. At one point she reaches over and squeezes his arm, and he doesn’t flinch away from it. I press my hand flat against the glass and wait for him to look for me, at least once.

He doesn’t.

Chapter six

Parker

How many cars are there? There must be dozens. The wake is so big that the Fairhaven Inn contributed a ballroom to host it. And almost every one of those people is a stranger.

Lance puts his hand on my arm, as if that will call me back. I don’t react. He’s always touching me in small ways—the hand, the elbow, the small of my back, which he seems to prefer above all other places. I can’t even sit on the couch to watch TV without him settling next to me.

For me to touch him requires me to screw up my courage, and then weigh what I’m actually putting out there. I’m not blind—I can see what it costs him when I don’t reach back. I wish I could feel the way he does. I want to. Instead, I feel like I’m about a million miles away. Like I’m in some cold Siberian wasteland where nothing can make me even the tiniest bit happy. His touch does not make me feel better. It just makes the loneliness more bearable.

“Parker,” Aunt Shelley says, “why don’t we go out to dinner the day after tomorrow to celebrate your eighteenth birthday? Just you and me.”

“Sure,” I say, because I am completely indifferent.

“Oh,” Lance says, sounding hurt. “It’s just that I’d already planned to take him out.”

“And I’m sure you’ll still have your evening, and it’ll be wonderful,” Aunt Shelley says. “But he’s just buried his family. Let his first birthday without them be a quiet one, with somebody who knew them.”

I can feel him looking back and forth between us. He squeezes my arm. “Sure.”

I stare out the window and even when we pull up in front of the hotel, I am still so lost in thought that Lance has to prompt me to move. He’s so gentle about it that for a moment, I think that if I could love anybody, anybody in this world, it would be him. And then I am so unreasonably, insanely angry at him for being so solicitous, as if I can’t do things for myself.

The ballroom smells like catered food and lilies and furniture polish.

Someone has brought in leather wing chairs and I sink into one of them gratefully.

Aunt Shelley drifts off to Mrs. Broussard, likely to talk about me, and I stare at the parquet floor. If I had a pencil I’d fill this room with other people—dancers, a wedding party, a cotillion. Anybody but us.

“Let me get you something to eat,” Lance says.

“I’m not hungry.”

He gets a mulish look. “Honey, it’s been almost two days. You have to eat.”

It’s the word honey that gets me. “I don’t have to do anything,” I retort. “And I don’t want to be eating or mourning or performing in front of these people.”

His face softens. He crouches down and looks up at me. “Tell you what, then. How about you last through this first little wave, and I’ll scout out a place where you can go and be alone. If I do that, will you eat?”

I nod tiredly. I don’t have the energy to do anything else.

The first wave of visitors arrives and I stand and let them perform their condolences and murmur faint praise for people they didn’t know. My hand is taken by men who tell me I’m so brave, and women who weep for me, clearly picturing their own children bereft. None of them see me at all. I’m not Parker. I’m a stand-in for their fears to focus on.

One girl from my high school comes up to me. I fasten my gaze on the plain cross at her throat. “Parker,” she starts, “I can’t imagine what you’re going through. But during times like these, we are called to be prayer warriors for Jesus. If you look at the story of Daniel in Scripture—”

“There is no God,” I say in this new, throaty voice. It’s been days and I still sound like this.

She reels back. This is the South. There is nothing more controversial I could have said, and she looks genuinely unprepared for it.

Someone puts their hand on my shoulder, but I can tell it isn’t Lance. It’s not gentle like his hand is. It’s heavier. I turn and see Miss Martha, the woman who used to come and babysit Elliott.

“You skedaddle, girlie,” she says in her husky smoker’s voice. “He’s out of his mind with grief.”

I want to say that I’m not out of my mind. I’m the sanest person in this room. But I don’t say anything. She pulls me into a tight hug, and after that, her husband, Mr. Gillibrand, does the same. Then Henry Drumm joins us.

Unexpectedly, I start to cry. Martha and Vernon Gillibrand in the house behind ours all my life, Henry next door, all of us strung along that one road, and now there’s no road and no houses and no reason for any of us to ever see each other again. Henry hugs me as well. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I tell him.