Page 21 of Haunted

“She was supposed to be right behind me,” he says. “I used to fuss at her for not making the bed, and now she’s gone and I can’t make the bed either. Who cares about a bed?”

I have no answers for him, so I don’t try. I look over at the man approaching our group. “Mr. Dare. Thank you for coming.”

“Randy. Please,” he says. He’s a slight man, middle-aged. He looks nervously at Henry and me. “I’m sorry for your loss, Henry,” he says, and then turns to me. “But yours,” he says, and hugs me. “Parker, I’m so sorry. I should have knocked on your door when I was evacuating. I saw you taking out the trash and I told myself that you were probably getting everything squared away there. But Henry was in the middle of packing up. I remember looking down the hill and seeing those suitcases inside his front door, and I thought…well, I thought everybody had gotten the message to get out.”

Henry stiffens and looks at Randy.

“She probably wouldn’t have listened to you,” I say. “My mother was proud and prickly. She…she didn’t really listen to people. So they tended to leave her to her own devices.”

“Are we having a Denning Court reunion?” the lady who used to live at the end of the cul-de-sac asks, approaching us. She puts her hand on my forearm. “I have a video I took of the street before it happened, if you want it. It’s not much. But it’s something.”

I know what video she’s talking about. She came up the road that morning with her phone held out in front of her, filming the houses for the insurance, and she stopped and asked if we were going to be okay. I don’t remember what I told her.

Elliott is on that video. He was out in the front yard the whole time and she can’t have been ten feet from him. That was the morning I told him that Mr. Snail wasn’t scared of anything, so we weren’t scared either. And he believed me, because he believed everything I ever told him.

I want it. And the wanting turns over into something else so fast that for a second I think I’m going to be sick right here in front of everybody, because if I ever press play I will hear myself reassure my brother, and I will never be able to unhear it.

“Thank you,” I say. “I don’t think I’m ready yet.”

“When you are, just let me know.”

“Let me take your details,” Lance says from behind me. I’m unbelievably relieved. Even his presence at my back makes the room a little less oppressive.

“I miss her,” Henry Drumm says. He’s trying, and failing, to pull himself together. All my life, I really believed that adults had the answers, and that someday, I would get them too. But this man doesn’t have any. Suzannah is gone and he’s just as destroyed as I am. Maybe more so, because unlike me, he can at least feel something besides the emptiness.

I turn and look at Lance. He catches my eye and signals that he’s found a place for me with a quick jerk of his head. I excuse myself and follow him, threading through the crowd of strangers out of the ballroom like he’s a magnet pulling me to safety. He is the only thing in this room that makes sense.

Chapter seven

Lance

Ipull Mom’s old Corolla into the high school parking lot and cut the engine. My truck is still in the shop—fire damage to the undercarriage and the tires—and the Corolla feels wrong, too small, like wearing someone else’s shoes. The houses on the way to school have been scrubbed clean of their Halloween paraphernalia.

Parker hasn’t said a word since we left the house. He’s still in all black, which he’s worn every day since the funeral. The cough is better—the antibiotics are doing their job—but he still sounds like he’s breathing through gauze. He’s lost weight he couldn’t afford to lose.

He turned eighteen on Saturday. Aunt Shelley took him to dinner and Mom made a cake for after, and he thanked everybody, and he opened the sketchbook Bree wrapped in about four rolls of tape and thanked her in his new voice. He did all of it right. But he wasn’t there for any of it. By Sunday nobody was mentioning it.

“I’ll get it,” I say, reaching into the back seat for his bookbag.

“No. I can get it.”

“You shouldn’t be—”

“I can get my own backpack, Lance.”

He says it without heat, which is worse than if he’d snapped at me. I pull back.

We get out. The parking lot is filling up. This year we didn’t turn the porch light on or hand out candy, the first time in my life that’s happened. For a second the ordinariness of everything else is disorienting. Then Parker coughs, and the moment breaks.

I offer him my hand.

He looks at it. He tries to smile at me, but shakes his head.

I put my hand in my pocket and fall into step beside him. That’s twice this morning.

Martha Gillibrand cornered me at the wake four days ago. “What exactly are your intentions?” she asked, with that hard smoker’s stare, and I told her I wanted to take care of him. She looked at me like I’d said something stupid.

“You’re joining the Marines in a few months. You could meet someone on base that knocks your socks off,” she said. “Or you could get hit by a sniper round and that’s the end of you. You sure you want to drag him into that?”