Page 75 of Haunted

Chapter twenty-six

Jonny

Neither of us slept well. We lay in the dark for a long time after I told him, not talking, not touching, just lying next to each other while the streetlights made patterns on the ceiling. At some point he rolled toward me and put his hand on my chest, and I covered it with mine, and that’s how we fell asleep. When I wake up, his hand is still there, but the rest of him has turned away.

I make coffee. He sits at the table and holds the mug without drinking. The roses on the windowsill look too bright for the mood.

“I keep thinking about the portrait,” he says. “In the lobby. I walked right past it. I looked at that face because I was curious about what your boss looked like, and a few seconds later, I was thinking about Elliott, and I never put the two together. That I was registering a resemblance.” He stops. “He’s been right there, Lance. For years. And he either didn’t know I existed or didn’t care enough to look.”

I don’t have an answer for that. I sit down across from him. “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know what the options are. Knock on his door? Write him a letter? Pretend I never found out?” He takes a sip of the coffee and grimaces. “How do you walk up to a man and say, I think you’re my father, and by the way, you paid my mother twenty thousand dollars and never came to find me?”

“You don’t have to do anything right now.”

“I know. But it’s sitting on me.” He looks out the window. “Everything is sitting on me. Alice. The memorial. I feel like the ground keeps shifting and I can’t get my balance.”

I want to fix this. I want to fix all of it. I want to call Rex Harlow and put him through a wall, and I want to solve Alice’s murder, and I want to make the memorial go away so Jonny never has to stand at a podium and talk about the worst day of his life. But I can’t do any of those things. So I do the one thing I can. I make myself useful.

“How’s it going with prepping for Monday?”

He looks at me. “My what?”

“The class. The Q&A they’ve got you doing before the conference.”

“That’s not until—” He stops. “When is that?”

“Monday.”

“This Monday?”

“You left it on the counter,” I say. “I wanted to see when it was, so I could come along and listen. Did you read the whole thing?”

He rubs his face. “Most of it.”

“There’s a Q&A session with an upper-level communications class. It’s in the contract. They’ve been assigned three episodes of your show and they’re expected to produce ‘meaningful questions and critiques.’”

“Meaningful questions and critiques,” he repeats flatly. “About a travel blog.”

“About you. Your platform. Your choices. These are communications students, Jonny.” I put my mug down. “Wow, are they going to give you a grilling.”

He picks up his coffee again and this time actually drinks it. “Okay. So what do you suggest?”

“Let me throw some questions at you. The kind they’ll ask. Then we’ll see what I think you’re in for.”

He nods. “Fine. Go.”

I pull up a chair. “You run a travel show in India. What’s your responsibility to expose corruption and injustice in the places you visit?”

“This is not political—it’s a travel blog. My responsibilities are in the arena of giving accurate and helpful travel advice.”

“Good. So if you’re not political, what advice do you give to gay travelers in India?”

He shifts in his chair. “The same advice I’d give somebody going to rural Alabama. Know where you are. Know who’s around you. A city is not a village and a village is not a country, and none of it is the same as the last place you were.”

“So your advice is to go back in the closet.”

“With respect, that’s not what I said.” He sets the mug down. “And I’d want to know why the question assumes I’ve come from somewhere safe. Two men can’t hold hands on most streets in this country either, and I don’t recall anybody calling that going back in the closet. It’s called reading the room.”