Between (16 page)

She stares past my father. “Oh—look, Marshall. The Wilsons are home.”

Richie and his parents are getting out of the car in front of their house. When Mr. and Mrs. Wilson see my dad and Nicole, they exchange a wary look.

“Hey, Richie!” I call, waving.

He waves back. He has dimples when he smiles. His T-shirt has a Batman cartoon on the front. There is no hint whatsoever of the reluctant delinquent he’ll become in a few years. Here, at age ten, he is all curls and sweetness and innocent energy. I adored him then. How could I not? Even as children, whether or not we realized it, we loved each other.

“Richard, get in the house. Now.”

“But Mom—”

Mrs. Wilson, smiling, her teeth gritted, says, “
Now
, Richard.”

He gives me a disappointed shrug, and I watch as he shuffles toward his house, looking back at me over his shoulder. He points at his mother and draws a circle around his ear with a finger as if to say,
crazy
.

I beam at him. But then I watch as Nicole stands with Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, talking to them as they nod with forced smiles. At such a young age, I didn’t understand what was going on, but now, watching the scene play out again, I understand. They don’t like her. Not at
all
.

“After my mother died,” I explain to Alex, the memory dissolving, “Nicole and my dad started dating right away. Nicole and her first husband were barely separated.” I don’t know why I’m telling him this. I don’t particularly want to talk about it, and like I’ve said so many times before, I’ve never believed any of the rumors. Suddenly, though, there is a flicker of doubt, from somewhere deep within my mind. It’s just a flicker. But it’s enough.

“Her first husband?” he asks. “You mean Josie’s dad?”

“Yeah,” I say, nodding. “But look at Josie, Alex. She looks a little bit like my father, don’t you think?” I try to remind myself that Josie looked like her
real
dad, too—they both had the same hair and eye color—but still. There’s this nagging doubt. People have been talking about this for so long. Could it possibly be true?

Josie is thin enough, and fairly petite, but there’s a shadow of thickness to her build. Unlike me—I had my mother’s genes, and even before I became rail thin, I was always lanky and slender—Josie struggles to maintain her figure. She doesn’t have much of a waistline. There’s a fleshiness to her that no high-protein diet or aerobics regime is ever going to change. Her physique fits into my father’s side of the family tree like a missing branch.

My dad and Nicole were high school sweethearts. They broke up and went their separate ways after graduation, but both of them eventually settled back in Noank with their respective spouses. It’s a small town; they were friends. My mother was sick long before she ever became pregnant with me. Who knows what my parents’ marriage was like?

“People think my dad and Nicole had an affair, and Josie was the result,” I tell Alex. “Before my mom died. Before Nicole got divorced.”

“Uh-huh. And what do
you
think?” Alex asks.

With Richie distracted by his mom, Josie is staring at her phone, busily texting, a half smile playing on her pretty red lips.

“I don’t know. Until a few minutes ago, I would have told you there was no way they ever had an affair. But”—my voice falters for a moment—“they got married so fast after my mom died. They barely even
dated
. I can’t imagine that my dad would have cheated on my mother, Alex. I’ve never thought it was possible, not for a second. It’s just that …”

“What?” Alex prompts. “It’s just that
what
?”

“She does look an awful lot like my dad. I never really noticed until right now.”

Alex stares at Josie. “Maybe you didn’t want to notice.”

Richie follows his mom into their house, leaving Josie alone outside, and I follow Richie, walking effortlessly through the front door after he closes it in my face.

The place has a deceptive sense of warmth. Everywhere you look, there’s art: paintings hung on the walls (no prints for the Wilsons—these are all original pastels, protected by museum-quality glass, a collection that could probably pay for Richie’s college tuition three times over); sculptures on the floor and on the bookshelves; stained-glass windows; handwoven rugs; plants in every corner of the seemingly casual, loving disarray in what looks to be a real home.

Except I know that it’s not. It’s just an accumulation of stuff. The paintings are meant to be appreciated, but not necessarily studied. Once, when I was looking at one of them, Richie’s dad actually told me to be careful not to
breathe
too close to the glass. The books are all for show, purchased in bulk from an antique auction years earlier. The rugs were imported in bulk from Morocco. They have a maid to water all the plants.

And there’s never any real food in the house, just things like wine and ketchup and the occasional container of leftover takeout. Richie’s parents spend most weekdays in the city, where they have a gallery—why should they bother to go grocery shopping? It’s not like their son needs to eat or anything like that.

Richie and his mother stand in the kitchen together as Mrs. Wilson stares into the massive, almost-empty stainless steel refrigerator. Aside from the shelves on the door, which are fully stocked with condiments, all I can see inside are a two-liter of pop, a pizza box, and a cardboard container of soy milk. The soy milk, I recall as I look at it, has been there for months.

“Richard, I know you won’t like hearing this from me, but I don’t want you spending time with Josie.” The kitchen is modern, sleek, cold: all marble and steel and glass. It screams of hunger by design, coupled with the conspicuous absence of any food whatsoever. A spare set of keys dangles from a hook. The dishwasher, with its transparent glass door, is completely empty. Richie used to eat breakfast at my house most days. I’m not sure what he’s doing with his mornings now.

“She just lost her sister,” he says. “She’s a mess.”

“That’s exactly the point. She just lost her sister.” When she closes the fridge, Mrs. Wilson’s face goes dark. The only light in the kitchen comes from the window above the sink and cuts the room in two, dividing Richie and his mom spatially. Mrs. Wilson—thin; in her fifties; no makeup; dark, curly brown hair; wearing a flannel shirt and dirty jeans—presses the heel of her palm to her forehead and leans against the kitchen island. “You aren’t old enough to remember what it was like right before Liz’s mother died. Lisa was my friend. Richard, she used to cry about Nicole. She used to tell me, ‘That woman is trying to steal my husband.’ It was horribly sad. The four of them—Josie’s parents, Liz’s parents—started off as friends. Lisa didn’t know that Nicole was obsessed with her husband. Can you imagine?” She scoffs at him a little bit. “Of course you can’t. You’re a kid.”

Richie stares at his white shoes. “What do you want me to do, Mom? I can’t ignore Josie. She doesn’t deserve it. She didn’t do anything.”

“She’s his daughter. Josie is Marshall’s daughter. You know that, don’t you? That affair went on for
years
right under everyone’s noses. And then his wife died. She
starved
herself to death. She was humiliated and heartsick and broken. You know, I don’t think she’d been buried a week when Nicole left her husband for Marshall.”

There are some things I don’t want to remember, no matter what I might be here to learn. I don’t want to listen; I don’t want to hear it. But I can’t help myself.

“It was years ago,” Richie says.

“It was horrifying.” Mrs. Wilson stands upright and goes to the only part of the kitchen that is remotely stocked: the wine cabinet. She opens a bottle of red and pours some into a coffee mug with the likeness of Edvard Munch’s
The Scream
printed on the side.

Richie bats his long, boyish eyelashes at her. “Mom,” he says, “it’s barely even noon.”

“It’s fine.” She grips the mug with both hands. Her fingers are dirty with clay. Her nails are short and brittle and unpainted; she seems, for someone so grounded in aesthetics, impossibly plain. She blows into the cup, as though attempting to cool what’s inside. “Pretend it’s coffee.”

“You liked Liz. I know you did.” Richie glances out the window, at the sky; it seems he wants to look anywhere but at his mother. She is so concerned about the lives of her neighbors. Meanwhile, it has probably been years since she actually cooked a meal for her only son.

“Yes. Sure, I liked her. She couldn’t help any of it, could she? I felt terrible for her.”

“How is Josie any different? It isn’t her fault what her parents are like.”

“She’s their daughter, though. At least Liz was Lisa’s child.” The declaration seems to carry great significance for Mrs. Wilson. “I don’t want you going over there anymore. This is your home.” And for the first time, she seems to notice his outfit. “Why are you dressed like that?”

“I was about to go running,” Richie says. “I need to leave. Right now.”

I would do anything to run with him.
Anything
. I would run in these boots, if the pain wouldn’t be unbearable. So what if my feet became swollen and bloody? What does it matter? I’m not even a corpse. Amazing how I can still hurt so badly, my toes crowded into the front of my boots, frustration welling into tears as Alex and I watch Richie trotting down our street, turning onto the road leading to Groton Long Point. I know from standing here in these boots, there’s no way I can run. The pain would be intolerable. It would kill me all over again. Just being upright feels like torture.

“Why do you think my feet hurt so badly?” I ask Alex. “I can’t feel pain anywhere else.” It seems odd that we haven’t discussed it before now, since the pain is constantly present.

He stares at my boots. “I don’t know. What do
you
think?”

The question frustrates me; it’s almost like he’s trying to get me to realize something, but I don’t feel like playing a guessing game right now. “Alex, you’ve been here a lot longer than me. If you have any answers, just say so.”

Alex shrugs. “I really don’t, Liz. You’re right; it’s weird.”

I sigh and turn to stare at Richie. “All I want to do is run.”

“Yeah?” Alex follows my gaze, then looks down at my boots again. “But you can’t. Not now, anyway.”

But Richie is free. He can run along the beach, beside the houses that tower obscenely in their decadence. In Groton Long Point, most of the homes are vacation places, and they’re unbelievable. There are homes with elevators. Houses with their own putting courses. In the summer, their driveways are crowded with Mercedes, Ferraris, and even a Bentley or two. These are people who never hear the word “no.” They are my neighbors, my parents’ friends. In a way—even though I’m a local—I was one of them. Because I wasn’t used to hearing the word “no,” either—especially after my mom died.

But now everything is no: No, you can’t remember. No, you cannot see your mother. No, you cannot run.

Richie, though, can jog on the cool beach; he can breathe the salty air and feel his ankles trembling as he holds his footing in the sand. I’ve done it hundreds of times myself. It only makes sense that I would not be able to do it now; running made me feel more alive than anything. Of course I can’t know it, now that I’m dead.

Richie’s mom watches from the front door as her son disappears at the end of the street. Leaving Alex behind, I follow her as she goes upstairs, into his bedroom. For a moment she just stands there. She goes to the bed, takes a corner of the quilt between her thumb and index finger, and studies it. Quietly—as though she knows she shouldn’t be in here, as though Richie might come in at any moment and catch her—she crosses the room to his desk. She picks up a photograph of me. She covers my face with her thumb, so all that’s visible is my hair and body. I was skin and bones by then, a few months before I died.

“Lisa,” she murmurs. And she moves her thumb away to reveal my smiling face. Despite my expression, there is a lackluster quality to my superficial prettiness: my hair, though long and blond, is limp upon closer inspection. There are shadows beneath my eyes, I’m sure, obscured by plenty of thick concealer. And there are my bones, their outlines visible beneath my skin. The leg bone connected to the knee bone, the knee bone connected to the hip bone …

“What’s she doing?” Alex asks.

I’m startled. I didn’t think he was following me, but he’s right here.

“I don’t know,” I say. “She’s looking around.”

“What’s she looking for?”

I shake my head. “I’m not sure. But if she goes snooping, she won’t like what she finds.”

Mrs. Wilson is inept as a mother, but she isn’t a bad person. Watching her now—gazing at the books on Richie’s shelves, each one hundreds of pages, their information contained within a son that she knows next to nothing about—I feel almost breathless with pity for her. I knew him better, I realize, than she likely ever will.

Except maybe she knows him better than I thought. Her fingers, tracing the spines of the books, land on the oversized, hardback copy of
Great Expectations.
They stop. She slides it slowly from the shelf and lets it fall open in her hands. Can it be a coincidence that she’s chosen
this
book?

The hollow space within is absolutely jam-packed with trouble: bags of weed, several bottles of prescription pills, a knotted plastic bag containing a
serious
amount of white powder, and a wad of money held together with a rubber band. Look, Ma! Your son sells drugs!

I expect her to gasp and cry, to confiscate the whole thing or call her husband or the police or
something.
But she doesn’t do any of that. Carefully, with delicate fingers, she closes the book and slides it back into place. She adjusts my photo on the desk until it’s exactly where it was before. Then, almost without a sound, she leaves the room, shutting the door behind her.

As ghosts, we can travel so easily. Even if I can’t run alongside Richie because of my horrible footwear, all it takes is a series of blinks, the mere
thought
of him—with Alex touching me in order to come along—and we’re at his side again.