“Okay, okay.” I recorded her wish list of professions on the lined notebook paper.
“And what’s wrong with your ears?”
“They’re just buzzy. Maybe from swimming. What about your husband’s profession?”
Isa got most of her top choices—in her M.A.S.H. life, she’d go on to enjoy a future as a Lamborghini-driving doctor with two kids and an acrobat husband, but she’d be living in a shack. “Oh, no! The shack ruins the whole life!” Her eyes blinked with outrage. “No matter how good everything else turns out, if I’m in that stinky shack, then everyone is laughing at me.”
“Maybe you and your husband are living off the grid. You know, making an anti-consumer statement.”
“Whatever. Name a single normal person who lives in a shack.”
“You could always sell your Lamborghini and upgrade to a house.”
“No.” Isa shook her head with great conviction. “That’s not what M.A.S.H. is. It’s about your final destiny.”
“M.A.S.H. is just a silly game.” I flipped the paper. “Do you want to do mine?”
“The shack wrecked my mood. Let’s go get Milo. He might be downstairs watching movies.”
“You go.” I didn’t want to. Lately, Isa hadn’t been too interested in tagging after Milo, or trying to include him in her entertainments, which was a relief. Milo existed in a neutral background these days—in other words, right where I wanted him.
After I’d settled Isa for the night, supplying her with a mug of honey-sweetened milk and her nature DVDs, and I was in my room getting ready for bed myself, I heard a scrape and thud directly over my head. In moments, I was up on the third floor, in the canopy bedroom. Where the curtains had been drawn—who’d done that?—casting it in near total darkness. The only light source was a blaze in the hearth, and Milo crouched in front of it, prodding it with a fire iron.
“What’s going on here? Did you open the flue?”
“Uh-huh.” He didn’t seem surprised or concerned to see me. The fire’s flames bathed him in a lurid orange half-light. “What’s it look like I’m doing? I’m burning stuff.” He gave a few more turns of the poker.
“What are you burning?” On a glance, just some papers.
“I write in a journal.” He spoke below his breath, so that his words weren’t quite for me. “Because I like to see everything written down. So that I know it really happened. That I wasn’t just making it up. Then I read it and memorize it. And then I have to destroy the hard evidence.”
I thought of my own journal, the muddle of every page. All those unfiltered, lunatic letters to Sean Ryan.
“What is it, exactly, that you need to destroy?”
“Everything that I don’t want to be true.”
“Come downstairs.”
“When the fire’s dead, I will.”
But I waited. It seemed irresponsible to leave Milo here, unattended, while a fire was burning.
“We have more in common than you think, you and I,” he said. The flickering light shadowed his face and shone reddish over his hair while siphoning the color from his eyes, and now he wasn’t exactly Milo anymore. I blinked him back to form.
The ringing in my ears was erratic but at the same time quite painful: in one moment as loud as the clang of church bells and then morphing to a wet but staticky noise like a nature show’s sound track amplified for some inaudible thing—the tunneling earthworm, the hatching larva. I fought a wave of fatigue as I leaned against the doorframe. “I wouldn’t know about that,” I told him. “Since I really don’t know anything about you.”
“But I know so many things about you.” Was the smoke getting thicker? It was too dark to focus. The fire seemed to have raised the temperature of the room. And Milo’s voice had deepened. Another trick, maybe.
“Like what?”
“You can see things that other people can’t see.” No, it was not Milo’s voice. “Isn’t that true? Because I’m always here, always. Even if the others can’t sense me, you can, always.”
“You brought me up to this room on purpose,” I said faintly.
“We used to come here all the time,” said Milo—though he wasn’t Milo, not anymore. He had taken on the shape of Milo, he’d lured me upstairs and into this room as Milo, and now it was too late—he’d drawn me in. And I realized, a cold and sinking knowledge, that I couldn’t consciously control what I saw anymore. Or what I heard.
“And we had a code, remember that?” he said. “She’d tell Isa to go to her room or the lighthouse or her playroom and—”
“You shouldn’t have done that to Isa,” I interrupted.
In profile he looked thoughtful but defiant. “No. Maybe not.”
“You loved Jessie,” I said. “And I do know how it feels to love someone who might not have returned that feeling with the same strength. Someone who maybe thought of you as a diversion, and who began to slip away from you before you were ready to let go. But love makes you stupid, and it was wrong—pointless and wrong—to hold on tighter to someone who was already gone. Gone from you, I mean.”
He didn’t answer. The room was warm, too warm. His skin seemed lit up by the fire—it threw off a radiance, sparks and heat. “And you’re right,” I continued, with as much assurance as I could muster, though I could hardly hear myself over the noise in my own ears. “You’re always here, I sense you always, and there are times when I also see you very clearly, Peter. I wish I didn’t. But you know that, don’t you? You know how much I don’t want to see you.”
“It’s nobody’s choice, Jess,” he said as he turned, and then all at once he’d closed the space between us in waves of heat and burning gasoline, smothering, a nearly unendurable furnace. But I didn’t move to leave or stop him. It almost startled me how easily I closed my eyes, deadened my will, my limbs, and gave into accepting that—if only for the moment—it was all exactly as he said it was. Even as my logical mind struggled to assert that I was witnessing nothing more than persuasive magic of the darkness and my own troubled dream state, of course I knew that it was more.
TWENTY-ONE
How many minutes was I there? When did the fire go out, when did I break free from my vision to find myself alone with my terror? No idea, no idea. All I knew was that then I wrenched free, I became all motion, sprinting manic down the stairs, thudding the runner with my heels to feel the shock vibrate up my spine, humming a pop song to muffle the existing chaos in my ears. Reconnecting with my senses as if released from a spell. Straight to my room, where I locked my doors, locked my bedroom and then locked my bathroom—ridiculous gestures, really—and I showered in the harsh jet of cold water that left a taste of ice and iron in my mouth.