Page 12 of The Reveal
“I told you earlier that we’d be getting tenants today,” I say, cheerfully, because she sometimes responds to cheerful. “I’ll be honest with you, Gran. I thought it would take a while. Not everyone wants a very simply furnished room in a rustic little cottage. But I got three takers within an hour.”
It seems more unbelievable to me when I say it out loud, but it doesn’t have to bebelievable. It just has to pay the mortgage and keep Gran in one piece and without bruises. Nothing else matters.
“Winter.” I can’t help it. Every time she says my name, it makes me want to dance around a little bit. Or cry. Because every time she says it, I worry that it’s the last time. That she’ll never know me again. “You need to be more careful.”
“Careful of what?”
Gran looks at me in that way again, as if she can see straight into me, down deep into my bones. “Can’t you feel it? She is stirring.”
“You don’t have to worry about the new housemates,” I tell her, ignoring theshe is stirringpart. My grandmother never had what I would call a sunny personality. No one would mistake her for Pollyanna on even her best day, but the dark prophecies she likes to mutter are a whole new level. I’m convinced they’re the reason why my nightmares are so intense, especially when she starts talking about theGoddess of Filth, as she’s been doing all summer. I try to think of it as Gran Radio, and I do my best to change the frequency. “They seem nice enough. But we don’t have to be friends with them. They just live here now. Theypayto live here. That’s all.”
“Every lock can be opened with the right key,” Gran mutters, and reaches for her cards. This is her way of dismissing me.
I leave her to her intense shuffling, trying not to look directly at the dark cards with all the golden figures and symbols that always seemsticky, like they’re trying to pull me in. I back out of the room, lock it tight, then peer out the barred windows to find that most of the moving in has been done. The cottage doors are all shut up tight with lights visible behind the boarded-up windows. The motorcycles are gone too. Standing there in the old dining room, with everything quiet around me, I canfeelthat our home, our land, isn’t ours any longer.
Or isn’tonlyours.
It’s tempting to imagine that I canfeelthe tenants the way I would feel bruises on my own body, but I try not to indulge in flights of fancy. Too much of that and I’ll turn into Gran.
I make my way into the kitchen and stand there, not sure what to do with myself. If I close my eyes—which I don’t, because I’m too aware that someone could walk in on me and take advantage of that weakness—it could be almost any day from my childhood. Back when the house was always full of people, slamming in and out, some living out in those very same cottages—under decidedly less cute circumstances. Back when my grandfather was alive and my parents lived up in the front bedroom, and Augie was always deliberately stomping up and down the stairs, making as much noise as possible because he thought it was funny.
If I take out each one of the people I’ve lost and look at them separately, it doesn’t make me feel the same sense of grief. Because all of them were complicated losses. Some so enormously so that I’m not sure I’ll ever untangle my impressions of them, or my feelings about the way I lost them. Maybe that’s what grief is.
Old men like my grandfather, at least, are supposed to die. It’s the natural order of things, no matter that our whole family never quite recovered from it. The other losses were crueler.
Like the twin who was once so much a part of my life, of me, that it was like we were one person, and now he’s just ... out there. Hopefully alive, but alone.
Leaving me equally alone here.
Sometimes I have the deeply unworthy thought that it would be easier if he was actually dead. Even though that’s my worst fear. And even though it breaks my heart to imagine it, at least then it would be over. I would know where he is.
I hear a faint noise at the back door and look over to find Savi standing there. I make myself smile.
“Are you settling in okay?” I ask her.
Because that seems like the kind of thing a landlord-type personwouldask.
She smiles at me and seems almost to ... float into the room that would be bright and sunny and happy if the windows weren’t mostly boarded up. And if there wasn’t so much smoke outside.
“This is such a lovely, historic house,” she says, but she says it the way people say things when they don’t have any idea what to say. It’s oddly endearing. Like she doesn’t know how to do this either. “Has it always been in your family?”
“Every generation adds on to it.” I wave a hand toward the place where the kitchen juts out from the original part of the house, because it was once a porch. You can see where my grandfather connected them. “It’s like a collaboration with ghosts.”
Savi pauses at the windows that look out over the backyard, squinting through the little slits between the boards. “I suppose collaborating with ghosts is preferable to fighting them off.”
I want to follow that up, but I figure that attempts at intimacy might kill us both. I can come up with some theories as to why an upscale woman like Savi might flee wherever she came from to hide out in a place like this. None of them are pretty.
I move over to the refrigerator instead and open the door. “I divided this up so that everyone has space,” I say, waving my hand at the interior shelves. “So we don’t have to worry about sharing things or taking other people’s things by accident. You can claim a space now if you want.”
I have the impression that Savi doesn’t really know what to do with this information. As if she’s never shared anything in her life.
She smiles at me. “How thoughtful.”
I excuse myself and leave her there, because I don’t know how to interact with strange people living in the house. No matter how much money they pay me. Left to my own devices, I will be awkward and direct, and no one wants that in a landlady.
No one wants that at all, come to think of it. Augie was the charming one.
Besides, there’s only so much daylight left.
