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That was when I decided that Richard had the right idea. I was on my way up the stairs with my own glass of wine when I heard a creak above me and saw Adam come around the corner onto the landing. He was looking down at his feet, not yet seeing me, and I realized for the first time how tired he looked. Shoulders caved forward, the skin under his eyes as dark as a bruise. When I said his name, he jumped.
“I didn’t see you there,” he said as I climbed to the landing to meet him. “Isn’t it a little early to be going to bed?”
“Just taking this party to my room.” I brandished my glass and glanced down the second-floor hallway. It was empty, and the door to Richard’s room was closed, but I lowered my voice anyway and leaned in. “I could take it to your room.”
He smiled, and for a moment the air was full of sizzling tension.
But instead of reaching for me, he stepped away. “I think we’d better not,” he said. “Just, you know, after everything tonight.”
I shrugged with fake nonchalance and took my own step back. Just a chill girl, being chilly. “Sure.”
He looked pained. “It’s not you. I mean, it’s not us. Nothing has changed. It’s just complicated, being here with your whole family.”
I tried to tell you,I thought. “Sure,” I said, again, but he didn’t answer, only looked at me like I should have more to say. There was a thick smudge of dust on one of his sleeves from his foray into the attic, and something wispy floating in the air just above his ear.
“There’s a cobweb in your hair,” I said, reaching out to pluck it away.
“Oh,” he said. “Thank you.”
For just a moment, I thought maybe he’d change his mind, take my hand, lead me upstairs. But when my fingertips brushed against his ear, he flinched.
An uneasy peace settled over the house after that. There were no more disruptions from Jack Dyer, no more eruptions from Richard, but there was also no happy whirlwind of activity, no laughter, no twinkling lights or warm embraces. There were no gifts piling up under the tree in expectation of a happy Christmas morning, because there was no tree at all. If my mom had been hoping that her warring siblings could put aside their differences just this once to enjoy the holiday and give Mimi the pleasure of seeing the family all together again, drinking eggnog by the fire while carols played softly in the background, she had to be disappointed. Instead, it seemed like everyone had made an unspoken agreement to avoid conflict by avoiding one another, so that I sometimes felt like I was living in a house with my secret boyfriend and a handful of ghosts.
For three days I sensed the presence of my relatives but rarely saw them except when we converged on the kitchen at mealtimes, where we ate hurriedly and then disbanded before the bickering could start afresh. Adam and I settled into a new routine, meeting for crampedbut delicious late-morning sex in the little bathroom under the stairs, and then meeting an hour later for lunch as if nothing had ever happened. At night, I woke up to the sound of Mimi pacing the floor downstairs, walking circles around her bedroom and having one-sided conversations with herself, sometimes bursting into laughter that was somehow creepier than the muttering. Just once, she left her room: the pacing suddenly stopped and she hissed, “I see you,” in a voice that made every hair on the back of my neck stand on end. Her footsteps pounded across the floor then, and I ran down the stairs to find her in the kitchen, trying unsuccessfully to open the door that led outside, thudding it repeatedly against the dead bolt that she didn’t seem to notice above her head.
“Mimi?” I said, and she whirled, her eyes huge, her face furious.
“I won’t go back there.He’sin there. It’shisroom,” she said, pointing back in the direction of her bedroom, her voice so clear and urgent that I had to force myself not to match her panic with my own. When I checked her room, it was chilly but empty. The only thing unusual was the way it smelled—a dusky, vaguely sweet aroma that I thought was familiar but couldn’t place.
“You’ve seen him, haven’t you? He’s always watching me,” Mimi muttered as I tucked her back into bed.
“Who?”
She leaned in, her voice a conspiratorial whisper: “The man with the brown teeth.”
I practically ran back upstairs, taking the creaky stairs as quickly and quietly as I could. Trying not to think too hard about men with brown teeth, trying to ignore the creepy sound of the wind as it rose and fell outside. I’d left a light on in my bedroom and its glow greeted me as I came down the hallway and around the corner, spilling through the cracked door and onto the carpet. Beyond it, the familiar space of the hallway, the small window at the end that looked out onto the bay.
My breath caught in my throat.
A man was standing at the end of the hall. I could see the shape ofhim against the window, the hulk of his broad shoulders, the peak of the old-fashioned cap on his head. No brown teeth, but only because he had no face at all, no features, nothing but shadow, and I flailed back toward the wall just behind me, reaching blindly for the light switch. My fingers grazed over it, slipped away, then found it once more, and the hallway flooded with light and I turned back to see . . .
Nobody.
The air left my lungs in a whoosh as my knees went weak. I slumped against the wall. Ahead of me was the hallway, empty. Far behind me, at the opposite end of the hall, a door cracked open and someone—William, maybe—hissed, “Would you keep it down? People are trying to sleep.”
“Sorry,” I muttered, and turned the light off, plunging the hallway once again into shadow. I braced myself for that figure to appear again, like a horror-movie monster that could be seen only in the dark, but it wasn’t there.It never had been,I thought, even as a wild, hysterical part of my mind suggested that oh yes, it was, this was just one of Mimi’s many visitors, and if he wasn’t here anymore, it was just because I wasn’t the woman he came here to see.
I wondered what the difference was, really, between a ghost and a memory.
And for the rest of the night I didn’t sleep badly, but only because I didn’t sleep at all.
We still walked the pine path in the afternoons, but now with Adam on my grandmother’s right-hand side. If she stumbled on the uneven ground, she inevitably reached for him, not me. Each stroll ended at the fallen tree, where she’d gaze into the dark impassable tangle of branches and then sigh. “We’ll have to come back for the sea lavender some other time,” she’d say. I started to imagine it growing wild on the other side, uncollected all these years, a purple forest trapped under the ice of the frozen tidal pools. If I came back in the summer, I thought, I could pick a bouquet for Mimi—and lay it on her grave.
Normally we would linger by the fallen tree, letting her reminisce about the times she’d walked here with my grandfather. But on our last walk, the day before Christmas Eve, Mimi was agitated; she turned away from the tree and pushed past us, moving quickly back down the path.
“Whoa there,” Adam said. “Where’s the fire, Miss Miriam?”
“I have to get back,” Mimi said. “I shouldn’t have left them alone.”
