Billy's Bones (15 page)

Tom went to the top of the stairs and called down, “Come on, boy!”

Shadow paced back and forth at the bottom of the stairs, whimpering. Beginning to grow concerned, Tom called to Kevin, who joined him at the top of the stairs for a moment before descending to the bottom. Once he was downstairs, Shadow stopped whining and panted happily.

“I think he’s fine,” Kevin observed. “He just doesn’t want to go upstairs.”

“Is he trying to tell us there’s a vengeful dead Japanese girl in my bedroom?” Tom was only half joking. It always spooked him when animals acted as though they saw things humans couldn’t see.

“He’s probably just afraid of stairs.”

“Stairs?”

Kevin crouched down and scratched behind Shadow’s big floppy ears, letting the pup lick all over his face—something that made Tom incredibly envious of the dog. “Stairs are scary, aren’t they, boy?” Kevin asked in a singsong voice. “Especially for a puppy who’s never been in a house before. Yes, they are!”

Tom came down the stairs to pet Shadow on the head and was rewarded by an affectionate licking of his fingers. “He didn’t have trouble going up and down the front steps to the porch today.”

“There’s only four or five of those,” Kevin replied. “Here, we’ve got—” He counted. “—twelve. That’s huge! And God knows where they go. It could be the Scariest Place in the World up there!”

Tom laughed, touched by Kevin’s ability to empathize with the dog.
Yeah
, he thought,
you’d make a good father, if you can ever get past your own baggage.
“So what should we do? I hate to leave him alone down here in his crate, especially on his first night in the house.”

“Hold on,” Kevin said. Then he scooped the seventy-pound puppy up in his strong arms and carried him up the stairs.

Once at the top, Kevin set Shadow down, and the dog appeared to be fine. He sniffed around the small upper landing and nosed his way into the library and the spare bedrooms.

“Problem solved,” Kevin announced.

“I hope we don’t have to do that every night,” Tom said, climbing the stairs to join them in the upper hall. “And it will be interesting to see if he pees all over us when we carry him down in the morning.”

Kevin smiled at him and reached out to scratch his beard.
Progress
, Tom thought. A full scratch, instead of the light, tentative brushes with Kevin’s finger he’d been getting during the week. Baby steps, but each one touched him.

He met Kevin’s sleepy hazel eyes and smiled back at him. “Where did you learn to be so good with dogs?”

“I don’t know.” Kevin shrugged. “We had a couple big dogs when I was a kid. My father liked yellow Labs. And I play with the mutts at Lee’s whenever I do work at his place.”

“You’re wonderful,” Tom said. “Shadow and I are lucky to have you.”

He was rewarded with that shy smile he adored as Kevin came damned close to blushing.

Fourteen

“I
DON
’
T
hate my mother, if that’s what you mean.”

Sue shifted in her chair and picked up her cup of coffee. “I merely asked why you haven’t seen her in four years,” she replied coolly.

Kevin had immediately made it clear that the subject of The Song was off-limits for this session. He wasn’t ready to deal with it, and he’d forbidden Tom to even tell him the title during the intervening week. Sue had been willing to put that off for another time, but in exchange, she’d begun to delve into the details of Kevin’s childhood.

Tom felt Kevin’s hand squeezing his fingers. The delicate touches and caresses Kevin gave him—always on the face, arms, or legs, never directly on his body—had progressed to Kevin occasionally taking his fingers in his hand and holding them for a time. Now, Kevin’s grip had grown uncomfortably tight, almost painful, but Tom let him hold on.

“We don’t get along,” Kevin said, his leg twitching.

“Have you had a falling out?”

“No.”

Sue took a slow sip of her coffee. “When did she move to Riverview?”

“Five years ago.”

There was a long silence, during which Sue seemed content to simply sip her coffee and watch Kevin fidget. At last Kevin gave a frustrated sigh and said, “Look. She’d almost hit retirement age, and she wasn’t in great health. She never took care of her diabetes properly. She wanted me to move back into the house and look after her and take care of the repairs it needed, but there was no fucking way.”

“You didn’t want to look after your mother?”

Kevin frowned. “I didn’t say that. I can’t say I
wanted
to do that, but I would have.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“Because I hated that place. I’d rather cut off my balls than move back into that house.”

He noticed he was crushing Tom’s fingers and let them slip from his grasp, muttering, “Sorry.” Then he leaned forward and rubbed his face with his hands. “Tracy would’ve moved into the house, but I couldn’t. And Mom wouldn’t move into the trailer. So we arranged for her to go to Riverview. She wasn’t real happy about it. But it’s a nice place.”

“Yes, it is,” Sue agreed, “but why couldn’t you move back into your house?”

“Because I get sick just thinking about it!” Kevin snapped. He stood up and started pacing. “I know everyone’s supposed to be all nostalgic and shit about their childhood and where they grew up, but there’s nothing in that place I want to remember.”

“What happened to the house?” Sue asked. “Did your mother sell it?”

“She tried. It’s still on the market.”

“So you could still go visit it.”

Kevin stopped pacing and glared at her. “Why the hell would I want to do that?”

There was something dangerous in the way he was standing, looming over Sue with his hands balled into fists, his mouth set in a grim line, and one of the muscles in his jaw twitching with suppressed anger. But Sue didn’t even adjust her position in her chair. She looked back at him calmly, meeting his eyes without any sign of being intimidated. Tom could see why she did so well with veterans suffering from PTSD.

“You said it yourself, Kevin,” Sue replied calmly. “Although indirectly. You said, ‘There’s nothing in that place I want to remember.’ But we both know that not remembering is part of the problem, don’t we?”

Kevin didn’t answer. He went back to the couch and plopped down on it beside Tom, but this time he made no move to take Tom’s hand. He was withdrawing into himself like a petulant child, not wanting to admit Sue might be right.

Sue seemed to sense this and gave him a couple of minutes, while she went to the coffeemaker and poured herself a new cup. “Would anybody like some?” she asked, holding the carafe up.

“Yes, please,” Tom said. Kevin just shook his head.

When they were all situated again, Sue said, “Sometimes in cases of suppressed memories, we bring in family members to help us reconstruct the period in a client’s life that has gaps. You don’t have any siblings. Do you have any grandparents or aunts or uncles still in the area? Any cousins? People who knew you as a child?”

“No,” Kevin said. “My grandparents are all dead. I haven’t seen my mother’s sister since she went into a retirement home in Maine, and she was never around when I was a kid anyway. If I have any cousins, I’ve never heard of them.”

“Any childhood friends you’re still in touch with?”

Something seemed to flicker briefly in Kevin’s features—something Tom couldn’t identify—but it vanished just as quickly. Kevin simply said, “Not really. I didn’t have many friends when I was young, and I was away through a lot of junior high school. I sort of knew some kids, like Lee and Tracy, but I never hung out with them.”

“Then that leaves your mother. Is there any way we could bring her in for a group session?”

Kevin shook his head adamantly. “No. That’s not going to happen.”

“Because you don’t think she’ll come, or because you don’t want her here?”

“Both.”

Sue sat back in her chair and gave Kevin a long, evaluating look. Tom could see she was beginning to find Kevin exasperating. The list of things Kevin considered off-limits was growing: his father’s suicide, his mother, the song he might or might not be dreaming about…. Tom began to fear Sue would tell Kevin she couldn’t help him after all. But Kevin needed her more than he realized.

Tom spoke up. “Do you still have a key to your house?”

Kevin gave him a sharp look. “The real estate agent that’s been trying to sell it off—he made me take a key, in case of… God knows….” He looked away, down at his fidgeting knee. “I might be able to find it.”

“Then why don’t we take a look at the house this weekend? Just a quick walkthrough to see if it jogs any memories for you.”

“I’ll be there with you,” Sue commented. “And we’ll leave if you feel you can’t handle it.”

“I
already
don’t feel like I can handle it,” Kevin said testily.

Sue smiled at him, unperturbed. “I understand. But we can’t stay completely safe. We’ll do what we can to make sure you don’t feel threatened.”

“Like what? How are you going to protect me from what’s in my own head?”

Sue said gently, “One possibility is to give you a mild sedative.”

Kevin did not look pleased with the idea. His entire face looked closed off, his eyes narrowed, his mouth flat and tense. Even his nostrils seemed to be constricted. “It was falling apart four years ago. The roof will probably collapse on us the moment we open the front door.”

“We’ll take the chance.”

Tom could see Kevin was beginning to sweat again. Kevin looked over at Sue, but she was the last person he could expect to bail him out of this. He looked down at his knee again. At last, he said, “Fine.”

T
HE
house certainly didn’t
look
as if it was about to collapse. It was a large, white colonial with a small screened-in front porch and an attached two-car garage. There was a “For Sale” sign on the front lawn, and the real estate agency had apparently sent somebody around recently to mow the grass. If it was in need of repairs, that wasn’t obvious from the outside. Overall, Tom thought it was a lovely house—one he wouldn’t have minded living in.

But Kevin’s face wore an expression of utter disgust as he got out of the passenger side of Tom’s car. He opened the back door and had to body-block Shadow from bolting out of the car until Kevin had a hold of his leash. It was a hot day, and the sun was beating down on them from a nearly cloudless sky. There was no way the dog could stay in the car without the air conditioner running.

“He might lift his leg on something if we bring him inside,” Tom observed. Shadow had gotten a little better about that, in the past week, but still didn’t have the whole not-peeing-in-the-house thing quite down yet.

Kevin let the dog jump down from the seat, and then he slammed the back door. “So what? I hope he does.”

Tom rolled his eyes at him, but Shadow was nuzzling his hand for attention, so he leaned down to scratch the pup on the head. Shadow was so excited to be in this new place that he couldn’t stop wagging his tail, which had the effect of making his entire body wag in the opposite direction as a counterweight. His tail, Tom and Kevin had discovered by now, was incredibly strong and heavy. It frequently knocked objects off low surfaces, such as glasses of coffee foolishly left sitting on boxes in the living room while Tom rushed around getting ready for work. And both men had been struck in the testicles so often that it was probably a good thing they didn’t plan on having children.

“Here, take him,” Kevin said, handing the leash to Tom.

Tom escorted Shadow onto the lawn to pee, while Kevin fished the house key out of his pocket. Shadow strained against the leash, fascinated by every rock and blade of grass in this new yard.

Sue’s car was nowhere to be seen, which worried Tom. She’d promised to arrive before the scheduled time, and it wasn’t like her to be late for anything. Tom pulled out his cell phone to call her, but it rang the moment it was out of his pocket.

“Tom!” Sue exclaimed when he answered. “I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner, but things have been crazy here at the hospital—”

“The hospital! Why are you at the hospital?”

“One of my clients attempted suicide this morning,” Sue replied. “I can’t really go into much detail. But please pass my apology along to Kevin and tell him we’ll have to reschedule for another time.”

“We’re already at the house,” Tom protested, though he knew it was pointless. Sue couldn’t simply walk out on her other client.

“I’m sorry, Tom. Just ask Kevin if we can reschedule. But don’t go in there without me. I think that might be… risky.” Before Tom could respond, she added, “Here’s her doctor. I’ve got to go. I’ll see you on Monday!”

When he relayed her message to Kevin, Tom was surprised by the man’s almost hostile reaction. “Fuck it. We’re going in now.”

“This isn’t her fault, Kevin.”

“I know that,” Kevin replied darkly. “Do you think I’m a total asshole?”

“No.”

“Other people have problems. It’s not all about Kevin Derocher. I get that. I hope her patient’s okay. But I’m not coming out here again.”