The Bargaining (18 page)

Now Miller leans against the kitchenette counter, and I curl my legs under me on the recliner, leaning toward him.

“I heard a rumor, and I need your help,” I say.

“Rumors. That's something I don't miss about high school,” he says, rubbing his chin, then moving to the back of his neck.

“It's about the house,” I start cautiously. With the paint of Jack still drying like blood on the carpet, I don't want to press on any fresh wounds.

“Can you be a little more specific?”

I strive for patience. Now more than ever, I know he knows what house I'm talking about.

“The Carver House. The one my stepmom is fixing up. The one we're living in.” I take a sip of coffee, which is already cold. Then I go for broke. “Your old house.”

Miller's head scoots back on his neck, and confusion gives way to understanding in the time it takes for him to slowly blink. “Right. The wall.” His eyes shift without permission to his scaffolding. “That was just a place I went to paint after my parents died . . . that was never my house.”

He might as well be talking to me from another galaxy he's so far away.

“My uncle, he's the one who always encouraged us to do the creative stuff, even though Jack never really got into it. And my pop wasn't big on all that. After my folks were gone, my uncle thought it'd be good if I put all of my feelings into painting. Coping or whatever.”

Miller's been through enough. That's what Ripp warned me about, and here I am dredging up all the traumatic ­memories of how his brother went missing in the woods, how
he's had to paint him onto sixty-four different canvases ever since just to cope.

I watch the green of Miller's eyes drain a little of their piney color. It looks as though an entire lifetime passes behind them.

“He just didn't want me ‘coping' in that house, I guess.”

After a moment, the saturation of green returns, and he finds me, shrugging off that lifetime with some effort. But not before I see the faintest glimpse of a small boy lining cars along the furniture in his room, the habit of quiet pretending that lonely kids fall into.

“It's old. The house, I mean, if that's what you're asking. That usually means old and neglected. Or so my buddies tell me.”

“Right,” I say. “Your contractor buddies. Remind me to ask you about that later.” Sorry April, but plumbing is far down on my list of priorities at the moment.

“What about the woods?” I press on.

He turns away, this time looking directly at the tower of canvases.

“Look,” he says. “My uncle called me this morning.”

“So you know we're old pals now,” I say, humiliated at the image of his uncle warning him against me.

“He's just being protective,” Miller says, and I nod like I know what that's like.

“I'm not trying to pry,” I say. “I wouldn't be asking if I didn't have a reason.”

This seems to get Miller's attention because he shifts to a different position against the kitchenette, his hand flinching at his side.

“It's just, I mean, you've been out there,” I say.

“So?”

“Have you ever gotten the feeling . . . ?”

I genuinely have no idea how to finish that thought. And if I was hoping that Miller would do it for me, I was dead wrong. He's not looking at me like I'm crazy. That might be preferable. He's looking at me like he's
daring
me to finish, like he could wait all day for me to get there on my own.

“It's just that sometimes I look at the painting, your painting, and I would swear . . .”

His eyes narrow, and I can practically feel a pickax inside of me, like he's trying desperately to unearth what I'm trying to say, but he won't dare finish the thought himself. I can't seem to finish a single thought, either. Saying it in its entirety might make it true.

“And nobody will come out and work on the house,” I say, pressing on but having difficulty hiding my frustration with him. It's like he's trying to make this harder.

“Let me ask you something,” he says, and now he looks
more serious than I've seen him look all night. More serious than he's ever looked, actually. “If you could go back to that night with Rae and change what happened, you would, right?”

I suddenly feel like I've been punched in the gut. When I told him all about Rae, I sort of thought that might be the end of it. Isn't there this mutual understanding that's supposed to bridge the expanse between people who have shared a confession? They're supposed to leave it there, in that time and place, to fossilize with the rest of the conversation. I don't know why he's bringing it up again, but I get the sense he was waiting for the right time to resurrect it.

“I didn't think we were talking about me,” I say.

“I don't remember agreeing to talk about me, either,” he shoots back, and I bristle under his rightness. But he doesn't spend any time gloating.

“If you could change things, you would, wouldn't you?” he persists.

“What the hell, Miller?”

“It's a simple question,” he says, his confrontational tone anything but simple.

“What happened to Jack and his friends? How's that for a simple question?” If he wants to rummage through our respective pasts for weapons, I can rummage with the best of
them. I'm renovating a house, goddammit. I practically have a doctorate in rummaging.

When his face darkens, I know I've struck a chord. But then his tone shifts, and he's trying to make his way back to Bemused Miller. He doesn't make it all the way there, though.

“What's with all the intrigue?” he says, shimmying his hands in midair, palms out.

“I don't follow,” I say, getting the distinct impression I'm being made fun of, and this time, it's far from charming.

“Sorry, it just sounds like you're kind of bored or something.”

Miller has no idea how wrong he is. I'd welcome boredom. I'd kiss boredom on the mouth. I'd let boredom get to second base. So fuck Miller and all his sarcasm that burning red hair can't make up for.

“Forget it. I've got to go.” I start to leave, but he puts his hand around my forearm. Not tightly, just enough to keep me still.

“Sorry. I'm sorry, okay? I guess I didn't realize what sort of conversation we were having. I wasn't . . . I wasn't ready to talk about Jack is all.”

His forehead wrinkles, so I should believe him when he says he's sorry. But there's something about the look in his
eyes—something searching—that makes me doubt it. His apology goes about as far as his uncle's did this morning.

“But it was okay to bring up
my
past? Forget it,” I say, turning back around.

I start to open the door, but I stop when he says, “It's not in your head.”

I turn back, and he's looking at his feet again. The hand that was just holding my arm is searching for a place to land.

I wait for him to tell me more, and when he doesn't, I turn to leave again.

“Penny, wait. I know you don't believe me, but I'm not this much of a jerk. I'm just a little messed up right now, and maybe you telling me all that stuff the other night, and knowing you live out in those woods, maybe it's just bringing up a lot of old crap.”

“Miller, I'm—”

“I know. You're in the middle of your own shit, too. I'm not trying to make it worse. Just . . . tell me, okay? Tell me the truth. If you had a chance to right a wrong, something truly awful. Just paint over it and start fresh. You'd do it, wouldn't you?”

I take a step toward him, and he stays where he is, but he looks like he's ready to back up if I get any closer.

“I would do a million things differently. I would've torn up
the letters so Rae could never read them. I'd have never written them in the first place. I'd have stopped being her friend months before that. Years before that. I would've erased the first conversation we ever had, and I would have gone on being the freak nobody talked to, but at least I would've been a freak who never ruined some girl's life for no reason or woke up in the desert with my sort-of best friend dead or hated myself so much for all of it months after I should've gotten over it. So yes. If I could erase it all, I would. But here's the thing about ‘would.' It's the most useless word in the entire dictionary because it has no place in any point in time. It's a stand-in for an imaginary space between what
might
happen and what
actually
happens.”

“If you believed it was hopeless, you wouldn't still be thinking about all the ways it might have been different,” he says. He bites his bottom lip, and I can tell he's looking for a specific response by the way his eyes scan mine. Right. Left. Right. Left. Like the register on a typewriter.

But I have no answers for him, and if he knows anything about me now, it should be that.

I leave without a word, mostly convinced that I'd be fine if I never set eyes on Miller again.

14

J
ACK BECKONS ME FROM THE
painting.

I don't want to go, but I'm in the room at the end of the hall before I can count the paces it takes me to reach it. His hand is still wet with the mud that shouldn't be there, only now I see it dripping to the ground, a phantom breeze bending the blades of grass at his feet in a confused dance.

“Have you figured out how to sleep yet?” he asks me.

“You won't let me,” I tell him, my disdain buried somewhere under my exhaustion. If he were to give me a little more time, he'd see the fruits of that tilled soil of anger. But for now, he'll only see the creases under my eyes grow deeper.

“Are you sure it's me not letting you?” he asks, a wiser question than his years should allow him to ask. And he seems to know it. He seems to relish it.

“I don't want to see any more,” I tell him.

“So why are you here?”

I shudder at the familiarity of his question. It seems even this kid knows I'm destined to be haunted for the rest of my half-waking life.

The trees in the painting creak and moan against the wind, snickering all the while. Dried paint swirls around me in a fine dust, and I'm back in the house he showed me the last time.

“He'll come home,” the man says to his wife, flashlights weighing both of their hands down at their sides.

“He's not right,” the woman named Doris says. Her voice is hoarse, like she's been talking for an entire century into an empty world. “He's never been right, Burt. Not since he came back.”

“He's your son, for God's sake. I won't hear it,” Burt says to her, his grip tightening around the flashlight.

Doris looks as though she has fought this fight, that she is tired from this fight, that with enough time the weight of it could crush her.

But just when it appears she might give in, she raises her head and levels her husband with a stare that says she may be sinking, but she's not going down alone.

“When I said those same words to you six months ago—when I
said to you, ‘He's your son'—you said the same thing. ‘I won't hear it.' When will you hear it, Burt? When will you hear it?!”

The man turns so fast I think he's going to burn a hole in the floor, and he slams the basement door and stomps down the stairs.

Doris follows him and slaps her hand hard on the door. “When will you hear it?! When will you hear it?!”

She walks past me and I feel the chill of her wake. I look for Jack, but he has again receded to the background of his own painting. He might as well be one of the anonymous trees from the scene Miller housed him in.

A young Miller stands once again in the frame of his open bedroom door. He must have been there the whole time, but nobody noticed. He grips the back of his neck, a gesture of an older man, and tugs a little, his hands too small to have much of an impact.

He ventures toward his mother's room, hanging tentatively in a different doorway now. He watches as she sets the flashlight on the bed and paces, her hands on her hips, then on her cheeks, then through her thinning hair.

“Mom,” he says so softly that I think maybe I imagined it. The woman continues to pace.

“I heard Jack leave,” he says, his voice only a shade louder this time. But it's enough to make the woman stop her pacing. She doesn't
face him in the doorway. She looks at nothing and waits for him to continue.

“He was staring again. Out the window, then at the wall. It was for really long this time.”

The woman shakes her head slowly, a force field against the sound of her son's voice, one that tells her what she already knows but can't hear.

“I don't want him to come back,” the boy says, this time loud enough for the woman to turn to him.

“Don't say that,” she says. “Don't you ever say that.”

“It's true though,” the boy pushes on. But I can hear his voice shaking, and I want to pull him out of the doorway, out from under the frantic gaze of his mother, out of this house altogether. But I can't do anything but watch.

“I don't want him to. You've seen it too. I know you have. When his mouth does that . . . I'm scared. Please don't let him come back again.”

He pleads, but his mother won't stop shaking her head, and now she's squeezing her eyes shut, taking on the denial for her husband and herself against this small child.

“Make Pop lock the door this time. Please!” he begs now, and he's trembling so hard I can almost feel floorboards ­rattle beneath us.