If Walls Could Talk (12 page)

“Remember, it’s a school night.”

They grunted in response.

As I walked down the hall to my bedroom, I noticed Kenneth following close on my heels, lurking like an ethereal shadow.

Great.

I stopped in my tracks. If he’d been corporeal, he would have bumped right into me; as it was, I felt a second of searing cold. I shivered, feeling goose bumps break out on my arms and a tingle on the back of my neck.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked him through clenched teeth as I resumed walking to my room.

“I thought I made that clear. I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“You’re not sleeping in here with me.”

“Come to think of it, I’m not actually sure I even need to sleep.”

“Oh, goody. This just gets better and better. Well, go haunt the neighborhood or something. Go on down to the taco truck in the Goodwill parking lot. You ought to be able to stir up plenty of trouble there.”

“I want to stay with you.”

“You don’t even like me.”

“I don’t?”

“You never used to when you were . . . you know . . . alive.”

He seemed genuinely perplexed.

“You mean I never made a pass at you?”

“More than once. But believe me, you were not the kind of man who needed to
like
a woman in order to make a pass at her.”

“No?”

“You honestly have no recollection?”

“It’s strange. I’m just wherever I am, with only the vaguest sense of the past. And the future . . .” He made a gesture like a poof in the air and shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Sounds rather Zen,” I said. “Maybe all the Berkeley types have been right all along? It’s best to live in the here and now?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t exactly feel contented.”

I crossed over to my bathroom and started to brush my teeth.

Glimpsing up at the mirror in front of me, I realized that by using the glass, I could look directly at Kenneth’s reflection, which was a relief. That peripheral vision thing only added to my sense that I was off, askew . . . crazy.

Kenneth’s blue eyes were haunted. Was it any wonder?

“Go away,” I said around a mouth of toothpaste foam.

He didn’t move.

I rinsed my mouth and wiped my face with a hand towel, taking the moment to regroup. I may well be going insane, but . . . this had been a man. A live man. Once again I flashed on the memory of holding him in what turned out to be some of the last moments of his life.

I glanced in the mirror again to see Kenneth watching me intently over my shoulder.

“I have to take a shower,” I said, hoping he’d take the hint.

No such luck. When he was alive Kenneth was pretty obtuse; as a ghost, he seemed even more so.

“Shoo.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. . . . How about the attic? Don’t ghosts like attics?”

“I’m not a bat.”

“The guest room, then.”

I led him down the hall. A light fixture hung limply, awaiting the electrician, and the wide-planked hallway was bare wood, stained with paint and in need of sanding and a new coat of varnish. There were cracks in the original plaster walls and ceiling. Patches of paint evidenced the effort to try to decide on wall paint colors. A huge multipaned window above a window seat was missing two panes, filled with cardboard in the meantime. My dad tinkered a bit here and there, but he never seemed to get much done anymore. Stan had accomplished a number of things downstairs, but had no wheelchair access to the second floor. And I . . . Well, Chez Turner was a classic example of the cobbler’s children having no shoes.

“This place is a wreck,” Kenneth whined as he followed me. “And I don’t like the way that woman looks at me.”

“What woman?”

There were no women in this house other than me—on the contrary, it was all testosterone, all the time. After growing up in a house with two sisters and a mother, I often felt as though I was living in a twisted fairy tale. My current life was filled with my father, Stan, Caleb, and my almost exclusively male cadre of employees. And now Dylan, and a decidedly masculine ghost.

“She looks like an older version of you. Has your eyes, anyway.”

A wave of grief and shock washed over me. “
Mom?
You can see my mother?”

“That’s your mother? I don’t think she likes me.”

“She probably wants you to leave me alone,” I said, my voice sounding hollow to my ears. Suddenly I was on overload—I simply couldn’t think about death, my mother, or ghosts anymore tonight.

“Look, Kenneth,” I continued. “I have
got
to get some sleep. Since you’re probably just a figment of my imagination, I won’t be seeing you again. But it’s been . . . interesting. And I really do wish you all the best.”

 

The arms of the old-fashioned alarm clock glowed green in my dark bedroom. Five a.m. on the dot.

I squeezed my eyes shut. I had hoped to sleep late this morning, figuring I needed the rest, but I was a creature of habit. Alarm or no, five was my usual wake-up hour and my internal clock seemed to rouse me no matter what.

Construction workers are early birds by vocation; we begin our workday at seven, and are often off the job by three or four. This is in part due to local noise ordinances and partly to an effort to get as much work in during daylight hours as possible. Today, though, I wanted to take the boys to school at eight . . . and after what I had seen and heard last night, I was beginning to seriously worry about myself. I had been hoping extra sleep might improve matters.

I wasn’t good at asking for it, but this much was clear: I needed help.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Kenneth. In my arms as he lay injured, or looking down at me from the window at the Vallejo Street house. And then there was the exceedingly bizarre apparition of the chatty, confused Kenneth in the passenger seat of my car. Was I going insane? And if I was going to be haunted by a ghost, shouldn’t he at least know something about his own murder, or what was happening with Matt, or . . . something?

Every time I opened my eyes, I feared I would see Kenneth for real.

I lay in bed for several minutes, listening to the familiar early-morning sounds of the neighborhood: Our next-door neighbor revving up his Pacific Gas and Electric truck for the early shift; stray cats mewling and whining at one another; someone poking around in the recycling bins, amassing their humble treasure one redeemable aluminum can at a time. Finally I gave in to inevitable sleeplessness and kicked off the covers. I dressed in a relatively tame—for me—short and stretchy black skirt, black thigh-high tights, and a colorful V-neck sweater over a pink tank. And my work boots, of course.

Avoiding the squeaky floorboards so I wouldn’t wake up the boys, I snuck downstairs to the home office, started up the computer, and flipped on National Public Radio for the morning news.

So far, so good. No Kenneth. I let out a deep breath and got to work.

One thing about running your own business: You always have something to do in the case of insomnia or worry. Too bad I hadn’t been able to lose myself in my academic dissertation the same way; when married life became miserable with my ex-husband, Daniel, the last thing I wanted to do was sit alone in a chair and write. Every time I tried to do so, my mind inexorably wandered back to wallow in the emotional pigsty that had become my personal life.

By managing Turner Construction, on the other hand, I seemed to be able to immerse myself, lose myself in the process of finding the perfect oiled-bronze hinges, or figuring the proper cut for the new trim, or sketching out the precise geometry of the gallery arches.

I rolled out the blueprints for Matt’s house on the large drafting table, using paperweights to hold down the curling edges. I studied them for several minutes—there were separate pages with detailed plans for everything from the electrical schema to the suggested finish trim. Jason Wehr might be out of touch with actual building, but he knew his stuff when it came to mandated codes and basic design. He had done a good job. Thorough.

Trying to treat the Vallejo Street remodel as if it were any other job, I started up a file on the house. This included a preliminary schedule and budget based on assumptions of availability and best-case scenarios; the timetable would change—it
always
changed—but I had to start somewhere.

Remodeling begins with the infrastructure. We work from the inside out, the bottom up. The first tasks were to get a thorough engineering report on the foundation structure and complete a
careful
demolition to take the walls back to the studs. Once the walls were open, we would begin redoing and upgrading the electrical and plumbing, heating and air ducts, and installing modern features like Wi-Fi capability and central vacuum. Some of these tasks could be accomplished simultaneously, while others had to be staggered. That was where careful scheduling came in.

Meanwhile, I would assess what trim, moldings, and hardware from the house could be rescued, what would have to be replaced either by scouring junk shops and salvage yards or with new items produced in a traditional way. I used a faux finisher to make new surfaces look old only as a last resort.

I deliberated over the blueprints further as I worked up the calendar. Graham was right—if we were going to do this job as it should be done, we needed to restore the original floor plan. We could look through Celia’s twin house for inspiration, though hers had clearly undergone many changes over the years. There hadn’t been many alterations to the essential structure of Matt’s house, but there were a few details missing in the blueprints, such as the entrance that Kenneth was using yesterday when he was lurking behind Graham and driving me nuts.

Speaking of nuts, I wanted the opinion of a more or less neutral party with regard to my sanity . . . or lack thereof. I placed a phone call to another early riser. Luz Perez was a dear, trusted friend; more to the point, she was the closest thing I knew to a therapist. She agreed to meet me at Liverpool Lil’s for lunch.

Soon afterward I was lured toward the kitchen by an enticing aroma wafting down the hallway: coffee.

“Good morning,” I said to Dad and Stan as I entered. Dad had already brewed a pot of French roast and was chopping ham and onion for omelets. He believed in big breakfasts.

“Hey, there, baby girl,” Stan said.

“Morning, babe,” said Dad, looking up from his task at the cutting board. “Hungry?”

“No, thanks.” Morning was just about the only time of day or night that I
wasn’t
hungry, so I never had anything but coffee. Still, the habit of thirty-eight years didn’t keep my father from offering—and then looking disappointed by my answer—each and every morning. Day after day after day. I tried to interpret Dad’s persistence as a demonstration of paternal love, but the daily interchange set my teeth on edge and made me fantasize about moving out. Presuming that Paris wasn’t anywhere in my near future, I might need to make other living arrangements, and soon.

I poured coffee into my favorite cobalt blue travel mug, emblazoned with a BERONIO LUMBERYARD logo, leaned back against the counter, and took a sip. Reveling in the aromatic steam and the promise of caffeine, I noticed Stan and Dad exchanging significant looks.

“What?” I asked.

“About that late-night guest you had,” Dad said. “He comin’ for breakfast?”

“G
uest? What guest?”I asked.

Again with the exchanging of glances.

“Look, babe,” said my dad, “I’m only too aware that you’re a grown woman and you can tell me to go jump in a lake. But . . . with Caleb and Dylan here, maybe you should be a little more discreet.”

“I just remembered I have to be . . . somewhere else,” interjected Stan, wheeling himself out of the kitchen without a backward glance.

“Dad,” I said, chuckling at Stan’s obvious ploy, “there’s no one here.”

“We heard you talking to someone last night,” Dad said, breaking eggs with a single hand into a bowl.

“Last night? Did anyone answer?” I almost hoped for corroboration. At least it would mean I wasn’t insane. “Did you hear a man’s voice?”

“Just yours, come to think of it. But then who were you talking to?”

“Um . . . no one.”

“No one?”

There was a long pause while our gazes held.

“I seem to be developing a bad habit of talking to myself, running through thoughts aloud. I’ll try to keep a lid on it.” I cleared my throat. “So, I saw Graham at the Addax job site yesterday. Why didn’t you tell me he was Cal-OSHA now?”

“Stan tried, but you didn’t want to hear it, remember?”

“It’s hard to imagine him working for a government bureaucracy.”

“A man has to do things he doesn’t want to, from time to time. He needed benefits, more than I could give him.”

“Why?”

“Long story. I’ll let him tell it.”

I watched while Dad dumped the chopped veggies into the eggs, then poured the whole mix into his favorite omelet pan. The concoction sizzled and popped, filling the room with the scent I associated with big family brunches on Sundays when I was young. I had scoured that skillet once when I was ten, thereby learning my lesson about never washing a cook’s “seasoned” omelet pan. I still wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but I was happy to leave the cooking of eggs—and cleaning up after them—to my father.

“Hold on here a minute.” Dad looked over at me. “When you say ‘the Addax job site’ it makes it sound like you opened a file on the job.”

“As a matter of fact I did. I told you I was going to.”

He slapped the spatula in his hand down on the cutting board.

“For cryin’ out loud . . .”

“Before you go too far with that attitude,
Father
, you should know that this is entirely your fault. You’re the one who passed your house-flipping zeal on to me.”