One Door Closes (2 page)

“So what do you do, personally?”

“Right now? Analyze public commentary. Later I’ll finalize the database.” He shrugged. “We don’t have a big team.”

Will nodded, thoughtful. “I wonder if we’ve worked with your firm at some point.”

“Would’ve had to have been a fairly large development. We don’t usually work on the private stuff.”

“I never would have picked that job for you.”

Calvin waited, unsure how to read the statement, and Will finished off his drink.

“But it fits you,” he said at last. He looked Calvin over, a quick flick of his eyes, and Calvin’s insides warmed.

He rose a little too quickly and held his hand out for Will’s glass, taking it to the sink. And then the only thing to do to stave off his discomfort was to address why Will was there at all.

“The inside needs some overhaul, even I can tell that.” Calvin led the way back to the massive staircase. The room that housed it was twice as tall as the others, save for the cavernous conservatory in the southwest corner. The stairs wound down from above under stained glass from the upper floor, and spilled out into wider and wider steps, the banisters extending outward like arms to embrace the ground floor. “But it’s actually in pretty good shape, considering.” He peeked at Will. “Right?”

“I’ll need to walk through to be sure. Make some notes.” He was looking up the stairs, his head tilted back to bare the clean arc of his throat. More freckles than Calvin remembered sprinkled the length of it, speckles of color that looked like they could be brushed off with a fingertip. When Will turned back, it caught Calvin off guard. “Take me a while if I remember correctly.”

Calvin returned his smile anemically. “Big house.”

Will turned in place, taking in the entire room. Again, it made the house feel smaller. “Had to be. Lots of kids here.” He paused. “Your mom did good things.”

Will’s hands were in his back pockets again, a thumb and forefinger holding the clipboard against his hip, and now he stood, boots evenly spaced, head tilted to look up the staircase once more.

Calvin nodded. “Yeah, she did.”

It felt like the house itself was breathing.

“Well.” Will’s eyes flicked as if he were nervous to have broken such profound silence. “You want to start indoors or out?”

“Let’s go out.”

Will followed him out front and spent a while pacing the porch, peering up into the corners and jotting spidery notes on the clipboard. A couple times he grabbed the wooden struts, giving a brief shake and pressing the surfaces. “Do you mind?” He gestured to the front railing and, when Calvin shook his head, climbed on top of it to get a closer look at the beams that braced the eaves.

Eventually he hopped off the railing, made some more notes, then trotted down the steps and backed away from the house, eyeing the length of the façade.

Calvin stepped down into the yard and all its brown bent weeds, grabbing his elbow with one hand and curling the fingers of the other against his leg. Will wandered up and down—Calvin felt somewhat useless trailing behind—and came to a stop level with the front door again.

“Is it going to break the bank?” Calvin finally asked. He squinted one eye, feigning world-weary resignation. “It’s all right, you can tell me the horrible truth.”

“Porch looks pretty good, actually.” Will shaded his eyes and pointed at the gable above the door. “You have a lot of mold on the support beams, though. That black stuff in the corners? There might be fungus. It doesn’t look like dry rot yet, but I can’t tell from here. Need to see how deep that goes, sand it off if we can and re-stain with a mold repellent. Might have to replace the beams if they’re really bad.”

“Could you match the old boards?”

Will smiled, toothy and white. “I can get as close as possible. You want to keep it the same, the way it looks?”

Calvin tracked the façade to the westernmost corner, all the weathered paint and broken siding. He blew out a breath through his nose. “I want to match the style, at least. Anything that’s not safe can go, though. Do whatever you need to do.”

A line formed between Will’s brows. “Well...what do you need me to do?” He gestured widely, encompassing the whole structure. “Better yet, what do you need out of this place once it’s done? Do you have particular plans for it?”

Calvin hadn’t voiced them aloud yet, but now the words swept easily over the rim. “Kind of wanted to do what Mom did.”

Will looked at him full-on.

Calvin licked his lips and looked up at the sky, trying to find something to land on. “I doubt I’d pass any qualifications for fostering yet. But there’s a youth group in town that’s been calling this place home for the last two weeks. They’re about to lose the lease on their office space in town. Audrey was trying to get them over here permanently when she...” He had to let that one go. “The kids are like we were. They have questions, and not a whole lot of room to voice them, not in this town.” His gaze fell on the house again at last, and a current of heat washed through him, fast enough to catch at his breath. “It would give them a safe space.”

Not to mention that giving the house a purpose would keep the town council off his back a little longer. A community service donation, and an homage to a woman who, even if not universally loved, had been respected for her generous spirit by pretty much everyone.

Three meetings in, and Calvin was only beginning to get an idea of what to do with such a diverse group of kids he didn’t even know. But they’d known Audrey.

“That’s great.”

Calvin jerked up at Will’s softly uttered praise. He found Will watching him again. This time, it was assessing, a deeper undercurrent.

“Is that what she asked for?”

“Not in as many words, but she would have liked it.” Unexpectedly, his throat closed.

Calvin had other reasons for wanting this house back up to its previous standard. The place, while full of warm wood and elegant angles... He had yet to shake the feeling of a hollow shell. This house was not meant to stand empty like this. It was made for echoes, for sound. Footsteps and voices. The tiny ongoing noises of life. Right now, he felt like the building was waiting, a hushed breath before the wild lunge of purpose.

He wasn’t entirely sure he was parent material, not like Audrey. But this place needed kids in its halls. Maybe his foster mother had always known that, and had simply accommodated. He’d never thought about it before, but faced now with the lack, he could see it so clearly.

“Just feels so vacant,” he finally said.

The front door swung open and Devon came out of the house wearing his black canvas jacket, motorcycle helmet under one arm. Calvin’s shoulders locked right up and threatened to infect the rest of him with the same ice. Devon jogged down the steps at a heartbeat’s rhythm, his shoes a resounding
thump-thump
,
thump-thump
against the boards. When he reached the bottom, he noticed them and walked over at a steady pace, his eyes on Will. Will stared back.

Calvin gestured between them. “This is Will. Old friend. He’s the contractor.”

Devon stuck out his free hand, which Will took after only a second’s hesitance. “Devon. Hi.”

“Hello.”

“I need to take him around the house,” Calvin said. “You mind if we’re in your room?”

“No.” Devon thumbed over his shoulder toward where his bike was parked on the leafy side of the drive. “I’m heading out. You need anything from the city?”

“I can’t think of anything.”

“Okay.” Devon squinted, then looked Will over properly, a single sweep of his eyes. “Good to meet you.”

“Likewise.”

Devon gave them a nod and headed for his bike. He wheeled it into the middle of the drive, swung his leg over and started it up with a spitting roar. The exhaust blasted fallen leaves into a flurry behind him.

Will was still watching when the motorcycle finally turned into the street. “Who’s that?”

“Foster brother.” It felt weird to say, even though it had been true for years, right from the instant he’d first stepped through the front door, aged eleven.
Foster
was obvious. Calvin had long since grown used to it. But the word
brother
implied a lot more knowledge than either of them had of each other.

Especially considering how quickly and easily Devon had taken himself out of the house when the state finally allowed it.

The sunlight lit intermittent strands of Will’s hair the color of wine. “Oh.” His shoulders dipped back in a peculiar way, fine lines smoothed around his mouth, a sloughing of something, and Calvin...

Wasn’t going to think too hard about that, in any variation.

“He’s living here, too.” He almost said
go figure
, but bit his tongue.

Will looked down the drive, though the bike was long gone. His nose scrunched up, a new sharpness in his eye when he spun around. “Wait a minute.
The
Devon?”

“The same.” Calvin tried to imagine what Devon must look like to Will, who had heard so much about him without ever actually seeing him. A phantom idol laced too headily with the scent of years gone. And colored by everything Calvin had told him, which had been plenty. Now, the once-skinny boy was a tall, solid presence made of dark lines and striking angles. A little bit of tousle entwining with keen perception in brown eyes.

Calvin wondered what
he
looked like to Will now.

“Huh.” Will sounded contemplative. But watching his face, it was difficult to tell what he was thinking.

The breeze rose again and the sun wavered to fuzziness behind the clouds. Calvin fingered his zipper, already up to his chin. “We should head in. Got a lot to cover.”

“You think?” Will smiled at him, and Calvin had to push down the new set of memories that surfaced.

* * *

It took over an hour to cover the rooms on the lower floor, and almost as long again moving through the creaky, groany upstairs. Some of the rooms were still covered in dust, others draped under white cloth, looking like the remnants of a wake. Will moved through them with one hand extended to his side. His fingers brushed the surface of couches and bureau tops, old lampshades, even the textured wallpaper. The tactile sense of it curled around Calvin’s spine, pulling up image after image of his lanky boyfriend walking into each room, unshouldering his duct-tape-covered backpack onto seat cushions and greeting Calvin’s mother when she came in to say hello. The urge to stretch his own fingers out, to brush those same places and somehow feel the ghosts of the house, was potent.

The empty bedrooms were what sobered, dropping Will’s hand to his side and fixing his fingers tightly back around his clipboard. Devoid of their bunks and mismatched dressers, the spaces echoed forlornly with their footsteps. The windows spilled thin light over the floorboards and washed over walls bare of all but a hatching of height marks on doorframes. Calvin stopped by one set of marks as Will surveyed the lintels and the cracked curve where ceiling bordered wall. The names next to each mark had faded; some had half the letters rubbed away. It wasn’t Calvin’s old room—his had been downstairs—but the child-shaped holes impressed deeply all the same.

Henry. Dominic. Adam, or maybe Aidan. Zachary.

Thinking about Zach, a boy three years older who had come and gone in a flurry of a year and left Calvin winded with unarticulated restlessness, an uneasy notion settled in, circling Will and Devon out there on the front walk, the way Will’s eyes had trailed Calvin’s foster brother as he mounted his bike. The heft of that irritation was startling. Calvin frowned, frustrated by twinges that had long been lodged behind closed doors.

Will’s mere arrival had reopened the largest of them. He clearly didn’t have to do much else.

“God.”

Calvin came off the wall with a jerk. “What?”

“It feels so different.”

Feels.
Not
looks.
Calvin pressed his lips together. “She cleaned it out when she stopped taking kids in. Had to sell most of it.” Maybe it was just too hard for Audrey to look at, all the evidence of empty spaces she’d never be able to fill again. Calvin remembered a quick and acute reorganization, furniture here one weekend, gone the next, and himself raising his eyebrows at his mother while she sat unruffled in the kitchen, a mug of tea held between her hands.

She must have been a lot more disheveled than her outer layer had shown.

Will’s face when he turned around was unhappy, mouth tugged in at the edges. He looked like Calvin felt.

Calvin ran a hand through his hair and waved at the door. “Next one?”

Devon’s room was neat and empty. It didn’t really look like anyone lived in it, save for the uneven lay of the bedspread and the heavy-duty camera resting on top of the bureau. Will eyed it but didn’t comment, and eventually they were in Calvin’s room without him having fully thought it through. He held back in the doorway while Will walked right on in, and watched with twitchy fingers as Will performed the same perusal as all the rest, regardless of the clothing folded in piles on the dresser and the blanket thrown messily aside on the bed. The room was well lit from the windows either side of the bed, and the closet door hung open as if someone had just walked inside it into the dark. Calvin’s books lay atop the little table he’d dragged across the room to serve at his bedside. A bookmark had slipped free of the topmost one and lay on the floor. Will leaned over and picked it up on his way to the far window, settling it on the novel out of which it had fallen.

God. Calvin dragged his gaze from Will’s lean frame and clamped his teeth into his lip, using the pain to jar his mind loose. This wasn’t even his old room, and to his knowledge, Will had never set foot in here before. There was no reason the tableau should strike such a resonant chord.

“
Lord of the Flies?
” Will asked, doing much more to sideline Calvin’s thoughts than he’d been able to manage on his own. The
again
sat loudly between them.

“Yeah. Always.”

“I’ll have to read it again” was all Will said as he turned back to his clipboard.