One Door Closes (3 page)

And Calvin was back to hugging his arm one-handed.

“So.” Will finished the sentence he was writing. “Attic’s all that’s left. I need to get a look at the roof.”

Calvin thought about those narrow stairs and the sharp bend hiding their ultimate end. “It’ll be a mess. I haven’t been up there since I got back.”

“If it’s anything like it used to be, you could be taking your life in your hands,” Will ventured with a grin.

In more ways than he knew. “Actually, would you be all right on your own for that?”

Will sobered. “Yeah?”

Calvin sighed and shoved both hands in his pockets. “Sorry, I just...”

Will’s eyes warmed so thoroughly it looked as though they’d shifted colors. “I get it. I’ll be down in a few.”

Waiting aimlessly at the base of the back stairs, Calvin doubted Will actually did get it, entirely. It wasn’t so much that Audrey was gone as that so many things
weren’t
gone. Going up to the attic, the one place that held echoes of everything and everyone who had ever lived here, all at once... At the very least, it felt like something Calvin shouldn’t be doing alone. Not with Will either. It didn’t gel quite right. He had no idea who he was supposed to do it with, who could make the process even remotely manageable, but there it was, a tiny stitch in his chest that he couldn’t mend.

Eventually Will came back down the attic stairs, gait lethargic and expression oddly dreamy. His return to the second floor pushed at something inside Calvin, heavy and insistent. But Will’s eyes looked like they were still focused on the contents of the vast space above their heads. He paused on the last step, reaching to run his fingers over the old portrait that hung in the alcove. Not anyone Calvin knew, not anyone even Audrey had known, but they’d all made up stories about the austere man in coat and cravat. He’d starred in so many dreams and nightmares, Calvin couldn’t remember them all.

Sitting curled in that alcove, lights out and flashlights playing across the portrait’s uneven surface, the line of Will’s side hot against Calvin’s in the darkness. Whispers and laughs, and eventually, more. Calvin had researched smugglers and racketeers for months because of that portrait.

And Will.

When Will saw Calvin, he snapped back to the fore. “You never took this down.”

Calvin’s mouth tingled and he cleared his throat. “Never had a reason to.”

“The roof is in the best shape of anything in the house. Your mom must have had some work done on it.”

Calvin smiled weakly. “She didn’t say anything to me.”

“Well, it’s a slate roof. Whoever put it in knew what they were doing. Definitely thinking ahead, which is more than I can say for a lot of my clients. People dismiss all old-school construction because of things like electrical and plumbing, which do tend to be outdated. But there’s a lot to be said for the mindset back then. Taking the time to do something right.”

With that, Will started in about the maze sheltered by the roof, the aging of the architecture and the things he’d seen in each room. Some of them Calvin had to dismiss without recollection, but some he could see so vividly that his hands felt heavy with their weight. He was gladder than ever that he’d let Will go on his own.

“Place is crazy up there. I got turned around a little, and I still remember the layout from—from before. When the kids used to play hide and seek. But I don’t remember it being
that
full.” Will laughed, almost to himself. “If you ever wanted to hide something, that’s certainly where I’d put it.”

After too long, and also paradoxically too soon, they were back downstairs with the sun sinking low over the house, and Will standing on the front porch once more.

“I’ll get you an estimate on a few options, put together a list of what you’ll need in terms of supplies and people. A lot of this you’ll be able to order yourself, or I can do it, whichever works better. The rain’ll be gone in a few weeks, and we can concentrate on the inside until then anyway.”

“God knows there’s plenty of it.” Calvin smiled, and Will returned it. Warmth there that he recognized, finally coming out to play after years layered in dust.

“It’s good to see you again,” Will said softly. He stuck out his hand. Calvin took its inviting clasp, letting his eyes trace the familiar spray of freckles on Will’s forearm. So many things different, and also so much the same, as if they’d only just parted on the high school’s side steps.

And that blunted his mood immediately. Calvin shoved his hand back into his pocket. Didn’t look at Will’s face.

“I’ll call you this week.”

“Sounds good.”

Calvin watched him trot down the steps toward his truck. Halfway there, Will turned again and lifted a hand in a motionless wave.

Calvin made himself shut the door before Will actually turned the ignition, but remained in the entrance hall, listening to his mother’s old clock tick loudly from the library. The sun cast a beam full of motes across the carpeting.

If they hadn’t parted on such disconcerting terms years ago—

But it was done. No sense rehashing, and no way to get it back. He should be grateful for this taste of normality. It was more than he ever would have expected.

Chapter Two

It wasn’t until that evening, sitting under the yellowing lights in the library with bills skewed across the tabletop, that all the normality began to chafe.

When Calvin had first arrived, a good two weeks before anyone else, it had only made sense to put everything under his name as quickly as he could. The power company certainly wasn’t waiting around feeling sorry for his loss. So many of the bills were already overdue at that point that there hadn’t been time to wait. Much easier to use his checkbook and ask the others to pay him their thirds when they finally showed up. But even excluding the payments he’d been able to put under direct deposit, it took so damned long to deal with it all—to verify that Audrey hadn’t been taken advantage of, to go in person to get the accounts transferred—and the interest had worked itself into tight little knots, cutting noticeably into what he fed to the principle amounts.

Tonight, his second go-around with the house expenses, all the red-marked default notices and number columns stared up at him with far greater complexity than was warranted. Calvin stopped right in the middle of his signature for the water bill, staring down at the sharp cut of ink against paper.

Where in God’s name had
normal
ever fit into this at all?

So dumbly complacent before, even pleased with himself, and suddenly he could only see otherwise. This morning had been like a dream, a retreat into a world he’d left behind. He’d managed to wipe out all thought of the reality lying in wait for him. And, yes, it had been easy talking to Will today. But talking to Will had never been particularly difficult, not till the very end.
Normal
was just a shroud Calvin had yanked back over the heart of it.

None of it could be normal anymore. He and Will hadn’t had
normal
since Calvin had made the worst mistake of his young life and tossed his instincts out the window in favor of—

He dropped the pen to the table and pressed his knuckles to his forehead, then got up, scraping the chair over the hardwood. His window for work had slammed shut and now the prospect just exhausted him. He pulled the plug on the Tiffany lamp rather than contort himself trying to locate the switch, but changed his mind halfway to the door and pushed open one of the huge windowpanes lining the outer wall instead, stepping out into frost-deadened flower beds. The night was heavily cold, dense with the warning of rain. Calvin walked the length of the house around to the front, wincing at the loud crunch when he reached the gravel drive.

When had his life grown so complicated he could barely recognize it? Could he have seen it coming and found a way to sidestep it? He didn’t think so. Audrey’d had plans for him long before he knew how far her illness had progressed, and he’d never have been able to look her in the eye and order her to leave him out of it.

He’d wanted air, but now that he was outside, he couldn’t settle, wanted to be inside instead, away from the world’s voiceless stare. His guts were sinking familiarly, nudging toward a despondency he’d learned to fear.

“Moot point.” He climbed the porch steps and let himself back inside. He couldn’t afford to go back on meds right now, not with this monstrous house in tow. Truthfully, he was hoping he didn’t need them again. It slunk in like always, and it would ebb away like always. But it was hardest to make that argument when it slipped close like this, tidal and creeping.

The house was quiet enough that Calvin could hear music filtering from the third occupied bedroom, upstairs and in the back. The foster brother he didn’t know at all, despite being able to pick his face out of memories of visits home after he’d aged out. Daniel...Redding? Redmond. The baby of their group. At least Devon, for all his detached silences, was a known quantity. Calvin had actually lived in the house with Devon for almost a year, a much older boy he’d never spoken to, save for the everyday concerns of who was next in line for which bathroom—a harrowing prospect in a house crammed full of adolescent boys—or passing the salt at dinner. This younger brother, Danny... Calvin had known what he looked like when he lived in the house, and very quickly afterward, that he was a textbook brat, even to someone as patient as Audrey. Calvin had no idea whether there even was a starting point between himself and Danny, much less where it might be.

And they hadn’t managed their first meeting very well at all, had they? Calvin could still picture opening the front door to a kid with a backpack over his shoulder and a hand-me-down suitcase at his side, brandishing a crumpled letter as if he planned to hit someone over the head with it. Too-long dark hair, sparking blue eyes, almost a decade’s difference in age, and no greeting to speak of from either of them. Calvin’s first thought, fueled by the ferocious glower on the kid’s face, had been that this was the last place the guy wanted to be. Again.

Having been settled in the place for nearly two weeks on his own already, Calvin hadn’t exactly been inclined to let him in.

But Danny’d had the letter. And Devon McCade had had a letter too when he roared up on his motorcycle the following day, with a single duffel and the most expensive Nikon Calvin had ever seen. If Audrey had meant her letters to be the price of admission, all three of them deserved equal room in this house. And that still stung, now that Calvin had figured out which foster brothers he was meant to be sharing with.

The one who walked out, and the one who ran out. Next to them, Calvin had never managed the dramatic coming of age that a teenager demanded.

Honestly it would have been easier if they’d all lived in the house as kids at the same time. As it was, he and Devon had only shared that one year, and the most Calvin had seen of Danny took place during the visits home to help an aging Audrey handle her dwindling brood. As far as Calvin knew, he was the only one who’d ever come back to his foster mother’s home after leaving the system, and he’d found himself unable to relate to any of the kids who had arrived to take his place. He was too sedentary, and they, too untethered. He’d known they wouldn’t stick around long, in spite of Audrey’s efforts, and he’d been right.

Then again, despite the year he’d shared with Devon, they had never been friends either, or even acquaintances. Maybe sharing a home as kids didn’t matter.

The first thing Calvin had seen Danny Redmond do, the evening of his arrival, was kick furious holes into one of the dried-out beds in the front yard. And Calvin would have feared exactly what he was in for, except that the following day, the kid was on his knees in that same dirt with a pile of weeds at his side, trowel in hand, carefully tamping down a mix of topsoil. Calvin hadn’t been aware that Audrey still had any in the gardening shed.

This house was too damn old and, even with just three of them, too damn full. Calvin shut off the light in the kitchen and trudged up to the second floor, rubbing at the chill on his arms. The house’s intermittent groaning steadied him, a voice he was well on his way to getting used to again. The door to his room sat open, spilling light to the edge of the stairs, and he paused. He couldn’t remember leaving the lamp on, but then, he was having trouble today focusing on much more than—Yeah.

Calvin was almost in his room before he turned to stare back through the darkness. Devon was still up, a stream of light shining off the floorboards beneath his closed door. Calvin left his room without really deciding to do it, and it wasn’t until he was almost to Devon’s door that he paused again.

He pulled out his phone and checked the time. Not too late. Not late at all but for how wiped out he felt. But now something else was moving around under his skin, restless with a problem he needed solved. He could wait for tomorrow, but an impatient, irritated part of him didn’t want to.

He knocked on Devon’s door.

“Yeah?”

Calvin set his jaw and pushed the door open.

Devon sat cross-legged on the floor, still dressed except for the boots sitting at the foot of his bed. An extremely battered paperback was in his hands. He gazed up at Calvin curiously. “Hey.”

He looked pretty normal. Just a regular guy. Sometimes Calvin had a hard time equating this man with the picture Audrey had kept on her dresser for ages after Devon had gone. “You have a second?”

Devon gestured vaguely, maybe at the floor, but Calvin was suddenly too wired to sit. He hooked his thumbs in his pockets.

“Listen.” He swung his hand out, palm up. “You know there are a lot of bills coming due. On the house, things left over.”

Devon nodded.

“Instead of me paying everything and you paying me to cover your part of it, would you be averse to having some of the bills in your name?”

Devon didn’t say anything. He definitely had the same eyes as that kid in the picture. Attentive. Focused. Calvin went on, slipping around the words. “I’m just, I’m having a little trouble dealing with it all. Would you mind?”

Devon sat so still that Calvin thought he wasn’t going to respond. Something cool and familiar trickled up through his gut. Devon’s five-o’clock shadow was messy, peppered across his chin and cheeks. As a kid, studying Audrey’s framed photo of Devon, Calvin hadn’t ever noticed how dark Devon’s eyes really were, but now, looking into them, so straightforward and too intrigued to be guarded... There was a lot of color there. Browns and blacks and a little bit of green, just enough to enrich the rest, make it all look even deeper.

Devon shook his head. “That would be fine. What do you want me to take?”

What are you willing to cover?
He didn’t know how much Devon managed to save up from each job, and he’d only been paid by check once. “Let me take a look at them tomorrow? Sorry, I should have...I’m kind of beat.”

Devon just nodded again. “Yeah, sure. Let me know.”

Calvin tried out a smile. It came more easily than expected. “Thanks. It’ll help. We’re due for another bunch in a couple weeks. I can give them to you as they come in.”

The way Devon distanced himself at that instant was startling. Pulled back, as if he’d physically moved across the carpet. Calvin felt something slip by him and gain contested ground. What had he said that had had this effect? Immediately in its wake came a potent spike of annoyance. But Devon was already speaking.

“I’m not actually going to be here in a couple weeks.” He pulled his camera down from its place on the dresser, opened the case and withdrew a polishing cloth. His hands moved steadily, ingrained motions, uncapping the lens, rubbing the corner of the cloth over it in gentle swipes, checking the give of the zoom toggle. “Going out of town.”

Calvin waited but nothing else came. He realized he was also waiting for Devon to look at him again, but when Devon did, his eyes skirted around the edges of Calvin’s face. The spike solidified into resentment well remembered.

“A job?” He knew Devon was a photojournalist, and that he traveled extensively, but nothing more detailed than that. He couldn’t imagine a life like that, living with the prayer of a paycheck, never sure if the month would bring money to live on or not.

“Article idea. I don’t know how long I’ll be up there.”

“Where?” He needed to make some inroad here, but the question fell as flat as expected. Devon looked at him at last, as if unsure why Calvin was pursuing it, and Calvin met his gaze squarely. At last, Devon went back to his camera, mouth pinching into a tempered moue.

“Seattle.” And that was all. But this time his gaze was expectant, and Calvin couldn’t think of what to say next that didn’t sound like reproach.

He wondered for the first time if Devon had unpacked at all, if there wasn’t a satchel sitting on the floor of his closet with all his clothing folded neatly inside, one that he flipped open and dug into every morning. One that he could sling over his shoulder at a moment’s notice.

Everything about Devon was fashioned for it. Even the clothing he wore spoke of perpetual, sometimes rough motion: jeans in no particular style, utilitarian above all else...comfortable and generic T-shirts, the kind that came in packs and blended their wearer in anywhere. Well-worn boots spattered with the mud kicked up by his bike. He was tidy, but the trait seemed inherent more than affected, as if Devon couldn’t help not making a mess simply because he refused to accrue enough possessions to do it.

He was as equipped to get up and leave now as he had been coming into the house. Apparently some things never changed, no matter the years that stood between.

Calvin had to work to keep it out of his voice. “What’s in Seattle?”

“A lot of kids living on the streets.” Devon looked briefly down at his hands. “I have a newspaper interested in publishing what I bring back. There’s a story there that people don’t want to hear. Faces they don’t want to see, or they haven’t seen, even when they’ve been looking.”

“Weather’s going to suck,” Calvin finally said, and was pushed off-kilter by the flicker of Devon’s smile.

“Counting on it, actually.”

“Why?”

Devon cleared his throat. “Shots are better. The colors pop.”

Here it was, the opening Calvin could run with. As if Devon were offering it to him on a tentatively held platter. But one glance at the other man showed Calvin a face that was still shut down somehow, and it only bricked in the bitterness that had been festering since Devon had arrived at the house. The desire to forge bridges faded further and Calvin let it go with a settling sensation in his chest.

Back to bedrock, the firmest ground.

“You know what, don’t worry about the bills.”

Devon frowned, his eyes flicking over Calvin’s face again in that disconcerting way of his. “Sure? Because I can set up payments online through my bank. I just have to know the companies to send them to.”

“No.” Calvin knew he sounded short and didn’t particularly care. “Easier to keep it under one name for now.”

Where did Devon get off looking him through and through when Calvin didn’t want to be stared at? “Well, when do you need the check, then? I can write you one right now.”

“That’ll work. All right if I cash it right away?”