The Haunted Heart: Winter (17 page)

“So that’s it? That’s the whole story?” I
asked. “What happened to the jazz musician? Was Ines having an
affair? Was the baby illegitimate? Did Ines drown herself?”

“That’s as much as I know,” Violet said
wearily, shaking her head. “I believe that’s as much as anyone
knows. It was a very long time ago, child.”

Kirk’s dark gaze met mine. He said somberly,
“How are you going to put
that
right, Flynn?”

* * * * *

It wasn’t until we squeezed into the packed
Magnolia Café for dinner that evening, and I noticed the pink and
red paper hearts, streamers, and cutouts of cherubs, that I
realized it was Valentine’s Day.

Now I understood the urgency behind the
phone call from my parents that morning. But after all, it was just
another day. I stared at the items on the menu. Steaks, salads,
seafood. A lot of selection. Everything from “alligator bites” to
“yummy desserts.” I was too tired to be hungry. It felt like the
longest day of my life. Was it only last night we had flown into
Baton Rouge?

Kirk ordered a NOLA Irish Channel Stout. I
ordered Bayou Teche Bière Noire. The waitress asked to see my ID. I
sighed, offered it, she winked and departed to fill our order.

Neither Kirk nor I had said much since we
left Maryann and Violet’s home. Kirk was right. I had no idea how
to put the past right. The whole concept suddenly seemed
ridiculous. I felt tired, even flattened every time I considered
what we had learned from Violet.

I closed the menu. “The turtle soup sounds
good.”

“No.” Kirk looked up from his own menu. His
face was grim. Nothing new there. “Enough with the liquid diet.
Order a real meal. Or I’ll order one for you.”

That took me aback. And then I got mad. “Are
you going to force it down my throat too? Who died and made you my
mom?”

“Do me a favor. Go take a look at yourself
in the mirror in the john. You look
transparent
.” His voice
dropped still lower, and I realized he was genuinely angry. “You
look like a goddamned ghost yourself.”

“Thanks, I’ve had all the looking in mirrors
I need for now.” But I picked up the menu again. “And for your
information, I
have
been eating more lately. Not that it’s
any of your damn business.” I glanced up and Kirk was still glaring
at me. “What’s your problem?”

He said tightly, “My problem is you think
you’re going to waltz home and tackle that…thing. That thing that
is waiting for you underneath the tarp in the shed of the house on
Pitch Pine Lane.”

I gave a disbelieving laugh. “Thanks, Kirk!
I don’t know why I don’t have a better appetite after that.”

“After everything we learned today —
everything we heard this evening —”

“What’s your solution?”

“You need to go home. To your real home, I
mean. To your parents.”

I was so angry I began to splutter —
stutter, “My
real
home? My
parents
? Do you think I’m
nine years old? My real home is —”
Alan
. I stopped and began
again, “Pitch Pine Lane is as much my real home as anywhere else
now. And yeah, I do think I’m going to have to face —” I broke off
as the waitress appeared again. “Hey! What’s the special tonight?”
I asked brightly.

She rattled off a couple of entrees and I
said, “Great! I’ll have that first one.” I handed her the menu and
glared at Kirk.

Kirk made his selection too and handed over
his menu.

The waitress withdrew and Kirk said — before
I could continue my rant, “Let me deal with it. Go visit your
parents for a while. Once I’ve got rid of the mirror, once I’m sure
she — it’s — gone, maybe you can come back.”

I shook my head. “You’re not making any
sense. You can’t put that mirror in cold storage on the other side
of the state and think problem solved. Besides…this is mine to deal
with, not yours. The mirror belongs to my family now and it’s my
job to…handle it.”

“And you’ll do that how? Tell Ines she’s
dead? Tell her to head for the light?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” Privately I thought
Ines had had long enough to figure that part out for herself.

“Or maybe you could tell her times have
changed. You could explain the Civil Rights Movement to her. She
might find Women’s Equality interesting too.”

“Shut up, Kirk.” I picked up my glass and
downed half my beer.

When I resurfaced Kirk was saying, “That old
woman nailed it. You’re too close to it. You’re too close to the
veil.”

The veil? What the hell. Really. Honestly.
The
veil
?

“You should hear yourself. Seriously.
You
should go look in the mirror.”

“Did you notice the dates on the
gravestones?”

“Of course! 1933. The baby died five days
earlier.”

“February fifteenth,” Kirk bit out.
“
Tomorrow
. The day we arrive home. The anniversary of Ines’s
death.”

Okay. Fair enough. That was a shock. I
didn’t pay a lot of attention to time and dates now. Those things
were irrelevant in a psychiatric hospital. And afterwards…I just
wanted to get through the year. So no. I hadn’t noticed we were on
the eve of the anniversary of Edward and Ines’s double suicide.

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” I said
finally.

I thought I was about to witness spontaneous
combustion, which would have given the patrons of the Magnolia Café
quite a story for many a year to come, but Kirk managed to cut the
blue wire in time.

He repeated, painstakingly enunciating every
word, “A. Good. Thing?”

“May. Be.” I was equally painstaking. “Look,
I don’t know. Maybe there’s a pattern here. Maybe the only reason
we’re even seeing Ines right now is it’s getting close to the
anniversary. Maybe this will all be resolved February sixteenth
regardless of what we do. Maybe it’s a cycle.”

He continued to look angry and
unconvinced.

“My uncle lived with that mirror for half a
century and it doesn’t seem to have done him any harm.”

“Flynn…”

I looked away. “Fine. I know. But I’m not
going to…”

“Another round, boys?” the waitress asked
cheerfully.

“Sure!” I responded. As she moved away, I
said to Kirk, “Let’s leave it for now. Please? I’m tired. We both
are. This isn’t the time to try to make a decision. So let’s eat.
Let’s sleep. And we can argue it out tomorrow.”

Kirk looked surprised. He nodded. “Fair
enough.”

The food was good. Good enough anyway. The
conversation between Kirk and me was pretty much nonexistent, but
that was okay too. I really was tired and I really didn’t want to
think anymore. While Kirk brooded and ate his dinner, I tried not
to watch the other diners, couples all of them. Tentative new
couples, affectionate older couples…not a great night for
singletons to go out to dinner.

We didn’t have much to say on the drive back
to the hotel either.

Or in the elevator.

“What time in the morning?” Kirk asked,
stopping in front of his door and pulling out his keycard.

“Eleven? That way we don’t have to rush. We
could have lunch on the way to the airport. I know how much your
meals mean to you.”

“Eleven it is.” He opened his door. I moved
on to mine and unlocked it.

“Night,” I said.

“Night.”

I turned the lights on in my room, avoided
glancing at the dresser mirror, and turned on the TV. But there was
nothing going on in the world I cared about.

I turned the TV off, took a shower, brushed
my teeth, still avoiding looking in the foggy bathroom mirror. Was
I ever not going to feel a twinge of anxiety when I looked in a
mirror?

I got into bed and picked up my cell phone.
No messages, no missed calls, no email. That’s what happened when
you shut everyone out of your life. I pressed photos and then
slideshow and watched Alan’s smiling face slide past.

It was almost a year now. I hadn’t realized
it. It still felt so new, so raw, so recent. But it had been last
March. Middle of March. Eleven months. I hadn’t believed I could
get through the first week.

The pictures slid swiftly past. And I could
remember every occasion, almost every moment. It was funny how a
photograph could take you back to an exact moment in time, let you
smell the fresh mown grass again, feel the sweat damping your skin,
hear warm laughter against your ear, taste a mouth sweet with
lemonade…

The pictures blurred and I wiped my
face.

I pressed stop and laid my cell phone aside.
For a few minutes I sat staring at the mustard colored drapes,
listening to the invisible rain against the windows.

I shoved back the coverlet and went to the
door adjoining Kirk’s room with mine. I knocked softly.

Nothing.

He was probably down in the Fitness Center
working off carbs. And his demons.

I turned away.

There were sounds of commotion from inside
the wall and my half of the adjoining door suddenly pushed open.
Kirk, wearing perfectly respectable green and blue striped pajama
bottoms — and his usual frown — stood in the doorway.

“Flynn?”

“Hey.”

He looked more closely, started to move, but
stopped. “Are you okay?”

I tried to laugh. Had to wipe my eyes again.
“This is going to sound really stupid.”

“Okay.” He didn’t look wary, though maybe he
should have. He looked calm, and I thought again how much I liked
that calm of his. All the more because now I suspected how hard won
it was.

I said, “I don’t want a relationship. I
don’t even want friends with benefits. I just…don’t want to be
alone tonight. I don’t think I can be alone tonight.”

Kirk said softly, “You don’t have to be
alone tonight.” His arms closed around me.

I
was wrong about
one thing. Kirk was a gentle man.

His arms were strong, kind, even protective
as he cradled me. “What do you want?” His voice was warm and
pleasantly raspy against my ear. “Do you just want me to hold
you?”

“I don’t know.” I did know. I wanted to
forget. To feel something other than alone and sad. But to say so
would have been to betray Alan, so I just shook my head and left it
to Kirk to interpret.

I already suspected that, unlike me, he had
a lifetime of sexual experience, and I considered this as we lay
together in the bleached, soft-worn sheets of the hotel bed. Kirk
leaned on his elbow smiling down at me. It was a funny sort of
smile. Thoughtful and affectionate. I could tell that he did
genuinely like me, care about me, and my remaining doubt,
uncertainty eased. I knew that nothing would happen that I didn’t
want to happen.

“I wasn’t there,” I said. “When Alan died. I
was supposed to be there, but Mr. Gardener wasn’t feeling good so
he asked me if I could go to an estate sale for him. So I did. Alan
was playing softball. The crew at WFLK versus the classical music
station in Harrisonburg. One of those charity events, you know? It
was a beautiful day. Bright and sunny. It was March, and you could
feel that spring had arrived right on time.”

Kirk was half lying against me, slowly
stroking my collarbone with his thumb. If it had been anyone but
Kirk, I would have felt self-conscious and ugly. I don’t get what
fashion models are about because there’s nothing beautiful in
jutting bones and stretched-too-tight skin. But then, if it had
been anyone but Kirk, I wouldn’t be here. Kirk already knew more
about me than friends I’d known for years, and this wasn’t about
trying to impress or seduce. It wasn’t about anything more than
getting through the night.

“Go on,” he said.

“It’s ridiculous.” I was smiling at the same
time tears filled my eyes. What was with all this crying? I’d gone
from never crying to a complete crybaby. My faucet was stuck. I
said, “He was struck by lightning. Out of a clear blue sky. He died
almost instantly.”

“I’m sorry, Flynn.”

I nodded, acknowledging the sincerity of
that. “It was a freak accident. An act of God. Someone even said to
me, ‘It’s an act of God, so you mustn’t be angry.’”

“I’d be angry.”

I wiped impatiently at my eyes. “I am angry.
What kind of God would do that? Of course I’m angry. And what’s
wrong with being angry? What’s wrong with being
sad
?”

“Nothing.”

“I don’t want to be numb and I don’t want to
forget. And too bad if that makes other people uncomfortable.”

Kirk rested his hand against the side of my
face, tilted my head up, and kissed me. It gave me a jolt. I hadn’t
wanted to be kissed, that was too much like making love, but it was
happening before I had time to recognize his intent. The
strangeness of it held me quiet. The softness of Kirk’s beard, the
softness of his lips, the softness of his eyelashes. His mouth
tasted of whisky, which surprised me because he hadn’t had whisky
at dinner. Mostly he did not taste like Alan, and that difference
was startling and confusing.

I had never been kissed on the mouth by
anyone who wasn’t Alan.

Kirk drew back. His breath was warm against
my face as he said, “It’s okay to be angry, Flynn. It’s okay to be
sad. You’re allowed.” His hand moved to the back of my skull, and
he guided my head to his chest, settling me. He stroked my
hair.

My mouth tingled, though it had been the
sweetest of kisses, intended to comfort not arouse. The fine, wiry
hair on his broad chest tickled my nose. I listened to the strong,
steady pound of Kirk’s heart beneath my ear.

Strange. So strange.

I felt like I should talk about Alan, tell
Kirk how we had grown up together, known each other all our lives,
known from the first that we would always be together. I felt like
I needed to keep Alan here with us, but uppermost in my mind were
all the ways that Kirk was different from Alan. I couldn’t seem to
stop inventorying all those differences, even though I didn’t want
to notice, let alone compare.